Nepsis and the Jesus Prayer

St. Joseph’s teaching on the inner life: watchfulness (nepsis) as the guarding of the mind, and the unceasing Jesus Prayer as the descent of the nous into the heart. His practice stands squarely within the hesychast tradition defended by St. Gregory Palamas, and his letters describe with unusual concreteness the labor, the stages, and the aim of the prayer of the heart.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

Watchfulness: Guarding the Mind

At the foundation of Joseph’s teaching is nepsis — watchfulness, sobriety, wakefulness of the mind — the vigilant guarding of the heart against the thoughts (logismoi) by which the passions enter. The term is ancient, giving its name to the Philokalia itself (the full Greek title of which speaks of “the neptic fathers”), and Joseph received it from that tradition and lived it with peculiar intensity (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998, on watchfulness and the guarding of the mind; on the neptic tradition generally, see The Jesus Prayer). To be watchful, in Joseph’s usage, is to stand at the door of the heart and refuse entry to the thoughts that would defile it, meeting each at its first approach with the name of Christ before it can grow into consent and passion.

Watchfulness is thus not passive but a continual warfare, and Joseph’s letters are full of the vocabulary of struggle, combat, and violence — the biastis, the one who “takes the kingdom by force” (Matthew 11:12), being one of his favorite images (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on forcing oneself and the violence of the ascetic effort). Watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer are, for him, two aspects of one act: the guarding of the mind is accomplished by the ceaseless invocation, and the invocation is possible only to a mind that watches.

The Jesus Prayer and the Descent into the Heart

The instrument of watchfulness and the substance of the whole inner life is the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” — repeated without ceasing, in obedience to the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Joseph taught the disciplined method of the hesychast fathers: the words said slowly and attentively, joined to the breath, with the nous — the mind’s deepest, intuitive faculty — gathered out of its dispersion among the senses and objects of the world and brought down into the heart, there to abide with the name of Jesus (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the method and aim of the prayer; on the tradition of the method, see St. Gregory Palamas).

The goal of this labor is what the tradition calls the union of the nous and the heart — the passage of the prayer from an activity of the mind that must be forced and repeated to a prayer that becomes self-moving, praying itself within the heart even in sleep, so that the whole person becomes, in the fathers’ phrase, prayer (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the prayer becoming self-acting; cf. Hierotheos [Vlachos], A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, 1991, recording the same teaching from Joseph’s disciple Elder Ephraim of Katounakia). Joseph distinguishes, as the tradition does, between the prayer that the ascetic performs by his own effort (praktiki) and the prayer that grace itself performs in him — the former the necessary labor, the latter the gift that crowns it and cannot be seized (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on effort and grace in prayer; see On Prayer, Repentance, and Grace).

The Stages of Prayer

One of the most valued features of Joseph’s letters is their concrete description of the stages through which the prayer passes — a rare thing, since most of the fathers speak of the inner life more guardedly. Drawing on his own experience and on the tradition, he describes an ascent: from the labored, verbal repetition of the beginner, through the deepening in which the prayer descends into the heart and begins to move of itself, to the higher states in which the ascetic is visited by grace — by an unspeakable sweetness, by tears, by warmth in the heart, and, at the summit, by the vision of divine light (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the stages and gifts of prayer; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, systematizing the elder’s teaching on the degrees of prayer).

Joseph is careful, however, to subordinate these gifts to repentance and humility and to warn insistently against seeking the higher states for their own sake or mistaking psychological or demonic counterfeits for grace — the perennial danger the tradition calls plani (delusion, Russian prelest) (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the danger of delusion and the primacy of humility). The letters return again and again to the point that the graces are given only to the humble and the deeply repentant, and are withdrawn from the presumptuous; the stages are described not as a technique to be mastered but as the free work of grace in a soul made ready by struggle and self-abasement (ibid.; see On Prayer, Repentance, and Grace).

The Palamite Grounding

Joseph’s teaching, though expressed in the plain and urgent idiom of a desert ascetic rather than in theological technicality, rests on the dogmatic foundation laid by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. The light and grace of which Joseph speaks are, in the Palamite theology confessed by the councils of Constantinople in 1341 and 1351, not created effects but the uncreated energies of God — God himself communicated to the deified, truly participated though the divine essence remains forever beyond participation (on this see St. Gregory Palamas and Theosis). Joseph does not argue the doctrine; he presupposes and lives it. When his letters speak of the divine light seen by the purified nous, they speak the language of Tabor and of Palamas, and the theology that makes such experience thinkable without idolatry or pantheism is the essence–energies distinction Palamas defended (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the light of grace; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, situating the elder within the Palamite hesychast inheritance).

This grounding is what allows the tradition to receive Joseph’s experiences (treated in the companion file) as more than private enthusiasm: they are read as instances of the deification the Church confesses to be the goal of the Christian life, described from within by one who is held to have reached it. The experiences themselves, and the discipline with which this collection reports them, are the subject of Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light.

The Transmission of a Method

Finally, Joseph’s importance for the tradition lies partly in the concreteness and communicability of his teaching. Because he had, on the tradition’s account, won the prayer of the heart himself and could describe its stages and pitfalls in exact and practical terms, he was able to transmit it to disciples as a living method rather than a literary memory — and it is through them that his teaching passed into the great coenobia and beyond the Mountain (see The Two Ephraims and Hesychasm in the Modern World). Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), setting down a night’s conversation with Joseph’s disciple Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, records the same teaching in the same concrete terms a generation later — evidence of how exactly the method was handed on (Hierotheos, A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, 1991). It is this — a hesychasm that could be taught and practiced, not merely admired — that made Joseph a source of the twentieth-century revival.

References

Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. (Watchfulness and the guarding of the mind; the method and stages of the Jesus Prayer; effort and grace; the danger of delusion; the light of grace.)
Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The elder’s teaching on the degrees of prayer, systematized; the Palamite grounding.)
Hierotheos (Vlachos), Metropolitan. A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain: Discussion with a Hermit on the Jesus Prayer. Trans. Effie Mavromichali. Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1991. (The same teaching transmitted through Joseph’s disciple Elder Ephraim of Katounakia.)
Scripture: Matthew 11:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:17.