Spiritual Fatherhood and Obedience

St. Joseph’s demanding eldership: his insistence on absolute obedience and the cutting-off of self-will as the indispensable ground of the prayer of the heart. His letters and the memoirs of his disciples describe a spiritual fatherhood of unusual severity, in which the disclosure of every thought, the surrender of one’s own judgment, and unquestioning submission were the price and the path of the inner life.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

Obedience as the Ground of Prayer

The center of Joseph’s teaching on the common life is a conviction he shares with the whole hesychast tradition but pressed to an extreme: that the noetic prayer of the heart cannot be safely won by anyone who has not first been emptied of his own will through obedience to a spiritual father. In Joseph’s understanding, self-will (idion thelima, one’s own will) is the root passion from which pride, delusion, and every spiritual danger grow; and prayer attempted while self-will remains intact is not merely fruitless but perilous, exposing the ascetic to plani — the delusion in which a man mistakes his own imaginings, or the suggestions of the enemy, for grace (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998, on obedience, the cutting-off of self-will, and the danger of delusion). Obedience, for Joseph, is therefore not a preliminary discipline to be graduated from but the permanent ground on which the whole edifice of prayer is built (ibid.).

This conviction had a personal root. Joseph himself, as the tradition tells it, had struggled to find an elder who could guide him in the inner prayer and had won it at great cost and risk (see The Search for a Living Elder); and precisely because he knew the dangers of the unguided path, he was the more insistent that his own disciples should not walk it, but should have in him the elder he had lacked (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on the elder’s insistence on obedience as the guard against the dangers he himself had known).

The Cutting-Off of Self-Will

In practice this meant a spiritual fatherhood of great severity. Joseph required of his disciples the classic marks of Athonite obedience, sharpened to a fine point: the full and frank disclosure of thoughts (exagoreusis, the revealing of every logismos to the elder), so that nothing was hidden and no thought was allowed to fester into a passion; the surrender of one’s own judgment, so that the disciple did not act or decide on his own but referred everything to the elder; and unquestioning, immediate submission to the elder’s word, even when it ran against the disciple’s own sense of what was reasonable (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the disclosure of thoughts and unquestioning obedience; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on the daily practice of obedience under the elder). The “cutting-off” (ekkopi) of self-will is the recurring phrase: the disciple was to cut off his own will at every turn, treating obedience as a kind of continual martyrdom of the self-love that resists it (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998).

The disciples’ memoirs do not soften this. Elder Ephraim of Arizona recalls an eldership that was affectionate but exacting, that tested and stretched its disciples, and that did not spare them hardship, rebuke, or the deliberate frustration of self-will for the sake of their formation (Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on the elder’s demanding but loving formation). The severity was understood — by Joseph and by those he formed — as love: the elder wounded the self-will precisely in order to heal the disciple, as a surgeon cuts to cure (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on severity as love).

Discernment and the Tailoring of Severity

For all its severity, Joseph’s eldership was not mechanical. The tradition emphasizes his discernment (diakrisis) — the reading of each disciple’s particular strength, weakness, and stage, and the tailoring of the discipline to the person (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the elder’s discernment in guiding different disciples; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). He did not impose a single regime uniformly but pressed harder where a disciple could bear it and drew back where he could not, so that the same elder could appear severe to one and gentle to another (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999). This discernment is itself, in the tradition’s account, one of the graces of his prayer (see Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light); and it is what made his demanding fatherhood formative rather than merely crushing, producing disciples who became great elders in their own right rather than broken men.

Because these accounts come from disciples who venerated him, they are naturally weighted toward vindicating the severity by its fruits, and they are read here on that footing — as the testimony of men formed by the discipline they describe, not as neutral assessment (on the character of the sources, see The Sources for His Life). The severity of the hesychast eldership is, moreover, a point on which the modern reader and the tradition may genuinely differ, and a sober assessment of it belongs to Section 09 (see Assessment).

The Fruit of the Method

The vindication the tradition offers is the disciples themselves. From this small, severe brotherhood came the men who would repopulate some of the greatest monasteries of Athos and carry Athonite hesychasm to America — Ephraim of Katounakia, Ephraim of Arizona, Joseph of Vatopaidi, Charalambos of Dionysiou, and others (see The Two Ephraims and The Repopulation of Athos). That so many of his disciples became themselves elders and abbots of note is, for the tradition, the proof of the method: the obedience Joseph demanded is credited with having formed not compliant subordinates but strong spiritual fathers, capable in turn of forming others (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the disciples as the fruit of the elder’s formation; Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on Joseph’s brotherhood as the seed of the revival). Whether the method is universally transferable, or bound to the extraordinary desert conditions and the person of Joseph himself, is a further question the assessment takes up.

References

Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. (Obedience and the cutting-off of self-will; the disclosure of thoughts; the danger of delusion; severity as love.)
Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (Obedience as guard against the dangers of the unguided path; the elder’s discernment in guiding different disciples; the disciples as the fruit of his formation.)
Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The daily practice of obedience; the demanding but loving formation.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (Joseph’s brotherhood as the seed of the revival.)