The Typikon of Vigil

The rule of St. Joseph’s brotherhood: a horarium built around the all-night vigil, in which the deepest hours of the night were given to solitary noetic prayer and the day to short rest, manual handwork, and a shared liturgical round, all fasting kept with severity. The typikon was not an end in itself but an instrument — the ordering of every hour toward the unceasing prayer the brotherhood existed to cultivate.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Vigil at the Center

The distinctive feature of Joseph’s rule was the all-night vigil. Following the ancient practice of the desert and the sketes, but with unusual rigor, the brotherhood gave the hours of the night — when the world sleeps and the senses are stilled — to prayer, reversing the ordinary order of waking and sleeping so that the deepest recollection coincided with the deepest silence (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on the nocturnal vigil and the reversed horarium; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on the nightly rhythm of the brotherhood). Each monk kept the greater part of the night alone in his cell in the darkness, standing or sitting at the prayer of the heart, calling on the name of Jesus for hours together, before the community gathered for the liturgical services and the day’s brief rest (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999). The vigil was the heart of the typikon precisely because it was the time of the prayer that was the point of the whole life (see Nepsis and the Jesus Prayer).

The Reversed Horarium

The day of Joseph’s brotherhood was accordingly divided in a manner that seemed inverted by ordinary standards. The monks slept only a few hours, and by day rather than at night; the long nocturnal hours were the working time of prayer; and the daylight was filled with the necessary business of survival and the shorter round of common services (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the division of the day; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). The precise horarium varied with the season, the feast, and the elder’s discernment of what the brotherhood could bear — Joseph adjusted the rule to persons and circumstances rather than imposing an unvarying schedule — but its skeleton was constant: solitary noetic prayer through the night, common prayer and the Divine Liturgy at the turning of night to day, short rest, and handwork (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999).

This reversal was not eccentricity but tradition intensified. The nightly vigil is deep in the Athonite and desert inheritance, and Joseph’s contribution was to hold his small brotherhood to it with a strictness that the general life of the Mountain had largely relaxed — one more instance of the recovery of a diminished practice that characterizes his whole significance (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the rigor of the sketes against the relaxation of the period; see The Athonite Renaissance).

Prayer, Fasting, and Handwork

Around the vigil the typikon wove the other elements of the ascetic day. Fasting was kept with the severity the desert imposed and Joseph required — little food, and that poor, with the Church’s fasts observed strictly, the body deliberately kept lean as a support of watchfulness (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the brotherhood’s fasting; see The Cave Life at Little St. Anne’s and Katounakia). Handwork — the making of prayer-ropes, small carvings, icons, and other articles of the traditional Athonite crafts — filled the working hours, chosen precisely because it could be done in the cell without breaking the recollection of the Jesus Prayer, so that labor and prayer were joined rather than opposed (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on handwork woven with prayer; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). The proceeds of the handwork bought the little the desert could not supply, and the discipline of labor guarded against the idleness the fathers name as the mother of many passions (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998, on work and the avoidance of idleness).

The liturgical round — the daily cycle of services and, above all, the Divine Liturgy — anchored the personal prayer in the common worship of the Church, so that the brotherhood’s hesychasm was never a private mysticism detached from the sacramental life but was rooted in the Eucharist and the offices (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the liturgical life of the brotherhood; on the liturgical grounding of Athonite prayer generally, Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002).

The Typikon as Instrument, Not End

It is essential to Joseph’s understanding — and to a fair account of his rule — that the typikon was never valued for its own sake. The vigils, the fasts, the reversed hours, the handwork: all were instruments, ordered wholly toward the acquisition and guarding of unceasing prayer (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on asceticism as the servant of prayer; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999). Joseph warned, in the manner of the fathers, against the subtle danger of taking the ascetic discipline as an achievement in itself, or of pride in one’s own austerity — the very self-satisfaction that the prayer of repentance is meant to dissolve (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the peril of pride in asceticism). The rule was strict because the aim was high; but the aim was prayer and, through prayer, the union with God that is the goal of the whole monastic life (see Theosis).

This instrumentality is also why the rule could be transmitted and adapted. When Joseph’s disciples went out to repopulate the great coenobia and to found monasteries in America, they did not transplant the extreme desert horarium unchanged — the coenobitic life has its own settled typikon — but they carried its spirit: the primacy of the vigil, the discipline of fasting, the labor joined to prayer, and above all the unceasing invocation at the center of it all (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on the spread of the brotherhood’s spirit to the coenobia; see The Repopulation of Athos). What was transmitted was not a timetable but a way of ordering the whole of life around prayer — and that, more than any particular hour, is the legacy of Joseph’s typikon.

References

Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The nocturnal vigil and reversed horarium; the division of the day; fasting; handwork woven with prayer; the liturgical life of the brotherhood.)
Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The nightly rhythm of the brotherhood.)
Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. (Work and the avoidance of idleness; asceticism as the servant of prayer; the peril of pride in austerity.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The rigor of the sketes; the liturgical grounding of Athonite prayer; the spread of the brotherhood’s spirit to the coenobia.)