Monastic Wisdom in the Letters

St. Joseph’s letters as his principal written legacy: written from the Athonite desert to monks, nuns, and laypeople seeking his guidance, gathered after his death and published in Greek as Expression of Monastic Experience (1979) and in English as Monastic Wisdom (1998). At once personal spiritual direction and a profound manual of the inner life, they are — with his disciples’ biographies — the primary window onto his teaching in his own words.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

A Legacy of Letters

St. Joseph the Hesychast wrote no treatise, no rule, no autobiography. His one substantial body of writing is his correspondence — letters sent out from the caves of Little St. Anne’s and Katounakia over the decades of his mature life to a widening circle who sought his direction (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998, the collected letters; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on the elder’s correspondence). That the great teacher of noetic prayer left his teaching in the informal and occasional form of letters is fitting: like the desert fathers whose apophthegmata were answers to particular questioners, Joseph taught not in the abstract but to named souls in named difficulties, and his doctrine comes to us embedded in the direction of concrete lives.

The correspondents were varied. Many were monks and nuns — some of them his own disciples when apart from him, others ascetics elsewhere on the Mountain or in convents on the mainland who had heard of him and sought his counsel; some were pious laypeople drawn into his orbit (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the range of correspondents; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999). This range gives the corpus its breadth: the letters address the beginner and the advanced, the tempted and the consoled, the cenobite and the hermit, and so cover the whole span of the spiritual life from first repentance to the heights of prayer.

The Character of the Letters

The letters are unmistakably the writing of a desert ascetic. Their Greek is unpolished and direct — Joseph was largely self-taught — and their tone is urgent, vivid, and often fiery, pressing the correspondent to force himself, to struggle, to not lose heart (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, throughout, in its plain and urgent idiom; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the elder’s manner of writing). They mix stern exhortation with tenderness, sharp rebuke with encouragement, and practical instruction in the method of prayer with soaring passages on the sweetness of grace. What they are not is systematic: the teaching must be gathered across many letters, and the same themes recur and deepen rather than being expounded in order (see On Prayer, Repentance, and Grace).

A distinctive and much-valued feature is their concreteness about the inner life. Where much of the ascetic tradition speaks of prayer and its stages guardedly, Joseph writes with unusual openness about the actual experience of prayer — its labor, its stages, its consolations and its withdrawals — drawing frankly on his own struggles to instruct his correspondents (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the stages and experience of prayer; see Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light, where the autobiographical element is handled under §3.5). This openness is what makes the letters not merely edifying but instructive as a practical guide, and it is one reason they have been so influential in the modern recovery of hesychast prayer.

The Gathering and Publication

The letters were not published in Joseph’s lifetime. After his repose in 1959 his disciples gathered the surviving correspondence, and it was published in Greek under the title Ἔκφρασις μοναχικῆς ἐμπειρίας — Expression of Monastic Experience — a collection issued from the Holy Mountain (first Greek edition 1979) that became a widely read text of the modern Athonite revival (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, editorial front-matter on the Greek original Expression of Monastic Experience; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the posthumous gathering of the letters). The English translation, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, was published by St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Florence, Arizona — the monastery founded by his disciple Elder Ephraim — in 1998, and it is through this edition that the letters have reached the English-speaking Orthodox world (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998).

The provenance of the corpus deserves a word, in keeping with the collection’s methodology. The letters are transmitted and published by the very brotherhood that venerates Joseph, and the selection, arrangement, and (for the English) translation are the work of his spiritual descendants; there is no critical edition prepared at scholarly remove (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, published by his disciples’ monastery). This does not impugn their authenticity — the letters are received as genuinely Joseph’s, and their voice is consistent and distinctive — but it means they come to us within, not outside, the devotional tradition, and the collection treats them accordingly (on this see The Sources for His Life).

Why the Letters Matter

The importance of the letters is threefold. First, they are the primary source in Joseph’s own words: for his teaching on prayer, on obedience, on repentance and grace, the letters are the closest we come to the man himself, and the disciples’ biographies largely systematize what the letters express (see Section 03). Second, they were a channel of the revival: read across the Mountain and beyond, Expression of Monastic Experience helped make the recovered hesychast prayer available to a new generation, functioning as a practical companion to the older texts of the Philokalia (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the literature of the revival; see The Athonite Renaissance). Third, they preserve the concreteness of a living practice: because Joseph wrote of prayer as he had done it, the letters transmit not a theory but a method, and it is as a method that his hesychasm passed to his disciples and, through them, to the wider Church (see Hesychasm in the Modern World).

See Also

References

  • Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. (The collected letters; the range of correspondents; the plain and urgent idiom; the openness about the experience of prayer; the editorial note on the Greek original.) Greek original: Ἔκφρασις μοναχικῆς ἐμπειρίας [Expression of Monastic Experience]. Mount Athos, 1979.
  • Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The elder’s correspondence and its posthumous gathering; his manner of writing.)
  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The literature of the twentieth-century revival.)