On Prayer, Repentance, and Grace

The theology of St. Joseph’s letters: the stages through which the Jesus Prayer passes, the primacy of repentance and self-reproach as the ground of prayer, the interplay of ascetic effort (praktiki) and divine grace, and the alternation of consolation and abandonment by which the soul is trained. The letters give this teaching not as a system but as urgent counsel to struggling souls.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Stages of Prayer

The letters return continually to the ascent of prayer, and it is here that Joseph is most valued as a guide. He describes, across many letters, a progression: the beginner labors at the words of the Jesus Prayer with the mind, forcing himself to attention against distraction; with perseverance the prayer descends from the mind into the heart and begins to warm and to move more freely; and at length, in those to whom grace is given, the prayer becomes self-acting (aftenergitos), praying itself within the heart continually, even during sleep and work, so that the person becomes prayer (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 1998, on the stages and the self-acting prayer; systematized in Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999). Beyond this the letters speak, more sparingly, of the higher gifts — the illumination of the nous, the vision of divine light, the raptures of love — which Joseph treats as the free gift of God to the deeply humbled, never as the guaranteed reward of technique (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the higher gifts; on these experiences and the §3.5 discipline that governs them, see Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light).

The value of this account, for the tradition, is its concreteness: Joseph maps the terrain of prayer with the precision of one who has crossed it, naming the signs and the pitfalls of each stage. But he guards the map against misuse at every point, subordinating the whole ascent to repentance and warning that the stages cannot be seized by ambition (see below).

The Primacy of Repentance

Beneath and before the stages of prayer, the letters place repentance (metanoia) and self-reproach (aftomempsia, the blaming of oneself) as the indispensable ground of the whole inner life. For Joseph, prayer that does not rise from a broken and self-accusing heart is unsafe and unfruitful; the prerequisite of the prayer of the heart is a deep and continual repentance, a reckoning of oneself as the chief of sinners, a refusal to justify oneself or to blame others (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on repentance, self-reproach, and mourning). He teaches the gift of tears — the penthos, the joyful mourning of the fathers — as both a sign and a means of this repentance, and he counsels his correspondents to weep for their sins and to hold themselves unworthy of any consolation (ibid., on tears and mourning). This insistence is the safeguard against pride and delusion: because the graces of prayer are given only to the humble and the penitent, the surest path to them is not to seek them but to deepen in self-reproach and to leave the giving to God (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on humility as the condition of grace).

This is why, in the letters, the highest spiritual counsel and the harshest self-abasement stand side by side. Joseph can write of the sweetness of divine love in one breath and, in the next, command his correspondent to consider himself lower than all creation; the two are not in tension but are, for him, the single movement of the soul that ascends by descending, that is exalted by grace precisely as it abases itself in truth (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on exaltation through self-abasement).

Effort and Grace

A central polarity of the letters is that between ascetic effort and divine grace — between what the fathers call praktiki, the active labor of the ascetic, and the grace that no labor can compel. Joseph holds both with equal firmness. On the one hand he is the great preacher of effort, of forcing oneself (to biazesthai), of the violence by which the kingdom of heaven is taken (Matthew 11:12); his letters are relentless in urging struggle, and he insists that grace is not given to the idle but to the one who labors with all his strength (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on forcing oneself and the necessity of effort). On the other hand he insists with equal force that the effort does not earn grace, which remains the free gift of God; the labor prepares and disposes the soul, but the descent of grace is God’s act, given when and as he wills (ibid., on grace as unmerited gift). The resolution of the polarity is that the ascetic must labor as if everything depended on his effort, while knowing that everything depends on grace — a synergy in which the human will and the divine work together without either being dissolved (on this synergy generally, see Theosis).

The Alternation of Grace and Abandonment

One of the most pastorally important themes of the letters — and one drawn most directly from Joseph’s own experience — is the alternation of the presence and the felt absence of grace. Joseph teaches that God gives consolation and then withdraws it, plunging the soul into dryness, darkness, and a sense of abandonment, and that this alternation is not a failure or a punishment but a pedagogy: grace is withdrawn to teach humility, to test and strengthen love, to wean the soul from seeking God for the sweetness rather than for himself, and to make the eventual return of grace the more fruitful (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998, on the alternation of consolation and abandonment; Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the pattern of grace and its withdrawal in the elder’s own life). To his correspondents in the darkness of withdrawal he counsels patience, endurance, and continued struggle without the felt reward — the hardest counsel, and the one his own experience most authorizes him to give (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998).

This theme is where the letters are most consoling and most demanding at once. It reframes the ordinary experience of spiritual dryness — which the beginner takes for failure or for God’s rejection — as a normal and even necessary phase of the ascent, to be borne with trust; and it makes endurance in the absence of consolation, rather than the enjoyment of consolation, the real measure of love. It is characteristic of Joseph that the counsel he gives here is not theory but the distillation of his own long oscillation between the sweetness of grace and the desolation of its withdrawal, offered to others as the map of a country he had crossed (see Experiences of Grace and the Uncreated Light, where the autobiographical basis is treated under §3.5).

The Whole in Summary

The theology of the letters is thus a single, tightly bound teaching: prayer rises from repentance; repentance keeps prayer humble and therefore safe; effort disposes the soul, but grace alone raises it; and grace comes and goes according to a divine pedagogy that trains the soul through both its presence and its absence. It is not a speculative theology but a practical one, worked out in the direction of real struggles, and it is offered — in the plain, urgent, self-accusing idiom of the desert — as a guide for anyone who would take up the same labor. That it could serve as such a guide, and not merely as edification, is why the letters became one of the founding texts of the modern hesychast revival (see The Athonite Renaissance).

References

Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. (The stages and the self-acting prayer; repentance, self-reproach, and tears; humility as the condition of grace; forcing oneself and the necessity of effort; grace as unmerited gift; the alternation of consolation and abandonment.)
Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (The stages systematized; the pattern of grace and its withdrawal in the elder’s life.)
Scripture: Matthew 11:12.