Hesychasm in the Modern World

The spread of St. Joseph’s recovered hesychasm beyond the Holy Mountain: through his disciple Ephraim of Arizona’s network of monasteries in North America, through the wider diffusion of the Jesus Prayer and the Athonite ascetic ethos into the Orthodox diaspora and among inquirers, and through the reading of his letters. This file also weighs, soberly, the questions that so rapid and far-reaching an expansion has raised.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

Beyond the Mountain

Joseph’s influence did not remain on Athos. The most consequential channel by which it passed into the wider world was his disciple Elder Ephraim of Arizona, who from the late 1980s and through the 1990s established a network of Orthodox monasteries across North America — commonly numbered at around seventeen to twenty, men’s and women’s houses, centered on St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Florence, Arizona (founded 1995) (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on the American foundations; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, St. Anthony’s Monastery, 2013; see The Two Ephraims). Through these monasteries the hesychast tradition that Joseph had recovered in the caves of Little St. Anne’s was transplanted to a continent where Athonite monasticism had never existed, and made accessible to Orthodox Christians who would never see the Holy Mountain.

The transplant carried Joseph’s whole ethos: the Jesus Prayer taught as a personal discipline, the vigil, strict fasting, frequent confession to a spiritual father, and the demanding obedience that Joseph had made the foundation of the inner life (Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on the ethos Ephraim transmitted; on Joseph’s teaching, see Nepsis and the Jesus Prayer and Spiritual Fatherhood and Obedience). The American monasteries became places of pilgrimage for many Orthodox faithful and drew inquirers and converts, so that Joseph’s hidden desert hesychasm has shaped, at two removes, the piety of a significant part of American Orthodoxy (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002, on the reach of the foundations).

The Letters as a Book of the World

A second, quieter channel was the printed word. Joseph’s letters, published in Greek as Expression of Monastic Experience (1979) and in English as Monastic Wisdom (1998), passed far beyond the monasteries into the hands of laypeople, clergy, and seekers across the Orthodox world and beyond it, functioning as a practical modern companion to the Philokalia — a living witness to the prayer of the heart in the voice of a twentieth-century man (Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998; see Monastic Wisdom in the Letters). Together with the biography and Ephraim’s memoir, the letters have made Joseph a widely read spiritual author, whose influence extends to many who have no connection to his monasteries at all. In this respect he takes his place among the modern Athonite witnesses — St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Sophrony of Essex, St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios — through whom the hesychast tradition has been carried into the modern imagination (see St. Silouan the Athonite and St. Sophrony of Essex).

Joseph and the Wider Recovery of the Prayer

Joseph’s diffusion belongs to a larger twentieth-century recovery of hesychast prayer that reached well beyond his own line. The same century saw the Russian Way of a Pilgrim carry the Jesus Prayer to a wide readership, the theological rehabilitation of Palamas by scholars such as John Meyendorff, the witness of the Silouan–Sophrony line in the West, and a general renewal of interest in the Philokalia and in noetic prayer among Orthodox and even non-Orthodox readers (on the tradition, see The Jesus Prayer; on the Philokalic root, St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and St. Paisius Velichkovsky). Joseph’s particular contribution within this wider recovery was the transmission of the prayer as a lived and teachable method through a vigorous monastic lineage — not primarily as a text to be read but as a practice to be handed on elder to disciple, and thence into whole communities. This is what distinguishes his legacy from a purely literary revival: through his disciples the prayer was not only published but embodied, in monasteries on two continents.

Sober Questions

So rapid and far-reaching an expansion has not been without controversy, and an honest account of the legacy must register it. The transplanting of the intense Athonite ascetic ethos — extreme fasting, all-night vigils, the demanding obedience to a spiritual father, frequent confession of thoughts — into the very different setting of parish and lay life in North America has drawn criticism as well as devotion. Some within American Orthodoxy have raised concerns about the suitability of a desert-monastic discipline for laypeople and families, about the intensity of the elder–disciple bond as practiced in some of the monasteries, and about pastoral excesses in particular cases; others have defended the monasteries as authentic transmitters of the tradition and the criticism as exaggerated or as discomfort with genuine asceticism (on the general tension between monastic and lay spirituality, see Monasticism). This collection does not adjudicate these contemporary disputes, which concern the practice of Joseph’s spiritual descendants rather than Joseph himself, and which remain live; it registers that the diffusion of so intense a tradition into new and very different conditions has raised real pastoral questions, and it leaves the weighing of them to the parties concerned and to time (a sober treatment of Joseph’s own legacy follows in Assessment).

The Measure of the Legacy

What is not in dispute is the scale and the fact of the diffusion. A tradition of prayer that, when Joseph came to Athos around 1921, was so diminished that he struggled to find a living teacher of it, had by the end of the century been carried — through his brotherhood — from the Athonite desert into flourishing coenobia, across the Atlantic into a new network of monasteries, and into the reading and prayer of Orthodox Christians around the world (Speake, Renewal in Paradise, 2002; Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom, 1998). Whatever questions attend the manner of the expansion, the recovery and transmission of the prayer of the heart is the substance of Joseph’s legacy, and it is a legacy of unusual reach for a man who spent his life hidden in a cave. It is this fruitfulness, among his sanctity and his teaching, that the Church weighed in glorifying him in 2020 (see Glorification 2020).

See Also

References

  • Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The American foundations and their reach; the ethos of the renewed tradition.)
  • Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The ethos Ephraim transmitted from Joseph to the foundations.)
  • Joseph the Hesychast, Elder. Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. Greek original: Ἔκφρασις μοναχικῆς ἐμπειρίας. Mount Athos, 1979.