Watchfulness and the Senses

The inner content of Nicodemus’s whole enterprise: nepsis — watchfulness or sobriety — the vigilant guarding of the senses, the imagination, and the heart that is the core discipline of the neptic-hesychast tradition the Philokalia exists to transmit. This file sets out the theology of watchfulness: the warfare of the thoughts (logismoi), the guarding of the gate of the senses, the purification of the heart, and the pure prayer and vision of God to which the whole discipline is ordered.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

Nepsis: The Watchful Sobriety

The Greek word nēpsis (νῆψις) — “watchfulness,” “sobriety,” “vigilance” — names the central discipline of the tradition Nicodemus spent his life gathering and teaching. It is the word in the very title of the Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers (see Compiling the Philokalia). To be nēptic is to be inwardly awake and sober — guarding the doorway of the mind and heart against the entry of the passions, attentive at every moment to what is rising within the soul. The Scriptural root is the apostolic exhortation: “Be sober (nēpsate), be watchful; your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). Nepsis is the inner waking that this command requires — the opposite of the spiritual sleep, distraction, and self-forgetfulness in which the passions do their work unobserved.

The neptic Fathers — Evagrius, Hesychios, Philotheos, Maximus, and the rest gathered in the Philokalia — made the analysis and practice of watchfulness into a precise spiritual science, and Nicodemus, their editor and disciple, made it the inner content of all his spiritual writing (see The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel).

The Warfare of the Thoughts

At the center of neptic theology is the warfare of the thoughts (logismoi). The neptic Fathers observed that sin does not begin with the act but with the thought — the logismos that presents itself to the mind, is entertained, consented to, and at last enacted. Evagrius’s classic analysis (gathered in the Philokalia) traces the genealogy of the passionate thought from its first suggestion (prosbolē), through coupling (the mind’s turning to dwell on it), assent (the will’s consent), and so to passion and act. The neptic art is to intercept the thought early — at the threshold, before it takes root — by watchfulness, by the rejection of the suggestion, and above all by the invocation of the name of Jesus (the Jesus Prayer), which both repels the thought and turns the mind to God (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). This is why watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer are inseparable in the tradition: the prayer is the chief weapon of the watchful mind, and the watchfulness is what keeps the prayer pure.

The Gate of the Senses

The thoughts feed on what enters through the senses, and so neptic watchfulness extends outward to the guarding of the five senses — the theme Nicodemus develops most fully in his Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (see The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel). The senses are the gates of the soul; through them the images and impressions of the world enter, and through them, ungoverned, the passions invade. The eye that gazes idly, the ear that drinks in slander or seductive song, the unrestrained appetites of taste and touch — each opens a breach in the soul’s defenses. The guarding of the senses is therefore the outer perimeter of the same warfare that the watching of the thoughts conducts within: control the gate, and the inner fortress is the easier to hold.

But, as in the Handbook, this guarding is not a hatred of the body or a contempt for the created world. The senses and the body are God’s good gifts, and the goal is their transfiguration, not their destruction: the eye is to be turned from lust to the contemplation of God’s beauty, the ear from idle noise to the words of Scripture and the chant of the Church, the whole sensory life re-ordered toward its Maker. The neptic ascesis is finally for the senses, restoring them to their true use, not against them.

The Purification of the Heart

The aim of all this watching and guarding is the purification of the heart — katharsis tēs kardias. In the neptic anthropology the heart (kardia) is the center of the person, the meeting-place of body and spirit, the throne on which either the passions or the grace of God will reign. The passions, fed by the thoughts and the senses, defile the heart; watchfulness, by intercepting their supply, allows the heart to be cleansed, and a cleansed heart is the precondition of the vision of God: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). The neptic Fathers read that Beatitude as the very charter of their discipline. Purification (katharsis) is the first stage of the threefold path the tradition maps — katharsis, illumination (phōtisis), and union (theōsis) — and watchfulness is the labor of the first stage that opens the way to the rest.

Pure Prayer and the Vision of God

The summit toward which watchfulness ascends is pure prayer and, in it, the vision of God. The mind (nous), cleansed of the thoughts and freed from the tyranny of images, becomes capable of standing before God in stillness (hesychia), praying without distraction, and at last receiving the illumination of the uncreated light — the theme that crowns the Philokalia in the writings of St. Gregory Palamas (see The Evergetinos and the Synaxaristes on the Palamas edition, and St. Gregory Palamas). This is theosis, deification, the participation of the whole person — soul and body, mind and senses — in the life of God (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). Watchfulness is not an end in itself but the necessary labor by which the soul is made ready for this gift; the guarding of the senses serves the vision of God.

This is the theology that animates everything Nicodemus did. The Philokalia gathers its sources; the Handbook applies it; the editions of Symeon and Palamas restore its great theologians; the hymnography sings it; the frequent Communion nourishes it. Watchfulness and the senses are not one topic among Nicodemus’s many but the inner thread that runs through them all.

The Stages of the Thought

The neptic anatomy of the logismos repays closer attention, because its precision is what gives watchfulness its practical force. The Fathers gathered in the Philokalia did not speak of “temptation” in the abstract but charted the passionate thought through distinct stages, so that the watchful mind would know exactly where to strike (Nicodemus and Makarios, comps., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber, 1979–). The first is the bare suggestion (prosbolē), the image or thought that simply presents itself, for which the soul bears no guilt; then coupling (syndyasmos), the mind’s turning to converse with the thought; then assent (synkatathesis), the will’s consent; then captivity, in which the mind is dragged along against its better judgment; and at last the settled passion (pathos) and the act (The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1979–). The whole art of nepsis is to intercept the thought as early as possible — ideally at the suggestion, before coupling begins — because the further the thought is allowed to descend the stages, the harder it is to expel. This is why the Fathers prize the invocation of the name of Jesus at the very threshold: the Jesus Prayer meets the suggestion at the gate and turns the mind to God before the thought can take root (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The Heart in Orthodox Anthropology

To understand why watchfulness aims finally at the heart, one must grasp the place the heart (kardia) holds in the neptic anthropology — a place quite different from the merely emotional “heart” of modern usage (The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1979–). For the Fathers the heart is the deep center of the whole person, the point at which body and spirit meet, the seat of the nous in its descent into the inmost self, and the throne on which either the passions or the grace of God will reign. The scattered, surface-dwelling mind is to be gathered and brought down into the heart, so that prayer is no longer a matter of the discursive intellect alone but of the whole person standing collected before God (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). This “descent of the mind into the heart” is the characteristic aim of hesychast prayer, and watchfulness is its precondition: only the heart guarded against the inflowing passions can become the quiet chamber in which the nous dwells and prays. The guarding of the senses, the watching of the thoughts, and the purification of the heart are thus a single movement inward, from the outer gate to the inmost center.

Katharsis, Photisis, Theosis

The neptic discipline is ordered along a path the tradition maps in three stages: purification (katharsis), illumination (phōtisis), and union or deification (theōsis) (The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1979–; the threefold path is standard in the neptic and Palamite tradition). Watchfulness is the labor proper to the first stage, the katharsis of the heart from the passions; but it is not left behind in the stages that follow. Rather, the purified heart is illumined — granted the phōtisis in which the nous, cleansed of images and freed from the tyranny of the thoughts, begins to perceive the things of God and to pray with a new clarity. And illumination opens at last onto theōsis, the union in which the whole person, soul and body, mind and senses, participates in the uncreated life and light of God (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). The threefold path keeps watchfulness from being mistaken for an end in itself or for a mere moral self-improvement: it is the first and indispensable labor of an ascent whose summit is the vision of God, and the seriousness of the labor is measured by the height of its goal.

The Unity of Nepsis Across His Works

Read against this theology, the apparent diversity of Nicodemus’s output discloses a single inner unity. The Philokalia gathers the neptic Fathers who taught the warfare of the thoughts; the Handbook applies their watchfulness to the guarding of the senses for a working pastor (see The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel); the editions of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas restore the great theologians of pure prayer and the uncreated light; the Rudder and the frequent-Communion treatise secure the ecclesial and sacramental conditions in which watchfulness is lived; and even the hymnography and the Christian Morality carry the same sobriety into the sung and the moral life (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974; see The Patristic Mind). Nicodemus did not pursue many separate projects but served a single thing under many forms — the recovery of the watchful, purified, deifying life of the Orthodox tradition — and nepsis is the thread on which every one of his labors is strung.

References

Nicodemus and Makarios, comps. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber, 1979–. For the neptic Fathers on watchfulness, the logismoi, and pure prayer (Evagrios, Hesychios, Philotheos, Maximus, et al.).
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1989. For the guarding of the senses and the imagination.
Scripture: 1 Peter 5:8 (nēpsate); Matthew 5:8 (the pure in heart). The threefold path of katharsis–phōtisis–theōsis is standard in the neptic and Palamite tradition.
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. On Nicodemus’s neptic theology.