The Prayer of the Heart

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” For St. Paisius Velichkovsky the invocation of the Name of Jesus in the silence of the heart was not one devotion among others but the living core of the hesychast tradition he had crossed the Orthodox world to recover. When that prayer was attacked in his own century as a novelty, a delusion, or a heresy, he answered it in writing — the treatise his disciples preserved as the Scroll or Field Flowers — arguing that the prayer is the ancient tradition of the Fathers, not an innovation; that it is safe only under the guidance of an experienced elder; and that it belongs to all the faithful, not to advanced hermits alone. This file sets out his teaching on the prayer and the controversy that compelled him to defend it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)

The Prayer and the Tradition It Belongs To

The prayer Paisius taught is the Jesus Prayer in its received form — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Slavonic Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnago) — repeated in stillness and drawn, in the mature practice, from the lips into the mind and from the mind into the heart, until it becomes the continuous remembrance of God (on the prayer’s form, stages, and pan-Orthodox grounding, see The Jesus Prayer). This is the prayer the neptic Fathers call the prayer of the heart: not a thought entertained by the head but the descent of the intellect (nous) into the heart, the unification of mind and feeling in the spiritual center of the person, sustained by watchfulness (nepsis) against the intrusive thoughts (logismoi) that scatter it.

Paisius understood this practice as the unbroken inheritance of the desert and of Byzantium, not as a private method. His whole life’s work — the search through Wallachia and Ukraine for a living elder, the years on Athos hunting down accurate Greek manuscripts, the labor of correcting the Slavonic ascetic corpus that became the Dobrotolyubie (see Translating the Dobrotolyubie) — was undertaken precisely so that the prayer of the heart could be practiced rightly from sound texts under sound guidance (Chetverikov 1980, chs. on Athos and Dragomirna; Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974). The Fathers he most often names as the prayer’s witnesses are the central figures of the hesychast current: St. Symeon the New Theologian (see St. Symeon the New Theologian), St. Gregory of Sinai, who carried the systematic teaching of the Jesus Prayer through the fourteenth century, and St. Gregory Palamas, who defended the hesychasts against Barlaam and grounded the prayer’s claim — that the purified person truly participates in the uncreated divine light — in the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies (see St. Gregory Palamas; on the Palamite synthesis, Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974). Behind these stand the earlier neptic Fathers — Diadochos of Photike, Hesychios, John Climacus — whom Paisius had gathered into his Slavonic collection. The prayer of the heart, in his account, is what this whole chain of Fathers teaches with one voice.

The Suspicion the Prayer Met

It is easy, from the far side of the nineteenth-century revival, to forget that in Paisius’s own time the Jesus Prayer was regarded with open suspicion in some quarters, including within Orthodox lands. The hesychast practice of inner prayer had never wholly died, but in the post-Petrine Slavonic world, where monasticism had been suppressed and a Latinizing, scholastic education had displaced the patristic ascetic formation, the prayer of the heart had become unfamiliar enough that its practitioners could be accused of error (Chetverikov 1980; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979). The charges leveled against it fell into several recognizable kinds.

First, the prayer was attacked as a novelty — a recent invention dressed up as ancient practice, and therefore not to be trusted. Second, and more dangerously, it was attacked as a path to delusion (prelest, Greek plani): the claim was that those who practiced inner prayer, and especially the psychophysical method of attending to the heart and coordinating the prayer with the breath, were laying themselves open to imaginary experiences, false lights, and the inflation of self-conceit that the ascetic tradition itself most feared. Third — and here the accusation became gravest — the prayer was associated by some with outright heresy: it was tarred with the names of the Bogomils and the Messalians (the Euchites, the “praying” sectarians of the early Church condemned for holding that ceaseless prayer alone, apart from the sacraments and the Church’s life, drove out the indwelling demon and brought sensible perfection). To call the hesychasts Messalians was, in effect, to charge that their inner prayer was a sectarian short-circuit of the sacramental and ecclesial life — an old polemic, for the same charge had been thrown at the fourteenth-century hesychasts by Barlaam and his successors (Meyendorff 1974).

The monks of Paisius’s own communities were not spared this. The Life and the surrounding correspondence record that members of his brotherhood at Neamț and elsewhere were challenged on the legitimacy of the Jesus Prayer, and that it was to answer such a challenge — to defend his monks and the practice itself — that Paisius set his own teaching down in writing (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980). The exact occasion and the identity of his opponents are not transmitted with full clarity: [Disputed: the disciple-*Life* and Chetverikov (1980) present the *Scroll* as composed to refute an attack on the Jesus Prayer mounted by an unnamed monk or monks who called the prayer a novelty and a delusion, the controversy reaching Paisius at Neamț; the precise identity, number, and provenance of these opponents are not preserved in the sources, and the framing is in part the work of the disciple-hagiographers, so the episode should be read as a real controversy whose particulars are imperfectly documented rather than as a single dated disputation.]

The Scroll / Field Flowers: Paisius’s Defense

Paisius’s reply is the ascetic treatise his disciples preserved under more than one name. It is referred to as the Scroll (Slavonic svitok) and, from its title, as the Field Flowers or “Lilies of the Field” — Slavonic Krïny sel’nïe — a phrase taken from the Lord’s words on the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:28; cf. Luke 12:27), which Paisius applies to the sayings of the Fathers on prayer gathered as a fragrant garland in the prayer’s defense. The precise textual situation carries some uncertainty: [Disputed: the work defending the Jesus Prayer is cited in the sources and scholarship under several titles and forms — the *Scroll* (*svitok*); *Field Flowers* / *Lilies of the Field* (*Krïny sel'nïe*); and as a set of "chapters" or a treatise on the mental prayer of the heart — and it is bound up with his prefaces and letters on the same theme; whether these represent one work under variant titles or a small cluster of related compositions, and the exact recension behind each printed excerpt, is not settled in the literature (cf. Chetverikov 1980; Metrophanes / Rose 1976). The substance of the defense, however, is consistent across the witnesses.]

The argument of the defense runs along four lines, each answering one of the charges.

The prayer is the ancient tradition, not an innovation. Against the accusation of novelty, Paisius marshals the Fathers themselves. The mental prayer of the heart, he insists, is no recent device but the teaching handed down from the Apostles through the desert and the hesychast Fathers — he appeals to Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, John Climacus, Hesychios, Philotheos of Sinai, Diadochos, Nikephoros, and the whole company collected in the neptic anthology (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980; on the same Fathers, The Philokalia, vols. 1, 4). The method is precisely what he has been at pains to recover in correct texts; to call it a novelty is to confess ignorance of the Fathers who teach it. His translation labor and his apologetic are thus one project: the Dobrotolyubie is the documentary proof that the prayer he defends is the Church’s own.

The prayer is no delusion when rightly practiced. Against the charge of prelest, Paisius does not deny that delusion is a real danger — he affirms it with the whole tradition. His answer is that the danger lies not in the prayer but in practicing it wrongly: alone, without guidance, in self-will, seeking experiences and visions. The prayer pursued in humility, with the petition “have mercy on me, a sinner” always sounding, and under the eye of an experienced guide, is the very opposite of delusion; it is the medicine against it. The Fathers’ warnings about prelest, which Paisius’s opponents wielded against the prayer, are in fact warnings about practicing the prayer without an elder — and so they tell for his position, not against it (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; cf. the treatment of prelest and its safeguards in The Jesus Prayer).

The prayer is Orthodox, not Messalian or Bogomil. Against the charge of heresy, Paisius’s defense is the same one the Church had made on behalf of Palamas. The Messalian error was to set ceaseless prayer over against the sacraments and the Church, claiming a sensible perfection apart from them; the hesychast prayer Paisius teaches is embedded in the Church’s sacramental and liturgical life, undertaken in obedience and humility, and oriented to repentance rather than to felt perfection. So far from being a sectarian substitute for the Church, the prayer of the heart presupposes the Church — the Mysteries, the services, the discipline of the cenobium — and withers outside it. The light the hesychasts confess is the uncreated light of Tabor that Palamas defended as truly divine, not the imaginary illumination the Messalians claimed (Meyendorff 1974; Ware 1974).

The prayer is for all, not for advanced hermits only. Finally, against the narrowing that would quarantine inner prayer among a few solitaries, Paisius taught that the Jesus Prayer belongs to all who seek God — monks of every degree and, in its simpler forms, the laity as well. The continuous remembrance of the Name is the fulfillment of the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), addressed to the whole Church and not to a spiritual elite (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980; Ware 1974). What is reserved is not the prayer but the higher reaches of the method, and these are reserved not by privilege but by prudence: they require a guide. This is why Paisius’s defense of the prayer leads directly into his teaching on eldership.

Prayer Under Obedience: The Inseparable Condition

The single thread running through the whole defense is that the prayer of the heart is safe only under obedience to an experienced spiritual father and the open disclosure of one’s thoughts to him. This is not a qualification Paisius adds to soften the practice for his critics; it is, for him, intrinsic to the practice. The same Fathers who teach the prayer teach that it cannot be undertaken alone without grave risk, and the one who attempts the noetic prayer of the heart without a guide and without revealing his inner life is the very figure the warnings about prelest describe (Metrophanes / Rose 1976; Chetverikov 1980). Paisius’s recovery of the prayer therefore could not have been merely literary or merely devotional; it had to be institutional. To defend the prayer was, in the same act, to restore the eldership that guards it — the disclosure of thoughts, obedience, and spiritual fatherhood that are treated in the companion file (see Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood). The two cannot be separated: the prayer is the treasure, and the elder is the one to whom the treasure is entrusted.

It is this combination — the prayer recovered from the Fathers and defended against its accusers, and the prayer always anchored in obedience and the open heart — that Paisius’s disciples carried out of Moldavia into the monasteries of Russia, where it would become the seed of the nineteenth-century Philokalic and Optina revival (see The Line to the Optina Elders).

References

Metrophanes, Schemamonk. Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Life and Ascetic Labors of Our Father, Elder Paisius. Translated by Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1976. (The disciple-Life together with translated excerpts of Paisius’s ascetic writings and letters, including the Scroll / Field Flowers defending the Jesus Prayer and its appeal to Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, and the neptic Fathers.)
Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Translated by Vasily Lickwar and Alexander I. Lisenko. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1980. (Original Russian, 1933. The fullest critical reconstruction of the controversy over the Jesus Prayer and of Paisius’s defense.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The hesychast tradition, the essence–energies distinction, and the history of the Messalian charge against inner prayer.)
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023. (Texts of Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, Diadochos, Hesychios, and the neptic Fathers cited in Paisius’s defense.)
The Holy Bible. Matthew 6:28; Luke 12:27 (the lilies of the field); 1 Thessalonians 5:17 (unceasing prayer).