Section 07: Prayer and the Heart

St. Theophan’s teaching on prayer — the goal toward which his whole system tends. This section sets out the uniting of the mind with the heart, the ascending degrees of prayer, and the sober, cautious practice of the Jesus Prayer, together with his crucial discernment between the natural warmth of the body and the spiritual warmth of grace — a teaching as much a safeguard against self-deception as a method of ascent.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

Contents

File Topic
The Prayer of the Heart “To stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart”; the descent of the mind into the heart; the four degrees of prayer; the Jesus Prayer practiced soberly; the warnings against mechanism, against techniques without a guide, and against the breathing methods that risk prelest
Feeling, Warmth, and Attention Attention as the indispensable core of prayer; the discernment of natural/bodily warmth from the grace-given warmth that is “truly spiritual”; the refusal to make any sensation a goal; the clinical precision of his psychology of prayer

How to Use

  • Read The Prayer of the Heart for the method and its cautions — the standing-before-God that is the aim, and the safeguards that keep the practice from delusion.
  • Read Feeling, Warmth, and Attention for the discernment that is the heart of his sobriety: the careful refusal to mistake feeling for grace.
  • This teaching rests on the anthropology of Section 08 and on the editorial cautions of Section 04.

Cross-References