The Prayer of the Heart

The center of St. Theophan the Recluse’s ascetical teaching: prayer is “to stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” This entry traces his teaching on the descent and uniting of the mind with the heart (сведение ума в сердце), the four ascending degrees of prayer gathered in The Art of Prayer, and his sober, cautious practice of the Jesus Prayer — a practice he hedged with grave warnings against mechanism, technique without a guide, and the spiritual delusion (prelest) that pursuit of bodily methods can breed.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Mind in the Heart

If a single sentence holds the whole of Theophan’s teaching on prayer, it is this: “The principal thing is to stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life” (Theophan, on the Jesus Prayer, in The Art of Prayer; cf. orthodoxprayer.org, St. Theophan on the Jesus Prayer). Every other element of his doctrine — the degrees, the cautions, the discernment of warmth — is an unfolding of that one image of standing before God with the mind brought down into the heart.

The phrase that the Russian tradition attaches to this work is сведение ума в сердце, the “leading-down” or uniting of the mind into the heart. Theophan’s psychology of prayer begins from a diagnosis: the mind, in its ordinary condition, is scattered in the head, dispersed among thoughts, images, and plans, and never gathered into one. To pray is to collect this dispersed mind, to bring it down out of its restless wandering and unite it with the heart — the deep center of the person — so that the whole man, mind and feeling and will together, stands collected and attentive before God. This is not a spatial or anatomical operation but a recollection of the entire person into his own depth, where alone he can meet the Lord. Theophan develops the same theme at length in the third part of The Path to Salvation, where the gathering of attention in the heart is treated as the foundation of the inner life (see The Path to Salvation).

His most compact statement of how the three faculties cooperate moves from the lips, through the mind, to the heart: “You must pray not only with words but with the mind, and not only with the mind but with the heart, so that the mind understands and sees clearly what is said in words, and the heart feels what the mind is thinking” (Theophan, in The Art of Prayer). Vocal prayer is not despised; it is the doorway. But word that is not understood by the mind, and thought that is not felt by the heart, has not yet become prayer in the full sense. The progression from word to mind to heart is the same progression that the degrees of prayer describe.

The Degrees of Prayer

In the texts gathered in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology — compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo and translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (Faber and Faber, 1966) — Theophan distinguishes four ascending degrees of prayer. They are drawn from his letters of spiritual direction, and they are best understood as stages along a single continuous path rather than as sharply bounded states; the sources do not warrant a false precision of page and paragraph for them.

The first is bodily prayer, the prayer of “reading, standing, making prostrations.” Here prayer is chiefly outward and laborious: the attention slips away and is forced back, the work is mostly that of the body holding itself to its task. The second is prayer with attention, in which “the mind collects itself” and begins genuinely to dwell upon the words it pronounces, so that the saying of the prayer and the understanding of it coincide. The third is prayer of feeling, in which “the heart is warmed by concentration so that what hitherto has only been thought now becomes feeling” — the words that the mind had understood now strike warm upon the heart, and prayer passes from a labor into a movement of the affections toward God. The fourth and highest is spiritual prayer: “When the feeling of prayer reaches the point where it becomes continuous, then spiritual prayer may be said to begin” (Theophan, in The Art of Prayer). At this degree prayer is no longer something the person manufactures but a gift; it is the Holy Spirit Himself praying within, and the person is borne along rather than striving.

The scheme is characteristic of Theophan’s method. It is gradual, honest about labor, and refuses to let the beginner mistake the lowest rung for the highest. One does not leap to spiritual prayer; one stands at one’s reading and prostrations until, in God’s time and not the seeker’s, the heart is warmed and the gift descends. The warming of the heart in the third degree must be read together with Theophan’s careful discernment of warmth, treated in the companion entry (see Feeling, Warmth, and Attention).

The Jesus Prayer Practiced Soberly

For Theophan the chief instrument of this whole ascent is the Jesus Prayer, the invocation of the name of the Lord. Yet no theme in his writing is more thoroughly hedged with caution. He is, above all, against mechanism. “You must not limit yourself to a mechanical repetition of the words of the Jesus Prayer,” he warns; “this will lead to nothing except a habit of repeating the prayer automatically with the tongue, without even thinking about it” (Theophan, on the Jesus Prayer; cf. orthodoxprayer.org). The lips may move ten thousand times and the man not have prayed once. The prayer is a means of standing before God with the mind in the heart, and the moment it becomes a tongue’s habit detached from mind and heart it has defeated its own purpose.

His second great caution concerns the psycho-physical techniques. “The various methods described by the Fathers (sitting down, making prostrations, and the other techniques used when performing this prayer) are not suitable for everyone,” he writes; “indeed without a personal director they are actually dangerous. It is better not to try them” (Theophan; cf. orthodoxprayer.org). He permitted only a mild coordination of the breath with the words, and he warned against seeking visions, sensations, or “warmth” as ends in themselves. To chase the bodily methods without a guide is to court prelest — spiritual delusion, the self-deception in which a man mistakes his own psychic states for the action of grace. Theophan observed that some in his own day, attempting these techniques, succeeded only in damaging their health: in the Russian ascetical tradition the vivid counsel circulated that the unwary, pursuing the physical methods, managed only to ruin their lungs. [Disputed: Kallistos Ware’s The Power of the Name gives the “damaged their lungs” counsel as the warning of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov; the OCA and Art of Prayer tradition attaches a parallel remark to Theophan. Both Russian fathers used the image, and the sources do not allow a clean attribution to one alone.]

This same instinct for caution governed Theophan far beyond the directing of individual souls. It is the very disposition that shaped his editing of the Russian Dobrotolyubie, where he omitted or softened the explicit psycho-physical breathing texts of the Greek Philokalia, judging them perilous for the unsupervised reader of his own age (see Translating the Dobrotolyubie). The editor and the spiritual director are the same man, applying the same discernment at different scales.

Within the Tradition

Theophan’s teaching on the prayer of the heart stands squarely within the broader Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Prayer and the Philokalia (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer). It is most naturally read alongside the parallel and sometimes contrasting teaching of his great contemporary St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, who treated the same prayer with a comparable severity of caution but a somewhat different emphasis (see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov). The standard pairing of the two nineteenth-century Russian fathers on the Jesus Prayer, and the long afterlife of their teaching in translation, is developed further among the materials on his legacy (see Influence and Translations). What unites Theophan to the tradition and distinguishes him within it is the same thing: an unhurried, almost clinical sobriety that keeps the whole towering edifice of prayer resting on the single humble act of standing before the Lord with the mind in the heart.

References

The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology. Compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo; translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. (The four degrees of prayer; the word–mind–heart synthesis; “to stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart”; gathered from Theophan’s letters of spiritual direction.)
St. Theophan the Recluse on the Jesus Prayer. orthodoxprayer.org. (Against mechanical repetition; the danger of the psycho-physical techniques without a personal director; the counsel against seeking sensations.)
Kallistos Ware. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Fairacres, Oxford: SLG Press. (The “damaged their lungs” counsel, attributed there to St. Ignatius Brianchaninov; cited for the disputed attribution.)
Theophan the Recluse. The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation. (Part Three, on the gathering of attention in the heart; cross-referenced for the doctrine of the mind in the heart.)