The Sinai Synthesis: Climacus and Hesychios

At Sinai the desert’s scattered elements — short prayer, the Name, watchfulness — were forged into a school. This file treats St. John Climacus’s teaching on stillness and the “Jesus prayer” in the Ladder (with the genuine scholarly dispute over whether he means a fixed formula), and Hesychios of Sinai’s On Watchfulness and Holiness, the first treatise to make the invocation of Jesus and the guarding of the mind a single, inseparable method.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Sinai as a School of Prayer

The monastery of the Burning Bush at the foot of Mount Sinai — from the sixth century sheltered by Justinian’s fortress church, later named for St. Catherine — became after the Arab conquests one of the great conservatories of the desert tradition, and it is in Sinaite authors that the Jesus Prayer first appears embedded in a coherent ascetical system rather than as counsel scattered through sayings and letters. The scholarship accordingly speaks of a “Sinaite school” of prayer, its chief monuments being the Ladder of St. John Climacus, the treatise of Hesychios, and the texts of Philotheos of Sinai (Ware, “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai,” in The Study of Spirituality, SPCK, 1986; Hausherr, The Name of Jesus, trans. Cummings, Cistercian, 1978). What Sinai added to the inheritance described in Monologistos Prayer in the Desert was the systematic linkage of the invocation to nepsis — watchfulness, the guarding of the mind’s gate against thoughts at their first appearance — and to hesychia, stillness, as the environment in which the linkage works.

St. John Climacus: The Ladder’s Witness

St. John Climacus (John of the Ladder; the traditional dates c. 579–649 are approximate, and modern scholarship allows a range across the sixth–seventh centuries — see Ware’s introduction to John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Luibheid and Russell, Paulist Press, 1982), abbot of Sinai, left in the Ladder of Divine Ascent the most influential ascetical treatise of the Christian East. Two steps concern this collection directly. In Step 27, on stillness, comes the sentence that the whole later tradition made programmatic: “Stillness (hesychia) is worshipping God unceasingly and waiting on Him. Let the remembrance of Jesus be present with your every breath. Then indeed you will appreciate the value of stillness” (Climacus, Ladder, Step 27.60–61, trans. Luibheid and Russell, 1982; the repository’s hub article cites the same passage). The joining of “the remembrance of Jesus” to “every breath” — whether Climacus meant it physiologically or as an idiom for constancy is itself discussed below — became the charter text for the hesychast coordination of prayer and breathing (see The Psychosomatic Method). In Step 28, on prayer, Climacus teaches the monologistos principle in its classical form: prayer should not be verbose, “for a single word saved the publican, and one cry of faith the thief on the cross”; the mind should be enclosed in the words of the prayer, patiently brought back each time it strays (Climacus, Ladder, Step 28, trans. Luibheid and Russell, 1982). Elsewhere he counsels flogging the enemies — the demons and their suggestions — with the Name of Jesus, “for there is no stronger weapon in heaven or on earth” (Climacus, Ladder, trans. Luibheid and Russell, 1982; the saying is among the Ladder’s most-quoted counsels in the later Jesus Prayer literature, e.g., in Ware, The Power of the Name, SLG Press, 1974).

The Dispute: Does Climacus Know the Fixed Formula?

The Ladder speaks of “the Jesus prayer” (Iēsou euchē) in Step 27 — the earliest occurrence of the phrase itself — and this collection flags honestly what the scholarship flags. [Disputed: whether Climacus’s Iēsou euchē and “remembrance of Jesus” refer to a fixed verbal formula such as the later standard Jesus Prayer, or more broadly to the practice of invoking Jesus without set words. (a) Kallistos Ware, in his introduction to the Paulist Press Ladder and in “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer,” notes that Climacus nowhere quotes any formula, and holds that while Climacus clearly attests devotion to the Name and single-phrase prayer, the standardized wording cannot be read back into him; the fixed formula is first attested in the roughly contemporary Discourse on Abba Philemon (Ware, introduction to Luibheid and Russell, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Paulist, 1982; Ware, “Origins,” 1986). (b) Irénée Hausherr, in the foundational modern study, similarly treats the pre-Athonite evidence as showing a devotion with fluid wording rather than a fixed prayer, against older accounts that projected the developed practice onto the early texts (Hausherr, The Name of Jesus, 1978). The devotional tradition itself, by contrast, has generally read Step 27 as the Jesus Prayer simpliciter — so, e.g., the nineteenth-century Russian teachers, who cite Climacus as teaching precisely their prayer (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Lazarus, Watkins, 1965). This collection follows the scholarly consensus that the practice is continuous while the formula was still fluid in Climacus’s day, and does not adjudicate what wording the abbot of Sinai himself used.] The fuller treatment of Climacus belongs to his own collection, St. John Climacus, including its section on hesychia and the Jesus Prayer.

Hesychios of Sinai: Watchfulness and the Name Made One

The treatise On Watchfulness and Holiness (Pros Theodoulon), transmitted under the name of “Hesychios the Priest,” stands first in order of influence among the Sinaite texts on the prayer itself. The English Philokalia‘s editors, following the scholarship, distinguish its author from the fifth-century Hesychius of Jerusalem and place him probably in the eighth or ninth century, a monk (the manuscript tradition says abbot) of the Sinai region (editors’ introductory note to Hesychios in The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber, 1979; the hub article notes the same). His treatise is the first sustained argument that watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer are not two practices but one. Watchfulness he defines at the outset as “a spiritual method which, if sedulously practised over a long period, completely frees us, with God’s help, from impassioned thoughts, impassioned words and evil actions” (Hesychios, On Watchfulness and Holiness 1, Philokalia vol. 1); and the method’s positive content is the continual invocation: attentiveness guards the heart’s entrance, and the Name of Jesus, called upon without interruption, is both the weapon that strikes the intruding thought and the presence that fills the guarded heart. The two reinforce each other in a circle he describes repeatedly — watchfulness intensifies the prayer, the prayer makes watchfulness possible — and he reaches for physical images of union to say how close the invocation should be: as air to the body, as flame to the wax, so should the invocation of Jesus be to the breath and the heart (Hesychios, On Watchfulness and Holiness, Philokalia vol. 1, throughout; on Hesychios’s place in the tradition, Ware, “Origins,” 1986, and Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974). In Hesychios the breath-language of Climacus has become explicit counsel — join the prayer to the breathing — though still as vivid direction rather than the articulated physical technique of the later Athonite texts (Ware, “Origins,” 1986; see The Psychosomatic Method).

Hesychios also fixes the tradition’s diagnostic vocabulary: the analysis of temptation into stages — provocation (prosbolē), coupling, assent, act — with the Jesus Prayer deployed at the first stage, so that the thought is cut off before it becomes conversation (Hesychios, On Watchfulness and Holiness, Philokalia vol. 1; the schema descends from Mark the Ascetic and becomes standard in the neptic literature). This is the practical psychology the whole later tradition presupposes: the prayer is not only worship but warfare, the “flogging of the foes” Climacus named, conducted at the mind’s gate rather than in its occupied interior.

Philotheos of Sinai and the School’s Legacy

Philotheos of Sinai, abbot of the Burning Bush monastery (his dates are uncertain; the Philokalia‘s editors place him after Hesychios, perhaps ninth–tenth century), continued the school in his Forty Texts on Watchfulness, teaching the same union of nepsis, remembrance of death, and the invocation of Jesus as the monk’s continual inner liturgy (Philotheos of Sinai, Forty Texts on Watchfulness, in The Philokalia, vol. 3, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber, 1984, with the editors’ note on his uncertain date). With Philotheos the Sinaite corpus was complete, and its afterlife was extraordinary: these are precisely the texts that the fourteenth-century Athonites would systematize, that Paisius Velichkovsky would translate, and that the Philokalia would carry into every Orthodox land (see Section 04 and Section 05; the anthology’s own history is treated in The Philokalia). When the tradition later names its lineage — “the Sinaite fathers” between the desert and Athos — it is Climacus, Hesychios, and Philotheos it means, and the substance of their bequest can be stated in one sentence: the invocation of the Name of Jesus, joined to watchfulness at every breath, within stillness, is the science of unceasing prayer.

References

Climacus, John. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, introduction by Kallistos Ware. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982. (Steps 27–28; the introduction for the formula dispute and the dating.)
Hesychios the Priest. On Watchfulness and Holiness. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (With the editors’ note on authorship and date.)
Philotheos of Sinai. Forty Texts on Watchfulness. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 3. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
A Discourse on Abba Philemon. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. (The earliest attestation of the standard formula, roughly contemporary with the Sinaite school.)
Ware, Kallistos. “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai.” In The Study of Spirituality, ed. Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold. London: SPCK, 1986. (The Sinaite school; the fluidity of the formula; Hesychios’s breath-counsel.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
Hausherr, Irénée. The Name of Jesus. Trans. Charles Cummings. Cistercian Studies 44. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1978. (The critical history; devotion vs fixed formula in the early evidence.)
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965. (The devotional tradition’s reading of Climacus.)