The Prayer and the Modern West

In the twentieth century the Jesus Prayer crossed every boundary its history had known: translated into the Western languages, popularized by a Russian wanderer’s tale and an American novel, compared with and distinguished from the new Christian meditation movements, and received by non-Orthodox Christians as a treasure of the undivided tradition. This file traces that reception and states, per §4.1, the respectful but clear distinction between the Jesus Prayer and “centering prayer” — closing with the prayer as Orthodoxy’s universal gift.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Vectors of Reception

The prayer’s Western journey ran along identifiable channels. The first was the Pilgrim: R. M. French’s English translation of The Way of a Pilgrim (1930) made the Russian tale a minor spiritual classic in the Anglophone world, and J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961), whose heroine carries the little green book and repeats its prayer, put the Jesus Prayer — named, quoted, and discussed — into one of the most-read works of postwar American fiction (The Way of a Pilgrim, trans. French, SPCK, 1930; Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Little, Brown, 1961; the vector is noted in most modern accounts of the prayer’s Western fame, e.g., the foreword material to A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet], The Jesus Prayer, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1987). The second was the Philokalia in English: the Kadloubovsky–Palmer selections (Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, Faber, 1951) and then the complete Palmer–Sherrard–Ware translation (Faber, vols. 1–4, 1979–1995; vol. 5, 2023) gave Western readers the tradition’s sources (the translation history is treated in The Philokalia). The third was the émigré and convert teachers: Lev Gillet’s essays, Kallistos Ware’s The Power of the Name (SLG Press, 1974 — published, significantly, by an Anglican religious community’s press), and the Essex monastery of St. Sophrony gave the prayer living Orthodox interpreters in Western Europe (Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987; Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; see Silouan, Sophrony, and the Athonite Revival). The result, visible from the 1970s onward, is that the Jesus Prayer is now prayed — with whatever varying depth — far beyond canonical Orthodoxy: by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Protestants, in religious communities and parishes, a fact Orthodox writers have generally received with gratitude rather than alarm, while insisting that the prayer travels best with its context: the faith it confesses and the sobriety it requires (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987).

The Centering Prayer Comparison

The same decades produced, within Western Christianity, meditation movements with which the Jesus Prayer is constantly compared, and the comparison deserves the same careful treatment given the mantra question (see Not a Mantra). “Centering prayer,” developed in the 1970s by the Trappists of St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts — Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger — and presented in Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart (1986), is a method of silent prayer in which the practitioner chooses a short “sacred word” not for continual repetition but as a symbol of consent to God’s presence and action, returning to it only when engaged by thoughts; its stated lineage is the fourteenth-century English Cloud of Unknowing and the apophatic strand of Western mysticism (Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel, Amity House, 1986; Pennington, Centering Prayer, Doubleday, 1980). Reported accurately, centering prayer is a Christian practice, Trinitarian in its stated intention, and its founders explicitly distinguish it from Transcendental Meditation.

The differences from the Jesus Prayer are nonetheless real, and Orthodox writers state them without hostility. First, content: the Jesus Prayer is a continuous, articulate confession and petition — Name, titles, mercy, sinner — where the sacred word of centering prayer is deliberately semantically thin, a placeholder for intention rather than a prayer said; the Orthodox practice fills the mind with dogmatic content, the Western method empties it of content in favor of consent (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974, on the prayer as confession and invocation; Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart, 1986, on the sacred word as symbol, not invocation). Second, address: the Jesus Prayer is unbroken second-person speech to the incarnate Christ; centering prayer, in its method, suspends discursive address for receptive silence. The Orthodox tradition knows and honors wordless prayer — but as the crown given by grace after long verbal invocation, not as a method’s starting point; the hesychast teachers are consistently wary of self-chosen silence unsupported by the Name, in which the unguarded mind is judged vulnerable (Theophan, in The Art of Prayer, ed. Chariton, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber, 1966; Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Lazarus, Watkins, 1965; see The Three Degrees). Third, frame: the Jesus Prayer comes embedded in a total ecclesial ascesis — confession, Eucharist, fasting, obedience, the warnings literature — where centering prayer is typically taught as a method available across confessional settings; from the Orthodox side this portability is precisely the concern, since the tradition regards the prayer’s safety as inseparable from its churchly frame (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; see The Prayer Rope and the Rule and Prelest and the Need for Guidance). Stated per §4.1: these are differences the Orthodox Church regards as weighty — reported here in both traditions’ own terms, without impugning the Christian intention of the Western practitioners, and without pretending the two practices are one.

What Orthodoxy Offers, and On What Terms

The prayer’s Western popularity poses a pastoral question the Orthodox teachers have answered consistently: the Jesus Prayer is offered to all Christians — it is biblical, its words are common Christian confession, and no Orthodox authority has ever fenced it — but it is offered whole: with its Christology, its repentance, its refusal of technique-thinking, its warnings, and its orientation to the sacramental life. Gillet and Ware, the two expositors most read by non-Orthodox, both structure their presentations exactly so: universal invitation, undiluted content (Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987; Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974). What the tradition declines to sponsor is the extraction of the formula as a free-standing relaxation technique — the “Jesus Prayer” without Jesus confessed as Lord, Christ, and Son of God, or without the publican’s self-knowledge; on the tradition’s own premises such an extract is no longer the prayer at all (see Not a Mantra; Sophrony, On Prayer, trans. Edmonds, SVS Press, 1996).

The Universal Gift

It is fitting that this collection ends where the hub article begins: with the prayer’s astonishing reach. A formula first attested whole in an Egyptian discourse of the sixth or seventh century (see The Words and Their Variants) is now prayed in every inhabited continent and scores of languages, by patriarchs and grandmothers, monks of Athos and commuters on trains — the most portable, most democratic, and most theologically compressed devotion Christianity possesses. Orthodox writers have not hesitated to name it among Orthodoxy’s principal gifts to the modern Christian world: a way of unceasing prayer that carries the whole dogmatic faith in one sentence and the whole ascetic tradition in its manner of use (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1995, where prayer of the heart stands at the summit of the Orthodox path; Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987). The gift, as this collection has tried to show throughout, is not a technique that happened to be preserved in the East, but the distilled practice of the Church’s faith in the Name “which is above every name” (Philippians 2:9) — and it is given on the Giver’s terms: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

See Also

References

  • The Way of a Pilgrim. Trans. R. M. French. London: SPCK, 1930.
  • Salinger, J. D. Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
  • Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1951; The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware (et al.), 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023.
  • A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet]. The Jesus Prayer. Rev. ed., foreword by Kallistos Ware. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.
  • Keating, Thomas. Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel. Amity, NY: Amity House, 1986. (Centering prayer in its own terms; the sacred word as symbol of consent.)
  • Pennington, M. Basil. Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.
  • Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. On Prayer. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.
  • Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965; The Art of Prayer, ed. Chariton, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
  • Scripture: Philippians 2:9.