Scripture and the Life of Prayer

The other great setting of patristic reading was not the pulpit but the monastic cell. There Scripture was not analyzed but ingested — memorized, murmured, ruminated, and prayed until it became the very substance of the monk’s inner life. This file treats the monastic reading of the Bible: the meditation (meletē) on the word, the memorization of the Psalter, and the roots of the Jesus Prayer in Scripture.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Reading as Rumination

Alongside the exegetical homily of the bishop stands a wholly different practice of reading, born in the Egyptian desert and carried through all later Orthodox monasticism: the slow, prayerful ingestion of Scripture until it becomes part of the reader. The desert monks did not, for the most part, study Scripture as a text to be analyzed; they took it into themselves as food. The characteristic word is meletē (Greek) or meditatio (Latin) — but “meditation” here does not mean silent reflection so much as the low, continual murmuring of a memorized text, repeated aloud under the breath as one worked, walked, or kept vigil. The monk “ruminated” on the word as an animal chews the cud, turning a verse over and over until its meaning and power were released into the heart (Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism, Oxford, 1993, the standard study; see also The Desert Fathers).

Burton-Christie’s study of the Apophthegmata (the Sayings of the Desert Fathers) shows how thoroughly the desert life was shaped by Scripture: a monk would ask an elder for “a word,” and the word given was very often a verse of Scripture to be carried, pondered, and enacted. The goal was not information but transformation — the doing of the word, not merely its hearing (James 1:22). Abba Antony’s whole conversion turned on hearing the Gospel read in church — “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21) — and simply doing it (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3; Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993). The desert reading of Scripture is the reading that becomes a life.

The Memorization of the Psalter

The concrete center of this practice was the Psalter, which the monk was expected to know by heart. From the earliest monastic rules, memorization of the Psalms was foundational: the Pachomian tradition required that a candidate learn to read if he could not, and that he commit portions of Scripture, above all the Psalms, to memory, so that the words would be available to him at every hour (the Pachomian Rule / Praecepta, on the learning of Scripture and the Psalter; Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, Cistercian Publications, 1980–82). The ideal, often repeated in the tradition, was that the monk should know the entire Psalter by heart — a hundred and fifty psalms carried in the memory — so that the Psalter could be prayed continually, at work and in the night, without a book (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, on the centrality of the Psalter in monastic prayer; see The Bible as the Liturgical Book).

This memorized Psalter was the raw material of unceasing prayer. St. Athanasius’ teaching that the Psalms uniquely give us words to speak back to God (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 10–11; trans. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980) found its fullest realization here: the monk who had taken the Psalter into his memory could let it rise continually as his own prayer, so that the boundary between reading Scripture and praying dissolved. The word read became the word prayed became the word lived. St. John Cassian, transmitting the Egyptian tradition to the West, describes how the monk who prays the Psalms perpetually comes to find that he is no longer reciting another’s words but praying his own, the psalm’s every emotion having become his own experience (Cassian, Conferences 10.11, on the Psalter internalized as one’s own prayer; see St. John Cassian).

Scripture and the Jesus Prayer

From this soil grew the practice most associated with Orthodox spirituality: the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — and the broader hesychast tradition of the prayer of the heart. The Jesus Prayer is itself woven from Scripture. Its confession, “Jesus Christ, Son of God,” is the confession of Peter (Matthew 16:16) and the aim of John’s Gospel (John 20:31); its plea, “have mercy on me,” is the cry of the blind man of Jericho (Luke 18:38: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”) and of the publican in the temple, “God, be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13). The prayer is a distillation of the Gospel into a single breath — Scripture reduced to its essence and made continual (Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality, SLG Press, 1974; see The Philokalia, the great anthology of the hesychast tradition, and the topical article on the Jesus Prayer).

The same continuity runs the other way: the monastic tradition read the scriptural command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) as the charter of unceasing prayer, and understood the memorized Psalter and the repeated Jesus Prayer as two forms of obeying it. The Philokalia, the anthology of hesychast texts compiled by Ss. Macarius of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, gathers the ascetic tradition’s teaching on watchfulness (nēpsis) and the prayer of the heart, and it is saturated with Scripture — the fathers it collects reason constantly from the biblical text, reading the whole ascetic enterprise as the doing of the word (see The Philokalia). Scripture and the life of prayer are, in this tradition, inseparable: the word is taken into the heart, and in the heart it becomes prayer.

The Reader Formed by the Word

Underlying the whole monastic practice is a conviction about what Scripture is for. The word is not given to be mastered but to master the reader — to purify, to convict, to illumine, to transform. This is why the desert tradition so insists on doing the word: the meaning of a text is not fully known until it is lived (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993). It is also why the tradition joins right reading to holiness of life, echoing St. Athanasius’ teaching that the Scriptures are understood only by those who imitate the life of the saints (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 57; see The Patristic Mind). The monk who has memorized the Psalter and prays the Jesus Prayer is not merely acquainted with Scripture; he is being remade by it. The word he has taken in is doing its work — conforming him, over a lifetime, to the Christ to whom it testifies (see Scripture and the Transformation of the Reader).

This monastic reading is not the property of monks alone. The Church holds it out, in a measure proper to each, to all the faithful: to carry a verse through the day, to pray the Psalms, to say the Jesus Prayer, to let the word read in church and at home sink down and become prayer. The two settings of patristic reading — the bishop’s homily and the monk’s cell — are finally one movement: Scripture proclaimed and Scripture prayed, both aimed at the same end, the salvation and transfiguration of the human person in Christ (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993).

References

Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The desert reading of Scripture; rumination; doing the word.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974; and The Orthodox Church, new ed., London: Penguin, 1993. (The Jesus Prayer’s scriptural roots; the Psalter in monastic prayer.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms 10–11 (trans. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980); Life of Antony 2–3; On the Incarnation 57.
Cassian, John. Conferences 10.11 — the Psalter internalized as one’s own prayer.
Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, 3 vols. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980–82. (The Pachomian Rule on learning the Psalter.)
Scripture: Matthew 16:16; 19:21; Luke 18:13, 38; John 20:31; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; James 1:22.