05 — Nepsis and Attention
Nepsis (νῆψις, Slavonic трезвение) is sobriety and wakefulness — the continual inner vigilance that meets a thought at its entrance instead of at its conclusion. It is the term from which the entire literature takes its name: the Philokalia is subtitled the anthology “of the holy neptic fathers”. This section defines watchfulness and the guard of the heart, then treats attention (prosoche), stillness (hesychia), and the descent of the nous into the heart.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
If sections 03 and 04 are the pathology, this section and the next are the therapy. The ascetic writers do not propose that a person defeat his passions by effort of will at the moment of crisis; they hold that by then the contest is largely settled. What they propose instead is a continuous low-level attentiveness — the guard set at the door, not the battle fought in the hall.
Watchfulness and the Guard of the Heart defines nepsis from its root sense of sobriety, traces its scriptural warrant, sets out the classic treatises — Hesychios the Priest, Philotheos of Sinai, Nikephoros — and treats the “guard of the heart” and the guard of the senses. It also distinguishes watchfulness from what modern readers most often assimilate it to.
Attention, Prayer, and the Descent of the Nous treats prosoche, the pairing of attention with prayer, the term hesychia and what it does and does not require, the memory of God and the remembrance of death, and the movement described as bringing the nous down into the heart — deferring the method as method to the collections that treat it.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| Watchfulness and the Guard of the Heart | Nepsis and its scriptural roots; the neptic fathers and their treatises; phylake kardias and the guard of the senses; the Unseen Warfare and its Western source; watchfulness distinguished from modern attention practices |
| Attention, Prayer, and the Descent of the Nous | Prosoche; attention joined to prayer; hesychia; the memory of God and the remembrance of death; the nous in the heart; what is deferred to the collections on the Jesus Prayer and St. Gregory Palamas |
See Also
- The Logismoi — what watchfulness watches for
- Diakrisis — the judgment watchfulness makes possible
- The Jesus Prayer — the practice, treated in full
- The Philokalia: The Hesychast Heart — the anthology’s unifying theme