Attention, Prayer, and the Descent of the Nous

Prosoche (προσοχή, Slavonic внимание) is attention — the working operation of which watchfulness is the standing state. This file treats attention and its inseparable joining to prayer, the terms hesychia (stillness), memory of God, and remembrance of death, and the phrase that names the goal of the whole neptic discipline: bringing the nous down into the heart. The method as method is deferred to the collections that treat it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Prosoche: Attention

If nepsis is the sober condition, prosoche is what a person actually does. Greek προσοχή means attending, applying oneself, holding one’s mind to something; Slavonic and Russian внимание renders it exactly and is the ordinary word for attention in both religious and secular use.

The neptic writers treat attention as a capacity that is damaged and can be trained. A person whose desire is scattered among many objects has a scattered attention as a matter of course, which is why the discipline of attention cannot be separated from the healing of the passions: an unhealed person cannot simply decide to attend. Conversely, the recovery of attention is one of the first observable fruits of ascetic labour, and the tradition treats it as a reliable measure of progress where felt experiences are not.

Attention is not concentration. Concentration is the narrowing of the mind onto an object and is a technique. Attention in this sense is the presence of the whole person to God — closer to what is meant by standing before someone than to what is meant by focusing. This distinction matters because a person who understands the practice as concentration will measure it by success at concentrating, and the tradition consistently refuses that measure.

Attention Joined to Prayer

The classic formulation is that attention and prayer are to be inseparable, as the body and the soul are inseparable in a living human being: without attention prayer becomes words, and without prayer attention becomes introspection. The statement occurs in The Three Methods of Prayer, a treatise transmitted under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian whose attribution to him is not accepted, and which is therefore conventionally cited as Pseudo-Symeon (The Three Methods of Prayer, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1995). This collection follows the attribution used at The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance.

The same treatise supplies the tradition’s best-known typology, and it is worth having because it is a typology of errors. It describes three methods of attention and prayer:

The first raises the mind toward heaven with images — picturing lights, angelic ranks, holy scenes — and is condemned outright. It produces excitement, self-satisfaction, and, in the treatise’s case-histories, derangement. The imageless character of prayer in this tradition is a direct consequence (see The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards).

The second keeps attention in the head, fighting thoughts with thoughts. The treatise judges it better than the first and still inadequate: it leaves the person contending on the enemy’s ground and produces a mind at war with itself.

The third is the one commended: attention held in the heart, with the invocation, in stillness and in obedience.

The imageless rule is the practical residue for any reader. Prayer in this tradition does not visualize. Whatever appears — light, form, voice, fragrance, or a figure claiming to be Christ — is not accepted, and the refusal is not an insult to God, who does not need a person’s imagination to reach him (Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness, in The Philokalia, vol. 4; and see The Jesus Prayer: The Three Degrees).

Hesychia: Stillness

ἡσυχία, Slavonic безмолвие, means stillness, quiet, tranquillity; from it come hesychast (ἡσυχαστής), the person who practises it, and hesychasm, the name of the whole tradition.

It has an outer and an inner sense, and confusing them is a standard error. Outwardly it is the solitude and silence of the cell or the hermitage. Inwardly it is a condition of the heart: the quiet of a person no longer driven by his own inner noise. The outer supports the inner and is not identical with it — the literature is full of accounts of men who achieved solitude and remained agitated, and of men in crowded coenobia who had stillness. St. John Climacus devotes Step 27 of the Ladder to hesychia and treats it as a demanding and dangerous condition unsuited to beginners, not as a peaceful setting (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 27; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982).

The dogmatic vindication of the hesychast life — the essence–energies distinction and the councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 — belongs elsewhere and is not restated here (see St. Gregory Palamas; Theosis: The Palamite Settlement).

The Memory of God and the Remembrance of Death

Two further terms belong to this family and are used constantly in the sources.

μνήμη Θεοῦ — memory of God — память Божия. The continual awareness of God’s presence, which the neptic writers treat as the positive content of watchfulness: not merely refusing thoughts but holding one thought. St. Basil the Great and the desert tradition make it the substance of “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and the Jesus Prayer is its practical form (see The Jesus Prayer; The Desert Fathers: Hesychia, Nepsis, and Unceasing Prayer).

μνήμη θανάτου — remembrance of death — память смертная. The deliberate keeping in mind of one’s own death, to which Climacus devotes Step 6. It is not morbidity, and the tradition is emphatic that its effect is the opposite of despair: it clarifies what matters, dissolves vainglory, and is repeatedly described as producing joy. It is one of Hesychios’ named forms of watchfulness (Climacus, Ladder, Step 6; Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in The Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979).

The Descent of the Nous into the Heart

The phrase that names the goal of the neptic discipline is the union of the nous with the heart, or — in the Russian formulation that has become standard — standing before God with the mind in the heart.

What is being described is not a spatial event. It is the gathering of the person’s perceptive and attentive power, ordinarily dispersed among external objects and its own imaginings, back to the centre from which his life actually proceeds, so that prayer is offered by the whole person rather than by a detached mental faculty (see Nous, Heart, and Soul). St. Theophan the Recluse is the classic guide here, and his formula — that the essence of the spiritual life is to stand before God with the mind in the heart and to go on standing before him unceasingly — is the most quoted sentence in the Russian tradition on the subject (Theophan, in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, comp. Igumen Chariton of Valaam, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer, London: Faber and Faber, 1966; see St. Theophan the Recluse: The Prayer of the Heart).

Three cautions attach, and the tradition attaches all three itself.

The physical techniques are not the thing. The posture, the regulation of breathing, and the direction of attention toward the physical heart described by Nikephoros, Gregory of Sinai, and Pseudo-Symeon are aids, restricted by every serious authority to those under experienced direction, and never presented as producing the result. The defence of the bodily dimension of prayer against Barlaam’s charge that it was materialistic is a separate and dogmatic matter, treated at St. Gregory Palamas: The Psychosomatic Method and The Jesus Prayer: The Psychosomatic Method. This collection defers to those treatments and does not describe technique.

Warmth and feeling are received, not manufactured. St. Theophan distinguishes the gentle warmth that accompanies genuine prayer of the heart from the warmth a person can produce in himself by effort or expectation, and treats the deliberate pursuit of the sensation as a wrong turning (Theophan, in The Art of Prayer, 1966; see St. Theophan the Recluse: Feeling, Warmth, and Attention). The collection on the Jesus Prayer states the same rule and this one agrees with it.

The measure is not experience but fruit. The tradition’s constant test of whether attention has become prayer is not what the person felt but whether he has become humbler and more patient with his neighbour. St. Silouan’s criterion — that the presence of the Holy Spirit is known by love of enemies — is the most exacting form of this test and the one the modern Athonite tradition has made central (see St. Silouan the Athonite: The Criterion).

For a Reader Who Is Not a Monk

The material in this file is monastic in origin, and the tradition’s own practice has been to give laypeople the substance while withholding the specialized technique. What is given: the prayer rule, said with attention rather than at speed; the Jesus Prayer in its simple oral and mental forms; the memory of God through the day; regular confession and communion. What is withheld outside direction: the psychosomatic method, prolonged solitude, and any programme aimed at producing states (see Prayer Rule; The Jesus Prayer: The Prayer for Everyone; Cautions for the Modern Reader).

References

The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology. Comp. Igumen Chariton of Valaam. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 6 and 27. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. Vol. 1 (1979): Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness. Vol. 4 (1995): Pseudo-Symeon, The Three Methods of Prayer; Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness; Nikephoros the Monk, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart. London: Faber and Faber.
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:17.