Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light

The Jesus Prayer stands within a whole theology of the spiritual life. The Philokalia teaches watchfulness (nepsis) over the thoughts, the war against the passions and the acquisition of the virtues, and — as the goal of the whole ascent — deification (theosis) and the vision of the uncreated, Taboric light, understood through the fourteenth-century theology of St. Gregory Palamas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Watchfulness and the War of Thoughts

The precondition of the prayer of the heart is nepsis — watchfulness, the sober, unsleeping attention that guards the entrance of the heart (see The Love of the Beautiful). The Philokalic fathers analyze the inner life with great precision as a war of thoughts (logismoi). A thought, they teach, arrives first as a bare “suggestion” (prosbole); if the intellect entertains it, there follows “coupling” or dialogue, then “assent,” then the passion, and finally the habit and the captivity of the soul (this graduated analysis, inherited from Evagrius and the desert, runs through Hesychios, Philotheos, and the neptic texts — St. Hesychios, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in the Philokalia, vol. 1; English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “provocation”). Watchfulness is the art of meeting the thought at the first stage, before it takes root — and the weapon for meeting it is the Name of Jesus (St. Hesychios, in the Philokalia, vol. 1; see The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart).

Behind this analysis lies the classic scheme of the eight (later, in the West, seven) principal passions or “thoughts” — gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness (acedia), self-esteem, and pride — the taxonomy of Evagrius transmitted through the desert and carried into the Philokalia (the eight thoughts, in the Evagrian and Philokalic texts, Philokalia, vol. 1; see The Desert Fathers). The purpose of the war is not the suppression of the soul’s powers but their healing and reorientation: the passions are the soul’s God-given energies, disordered by the Fall, to be turned back from their misuse toward their proper end in God (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “passion”).

From the Passions to the Virtues to Dispassion

The negative labor of cutting off passionate thoughts is inseparable, in the Philokalia, from the positive acquisition of the virtues. As the passions are healed, their opposing virtues grow — temperance against gluttony, love against anger, humility against pride — until the soul arrives at apatheia, “dispassion”: not apathy or insensibility, but a state of inner freedom and health in which the soul is no longer ruled by the passions and its energies are reintegrated and turned toward God (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “dispassion [apatheia]”; St. Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in the Philokalia, vol. 2). For St. Maximus above all, dispassion is not the summit but the threshold of love: the crown of the whole ascent is agape, the love of God and of all humanity, which is the fruit of dispassion and the very likeness of God in the soul (St. Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in the Philokalia, vol. 2; see St. Maximus the Confessor). This is the “love of the beautiful” the book’s title names.

Deification: The Goal of the Whole Path

The end toward which all of this moves is theosis — deification, the participation of the human person in the life of God. The Philokalia stands squarely within the classic Orthodox doctrine, rooted in 2 Peter 1:4 (“partakers of the divine nature”) and the fathers’ teaching that “God became man that man might become god” (St. Athanasius, and the patristic tradition): the human being is made not merely to be forgiven and improved but to be united to God and transfigured by His grace, sharing in the divine life while remaining a creature (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “deification [theosis]”; see Theosis). The whole discipline of watchfulness and prayer is ordered to this end: the purification of the heart is for the sake of the vision of God, and the vision of God is for the sake of union with Him and transformation into His likeness (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Uncreated Light and the Palamite Frame

At the summit of the Philokalic ascent stands the vision of the uncreated light — the same light that shone from Christ on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8), which the tradition confesses to be not a created radiance nor a symbol but the very uncreated glory and energy of God, seen by the bodily eyes of purified saints (English Philokalia, vol. 4, Faber, 1995, on the hesychast texts; see the treatment of the Taboric light in St. Gregory Palamas). This is where the theology of St. Gregory Palamas governs the whole collection. In the fourteenth century Palamas defended the hesychasts’ claim to behold this light by drawing the distinction between the unknowable essence of God and His energies, in which He truly gives Himself and is really participated: the saints do not see God’s essence, which no creature can see, but they truly see and are united to His uncreated energies, of which the Taboric light is one (the Palamite theology, defended at the Constantinople councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; deferred to St. Gregory Palamas).

The Philokalia is, in this sense, a Palamite book. Its compilers, the Kollyvades, were conscious heirs and defenders of Palamas — St. Nikodemos edited Palamas’s works — and they arranged the anthology so that it culminates in the fourteenth-century hesychast fathers and Palamas himself (see The Kollyvades Movement; The Authors from Antony to Palamas). The whole earlier tradition — the desert, Diadochos, Maximus, the Sinaites — is presented as leading up to and being vindicated by the Palamite theology of deifying vision: the essence–energies distinction gives the theological account of what the practice of watchful prayer is ultimately for, and of how the vision of God it promises is possible without compromising the divine transcendence (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012).

The Coherence of the Whole

Watchfulness, the war of the passions, the acquisition of the virtues, dispassion, love, deification, and the vision of the light are thus not separate topics but successive moments of one movement, which the Philokalia describes from a hundred angles. The prayer of the heart (the companion file) is the practical engine of this ascent; the theology of theosis and the uncreated light is its goal and its explanation. Together they constitute the “map of the inner life” the whole book offers (see A Map of the Inner Life). It is this integrated vision — a complete theology of the human person as made for union with God and transfigured in His light — that gave the Philokalia its power to renew Orthodox spirituality wherever it was translated, and that lies behind the twentieth-century recovery of Palamas and of the theology of deification as central to Orthodox theology (see The Philokalic Renaissance).

See Also

References

  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1, 2, and 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1981, 1995. (The war of thoughts; the eight passions; the Glossary on “passion,” “dispassion [apatheia],” “deification [theosis],” “provocation”; Maximus on love; the hesychast texts on the light.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, 9–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. (Deification and the vision of the light; the Palamite frame of the collection; the Kollyvades as heirs of Palamas.)
  • Scripture: 2 Peter 1:4 (“partakers of the divine nature”); Matthew 17:1–8 (the Taboric light of the Transfiguration).