The Jesus Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart

The single thread that binds the Philokalia’s many authors is the practice of inner prayer: the unceasing invocation of the Name of Jesus and the “descent of the intellect into the heart.” From Diadochos in the fifth century to Gregory of Sinai and the Xanthopouloi in the fourteenth, the anthology’s authors teach one discipline — to guard the heart and to pray without ceasing in the Name — surrounded always by warnings that it is perilous without a guide.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Prayer at the Center

If the Philokalia has a single subject beneath its diversity, it is the Jesus Prayer — the short invocation, in its classic form “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” repeated until it becomes continuous and, in the tradition’s language, “self-acting,” praying itself in the heart of the one who prays (Kallistos Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012; English Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, Faber, 1979, Introduction). The prayer rests on the New Testament command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), on the power the Scriptures attach to the Name of Jesus (Philippians 2:9–10; Acts 4:12), and on the cry of the publican and the blind man, “have mercy on me” (Luke 18:13, 38). The full history and theology of the prayer are treated in the topical article on the subject (see The Jesus Prayer); here the concern is its place in the Philokalia.

The prayer is not equally explicit in every text of the collection, but it is the horizon of them all. Its earliest clear Philokalic witness is St. Diadochos of Photiki, who in the fifth century already teaches the continual remembrance of the Lord Jesus in the depths of the heart as the way to gather the scattered intellect (St. Diadochos, On Spiritual Knowledge, in the Philokalia, vol. 1; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on Diadochos as a source of the Jesus Prayer). St. Hesychios the Priest makes the union of watchfulness with the Name the whole burden of his On Watchfulness and Holiness: the Name of Jesus is the weapon that meets each thought at the gate of the heart, and the remembrance of Jesus is to be joined to the very breath (St. Hesychios, in the Philokalia, vol. 1). By the fourteenth century, St. Gregory of Sinai and Sts. Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos give detailed practical instruction in the prayer as the center of the monastic day (in the Philokalia, vol. 4).

The Descent of the Intellect into the Heart

The characteristic Philokalic phrase for the goal of this practice is the “descent” or “return” of the nous — the intellect, the spiritual faculty of perception — “into the heart.” In the fallen condition, the fathers teach, the intellect is dispersed among the senses and scattered over external things, and the human person is fragmented. The labor of the Jesus Prayer is to gather the intellect out of this dispersion, to bring it back into the heart — the deep center of the person — and there to unite it with the continual invocation of the Name, so that mind and heart pray together as one (English Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979, Glossary, s.v. “heart,” “intellect”; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the union of intellect and heart). This “union of the intellect with the heart” is the Philokalia’s shorthand for integrated, whole-person prayer, in which the person is no longer divided but wholly turned, in love, toward God.

This is why the tradition speaks of the “prayer of the heart” as distinct from mere verbal or mental repetition. The words may be the same, but the aim is that the prayer should descend from the lips, through the mind, into the heart, and there become unceasing — a state given by grace, not achieved by technique (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; St. Theophan the Recluse’s teaching on the three degrees of prayer, oral, mental, and of the heart, systematizes this Philokalic doctrine — see Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie).

The “Method” and Its Cautions

Some of the later Philokalic texts — those of Nikephoros the Monk, of St. Gregory of Sinai, and the treatise The Three Methods of Prayer transmitted under St. Symeon the New Theologian’s name — describe a bodily “method” to assist the descent of the intellect into the heart: a particular posture (the head bowed, the gaze directed toward the chest), the regulation of the breathing, and the synchronizing of the invocation with the breath, as aids to gathering the attention and locating it in the region of the heart (St. Nikephoros, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, in the Philokalia, vol. 4; The Three Methods of Prayer, in the Philokalia, vol. 4; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the psychosomatic method). It was precisely this physical method that Barlaam of Calabria mocked in the fourteenth century, deriding the hesychasts as omphalopsychoi, “people with their souls in their navels” — a caricature that St. Gregory Palamas answered by grounding the bodily technique in the theology of the human person as a unity of body and soul, both destined for deification (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; see Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light and St. Gregory Palamas).

The Philokalic authors themselves surround this method with insistent warnings. The bodily technique is an aid, not the essence; it is dangerous if pursued for its own sake or without an experienced guide; and the higher states of prayer are gifts of grace that cannot be forced and must never be sought for the sake of “experiences” (St. Gregory of Sinai and the Xanthopouloi, in the Philokalia, vol. 4, on the need for guidance; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012). The danger of self-delusion (plani, Slavonic prelest) — mistaking the imaginations of one’s own mind, or the suggestions of the enemy, for the grace of God — is a constant theme, and the standard safeguard is submission to a spiritual father who has walked the way (see Reading the Philokalia; and Spiritual Direction). St. Theophan the Recluse would later be so wary of the physical method that he abridged or omitted some of it in his Russian edition (see Theophan the Recluse and the Russian Dobrotolyubie).

One Prayer, One Tradition

The unity the Philokalia possesses as a book is, in the end, the unity of this single prayer and its single goal. Across eleven centuries and thirty authors, the anthology teaches one thing: to guard the heart, to invoke the Name of Jesus without ceasing, to draw the intellect down into the heart, and so to be made whole and turned wholly toward God (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; see A Map of the Inner Life). This is what made the book portable across languages and centuries: it is not a period piece but a manual of a living practice, and wherever it went — into Slavonic, Russian, English — it carried the Jesus Prayer with it and kindled its practice anew (see The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie; The Way of a Pilgrim). The wider theological frame in which the prayer stands — watchfulness, the passions, deification, and the light — is the subject of the companion file.

See Also

References

  • Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vols. 1 and 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1995. (Diadochos, Hesychios, Nikephoros, Gregory of Sinai, the Xanthopouloi, and The Three Methods of Prayer; the Glossary on “heart” and “intellect”; the Introduction on the Jesus Prayer.)
  • 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. (The Jesus Prayer as the unifying theme; the union of intellect and heart; the psychosomatic method and Barlaam’s mockery; the need for guidance.)
  • Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Philippians 2:9–10; Acts 4:12; Luke 18:13, 38 (the biblical roots of the invocation of the Name).