Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church

What is given in the Mysteries has to be received, and the ascetic tradition is the Church’s account of how a fallen creature is made capable of receiving. This file sets out the threefold way of purification, illumination, and deification; the commandments and the war with the passions; the ascetic practices and what they are and are not for; the prayer of the heart and the Philokalia; and finally why the subject of deification is the Church rather than the isolated individual.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Threefold Way

The Orthodox ascetic tradition describes the road in three stages, which are not neatly sequential but do name a real order of dependence (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge, 1957, chs. 9–11; and see Theosis, which gives the same scheme):

Purification (katharsis) — the cleansing of the soul from the passions through repentance and ascetic struggle. This is the long stage, and most of the ascetic literature is about it.

Illumination (photismos) — the enlightenment of the nous by grace, in which the person begins to perceive God’s presence and to read creation as the work of God.

Deification (theosis) — union with God through participation in the uncreated energies, the vision of the uncreated light.

Two cautions govern the use of this scheme. It is a description, not a programme: no one advances himself from one stage to the next, and the stages overlap in any real life. And the third is not a rank to be claimed. The tradition holds that those who have reached it do not announce it, and that announcements are diagnostic of the opposite (see Counterfeits and Confusions).

The Commandments Are the Road

The starting point of the ascetic tradition is not a technique but the commandments of Christ.

The Fathers treat the commandments as the description of what a deified person does, and therefore as the way into deification rather than a set of conditions attached to it. The logic runs from the anthropology: if the human being is constituted by reference to Christ as archetype, then acting as Christ acts is the exercise of one’s own nature, not an imposition on it (Nellas, Deification in Christ, trans. Russell, SVS Press, 1987, 116 — “the spiritual life is not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love”; see Panayiotis Nellas: A Living Creature Being Deified).

The Lord’s own statement of the connection is the one the tradition cites most: “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him… We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:21, 23). Indwelling follows obedience; the vision is promised to the one who keeps the commandments, not to the one who seeks the vision.

Above all, the commandment of love. St. Silouan the Athonite made love of enemies the criterion of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and refused to allow any other sign to substitute for it — a test that cuts through every counterfeit spirituality (see St. Silouan the Athonite: Love of Enemies).

The War with the Passions

The obstacle is the passions (pathe) — not the emotions as such, but the disordered movements of a nature turned in on itself: gluttony, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness (akedia), vainglory, pride, and the rest, in the classifications developed by Evagrius, St. John Cassian, and the ascetic Fathers (see The Desert Fathers; The Philokalia).

Three points about this warfare bear on deification.

The passions are turned powers, not alien additions. For St. Maximus the passions are the natural faculties of the soul deflected from their objects, and the ascetic task is to turn them back rather than to destroy them. Desire directed to God is the engine of the ascent; the same desire directed to a creature is a passion. This is why the tradition does not counsel the extinction of feeling (see St. Maximus the Confessor: Ascetic Teaching).

The battlefield is the thought. The ascetic Fathers’ attention to the logismos — the suggestion that arrives before consent — is the practical form of the doctrine of synergy: consent is given or withheld at a point long before an act. The whole Philokalia is in large part an account of nepsis, watchfulness at this point (see The Philokalia).

Purification is negative work in service of a positive end. The point of emptying the house is that it should be filled. An asceticism that becomes an end in itself has stopped being Christian, and the Fathers say so with some force.

The Practices and What They Are For

Fasting, vigil, almsgiving, obedience, silence, and the rule of prayer are the standard means, and the tradition is unusually careful to say what they do and do not accomplish.

They do not earn grace. Nothing does; grace is uncreated and God’s to give.

They do dispose the person to receive: they weaken the tyranny of appetite, they reduce the noise in which the nous cannot attend, they train the will in small consents, and they turn the body from an obstacle into a participant. Because deification is psychosomatic, the body must be involved in it, which is why Orthodox asceticism is so relentlessly physical — prostrations, standing, fasting, vigil (see St. Gregory Palamas: The Psychosomatic Method).

They are not contempt for the world or the body. On the reading of the garments of skin developed at The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound, the ascetic anticipates the mode of the resurrection rather than despising the provision of the fall: the monk does not scorn marriage or food; he lives already, imperfectly, in the age to come (see Orthodox Monasticism; Panayiotis Nellas: Consequence and Provision).

They are not the property of monastics. The measure differs; the principle does not. The Church prescribes fasts, prayer, and almsgiving to all her children, and Great Lent is the annual form of the ascetic life offered to everyone (see Great Lent).

The Prayer of the Heart

The prayer that the Orthodox tradition associates most closely with deification is the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Its logic is simple and its practice is not. The aim is unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17) — the descent of the mind into the heart, so that the invocation of the Name becomes continuous and the whole person is unified around it. The hesychast tradition of Sinai and Athos developed the method; the Palamite controversy defended its claims; the Philokalia, compiled by Sts. Macarius of Corinth and Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and published at Venice in 1782, is its principal anthology (see The Jesus Prayer; The Philokalia; Mount Athos).

Three things about the Prayer belong in a treatment of theosis.

It is Christological, not a mantra. What is invoked is a Person, and the content of the prayer is a confession of faith and a plea for mercy. Detached from that content the technique is something else entirely (see The Jesus Prayer: The Theology of the Name).

It is inseparable from repentance. The Prayer ends “a sinner,” and the tradition treats the loss of that clause as a symptom. Compunction, not exaltation, is its normal register (see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Eucharist and Tears).

It requires guidance. The tradition’s warnings here are severe and constant: the Prayer practised without obedience, without confession, and without a spiritual father is dangerous, and the specific danger has a name — prelest (plani), spiritual delusion, in which the person mistakes his own imagination or a demonic suggestion for grace. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s writings on the subject are the standard Russian treatment, and the whole matter is set out at The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance. No file in this collection should be read as an invitation to attempt the Prayer as a private technique.

The Church Is the Subject of Deification

The last point is the one most easily lost in an individualistic culture, and it governs everything above.

Deification does not happen to isolated individuals who have found a method. It happens to members of a body. The Christian is baptized into the Church, communes in the Church’s assembly, confesses to the Church’s priest, prays the Church’s prayers, and is judged by the Church’s saints. The New Testament’s language is corporate: “you are the body of Christ, and members individually” (1 Corinthians 12:27); the growth is “to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13), and it is the Church that grows (see Ecclesiology).

Three consequences follow.

Obedience and confession are structural, not optional. They are the ordinary means by which a person is protected from his own judgment, and the tradition regards a spiritual life without them as unsafe on principle rather than merely unwise in practice (see Orthodox Monasticism).

Liturgy is formative, not decorative. The services are how the Church teaches deification to people who will never read a treatise, and the doctrine is embedded in the texts of the feasts far more thoroughly than in any manual (see The Liturgical Witness and the Uncreated Light; The Psalter and the Daily Office).

The saints are the Church’s evidence, and they are not a separate class. They are ordinary members of the same body in whom the same grace has done its work (see The Saints as Evidence and a Sober Assessment).

A Closing Proportion

It is worth stating the proportions honestly. The overwhelming majority of what the Church asks of a Christian is unremarkable: attend the services, keep the fasts, confess, commune, forgive, give alms, say your prayers, obey. Almost nothing of it looks like deification. That is the point. The doctrine of theosis does not describe a spectacular alternative to the ordinary Christian life; it states what the ordinary Christian life is for, and what God is doing in it while nothing appears to be happening.

References

Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus. Boston: New Seeds, 2006; and the writings on prelest in The Arena and the Collected Works.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. Esp. chs. 9–11.
Maximus the Confessor. The Ascetic Life; The Four Centuries on Charity. Trans. Polycarp Sherwood, Ancient Christian Writers 21. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1955.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987. Esp. 116.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware. 5 vols. London: Faber, 1979–.
Stăniloae, Dumitru. Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful. Trans. Archimandrite Jerome (Newville) and Otilia Kloos. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995.
The Holy Bible, cited in the New King James rendering.