Orthodox Monasticism 17 — Dispassion and the Incarnation

Since it is the Christmas season, we thought we should say something. Let us talk about the Incarnation in the context of the movement from passion to dispassion. In the thinking of the Orthodox Fathers, the passions in man, taken as emotional tendencies to sin based on pleasures of the senses, are due to the fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We each of us inherited from Adam and Eve emotional tendencies to sin. Dispassion, on the other hand, is a condition of Christian perfection that restores the likeness to God to what it was in Adam and Eve before the fall. The condition of dispassion is expressed in the saying of the Greek Fathers, including St Irenaeus of Lyons, St Athanasios the Great of Alexandria and St Gregory the Theologian, that God became man so that man might be made God. This condition is the same as adoption as son or daughter; it is also called divinization. In this state, the emotional tendencies are directed to virtue.

In the classic formulation, due in part to St Diadochos of Photiki, when Adam and Eve sinned in Paradise, they (and we their children) lost their likeness to God. However, although it was distorted, they (and we) did not lose the image of God in us. There is no doctrine in the Orthodox Church of the depravity of the unsaved sinner. In Orthodox baptism, the image of God is restored by the accession of the Holy Spirit. The likeness to God, however, is a matter of our life-long endeavour.

There are several roads open to the Christian in the pursuit of the restoration of the likeness to God. These are chiefly the married state and the monastic state (we ignore here the priesthood). This is what we have been talking about: the Ladder of Divine Ascent teaches to the monk the basics of the movement from passion to dispassion, from passion to the restoration of the likeness to God, from an ordinary human condition to a condition of being a god by Grace.

What has Christ to do with all this? The Fathers, especially St Gregory the Theologian, are very clear that Christ became man, emptying himself of his Glory for a time, so that man might partake of Christ’s Divinity. It is the Incarnation of Christ that opens to man, whether in the married or in the monastic state, the possibility of his return to the likeness to God that he lost in Adam and Eve in Paradise. God became man so that man might be made God.

What struck us in the vigil we attended at Christmas was the love of God. Just as we discussed in our disquisition on the Parable of the Prodigal Son for our Romanian-Orthodox reader, in the case of the repentant sinner God rushes out of his house to embrace his lost child. But that is exactly what the services of the Church teach us about the Incarnation of Christ. God, seeing the terrible condition of Adam and Eve (and, hence, all their children on the face of the earth), takes pity on them and on all men and inclines the Heavens so that his Son might come down to take up human flesh. Why? So that we might become gods by Grace. So that we might attain to dispassion. It is a matter of the love of God—of all three Persons of the Holy Trinity, surely, starting with the initiative of the Father—for his creature that he created in his own image. How great is man’s nature that he was made in the image of God and by God’s own hands! How great is the love of God for man that, although man sinned, he inclines the Heavens to come down so that man might be made God!

God not only rushes out of his house to embrace the baptized Christian who repents, but he inclines the very Heavens for his Son to descend to save the lost sheep, the human nature.

Somewhere, St Isaac the Syrian says something to this effect: What can we say about the justice of God when he did not spare his own Son but sent him down from Heaven to Earth to save his sinning creature, man? This is the same St Isaac who remarks that the raiment of Divinity is humility.

Dispassion is a return in the core of our being to the condition of Adam and Eve in Paradise; it is the restoration of the likeness to God that we lost in Adam and Eve. It is the adoption of the Christian as son or daughter of God; it his being made a god by Grace. It is the fulfilment of the movement from passion to dispassion that is the topic of the Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Dispassion, the adoption as son or daughter, divinization, is usually fulfilled in Christians in the Second Coming and the General Resurrection. However, for those who can and will make the effort, there is the possibility, with the help of God, of either a partial or full restoration in the monastic state. And we owe this possibility to the love of God manifested in the Incarnation of his Son who emptied himself of Glory so that we might partake of his Divinity. May he bless us and all mankind.

Merry Christmas to All!
Orthodox Monk

Orthodox Monasticism 16D — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 5

The central problem of the monastic life is the nature of the passions, the nature of the battle against the passions and the nature of dispassion. This has nothing to do with the proper way to meditate.

When the modern reader reads the Ladder, he is ‘freaked out’ by the severity of the Prison. What we should understand is that the passions are very deeply rooted in the human person, that their eradication is very difficult and that the spiritual damage sin does to a Christian is greater than realized.

Why would anyone become a monk? After all, he could, presumably, repeat ‘Maranatha’ twice a day in the married state.

The angel is the light of the monk and the monk of the layman. The ideal of the monk is the angel; the ideal of the layman is the monk.

In the monk, the movement from passion to dispassion—in Western terminology, the ‘conversion of morals’: the passage of the soul through the purgative stage, then the illuminative stage, then into the unitive stage of the mystical life—is a passage, ideally, from an ordinary human condition to the condition of an angel. This is explicit both in Evagrius’ Monk and in St John’s of Sinai’s Ladder.

It is not by accident that in the late step of the Ladder that discusses Hesychasm, the Hesychast is described as ascending through the angels until he reaches the Seraphim.

Consider again St John’s definition of the monk:

1, 10 A monk is the order and condition of the bodiless powers accomplished in a material and sordid body. A monk is he who has only the commandments and words of God in every time, place and thing. A monk is continual violence to nature and a faultless guard of the senses. A monk is a purified body, a cleansed mouth and an enlightened mind. A monk is a soul full of pain that is occupied in the uninterrupted memory of death both awake and sleeping.

Contrast this to the instructions that St John gives to laymen:

1, 38 I heard some men who were settled in a negligent state in the world asking me: ‘How can we, living together with spouses and surrounded by public cares, follow the monastic state?’ I replied to them: ‘All things good that you can do, do. Revile no one. Steal from no one. Lie to no one. Be arrogant with no one. Hate no one. Do not separate yourselves from the services of the Church. Be sympathetic towards those in need. Cause scandal to no one. Do not approach the portion of another and be satisfied with the wages that your wives can give you. If you do thus, you are not far from the Kingdom of the Heavens.’

St John views the monastic state as violence to human nature so as to attain to what is above human nature, the angelic state. He views the lay state as a matter of attending Church and living a just life. This is very similar to Jesus’ advice to the rich young man: If you want to inherit eternal life, keep the commandments. You have done all these since your youth? Then if you want to be perfect, sell all that you have, give to the poor and come follow me. St John of Sinai is emphatic that it was not for the sake of baptism but for the sake of the monastic vocation that the rich young man was called upon to sell his possessions and give to the poor.

The monastic calling is a calling of perfection. The monk works at eradicating his passions so as to become angelic. Here we understand ‘passion’ to be an emotional tendency to sin founded on a pleasure of the senses. Our Episcopalian reader is right: it is our desires that are at the root of the passions; and we cure our passions by refusing desire. However, in the classic analysis of the Orthodox monastic Fathers (articulated originally by Evagrius but enunciated by many other Fathers, especially including St John of Sinai), it is the demons that excite the passion, awakening desire in us. In the practice of the Jesus Prayer, the inception of a tempting image in the mind is due to the demon that has approached and excited our passion, our desire. This is true of any of the eight passions. It would be impossible to understand the School of Sinai, especially St Hesychios, St John of Sinai’s disciple, without understanding this analysis.

The ‘fundamental theorem’ of this school, recapitulated by St Maximos the Confessor in his ascetical writings, is that you cannot see God before you have eradicated your passions. In the Monk, Evagrius says this:

61 The mind will not advance nor depart that good departure and come to be in the land of the bodiless [powers] if it has not corrected what is within. For the disturbance of the familiar [parts of the soul] is accustomed to return it to those things from which it has departed.[1]

What Evagrius is saying is that the monk will not be able to enter into the illuminative stage of the mystical life (here identified with ‘the land of the bodiless powers’, i.e. the condition of the angels) until he has passed from his impassioned state to a state of virtue. That is what it means to have ‘corrected what is within’. The ‘disturbance of the familiar parts of the soul’ is the disturbance the monk experiences in his consciousness due to passions that he has not yet eradicated. Evagrius is saying plainly that a person who enters into contemplation before he has got rid of his passions will be obliged to return to the earth, to his impassioned reality, because of disturbances of soul caused by his uneradicated passions.

It is not easy for us to eradicate the passions.

In the doctrine of St John of Sinai in the Ladder, the layman does not attempt to eradicate his passions; he attempts to live a just life. We might say a virtuous life.

But someone might object: well, that’s just what Evagrius says in the precondition for me to enter into contemplation.

Not quite.

Evagrius has a doctrine of purity from the passions, and of virtue, that goes far deeper than anything that could be expected of a layman. The virtuous layman continues to have a residue of the passions within. Indeed, in his married state he can work on a complete eradication of the passions only if he voluntarily accepts to live with his wife in chastity. But that is not a condition for his salvation and it is not imposed on him by the Church.

When we are discussing the eradication of the passions we must understand that the ideal is the monk who has become the equal of an angel: he no longer has any passions at all. He has a complete accession of virtue.

Most monks start off in the coenobium. The Ladder itself is intended for coenobites and not for Hesychasts, even though its author was a Hesychast for forty years. If we think that the Ladder is severe even though it is only for coenobites, we should consider the standard that St John of Sinai is setting for Hesychasts. Absolute purity, including in thought.

The steps of the Ladder are intended to purify the coenobite of his passions. They prescribe largely external means. By and large they do not enter into the issue of purifying the coenobite in his thoughts. That is reserved for the Hesychast.

Now it might be thought that St John of Sinai was ignorant. He didn’t know that with an oriental method of meditation with a Christian mantra he could enter into direct contact with God, surpassing self, in the married state.

However, poor old St John is the originator of the following remark: ‘The practice of stillness (hesychia) is the constraint of the immaterial mind in the material body, a most remarkable thing.’ He is the originator of this statement: ‘Let the Jesus Prayer cleave to your breath and you will know the benefits of stillness (hesychia).’ He has some very explicit instructions on the practice of Hesychasm. He was a Hesychast for forty years. But, strange thing, he doesn’t think that the Jesus Prayer is going to do everything in no time flat for the layman or for the monk in the coenobium. How could he be so deluded?

Eradicating our passions in our actions, which is the task of the coenobite, is hard. It requires ascesis. That is why a layman might choose to become a monk: he might decide he wants to become perfect and that he will take the hard road.

Eradicating our passions in our thoughts, which is the task of the hermit or Hesychast, is even harder. It is for those few monks who are able to carry through the Hesychast program.

Again let us quote this passage from Evagrius:

40 The mind would not be able to see the place of God in itself not having become higher than all [mental representations] which are in [sensible] objects. It will not become higher, however, if it does not unclothe itself of the passions, which are what, by means of the mental representations, bind it together with the sensible objects. And the passions it will lay aside by means of the virtues; the mere thoughts, then, by means of spiritual contemplation; and this [i.e. spiritual contemplation], again, when, during the time of prayer, that light shines upon the mind that works in relief the place which is of God.†

Starting from Evagrius and continuing with St John of Sinai and the other members of the School of Sinai, the precondition of having ‘that light shine upon the mind that works in relief the place which is of God’—of being divinely illuminated—is complete purification from the passions even in thought. Hence, normally in the Orthodox tradition, it is only the Hesychast who has this experience. This is at the heart of the Hesychast controversy on Mt Athos in the 14^th Century.

Part of the Hesychast program in the Orthodox tradition is the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, but there is much more to the Orthodox tradition of Hesychasm than just the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. The tradition contains explicit instructions for combating the passions in thought so as to attain to that complete purification from the passions even in thought which is necessary for divine illumination. The end-result is called by St John of Sinai dispassion.

When he is addressing coenobites, St John of Sinai changes somewhat the traditional formulation of the goal of the monk. He makes the goal of the coenobite deep humility, not divine illumination. He leaves divine illumination to the Hesychast in the cave.

This should make us realize not only just how difficult the monastic vocation is, but just how difficult is the further vocation of the monk to Hesychasm.

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[1] The Psychological Basis of Mental Prayer in the Heart, Fr Theophanes (Constantine), Vol. II, The Evagrian Ascetical System, p. 27. 2006. Mt Athos, Greece: Timios Prodromos.

† The Psychological Basis of Mental Prayer in the Heart, Fr Theophanes (Constantine), Vol. II, The Evagrian Ascetical System, p. 178. 2006. Mt Athos, Greece: Timios Prodromos.

Orthodox Monasticism 16D — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 4

We have decided that it is enough. We will not pursue the matter of Dom John Main any further.

Orthodox Monasticism 16D — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 3, Part 3

It does not speculate as to the source of the thought, insight, image, vision, etc.

The monk knows what he is doing. However, we agree that the sober monk does not accept visions and does not occupy himself with where they are from. He does report them to his confessor, who judges.

All such things are below God and abandoned for the sake of God alone at the time of prayer.

That’s certainly Evagrius, but written for men in the unitive stage of the mystical jouney.

It should be pointed out, however, that in the tradition of the Philokalia one of the basic methods for beginners to confront a thought is just the same as it is in the method of Fr Thomas Keating: one returns to the words of the Jesus Prayer. Only the more advanced learn how to battle against the thoughts using anger and other means. Much of the Ladder deals with these issues.

As the Hesychast advances in his practice of the Jesus Prayer and sobriety, he brings his mind down into his heart in order to practise the method of spiritual ascesis in the very centre of his being.

In addition, at a certain stage and if God wills, the practice of the Jesus Prayer becomes automatic and centred in the Hesychast’s heart. Recall that from the beginning the Hesychast has prayed the Jesus Prayer with meaning, with intent, in a heartfelt way. Now he is doing so twenty-four hours a day with his consciousness centred in his heart.

Clearly, all the stages of Hesychast practice of the Jesus Prayer are not for everyone. However, it behoves us to understand the outline of the full method if, first, we wish to practise it, and, second, we wish to compare it to the methods of centring prayer making the rounds in America and the West.

It seems to me that much that is said is similar between the two approaches and that the main differences are in the saying of the prayer with meaning (thought?) and the use of anger towards demons in the later stages. I would especially appreciate hearing more about the relationship between attention without thought and the praying with meaning in the use of the Jesus Prayer. The role of compunction in prayer may also be helpful to understand.

The issue can be summed up thus: in praying the Jesus Prayer we are to mean it in just the way that we would mean it when we sincerely apologized to our wife for a misdemeanour. We are to concentrate on the words of the prayer without cultivating silence. The Holy Spirit when it raises us to contemplation ceases the prayer itself. Recall that the Holy Spirit is what is impelling the continuous repetition of the prayer in the first place. Then we contemplate in ecstasy.

The problem might be put this way: Why shouldn’t there be a Christian practice of Zen with Christian koans? We would suggest the following koan: ‘What is a Christian koan?’ It has the basic structure of the classical Zen koan: it is an absurdity.

This was perhaps a problem for Merton and his followers, which are many. Many are also those who encourage and practice a so-called ‘interspirituality,’ borrowing practices from a variety of religions to customize one’s own spirituality.

It’s a consumer society.

Yet there are also those of us who see in John Main an authentic teacher on contemplative prayer that is fully, as it seems, rooted in the Christian tradition. For such people, there may be little interest in Zen or any other religion, let alone in having a Christian Zen. On the other hand, we live in a very pluralistic society where many feel that all religions are the same and meditation is meditation regardless of whether it is Christian or Budhist. We [They?] typically say that meditation is Christian if the person meditating is Christian – it is that person’s faith in Christ, their participation in church, and their reading of the Scriptures and the saints that provides the context, the meaning, and the goal of that person’s prayer.

On Mt Athos, they would tell you that the first thing is for you to become Orthodox. Then they would teach you the Jesus Prayer. And you would leave Dom John Main’s method behind. ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child, when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

Apart from any bon mot, the point is that the Athonites take exactly the opposite point of view to what you are saying. They start with membership in the Orthodox Church. Then they teach the method they have learned from their Elders. They don’t believe any method is Orthodox merely because the practitioner is Orthodox.

For understanding the differences between Christian and, for instance, Buddhist meditation, a better understanding of the distinctiveness of the practice of the Jesus Prayer would be helpful, since it has been handed down more faithfully and practiced much more broadly and consistently than contemplative prayer in the West.

Please read, as you seem to have anyway, this blog from the beginning. We will bear this question in mind.

Orthodox Monasticism 16D — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 3, Part 2

The fact that most formulas historically used in Orthodoxy are formulas of invocation is not accidental, because a formula of invocation facilitates praying with the heart.

This is an important distinction that perhaps could be elaborated on. What is the relationship between word and silence in the Jesus Prayer?

We will have to reserve a full discussion of this for a full post, but let us remark that when we pray the Jesus Prayer, we make no attempt to strip the words of their meanings. When we say ‘Lord’, we know what that means; when we say ‘Son of God’, we know what that means. When we say, ‘have mercy on me a sinner’, we know what that means.

Here we can grasp what it means to pray with the heart, what ‘meaning it’ means. When I say something to someone, I might be lying; I might be reciting a script; I might be insincere. But I might ‘mean it’. That is what is involved in the Jesus Prayer. We begin with a slow oral recitation involving the whole person—i.e. his heart, the centre of his personhood. We honestly pray ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner.’ We mean it. We know who Jesus is; we know that we are sinners. Of course, there is an issue here with emotional exaggeration, which is very dangerous, although there is a school on Mt Athos that emphasizes compunction. Here, read the life of Ephraim of Katounakia by his disciples: Elder Ephraim of Katounakia. Translated by Tessy Vassiliadou-Christodoulou. 1^st Edition, 2003. Katounakia, Mount Athos, Greece: H. Hesychasterion ‘Saint Ephraim’. Distribution: Bookstore ‘To Periboli tes Panaghias’, email: bookstore@toperivoli.gr.

In John Main’s teaching, Maranatha is recommended precisely because it does not conjure up meanings or associations for most.

It is not a matter of conjuring up meanings or associations in the sense of having fantasy dramas of Jesus in the mind when we say the Jesus Prayer. We agree, that is wrong. However, as integral people the centre of whose being is the heart, we engage with the meaning of the Jesus Prayer so that we really mean it. Here it is very important to grasp the role of the heart in prayer. We are whole people. The whole person prays the Jesus Prayer.

That is not to say it is meaning-less. In fact, this is the most ancient of Christian prayers, recorded in the earliest liturgies and the only prayer that has come down to us in Jesus’ own language.

Although we are aware of the word ‘Maranatha’, we are unaware of its special liturgical pedigree. It is never mentioned in the Orthodox Church.

Rather, the purpose of meditation is absolute attention to God,

To the extent that this is taught by Evagrius it is for the perfect. For those of us who are not, it is better sincerely to ask Jesus for mercy.

without the intermediary of thought and image.

Please explain this phrase which along with ‘thought and conception’ seems to have an Evagrian pedigree.

The concern is that to dwell on a meaning is to take attention off the words themselves.

Here, if we understand both ourselves and you, there is a serious problem with your method. Well yes, we don’t want to be thinking ‘around’ the Jesus Prayer in a discursive sort of way: What a wonderful friend Jesus is, what it means for him to be our Lord, what it means for him to be our friend, what it means for him to be the Son of God—and what about the procession of the Holy Spirit… No, we don’t want to go in that direction. But that is not what we mean by ‘meaning it’. The oral sounds of the Jesus Prayer are the bearers of meanings—what Evagrius calls mental representations, or if you want conceptions. These are like the mental icons of the cup that we discussed earlier, but they are abstract mental icons: icons of abstract meanings. Hence, when we pray the Jesus Prayer as whole persons we are bearing into our mind the abstract conceptions involved in the prayer. We do not think about these conceptions in a discursive way, but neither do we try to strip these conceptions away so as to concentrate only on the words. That is the difference between an Orthodox method and the East.

Rather than simply saying the word, we begin instead to think about the word or phrase. Could you say more about the value of ‘meaning’ the words that are said?

Praying with the heart means praying with intention, ‘meaning it’, not just reciting the words in a mechanical fashion.

I may also note that the word is to be said gently and lovingly, not mechanically, according to John Main.

This is correct, but the emotional spectrum in Orthodox prayer is far wider.

Here, we think, we can see the Buddhist roots of the method of centring prayer. That is, the very fact that a ‘sacred word’ is repeated in the mind (more precisely, in the head), with no descent foreseen of the mind into the heart, and with no emphasis on praying with the heart—this very fact shows the Buddhist background of the method: these Western teachers do not understand the role of the heart in prayer. The reason they do not understand the role of the heart is that they have learned their method from Buddhists, where there is no such emphasis on praying with the heart…

Again, according to John Main, and personal experience of this way of meditation, the prayer begins in the mind or thoughts and descends to the heart over time, at which point the prayer is truly said, the person truly begins to meditate.

But there is something more involved in the Jesus Prayer. When one prays the Jesus Prayer, from the beginning he prays with the heart. That is not the same thing as praying with the mind in the heart, which is a very advanced stage of the Jesus Prayer. No one but no one in the Orthodox Church would teach anyone the Jesus Prayer as a string of syllables merely to be repeated for a certain period of time twice a day, even with a preliminary intention of the practitioner to open himself up to the action of God within him. When we pray the Jesus Prayer, we mean it. Usually, the beginner is taught to pray the Jesus Prayer slowly and orally, focusing on the meaning of the words and intending those words, which are words of invocation to Jesus Christ: the beginner from the beginning prays with the heart, prays in a heartfelt way. However, he prays without emotional exaggeration: he is counselled as he learns the method to avoid overdoing it, although there is a school on Mt Athos that encourages compunction: it is quite damaging for an unbalanced or naïve beginner to exaggerate the ‘meaning it’ part, but mean it he should. Later, the beginner will speed up his recitation of the Jesus Prayer as he becomes the better able to focus on the meaning of the words at an increased speed; and he will eventually bring the words inside his mind: the repetition will become ‘mental’. However, he will not cease to ‘mean it’. The Jesus Prayer is not merely a mantra, although it obviously has similarities to a mantra given that it is the repetition of a fixed formula. It is a prayer and must be prayed from the beginning as a heartfelt prayer to Jesus Christ.

By absolute attention to the word used in meditation, the person meditating does not think about the meaning of words or their content.

Here is the problem as between the Jesus Prayer as a prayer, and meditation with ‘Maranatha’. As we have already agreed, the person is not to think about the words of the prayer in a discursive way. But as a whole person in love with Jesus, he is to repeat the words, not only ‘gently and lovingly’, but also with his whole being. The Jesus Prayer formula has a meaning: it is an invocation of mercy from the incarnate Son of God who died for the sins of the man praying, who will judge the man praying when he comes ‘again in glory to judge the living and the dead’. While he who prays the Jesus Prayer is not to think about these things, he already has them as part of his spiritual context; it is what he thinks about when he’s not praying the Jesus Prayer. So when he prays the Jesus Prayer, he is engaged with the semantic content of the Prayer. He really is asking Jesus Christ for mercy. He is praying from his heart. Now one of the results of this is that his own heart ultimately opens and he can begin to love, as we mentioned in our response to our young Romanian-Orthodox reader. If you meet an Orthodox Saint, you find that he is a very warm person genuinely interested in others. Elder Paisios of Mt Athos was the most remarkable example in recent times of this; St Seraphim of Sarov is another example.

The concern is that in saying something such as ‘have mercy on me, a sinner,’ that person may attempt to manufacture a certain feeling of compunction or contrive a certain attitude.

See the Life of Elder Ephraim of Katounakia.

That may encourage a person to be self-reflective, ready to congratulate himself when the desired feeling in accomplished. As attention deepens we discover what it means to leave self behind.

This emphasis on leaving the self behind is not found in precisely the same terms in the tradition of the Orthodox Church. In the weight that is put on it in the method you are explaining, it seems to be a remnant of the Eastern origin of the method.

We leave behind all that we are, all that we think we are, and all that we want to be, in order to see ourselves as we are and become who we’ve been created to be.

To the extent that this is done in the Orthodox Church, it is done at very high stages of the Jesus Prayer, when having been completely purified from the passions, one enters into the illuminative stage of natural contemplation. It is not something that is encouraged in the beginner.

In other words, we seek not to see ourselves in a particular way (as a sinner or a saint), but to lose ourselves completely in order to find ourselves in God, to see ourselves and all around us as God sees them in their totality, just as they are.

This is very dangerous. We once had a discussion with a certain teacher of the Jesus Prayer (not Orthodox and not one of the people ever mentioned on this blog) who thought that the students that were going through the person’s Jesus Prayer school were experiencing the stage of the Jesus Prayer where the person sees all creation permeated with the energies of God (natural contemplation). We discussed this meeting with a clairvoyant Orthodox Elder who was able to discern the teacher through our own discussion of the teacher. He simply remarked: ‘Demons’. It wasn’t real.

This sort of thing is never encouraged in Orthodox prayer. You never lose a sense of who you are: when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, they didn’t forget who they were. They were transfigured. There is a very advanced stage of rapture where there is a temporary loss of personhood, but the persons experiencing such a thing are few and far between. See Wounded by Love, especially pp. 27–33 for a description of such an experience and its results. But read the whole book.

Moreover, in the advanced stages of the practice of the Jesus Prayer, the practitioner will learn to pray with Eros towards Jesus Christ and to learn to use anger against the demons.

Using anger against the demons is certainly not taught by John Main or Thomas Keating. Truthfully, demons are not much spoken of. This may have more to do with the environment in which the teaching is given than necessarily any lack of belief in demons. (On a side note, I did hear a talk given by Fr. Thomas where he mentioned the impression made on him of the reality of demons when he attended an exorcism.) These teachers of prayer are often attempting to reach those who have left the Church after becoming spiritually dissatisfied. It is believed that the Western Church’s failure to teach contemplative prayer over the past several hundred years is to blame for so many in the West looking to Eastern non-Christian religions for meaning and depth.

See our remark that refers to TM.

There is a desire, then, to meet people where they are in this often very skeptical, rationalistic society [who] may no longer hear the message if such phenomena as demons are too frequently mentioned. Yet, this way of prayer does include battling against the demons to the extent that it involves battling against thoughts – not by direct confrontation but rather by struggling to maintain attention.

This is the stage of the beginner.

As St. James says, ‘But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death’ (James 1:14). It is at the level of desire that meditation focusses its efforts[; at] the level of conception, bringing the mind back to attention the second it becomes distracted by anything.

We will deal with the issue of desire when we continue with the notions of passion and dispassion in St John of Sinai. What strikes us continually in reading such words as yours here is that the interior or mental battle against the passions—for that is what the effort to overcome desire is all about—is a very advanced stage of spiritual practice in the Orthodox Church, for a Hesychast with a special call from God. Ordinarily, we begin in the coenobium, if we are monks, or in our marriage, if we are married, in combating all the passions in our actions. All of the passions depend on desire. Only after we have made progress in combating the passions in action can we move to the interior battle to combat them in our thoughts—although that certainly wouldn’t prevent a lay person or coenobitical monk from praying the Jesus Prayer.

Orthodox Monasticism 16D — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 3, Part 1

Here is a reply of our Episcopalian reader. We have inserted our preliminary comments. We will try to comment on this letter in more depth when we next post. Our own comments on this letter are in italics. Again, for reasons of space it is posted in parts.

Dear Fathers,

There is only one of us on this blog. Please use the singular.

Thank you for responding to my message so thoroughly in the past 2 posts. I wanted to respond to a few things just to make some clarifications and to set the stage to better understand the practice of the Jesus Prayer and how it may differ from the practice of contemplative prayer as I have practiced it in the tradition of John Main. I should first say that I am most familiar with John Main OSB and it is his teachings on prayer that I have followed for the past many years and that I am not very familiar with Thomas Keating. There are some differences in what is taught by the two monks, differences which may or may not be significant in this discussion, but to avoid confusion and the need to compare and contrast the two it may be better just to discuss John Main and his teaching.

Agreed. Except that we will make some remarks here to clarify certain issues.

To clarify, from here on I will use the word ‘meditation’ to mean the same thing as ‘contemplative prayer,’ the former not to be confused with methods of meditation in the West which utilize the imagination and reflective or discursive faculties.

We already knew something about Dom John Main, OSB, and we were confident of being able to discuss his method of contemplative prayer, but we knew nothing at all about Fr Thomas Keating, OCSO, although we had heard his name, so we thought we would start with him… [We] will be comparing Fr Thomas Keating’s method to the Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, as we ourselves understand it. It should be emphasized that nothing we ourselves heard from Dom John Main is in any way different from what Fr Thomas Keating is writing, so although we do not know just what connection there is between the two men and their respective methods, we are confident that, in talking about Fr Thomas Keating’s method of centring prayer, we are also talking about Dom John Main’s method of prayer, and vice versa.

Again, I would prefer from here on that we just discuss John Main’s approach as there are differences between his teaching and that on centering prayer by Thomas Keating. There are of course similarities since they draw from the same tradition, primarily that of John Cassian and The Cloud of Unknowing, but there are also differences which may be more or less significant to our discussion. Just discussing John Main’s teaching will help reduce confusion.

We know from a personal conversation with Dom John Main that he learned his version of centring prayer from a teacher in Malaysia when he was an officer in the British Colonial Service. What he learned was a Buddhist method of meditation with a mantra. Wikipedia gives his teacher the title of ‘Swami’, which is a Hindu title, but we recall that the teacher was Buddhist. Wikipedia claims that the teacher himself gave John Main a Christian mantra, would be more consistent with a Hindu than a Buddhist teacher. Our conversation with Dom John Main was many years ago and we may have the details wrong.

John Main was raised Roman Catholic and had been an Augustinian monk before leaving the Order and later joining the British Colonial Service. He met the Hindu Swami while on a visit to his ashram and orphanage on business. During one such visit the two men began to speak about prayer and John Main was interested in what the Swami said about meditation without images and thoughts, Main himself having only been trained on discurssive forms utilizing the imagination and reflective faculties. He asked the Swami if he could learn to meditate as a Christian and the Swami then proceeded to teach him how, giving him a Christian mantra. Interestingly, the Swami was raised in a Roman Catholic school so had some familiarity with Roman Catholic teaching. After some experience of this way of meditation after returning from Malaysia, John Main decided to become a Benedictine monk. Once at the monastery, it is interesting that his novice master required that he give up this way of meditation since it was considered non-Christian and he willingly obeyed. It was only 15 or more years later that he discovered John Cassian and then began to pray again in this way and according to what he discovered in Cassian.

We’re leaving this in despite a sense that we are being used as a forum to advertise Dom John Main and his movement. Our readers will discern.

In other words, after a brief period of prayer to the Holy Spirit, a person chooses a single word such as one of those given, and proceeds to spend 20 minutes twice a day repeating that word as a Christian mantra, returning ever so gently to the word when thoughts arise in his field of consciousness. As far as we know, there is no difference in Dom John Main’s method.

I don’t want to get preoccupied in comparing John Main’s teaching with that of Thomas Keating but here may be an important distinction. In the teaching of John Main, the person who wants to learn to meditate is to take a short phrase or a single word and to say that word or phrase faithfully and attentively for the entire time of their meditation, 20-30 minutes every morning and every evening.

This is important in our own understanding of the method of Fr Thomas Keating. After we posted our discussion, when we were rereading the post (incidentally, it is so long that we cannot easily correct the typos; they will remain), it struck us that Fr Thomas was not so much teaching us to repeat the ‘sacred word’ but to meditate on it, to pay attention to it in a more static fashion. But perhaps this is merely a matter of our not understanding what Fr Thomas is writing. Here, however, our Episcopalian reader seems clear that in the method of Dom John Main, the word or phrase is repeated mentally.

John Main recommends the prayer word ‘Maranatha’ which in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, means ‘Come Lord’ and is sometimes translated ‘Come Lord Jesus.’

That’s the word he mentioned to us.

There is nothing about the heart here…

In the beginning, the person praying says the word in the mind or in the thoughts. Over time, as the person remains faithful to this discipline and attentive at the times of prayer, the word(s) of prayer begin to take root in the heart.

Yes, in Hindu teaching, the mantra automatically takes root in the heart there to be repeated automatically.

We are not convinced that this is the same thing as praying ‘with the heart’. We will clarify below what we meant by ‘praying with the heart’.

It is as though the prayer sounds of its own and the person praying has only to listen to the prayer arising from the heart with deepening attention.

You can read this in handbooks of Indian yoga.

It is at this point that the person has truly begun to meditate, when it is ‘no longer I who pray but the Spirit that prays within me’ (Romans 8:26).

There is a very big issue here. Is it the Holy Spirit that is praying within me in this case?

…and there is no indication that there is a more advanced technique for those who have grown proficient in centring prayer as here taught.

The reason we mentioned ‘advanced technique’ is that we wanted to point out that Fr Thomas Keating’s version of the meditation technique does not foresee the more advanced stages of mental prayer that we are aware of in the Orthodox Church: it seems to be stuck in the head as a Christian mantra, reminiscent of what we have heard of Transcendental Meditation. In this, consider our Episcopalian reader’s remarks below on gettting to the Christians who have gone to the East.

Advanced technique. This fact is shared by John Main’s teaching. The person praying may find it helpful to synchronize the prayer with his breath, but sometimes this can also distract, splitting attention between the word and the breath.

These things are certainly true, but things are getting just a bit circular here. Did Dom John Main get these things from his Hindu teacher in Malaysia, or did he pick them up later reading the Orthodox texts on the Jesus Prayer. If the latter, the most that we could conclude is that he customized his meditation technique.

What is emphasized is the humility and simplicity of the person praying, their absolute attention, and their faithfulness to their rule of prayer, every morning and evening of every day.

That is certainly sound. It sounds like an influence of Dom John Main’s Benedictine tradition.

The discussion of advanced techniques is avoided as it could lead to spiritual ambition and pride.

These things (i.e. the use of advnced techniques) develop organically in the monastery. What we would emphasize here is not so much the use of the breath or even breath retention, but the notion that even if the Jesus Prayer starts in the head, it is foreseen to end in the heart, something we didn’t see hinted at in Fr Thomas Keating’s outline of his method.

That isn’t to say that a person’s prayer won’t and shouldn’t change over time. It will, just by that person continuing to meditate and allowing himself to be shaped by his meditation.

This is both true and false. We wouldn’t want to leave a beginner to ‘evolve’ without the direction of a human person. A Hesychast in a cave who has experienced the second advent of the Holy Spirit might be able to discern his own journey. But even the best Elders consult other Elders on their own practice—even if they are counselling others.

If such an ‘advanced technique’ were to be encouraged, it would have to be done in the intimate relationship between spiritual father/spiritual director and spiritual child/directee.

True.

Since John Main’s teachings as they have come down to us are in the form of talks given to groups or letters written to wider audiences, he emphasizes the simplicity of the method so as not to create distraction with too much talk about techniques. Meditation is not about mechanical technique but leaving self behind in loving attention to God.

We wonder what ‘ leaving self behind in loving attention to God’ means.

First of all, in the Orthodox tradition, the formula used is rather long and a formula of invocation (there are some historical exceptions). The standard form of the Jesus Prayer is ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ There are short forms; there are longer forms; there are variant formulas. However, one can see that the standard formula is an invocation to Jesus Christ to have mercy on the person praying the formula.

Abba Isaac also recommended a longer verse from the Psalms to John Cassian in his Conferences. John Main recommends ‘Maranatha’ but allows for each person to choose another word, such as the name of Jesus, or a longer verse, if that person prefers.

Normally the ‘spirit-bearing’ Elder discerns the prayer practice of the disciple, including the formula used. See our post on the charism of discernment. It’s not simply a matter of taste.

What is important is that what is chosen is stayed with faithfully during meditation and each time the person meditates. This is to avoid the temptation to think that my meditation would ‘go better’ if I used different words.

In a very advanced discussion for Hesychasts, St Gregory of Sinai (14^th C) recommends alternating between two different formulas over a period of days or hours. But this is for someone praying the formula twenty-four hours a day.

It is in The Cloud of Unknowing in the West where we find the emphasis on saying a single word rather than a lengthy phrase.

Orthodox Monasticism 16C — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 3

Let us consider this chapter from ‘On the Thoughts (Peri Logismon)’ of Evagrius Ponticus:

40 The mind would not be able to see the place of God in itself not having become higher than all [mental representations] which are in [sensible] objects. It will not become higher, however, if it does not unclothe itself of the passions, which are what, by means of the mental representations, bind it together with the sensible objects. And the passions it will lay aside by means of the virtues; the mere thoughts, then, by means of spiritual contemplation; and this [i.e. spiritual contemplation], again, when, during the time of prayer, that light shines upon the mind that works in relief the place which is of God.[*]

This is a rather difficult passage. First, what is the mind? This is the spirit of man, the part of his soul with the capacity to see and to know spiritual things, including God. What the passage is saying is that for us ‘to see the place of God’—to come to mystical knowledge of God—we must surpass all ‘mental representations’ of sensible objects. An example of a mental representation is the visual image we have of a cup in front of us on the table; another example is the visual image we have of the cup when we remember it; a third example is the visual image of the same cup that we have in a dream. We might call the mental representation the mental icon of a sensible object that we have in our mind.

The passage goes on to say that in order to surpass these mental icons of sensible objects, the mind must divest itself of the passions. The reason that Evagrius gives is that the passions are what tie the mind down to the sensible world. The passions do this through mental icons of sensible objects. In other words, in order for your mind to know God, it has to surpass all mental icons of sensible objects, including your wife, your dog and your cat. But your passions are what tie you to the sensible world because your passions are what attract you to the sensible objects whose mental icons you have in your mind.

Evagrius goes on to say that the passions are laid aside by means of the virtues. He calls this stage of the spiritual journey praktiki, the practical life. In the West, the term is the purgative stage of the mystical journey.

‘Mere thoughts’ are a special kind of ‘thought’ in Evagrius: they are mental icons of sensible objects which are unencumbered by passionate attachment. That is, having gone through the purgative stage, we no longer have passions but if we open our eyes, we will see the cup in front of us on the table. We will also remember the cup. These are ‘mere thoughts’ of the cup.

Evagrius says that these ‘mere thoughts’ are put aside by means of ‘spiritual contemplation’.

Since we have been discussing centring prayer and its variants, it behoves us to clarify if perhaps centring prayer is such a spiritual contemplation. No. Evagrius quite clearly has something else in mind. This is a very important issue for our Episcopalian reader to grasp in comparing his method of centring prayer to the Jesus Prayer, which is an integral part of the Evagrian method as adopted by St John of Sinai in the Ladder.

What Evagrius means by ‘spiritual contemplation’ is what is called in the West the illuminative stage of the mystical journey.

The next thing that Evagrius says is that during the time of prayer, the light of God shines on the mind and works ‘in relief the place which is of God’. The reason for this circumlocution is that no one has ever seen God (John 1, 18). What Evagrius could just as easily say is that we see the ‘hindparts’ of God, after Exodus. What Evagrius means is the third stage of the mystical journey, called in the West the unitive stage.

The Evagrian system of the three stages of the mystical life was introduced into the West by St John Cassian. It took hold and became forever standard. It is what is at the basis of St John of the Cross’ notions of the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul.

In the system of St John of the Cross, the dark night of the senses is the purgation from the senses that precedes, if we remember correctly, the entry from the purgative stage into the illuminative stage. The dark night of the soul is the purgation that precedes entry from the illuminative stage into the unitive stage. The two nights are considered very difficult, especially that of the soul.

Our Episcopalian reader writes: ‘As a movement [the contemporary contemplative prayer movement in the West] is international and has introduced countless priests, monks, and lay persons to a daily discipline of silent and attentive prayer which leads beyond thought and conception to a greater sense of God’s presence in the midst of everyday life.’

The expression ‘beyond thought and conception’ is Evagrian, as can easily be inferred from the quotation we have given. ‘Conception’ is a standard variant translation for the Greek word that Fr Theophanes has rendered ‘mental representation’. We wonder if the expression is not an allusion to the 153 Chapters on Prayer or to another Evagrian work. Perhaps our Episcopalian reader could write to us to clarify. However, what should be clear is that in Evagrius, the possibility of moving ‘beyond thought and conception’ to a spiritual knowledge of ‘the place of God’ is strictly dependent on passing through the purgative and illuminative stages of the mystical journey. In the language of St John of the Cross, we would have to pass through the dark night of the senses and then the dark night of the soul.

Something is wrong. We don’t pass through the dark night of the senses doing 20 minutes of Christian mantra meditation twice a day. Ditto the dark night of the soul. Our Episcopalian reader is not a fool. He does not believe that. But it behoves him to understand that if this is so, then what he is experiencing with his method of Christian mantra meditation is not being mapped properly onto the authentic Christian tradition of mysticism, either East or West.

The key to understanding the problem is to understand the passions. For the structure of the Ladder is essentially a set of steps in the purification from the passions through acquisition of the virtues. There is also material in the Ladder on entering into the unitive stage. St John of Sinai’s term for the unitive stage is dispassion. Things should now be coming into focus. We will continue in the next post.

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[*] The Psychological Basis of Mental Prayer in the Heart, Fr Theophanes (Constantine), Vol. II, The Evagrian Ascetical System, p. 178. 2006. Mt Athos, Greece: Timios Prodromos.

Orthodox Monasticism 16B — Passion and Dispassion in the Ladder 2

Strange as it may seem, we don’t know everything. Hence, we were somewhat unsure how to proceed in commenting on the letter that we provided in the preceding post. We were just not sure what ‘the contemporary contemplative prayer movement in the West’ is that our reader asked us to comment on. So we did what every blogger does in such circumstances, we searched the Web. We already knew something about Dom John Main, OSB, and we were confident of being able to discuss his method of contemplative prayer, but we knew nothing at all about Fr Thomas Keating, OCSO, although we had heard his name, so we thought we would start with him. We found on our first shot an article written by Fr Thomas Keating called ‘The Method of Centering Prayer’, http://www.thecentering.org/centering_method.html, © St Benedict's Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado. We will quote under the doctrine of fair use some of the text of that article as a basis for our own discussion. It is a fair use since we will be comparing Fr Thomas Keating’s method to the Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, as we ourselves understand it. It should be emphasized that nothing we ourselves heard from Dom John Main is in any way different from what Fr Thomas Keating is writing, so although we do not know just what connection there is between the two men and their respective methods, we are confident that, in talking about Fr Thomas Keating’s method of centring prayer, we are also talking about Dom John Main’s method of prayer, and vice versa.

 First, however, by way of background, let us talk a little about Thomas Merton. In ‘Orthodox Monasticism 15B’, we recommended to our young Romanian-American reader that he not read the New Directions edition of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which edition is due to Thomas Merton. We were reluctant to mention Thomas Merton by name out of a sense of Orthodox courtesy but we eventually concluded that to do otherwise would be to leave the reader open to reading that work by mistake and to being badly influenced by it. We will discuss our reasoning below. (Of course, if anyone wants to go out and read it, it’s a free country.)
We have read, many years ago, if we recall correctly, The Seven Storey Mountain, the Asian Journal and Contemplation in a World of Action, all by Thomas Merton. We do not recall reading other works by him, so a Thomas Merton expert would easily conclude that we don’t know beans about Merton. We would readily agree.
Let us look at what strike us as some important issues in the spiritual legacy of Thomas Merton.
We once glanced at the New Directions edition, due to Thomas Merton, of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (actually, a small selection of the Sayings) and what struck us immediately and forcefully was that the translation had been done in such a way as to present the Desert Fathers as Zen Masters.
However, the original Greek of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers just doesn’t support such a Zen interpretation. It’s just not there. It’s something that was imported into the text by Merton.
Let us go just a little further. The home page of the organization which has the text of Fr Thomas Keating that we will be discussing, ‘Contemplative Outreach of Northern California’, is advertising a seminar called ‘The Centered Heart: Integrating East-West Meditation’, where one of the presenters is a member of the Tassajara Zen Center, located just outside of San Francisco. It appears from the Wikipedia article on him that Fr Thomas Keating is one of the founders of Contemplative Outreach Ltd., although we do not know the precise connection between the two organizations. The one sounds like a local branch in Northern California of the other.
We know from a personal conversation with Dom John Main that he learned his version of centring prayer from a teacher Malaysia when he was an officer in the British Colonial Service. What he learned was a Buddhist method of meditation with a mantra. Wikipedia gives his teacher the title of ‘Swami’, which is a Hindu title, but we recall that the teacher was Buddhist. Wikipedia claims that the teacher himself gave John Main a Christian mantra, would be more consistent with a Hindu than a Buddhist teacher. Our conversation with Dom John Main was many years ago and we may have the details wrong.
In the Asian Journal, Thomas Merton records his conversations with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, some few weeks before he himself is electrocuted in Bangkok. In those conversations, the Dalai Lama recommends to Thomas Merton to take up a special Tibetan meditation which, he says, will help him considerably (the Tibetan term for the meditation means something like ‘lightning method’). Thomas Merton records that after his conversations with the Dalai Lama he felt that he had a personal relationship with the Dalai Lama. We have always wondered about this relationship, which to us has always seemed to hint at something more than a friendship, i.e. spiritual discipleship.
We do not recall exactly where we read the following, possibly in the preface to the Asian Journal, but one of the Roman Catholic religious who were present either at Thomas Merton’s funeral or at his memorial service forty or fifty days after his death writes that those present took a vow, Thomas Merton’s spirit being present, to continue his work. Nowhere does the Roman Catholic father who is writing explain just what he means, but we have always been uneasy about this episode given that we know that the Tibetan Buddhists have a religious service of invocation that is intended to bring the departed spirit of a dead person from whatever ‘bardo’ he might be in, to where the lamas are, right there in front of them. Given the unusual expression, we wonder if the Tibetan lamas present at the service, as we believe there were, did not conjure up Merton’s spirit. This is not Christian. Of course, it may very well be that something quite innocent was going on. We are open to being corrected on this.

Jim Knight, a fellow who knew Merton almost all of his life, writes the following:
The Merton we knew, who is still in the lives of both of us [he is referring to a second friend of Merton], was a different man, and monk, from the saintly person of pre-fabricated purity that has become his image these days. He was a real person, not a saint; he was a mystic searching for God, but a God that crossed the boundaries of all religions; his was not a purely Christian soul. He developed closer spiritual ties than Church authorities will ever admit to the Eastern religions, Hinduism as well as Buddhism. In fact just before his appalling accidental death in December 1968, he was saying openly that Christianity could be greatly improved by a strong dose of Buddhism and Hinduism into its faith. These are things the record needs.

(http://www.therealmerton.com/tommie.html)

There is a very Buddhist element in the concrete contemplation movements that our reader has referred to in his letter. The method of centring prayer proposed by Fr Thomas Keating, to all intents and purposes the same as the method of Dom John Main, is a method of prayer that diverges in significant ways from the Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer.
Let us turn to the method. We recommend that our readers read the whole page at the link given, since it is too long for us to quote here and since we do not want to run afoul of the copyright laws. Here is the actual method as expounded by Fr Thomas Keating at the link given:

The Guidelines
Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence and action within.
Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God's presence and action within.
When you become aware of thoughts, return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.
At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes.

Fr Thomas gives the following explanation of the sacred word:
The sacred word expresses our intention to be in God's presence and to yield to the divine action. The sacred word should be chosen during a brief period of prayer asking the Holy Spirit to inspire us with one that is especially suitable for us. Examples: Lord, Jesus, Abba, Father, Mother. Other possibilities: Love, Peace, Shalom.
In other words, after a brief period of prayer to the Holy Spirit, a person chooses a single word such as one of those given, and proceeds to spend 20 minutes twice a day repeating that word as a Christian mantra, returning ever so gently to the word when thoughts arise in his field of consciousness. As far as we know, there is no difference in Dom John Main’s method.
There is nothing about the heart here, and there is no indication that there is a more advanced technique for those who have grown proficient in centring prayer as here taught.
We are somewhat surprised by Fr Thomas’ emphasis on our intention ‘to consent to God’s presence and action within’. As he expounds his method in more detail on the same page, he emphasizes this. This is new to us. We frankly do not know why he does it.
Let us look by contrast at the method of the Jesus Prayer. First of all, in the Orthodox tradition, the formula used is rather long and a formula of invocation (there are some historical exceptions). The standard form of the Jesus Prayer is ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ There are short forms; there are longer forms; there are variant formulas. However, one can see that the standard formula is an invocation to Jesus Christ to have mercy on the person praying the formula.
The fact that most formulas historically used in Orthodoxy are formulas of invocation is not accidental, because a formula of invocation facilitates praying with the heart.
Praying with the heart means praying with intention, ‘meaning it’, not just reciting the words in a mechanical fashion.
An element in Fr Thomas Keating’s method that must interest us is that the person practising centring prayer, having made his intention to open himself up to God’s action within him, is merely to repeat the chosen word, returning to it gently any time his mind wanders. There is nothing here about ‘meaning it’—intending the word, repeating it with commitment. That is surely covered in Fr Thomas’ view by our original intention to open ourselves to God’s action in us before we begin our 20 minute exercise.
Here, we think, we can see the Buddhist roots of the method of centring prayer. That is, the very fact that a ‘sacred word’ is repeated in the mind (more precisely, in the head), with no descent foreseen of the mind into the heart, and with no emphasis on praying with the heart—this very fact shows the Buddhist background of the method: these Western teachers do not understand the role of the heart in prayer. The reason they do not understand the role of the heart is that they have learned their method from Buddhists, where there is no such emphasis on praying with the heart. (Possibly, it might be necessary to qualify this that they have learned their method from Theravada Buddhists; we wonder if Mahayana Buddhists have formulas of invocation prayed with the heart.)
Now of course these Western teachers issue caveats. This is one particular method of contemplative prayer. There are other methods of prayer which can supplement this one. Presumably prayer with the heart (they would say ‘affective prayer’) can be done at a different time of day. This time of the day is for this special type of contemplative prayer.
But there is something more involved in the Jesus Prayer.
When one prays the Jesus Prayer, from the beginning he prays with the heart. That is not the same thing as praying with the mind in the heart, which is a very advanced stage of the Jesus Prayer. No one but no one in the Orthodox Church would teach anyone the Jesus Prayer as a string of syllables merely to be repeated for a certain period of time twice a day, even with a preliminary intention of the practitioner to open himself up to the action of God within him. When we pray the Jesus Prayer, we mean it. Usually, the beginner is taught to pray the Jesus Prayer slowly and orally, focusing on the meaning of the words and intending those words, which are words of invocation to Jesus Christ: the beginner from the beginning prays with the heart, prays in a heartfelt way. However, he prays without emotional exaggeration: he is counselled as he learns the method to avoid overdoing it, although there is a school on Mt Athos that encourages compunction: it is quite damaging for an unbalanced or naïve beginner to exaggerate the ‘meaning it’ part, but mean it he should. Later, the beginner will speed up his recitation of the Jesus Prayer as he becomes the better able to focus on the meaning of the words at an increased speed; and he will eventually bring the words inside his mind: the repetition will become ‘mental’. However, he will not cease to ‘mean it’. The Jesus Prayer is not merely a mantra, although it obviously has similarities to a mantra given that it is the repetition of a fixed formula. It is a prayer and must be prayed from the beginning as a heartfelt prayer to Jesus Christ.
From the beginning, then, we see a very serious divergence of the Orthodox method of the Jesus Prayer from the methods of Fr Thomas Keating and Dom John Main. It is very doubtful whether the same results can be achieved.
Moreover, in the advanced stages of the practice of the Jesus Prayer, the practitioner will learn to pray with Eros towards Jesus Christ and to learn to use anger against the demons.
‘Thoughts’ are a very important concept in the practice of the Jesus Prayer. Here is what Fr Thomas says about thoughts:
During the prayer period various kinds of thoughts may be distinguished. (cf. Open Mind, Open Heart, chapters 6 through 10): Ordinary wanderings of the imagination or memory. Thoughts that give rise to attractions or aversions. Insights and psychological breakthroughs. Self-reflections such as, "How am I doing?" or, "This peace is just great!" Thoughts that arise from the unloading of the unconscious. During this prayer, we avoid analyzing our experience, harboring expectations or aiming at some specific goal such as: Repeating the sacred word continuously. Having no thoughts. Making the mind a blank. Feeling peaceful or consoled. Achieving a spiritual experience.
One of the first authors to discuss the Jesus Prayer is St John of Sinai in the Ladder. St John adopts the basic theory of the thoughts of Evagrius Ponticus and refines it significantly; this process is continued by his disciple, St Hesychios, whom we will discuss after St John.
The basic structure of a thought (in the technical sense here being discussed) in the Hesychast tradition is the inception of an image in the consciousness of the person through the influence of a demon which has approached the person and excited one of his passions. The goal of the person in practising the Jesus Prayer is to purify himself of his passions so as to achieve dispassion. It is in this fundamental way that he conquers the thoughts. Once he has conquered the thoughts, he can enter into the contemplation of God. The recitation of the Jesus Prayer is explicitly tied in the Hesychast tradition to an interior battle against the demons that are tempting the Hesychast by sowing thoughts in his mind. The earliest text to deal with this doctrine of spiritual ascesis in the context of explicit reference to the Jesus Prayer is the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos of Photiki, written about 25 years after Cassian wrote the Conferences. This spiritual ascesis against the thoughts is given the name ‘sobriety’ by St Hesychios. Purification from the passions through sobriety is an activity that takes decades even for a Hesychast in a cave. When the Hesychast is purified by sobriety—which sobriety includes but is not limited to the practice of the Jesus Prayer—he then reaches dispassion, which St John of Sinai describes in the Ladder as being the resurrection of the soul before the General Resurrection. As can easily be seen, this is a far deeper doctrine than the doctrine of centring prayer taught by Dom John Main and Fr Thomas Keating.
It should be pointed out, however, that in the tradition of the Philokalia one of the basic methods for beginners to confront a thought is just the same as it is in the method of Fr Thomas Keating: one returns to the words of the Jesus Prayer. Only the more advanced learn how to battle against the thoughts using anger and other means. Much of the Ladder deals with these issues.
As the Hesychast advances in his practice of the Jesus Prayer and sobriety, he brings his mind down into his heart in order to practise the method of spiritual ascesis in the very centre of his being.
In addition, at a certain stage and if God wills, the practice of the Jesus Prayer becomes automatic and centred in the Hesychast’s heart. Recall that from the beginning the Hesychast has prayed the Jesus Prayer with meaning, with intent, in a heartfelt way. Now he is doing so twenty-four hours a day with his consciousness centred in his heart.
Clearly, all the stages of Hesychast practice of the Jesus Prayer are not for everyone. However, it behoves us to understand the outline of the full method if, first, we wish to practise it, and, second, we wish to compare it to the methods of centring prayer making the rounds in America and the West.
The problem might be put this way: Why shouldn’t there be a Christian practice of Zen with Christian koans? We would suggest the following koan: ‘What is a Christian koan?’ It has the basic structure of the classical Zen koan: it is an absurdity.
We will now turn to St John’s doctrine of the passions and dispassion.