Hesychasm: The Principle Fruit

What is on our mind when we think of Hesychasm or someone we could call a hesychast? What do we imagine the fruit to be that a hesychast acquires? In the last post we read a comment of Archimandrite Peter: “The essence of Hesychasm lies in the guarding of the heart from all alien influence.” What does “guarding the heart from all alien influence” lead to? The Psalmist tell us: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psa. 45:11). If one “guards the heart from all alien influence” and “becomes still” then a place is made ready for God to manifest Himself and act within a person, within his heart. The person is then able to progress in acquiring knowledge of God, not through intellectual study but through a participation of God’s action within, again, within the heart. Such a man acquires “actual” not “factual” knowledge of God. For true theology is “the narration of important occurrence which is the encounter between the spirit of man and the living God.” 1 But what is the knowledge one will acquire? In short St. John the Theologian tells us “God is love” (I John 4:8).

What is it then, that comes to pass within a man who has “actual” knowledge of the love of God, who has come ‘to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19)? What is the content of his heart? In order to make an attempt to answer this we must refer to those who have had such an experience. So I will go on to refer to both Sts. Silouan the Athonite, his spiritual child, Sophrony of Essex, and—continuing this spiritual family line—his spiritual child, Archimandrite Zacharias. In addition I will also refer to St. Joseph the Hesychast his spiritual child Joseph the Younger—or of Vatopedi.

Over and over again in the writings of St. Silouan he tells us that he knows the love of God through the Holy Spirit. He experienced a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ early on in his monastic life and St. Sophrony relates of this, “the gentle gaze of the joyous, all-forgiving, boundlessly-loving Christ drew Simeon’s (St. Silouan’s name before his monastic tonsure) entire being to Himself.” St. Silouan experienced the “love of Christ which surpasses knowledge”. Concerning “the love of Christ”, Archimandrite Zacharias writes:

“It is this love that is expressed in hypostatic prayer for the salvation of the whole world, which follows the example of the Lord, the New Adam, which He prayed in Gethsemane before going to His voluntary and saving Passion. If, by the grace of Christ, man embraces the entire world in prayer and brings every creature before God in intercession, it is a sign that God’s pre-eternal plan has been accomplished in a complete and perfect fashion, and that he is now ‘in the image and likeness of God’.” 2

Based on his own experience of knowing Christ as a Person, St. Sophrony tells us something about Him, that is, the Person of Christ. Only a few days before his repose he stated:

“The content of the Person of Christ is His self-emptying love unto the end by which He accomplished the salvation of the world.

“Man likewise proves himself a person when he acquires love for God to the point of self-hatred,3 pure prayer which accompanies this, and prayer for the world similar to Christ’s prayer at Gethsemane.”

Fr. Zacharias comments on this as follows:

“In this state of hypostatic prayer or prayer for the world, the mind of Christ is transmitted to man and his heart is enlarged to embrace heaven and earth and to bring before God every creature. Thus the true calling of man is to become a true hypostasis, a true person in the image of Christ’s Person, a new Adam bearing in himself the whole of humanity and presenting it before God in intercession for salvation.” 4

So to become a true person or hypostasis in the image of Christ’s Person (or Hypostasis) is to acquire His self-emptying love unto the end. Hypostatic prayer then, is the prayer of a person who has lulled the passions, and undergone a divine transformation to the point that he is in the image of Christ’s Person, the content of Whom is self-emptying love unto the end. How does such a person pray? He bears in himself the whole of humanity presenting it before God in intercession for salvation. When he prays he holds all of mankind in his heart. St. Sophrony, of course, experienced this and so he used the term “hypostatic prayer” to express this experience of his. In St. Silouan we see a superlative example of this. Archimandrite Zacharias writes of him:

“There could be no distinction between enemies and friends for Saint Silouan, as the Lord imparted to him the ‘enlargement’ of His love when He appeared to him. Thus he could not bear that even one person, even one creature, be absent from his heart, in which case he would have considered his hypostasis mutilated and without any likeness to that of the Lord of Glory as he had known Him at the time of his vision. All the peoples of the earth, the whole Adam, from the beginning of time to the end of the world, were the content of his heart and their salvation was the entreaty of his unceasing prayer.” 5

Accordingly St. Sophrony in instructing his monastics has “said that even one evil thought against our brother ‘causes a crack in the wall of our spiritual stronghold.’” Fr. Zacharias comments on this: “Why is it that, as Elder Sophrony drew to our attention, one evil thought causes a crack in the wall of our spiritual fortification? It is because when we stir up negative thoughts about our brother and we remove him from our heart then we mutilate our being. Our unity is contained in this understanding: to hold all in our heart and avoid even the least negative thought for our fellows.” 6

In the teaching of St. Sophrony, as related by Fr. Zacharias, this should be our common aim: “each of us when we stand before God, should carry in our hearts all of our brethren.” 7 (to be continued…)

1. Man the Target of God, Archimandrite Zacharias, Mount Thabor Publishing 2016, pp100-101
2. The Engraving of Christ in Man’s Heart, Archimandrite Zacharias, Monastery of St. John the Baptist Essex, 2017, p. 61
3. Love of God is mentioned first and then “self-hatred” as its offspring. This is sometimes manifested in neglecting bodily needs or stricter asceticism. The utmost manifestation of this is what we see in the Holy Apostle Paul, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race.” (Rom. 9:3) There is no longer a desire for one’s own salvation but one could wish (or pray) that he would be lost and another saved in his place.
4. Man the Target of God p. 147
5. The Engraving of Christ in Man’s Heart, p. 54
6. ibid. p. 20
7. ibid. p. 20

St. Gregory Palamas and Hesychasm

This Sunday our Church celebrates the memory of St. Gregory Palamas. He was a defender of our Orthodox faith. He is primarily known for expounding the Orthodox concept of deification. This was misunderstood and distorted by a Greek monk, Barlaam. Barlaam was well educated in the West, which considered knowledge of God a matter of intellectual reasoning. As Barlaam was perpetuating his error, St. Gregory came to the defense of the truth. He made a distinction between the unknowable Essence of God and His Energy, in Which we can participate and Which is uncreated. Through St. Gregory’s teaching we can understand the Apostle Peter’s words: “we have become partakers of the divine nature” (IIPet. 1:4).
Barlaam also misunderstood and attacked the hesychast tradition of the Church. St. Gregory again came to the rescue explaining how it assists in leading one to unite with God. So then, hesychasm is a path to the aforementioned, that is, the participation in the Uncreated energy of God, being partakers of the divine nature, which is deification. So today let us say a few words about hesychasm because by living it one obtains an entrance into the divine Life that God desires to pour out upon us.
In order to accomplish this I will refer to the “Foreword” of the book by Archimandrite Zacharias of St. John the Baptist Monastery in Essex: Hesychasm, The Bedewing Furnace of the Heart. Here the abbot of the Monastery, Archmandrite Peter writes about Hesychasm and its place in the Church as follows:

“The Lord Jesus Christ is the spiritual sun which illuminates the whole universe. In the light of His precepts, we come to know the unerring way to the Father. Through His Incarnation, He established on earth the holy Body of His Church and within her bosom He implanted monasticism as a holy root which from the first centuries of Christianity until our days has brought forth blessed fruits, our sacred and God-bearing Fathers, who have bequeathed to us the holy way of Hesychasm.
“Hesychastic prayer is the heart of the Orthodox ascetic tradition. Hesychasm is the ‘innermost body’ of the Body of the Church the ‘salt of the earth’ and the sustaining power that preserves the world.
“The essence of Hesychasm lies in the guarding of the heart from all alien influence, so that man can stand before God in ‘pure prayer’.
“In this arduous struggle, the Lord astounds the soul with the unexpected and luminous dawning of His grace in the wondrous place of the deep heart. Then it is that man is built into a temple of Divinity not made by hands, fulfilling his true destiny. By the union of mind and heart, every Christian truly finds himself in the innermost recesses of his soul and, as a God-like mind, as an immortal hypostasis, he invisibly beholds God. This contemplation enlarges the heart to embrace heaven and earth; and then the ‘true man goes out to his true work’, namely, hypostatic prayer and intercession for the whole world. Such a prayer is a sign that the image first given to man at his creation is restored in us.
“The world, the creation of our great God, is beautiful indeed; but there is nothing more marvelous than ‘the hidden man of the heart’, the true man, in the image and likeness of God.” (Hesychasm, The Bedewing Furnace of the Heart, pp.11-12)
Let us struggle then, to make this manifest within us, which is—as Archimandrite Peter continues to write—“the most desirable and sublime miracle in all creation, the union of the heart of man with the eternal Spirit of God.”
Amen!

The Veneration of Icons/Sunday of Orthodoxy

Beloved of God, in the second of the Ten Commandments we read: (Exo 20:4) “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.”

Both in the past and the present a literal interpretation of this, out of context, has caused many to reject the veneration of icons. During the eighth and ninth century there was a terrible persecution against those who venerated the icons. And today we celebrate the end of these persecutions and the restoration of the icons to the Church.

But let us carefully examine this commandment and see exactly what caused this problem and what was it that our Lord was prohibiting. If we want to understand this commandment it should be considered in its historical context and collated with a more detailed description which is found in the Book of Deuteronomy. Here the Lord warns:

“Beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve them, things which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.” (Deu. 4:16-19) If we consider the historical context, it is obvious that this commandment includes the prohibition of every variety of idolatry known to have been practiced among the Egyptians. Now let’s examine this step by step.

First the critical term which has caused much confusion: “graven image”. According to Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary (can be found at http://www.e-sword.net) the Hebrew term translated here is pesel; it is defined as, “an idol: -carved (graven) image”, the root word of this means “to carve”. In the Greek Septuagint text this word translated as “eidolon” which in English is idol. A question: Does pesel equal an Orthodox icon?

Let’s continue with a detailed examination of the prohibitions. Likenesses of male and female were mentioned. In ancient Egypt the people held a certain Osiris and his wife Isis as supreme divinities. Images of Orisis depict him as a handsome man in royal dress wearing a crown of an Upper Egypt headdress.
“The likeness of any beast that is on the earth”. “Among the Egyptians the ox was not only sacred but adored, because they supposed that in one of these animals Osiris took up his residence: hence they always had a living ox, which they supposed to be the habitation of this deity; and they imagined that on the death of one he entered into the body of another, and so on successively. This famous ox-god they called Apis and Mnevis.” 1

“The likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air”. Birds such as the stork, or crane, and hawk were objects of Egyptian idolatry. “The likeness of anything that creeps on the ground”. The crocodile, serpents, or beetle, were all objects of their adoration. “The likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth”. All fish were esteemed sacred animals among the Egyptians. One called Oxyrynchus had a temple, and divine honors paid to it. Another fish, called Phagrus, was worshipped at the city of Syene (modern day Aswan) on the Nile in Southern Egypt.

“In short, oxen, heifers, sheep, goats, lions, dogs, monkeys, and cats; the ibis, the crane, and the hawk; the crocodile, serpents, frogs, flies, and the scarabeus or beetle; the Nile and its fish; the sun, moon, planets, and stars; fire, light, air, darkness, and night, were all objects of Egyptian idolatry, and all included in this very circumstantial prohibition as detailed in Deuteronomy.” 2

Again let us hear the second commandment of our Lord:
“You shall not make for yourself an idol or graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.”

Now when we put it into its historical context, is it at all possible to believe that the Hebrew term pesel is equal to an Orthodox icon? No, how could it be? To do so would be show a total lack of logic. So let us, with undoubted faith continue to do as today’s tropar says, “We venerate Thy most pure image, O Good One”.3 By reason of the fact that, “The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed,…and He has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with divine beauty. This our salvation we confess in deed and word and we depict it in the holy ikons.”4

May our Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of all the saints who suffered for the veneration of the holy icons have mercy on us and save us. Amen!

1. From the commentaries of Adam Clarke (British Methodist Theologian reposed 1832) on Exodus 20:4. Can be found on http://www.e-sword.net.
2. Ibid.
3. Translation as found in service books published by St. Tikhon’s Monastery.
4. The Lenten Triodion, p. 306