"Be Still and Know that I am God": St. Gregory of Sinai on Prayer

In a culture that thrives upon and craves constant stimulation of the senses and imagination, the spirituality of the Christian East presents the Western mind (as noted in a previous post) with something of an enigma.  With the exception of a few rare instances, the ascetic struggle and the manner of praying that is part of that struggle, notably the practice of the Jesus prayer, the Philokalia presents a spirituality that is “apophatic”.  While it allows to a certain extent a place for the feelings and for the meditation on things Divine through the liturgy and praying the psalms, the spirituality of the Philokalia and of St. Gregory of Sinai whose work “On Prayer” we will be considering in this post, avoids any trace of sentimental emotionalism and carefully warns against the ever-present danger of delusion by false visions of light and of indiscriminately trusting one’s own judgment in regards to spiritual realities.  “In the West, there is a strong tradition of using images (kataphatic prayer), as well as imageless (apophatic) prayer.  In the East, however, and especially in the Athonite spirituality contained in the Philokalia, the use of images is strongly discouraged. . . .Imageless prayer is seen as superior to the use of images in prayer and as necessary to unceasing prayer” and to defeat the devil’s attempt to distract us from the pure and inner prayer of the heart.  This can often be challenging for those in the West who are given to understand that words and images are integral to the practice of prayer.  The stilling and purifying of the intellect (nous), that is the eye of heart, is essential in the Philokalic tradition.  “Unceasing prayer is an inner activity of the intellect, and the lack of outward expression does not mean that it has ceased.”  Rather, the goal is to open the heart fully and completely to the indwelling presence of Christ: “The aim of the Jesus Prayer, as of all prayer, is to reveal in a conscious and dynamically active way ‘the energy of the Holy Spirit, which we have already received in baptism.’  Through the invocation of the Holy Name, we are enabled to pass from the stage when baptismal grace is present in our hearts merely in a hidden and unconscious manner, to the point of full awareness at which we experience the activity of this grace directly and consciously.”  

As we shall see in the writings of St. Gregory, this is a labor of love that requires patience, endurance, humility and, most of all, the grace of God. 

“No one can master the intellect (nous) unless he himself is mastered by the Spirit.  For the intellect is uncontrollable, not because it is by nature ever-active, but because through our continual remissness it has been given over to distraction and has become used to that.  When we violated the commandments of Him who in baptism regenerates us we separated ourselves from God and lost our conscious awareness of Him and our union with Him.  Sundered from that union and estranged from God, the intellect is led captive everywhere; and it cannot regain its stability unless it submits to God and is stilled by Him, joyfully uniting with Him through unceasing and diligent prayer and through noetically confessing all our lapses to Him each day. . . ; for the mind is brought under control only in those who have been made perfect by the Holy Spirit and who have attained a state of total concentration upon Christ Jesus” (Philokalia, Vol. 4, 277).

With the help of God, in the spiritual battle we are to expel thoughts that would pull us away from this concentration upon Jesus.  Quoting St. John Climacus, St. Gregory tells us to “lash your enemies with the name of Jesus, because God is a fire that cauterizes wickedness.”  When embattled and overcome, we are to call out to God who will be prompt to help and “will speedily come to the defense of those who wholeheartedly call on Him day and night” (Ibid., 277).  

As mentioned earlier, in this battle one may make use of praying the psalms.  In fact, St. Gregory states, “to psalmodize often is appropriate for novices in the ascetic life, because of the toil it involves and the spiritual knowledge it confers” (Ibid., 278).  “Psalmody is given to us because of our grossness and indolence, so that we may be led back to our true state”; that is, the stillness wherein one can pray “to God with travail of heart, eschewing all conceptual images” (Ibid., 278) and shedding all thoughts whether of sensible or of intelligible realities. 

Such prayer, St. Gregory states, involves the whole self and so requires disciplining the body as well; in particular, the control of the belly - the “queen of the passions”.  Gregory writes: “If you can deaden or half-deaden it, do not relent. . . Through it we fall and through it - when well disciplined - we rise again.  Through it we have lost both our original divine status and also our second divine status, that which was bestowed on us . . .through baptism, and have lapsed once more, separating ourselves from God through our neglect of the commandments . . . .” (Ibid., 280).  To humble and still the intellect, one must humble the body. Though our bodies and needs vary greatly, those who seek such inner stillness and pure prayer should “always eat too little, never too much.  For when the stomach is heavy the intellect is clouded, and you cannot pray resolutely and with purity . . .To eat again after reaching the point of satiety is to open the door to gluttony, through which unchastity comes in” (Ibid., 281).  

Admittedly, such discipline of mind and body, such a desire to foster a radical stillness and purity of heart, may seem foreign and enigmatic to those of the West and perhaps inhuman.  But according to St. Gregory this “mindfulness of God, or noetic prayer, is superior to all other activities.  Indeed, being love for God, it is the chief virtue” (Ibid., 282).  It is love and no other reason that drives one to seek and foster such stillness - for it is there that the Beloved is found, as He Himself tell us, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46).

Signs of Grace and Delusion

After a long hiatus, it is my hope now to pick up with my reading of the Philokalia with some regularity; in particular, reading those texts set down by a staretz in the “Way of the Pilgrim” as most appropriate for beginners.  I turn now to take a look at a work entitled “On the Signs of Grace and Delusion, written for the Confessor Longinos: Ten Texts” by St. Gregory of Sinai, contained in the IV volume of the Philokalia. St. Gregory (b. circa 1265, d. 1346) after embracing the monastic life in Cyprus, received the the full monastic profession at Mt. Sinai, and then travelled to Crete where he was taught by a monk called Arsenios about ‘guarding the intellect, true watchfulness and pure prayer, including the Jesus prayer; and so was initiated into the hesychastic tradition to which the writings of the Philokalia bear witness.  From Crete, Gregory went to Mt. Athos where he lived for 25 years in a secluded hermitage not far from the monastery of Philotheou, until being forced to leave due to the Turkish incursions.  He lived out the remainder of his life in the remote wilderness of Paroria on the border between the Byzantine Empire and Bulgaria.  Five of his works have been included in the Philokalia.  

Though very brief, “Signs of Grace and Delusion” addresses inner prayer, in particular the Jesus prayer, and contains a much needed description of how one discerns between what is of God and the movement of the Holy Spirit and what is of the fallen self and Satan, the source of delusion and falsehood.  

Often we lose sight of our dignity and destiny as sons and daughters of God - those given new life through baptism.  God has given us all we need to know Him and His will and to converse intimately with Him through the pure prayer of the heart.  St. Gregory describes this sad state with simplicity and candor:

“As the great teacher St. John Chrysostom states, we should be in a position to say that we need no help from the Scriptures, no assistance from other people, but are instructed by God; for ‘all will be taught by God’ (Isa. 54:13; John 6:45), in such a way that we learn from Him and through Him what we ought to know.  And this applies not only to those of us who are monks but to each and every one of the faithful: we are all of us called to carry the law of the Spirit written on the tablets of our hearts (cf. 2 Cor. 3:3), and to attain like the Cherubim the supreme privilege of conversing through pure prayer in the heart directly with Jesus. . . Unaware of the surpassing grandeur of the honor and glory in which we share, we fail to realize that we ought to grow in soul and spirit through the keeping of the commandments and so perceive noetically what we have received.  On account of this most of us fall through indifference and servitude to the passions into a state of benighted obduracy.”

Having failed to keep His commandments in obedience and to purify the the eye of the heart through unceasing prayer (“the continuous invocation of the Lord Jesus”. . . “that sets the heart alight with the ineffable love for God and man”), we no longer see and perceive what God has given us.  Rather, we fall into an unyielding and inflexible state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance; no longer sons and daughters of Light but those whose faith is “formal, lifeless and ineffectual.”  

For every beginner, St. Gregory tells us, there are “two forms of energy at work, each affecting the heart in a distinct way” and each generating different kinds of fervor that can be prompted either by grace or delusion.  We would do well to study them thoroughly.  The following three paragraphs excerpted from this text will hopefully be a helpful introduction:

ON DIVINE ENERGY

“The energy of grace is the power of spiritual fire that fills the heart with joy and gladness, stabilizes, warms, and purifies the soul, temporarily stills our provocative thoughts, and for a time suspends the body’s impulsions. The signs and fruits that testify to its authenticity are tears, contrition, humility, self-control, silence, patience, self-effacement and similar qualities, all of which constitute undeniable evidence of its presence.”

ON DELUSION

“The energy of delusion is the passion for sin, inflaming the soul with thoughts of sensual pleasure and arousing phrenetic desire in the body for intercourse with other bodies. According to St. Diadochos it is entirely amorphous and disordered, inducing a mindless joy, presumption and confusion, accompanied by a mood of ill-defined sterile levity, and fomenting above all the soul’s appetitive power with its sensuality. It nourishes itself on pleasure, aided and abetted by the insatiable belly; for through the belly it not only impregnates and enkindles our whole bodily temperament but also acts upon and inflames the soul, drawing it to itself so that little by little the disposition to self-indulgence expels all grace from the person thus possessed.”

This is just a taste of St. Gregory’s work, which should be read in its entirety.  Within it, he discusses how to discover the energy of the Holy Spirit and what are the signs which accompany the Holy Spirit’s activity in us. St. Gregory also describes different kinds of exultation, joyousness, and trembling, explaining what such experiences may look like which are from God and symptomatic of the experience of divine grace, and those which come from the Evil One and are symptomatic of demonic delusion. 

The Potential Enigma of Philokalic Spirituality for the Western Mind

To the Western mind, the starkness of philokalic spirituality with its constant emphasis on watchfulness, and the controlling of thoughts through unceasing prayer may be perplexing.  There is in the West an almost inherent suspicion of things, especially spiritual, regarding asceticism involving restriction of thoughts unless such practices are stripped of anything approaching moral judgment or recognition of evil influence.  One might, for example, be attracted to and engage in certain practices of meditation if the emphasis is on obtaining peace of mind and obtaining a state of inner calmness.  Among those who do have religious and moral sensibilities that allow for such asceticism, the lack of emphasis on imaginative meditation on the life of Christ and his passion still presents something of an enigma. While the Western spiritual tradition does not lack such notions and spiritual writers who emphasize the type of spirituality the desert fathers put forward, the prevailing practice centers on imaginative and affective prayer and discursive mediation.  This may make the Evagrian spirituality that prevails in the Philokalia seem obscure and foreign.  Kallistos Ware writes: “Even though only a few pages are devoted to the works of Evagrios Pontus himself, the book as a whole makes constant use of his threefold classification of the spiritual way into the active life (praktiki), the contemplation of nature (physiki) and the contemplation of God (theologia).  It also repeats in many places Evagrios’s description of prayer as a ‘shedding of thoughts’, a laying aside of images and discursive thinking. ‘When you are praying,‘ says Evagrios, ‘do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity, and do not let your intellect be stamped with the impress of any form; but approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner, and then you will understand.‘  

I mention all of this because it is fundamental to having a clear understanding of prayer and watchfulness as described in the writings of Hesychios that I have been considering in recent posts.  With the exception of a few rare instances, the ascetic struggle and the manner of praying that is part of that struggle, notably the practice of the Jesus prayer, the Philokalia presents a Evagrian spirituality that is ‘apophatic‘.  

The writers of the Philokalia, Hesychios among them, emphasize the interactions between thoughts, passions and sinful acts.  Understanding these interactions and the fathers’ use of such terms is imperative.  Before moving on to consider Hesychios’ teaching on controlling thoughts, it may be helpful to briefly consider a few definitions offered by Gregory of Sinai.  These few paragraphs give great insight into why the fathers place special emphasize on struggling with distracting thoughts.  

Gregory writes:

“Sinful acts provoke passions, the passions provoke distractive thoughts and distractive thoughts, provoke fantasies. The fragmented memory begets a multiplicity of ideas, forgetfulness, causes the fragmentation of the memory, ignorance leads to forgetfulness, and appetites are aroused by misdirected emotions, and misdirected emotions by committing sinful acts. A sinful act is provoked by a mindless desire for evil and a strong attachment to the senses and to sensory things” (Philokalia IV).

The Fathers of the Philokalia taught that sense factors can evoke the passions. The senses are mainly visual, but can be auditory, taste, touch and smell as well. In anticipation of many modern psychologists, the Fathers understood that cognition, memory and emotions scan also be triggered by such cues.

St. Gregory of Sinai again expresses these factors well:

“Distractive thoughts arise and are activated in the soul's intelligent faculty, violent passions in the incensive faculty, the memory of bestial appetites in the desiring faculty, imaginary forms in the mind and ideas in the conceptualizing faculty ... We are provoked to sin by such thoughts; the irruption of evil thoughts is like the current of a river, and when as a result of this we give our assent to sin, our heart is overwhelmed as though by a turbulent flood” (Philokalia IV).

The Fathers understood that the senses are activated by such distractive thoughts and so the battle must be waged there. Thus, St. Gregory continues:

“By the "deep mire" (Ps. 69:2) understand slimy sensual pleasure or the sludge of lechery, or the burden of material things. Weighed down by all this, the impassioned intellect casts itself into the depths of despair ... sin ... is named according to its external manifestation” (Philokalia IV).

Such thoughts and behavior can become deeply entrenched (habitual) and our only overcome by ascetic struggle, humility, prayer and the grace of God.  St. Nilus noted, "A practice leads to a habit, and habit takes root like second nature. It is difficult and painful to stir or transform a nature.”  Likewise,  St. Gregory of Sinai wrote, "The cause and origin of the passions is the misuse of things ... (and) expresses the bias of the will ... " (Philokalia IV).  

With these considerations in mind, perhaps we can begin to understand the firmness of Hesychios as discusses the kinds of watchfulness and why he wants us to be particularly attentive to these measures and practice them with diligence.  He writes:

“I shall now tell you in plain, straightforward language what I consider to be the types of watchfulness which gradually cleanse the intellect from impassioned thoughts.  In these times of spiritual warfare I have no wish to conceal beneath words whatever in this treatise may be of use, especially to more simple people.  As St. Paul puts it: ‘Pay attention, my child Timothy, to what you read.’ (1Tim 4:13).

“One type of watchfulness consists in closely scrutinizing every mental image or provocation; for only by means of a mental image can Satan fabricate an evil thought and insinuate this into the intellect in order to lead it astray.”

“A second type of watchfulness consist in freeing the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still, and in praying.”

“A third type consists in continually and humbling calling upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help.”

“A forth type is always to have the thought of death in one’s mind.”

“These types of watchfulness, my child, act like doorkeepers and bar entry to evil thoughts.  Elsewhere, if God gives me words, I shall deal more fully with a further type which, along with others, is also effective: this is to fix one’s gaze on heaven and to pay no attention to anything material.”

“When we have to some extent cut off the causes of the passions, we should devote our time to spiritual contemplation; for if we fail to do this we shall easily revert to the fleshly passions, and so achieve nothing but the complete darkening of our intellect and its reversion to material things” (Philokalia I, pp. 164-165)

The ascetic struggle described here is great and constant, but its goal is not simply self mastery or freedom from thought or sinful passions.  There is a radical personal element involved in the discipline, emphasized in the practice of the Jesus prayer which directs our thoughts and our hearts to God.  We do not seek to cleanse the heart and the intellect (nous: the eye of the heart) for ourselves but for God.  Jesus warns against a failure to keep this in mind as does Hesychios in his final comment.  

“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order.  Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12: 43-45)  

If we sweep and clean the house without having Christ coming to dwell in and be Master of that house, more demons will return and we will find ourselves in a worse state than when we began.