Inwardness

Kallis­tos (Ware) Bishop of Diok­leia

The re­peated In­vo­ca­tion of the Name, by mak­ing our prayer more uni­fied, makes it at the same time more in­ward, more a part of our­selves - not some­thing that we do at par­tic­u­lar mo­ments, but some­thing that we are all the time; not an oc­ca­sional act but a con­tin­u­ing state. Such pray­ing be­comes truly prayer of the whole per­son, in which the words and mean­ing of the prayer are fully iden­ti­fied with the one who prays. All this is well ex­pressed by Paul Evdoki­mov (1901 - 1970): "In the cat­a­combs the image that re­curs most fre­quently is the fig­ure of a woman in prayer, the Orans. It rep­re­sents the only true at­ti­tude of the human soul. It is not enough to pos­sess prayer: we must be­come prayer - prayer in­car­nate. It is not enough to have mo­ments of praise; our whole life, every act and every ges­ture, even a smile, must be­come a hymn of ado­ra­tion, an of­fer­ing, a prayer. We must offer not what we have but what we are". That is what the world needs above all else: not peo­ple who say prayers with greater or less reg­u­lar­ity, but peo­ple who are prayers.

The kind of prayer that Evdoki­mov is here de­scrib­ing may be de­fined more ex­actly as "prayer of the heart". In Or­tho­doxy, as in other tra­di­tions, prayer is com­monly dis­tin­guished under three head­ings, which are to be re­garded as in­ter­pen­e­trat­ing lev­els, rather than suc­ces­sive stages: prayer of the lips (oral prayer); prayer of the nous, the mind or in­tel­lect (men­tal prayer); prayer of the heart (or of the in­tel­lect in the heart). The In­vo­ca­tion of the Name be­gins, like any other prayer, as an oral prayer, in which words are spo­ken by the tongue through a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort of will. At the same time, once more by a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort, we con­cen­trate our mind upon the mean­ing of what the tongue says. In course of time and with the help of God our prayer grows more in­ward. The par­tic­i­pa­tion of the mind be­comes more in­tense and spon­ta­neous, while the sounds ut­tered by the tongue be­come less im­por­tant; per­haps for a time they cease al­to­gether and the Name is in­voked silently, with­out any move­ment of the lips, by the mind alone. When this oc­curs, we have passed by God’s grace from the first level to the sec­ond. Not that vocal in­vo­ca­tion ceases al­to­gether, for there will be times when even the most "ad­vanced" in inner prayer will wish to call upon the Lord Jesus aloud. (And who, in­deed, can claim to be "ad­vanced?" We are all of us "be­gin­ners" in the things of the Spirit).

But the jour­ney in­wards is not yet com­plete. A per­son is far more than the con­scious mind; be­sides the brain and rea­son­ing fac­ul­ties there are the emo­tions and af­fec­tions, the aes­thetic sen­si­tiv­ity, to­gether with the deep in­stinc­tive lay­ers of the per­son­al­ity. All these have a func­tion to per­form in prayer, for the whole per­son is called to share in the total act of wor­ship. Like a drop of ink that falls on blot­ting paper, the act of prayer should spread steadily out­wards from the con­scious and rea­son­ing cen­tre of the brain, until it em­braces every part of our­selves.

In more tech­ni­cal terms, this means that we are called to ad­vance from the sec­ond level to the third: from "prayer of the in­tel­lect" to "prayer of the in­tel­lect in the heart". "Heart" in this con­text is to be un­der­stood in the Se­mitic and bib­li­cal rather than the mod­ern West­ern sense, as sig­ni­fy­ing not just the emo­tions and af­fec­tions but the to­tal­ity of the human per­son. The heart is the pri­mary organ of our iden­tity, it is our in­ner­most being, "the very deep­est and truest self, not at­tained ex­cept through sac­ri­fice, through death". Ac­cord­ing to Boris Vysh­eslavt­sev, it is "the cen­tre not only of con­scious­ness but of the un­con­scious, not only of the soul but of the spirit, not only of the spirit but of the body, not only of the com­pre­hen­si­ble but of the in­com­pre­hen­si­ble; in one word, it is the ab­solute cen­tre". In­ter­preted in this way, the heart is far more than a ma­te­r­ial organ in the body; the phys­i­cal heart is an out­ward sym­bol of the bound­less spir­i­tual po­ten­tial­i­ties of the human crea­ture, made in the image of God, called to at­tain his like­ness.

To ac­com­plish the jour­ney in­wards and to at­tain true prayer, it is re­quired of us to enter into this "ab­solute cen­tre", that is, to de­scend from the in­tel­lect into the heart. More ex­actly, we are called to de­scend not from but with the in­tel­lect. The aim is not just "prayer of the heart" but "prayer of the in­tel­lect in the heart", for our var­ied forms of un­der­stand­ing, in­clud­ing our rea­son, are a gift from God and are to be used in his ser­vice, not re­jected. This "union of the in­tel­lect with the heart" sig­ni­fies the rein­te­gra­tion of our fallen and frag­mented na­ture, our restora­tion to orig­i­nal whole­ness. Prayer of the heart is a re­turn to Par­adise, a re­ver­sal of the Fall, a re­cov­ery of the sta­tus ante pec­ca­tum. This means that it is an es­cha­to­log­i­cal re­al­ity, a pledge and an­tic­i­pa­tion of the Age to Come - some­thing which, in this pre­sent age, is never fully and en­tirely re­al­ized.

Those who, how­ever im­per­fectly, have achieved some mea­sure of "prayer of the heart", have begun to make the tran­si­tion about which we spoke ear­lier - the tran­si­tion from "stren­u­ous" to "self­act­ing" prayer, from the prayer which I say to the prayer which "says it­self" or, rather, which Christ says in me. For the heart has a dou­ble sig­nif­i­cance in the spir­i­tual life: it is both the cen­tre of the human being and the point of meet­ing be­tween the human being and God. It is both the place of self-knowl­edge, where we see our­selves as we truly are, and the place of self-tran­scen­dence, where we un­der­stand our na­ture as a tem­ple of the Holy Trin­ity, where the image comes face to face with the Ar­che­type. In the "inner sanc­tu­ary" of our own heart we find the ground of our being and so cross the mys­te­ri­ous fron­tier be­tween the cre­ated and the Un­cre­ated. "There are un­fath­omable depths within the heart", state the Macar­ian Hom­i­lies. "...God is there with the an­gels, light and life are there, the king­dom and the apos­tles, the heav­enly cities and the trea­sures of grace: all things are there".

Prayer of the heart, then, des­ig­nates the point where "my" ac­tion, "my" prayer, be­comes ex­plic­itly iden­ti­fied with the con­tin­u­ous ac­tion of An­other in me. It is no longer prayer to Jesus but the prayer of Jesus him­self. This tran­si­tion from "stren­u­ous" to "self-act­ing" prayer is strik­ingly in­di­cated in The Way of a Pil­grim: "Early one morn­ing the Prayer woke me up as it were". Hith­erto the Pil­grim has been "say­ing the Prayer"; now he finds that the Prayer "says it­self", even when he is asleep, for it has be­come united to the prayer of God within him. Yet even so he does not con­sider that he has as yet at­tained prayer of the heart in its full­ness.

Read­ers of The Way of a Pil­grim may gain the im­pres­sion that this pas­sage from oral prayer to prayer of the heart is eas­ily achieved, al­most in a me­chan­i­cal and au­to­matic fash­ion. The Pil­grim, so it seems, at­tains self-act­ing prayer in a mat­ter of a few weeks. It needs to be em­pha­sized that his ex­pe­ri­ence, while not unique, is al­to­gether ex­cep­tional. More usu­ally prayer of the heart comes, if at all, only after a life­time of as­cetic striv­ing. There is a real dan­ger that, in the early stages of the Jesus Prayer, we may too read­ily as­sume that we are pass­ing from oral prayer to prayer of the heart. We may per­haps be tempted to imag­ine that we have al­ready at­tained word­less prayer of si­lence, when in fact we are not re­ally pray­ing at all but have merely lapsed into va­cant drowsi­ness or wak­ing sleep. To guard against this, our teach­ers in the Hesy­chast tra­di­tion in­sist upon the need for stren­u­ous ef­fort when first em­bark­ing on the Jesus Prayer. They em­pha­size how im­por­tant it is to con­cen­trate full at­ten­tion upon the recita­tion of the ac­tual words, rather than to form high am­bi­tions about prayer of the heart. Here, for ex­am­ple, is the ad­vice given by a noted spir­i­tual fa­ther of Mount Athos, Geron Joseph of New Skete (+1959):

The work of inner prayer con­sists in forc­ing your­self to say the prayer with your mouth con­tin­u­ally, with­out ceas­ing. ...At­tend only to the words "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me"... Just say the Prayer aloud, with­out in­ter­rup­tion... All your ef­fort must be cen­tred on the tongue, until you start to grow ac­cus­tomed to the Prayer.

The sig­nif­i­cance at­tached here to the power of the spo­ken word is in­deed strik­ing. As St. John Cli­ma­cus tells us, "Strug­gle to lift up, or rather, to en­close your thought within the words of your prayer". But of course we never think ex­clu­sively about the words on their own; al­ways we are con­scious also of the per­son of Jesus whom our words in­voke.

Prayer of the heart, when and if it is granted, comes as the free gift of God, which he be­stows as he wills. It is not the in­evitable ef­fect of some tech­nique. St. Isaac the Syr­ian (sev­enth cen­tury) un­der­lines the ex­treme rar­ity of the gift when he says that "scarcely one in ten thou­sand" is counted wor­thy of the gift of pure prayer, and he adds: "As for the mys­tery that lies be­yond pure prayer, there is scarcely to be found a sin­gle per­son in each gen­er­a­tion who has drawn near to this knowl­edge of God’s grace". One in ten thou­sand, one in a gen­er­a­tion: while sobered by this warn­ing, we should not be un­duly dis­cour­aged. The path to the inner king­dom lies open be­fore all, and all alike may travel some way along it. In the pre­sent age, few ex­pe­ri­ence with any full­ness the deeper mys­ter­ies of the heart, but very many re­ceive in a more hum­ble and in­ter­mit­tent way true glimpses of what is sig­ni­fied by spir­i­tual prayer.