Orthodox Christian Monasticism - Hesychasm

Ladder will define as way of union with God through hesychia, guarding of the mind or heart and continual prayer. The actual founder of Hesychasm is Saint John Climakos (+649), the author of the spiritual "The Ladder of Paradise", in which recommends the monologic prayer, that is the prayer reduced to a single word: Jesus.

The Byzantine Church was familiar with the hesychastic form of monasticism, continuing to exist in the Orthodox Church today. The great monasteries produced mystics capable of practising the purest forms of Hesychasm. Hesychasm flourished in the Stoudios, in the tenth an eleventh centuries, in the person of Saint Simeon the Pious and Saint Simeon the New Theologian. A movement that was organized at Mount Athos in the XII-XIVth centuries, the Hesychasm could not be separated from the theology of the 'uncreated character of the Thaboric light,' and from the direct experience of the glory of God. From Athos was spread in the following centuries in the monasteries from Serbia, Russia and Romania, influencing not only a monastic life, also the liturgic. As method for contemplative life, the Hesychasm is not separated from the liturgical or sacramental spirituality. Indeed the hesychast texts has been written for the monks and they are applied best in conditions of retreat and solitude of the monasteries. Athos, that collected the writing of the Philocalia, will say that the Prayer of the heart pertains to everybody, to the monks as well as to the lay people; this is why there are not two systems of Orthodox spirituality. One of the fundamental ideas of the Hesychasm is that the spiritual life, under monastic or liturgic form, is not arbitrary, but needs a 'spiritual father.'

For the hesychast fathers the theory and practice of the Prayer of Jesus, the silent meditation over the nae of Jesus and the state of peace that this produce are not a goal in themselves. Saint Simeon the New Theologian, talks about conscience and the feeling of grace, and Saint Gregory Palamas about the direct contemplation of glory of God through the uncreated divine energies, as essential elements of hesychast spirituality. If for the Hesychasm practised by Evagrius is the intellectual contemplation and the monological prayer of the mind, or the invocation of the Name of Jesus, other Hesychast orientations, as for example that proposed by Saint Makarios the Egyptian (sec. V), returns to a biblical anthropology, insisting over the guarding of the heart. Although in Orthodox spirituality, the heart (kardia), is not the physical organ, but the spiritual centre of man, created after the image of

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic