Orthodox Christian Monasticism - Hesychasm

to passion and captivity, made in evidence the importance of guarding the mind as the 'guardian' at the door of the heart: not to allow the conversation with the sinful suggestion but to reject it from the first apparition. "Be the guardian of your heart and of any thought that is presented put him this question: 'Are you from ours or from our enemies"(Joshua 5:13) . "Look why Saint Makarios the Great say that all the fight of man take place in thought.", and Hesychios the Sinaite can to reduce all the ascesis to nepsis defined by his as "a spiritual method...that, with the help of God and through a sustained and firm effort, freed completely the man from thoughts and passionate thoughts, as well as of evil deeds.".

This rigorous discipline imposed to the heart and mind, accompanied by bodily asceticism not less severe, with which together form the praxis or the first of the ascetical life, do not follow only the avoidance of sin, also she prepare the interior climate for pure prayer the alone unites with God. But as greater the ideal of the pure prayer is, more difficult its realization is, because of the sin that destroyed the harmony psycho-somatic of man and weakened the power of concentration of attention in the heart. After the ancestral sin, the inner unity of man, ensured by the heart as center and source of active faculties of the mind and will, was destroyed. Thus the mind (nous), deprived of his centre is dispersed in a world that becomes to him from now on exterior. This is why the diversity of the thoughts (logismoi), and the forgiveness of continual remembrance of God. The hesychast observed early that the remedy for the liberation of mind form the pernicious captivity of thoughts is that later one of them will call: " the return to the original simplicity" through the perseverant and ceaseless invocation of God in prayer."

We arrive thus to the need of the unceasing prayer, that in the hesychast language was called "The Prater of the Heart" or "The prayer of the Mind," fixe with the time in the "Jesus Prayer." Even if this name was renown after the hesychast movement of the XIVth century, the Jesus Prayer, has a very ancient genesis, his origins ascending to the first monks. They knew already short prayers (monologismos), and emissive (ejected from the heart), for the invocation of the Name of God. For Saint Makarios the Great the spiritual life founded integrally on the Incarnation of the Word of God. He

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