No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
The liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is known and appreciated by the Catholic West. Less known are its non-liturgical devotions. One such devotion, ‘the prayer of Jesus,’ has for centuries been encouraged in the Eastern Church, though, leaving the freedom of choice in spiritual ways to her faithful, she never imposed it or ascribed to it any particular merits (a practice unknown to the East). With this proviso the Prayer can be compared with the Rosary in the West; and as its roots go back to the early, undivided Church, it could be claimed by the West no less than by the East.
‘Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.’ This invocation has behind it volumes of spiritual writings and centuries of ascetico-mystical tradition. It is known as ‘the art or mental prayer.’
Many seem to have built their whole spiritual life on the prayer of Jesus, though it cannot be regarded as detached from the rest of the Christian life: Bible reading, sacramental grace, practice of the Commandments and theological virtues. In monasteries it was combined with special ascetical practices. Beginners in the use of the prayer abstained from devotional reading in order to concentrate, and the prayer replaced private psalmody in the cell, outside the services. Some kept it as a unique rule. It was repeated with beads several thousand times and was accompanied by prostrations. This acted as the first ascetical exercise of the will in obedience to the rule imposed by one’s spiritual father, teaching also control over the body.
1 The practice of the Prayer of Jesus is found as early as the fourth century. To mention only a few of those who wrote on it : Saints Antony, Evagrius of Pont, pseudo-Macarius of Egypt (fourth century); Neilus of Sinai, Marc the Ascetic, Venerable Diodochus, Isaak the Syrian, John Climax, Hesychius (fifthninth centuries); Symeon the New Theologian (mystic of the tenth century), is followed by a new interest in this prayer, and a controversy arose about it in the fourteenth century; the main advocates of it are Gregory of Sinai and the Archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas. In Russia, the prayer is taught !y Abbot St. Nilus of Sora in the fifteenth century; and St. Devetrius Bishop of Rostov, in the seventeenth century. A monk, Paissy Velichkovsky (? 1794), rediscovered this way of prayer, and he exercised great influence in the monasteries of South Russia, Mount Athos and Roumania. To him and his followers is due the revival of the ascetico-mystical tradition and writings in Russian monasteries, especially in @tino (famous thenceforward for its spiritual directors) and Valaam in Finland. St. Seraphim, the hermit of Sarov (+1833), practised and taught this prayer. The monks of Optino and the famous Bishop of Vladimir, Theophan ‘ the Recluse ‘ (+1894), edited, in Russian, volumes of ancient writings on the Prayer of Jesus. Of its practice by a layman, a peasant, an interesting document remains in the booklet, The Sincere Tales of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father (translated by R. M. French, The Way of a Pilgrim, S.P.C.K.). As late as 1938, the monks of Valaam published The Discourses on the Prayer of Jesus in two volumes.
You have
Access