The Prayer of the Heart, also called the Jesus Prayer, is in the Orthodox tradition the shortest and at the same time the deepest form of unceasing prayer. Its basic formula, repeated with perseverance and attention, is: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is not a mere pious exercise or a technique, but a work in which man turns back from the scattering of the mind and meets, in his own heart, the living Christ. In it lies the mystical synthesis of Orthodoxy: repentance, the Incarnation, uncreated grace, deification.
Below we follow the thread of this tradition as it has flowed, unbroken, from the desert of Egypt to our own century.
Roots in the Egyptian Desert — The Paterikon
In the fourth century, when the Roman world was putting on the garment of state Christianity, the Spirit led the first monks out into the desert. The Egyptian Paterikon, the collection of the sayings of the Fathers, preserves their short words, full of fire.
There, for the first time clearly, appears the exhortation to bear Christ on the lips without ceasing. “Always have Jesus in your mind,” says Abba Arsenius; and Abba Macarius teaches his disciple to say briefly, “Lord, have mercy on me,” showing that fruit is not brought by a multitude of words, but by attention to one Name. The Desert Fathers speak of the guarding of the mind, of the cleansing of thoughts, and of the prayer that, drop by drop, slips into the heart.
Here, in the silence and harshness of the desert, was born what centuries later would be called hesychasm, the path of inner stillness. The Prayer of the Heart is not a late addition to the Church: it comes directly from the struggle of the Desert Fathers.
Saint Isaac the Syrian — Tears and Stillness
Toward the end of the seventh century, Saint Isaac the Syrian, a bishop who left his episcopal throne to withdraw into the mountains of Persia, wrote the Ascetical Homilies, one of the deepest treatises on prayer in all Christian literature.
Saint Isaac distinguishes the prayer of those who still ask for the things of this world from the prayer of those who begin to taste, through the Spirit, the world to come. He teaches that pure prayer is not the work of man, but the gift of God given to the one who perseveres in repentance and tears. Whoever has not shed the tears of repentance, he says, has not yet reached the threshold of true prayer.
Saint Isaac’s presence in the hesychast tradition is seen also in the fact that all the great men of prayer, from the Athonites of the fourteenth century to Saint Joseph the Hesychast, return again and again to his words.
Saint Gregory Palamas — The Confession of the Uncreated Light
The fourteenth century is the hour in which the Prayer of the Heart became, by the providence of God, a boundary stone of Orthodoxy. On Mount Athos there lived monks who, through a long work of prayer, were made worthy to behold an ineffable light, the light of the Transfiguration on Tabor.
Barlaam of Calabria, a monk who came from the West with a rationalist way of thinking, accused these men of prayer of delusion, saying that the light they saw was a created light, a mere imagination. Against him stood Saint Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica.
The councils of Constantinople (1341, 1347, 1351) sealed the teaching of Saint Gregory as the conciliar teaching of the Church: between the essence of God, forever beyond comprehension, and His works, or energies, through which He communicates Himself to creation, there is a real distinction, but without separation. The light seen by the hesychasts is divine and uncreated, the same light that shone on Tabor and will shine in the age to come. Deification, theosis, is not a pietistic imagining, but real participation in God through His energies.
Saint Gregory thus places the Prayer of the Heart in the heart of dogma: whoever denies it denies the very possibility of real union with Christ.
The Philokalia — The Gathered Treasure
At the end of the eighteenth century, two Athonite fathers, Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Saint Macarius of Corinth, gathered into one great collection the texts of the hesychast Fathers from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Thus was born the Philokalia (printed in Venice, 1782), “the love of the beautiful and the good,” an anthology of pure prayer.
The Philokalia is not merely one book among others. It is a spiritual edifice in which the voices of the Fathers, from Anthony the Great and Macarius of Egypt to Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas, are woven into one testimony: unceasing prayer is possible, it is the calling of every Christian, and it has precise paths, shown by those who walked before us.
Saint Paisius Velichkovsky — The Philokalic Return
At the same time that the Philokalia was coming off the press in Venice, in the Romanian lands a hidden elder was carrying out a parallel work: Saint Paisius Velichkovsky, Ukrainian by birth, Athonite by discipleship, elder of the monasteries of Dragomirna, Secu, and Neamt. He translated the Philokalic corpus into Slavonic and formed around himself a brotherhood of more than a thousand disciples, Romanians, Russians, and Greeks, who, returning to their homelands, rekindled the Prayer of the Heart throughout the Orthodox world.
From Paisius came the famous brotherhoods of Optina in Russia, where the elders Leonid, Macarius, and Ambrose carried the Philokalic fruit into the twentieth century. From Paisius also comes the monastic awakening in Moldavia, with all the confessors who followed.
Saint Joseph the Hesychast — The Living Witness of Our Century
That this tradition has not died out is shown to us in the twentieth century by Saint Joseph the Hesychast (+1959). Withdrawn into the deserts of the Holy Mountain, he lived, together with his few disciples, a life of austerity and depth worthy of the great Fathers of Egypt.
His spiritual letters, gathered in Monastic Wisdom and in The Expression of Monasticism, are perhaps the clearest pedagogy of the Prayer of the Heart that we have for our time. His disciples, among them Elder Ephraim of Arizona and Elder Joseph of Vatopedi, spread this work throughout the Orthodox world, showing that hesychasm is not a museum piece, but a living reality.
Why It Matters for Every Christian
Some say: the Prayer of the Heart is for monks. The Fathers themselves testify to the contrary. Saint Gregory Palamas says clearly, in a homily, that the commandment “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) is given to all Christians, not only to monastics; and the only means by which it can be fulfilled in the life of a person burdened by cares and by the world is the frequent remembrance, in the heart, of the Name of Jesus.
In the life of the layperson, the Prayer of the Heart is:
- a shield against thoughts which, if left unopposed, drag us into the passions;
- the return of the mind into the heart, where, according to the Fathers, the natural place of the whole person is found;
- humility continually renewed, because the words “have mercy on me, a sinner” cannot be spoken with pride;
- preparation for death and judgment, because then, the Fathers say, a person will have with him only those words he has spoken with the heart.
The Resistance of Those Bound to Form
Sadly, in every age of the Church there has arisen a voice which, wearing the garment of outward piety, has stood against the Prayer of the Heart. In the fourteenth century, Barlaam tried to scatter the hesychasts through rational arguments, portraying them as dreamers. Today, the resistance takes a more subtle form.
It often comes from those who have reduced Christianity to ceremony. For them, to be a Christian means to go to services, to light candles, to keep the fasts, and nothing more. The service, which by its very nature is an ascent toward the Prayer of the Heart, becomes an end in itself; and when they are spoken to about inner prayer, about the guarding of the mind, about tears and watchfulness, they are troubled and consider it “superfluous,” “a cause of delusion,” or “something for monks.”
But the Holy Fathers do not speak this way. Saint Isaac the Syrian says that service without inner prayer is a body without a soul. Saint Gregory Palamas, who himself was a serving hierarch of the Divine Liturgy, never saw the Prayer of the Heart as opposed to the services, but as their very sap. The Philokalia is nothing other than the call to live in the heart what is accomplished in church.
To suppose that the service alone is enough, without the inner work, is a subtle form of delusion: not of the simple people who go to church with pure faith, but of those who use the form as an adornment by which to avoid entering the true struggle. Saint Joseph the Hesychast wrote to his disciples: whoever does not practise the Prayer of the Heart does nothing.
The Prayer of the Heart — A Gift for Our Time
The Prayer of the Heart is not a spiritual fashion, nor a monastic “specialty.” It is the golden thread on which the history of Orthodoxy has been woven: from Abba Macarius in the desert of Egypt, through Saint Isaac the Syrian in the mountains of Persia, through Saint Gregory Palamas in Thessalonica, through the Philokalia compiled on Athos, through Saint Paisius Velichkovsky in Moldavia, to Saint Joseph the Hesychast in our own century.
Whoever knows it can no longer look at the services, fasting, and devotion as ultimate goals: they are paths toward it. Whoever practises it, however hesitantly, begins to taste, even in this life, something of the “joy of the Lord” of which the Gospel speaks. And Orthodoxy, as handed down by the Fathers, without additions and without amputations, remains the only place where this prayer preserves untouched its two-thousand-year-old depth.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is a prayer that fits within three breaths, and yet all of Christ fits within it.