Every deed a man does, good or evil, begins with a thought. Before the hand helps or strikes, before the mouth blesses or wounds, a man has already thought of what he is about to do. Through thinking we make our plans, choose what must be done first and what can wait, and turn our mind towards God or towards the people we love. From thinking can be born discernment, that is, the power to distinguish good from evil and to see what is fitting in each circumstance. Sometimes even faith is born from it, where faith was lacking.
Anyone who talks with people notices, however, that most of them think little, and in haste. They think about practical things, the business of the day, what they will answer and what they will buy, but they rarely stop to reflect on what truly matters: who they are, where they are going, what will remain of their life. Care for practical things is not bad in itself, for raising one’s children, doing one’s work honestly and knowing how to share out the little one has all demand a great deal of judgement. Thinking stays on the surface, however, when it never goes beyond the needs of the day. Others think a great deal, but think crookedly, and crooked thinking, carried through to the end, has often brought great calamities.
And yet the Church, which values the human mind so highly, keeps a prayer in which the one who prays strives to set thoughts aside. It is the prayer of the mind: the unceasing invocation of the Lord’s name, with the mind gathered, in the words “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Those who labour above all in this prayer are called hesychasts, from the Greek word hesychia, which means stillness. In the same way, when we enter a church or pray at home, we are asked to think of nothing but the words of the prayer and of God. How can esteem for thinking be reconciled with the stilling of thoughts?
Every Deed Begins in a Thought
Christ the Saviour showed where man’s deeds come from: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19). Evil thoughts head this list because they come before all the rest. The Greek word translated here as “thoughts” means, more exactly, the reckonings and judgements a man makes within himself.
The Holy Fathers traced with great care the path a thought travels until it becomes a deed. Saint Hesychios of Sinai, whose writings were placed in the Philokalia (the collection of texts of the Holy Fathers on prayer and the guarding of the mind), shows that at first there appears in the mind merely the thought of some evil thing, which the Fathers call the provocation. This thought is cast into the heart by the devil, and its mere appearance is not yet the man’s sin. Those who are troubled by thoughts they did not summon can find great consolation here. If a man does not drive it away, his own thoughts run after it and begin to converse with it. Here the man’s responsibility begins. Then comes assent, and after assent, the deed. A deed repeated grows strong in the soul and becomes a passion, that is, an evil inclination that comes to rule over the man.
The struggle is therefore easiest at the beginning of the road, for a thought rejected the moment it appears never becomes a deed. The same is true of the good. Every good deed begins with a good thought: a remembrance of God, a compassion kindled in a man at the sight of his neighbour, a resolution taken in secret before it is fulfilled.
The Thoughts We Nourish
Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, one of the best-known spiritual fathers of Serbia in the twentieth century, learned the prayer of the heart from a father formed in the spirit of the Elders of Optina, in Russia. His teaching was gathered into a book whose title sums it up: Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives. At first sight, the saying looks like an exhortation to the “positive thinking” so much talked about today. The Elder, however, had in view the thoughts a man receives, nourishes and allows to settle within him.
A thought received many times becomes a habit, and a habit becomes the way a man sees the world. He who grows used to seeing an insult in every word of others ends up living among enemies he has made for himself, in his thoughts, though the people around him have remained the same. He who constantly compares himself with others suffers at every success of his neighbour. In the same way, the man who grows used to seeing the good he has received, and to praying for the one who has upset him, slowly sets right both his heart and his deeds.
That is why discernment begins at the very door of the mind. Some thoughts must be examined patiently: whether what I want is good, whether I do something out of love or out of pride, whether what I believe about a person is true. Others must be cut off at once. With a thought of hatred, of fornication or of despair one should not converse, for every reckoning you make together with it makes it stronger.
To examine a thought does not mean circling endlessly around it. Whoever carries the same anxiety in his mind for days on end, without reaching any decision and without asking for counsel, is not thinking more deeply; he is only fretting. The holy Apostle Paul shows the Philippians what to nourish their minds with: “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). The mind feeds on what it looks at, and the Apostle shows it the good food.
A Sound Mind
The power of the human mind is great, because it is a gift of God. The mind is one of the most precious gifts man has received. Saint John of Damascus shows that man is made in the image of God through his mind and his free will, and in His likeness through virtue, as far as this is possible for him. The image we received as a gift; the likeness we acquire by working with what we have received. And of Adam we read: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The same is asked of man with regard to his mind. He works it by learning, reading and reflecting, and he keeps it by watching over his thoughts, humbling himself and praying. These two words, to dress (that is, to work) and to keep, contain all the care the mind requires.
Philosophers, by thinking, have built entire systems, and writers have raised in their novels worlds that seem alive. The Holy Fathers, however, did not measure a man by how much he knows.
Saint Athanasius the Great relates in the Life of Saint Antony that certain philosophers came to the great hermit to mock him, because he had not learned letters. Antony asked them which comes first, the mind or letters, and whether the mind gives birth to letters or letters to the mind. They answered that the mind comes first and that it invented letters. Then the saint told them that the man whose mind is sound has no need of letters. By these words Saint Antony did not despise learning. He was showing that the most precious thing in a man is a sound mind, and the soundness of the mind is not measured in books read.
What a man acquires with difficulty, through years of study and toil, God can give him in an instant. Solomon was young when he prayed to God: “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad” (1 Kings 3:9). He asked, then, for discernment itself. And God answered him: “lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee” (1 Kings 3:12). The Saviour told His disciples that they would be brought for His sake before governors and kings, and He promised them: “take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak” (Matthew 10:18–19). Such gifts, however, do not usually come to one who wants to be spared toil. To the Prophet Daniel the angel sent to him said: “from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard” (Daniel 10:12). In these words thinking, the heart and humility stand together. Man sets his mind to work and humbles himself, and God gives him, sometimes in an instant, what toil alone would not have gathered in a whole lifetime.
Sometimes thinking brings a man to the very threshold of faith. The holy Apostle Paul writes that “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20). Saint Justin the Martyr and Philosopher sought the truth, one after another, in several philosophical schools of his time. One day, when he was alone near the sea, he met an old man who spoke to him about the prophets. The old man counselled him above all to pray that the gates of light might be opened to him, because these things cannot be understood by everyone, but only by the one to whom God and His Christ grant understanding. Justin testifies that at once a fire was kindled in his soul, and love for the prophets and for the friends of Christ took hold of him. His mind had brought him as far as the door. The old man showed him that beyond it one passes only through prayer and the gift of God.
The same power of the mind can also build error. Immediately after the words quoted above, the Apostle shows what happens to the mind that knows God but does not glorify Him. Of such people he writes that, “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21–22). The straying of thoughts begins where glory and thanksgiving to God cease. It is no accident that the name of our faith, Orthodoxy, means in Greek both right belief and the right glorifying of God.
Heresies were not born of a lack of thinking. Arius, a priest of Alexandria, judged the mystery of the Son of God by the measure of human births and came to teach that the Son is a creature. The Holy Fathers answered the heresies by thinking too, and they thought so clearly and so deeply that their writings nourish us still. Their thinking, however, was born of prayer and purity. Saint Gregory the Theologian, who defended the divinity of the Son against the heretics of his time, said that it is not given to everyone to theologise, that is, to speak of the mysteries of God, but to those who have purified soul and body, or who are on the way of purification.
The Scattered Mind
Why do so few people think deeply? What most of them lack is not the power of the mind but its stillness. The Holy Fathers speak of the scattering of the mind.
The mind of man goes constantly outward through the senses and runs from one thing to another: from a care to a desire, from a desire to a memory, from a memory to a fear. It does not linger by anything long enough to know it. Today this running has become swifter than ever, for screens bring before our eyes, hour after hour, new faces and new tidings, and the mind leaps from one to the next without stopping at any.
In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the collection of the words and deeds of the fathers of the desert, there is a story of three friends who became monks. The first chose to reconcile those who quarrelled, following the Saviour’s beatitude on the peacemakers. The second chose to visit the sick. The third went into the desert to live in stillness. The first wore himself out amid quarrels and could not reconcile everyone. Discouraged, he went to the second and found him downcast too, for neither could he fulfil his work. Both then went to the one in the desert and told him their troubles. He was silent for a while, then poured water into a vessel and told them to look into it. The water was troubled. After a little while he told them to look again, and they saw their own faces in the clear water, as in a mirror. Then the hermit told them that so it is with the man who lives amid turmoil: he does not see his sins, but when he becomes still, he sees his failings.
The mind of man is like this water. As long as it churns among a thousand things, it sees nothing clearly, and least of all itself. Deep thinking and prayer both demand the same state: a gathered mind, able to remain a long while with a single thing. That is why a man who cannot gather his mind even for a few moments of prayer will find it hard to reflect on the things of his own life.
Discernment
Saint Antony the Great held discernment to be the greatest of the virtues. Saint John Cassian relates in his Conferences that one night the elders of the Thebaid, the region of Egypt where Saint Antony lived, gathered with him and asked one another until morning which virtue keeps the monk unharmed by the snares of the devil and leads him by a sure road towards perfection. Some answered: fasting and vigils; others: renunciation of all things; others: solitude; others: love shown to the brethren. Saint Antony showed that many who had laboured in all these things had nonetheless fallen, because they lacked discernment. Cassian calls it the mother, guardian and guide of all the virtues. For him this virtue is also a gift of the grace of God. He also sees in it the eye of which the Saviour speaks in the Gospel: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). As the eye lights the body’s way, discernment searches a man’s thoughts and deeds and sees what must be done.
Someone might ask how this saying agrees with the Apostle’s: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Saint Antony did not set discernment above love. That night the elders were asking what guards a man on the road, while the Apostle speaks of the road’s end. Even works of love can go astray without discernment, for without it a man may call love what is only weakness or the wish to please. Discernment guards the road, and love is the end to which it leads.
The Romanian language names this virtue dreapta socoteală, literally “right reckoning”, and the name holds a truth. Reckoning is a work of the mind, by which a man weighs, judges and chooses. Discernment is therefore born of thinking, but of thinking set right. From the same heart out of which, by the Lord’s word, evil reckonings proceed, right reckoning can also spring.
The holy Apostle Paul shows how the mind is set right: “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). The power to prove, that is, to test and discern, comes after the renewal of the mind. In the Greek text, the word translated here as “prove” has the same root as the word by which the Apostle, at the beginning of the epistle, describes the mind of those who did not like to retain God in their knowledge: “God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Romans 1:28). The mind that turns away from God loses the power to discern, and the renewed mind receives it again.
Immediately after these words the Apostle adds a counsel for the mind: that each should “not think of himself more highly than he ought to think” (Romans 12:3). A little further on he writes again: “Be not wise in your own conceits” (Romans 12:16). Discernment grows out of humility. Saint John Cassian teaches the same: it is acquired through true humility, when a man lays open his thoughts before his spiritual father and does not trust his own judgement. Thus the highest power of the mind is born of a man’s distrust of his own mind.
Discernment, too, sets the things of life in their right order. A man makes plans and decides what matters most, but only a mind enlightened by God knows what must be put first. The Saviour gathered this order into a single sentence: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). He who puts in first place what belongs in second spoils both his plans and his life.
The Stillness of Prayer
At first sight, the prayer of the mind seems opposed to this esteem for thinking, since the Fathers who wrote of it ask the one who prays to leave thoughts behind. Saint Hesychios of Sinai says: “Attentiveness is the heart’s stillness, unbroken by any thought.” But he adds at once that this attentiveness calls unceasingly, with every breath, upon Christ alone, the Son of God and God. This stillness is not a void. At its centre stands a Person. The mind stops running after thoughts so that it may stand, gathered and awake, before Christ.
A man who, while someone dear to him is speaking, prepares his answers in his head no longer truly hears him. So too in prayer, even a good thought can separate us from the One to whom we speak. Saint Hesychios asks that attentiveness keep the heart free of every thought, even when the thought seems good. Concern for something that must be done, or a beautiful idea about God, each has its own time. In the moment of prayer, they can wait.
The Fathers distinguish three things that we usually call by the same word. They call the mind (in Greek nous) the highest part of the soul, through which man can know God, and they also call it the eye of the soul. Reasoning (in Greek dianoia) is the mind’s power to judge, to weigh and to connect one thing with another. Thoughts (in Greek logismoi) are what come and go unceasingly through us: memories, imaginings, desires and fears, many of them stirred up by the passions. Prayer stops the flow of these thoughts, but the mind itself does not stop. Only now does it awaken.
The Fathers call this state watchfulness (in Greek nepsis). Saint Hesychios describes it as a steady setting of the thought at the gate of the heart, from where it watches the thoughts that come like thieves, before they can enter. Saint John Climacus, in his book called The Ladder, urges the one who prays to enclose his mind within the words of the prayer, and when it grows tired and falls, like a child, to raise it up again. Whoever has tried to pray in this way knows that this is the hardest work of the mind.
The Saviour Himself ordained this gathering of man into himself: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). So too does a man pray in church. When he stands at the service with his mind gathered in the words of the prayers, he does not stop thinking. His whole thinking is drawn together into one place and turned towards God.
The Church had to defend this prayer against a way of thinking that considered itself higher than it. In the fourteenth century a learned man from Calabria, in southern Italy, named Barlaam, mocked the hesychast monks and maintained that without the learning of the philosophers man cannot attain the knowledge of God. Saint Gregory Palamas defended the monks in the writings known as the Triads, and the Church received his teaching in the councils held at Constantinople. Palamas thought with rare power, but his thinking sprang from prayer. The Church never set prayer and thinking against each other, like two enemies. She placed them in their right order: first the mind is purified and gathered in prayer, and then it thinks rightly.
The Mind in the Heart
Many people feel that true thinking is not done with the head alone. In Scripture, the heart has a deeper meaning than the usual one. It is not only the seat of the feelings, but the innermost core of man, the place where he makes the decisions of his life, where he meets God, and from which, by the Lord’s word, thoughts proceed. In the song of the Mother of God it is said that God “hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51). The Greek word rendered here as “imagination” is dianoia, reasoning. Man’s reasoning has its root in the heart, and there too pride takes up its seat.
The Mother of God shows us how a pure heart reflects. After the Nativity of the Lord, when the shepherds had told what they had seen and heard, “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). The Greek verb used here means to put together and to weigh: the Most Pure one set the words side by side and pondered them in silence. This is a true work of thinking, accomplished in the heart, with humility and with love. The Evangelist says the same after the Child Jesus was found in the temple among the teachers: “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart” (Luke 2:51).
Saint Theophan the Recluse summed up the whole work of prayer in a single counsel: to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and to go on standing so unceasingly, day and night, until the end of life. The mind is not left behind. It descends into the heart and is united with it. This does not mean that a man should follow every impulse of his heart. The Saviour showed that evil thoughts also come out of the heart. The mind descends into the heart in order to guard it and, through prayer, to purify it.
At every Divine Liturgy, before the reading of the Gospel, the priest prays: “Shine in our hearts, O Master Who lovest mankind, the pure light of Thy divine knowledge, and open the eyes of our mind to the understanding of Thy Gospel teachings.” In the Greek text of this prayer, the eyes asked to be opened are those of our dianoia, our reasoning. In one and the same prayer, the Church asks for light for the heart and open eyes for our thinking. The two disciples going to Emmaus remembered, after they had known the Lord in the breaking of the bread, that their hearts had burned within them on the road while He opened the Scriptures to them. Later, when He appeared to the apostles, the Evangelist writes: “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45).
Thinking that works only in the head can be brilliant and cold. It can find arguments for anything and justify anything. Descended into the heart, thinking is humbled and warmed without losing its clarity, for in the heart a man stands before God and learns not to lie to himself any longer.
Thinking and Love
Love is the gift of God, but in man it takes root through thoughts, grows through thoughts, and through thoughts too it can wither. The great commandment asks man to love God with his whole being: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). The Greek word translated here as “mind” is dianoia, which names precisely reasoning, the mind’s power to judge and to weigh. The love of God asks for the whole mind. The holy Apostle Paul writes to the Philippians: “And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; that ye may approve things that are excellent” (Philippians 1:9–10). In the Greek text, the verb translated here as “approve” is the same one translated in Romans 12:2 as “prove”. Love that grows in knowledge also receives the gift of discernment.
The Saviour says: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). Where the heart is, there the thoughts run too. A man who loves someone thinks of him without meaning to, and in the midst of any task his mind returns of itself to the one he loves. Likewise, whoever thinks often and kindly of a person comes to love him more. Saint Gregory the Theologian said that we ought to remember God more often than we breathe. The unceasing remembrance of God is the form love takes in the mind of man, for you cannot love One of whom you never think.
The same holds in love for people. The Fathers call remembrance of wrongs the habit of the mind of keeping old injuries and turning them over and over. Whoever feeds his mind on the faults of his wife or husband, of his children or friends, loves them a little less each day, even if he does not notice it. Judging one’s neighbour also begins in a thought, before it becomes a word. Whoever remembers the good he has received, whoever seeks to understand the other and to forgive him, whoever prays for him, guards his love.
The Return of the Mind
The parable of the prodigal son shows how thinking is healed. After he had spent his substance and come to feeding swine, hungry, the younger son began to think. The Lord says in the parable that “when he came to himself”, the young man realised that his father’s hired servants had bread enough, while he was perishing with hunger (Luke 15:17). His return began with a thought: he stopped, looked at his life, and remembered his father’s house. This thought at once became a resolution: “I will arise and go to my father” (Luke 15:18).
The Greek word translated as repentance, metanoia, means a change of mind. Repentance is thinking coming home, and the Apostle calls it the renewing of the mind. He who returns finds at home more than he would have dared to hope: “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion” (Luke 15:20). The father runs to meet the son who has only just come to himself.
Perhaps that is why the Fathers placed a single sentence on the lips of those who pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In it is contained all that a man can think most deeply: who God is, who I am before Him, and what I need. The mind that says these words attentively, descended into the heart, has not stopped thinking. It has at last begun to think truly.
Sources
Holy Scripture is quoted from the King James Version.
- Saint John Cassian, Conferences, Second Conference of Abba Moses (On Discretion), ch. 1, 2, 4 and 10.
- Saint Athanasius the Great, Life of Saint Antony, 73.
- Saint Justin the Martyr and Philosopher, Dialogue with Trypho, 2–8.
- Saint Gregory the Theologian, Oration 27 (First Theological Oration), 3–4.
- Saint Hesychios of Sinai, On Watchfulness and Holiness (To Theodoulos), 2, 5, 6, 20 and 46, in the Philokalia.
- Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 28 (On Prayer).
- The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, on stillness.
- Saint Gregory Palamas, Triads (In Defence of Those Who Devoutly Practise Stillness).
- Saint Theophan the Recluse, letter on the Jesus Prayer; in English, see The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo.
- The Divine Liturgy, prayer before the Gospel.
- Saint John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 12.
- Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives.