Jesus Prayer

The prayer of Orthodox hesychasm is repeated, often continuously, often synchronised with the breath, and often counted on a knotted wool cord. That makes it structurally comparable to the material this collection files alongside it. It also differs from that material in one respect its own tradition regards as decisive.

The words are meaning-bearing throughout, and Orthodox teaching insists they must be attended to. The standard instruction is to keep the mind in the words, to descend with the mind into the heart, and specifically not to allow the repetition to become mechanical. The technical term for the danger is prelest, spiritual delusion, and generating the sounds without attention is one of the ways into it.

That is precisely the difference between this and a seed syllable. A syllable with no lexical meaning cannot be attended to as meaning; its operation is held to be of another kind entirely. The comparison filed here is a comparison of structure, fixed formula, repeated, in a devotional discipline, and it does not extend to mechanism.

Its wording varies and the variation is accepted. The full form names Jesus Christ, Son of God, and asks mercy on the speaker as a sinner. Shorter forms drop the final clause or reduce to the name alone, and different teachers recommend different lengths at different stages.

The scriptural anchors usually cited are the tax collector's prayer in Luke 18 and the blind man's cry on the road to Jericho, both of which ask for mercy in almost these words.

The prayer's history is longer than its text, and the two should not be conflated.

Elements are in the Egyptian desert literature of the fourth and fifth centuries, where the monastic sources discuss short repeated prayers, monologistos, as an aid to unceasing prayer, without giving this wording. Repeated invocation of the name of Jesus is discussed by writers of that period and after. The fixed form, and above all the physical technique of breathing and posture, belong to later Byzantine sources: Symeon the New Theologian and the fourteenth-century hesychast writers, whose defence by Gregory Palamas against Barlaam of Calabria is the theological centrepiece.

The Philokalia, compiled in 1782 by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, gathered this literature and was translated into Slavonic and then Russian, which is how it reached Russian monasticism and, through it, the wider world.

The reason most Western readers know the prayer at all is a single anonymous nineteenth-century Russian book, The Way of a Pilgrim, in which a wanderer learns the prayer, recites it thousands of times daily, and finds it praying itself. It is a work of spiritual literature, its authorship and provenance are uncertain, and it is not a manual.

Orthodox writers warn repeatedly against taking up the breathing technique without a spiritual father. The caution is about method and about the psychological risks of intensive practice; the words themselves are entirely public, printed in every prayer book, and nothing about them is withheld.