"And you who have in the heavenly Jerusalem speedy prayer hearers, Those who deny themselves And thus become your ardent sons, All those who are monks or hermits, or anchorites, all your spiritual advisors who keep with great care their precious blessings, all the good advice that cleanses sins and directs man on the straight path of your all-purity and benevolence all those who are called The Good Pure Gnosis or the Inheritance of the Saints that you lay within our reach through the writings, psalms and the sermons of the Fathers and we will forever praise, honour and laud you: Rejoice, Defending Sword of the
hesychast Tradition." (Tudor 1999: 58 sq) The Mother of God--A source of perpetual prayer
While these scholars reveal their biases for Western art or
hesychast spirituality, what is interesting here is the choice made by Russian painters.
the sotto voce
hesychast refrain that sustains meditation and eventually
"Anthropocentric Intention of
Hesychast and Sufistic Practices of Freedom Personal Development." Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research issue 7: 36-49.
(7) Given his need for a single idea to saturate the cognitive environment of 'the mind' such that it became a 'dominant idea', Coue eventually settled on an ancient, tried-and-true
Hesychast ritual and, from that, he constructed a formula ("Every day in every way I'm getting better and better") that was appropriate to his therapeutic goals and, also, to the ritual's mechanics.
The particular dispute I want to look at here was known as the
Hesychast controversy, and had its origins in the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos.
To use an example from my own field (theology), Roudometof rightly notes the importance for Orthodoxy of the
Hesychast controversy in the fourteenth century, correctly explaining that the Byzantine theologian St.
Paert's contribution is astute in the contrast her essay draws between the
Hesychast theology of inner solitude and aloneness with the general emphasis on Orthodoxy's spiritual collectivism.
This avoids the heresy of becoming one with the essence of God, because, in Orthodoxy, the "likeness" is the theosis (glorification), which is salvation by grace--freely given to the
hesychast by God.
The term
Hesychast was used since the sixth century while the practice of inner focus and blocking of the physical senses dates from even earlier period.
As late as fourteenth-century Byzantium, the exegesis of biblical theophanies was still providing the exegetical infrastructure for the
Hesychast controversy.