Глава 1. Против хулителей умной молитвы. О том, что умная молитва есть делание древних святых отцов, и против хулителей этой священной и пренепорочной молитвы

Let it be known that this Divine work of sacred mental prayer was the constant work of our ancient God-bearing fathers, both in many desert places and in cenobitic monasteries, like the sun it shone among the monks: in Mount Sinai, in the Egyptian monastery, in Mount Nitria in Jerusalem and in the monasteries that are around Jerusalem, and simply to say - in the whole East, in Constantinople, on Mount Athos and on the sea islands; and in recent times, by the grace of Christ - also in Great Russia. With this intelligent attention to sacred prayer, many of our God-bearing fathers, kindled by the seraphic flame of love for God, and according to God for one’s neighbor, became the strictest keepers of God’s commandments and, having cleansed their souls and hearts from all the vices of the old man, were worthy to be chosen vessels of the Holy Spirit. Filled with His various Divine gifts, they appeared in their lives as luminaries and pillars of fire for the universe and, having performed countless miracles, in deed and word they led countless human souls to salvation. Many of them, moved by secret Divine inspiration, wrote books of their teachings about this Divine mental prayer, according to the power of the Divine Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, filled with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. And this was according to the special providence of God, so that somehow in recent times this Divine work would not fall into oblivion. Many of these books, by God's forgiveness for our sins, were destroyed by the Saracens, who conquered the Greek kingdom; some, by God’s providence, have survived to our times. None of the true believers ever dared to blaspheme the aforementioned Divine mental work and preservation of the paradise of the heart; but everyone always treated him with great honor and extreme reverence, as a thing full of all spiritual benefits. But the chief of evil and the adversary of every good deed - the devil - seeing that most through this practice of mental prayer the monastic order, choosing the good part, sits with unwavering love at the feet of Jesus, advancing in the perfection of His Divine commandments, and through this becomes light and enlightenment to the world - began to melt with envy and use all his intrigues to discredit and blaspheme this soul-saving work and, if possible, completely destroy from the face of the earth. And then, as said above, through Saratsin, who was similar to him in everything, he destroyed books: then in the pure and heavenly work of this work he sowed the wheat with his choking tares, so that through the reckless he could bring blasphemy to this saving work by the fact that the arbitrators who touched this work, for the sake of their exaltation, instead of wheat, reaped thorns, and instead of salvation they found destruction. And the devil was not satisfied with this yet, but found in the Italian countries the Calabrian serpent, the forerunner of the Antichrist, proud in everything like the devil, the heretic Varlaam, and settling in him with all his power, he inspired him to blaspheme our Orthodox faith, as this is written in detail in the Lenten Triodion, in the synaxarion of the second week of Holy Great Lent. By the way, he dared in various ways, both with tongue and with hand, to blaspheme and reject sacred mental prayer, as he writes about this in his holy book, in chapter 31, like our holy father Simeon, Archbishop of Thessalonites, whose original words I offer here, saying this: “This accursed Varlaam blasphemed a lot and wrote about both the sacred prayer and the Divine prayer that is on Tabor (Matthew 17:5), grace and illumination. Not understanding, and even unable to understand (and how can one comprehend this who is fussed with his mind, and in dreaming thoughts is united with the proud?) what the words mean: pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17) nor what the words mean: I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the mind (1 Cor. 14:15); also: making melody and singing in your hearts to the Lord (Col. 3:16); and that God sent the Spirit of His Son, that is, grace; in your hearts, crying: Abba, Father (Gal. 4:6); also: I want to speak five words with my mind, rather than ten thousand words with my tongue (1 Cor. 14:19), - he rejected both mental prayer, or better, the calling of the Lord, which is both the confession of Peter, who confessed: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16), and the tradition of the Lord himself, who says in the Gospel: whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give it to you (John. 15:16); also: In My Name the demons will be destroyed (Mark 16:17), and so on. After all, His name is eternal life: and this, he says, was written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that you who believe may have life in His name (Jn. 20:31); and the Holy Spirit is taught by the invocation of Christ: no one can say the Lord Jesus, but by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3), and this has been said a thousand times.” What did the evil serpent accomplish with his undertaking with the son of perdition, the accursed heretic Varlaam, whom, as I said, he taught to blaspheme against sacred mental prayer? Could blasphemy darken the light of this clever work and, as he hoped, completely destroy him? No way. But his illness turned on his head. At that time, the great champion and representative of piety, the most luminous among the saints, our father Gregory, Archbishop of Thessalonites, Palamas, who, in perfect obedience and constant sacred exercise of mental prayer, like the sun, shone on the holy Mount Athos with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even before his elevation to the episcopal throne of this church, during the reign of the most divine king Andronikos Palaeologus in the reigning city in the famous great church of the Wisdom of God at the council gathered against the above-mentioned heretic Barlaam, filled with the Spirit of God, having clothed himself with irresistible power from above, blocked his mouth open to God and finally put him to shame, and his boastful heresies and all his blasphemies with fire-inspired words and scriptures burned and turned to ashes. And by the entire Catholic Church of God this heretic Barlaam, with Akindinus and all his like-minded people, was thrice anathematized. But even to this day, every year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the same Church, together with other heretics, curses him as follows: Barlaam and Akindinus and their followers and successors are thrice anathema. Look here, friends, who dare to blaspheme mental prayer, and consider who its first blasphemer was: is not Barlaam the heretic, three times anathematized by the Church and subject to be cursed forever? Do you not also share in your blasphemy with this heretic and his like-minded people? Do you really not tremble in your soul to fall under a similar church curse and be alienated from God? Rising up for a most sacred cause and seducing with your blasphemy the souls of those who are not firmly established in the minds of your neighbors, are you not horrified by the terrible thunderstorm of God for this in the Gospel? Aren't you afraid, according to the word of the Apostle: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31), to fall for this, if you do not repent, and to temporary and eternal punishment? What plausible reason have you invented to blaspheme this immaculate and most blessed thing? I'm completely perplexed. Do you think that calling on the name of Jesus is unprofitable? But about anyone else there is no possibility, except about the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is the human mind, by which prayer operates, vicious? But this is impossible. After all, God created man in His image and likeness: the image of God and this likeness is the soul of man, which, according to God’s creation, is pure and immaculate: this means that the mind, being the primary spiritual sense, like vision in the body, is also immaculate. But doesn’t the heart, on which, as on an altar, the mind sacredly performs the secret sacrifice of prayer to God, deserve blasphemy? No way. Being a creation of God, like the entire human body, it is beautiful. If the calling of Jesus is saving, and the mind and heart of a person are the work of God’s hands, then what vice is it for a person to send up a prayer from the depths of his heart with his mind to the sweetest Jesus and ask for mercy from Him? Or is it not because you blaspheme and reject mental prayer because you think that God does not hear secret prayer made in the heart, but hears only that which is pronounced with the lips? But this is a blasphemy against God: after all, God is a knower of the heart, and knows exactly all the most subtle thoughts of the heart, and even future ones, and knows everything as God and the All-Knower. Yes, and He Himself demands, as a pure and immaculate sacrifice, precisely such a secret prayer, sent from the depths of the heart, commanding: But whenever you pray, go into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father, who is in secret, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you in reality (Matthew 6:6); that the lips of Christ, the universal luminary, the universal teacher, Saint John Chrysostom, in the nineteenth conversation on the Gospel of Matthew, by God-given wisdom of the Holy Spirit, refers not to that prayer that is pronounced only with the lips and tongue: but to the most secret, silent, prayer sent from the depths of the heart, which he teaches to perform not with the actions of the body, and not with the cry of the voice, but with the most zealous will, with with all quietness, with contrition of thoughts and inner tears, with mental illness and the closing of mental doors. And he brings as testimony to this prayer from the Divine Scriptures Moses the Seer of God, and Saint Anna, and the righteous Abel, saying this. “But are you sick in your soul? You cannot help but cry out, because praying and asking in the way I said is characteristic of someone who is very sick. And Moses, being sick, prayed like that and his illness was heard, which is why God said to him: Why are you crying to Me? (Ex. 14:15). And Anna, again, did everything she wanted, but her voice was not heard, because her heart was crying out. Didn’t Abel silently, and even after dying, pray? and his blood emitted a voice more excellent than the voice of a trumpet. You too, just like Saint Moses, do not forbid. Tear off, as the Prophet commanded, your heart, not your garments. From the depths, call on God: from the depths, he says, I called to You, Lord. From below, from the heart, attract a voice; make your prayer a sacrament. And below: “after all, you do not pray to people, but to the omnipresent God, who first hears voices and knows unspoken thoughts: if you pray like this, you will receive a great reward. Your Father, he says, who sees in secret, will reward you in reality (Matthew 6:6). And below: “Since He is invisible, He wants your prayer to be the same.” You see, friends, that according to the testimony of the invincible pillar of Orthodoxy, there is another prayer, besides the one pronounced with the lips, secret, invisible, silent, from the depths of the heart, raised to God, which, like a pure sacrifice, the Lord accepts into the stench of spiritual fragrance, rejoices over it and is glad, seeing that the mind, which should primarily be devoted to God, is united to Him in prayer. Why, then, to this prayer, testified by the lips of Christ, I say to the saints, John Chrysostom; you arm your tongue with blasphemy, blaspheming, slandering, hating, swearing, rejecting and turning away as if it were some bad thing, and trembling overwhelms me because of such a wordless undertaking of yours. But also, seeking the reasons for your blasphemy, I ask you: is it not because you blaspheme this most saving prayer because perhaps you happened to see or hear that one of the practitioners of this prayer lost his mind, or accepted some delusion instead of the truth, or suffered some kind of spiritual harm, and therefore it seemed to you that mental prayer was the cause of such harm? But no, no! In fact, this is not true at all. Sacred mental prayer, according to the power of the writings of the God-bearing fathers, acted by God's grace, cleanses a person from all passions, arouses him to the most zealous keeping of God's commandments, and keeps him unharmed from all the enemy's arrows and charms. If anyone dares to act this prayer arbitrarily, not according to the strength of the teachings of the holy fathers, without questioning and the advice of experienced people, and being arrogant, passionate and weak, lives without obedience and obedience, and, moreover, pursues only a desert life, which, for his own self-rule, he is not worthy to see even a trace of: such, truly, and I affirm, conveniently falls into all the snares and charms of the devil. What then? Is this prayer the reason for such charm? No way. If you discredit mental prayer for this, then let the knife also be disgraceful for you if it happened to a small child, while playing, due to foolishness, to stab himself with it. Also, in your opinion, it is necessary for warriors to be prohibited from using a military sword, which they take against their enemies, if some crazy warrior happened to stab himself with his sword. But just as a knife and a sword do not serve as the cause of a single vice, but only expose the madness of those who have slain themselves with them: so the spiritual sword, sacred, I say, mental prayer is not guilty of a single vice; but the arbitrariness and pride of self-inflicted people serve as the cause of demonic charms and all kinds of mental harm. But why else, as if I had been perplexed until now, am I asking you the reasons for your blasphemy against this most significant reason for your pain in language! These reasons are the following: 1st, not according to the commandment of God, that is, not with testing, your reading of the Holy Scriptures; 2nd, distrust of the teaching of our holy fathers, who teach about this Divine mental prayer by the God-given wisdom of the Spirit, according to the power of the Holy Scriptures: 3rd, finally, your extreme ignorance: you either have never, perhaps, seen or heard about it in the writings of our God-bearing fathers; or, if not this, then you do not understand the power of their God-wise words - this is the most significant reason for such your wickedness. If you, with the fear of God and strong attention and undoubted faith, with diligent testing and humility, read the patristic books, which are most suitable for reading by monastics alone, containing in themselves the whole mind of living the Gospel - paternal books, I say, which are also necessary for monks for spiritual benefit and correction and for acquiring a true, healthy, unpretentious, and humble mind, how breathing is necessary to constitute bodily life; If you had read these books like this, then God would never have allowed you to fall into such a ditch of blasphemy. Moreover: through this doing, He would kindle you with His Divine grace into His ineffable love, so that you and the Apostle would cry out: who will separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35), which you would be deemed worthy to achieve by mentally doing this prayer? And you would not only not blaspheme her, but you would also strive to lay down your soul for her, feeling from this intelligent attention by deed and experience an indescribable benefit to your souls. And since you do not read the books of our reverend fathers with undoubted faith, or even when reading, you do not trust, as the fruits of your blasphemy show, or you completely neglect to read: then you have fallen into such an ungodly wisdom that, as if you had never heard the Christian scriptures, you blaspheme and reject this sacred prayer, testified, according to the God-wise explanation of the holy fathers, by all the Sacred Scripture. And in order to get rid of you, and everyone who doubts about it, from such spiritual harm, I do not find any other decent cure, except that I will try, as much as the Lord with His grace will hasten and help me, to point out that our God-bearing fathers, enlightened by Divine grace, establish the edifice of their soul-beneficial teaching about this all-sacred prayer, secretly worked by the mind in the heart, on the immovable stone of the Holy Scripture. But you, having seen for yourself openly and clearly, with the assistance of the grace of God that has secretly touched your souls, the truth of the teachings of the holy fathers, and having been healed of this spiritual illness of yours, bring to God the most sincere repentance for your attempt - and you will be worthy of His Divine mercy and perfect forgiveness of your sin. You might be interested in: