The word "quiet" is derived from the verb "quiet" which means to be in a state of silence, tranquility and self-awareness. The quiet monk, but also a layman, flooded with divine love, tries to eliminate all worldly preoccupations and thoughts, seeks quietness and concentrates on the memory of God, constantly saying the mental prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on the sinner". This exercise cleanses the heart from all passion and the mind from the impure calculations dictated by the demons. The hesychast thus acquires the "mind of Christ", as the apostle Paul said. His mind, his heart, his senses and in general his entire psychosomatic being is filled with the uncreated grace and presence of God, it cleanses him of the impurities of sin, sanctifies him, makes him a sharer of God's uncreated actions. With constant practice the hesychast feels with his physical senses, sees with his physical eyes the uncreated divine light, this light that the holy apostles saw on Mount Tabor.
The Hesychast movement existed from the foundation of the Church. Great Fathers of the ancient Church practiced hesychasm, such as M. Basilios and St. Gregory the Theologian, who isolated themselves on the river Eri in Pontus, where they practiced silence, prayer, the study of the Holy Scriptures, divine contemplation and reached wondrous divine experiences and in clairvoyance. But the Hesychast movement developed and flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries AD, centered on Mount Athos. The first bearer and teacher was Anastasios the Sinaitic. His successor was Saint Grigorios Palamas (1296-1356), who glorified the monasticism of Saints.
But the Hesychast movement was fiercely fought by Western corrupt Christianity and exegetical theology. In 1335, the monk, theologian and philosopher Barlaam the Calabrian, came from Italy to the Orthodox East to oppose the movement of the Hesychasm. Deeply influenced by Aristotelianism, Latin theology and scholasticism, he taught that it is impossible for man to know, approach and unite with God. He also taught that God is "closed in himself" and cannot unite with people. On the contrary, the Orthodox Fathers, making a distinction between the essence and the actions of God, taught that the knowledge of the essence of God is impossible, but not the uncreated divine actions, which are given as supreme gifts to people and become apparent to those who succeed to be cleansed of their passions. The main means of illumination and personal experience of God's uncreated actions is the incessant mental prayer, in which the silent monks practiced, through the incessant prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son and Word of God, have mercy on me", they were able to see with the physical the eyes the Uncreated Light, that is, the glory of God.
For the Westerners, and in this case for their representative the monk Barlaam, the vision through mental prayer and washing was incomprehensible and blasphemous. They accused the hesychasts of being heretics (messalianists) and accused them of being "navel-gazers", because these monks focused their gaze, during prayer, on the sternum, the part of the heart. Their conflict with Saint Gregory was fierce and caused a spiritual storm, comparable to iconoclasm.
St. Gregory Palamas was an advocate of hesychasm, the most spiritual expression of the orthodox monastic ideal, because he was absolutely convinced that theocution through exercise and mental prayer is in accordance with the teaching of the Church. That is why he was a teacher and inspirer of hesychasm. Continuing the centuries-old tradition of the ancient Fathers and ascetics of the Church, he taught that man, through exercise and ablution, can see even from this life, with his natural eyes, the uncreated light of God, this light which the disciples of Christ saw during His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
That is why a new fierce theological dispute broke out, similar to that of iconoclasm. The so-called hesychast controversy is known, which shook the Church and which was forced to convene three Synods (1351,1347, 1351 and 1351), to define its saving teaching on the thorny subject of hesychasm, condemning its polemics as heretics. In fact, the Synod of XNUMX is considered as the XNUMXth Ecumenical Synod for our Orthodox Church.
It must be pointed out that, for our orthodox faith, God is not otherworldly and completely unknown to us finite humans. Of course, we cannot know His essence, which remains completely unknown to us, but we can have participation and knowledge of His uncreated actions, through which we are saved. The god of Western scholasticism, of the Western Christian tradition, who is supposed to be "understood" by reason does not exist, because as we said it is not possible for man to understand the essence of God, but is in essence an idol, a human invention of a unknown God. That is why Western man, after realizing that what he perceived as "god" is not God, denied him, reaching the point of officially proclaiming the "death of God" through the mouth of the tragic representative of the European intellectual, Nietzsche. On the contrary, in the Orthodox East, where our Church has set the correct boundaries between man and God, that is, knowledge and participation in his uncreated actions, such phenomena of denial and atheism are absent. Modern denial and atheism came to us from the West.
So everyone understands how important the contribution of the Hesychastic movement is to the formation of our Greek Orthodox identity and our self-awareness. For us Orthodox, hesychasm is identified with
our unadulterated and incorruptible Christian faith and life. We see this in the faces of our saints, who were sanctified and deified because they were quiet, that is, they strived to become partakers of God's uncreated actions, through right faith, purification from passions, continuous and pure prayer, through a pure life , and of sharing in the sanctifying grace of our Church.
Hesychasm has never ceased to be experienced in our Orthodox Church, the genuine, the true, the only One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ. We remind you that even during the difficult years of the Turkish rule, we have a similar pacifist movement, the so-called Kollyvada movement, centered on Mount Athos. And then harmful influences came from the area of the heretical West, through the papal and Protestant missionaries, who had invaded the Orthodox Turkish occupied area to alter our Orthodox faith and convert us to their own doctrines, to alter our Orthodox life with their own customs. Then the Kollyvadi movement rose as a strong breakwater and averted this danger. But also our modern saints, the saint
Nektarios, Saint Nikolaos Planas, Saint Panagis Basias, Saint Iustinos Popovich, Saint Nikolaos Ahridos, Saint Paisios, Saint Porphyrios, Saint Amfilochios, Saint Kallinikos etc. and the great writers Papadiamantis, Moraitidis, Kontoglou and others were continuations of the hesychastic and kolyvadian spirit. This is a strange proof that our Orthodoxy, alone, has the truth and the Holy Spirit, who has been in it since the day of Pentecost, leads it to all the truth and saves it intact and unscathed from errors, heresies and the forgeries, because as we constantly emphasize, the truth is identical with our salvation, without the truth, which our Church teaches, there is no salvation. There is no salvation outside the Church, as Saint Cyprian of Carthage, that great father and teacher of our Church, proclaimed.
But even nowadays there is no lack of critics of the Hesychasm and the Kollyvadi Movement. Modern theologians and non-theologians, deprived of genuine orthodox spirituality, confuse Hesychast spirituality and its practices with the principles, beliefs and practices of Eastern religions and mainly Hinduism and Buddhism. The silence is confused with the eerie isolation of the gurus. The unceasing prayer, the single-minded wish, with the transcendental meditation. But they want to ignore that there is an unbridgeable gulf between orthodox spirituality and these modern pagan and polytheistic religions.
Despite the apparent "similarities" of some external practices, they have nothing in common as far as theology, anthropology and soteriology are concerned. In Eastern religions there is no supreme personal God. There is no good and bad, but human life is absolutely defined by fatalistic "karma" and therefore no savior is required. A savior is man himself for himself, who is "saved" through the practices of yoga and transcendental meditation. The yogi isolates himself, to get rid of the "negative energy" of people and to realize his "self-salvation". On the contrary, in the orthodox hesychast tradition, the hesychast believes in the personal Triune God of love and entrusts to Him, with humiliation and brokenness, his sinful self. He does not isolate himself in order to "get rid" of his fellow men, but to devote himself, undistracted from worldly things, to his meeting with God. His love for the whole world is manifested in his unceasing prayer for it. Silence, uninterrupted prayer, fasting, vigil are not an end in themselves, but the means for the realization of union with God and the sight of His creative actions.
Many may wonder: The hesychast life and its practices refer to the monks, they can and should be hesychasts. We who live in the world and are charged with personal, family, professional, etc. obligations and face difficulties and problems of everyday life, cannot be quiet, which means we cannot become partakers of God's creative actions and seers. This is a misconception. Every Christian, regardless of whether he lives in the world, or in a monastery or in the desert, is called to make his own struggle for purification from his passions, the acquisition of virtues, to cultivate his faith and his trust in God. To have a conscious church life, to be in constant repentance, to confess, to receive communion regularly, to go to church, to pray fervently, to fast, in order to gain strength in his struggle. To study the word of God. To be constantly alert and generally entrust his life to
God. This is the path we must follow in order to unite with God, to become partakers of his creative actions and to nurture the sure hope of our salvation. The God of love, our loving Father, will appreciate our effort, bless it and use it for the benefit of us his children.
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