WEB 4 -  ARCHIVE

Commentary 16 - Page  4

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The knowledge developed by the early fathers of the church, but long ago lost to the West, included psychological ways of cultivating what we sometimes call presence of mind. Its overall aims - defined in modern terms by saints like Theophan the Recluse - were to ‘restore’ us to a natural state that is not yet known to us. In aiming to evoke that state, the method aims to restore true conscience.   The classical Christian approach did this by instilling love, not fear, in the view that morality must be drawn from the heart, not imposed on the mind. Part of the method of this education of the emotions was described by Saint Symeon the New Theologian (quoted above), whose teaching  taught that the beatitudes described what was needed, but did not teach how we might achieve it. What we call the inner tradition is based on that missing part of the teaching … the long-forgotten instruction that once taught people how to be Christian.

The passage from St. Symeon, quoted above, is frequently used in the Institute’s teaching programme. Properly understood, it  makes it clear that, despite its importance, the canonical New Testament which has reached us today, more than 2000 years after Jesus’ birth, cannot be regarded as containing the whole of the original Christian teaching. 

In practice, the methods of the inner tradition include the classic form of the famous Prayer of the Heart, a practice akin to but not identical to modern concepts of repetitive meditation. This forms the basic method of Eastern church monasticism and for almost two millennia has been the motivating force of inner Christianity.

The struggle to perform this practice properly leads in time to a form of spontaneous prayer, which is the point at which the practice bears fruit.  Traditionally, the regular practice of the formal prayer of the heart is still maintained even after spontaneous prayer is fully established.

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