Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Monastic Wisdom... (letters)

FRIENDS OF MOUNT ATHOS BOOK REVIEWS

Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. By Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, Arizona: St Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998. 421 pages. Price £19.95. ISBN 0-9667000-0-7 (HB), 0-9667000-1-5 (PB).

Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. By Elder Joseph. Mount Athos: The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. 231 pages. Price not given. ISBN 960-7735-12-9 (SB).[i]

Among other spiritual strugglers, Elder Joseph the Hesychast (+1959) has long been associated with the renewal of monastic life on the Holy Mountain. A number of his spiritual children and grandchildren have been instrumental in renewing six of the twenty Athonite monasteries, and one of these has also founded a number of monasteries and convents in North America. In these two books, translations from the Greek, English readers at last have a means of knowing more about this great Elder’s life and teaching.

Elder Joseph the Hesychast contains a biography written by one of his co-strugglers, another Elder Joseph, who is currently spiritual father to the Vatopedi Monastery. As one who lived with the Elder until his death he is eminently qualified to write his life, especially since, as the author himself admits, 'owing to the Elder’s peculiar manner of life there are not many witnesses who saw and heard him at first hand.' The author’s first-hand accounts bring the reader that much closer to this saint of our times. The book is replete with such phrases as: 'When we asked him to explain...' or: '"One summer", the Elder told us...' This immediacy is further enhanced by photographs of the various caves and cells in which the ascetic lived.

Born in Paros, the future Elder went to work in Piraeus in his teens, where he gained some success as a merchant. When he was twenty-three years old he began to read lives of the Fathers. These lives, particularly those of the strict ascetics, and also a dream, inflamed him with desire to follow the ascetic path. His initial response was to spend time fasting and praying in the uninhabited countryside nearby, before finally departing for the Holy Mountain. His youthful zeal for ceaseless prayer was sorely tried in this early period, partly because he could not find a spiritual father, partly because of the indifference or even mockery displayed by many of the monks towards his quest for undistracted prayer. 'I was inconsolable,' he later explained, 'because I was longing so ardently to find what I had set out for in search of God; and not only was I not finding it, but people were not even being helpful.' Yet it was amidst this desert experience that he had a vision of the uncreated light, and ceaseless prayer of the heart was granted him. 'At once I was completely changed,' he later told his disciples, 'and forgot myself. I was filled with light in my heart and outside and everywhere, not being aware that I even had a body. The prayer began to say itself within me...'

During most of this early period, whose length is unspecified by the author, he spent his time in remote places so that he could 'keep hold of the Jesus Prayer within himself'. Eventually he met his future fellow struggler and companion, Fr Arsenios. They found their hearts united in a common desire for hesychasm, and so decided to live their ascetic life together under an experienced elder. They soon found what they desired in an old Albanian ascetic, Ephraim 'the barrel maker'. These three arranged their lives to provide the maximum silence for the Jesus Prayer. Apart from his daily work and the prayer rule given him, Elder Joseph went to a cave at sunset to say the prayer continuously for six hours.

After Elder Ephraim died, Joseph and Arsenios spent their summers moving from place to place, chiefly around the peak of Athos. Their reasons were to find and learn from spiritual men, and to remain unknown. In winter they returned to their hut in the wilderness of St Basil’s. Their life was ascetic: Elder Joseph ate just three ounces of rusks a day, and sometimes some boiled wild greens; they spoke little among themselves so that their hearts were free for prayer; their possessions were their rags. About this time Fr Joseph began to be assailed by the demon of fornication; the assaults and his merciless battle against them were to continue with little remission for eight whole years. Joseph responded among other things with extended vigils and exchanging his bed for a chair. It was during this time that he and Arsenios finally discovered an experienced ascetic who would become their new spiritual father, the famed Fr Daniel.

Eventually the elders accepted three brothers to dwell permanently with them, while still more came to live with them for shorter periods of time. As the Elder Joseph came to be known for his spiritual experience, more and more monks began to visit to seek his advice. This prompted him, in 1938, to flee with his disciples to a quieter place, a cave at Little St Anne’s. There the brotherhood grew to number seven monks. In time the hard physical work needed to survive at St Basil’s and the great privations of their ascetic life combined to make most of the fathers ill. The Elder consequently decided to move the community lower down and nearer the sea, to New Skete. It was there that he reposed, eight years later, on the feast of the Dormition, 15 August 1959.

Elder Joseph’s life was characterized by his thirst for Christ, expressed above all in his uncompromising commitment to intense inner prayer. This involved finding quiet places and keeping to a programme of life which produced the optimum conditions for the prayer. To this end he endured, and even chose for himself, deprivations which most people would find unbelievable. The depth of his repentance purified the eye of his heart (the nous as it is called in Greek), so that he came to know the subtle workings of the soul in great detail. It is also evident from the Life and the Letters that he was granted many visions and revelations: the spiritual world was his natural environment.

In the last sixty pages of the book the author explains the main tenets of the Hesychast’s teachings. From these it is clear that, for all his withdrawal from people, Joseph the Hesychast was granted great love for people, a love expressed above all through tears of compassion shed in heart-felt prayer: Joseph the Hesychast could equally be called Joseph the Compassionate. This same divine love also constrained him to sustain a full correspondence with those many who wrote to him for help. Some of these letters are the content of the second book under review.

Monastic Wisdom is divided into two parts, the first containing eighty-one letters, each about three to four pages long. Part Two is a fifty-four-page 'Epistle to a Hesychast Hermit'. There is also a useful eighteen-page Glossary explaining some spiritual and ecclesiastical terms, and a good index. The Preface is by Archimandrite Ephraim, who was a disciple of Elder Joseph and the former Abbot of Philotheou Monastery, and whose present monastery in Arizona has published the book. Fr Ephraim’s recollections of his elder are evocative, and quickly dispel any romantic ideas about what is needed for the spiritual life. He writes, for example:

in those twelve years I lived with him, rarely did I hear him call me by name. To call me or address me, he used all kinds of insults with appropriate adjectives. But the driving force behind all that masterful verbal abuse and insult was true paternal affection and a sincere interest in the cleansing of my soul. How grateful my soul is now for that paternal affection!

One feels that, whenever Elder Joseph advises, he speaks from personal knowledge. What particularly struck me was the frankness with which he describes his own experiences of God. Although he sometimes disguises what he relates by writing in the third person, as often as not he makes it clear that he writes of himself. For example:

I bent my chin upon by chest and began to say the prayer noetically. As soon as I said the prayer a few times, I was at once raptured to theoria [spiritual vision]. Even though I was inside the cave and the door was closed, I found myself outside in heaven, in a wondrous place with profound silence and serenity of soul--perfect repose.

The Elder had only two years of schooling, yet he possessed a profound understanding of the human soul, gained by deep repentance and years of experience. 'When through obedience and hesychia a monk’s senses have been purified,' he writes, 'his nous has been calmed, and his heart been cleansed, he then receives grace and enlightenment of knowledge. He becomes all light, all nous, all lucid.'

But the Elder was not content to proffer mere words of advice or consolation; he bore people’s sorrows and made them his own. Their salvation was his own. More than one letter ends with the assurance: 'don’t despair! We will go to paradise together. And if I don’t place you inside, then I do not want to sit in there either.'

But the content of the letters, and indeed the whole of the Elder’s life, is perhaps most vividly expressed in the following extract:

When grace is operative in the soul of someone who is praying, then he is flooded with the love of God, so that he can no longer bear what he experiences. Afterwards, this love turns towards the world and man, whom he comes to love so much that he seeks to take upon himself the whole of human pain and misfortune so that everyone else might be freed from it. In general he suffers with every grief and misery, and even for dumb animals, so that he weeps when he thinks they are suffering. These are the properties of love, but it is prayer that activates them and calls them forth. This is why those who are advanced in prayer do not cease to pray for the world. To them belongs even the continuation of life, however audacious and strange this may seem. And you should know that, if such people disappear, then the end of this world will come.

Although most of the letters are written to monastics, their essential teachings are applicable to all who have set out on the path to deeper repentance and prayer. For this reason Monastic Wisdom, along with the Life, is to be highly recommended. Only be warned: there are no compromises to a comfortable, armchair spirituality! According to his biographer, 'The fathers’ saying "give blood and receive the Spirit" could be described as the ever-memorable Elder’s permanent motto.'

BROTHER AIDAN

Shropshire