Anthology on Noetic Prayer

The Orthodox Ethos Team
15 hours ago
10 min read

By Geronda Ephraim of Philotheou and Arizona (from Counsels from the Holy Mountain)

1. Prayer is one of the foremost and strongest powers that causes him who prays to be born again, and it grants him bodily and spiritual well-being.

2. Prayer is the eyes and wings of the soul; it gives us the boldness and strength to behold God.

3. My brother, keep praying with your mouth until divine grace enlightens you to pray also with your heart. Then a celebration and festival will take place within you in a wondrous way, and you will no longer pray with your mouth, but with the attention which works in the heart.

4. If you truly desire to expel every anti-Christian thought and to purify your nous, you will achieve this only through prayer, for nothing is able to regulate our thoughts as well as prayer.

5. Be careful, because if you are lazy and inattentive in prayer, you shall not make any progress either in your pursuit of devotion towards the Lord, or in the acquisition of salvation and peace of thoughts.

6. The name of Jesus Christ, which we invoke in prayer, contains within it self-existing and self-acting restorative power. So do not worry about the imperfection and dryness of your prayer, but with perseverance await the fruit of the repeated invocation of the Divine Name.

7. When guided by prayer, the moral powers within us become stronger than all our temptations and conquer them.

8. Frequency in prayer creates a habit of prayer, which quickly becomes second nature and which frequently brings the nous and the heart to a higher spiritual state. It is the only way to reach the height of true and pure prayer. It constitutes the best means of effective preparation for prayer and the surest road for one to reach the destination of prayer and salvation.

9. Each one of us is able to acquire interior prayer—that is, to make it a means of communication with the Lord. It does not cost anything except the effort to plunge into silence and into the depths of our heart, and the care to call upon the name of our sweetest Jesus Christ as often as possible, which fills one with elation. Plunging into ourselves and examining the world of our soul give us the opportunity to know what a mystery man is, to feel the delight of self-knowledge and to shed bitter tears of repentance for our falls and the weakness of our will.

10. May your entire soul cleave with love to the meaning of the prayer, so that your nous, your inner voice, and your will—these three components of your soul—become one, and the one become three; for in this way man, who is an image of the Holy Trinity, comes into contact with and is united to the prototype. As the great worker and teacher of noetic prayer, the divine Gregory Palamas of Thessalonica said, “When the oneness of the nous becomes threefold, yet remains single, then it is united with the divine Triadic Unity, and it closes the door to every form of delusion and is raised above the flesh, the world, and the prince of the world.”[1]

11. Wherever the prayer is active, there is Christ with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, one in essence and indivisible. Wherever there is Christ, the Light of the world, there is the eternal light of the other world; there is peace and joy; there are the angels and the saints; there is the splendor of the Kingdom. Blessed are those who in this present life have clothed themselves with the Light of the world—Christ—for they have already put on the garment of incorruption.

12. Since Christ is the light of the world, those who do not see Him, who do not believe in Him, are all most certainly blind. Conversely, all who strive to practice the commandments of Christ walk in the light; they confess Christ and venerate and worship Him as God. Whoever confesses Christ and regards Him as his Lord and God is strengthened by the power of the invocation of His name to do His will. But if he is not strengthened, it is evident that he confesses Christ only with his mouth, while in his heart he is far from Him.

13. Just as it is impossible for someone who walks at night not to stumble, likewise it is impossible for someone who has not yet seen the divine light not to sin.

14. The goal of noetic prayer is to unite God with man, to bring Christ into man’s heart, banishing the devil from there and destroying all the work that he has accomplished there through sin. For, as the beloved disciple says, “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”[2] Only the devil knows the inexpressible power of these seven words of the Jesus prayer, and this is why he wars and fights against the prayer with furious rage. Countless times the demons have confessed through the mouths of possessed people that they are burned by the action of the prayer.

15. The more the prayer unites us with Christ, the more it separates us from the devil—and not only from the devil, but also from the spirit of the world, which engenders and sustains the passions.

16. The prayer’s satan [i.e., adversary] is listlessness. Satan’s satan is the desire for the prayer, the fervor of the heart. “Be fervent in spirit,” says the apostle, “serving the Lord.”[3] This fervor draws and retains grace for the one who prays, and it becomes light and joy and indescribable consolation for him—but to the demons it is fire and bitterness and persecution. When this grace comes, it collects the nous from its wandering and sweetens it with the mindfulness of God, healing it of all evil and unclean thoughts.

17. Is the prayer on your lips? Then grace is there as well. But from the lips it must pass into the nous and descend into the heart—and this takes much time and labor. The tongue must toil in order to pay for all its idle talk and its falls, and it must acquire the habit of praying. For without labor and practice, a habit cannot be formed. Humility must also appear for grace to come. After that, the road is clear; the prayer cleaves to our breathing and the nous wakes up and follows it. With time the passions abate, thoughts subside, and the heart grows calm.

18. Do not get tired of bringing your nous back every time it wanders. God will see your eagerness and your toil, and will send His grace to collect it. When grace is present, all is done with joy, without toil.

19. With the prayer, we pass from one joy to another; without the prayer, we pass from one fall to another, from affliction to affliction, and heavy is our remorse. In short, with a little labor and pain in the prayer, we obtain much joy-making mourning, compunction, and tears, along with the sweetness of the presence of God and the immaculate fear of Him, which cleanses and purifies nous and heart.

20. The heart must be purified for the nous also to be enlightened by it with the pure thoughts reflected towards the nous from above.

21. It is not the unrepentant who enter the Kingdom of God, but sinners who are transformed through repentance and tears. Nothing helps man fight and conquer the passions as much as unceasing noetic prayer.

22. When you are attacked by listlessness, when the nous, the tongue, and the fingers on the prayer-rope are flagging, I beg you not to give up. Make a little more effort, so that God will see your resolve and strengthen you. There is something more that God wants from you, and He allows this time of temptation so that you may give it. For He knows—and you know—that you can do more.

Therefore, compel yourself as much as you can at your appointed time of prayer; do your duty to have God as your debtor. And if you do not receive grace, you have prepared yourself for the next time or the time after that. In any case, sooner or later you shall receive grace; it is impossible for you not to. In fact, it is God’s practice to give much more when He delays.

23. The field of the heart yields in accordance to how well it has been plowed by prayer, watered by tears, and weeded of thoughts.

24. From time to time it happens that, without your being at fault, grace withdraws. It is as if God were saying to you, “All your works are fine, but do not think that everything depends on you. I shall come and go as I see fit, to teach you to completely cut off your will and to be patient, so that you learn the lesson of humility well.”

25. Those who are advanced in the prayer have the indubitable conviction that, in spite of all man’s labor, prayer is the work of grace.

26. St. Symeon the New Theologian says clearly that no one is able to glorify God on his own, but it is the grace of Christ, which has taken abode in him, that glorifies and hymns God and prays within him.

27. It is a sign that the grace of God has visited the soul when one prays with fear and reverence, standing with much orderliness and giving great attention to what one is praying.

28. Attention must be inseparably bound to prayer in the same way the body is inseparably bound to the soul. In other words, the nous should guard the heart at times of prayer, always circling around within it, and from there, from the depths of the heart, it should send up prayers to God, continuously saying “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Once it tastes and experiences there in the heart that the Lord is good, and it is sweetened, the nous no longer wants to leave the place of the heart, but says along with the Apostle Peter, “It is good for us to be here.”[4] It wants to circle around, pushing out and expelling, so to speak, all ideas sown in there by the devil, not allowing any thought of this world to remain, and thus becoming poor in spirit—bereft of every worldly thought.

Such a task seems very arduous and oppressive to those who do not know about it. But those who have tasted its sweetness and enjoyed its pleasure in the depths of their hearts, cry out with the divine Paul, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”[5]

29. Our Holy Fathers, heeding the Lord Who said that the evil thoughts which defile man proceed out of the heart[6] and that we must cleanse the inside of the cup for the outside to be clean also,[7] left every other spiritual work and devoted themselves completely to this work—namely, to the guarding of the heart—being certain that, together with this work, they would easily acquire every other virtue as well.

30. The God-bearing St. Symeon the New Theologian says, “Let us purify our hearts, so that we may find the omnipresent Lord within us. Let us purify our hearts with the fire of His grace, that we may see within ourselves the light and glory of His divinity.”

31. Fortunate are those who have approached the divine light and entered into it, and have been united to the light and become all light; for they have completely stripped themselves of the defiled garment of their sins and will no longer weep bitter tears. Fortunate are those who have known already in this life the light of the Lord as the Lord Himself, for they will stand before Him with boldness in the life to come. Fortunate are those who have received Christ, Who came as light to them, who were formerly in darkness, for they have now become sons of the light and of the day without evening.

32. St. Gregory Palamas says that when the prayer is practiced in conjunction with breathing in and out, in time it causes a sweet breath of grace, a savor of spiritual fragrance, to come forth from the nostrils of the person praying—“a savor of life unto life,”[8] according to the great Paul. Truly, there is nothing like the breath of the prayer, of unceasing noetic prayer. The prayer sheds grace not only on the person praying, but it also overflows and is diffused, spreading through him to creation. As he breathes in, he is purified, vivified, and sanctified; as he breathes out, he purifies, vivifies, and sanctifies creation—it is not he, but divine grace that accomplishes this.

33. In these last days, when the breath of the Antichrist pollutes land and sea and every breath of life, God fans the activity of noetic prayer in the bosom and heart of the Church like a refreshing dew of grace, like the breeze heard by the Prophet Elias,[9] as an antidote for the health and salvation of soul and body in the days that are upon us and those to come.

34. I know thousands of souls in the world—throughout the whole world, I would say—who compel themselves in the prayer with wondrous results. The prayer fortifies them in their spiritual struggle; it enlightens them inwardly, and they confess thoroughly and sincerely. Distressed by the thoughts and temptations which the demons rouse against those who say the prayer, they run with longing to the immaculate Mysteries. Then, they run back to the struggle with thoughts and passions, and then, back again to the Mysteries—they can no longer do without the prayer.

35. The prayer is breath. When a person breathes, he is alive, and he attends to his whole life. Whoever begins to say the prayer, also begins to correct his whole life, with his spiritual father as a guide. Just as the rising sun awakens, illuminates, and gives life to creation, so also when Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, rises by means of the prayer in man’s nous and heart, He awakens him to do the works of light and of the day without evening.

36. Therefore, brethren, “breathe Christ continuously,” as St. Anthony the Great, the chief of the ascetics, used to say. And the Apostle to the Gentiles advises, exhorts, and commands all Christians of every place and time to “pray without ceasing.”[10] The divine Fathers explain that “without ceasing” means that there is no end or measure to it.

So in time of peace do not be negligent, but pray; correct yourself; prepare for war. Take courage. Do not fear temptations. Everyone experiences changes, but patience and perseverance are needed in the struggle. The righteous man, even if he falls a thousand times a day, rises again and it is considered a victory for him. This is what the prayer means: continuous repentance, incessant calling on divine mercy.

To Christ our God, Who gives prayer to him who prays,[11] be glory and thanksgiving unto the ages. Amen.