The Jesus Prayer: A Gift From the Fathers
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The Jesus Prayer has been on the lips of Christians since the time of the Desert Fathers. What is its history? How do we make it our own? This booklet traces the development of the Jesus Prayer through the early centuries of the Church, follows its progression through Mount Athos, the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, and others, and discusses its modern revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The text concludes with a brief discussion of how this prayer can be appropriated by the individual believer today.
Key Features
- Examines the history of the Jesus Prayer
- Discusses the teachings of multiple saints
- Covers modern and historical interpretations of the Jesus Prayer
Contents
- The Early Centuries
- Saint Makarios of Egypt and His Disciple Evagrios
- Saint Diadochos of Photike
- Growth at Mount Sinai: Saint John Klimakos
- Saint Maximos the Confessor
- Saint Symeon the New Theologian
- The Flowering on Mount Athos
- Saint Gregory of Sinai
- Saint Nikephoros the Hesychast
- Saint Theoleptos of Philadelphia
- Saint Gregory Palamas, Defender of Hesychasm
- A Modern Revival
- The Age of The Philokalia
- Nineteenth-Century Russia
- The Twentieth-Century West
- Receiving the Gift
Top Highlights
“Two of these factors are of primary importance: the practice of frequent repetition of short prayers, and the great respect in which the Name of Jesus was held.” (Page 6)
“Evagrios of Pontus (346–399) and Pseudo-Makarios, whose writings were thought to be those of Saint Makarios. (The real Saint Makarios of Egypt, c. 300–c. 390, was Evagrios’s master in the desert.) The influences of the two, however, were very different. Evagrios applied Neoplatonism, with its emphasis on the mind, to the desert spirituality, while Pseudo-Makarios, with a more biblical outlook, emphasized the totality of the person, represented in the heart.” (Page 8)
“Evagrios’s teaching was posthumously condemned, along with that of Origen, at the fifth Ecumenical Council in 533” (Page 10)
“disciple of Origen, and he used the Neoplatonic principle of dualism” (Page 9)
“the sixth or seventh century that the full text of the Jesus Prayer is first found” (Page 11)
About David Hester
David Hester is an archpriest of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and pastor of St. Mary Antiochian Church in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He earned an STB from the Gregorian University in Rome, an STM from the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley California, and an SEOL and SEOD from the Pontifical Oriental Institute of Rome, Italy. He is on the faculty of the Antiochian House of Studies and of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary, teaching patrology and church history.
