Gregory of Sinai

By the thirteenth century, the hesychast tradition had a problem. The texts were there — the writings of Evagrius and Maximos and John Klimakos and dozens of others, filling the libraries of monasteries across the Byzantine world. But the living practice had become rare. The Jesus Prayer was being described more than it was being done.

Gregory of Sinai went looking for someone who still knew it from the inside.

He was born around 1260 on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Captured by Turkish pirates as a young man and ransomed to Cyprus, he became a monk, traveled to Sinai, then to Crete — where he found, in an elder named Arsenios, what he had been looking for. Arsenios had received a living transmission of the prayer of the heart. Gregory received it from him and began to practice.

What he discovered was not a new doctrine. It was a rediscovery of something very old that had been technically described many times but practically neglected. The difference between reading about prayer and actually doing it, as Gregory had learned from Arsenios and would spend the rest of his life teaching, was enormous.

He made his way to Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece that had been the heart of Byzantine monastic life for centuries. What he found there troubled him: hundreds of monks, rich liturgical life, good spiritual fathers — but the specific practice of hesychast prayer, the careful disciplined work of the nous in the heart, was thin on the ground.

He began to teach. People came. Within a short period he had gathered a circle of serious practitioners around him. Turkish raids eventually forced him to move, and he settled in Paroria, in the mountains near the modern Bulgarian-Greek border, where he founded a monastic community that became a center of hesychast formation for the entire Balkan world. His disciples spread the practice in all directions. Several streams ran eventually into Russia.

His practical instructions for the Jesus Prayer are among the most specific in the tradition: the posture, the breathing, the coordination of words with breath, the quality of interior attention required. He is also the tradition's most useful guide to prelest — spiritual deception — precisely because he was teaching people who were new to the practice and needed to know where the dangers were.

His rule is simple and stringent: if something in your inner life seems extraordinary — a light, a warmth, an unusual sense of presence — do not embrace it. Treat it with suspicion. Bring it to a spiritual father. The criterion for spiritual experience is not intensity or unusualness but conformity to humility and love.

This is not the counsel of a fearful man. It is the counsel of an experienced navigator who knows the specific shoals of this particular sea. He died around 1346, just as Gregory Palamas was defending the theological foundation of everything he had taught.