Vigils Reading

From Words to Silence

by Father Kallistos Ware

The more a man comes to contemplate God in nature, the more he realizes that God is also above and beyond nature. Finding traces of the divine in all things, he says: ‘This also is thou; neither is this thou.’… In Scripture, in the liturgical texts, and in nature, we are presented with innumerable words, images and symbols of God; and we are taught to give full value to these words, images and symbols, dwelling upon them in our prayer. But, since these things can never express the entire truth about the living God, we are encouraged also to balance this affirmative or cataphatic prayer by apophatic prayer… as Evagrius puts it… ‘a laying aside of thoughts.’

…Reaching out towards the eternal Truth that lies beyond all human words and thoughts, the seeker begins to wait upon God in quietness and silence, no longer talking about or to God but simply listening. ‘Be still, and know that I am God’.

This stillness or inward silence is known in Greek as hesychia… concentration combined with inward tranquility. It is not merely to be understood in a negative sense as the absence of speech and outward activity, but it denotes in a positive way the openness of the human heart towards God’s love… The way of negation and the way of affirmation are not alternatives; they are complementary.

But how are we to stop talking and to start listening? Of all the lessons in prayer, this is the hardest to learn. There is little profit in saying to ourselves, ‘Do not think’, for suspension of discursive thought is not something that we can achieve merely through an exertion of will-power. The ever-restless mind demands from us some task, so as to satisfy its constant need to be active… The mind needs some task which will keep it busy, and yet enable it to reach out beyond itself into stillness. In the Orthodox hesychast tradition, the work which is usually assigned to it is the frequent repetition of some short ‘arrow prayer’, most commonly the Jesus Prayer… an invocation addressed to another Person.

Its object is not relaxation but alertness, not waking slumber but living prayer… the rhythmic repetition of the same short phrase enables…by virtue of the very simplicity of the words…to advance beyond all language and images into the mystery of God…where the soul rests in God without a constantly varying succession of images, ideas and feelings…

The way of negation resembles not so much the peeling of an onion as the carving of a statue. When we peel an onion, we remove one skin after another, until finally there is no more onion left: we end up with nothing at all. But the sculptor, when chipping away at a block of marble, negates to a positive effect. He does not reduce the block to a heap of random fragments but, through the apparently destructive action of breaking the stone in pieces, he ends up by unveiling an intelligible shape…

In some writers the ideas of light and darkness are combined… St Dionysius says, ‘The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell.’ There is no self-contradiction about such language, for to God ‘the darkness and the light are both alike’… If God is said to dwell in darkness, that does not mean that there is in God any lack or privation, but that he is a fullness of glory and love beyond our comprehension