“The Inner Man of the Heart”

Olivier Clément

Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.

The title of this chapter is a citation from 1 Peter 3:4.

By interiorizing celebration, the body is called to become conscious of its resurrection in the Risen One. Such is the goal of Christian asceticism and spirituality: to awaken the “body of glory” in the “body of death,” through the Paschal victory of Christ.

Asceticism means “exercise,” “struggle.” Its aim is to mortify the elements of death bound to our existence, in order to allow the life of Christ to rise within us — the power of the resurrection. It frees us from this world (the expression is evangelical), understood as a web of hypnosis and illusion, so that we may discover the world as gift and language of God, a dialogue between God and humanity.

Man is created in the image of God. Image signifies call. The image tends toward its model; man vibrates in response to that call. But he is born in order to die, and “the world lieth in wickedness.” The dynamism of the image — the very call that lifts us — collides with finitude and becomes anguish and fascination with death. Here enters, far from all romanticism, the ascetic notion of “passion.” The “passion” that conditions all the others is death. The “passions” (with emphasis on the passivity of the one who suffers them) are at once an escape from this anguish and a thirst for the absolute. As such, they deserve respect — but they operate in ignorance of the absolute. “Passion” thus appears as a kind of abscess swollen with nothingness, which for a moment gives us the illusion of being more — but leaves us strangely dislocated. The energy it usurps must not be suppressed but transfigured.

The turning point comes in metanoia — less a matter of remorse than a revolution in our perception of reality. Sin — and there is ultimately only one: “self-idolatry”¹ — is either separation or confusion; it is metaphysical narcissism. It makes beings and things revolve around the ego, and thereby paradoxically robs the ego of its true kingship, abandoning it like a straw to be tossed about by the great forces of the species and the cosmos. The two “mother passions,” say the ascetics, are greed and pride. Faith — that is, trust placed beyond oneself in the God veiled/unveiled by His incarnation² — and therefore humility (existence is given to me by Another), gradually transfigures the “passions” into “virtues” — that is, into divine-human forces, a participation in the divine energies through the deified and deifying humanity of Christ.

The “remembrance of death” lays bare the fundamental anguish — the state of spiritual death in which humanity lies, with our complicity. It then becomes a “remembrance of God” — of the incarnate and crucified (yet rising) God who never ceases to descend into our inner hell to set us free. The “remembrance of death” uncovers, beneath worries, passions, and an often “moral” and “conforming” restlessness, the nothingness that seeks to engulf us. But behold — Christ reveals Himself not in the Pharisaic sphere of the sacred, but in the very depth of that “black hole.” Thus, it is not necessarily the most “moral” who encounter Him, but sometimes those who go all the way to the end of passion, of chaos, of mockery. Whatever the case, He is there, and He places Himself forever between us and the abyss of nothingness.

Then come the “tears” which, from bitterness, are transformed into gratitude. Passion, transfigured by the Passion of Christ, becomes com-passion — in the strongest sense of the word.

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The human body is constituted, in its structure and its rhythms, to become — as Paul says — “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” Two fundamental rhythms are involved here: that of breathing and that of the blood. And one “place” that is both bodily and spiritual: the “place of the heart.” The rhythm of breathing is the only one of which we can voluntarily make use. The second account of creation, in Genesis (2:7), emphasizes the correspondence between the Spirit of God — His breath — and the vital breath of man. Since the Spirit, from all eternity, is “the Breath who utters the Word,”³ then when the human breath pronounces the Name of the incarnate Word, it becomes mingled with the Breath of God — and man, as the Byzantine spiritual writers used to say, “breathes the Spirit.” Blood, liquid like water, salty like the sea, red and warm like fire, seems to be the sap of the world in the process of being spiritualized. But man the murderer — the eternal Cain — sheds blood. And the woman who is not made fruitful bleeds periodically, sensing in that, as Simone de Beauvoir noted, that “her body is something other than herself,”⁴ delivered through her to the play of life and death. Christ, sweeping away the ancient taboos on purity and impurity — since what matters is the person, not “life” (life/death) — never turns away from a woman, and heals the one afflicted with a flow of blood. On the cross, He sheds His blood for the salvation of His murderers—that is, for me, for you—a life-giving blood, the very blood of the Eucharist. From now on, this divine-human blood is mingled with ours through the sacramental life.⁵ This blood of immortality transforms the rhythm of our own blood into celebration. The spiritual person who receives the grace of “unceasing prayer” experiences it as the very beating of his heart now singing the Name of Jesus.

For in the Bible — and in an entire stream of Christian spirituality — the heart represents (and in some sense constitutes) the innermost center of the human being, that properly personal depth called to integrate what Diadochus of Photike calls the “sense” or the “sensation of the heart”⁶ encompasses all the faculties of man. That is to say, according to the classification that the Fathers borrowed from Greek philosophy: the νοῦς (nous), which is intelligence and lucidity; the θυμός (thumos), which signifies ardor or strength; and the ἐπιθυμία (epithymia), desire in the properly carnal sense. The nous is associated with the head, the thumos with the chest, and the epithymia with the sexual organs. (One would find exactly the same classification in India, with sattva, the radiance of being; rajas, the properly royal faculty; and tamas, darkness and heaviness.)

The “fallen” condition (we do not intend to elaborate here a theology of original sin; the word “fallen” is simply a factual observation) manifests as the fragmentation, the dissociation of this “sense of the heart.” Intelligence becomes abstract and divisive, ardor becomes aggression, carnal desire becomes debauchery and sorrow (if not downright “gastrolatry”!).

And yet, the “abyss of the heart” does not cease to yearn for transcendence. There is light in its depth, and grace secretly invests it at baptism. The deep heart thus appears as a kind of “super-conscious” or “trans-conscious”, tormented by the desire for God. For the “psychoanalysts of existence”, and notably Viktor Frankl,⁷ whose thought owes much to his observations of the strength of soul shown by certain prisoners in the Nazi camps, the human unconscious in its “super-conscious” dimension speaks of God — it reveals the irreducible relation of each person to transcendence. Neurosis, then, results from the ignorance or refusal of the mystery. The ascetics also refer to the “heart” as the dark abyss of the individual, pan-human, and undoubtedly cosmic “infra-conscious.” This is why they can speak of the “heart” — and Dostoevsky does as well — as a battlefield between light and darkness.

In relation to ordinary consciousness, the deep heart remains closed, except in flashes — in those limit situations of love, beauty, and death. And in the miraculous intuitions of childhood, adolescence, and genius.

The whole spiritual task, then, will be to “make the clear consciousness descend” — to bring the intellect “into the heart,” and at the same time to transfigure, in the crucible of this “heart-mind,” both thumos and epithymia. Certain Orthodox spiritual writers — such as, in the 18th century, the Starets Basil of Poiana Mărului⁸ (that is, in Romanian, “of the apple-tree clearing”) — subtly distinguished, even in their physical location, the spiritual heart from the physiological heart (over which, if the latter is identified with thumos, the spiritual heart must reign), though without separating the two — thus suggesting that the heart of flesh symbolizes and partly incorporates the deep heart. It is possible that a neurophysiologist respectful of the spiritual might point out that the union of intellect and heart is reflected — without being reducible to it — in the integration of the two brain hemispheres: the left generally devoted to intellectual activity, the right to intuitive activity.⁹ In any case, the heart of flesh plays an essential role in this matter. When one says, for example, that it catches fire, this is not merely a metaphor, for some monks have had their shirt burned at the location of the heart.

The progressive union of the heart and the intellect requires the practice of “guarding the heart.” One must learn to distance oneself from the flux of the psyche by anchoring to the rock of the Name of Jesus. When thoughts — λογισμοί (logismoi) or διαλογισμοί (dialogismoi) — arise from the unconscious (better understood as suggestions, impulses…), they must be clothed with the Name of Jesus, and their obsessive charge (if such exists) disintegrated through intensified invocation. Perception must be brought back to the simplicity of sensation. As Saint John Climacus says, one must “circumscribe the incorporeal within the corporeal,”¹⁰ and offer sensation, in its original virginity, upon the altar of the heart.

The great “hesychasts”¹¹ practiced enfolded postures, with the head between the knees, like Elijah on Mount Carmel. More simply, they advise repeating a short invocation — the Κύριε ἐλέησον (Kyrie eleison, “Lord, have mercy”), or “I pray to you, Lord, I pray to you,” or “Glory to you, O God, glory to you.” Most commonly — beginning with Abba Isaiah in the sixth century in what was then the desert of Gaza — the invocation became: “Lord Jesus,” or simply “Jesus.” The formula that seems to have become standardized on Athos in the Middle Ages is: “Lord Jesus Christ (Son of God), have mercy on me (a sinner).” The Greek word translated “mercy” — ἐλέησον (eleison) — carries a richer meaning: not mere pity, but presence, tenderness, compassion. In the 18th century, Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite would recommend the prayer: “Jesus, Jesus, my beloved God.” This diversity of invocations makes it clear that this is not a mantra, but a living, ardent, and peace-filled relationship.

One sits on a low stool, bows the head toward the chest, and brings the intellect into prayer within the heart, following the movement of the breath. In the 19th century, the “Russian Pilgrim”¹² advised synchronizing the syllables of the invocation with the heartbeat, as well as its two parts with the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation. Today, however, the most experienced spiritual elders advise against willful synchronization with the heartbeat. The modern Westerner, too tense, too nervous, risks disturbing this rhythm, and in a sense, “losing” it. Only the prayer of the breath is suitable. The awakening of the heart then happens of itself, by the grace of God.¹³

It is not our purpose here to describe in detail the journey thus sketched. The heart first experiences touches of a profoundly gentle fire, then “catches fire,” takes flight like a dove, and becomes an “eye of light.” In his 12th treatise, Saint Isaac the Syrian beautifully stylizes the signs of this entrance into fire and light.¹⁴ Sometimes it comes through a verse, a phrase, a word of the lectio divina: a silence that remains; a movement of the whole being — sober, stripped bare — and perhaps charismatic tears that gently overflow without tension in the face; a state of peace that lingers. Then, for a time, the union of intellect and heart takes place. When this state stabilizes and deepens:

“Let every mouth and tongue fall silent […] and let the work of meditation, that swift and impudent bird, cease its activity. […] For the Master of the house has come.”¹⁵

From the unified and illumined heart-mind, grace spreads to the whole body. The body becomes peacefully aware, not in narcissism but in blessing, in a non-passionate joy of being. When “the sense of the heart,” writes Diadochus, is unified by the Spirit, it communicates its joy “even to the body itself.”¹⁶ The person then feels God “in the very sensation of his bones.”¹⁷ An ontological tenderness seizes him — “the blessed smile of the soul,” says Saint John Climacus. Childhood is regained, a smile illuminating the tears!

Then man becomes the priest of the world on the altar of his heart — the priest of the cosmic liturgy. “He offers the universe to God […] as upon an altar,” says Maximus the Confessor.¹⁸ He liberates the sacramentality of the world. “Everything around me appeared in the light of beauty,” writes the Russian Pilgrim, “everything prayed, everything sang the glory of God.”¹⁹ The body is now no longer merely a clearly outlined volume cut from space; it becomes as vast as the world. “The world is within,” says the poet. The breath that resonates in the body is the very breath that bears the world.

This vast heritage of wisdom can truly be put into practice only by a few — primarily, though not exclusively, monastics. Yet we can nonetheless find in it the most precious light for our own searchings and concerns.

First and foremost, it is important, in the light of this properly Christian experience, to exercise discernment regarding psychosomatic methods — some of which come from the distant East, while others are being developed in the West itself, and are at times indiscriminately popularized by the New Age. No doubt, these techniques may help relax and pacify the human person in his bodily existence and in a harmonious relationship with the life of the cosmos. But the danger lies in remaining within an immanentist perspective — that is, ultimately, a closed one. The divine would then appear merely as the depth of the human being and of the world, a reserve of energy to be tapped through appropriate techniques, in which one ultimately dissolves oneself, believing thereby to be universalized. Whereas in India, for example, such methods are practiced within a strict ascetical framework (notably that of continence), in the West they are often applied as-is, in pursuit of “powers” or with a vaguely “Rasputin-like” spirit: the shaman rather than the starets! The Hindu Self — or even the Jungian Self — can then become an exaggerated hypertrophy of the Western ego. It is more pleasant to imagine oneself to be everything — or nothing — rather than to accept being limited and responsible. It is easier to move from external techniques to those of interiority than to run the risk of faith — like a gambler who refuses to place a bet until he has seen the cards. It is more gratifying, as they say, to take a “hesychasm workshop” than to repent.

And yet, early monasticism absorbed the anthropology of Plato and Aristotle without becoming Platonic or Aristotelian, and incorporated much of Stoic asceticism — which was also based on an impersonal conception of the divine — without becoming Stoic. The Philokalia, that vast anthology of mystical theological writings published in 1782, opens with a long Stoic-style text attributed to Saint Anthony, the father of monks! And the theologians of Alexandria were not unfamiliar with the “gymnosophists” of India... This patristic approach is something we ought to recover on the scale of the spiritualities of the whole earth. The modern Westerner is so tightly bound up, so alienated from himself, so constantly fleeing from himself — whether through good or evil — that he needs to go deep into his very body, and into the poetry of things, before approaching traditional asceticism. That asceticism was made for the man of ancient cultures — cultures of silence and slowness (and, admittedly, of cruelty as well): the human tree in such cultures is vigorous; it only needs pruning. But modern man often resembles a fragile sapling: he must first be rooted in the earth, the wind, and the light, before he can be pruned. Alyosha Karamazov’s advice to his brother Ivan, to “first learn to love life,” is more relevant than ever, in all its apparent banality. This is why it is important to ask whether certain elementary practices of yoga (especially hatha yoga), or the free and contemplative delight in the “ah!” of things found in Japanese flower art, or even in Zen Buddhism, might find their place — provided some corrections — in the great vessel of the Church. (At times, of course, refusal is necessary: as in the case of Transcendental Meditation, which is always connected to the invocation of a Hindu deity...) This is an entire culture of attention that must be preserved — attention and wonder. By teaching adolescents how to “deconstruct” a television program; by introducing children to all the marvels of the world’s tales and legends, and then to the majestic and prismatic stories of Genesis… Later, by putting into their hands a camera or a video recorder. The liturgy can play a key role here, provided it is beautiful, engaging, festive, and extends into the fellowship and friendship of the faithful. As Kierkegaard hoped, we must “deepen beings within existence.” Art too can play a great role — and it is a fact that more and more people are flocking to museums — to open, beyond somnambulism and the utilitarian, toward what the ancient Greeks called θαμβός (thambos): the terrible and jubilant astonishment of simply existing.

Secondly, it seems to me that we should broaden the great ascetical attitudes we’ve mentioned in light of this culture, though well short of any purely monastic technicality. The rhythm of breath, of blood, of walking, of dancing, can become celebration. To fast is holy, Martin Buber liked to say, but to eat can be holiness itself — if one eats with gratitude, releasing the sparks of divine presence, the Shekhinah, that are found in the food! It is up to us to live differently the meeting of the elements, which so many young people today are seeking: this return of a civilization of the body, vibrant in sunlight, sea, and wind, yet disciplined through the asceticism of dance or sport. The Kouroi of ancient Greece, to whom Christianity gave a face, but whose bodies it so often despised, must be welcomed back into the Church — like the noble shafts of ancient columns, which, after so many centuries of Christian prayer, are no longer temples of idols, but simply vessels of cosmic beauty.

Yes, “to bring the incorporeal back into the corporeal”: to listen to the beating of one’s heart — not in the awful anguish of death lying in wait, inevitable (this heart, all hearts will cease to beat!) — but as grace, as the praise of a life given, forgiven, that comes to us from elsewhere, that comes to us from an Other. To breathe the scent of humus, of the earth, of the immense wind, the fragrance of narcissus — as a communion with the “holy flesh of the earth,” for it is the flesh of our God. The quiet invocation of the Name of Jesus, the “Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee,” can suddenly expand space to infinity, and in the wind, in the fire — beyond — there is for a moment the very Breath we breathe.

How many young Western Christians have been overwhelmed in reading the life of Francis of Assisi, and the Canticle of the Creatures! At last, they were freed from schizophrenia, from the opposition between “God and my soul” and “faithfulness to the earth.” We must pause here over what Eastern Christian spirituality calls the “contemplation of nature,” the “knowledge of beings,” the vision of “the secrets of the glory of God hidden in beings and things.”²⁰

For the Fathers, from Evagrius to Maximus the Confessor, this form of contemplation is absolutely necessary. It is in this perspective that Maximus interprets Peter’s vision recounted in Acts (11:4–10): a sheet descending from heaven, filled with clean and unclean animals, while a voice commands, “Kill and eat.” “Through this sheet,” Maximus says, “God revealed to Peter the visible world as spiritual nourishment, understood through the invisible world — or rather, the invisible world made manifest through the forms of visible things.” Seen in this light, the world contains no impurity. “The one who transcends the false conception of things sanctifies the visible, consumes the λόγοι (logoi, inner essences) of invisible things as spiritual food, and attains the contemplation of nature in the Spirit.”²¹

Salvation requires deciphering, assumption, offering—of the universe. A great modern poet, Pierre Emmanuel, wrote:

“These things, at once visible and invisible, exist as much and more than I, each in its own order… All are emblems, even the scorpion I avoid crushing and love to see spread out on the wall. The true measure of man is in these things: it is to make their interiority his own, to share in their praise, to hear it in them, to give it form within himself.”²²

For the one who prays in the heart, says the Tradition, the whole world is a church. Maximus the Confessor dares to say — and permit me to interpret a little — that things in their very appearing, in their manifestation, in their diaphany, offer themselves to us as the Body of Christ, and their celestial roots as His Blood.

A cosmic Eucharist.

1. The expression is from Saint Andrew of Crete in his Great Penitential Canon, read during Lent in the Byzantine rite. An English translation of the complete text can be found in The Lenten Triodion, translated by Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2022).

2. “Through His love for humanity [...], the Supra-Essential renounced His mystery; He manifested Himself to us by assuming humanity. However, despite this manifestation — or rather [...] at the very heart of this manifestation — He nonetheless retains all His mystery. For the mystery of Jesus remained hidden. [...] However one understands it, He remains unknowable.” (Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter 3 to Gaius, PG 3, 1069. English translation in The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite. Translated by Rev. John Parker. James Parker and Co., 1897.)

“By becoming incarnate, God does not make Himself comprehensible but appears even more incomprehensible. He remains hidden [...] in this very manifestation. Even when expressed, He remains the unknown.” (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, PG 91, 1048–1049. English translation in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Edited and translated by Nicholas Constas. 2 volumes. Harvard University Press, 2014.​)

3. St John of Damascus. De Fide Orthodoxa, 8. SC 535. English translation in On the Orthodox Faith: A New Translation of An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Translated by Norman Russell. Popular Patristics Series, no. 62. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2022.

4. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 66. English translation Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

5. This is one of the central themes in Nicholas Cabasilas’ Life in Christ — see Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, translated by Carmino J. DeCatanzaro (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974).

6. Chapters 91, 92, and 96 from One Hundred Chapters on Spiritual Perfection by Saint Diadochus of Photike. English translation in Following the Footsteps of the Invisible: The Complete Works of Diadochus of Photike. Translated by Cliff Ermatinger. Cistercian Studies Series, no. 239. Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2010.

7. Cf. Viktor E. Frankl, Le Dieu inconscient. Paris: Fayard, 1975. See also the English edition, The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology, translated by Joseph Fabry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).

8. Translator’s note: Cf. A Monk of the Brotherhood of Prophet Elias Skete. Elder Basil of Poiana Mărului (1692–1767): His Life and Writings. Liberty, TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1996.

9. Cf. G. Pégard, “La neurocybernétique du comportement humain à la lumière du silence de la pensée dans l’hésychasme,” in Science et conscience: Les deux lectures de l’univers (Paris, 1980), 413ff.

10. John Climacus, Scala Paradisi, Step 26 (“On Discernment”), Section 63; PG 88:1005D–1008A. English translation John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, revised ed. (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1991), Step 26, Section 63.

11. Hesychasm refers to the most central and profound spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church. From the Greek ἡσυχία (hesychia): peace and silence in union with God.

12. Récits d’un pèlerin russe à son père spirituel, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English translation The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, translated by R. M. French (New York: Seabury Press, 1954; reprint, HarperOne, 2009).

13. Let us note that Nicodemus the Hagiorite recommends saying the entire invocation during the inhalation and the retention of breath, because if the air is expelled abruptly, its exhalation, he says, would disperse the intellect. Once again, we find diversity, even freedom: this is not a “technique,” but a prayer.

14. Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. 2nd ed. Translated by Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011.

15. Ibid., 12th and 31st homilies.

16. One Hundred Chapters on Spiritual Perfection, chapter 25.

17. Ibid., chapter 14.

18. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. and ed. Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), Question 51.

19. Op. cit., p 57.

20. Isaac the Syrian, op. cit., 72nd homily.

21. Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., Question 27.

22. L’Arbre et le Vent. [The Tree and the Wind.] Pierre Emmanuel is here more contemplative — and less practical — than a fifth-century monk, Elpidios, who, absorbed in psalmody and stung by a scorpion, paid no attention to the pain — perhaps barely felt it at all — but discreetly crushed the insect underfoot, “without even changing his posture.” (Lausiac History 48.2.)