Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies

Summer 2003, Vol. 9, No. 1

Uncreated Peace:
The ‘Peace that passeth all understanding’ according to the Philokalia

Vincent Rossi

They have misled my people, saying, 'Peace,' when there is no peace. (Ezek. 13: 10)

Stop defiling your flesh with shameful deeds and polluting your soul with sinful thoughts;
then the peace of God will descend upon you and bring you love.
St. Maximos the Confessor1

These are mysteries which are unveiled through an intelligible contemplation enacted by
the operation of the Holy Spirit in those to whom it has been given--and is ever given--to
know them by virtue of the grace from on high. Knowledge of these things is for them
whose intellect is illumined daily by the Holy Spirit on account of their purity of soul,
whose eyes have been clearly opened by the rays of the Sun of righteousness, whose word
of knowledge and word of wisdom is through the Spirit alone, whose understanding and
fear of God, through love and peace, are preserved firmly in faith by the sanctity and
goodness of their way of life.
St. Symeon the New Theologian2

Do not think that I come to bring peace to the world. I come not to bring peace, but a
sword (Mt. 10:31)…Peace I leave with you, peace I give unto you: not as the world
giveth give I unto you (John 14: 27).

Even if some imagine they do, not everyone who hears of the Lord Jesus discerns the
effects of His life-giving death and its miraculous activity which is ever bringing virtue
and knowledge into being in the perfect…therefore, do not simply hurry past these words
and think that you have somehow thus understood the power which is hidden in them, but
instead examine precisely with me, beloved, the interior condition of your soul.
St. Symeon the New Theologian3

O Holy Spirit, Thou hast revealed a mystery to me that passeth all understanding”
St. Silouan the Athonite4

1
St Maximos the Confessor, Second Century on Love 44, , in The Philokalia, vol. II, Eng. trans. Palmer,
Sherrard, and Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p, 57..
2
, St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Ethical Discourses 9, Eng. trans. Alexander Golitzin in On the
Mystical Life: the Ethical Discourses, vol. 2 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996)p. 114.
3
, Ibid., The Ethical Discourses 11, p. 130.

1
The problem of peace: its ambiguity of meaning
‘I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some
formula of peace’5. So wrote Joseph Conrad in one of his novels. In his hesitation
between the ‘form’ and the ‘formula’ of peace, the novelist gives expression to a
fundamental ambiguity or uncertainty inherent in the understanding of and quest for
peace that makes it so often a mirage, as much in the personal realm as in relations
among nations. Peace is pragmatically ambiguous as to its nature and also as to its source
and scope. Understood primarily in negative terms as the absence of strife or disturbance,
peace tends usually to be defined as “freedom from” war or public disturbance or internal
turmoil. But we also have a feeling that peace is—or should be-- a positive quality, which
is then expressed in terms of harmony or concord or inner tranquility. Yet one asks, what
is the nature of this concord, this inner tranquility? What is the source of this harmony?
In the unlikely event that questions such as these are posed at all, we usually tend to
answer them by reverting to the negative terms of “freedom from” and “absence of”. Is
peace a natural quality or a moral quality? Is it a presence or an absence? Is the normal
functioning of the natural world a state of peace? Can one legitimately refer to the
organic harmony of a living organism as “peaceful”? Is the competition observed in
nature a “war of all against all”, a sign of nature “red in tooth and claw”, or is peace
somehow the basis of the stability and harmony also observed in the order of nature in
spite of the “competition”?
When we turn to the conscious experience of peace in the human sphere, we face the
same uncertainty. Is the feeling of “inner peace” a good thing under all circumstances?
Put in religious terms, is the fact that one’s conscience seems to be at peace always a sign
that one is doing right or is in a good spiritual state? Is the absence of psychological
conflict always a sign that one is well-integrated or on a sound and healthy spiritual path?
Is everything that produces ‘peace of mind’ or ‘inner peace ‘or freedom from discord
with our neighbors and family and community a good thing that should be pursued

4
Archimandrite Sophony, St. Silouan the Athonite (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999,
p. 192.
5
: Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Polish-born English novelist. The narrator, in Under Western Eyes,
Prologue to pt. 1 (1911).

2
without question? Finally there is the crucial question of the relationship between peace
and strife in the inner spiritual state of individuals and that of the outer reality of
communities and nations.
Christians believe that Jesus is the Prince of Peace and theirs is the religion of peace;
prayer for peace is frequent in Christian churches; and peace is on everyone’s lips during
the Christmas holiday season. But do Christians experience the state of peace more
readily than other people? Is Christian baptism an automatic conduit to a permanent state
of inner peace? Or are there levels or degrees of peace or inherent spiritual ‘laws’
involved in the acquisition of peace?
Simply to ask these questions is to become aware of the deep ambiguity in our
knowledge and experience of peace. Do we really know what peace is, do we have a clear
idea of how to acquire it, and, even more importantly, how to sustain it? Emotional states
that we tend to call peaceful come and go like the weather, and seem just as
unpredictable. Just what is peace, anyway—a natural condition? A virtue? A state of
being? A gift of grace? An absence? A presence? Some of us may recognize with chagrin
and shame that there is no correlation between how often the word peace passes through
our lips, and the likelihood that it exists in our hearts. Peace is a mystery that eludes us.
Yet the Scriptures tell us to “seek peace and pursue it.”6
Is there a unique Orthodox perspective on peace?
"The loftier the word, the more ambiguous it is, the more insistently it demands from
Christians who use it not simply its most precise definition but also its liberation,
exorcism and cleansing from the lie that perverts it from within.”7 Fr.Alexander
Schmemann was speaking of the principle of unity in relation to the Eucharist when he
wrote these words, but they apply equally to our exploration into the patristic meaning of
peace. It is possible that there is no word in human language more in need of such
liberation, exorcism and cleansing than “peace.” The lie that perverts its meaning from
within is particularly diabolical, in that it has been stolen from God, as the writings of the
Philokalic Fathers will subsequently make clear. For in the case of peace, “the primary

6
Ps. 34:14.
7
Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), pp. 148.

3
meaning and the substitution, the ‘theft’, concern not something related to life but life
itself, genuine life in its quintessence”8
Most analyses of peace from an Orthodox perspective commonly begin by making a
passing mention of hesychia and peace before moving quickly to the usual discussions of
peace in the liturgy, personal inner peace, war and violence, just war theories, justice and
peace among nations, and the tangled, violent and often tragic political history of
Orthodox peoples. However insightful or otherwise commendable, there seems nothing
particularly Orthodox about this approach, save for the fact that Orthodox people are
involved. Convinced that there is indeed a genuinely Orthodox perspective on peace, and
that this authentically Orthodox conception of peace is to be found in the Philokalia, I
intend in this paper to take the road less traveled, namely, ignoring the usual discussions
outlined above to present a sustained examination of peace and hesychia9 that relies
primarily on the writings on peace of the so called Neptic Fathers of the Philokalia. Only
when we have taken full account of the hesychastic reality of peace will we be able to
understand the true nature--and truly radical reality--of the peacemaker from the
Orthodox point of view. For the Orthodox Christian view of the peacemaker is not of one
who merely prefers peace to violence, nor merely one who holds spiritually correct views
abut peace, but is one who literally makes peace through the power of the radical
presence of peace within him. The peacemakers are called the children of God not in
praise of their views or of their supposed moral superiority, but in acknowledgement of
the Peace that lives in them and in which they participate to the point of total
identification.

8
Ibid, p. 150.
9
Hesychia, usually translated as “stillness,” sometimes as ‘inner peace’ or ‘silence,’ is much more than
these words imply in English. Far beyond the conventional understanding of ‘inner peace’ or ‘tranquillity,’
transcending any notion of quietism, hesychia denotes a state of intense watchfulness, prayer and listening
to God, which is in itself a transforming energy that curbs passions, unifies the spiritual divisions in the
inner man (eso anthropos):and raises the mind to divine vision. From St. Thalassios the Libyan: “Seal your
senses with hesychia and sit in judgment upon the thoughts that attack your heart….Self-control and
strenuous effort curb desire; hesychia and intense longing (eros) for God wither it…Hesychia, prayer, love
and self-control are a four-horsed chariot bearing the intellect to heaven”. On Love, Self-control and Life in
accordance with the Intellect, 1: 22, 24; 2: 21, Philokalia, Vol. 2, pp. 308, 314.

4
 The first three petitions of the Great Litany of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy10. define
the scope of the conscious experience of peace: in oneself, from God, and in the world.11
The focus in the Philokalia is emphatically and unreservedly on the ‘peace from above
and the salvation of our souls’. We need make no apology for following the Neptic
Fathers in this approach, which may seem at first glance to give short shrift to the very
real problems of peace in the world and in our personal lives. But this is not the case, for
the Orthodox world-view of the Philokalia, which is at once ascetical and liturgical, at
once cosmological and eschatological (otherworldly), is eminently realistic. While
always seeking the source and method of acquisition of peace in oneself and for the
world, the Neptic Fathers never forget that there can be no true peace of any kind
anywhere if it is not the Peace from above. In this world, we can expect “tribulation”
(John 16:33), but followers of the Prince of Peace must never relinquish the world to the
spirit of tribulation, for our Saviour has overcome the world to become, with his Body the
Church, the real World. The asceticism of the Philokalia is steeped in the liturgical ethos
of Orthodoxy. Equally--and this is a fact that often goes unrecognized--the Divine
Liturgy is entirely grounded in the ascetical spirit of the Philokalia. After we examine the
concept of peace from the standpoint of the Neptic Fathers, we will look--hopefully with
new eyes--at the place of peace in the Liturgy and at the true meaning of the Orthodox
witness for peace in the world.
The teaching of the Philokalia on peace, essentially a millennium and a half of
monastic exegesis of Isaiah, Psalms, John 14:27, 16:33, Gal. 5:22 and Phil. 4:7, cannot
properly be understood without taking into account and even, dare I say it, putting into
practice the fundamental principles and presuppositions of the way of nepsis, that is,
ascetic attention or watchfulness12 as a way of life in which the doctrines of the Church

10
The first of the three petitions for peace in the Great Litany of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
is “in peace, let us pray to the Lord…” The second is “for the peace from above and the salvation of our
souls, let us pray to the Lord…” And the third petition is, “for the peace of the whole world, the good estate
of the Churches of God and the union of all men, let us pray to the Lord…” The response to all three is
“Lord, have mercy.”
11
Cf. Lev Gilet, Serve the Lord with Gladness, Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1990.
12
“Watchfulness is a spiritual method which, if sedulously practiced over a long period, completely frees
us with God’s help from impassioned thoughts, impassioned words and evil actions. It leads, in so far as
this is possible, to a sure knowledge of the inapprehensible God, and helps us to penetrate the divine and
hidden mysteries. It enables us to fulfill every divine commandment in the Old and New Testaments and

5
are activated and, above all, experienced by the three-fold spiritual method of
purification, illumination and perfection.
To anticipate our conclusions, peace as understood in the hesychast perspective is not
a mental concept or a moral principle, but a theophanic presence that can and must be
experienced to be known, a presence that demands a response and a relationship. The ‘lie
that perverts the meaning of peace from within’ is the common and, indeed, ‘religious’
belief that peace is an ethical concept that makes one peaceful, a moral attitude that
makes one a better, i.e., more peaceful, person, a personal virtue. From this perspective,
peace is nothing more than an individual’s ethical orientation. This way of thinking,
however well-intentioned, denies or ignores the relationship with that Presence that is
peace itself, and is thus in fundamental opposition to the authentic Orthodox ethos of the
Philokalia. There used to be a slogan in the peace-movement of some years back that
caught something of this home-truth: “there is no way to peace; peace is the way.” Peace
as theophanic presence is indeed the way of peace, as well as its truth and its life.
Nepsis is the traditional Orthodox response that opens the way to that eirenic
relationship. We will therefore begin by reviewing the essential principles and
presuppositions of the eirenic way of nepsis. This may seem to some readers as an
unnecessary detour away from the subject of peace, but I am convinced—a conviction
confirmed in the witness of the Philokalia--that without an understanding of these
essential principles of therapeutic Orthodoxy, our efforts to promote peace, however
well-meaning, will inevitably have the fruitless character and ineffectiveness of any other
form of moral “rearmament”. Only ascetic attention will allow one to distinguish between
true and false peace. As the Philokalia will make clear, the quest for peace is actually a
matter of life and death. True peace is the transformative encounter with ‘Life in its
quintessence’. The following Orthodox principles, the fundamental bases of thought

bestows upon us every blessing of the age to come. It is, in the true sense, purity of heart, a state blessed by
Christ when He says: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Mt. 5: 8); and one which,
because of its spiritual nobility and beauty—or, rather, because of our negligence—is now extremely rare
among monks. Because this is its nature, watchfulness is to be bought only at a great price. But once
established in us, it guides us to a true and holy way of life. It teaches us how to activate the three aspects
of our soul correctly, and how to keep a firm guard over the senses. It promotes the daily growth of the four
principle virtues, and is the basis of our contemplation.” St. Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and
Holiness, in The Philokalia, vol. I, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p,
162.

6
without which the teachings of the cannot be truly understood, are the sole and God-
inspired means of exorcising, cleansing and liberating the idea of peace from all demonic
lies.
Presuppositions for understanding the Neptic meaning of peace in the Philokalia
The chief presuppositions of the Philokalic hierarchy of values are grounded in five
basic conceptions: 1) Orthodoxy as the therapeutic way of life; 2) hyperapophatic
hierarchic world-view; 3) doctrine as experience; 4) liturgy as theanthropocosmic
transfiguration; and 5) ascesis as spiritual method based upon “photo-noetic” faith. The
following is a brief discussion of each of these presuppositions.
1) Orthodoxy as the therapeutic way of life. To understand the approach of the
hesychast tradition to the concept of peace, it is first necessary to understand at the outset
that underlying everything in the Philokalia is a precise and distinctive understanding of
Holy Orthodoxy. Holy Orthodoxy, according to the spiritual masters of the Philokalia, is
neither an ideology nor a “religion” as commonly understood, not even the most
“complete” manifestation of the Christian religion. Orthodoxy is a therapeutic way of life
rooted and grounded in the experience of God. The doctrines of the Orthodox Church are
expressions of various aspects of that archetypal Divine experience. Her commandments
are therapeutic formulae for healing the pathologies of the soul that prevent or occlude
that experience of the Divine. Her practices are tried and true methodologies for
attaining, preserving and transmitting the concrete, experiential dynamic state of union
with the holy, co-essential and life-creating Trinity.
Humanity’s sickness is sin, but this statement must be understood ontologically, not
morally. If understood morally alone, any attempt at cure will be at best a sinecure,
because the moral approach will not heal. The ontological sickness of sin is separation
from God, and its accompanying disunity and division throughout all dimensions of life.
Efforts at becoming a “better” person in a moral sense cannot cure the sickness of
separation from God; the moral approach is the medical equivalent of trying to heal the
symptoms rather than addressing the cause of the disease. In human beings, this sickness
manifests as the darkening of the nous and its dissipation throughout the sensible order,
the division and disharmony of the powers of the soul, and the passibility, corruptibilty

7
and mortality of the body. All of these conditions result in a radical dis-ease or absence of
the primordial peace that is our God-intended birthright.
Humanity’s cure consists of the therapeutic way of life of Holy Orthodoxy by which
the ontological disease of sin is actually healed. The healing process begins with the
practice of the commandments, leading to the acquisition of the virtues (again understood
in an ontological, rather than merely a moral sense), which bears fruit in the illumined
contemplation of creation and culminates in sustained communion with God. This
process is based on the three universal stages of cure, namely, purification, illumination
and deification. The actual conditions which must be accomplished to obtain true healing
are the return of the nous to the heart by a process of purification and illumination, the
unification and harmonization of the powers of the soul and the restoration of the image
and likeness of God even in the body. The spiritual conditions which result from this
process are spiritual knowledge, divine love and profound peace.
The Philokalia’s sense of the certainty of spiritual knowledge (gnosis) is total,
stunning, and almost incomprehensible to our modern mentality, inescapably steeped as it
is in rationalism, pluralism and relativism. To understand aright the ascetic, hesychastic
writers, even contemporary Orthodox Christians predisposed to honoring the Philokalia
as a great compendium of spiritual wisdom must learn not to trust habitual modern
understandings of things.13 We must be willing to detach ourselves from whatever
contemporary presuppositions that we may hold as children of this age in order to realize
the clarity, delicacy, precision, subtlety, profundity and power of the spiritual and
psychological insights developed by the Eastern Orthodox spiritual masters, heirs of
nearly 2000 years of ascetic tradition. This profound spiritual psychology, born of
centuries of the most intense observation of the human psyche under all possible

13
A particular difficulty for the contemporary reader is the fact that words often change their meaning over
time. A change in the meaning of a word is a change in consciousness--that is, in that of which one is
consciously aware. Sometimes the change may be in the “level” of consciousness--that is, in the depth,
breadth and height of the awareness The spiritual masters of the Philokalia often use common, ordinary
words (essence, substance, person, knowledge, habit, attention, discrimination, dispassion, doctrine,
intellect, participation, passion, prayer, watchfulness, etc.) in an extraordinarily precise and powerful way.
It is easy to assume we know what they mean when perhaps the contemporary meaning of the word in
question does not coincide with the patristic meaning. “Substance” for Aristotle meant the underlying
reality of an existent thing; for St. Basil the Great 600 years later, its meaning was transformed by new
theological depth in the light of the Divine Triunity while retaining its metaphysical dimension; for the
contemporary mentality, the meaning of ‘substance’ has lost both metaphysical and theological dimensions,
and has a primarily materialistic meaning: the physical stuff of which something is made.

8
conditions, has developed a technical vocabulary of amazing discriminatory power,
delicacy of psychological discernment and depth of experience. 14 When the great
hesychasts speak of peace, they are speaking of an immediate, tangible experience of
divine gnosis and love.
2) A hyperapophatic, hierarchic world-view. The commitment of the hesychast mind
(phronema) to a theocentric, trinitarian hierarchic world-view that is not merely
conceptual but experiential and participable is absolute, utterly uncompromising and
unwavering in every respect. By hyperapophatic I mean the tension in reciprocity
between the two fundamental theological ways of denial (apophasis), affirmation
(cataphasis) and that which is beyond both denial and affirmation (hyperphasis) which
are always at work in Orthodox theology and thus in the worldview that stems from it. In
the Orthodox world-view, everything, under pain of non-existence, is grounded in,
depends upon and participates in God, who is absolutely transcendent and utterly
immanent, beyond being, participation, and knowing. An Orthodox hierarchical
worldview seems to posit a ‘great chain of being’, while at the same time radically
undermining any substantialist view of the hierarchic ‘chain’ by its insistence on the
totality of the Divine transcendent-immanence: the Holy Spirit is a ‘heavenly King who
is ‘everywhere present and fillest all things.’
Hierarchy in the Orthodox tradition thus has a much different meaning than its
contemporary connotation of a fixed top-down authority structure. St. Dionysius the
Areopagite gives the Orthodox understanding of hierarchy thusly: "A hierarchy is a
sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as
possible to the Divine".15 Note the three key terms: 1) an order, or state of being; 2) an
understanding, or state of knowing; 3) an activity, or state of doing--here are the three
basic theological dimensions of the question: ontological, epistemological and
cosmological. Now look at the following phrase. What does Dionysius mean by
"approximating as closely as possible to the Divine"? His very next sentence gives the
explanation: "It is uplifted to the imitation of God in proportion to the enlightenments
14
An excellent analysis of the relationship between consciousness and words and meaning may be found
in the works of Owen Barfield, a life-long friend and intellectual sparring partner of C. S. Lewis. See
especially Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1957).
15
St. Dionysios the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy 3,1, (PG 3--164D).

9
divinely given to it.” The key terms here are: 1) uplifted;16 2) imitation17; 3)
enlightenments18. He then goes on to describe the Divine Beauty, its unity and simplicity,
how it uplifts through sacramental enlightenment by imitation, which is nothing but the
conformation of the creature to Beauty as grace:
The beauty of God--so simple, so good, so much the source of perfection--is completely
uncontaminated by dissimilarity. It reaches out to grant every being, according to merit a
share of light and then through a divine sacrament, in harmony and in peace, it bestows
on each of those being perfected its own form".19

A hyperapophatic hierarchy, therefore, according to Dionysius, is created to uplift by

means of grace given to the imitators of God, who are initiated by enlightenments (ie,
experiences of the uncreated graces and energies of God) into the beauty of God which
bestows its own form (unknowable and unparticipable in its own essence) on every
member of the hierarchy by means of the sacramental action which perfects the image in
unity. The foregoing explanation is spelled out clearly by Dionysius in the next section of
Chapter 3:
The goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to
be at one with Him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding and action. It
is forever looking directly at the comeliness of God. A hierarchy bears in itself the mark
of God. Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear
and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God Himself. It
ensures that when its members have received the full and divine splendor they can then
pass on this light generously and in accordance with God's Will to beings further down
the scale".20

The order, understanding and activity of the hierarchy is the sanctifying beauty of the
Divine image, revealed simultaneously in the being of the hierarchy, in the knowing of
the hierarchy and in the activity of the hierarchy. A hierarchy is not just a 'chain of
command'; or an organizational chart representing a system of authority that is imposed
from above upon a mass of individuals who are not part of the authority structure but are

16
The purpose of all hierarchy, according to Dionysios, is to raise all its participants to the Divine.
17
Theomimesis: the root word in Greek is mimesis [imitation], a fundamental term in the patristic
understanding of the relationship between archetype and image, and of the participability of the cosmos
18
Dionysios’ term for the experience of the uncreated energies of God.
19
Ibid.
20
Cel. Hier.3,2 (PG 3-165A).

10
subject to its authority and rule. Such an aridly sociological conception of hierarchy,
which represents the contemporary view of the matter, is totally alien to the Dionysian,
Eastern Orthodox conception. In the Dionysisan Orthodox understanding, hierarchy is an
entire order in creation, an ecology, if you will, which includes all its members in organic
unity and diversity. Peace, understood hierarchically, is the effect of the beauty of God
bestowing its own form--although unknowable and unparticipable in its own essence--on
every member of the hierarchy by means of the sacramental action which perfects the
image in unity.
3) Doctrine as experience. The philokalic concept of doctrine is irreducibly experiential,
to a degree without precedent or complement in modern sensibility. Doctrine that is not
warranted by experience, or that cannot be experienced directly as spiritual knowledge
(gnosis), or that is incapable of transforming human nature and transfiguring the cosmos,
is inconceivable to these saints. More precisely, it is inconceivable to the hesychasts that
any doctrine unwarranted by experience could possibly be true. We will find an equally
experiential orientation, both precise and profound, in the philokalic understanding of
peace.
The first principle of hesychasm, to repeat, is Orthodoxy, which may be summed up
as the unity in the Church of doctrine, method and experience: orthodoxy equals doctrine
plus method (praxis) times experience (peira). The great fourteenth century hesychast, St.
Gregory of Sinai, defines this all-embracing principle of the teaching of these Neptic
Fathers as follows
Orthodoxy may be defined as the clear perception and grasp of the two dogmas of the
faith, namely, the Trinity and the Duality. It is to know and contemplate the three Persons
of the Trinity as distinctively and indivisibly constituting the one God, and the divine and
human natures of Christ as united in His single Person.21

Note that the primary emphasis is not on the verbal forms of dogma, but is directly on
perception, the act of knowing and the experience of “contemplation” or vision (theoria).
Orthodoxy is first clear perception and grasp, followed by doctrinal expression. Of
course, the precise formulation of doctrine is also of equal importance to the Philokalic
Fathers. The prominence in the Philokalia of masters of dogma such as St. Maximos the

21
St Gregory of Sinai, On Commandments and Doctrines 26, English translation by Palmer, Sherrard,
Ware in The Philokali a, vol. 4 (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 217.

11
Confessor and St. Gregory Palamas, plus innumerable references to the Cappadocian
Fathers, prove that. Yet even here the emphasis upon experience is central, because the
writers of the Philokalia never forget that the precision of doctrinal expression, such as
the Chalcedonian22 definitions, for example, are intended to function as a safeguard for
the Divine experience rather than mere correctness of expression. Orthodoxy for St.
Gregory the Sinite is thus not simply a matter of rationalistic adherence to accepted
doctrinal formulae but is rather an epistemic participation in the reality expressed by the
doctrine and an experiential, hypostatic realization of this reality in ascesis,
contemplation, spiritual knowledge, peace and love23. A great contemporary Orthodox
theologian who is steeped in the Philokalic mind has called this participation in the reality
of Orthodox doctrine the ‘dogmatic consciousness’ of the Fathers of the Church24.
4) Liturgy as theanthropocosmic25 transfiguration. Complete Orthodoxy includes as
well a fully activated and effective liturgical dimension that reveals through the
Incarnation of the God-man the mutual co-inherence of God, man and nature as a truly
spiritual knowledge and transfiguring love in the soul. We find this micro-macro-
metacosmic understanding of the liturgy expressed in the Mararian Homilies:
The whole visible arrangement of the Church of God came to pass for the sake of the
living and intelligible being of the rational soul that was made according to the image of
God which is the living and true Church of God….for the Church of Christ and temple of
God and true altar and living sacrifice is the man of God, through whom the thing
sanctified bodily obtained the invocation of the heavenly. For just as the worship and

22
The Council of Chalcedon (451) did not define the mystery of Christ, the God-man, in positive terms, but
in negative ones. The ‘hypostatic union’ of God and man in Christ is a mystery that must be acknowledged
in two natures that undergo ‘no confusion, no change, no division, no separation’. These four negative
adverbs safeguard the integrity of the natures of both God and humanity in our understanding, thus keeping
free from all distortion the path of divinisation (theosis) which was opened for us by Christ’s Incarnation.
23
Ibid., On Commandments and Doctrines 136, 25, pp. 251, 217. That there is more than conventional
doctrinal conformity in St. Gregory’s understanding of Orthodoxy is underlined by the saint elsewhere in
the same work when he adds cosmological, gnoseological and contemplative aspects to his definition of
Orthodoxy. “Complete” orthodoxy in the patristic, neptic tradition must include an effective spiritual
knowledge (gnosis) that not only reveals the kingdom of heaven within but also and at the same time
reveals the cosmos without to be a revelation of God, and, indeed, imbedded in God.
24
Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994).
25
A word coined by the late Orthodox theologian, Philip Sherrard, to refer to the unity of God, Man and
Nature in Patristic cosmology. Principle translator of the Greek Philokalia into English, Sherrard was
himself an outstanding modern exponent of Patristic theology, especially its synthesis of trinitarian
theology, Christology, cosmology and ascetic spirituality as found in figures such as Sts..Dionysios the
Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor and Symeon the New Theologian.

12
mode of life of the Law were a shadow of the present Church of Christ, just so is the
present and visible Church a shadow of the rational and true inner man.26

The boldness of this vision of the centrality of the human state in creation is almost
shocking to our contemporary sensibility, so indoctrinated against claiming any special
status for humanity. But St. Macarios had no such qualms. In harmony with the patristic
tradition, he gives full theoanthropocosmic value to the doctrine of humanity created in
the image and likeness of God. ‘Visible arrangement’ (oikonomia) is a term used by the
Fathers to refer to the cosmos as created by God. In the vision of St. Macarios, not only is
the Church a cosmos, or, more accurately, the transformed and transfigured
macrocosmos, but it is a universe that exists for the sake of man, the image of God, the
microcosmos. Note that according to Macarios both man and the Church possess the
character of being the image of God; yet because the Divine Logos himself has assumed
human nature, the centrality of the theomorphic image-nature rests principally with man.
Yet not just any man, but the ‘man of God’, first the theo-anthropos Himself, then
through Him man deified as a result of the liturgical synergy of God and man. For the
true Church of Christ, the temple of God, the true altar and the living sacrifice is the man
of God, who is in union with the God-man, and who thus obtains the heavenly power to
sanctify bodily things. This is an astonishing vision of the spiritual heights possible in the
human state.
Even more striking is the manner in which St. Macarios sees the traditional
shadow/image symbolism used by the Fathers to link the Old and New Covenants as an
analogy of the relationship between the present and visible Church and the rational
(logikos)27 and true inner man (eso anthropos). If the present and visible one, holy,
catholic and apostolic Church is a shadow of the ‘true, inner man, that figure must
represent not only the highest possibilities of redeemed humanity, but also suggests the
perfection of human nature in the eschaton, of which the foretaste is the peace that passes
understanding. In all this, St. Macarios is a direct precursor of the liturgical vision of St.
Maximos the Confessor.

26
Homily 52.1; See Alexander Golitzin’s article ‘Hierarchy versus Anarchy’, SVTQ 38.2 (1994), 131-179,
for English translation of this most important homily of St. Macarios.
27
The English word ‘rational’ does not convey the providential symbolism (to the Greek mind) of the word
logikos, which in its very form suggests its origin in the Logos.

13
 St. Maximos the Confessor in his Mystagogia, which is a commentary on the Divine
Liturgy itself, links sacred science, spiritual knowledge, transfiguring love and holy peace
in a liturgical contemplation that unites God, man and the whole natural world in a
process of transfiguring deification. He writes:
For thought is the act and manifestation of the mind28 related as effect to cause, and
prudence is the act and manifestation of wisdom, and action of contemplation, and virtue
of knowledge and faith of enduring knowledge. From these is produced the inward
relationship to the truth and the good, that is, to God, which he [St. Maximos’ teacher,
the ‘great elder’] used to call divine science, secure knowledge, love and peace in which
and by means of which there is deification.29

We will return to this important text later on when we discuss the primacy of “the peace
from above” in the liturgy. Participation in the Divine Liturgy as a formative experience
is a fundamental presupposition of the Neptic Fathers. For liturgy is the method by which
the mind, the soul and the body of the Christian are unified and transfigured with the
visible and invisible cosmos and led up the ladder of deification, the ultimate goal of the
Orthodox Church and the ultimate experience of God for the individual ascetic. Again we
notice the emphasis on knowledge and experience. For the Neptic Fathers of the
Philokalia, the earthly church at worship is both the image of the new man transfigured in
Christ, and also of cosmos itself transfigured by Christ, just as the earthly liturgy is a

28
Intellect—reason—mind: these three words have similar and overlapping meanings in contemporary
English that tend to coincide in the direction of discursive rationality grounded in sense data. Patristic
Greek, however, makes a clear distinction between the discursive reason (dianoia) and the faculty of direct
apprehension or spiritual perception (nous). This distinction was also known in the West as we can see
from Latin which distinguishes between intellegere, to perceive, from which English gets ‘intellect’, and
ratio, from reri, to think, from which comes English ‘reason’. Western theology in the middle ages,
generally speaking, understood the distinction between ‘intellect’ and ‘reason’ in a similar manner to the
Greek. Unfortunately this very useful distinction gradually got lost during centuries following the
Renaissance and the so-called Enlightenment. The translators of the Philokalia, faced with its absolutely
consistent witness of the crucial importance for spiritual discernment of the distinction between immediate
apprehension (nous) and discursive rationality (dianoia) chose--rightly, in my view--to recover this vital
distinction and to restore to “intellect” its original meaning of the faculty of direct, immediate perception.
Unfortunately, the translators or the otherwise excellent book, Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder
Joseph the Hesychast, have failed to discern the importance of this rediscovery and have linked “intellect”
solely with dianoia and nous solely with the far more ambiguous “mind”, thus obscuring a crucially
important distinction. The word ‘mind’ in contemporary English has a range of meanings, but it can carry a
meaning that is close to the patristic ‘nous’, and in some cases it may be preferable to use ‘mind’ rather
than ‘intellect’. Cf. Monastic Wisdom (St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998), pp. 410-11.
29
St. Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogy 5, English translation found in Berthold, Maximos Confessor:
Selected Writings,(Paulist Press). pp. 193-194. See also Dom Julian Stead, O.S.B., The Church, the Liturgy
and the Soul of Man: The Mystagogia of St. Maximus the Confessor ( Still River,MA:St. Bede’s
Publications, 1982).

14
reflection/imitation of the cosmic and celestial liturgies. St. Maximos’ liturgical master
was St. Dionysios the Areopagite, who writes in this regard:
It would not be possible for the human intellect30 to be ordered with that immaterial
imitation of the heavenly hierarchies unless it were to use the material guide that is
proper to it [the liturgy], reckoning the visible beauties as reflections of the invisible
splendor, the perceptible fragrances as impressions of the intelligible distribution, the
material lights an icon of the immaterial gift of light, the sacred and extensive teaching
[of the scriptures] an image of the mind’s intelligible fulfillment, the exterior ranks of the
clergy [an image] of the harmonious and ordered habit of mind [hexis] which leads to
divine things, and [our partaking] of the most divine Eucharist [an icon] of our
participation in Jesus.31

The liturgical dimension of the writers of the Philokalia presupposes also the concepts of
hierarchy, macrocosm/microcosm and archetype/image, applicable alike in the human,
cosmic and celestial spheres of being. This agrees with St. Gregory’s expression of
“complete” Orthodoxy as a principle and presupposition of the Philokalia:
Complete doctrinal orthodoxy consists in a true doctrine about God and an unerring
spiritual knowledge of created things…a right [orthodox] view of created things depends
upon a truly spiritual knowledge of visible and invisible realities. Visible realities are
objects perceived by the senses, while invisible realities are noetic, intelligent, intelligible
and divine.”32

“Complete doctrinal orthodoxy,” then, according to the Philokalic tradition, is profoundly

experiential, linking theology, cosmology and anthropology in a participative, salvific,
liturgical and illuminative knowledge33, which can not be grasped by the reason alone but
only be understood, realized and adhered through the transformation of the whole man,
spirit, soul and body. Orthodoxy in its fullness is the experiential realization of God in the
heart through the uncreated energy of grace revealed in the Incarnation of Christ and

30
See note 28.
31
St. Dionysios the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy I.3, PG 3, 121C-124A. For this citation and much
else relating to the Areopagite and to St. Symeon the New Theologian, I am indebted to Alexander
Golitzin’s excellent article “Hierarchy Versus Anarchy? Dionysius Areopagita, Symeon the New
Theologian, Nicetas Stethatos, and Their Common Roots In Ascetical Tradition”, St. Vladimir’s
Theological Quarterly, 1994.
32
Ibid., On Commandments and Doctrines, 136, 25, pp. 251, 217.
33
“Knowledge” in English lacks the depth and richness of what is meant by gnosis in the Philokalia. The
state referred to is a knowledge that is also love (agape) (agapistic gnosis), or, better, a love that is also
knowledge (gnostic agape). Both knowledge and love in, for example, St. Maximos the Confessor,
invariably imply for their acquisition a transformed state of being. Thus whether speaking of knowledge or
love, always in the Confessor there is the ternary, being-knowledge-love. Cf. Char. 1:1, 1:4, 1:9, 1:12,
1:27; 4:56-57; 4: 59, 60, 61, 62.

15
manifested in the divinization of man. St. Gregory of Sinai, uniting here the theological,
cosmological and anthropological dimensions of Orthodox soteriology, summarizes the
complete Orthodox principle in a trinitarian sense thusly:
God reveals and manifests Himself in all things in a threefold manner. In Himself He is
undetermined; but through the Son in the Holy Spirit He sustains and watches over all
things. And wherever He expresses Himself, none of the three Persons is manifest or to
be perceived apart from or without the other two.

In man there is intellect (nous), consciousness and spirit. There is neither intellect
without consciousness nor consciousness without spirit: each subsists in the others and in
itself. Intellect expresses itself through consciousness and consciousness is manifest
through the spirit. In this way man is a dim image of the ineffable and archetypal Trinity,
disclosing even now the divine image in which he is created.

When the divine fathers expound the doctrine of the supraessential, holy and
supranatural Trinity, they illustrate it by saying that the Father truly corresponds to the
intellect, the Son to the consciousness and the Holy Spirit to the spirit. Thus they
bequeath to us the dogma of one God in three Persons as the hallmark of the true faith
and the anchor of hope. For, according to Scripture, to apprehend the one God is the
root of immortality, and to know the majesty of the three-personed Monad is complete
righteousness. Again, we should read what is said in the Gospel in the same way: eternal
life is to know Thee the only true God in three Persons, and Him whom Thou has sent,
Jesus Christ, in two natures and two wills.34

An Orthodox understanding of peace must in a direct way reflect and reveal this patristic,
hesychastic understanding of Orthodoxy.
5) Ascesis or ‘photo-noetic’ faith-in-action as spiritual method. United indivisibly
with the doctrinal principle of Orthodoxy is its indispensable spiritual method, or mode of
its activation, photo-noetic, synergistic faith-in-action: ascesis. The authentic asceticism
of the Orthodox Tradition, born in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, is not merely a
form of activity for the chosen few, but it is that intelligible-light-imbued (photo-noetic)
faith in action required of everyone. The faith of the Philokalia is not merely belief that
can be expressed in words alone, but it is an activity built upon belief that has been
energized by conscious experience. For St. Gregory (and the whole Orthodox ascetic
tradition) the meaning of faith has unusual plenitude and depth. Note, for example, that
“righteousness” of faith is characteristically linked with knowledge: “to know the majesty
of the three-personed Monad is complete righteousness.” The righteousness of faith is not

34
Ibid., On Commandments and Doctrines, 30-32, p. 218.

16
mere logical conformity of belief or the fulfillment of juridical requirements laid down by
an omnipotent power, but living faith in action. Righteousness implies activity, doing,
praxis. It is an understanding of faith that is more a verb than a noun35. Faith in action is
the activation of the deifying synergy between God and man: an initiation through
imitation (mimesis)36, participation (metousia/methexis)37, contemplation (phusiki)38,
vision (theoria)39, illumination (ellampsis)40 and union (theologia)41 of the soul into the
experience of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, the uncreated energies of God as living
realities in the present life. The uncreated energies of God are His Divine Names, or
attributes, which, when participated in by the soul, provide an experience that effects and
transfigures every sphere of created existence. St. Gregory of Sinai gives us a definition
of this pistic principle of spiritual activation, which differs drastically from the ordinary
religious notion of faith:

35
It is not coincidental that in Greek, unlike English, faith can be a verb: pisteo. Translating pisteo as ‘to
have faith,’ as is usually done, keeping faith as a noun, is actually to lose the dynamic active sense of the
Greek verb.
36
St. Dionysios the Areopagite, Divine Names 4:10, PG 4-708B; St. Maximos the Confessor, Cemturies on
Love (Char.) 4: 55, op cit., p. 107; Ibid., Quaestiones ad Thalassium (Q. Thal.) 65, PG 90-765C.
37
St. Maximos the Confessor, First Century of Various Texts 7, in Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 165.
38
St. Maximos the Confessor, Char. 1: 94; 97, op. cit., p. 64; Theol. 1: 70, p. 128; 2:16, p. 141; 2:96, p.
163; Q. Thal 27, 90-356B, op.cit., p. 186. Phusiki is true contemplation in the patristic, hesychastic sense,
communicating a knowledge of created things in their essence as logoi united in the Supreme Logos. When
combined with theoria, it is often translated as “natural contemplation”, but such contemplation entails, not
the enjoyment of the outward beauties of nature so much as knowledge of the inward essences (logoi) of
created things, which reveal the Divine Beauty in nature. Natural contemplation also requires a significant
degree of mastery of the discipline of nepsis. Cf.
39
Among the hundreds of references in the Philokalia and throughout the patristic writings to vision-
theoria, a good example is St. Maximos, First Century on Theology (Theol.) 83, op. cit., p. 132, Theoria
is often translated as “contemplation”, which word in its Western connotation loses something of the
immediateness of the experience of vision which the Greek word suggests.
40
CH 3:1—164D. , Rorem/Lubheid, p. 153. Ellampsis refers to the direct experience of the uncreated
energies of God in and as intelligible light.
41
St. Maximos the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, op. cit., p. 287; ibid., Theol. 2: 38-39, p. 147; Ibid.,
Fourth Century of Various Texts, 14, p. 238; ibid., 80, p. 255; ibid., Ambiguia, PG 91-1241CD; St.
Thalassios the Libyan, On Love, Self-Control and Life in accordance with the Intellect 4: 62, 74, 75, 78, 80,
in The Philokalia, vol. 2, pp. 328-30. Beginning with the writings of Evagrios, a great many citations from
the patristic and hesychastic writers could be cited, giving the identical teaching as the citations from St.
Maximos above. Theologia, in the Evagrian/Maximian sense, is universally understood by all the writers of
the Philokalia to mean the full realization of spiritual knowledge, the fruit of the attainment of “pure
prayer”, the transcending of all human modes of perception and knowledge in a mystical union with God in
the Divine Darkness. It is in this sense that we are to understand the well-known saying of Evagrios of
Pontos that “If you are a theologian you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (On
Prayer 61, in The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 62). To be a theologian in this sense is a rare and exalted state,
requiring the acquisition of “stillness” (hesychia), dispassion (apatheia) and pure prayer, yet it is a striving
to which all Christians are called: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Mt.
5:48).

17
Grace-imbued faith, energized by the Spirit through our keeping of the commandments,
alone suffices for salvation, provided we sustain it and do not opt for a dead and
ineffectual faith rather than for a living and effective faith in Christ. To embody and give
life to an effective faith in Christ is all we need to do as believers. But nowadays we who
call ourselves orthodox believers have in our ignorance imbibed not the faith imbued
with grace but a faith that is merely a matter of words, dead and unfeeling.42

For the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, faith is not merely rational agreement with
orthodox doctrine, but is the literal ‘substance of things hoped for’. St. Mark the Ascetic
(5th c.) writes: “There is faith ‘that comes by hearing’ (Rom. 10:17) and there is faith that
‘is the substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1)43. The inward experience (the hoped-
for reality) of the uncreated energy of grace (substance) is a heavenly gift which,
although not dependent on our actions, is nevertheless linked to our activity by the
synergy which underlies the relationship of Divine Archetype and human image. Grace-
imbued faith, as opposed to ignorant, ineffectual faith, is ‘energized by the Holy Spirit
through our keeping of the commandments’. This divine-human synergy is that conscious
cooperation between man and God that the Tradition calls asceticism. Asceticism, rightly
understood and rightly practiced as the ground of prayer and contemplation, produces the
“evidence of things not seen”. As such, synergy is the basis for the universal emphasis in
the Philokalic tradition upon the keeping of the commandments and the acquisition of the
virtues as indispensable steps toward the “drawing down” of grace, which energizes the
soul with Divine life, light and peace.
The remarkable consistency of the teaching of the Philokalia on
faith/action/asceticism can be seen in the following passage from St. Isaac the Syrian,
written six centuries before the Sinite saint:
I do not call this faith, that a man believes in the discrimination of the adorable hypostases of the
Essence, or in the properties of His nature, or in the amazing government regarding humanity
consisting in His accepting our nature. But I call this faith: the intelligible light which by grace
dawns in the soul and, without leaving room for doubt, supports the heart by the testimony of the
mind, namely by the persuasion of hope which is far from all presumptions and not by tradition
from hearsay. This light will show the spiritual eyes of the soul the hidden mysteries which are in
the soul, and the secret riches of divinity which are concealed from the eyes of fleshly men and
are revealed spiritually to those who at the table of Christ are brought up in meditation upon His
laws; as He says: If ye keep my commandments, I shall send you the Spirit, the Comforter, whom

42
Ibid., On Commandments and Doctrines 28, p. 217.
43
St. Mark the Ascetic, No Righteousness by Works 100, in The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 133.

18
the world cannot receive, and He will guide you into all truth (Jn.16:13).44

Knowledge married to faith is a higher state of knowing grounded in intelligible light.

The energy or activity that will propel the knowing subject to perceive this higher state of
being through a higher state of knowing is, according to St. Isaac, the photonoetic
energy-activation of faith45. When the photonoetic energy of faith is added to or married
with the dianoetic acts of experiencing, understanding and judging, something
extraordinary happens to knowledge. While remaining the same in its objective essence
and substance, it is transformed in the subject through the light-infused energy of faith. It
is, as St. Isaac says, “knowledge as it ought to be,”46 a noetic operation or energy that
awakens higher powers of the soul, intensifies knowledge, activates the spiritual senses,
actualizes the capacity for virtue, illuminates body and soul, and lifts the human person
toward Christ through the influence of the Holy Spirit, in whom only is true peace found.
Faith in the thought of St. Isaac the Syrian as with St. Gregory of Sinai and all the
rest of the Neptic Fathers is thus not to be understood solely according to its usual
connotations as mere belief in what is not known or non-rational commitment to religious
doctrines or even as informed, rational agreement with creedal statements. Faith,
according to the great elder, Isaac, is a noetic energy, more subtle than first degree
knowledge [based on reason and the senses] as such knowledge is more subtle than
deeds, realized in spiritual insights through the naked activity of the soul,47 an intelligible
light of intellect-soul that produces certainty, a gift of grace that awakens the spiritual
senses to the hidden mysteries in the soul. St. Gregory of Sinai illustrates the relationship

44
Isaac of Nineveh, Mystic Treatises, trans. A.J. Wen n sinck, (Wiesbaden: Martin Sandig oHG, 1969), p.
252.
45
According to the teaching of St. Isaac the Syrian, everything knowable may be known or apprehended on
three distinct and ascending levels. This gives a greater precision and dimensionality to the usual division
of knowledge into practical and theoretical; in this gnosiology based on the spiritual psychology of
hesychasm, both practical and theoretical knowledge may be experienced in three ascending modes,
accessible to 1) reason; 2) faith; and 3) grace. From this we conclude that for St. Isaac knowledge is a state
of being accompanied by a state of consciousness in which the object being known and the knowing subject
are in a state of unity.
46
Ibid.
47
The Ascetical Homilies, 52, p. 262.

19
of faith and knowledge by positing an analogy between the commandments, virtues and
grace, and the nature of man as soul-body complex48:
The whole complex of the commandments united and knit together in the Spirit has its
analogue in man, whether his state is perfect or imperfect. The commandments are the
body. The virtues—established inner qualities—are the bones. Grace is the soul that lives
and vivifies, energizing the vital power of the commandments just as the soul animates
the body.49

It is essential to keep the foregoing presuppositions and principles in mind as we explore

the teaching of the ascetic masters and holy elders on peace. Having reviewed, however
briefly, some of the basic presuppositions of the Orthodox neptic world-view, we are
hopefully better prepared to understand the Philokalic understanding of peace.

The Scriptural context of the ascetic exegesis of peace

1. Peace in the Old Testament. Peace in Scripture is a vast subject in itself. Here we
must confine ourselves to a few observations. There are hundreds of references to peace
in the Bible. The Fathers of the Philokalia tend to refer primarily to texts from the
Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels and the Epistles. These seem on the surface to be typically
Christian preferences, and of no special significance. The true significance of these
textual choices for our study, however, lies in the unfolding of the deeper meaning of
peace in the texts of Scripture itself. This unfolding consciousness cannot be seen merely
by looking at the Hebrew word for peace, shalom, or the Greek word, eirene, but it may
be seen in its Scriptural context and in the kind of texts actually chosen by the Fathers for
exegesis. We see the Patristic phronema in action and the Holy Spirit at work in the
Church in the texts chosen for exegesis. Through these texts we may discern an unfolding
or procession of the meaning of peace that can actually be seen in the texts themselves.
There is a progression in the Scriptural awareness of the Divine basis of peace that is as

48
The analogy between human nature and the virtues goes back at least as far as Origen, was further
developed in an orthodox direction by St. Maximos the Confessor, and fully elaborated by St. Symeon the
New Theologian. This analogy was understood very realistically in the patristic tradition. Just as biological
man is composed of body, bones and soul, so theological man is composed of-and really is--a spiritual
being the flesh, bones and soul of which are commandments, virtues and grace. This analogy culminates in
the idea--found prominently in St. Maximos-- that Christ himself is incarnate in the inner man by means of
the commandments through the virtues.
49
Ibid., On Commandments and Doctrines 20, p. 216.

20
striking as it is ignored and unrecognized by contemporary scholarship. It is a progression
in meaning and in consciousness, in depth, breadth and height, toward a recognition of
the experience of God in peace. The experience of God in peace culminates as the
experience of God as peace.
By far the great majority of the hundreds of references to peace in the Hebrew
Scriptures of the Old Testament starting from Genesis, fall into four or five basic
categories: 1) going or coming “in peace”; 2) refraining from conversation or rebuttal or
“holding one’s peace”; 3) the many references to the “peace offering”; 4) peace as
opposed to war in relations among kingdoms or nations; and 5) the blessing or greeting,
‘peace be with you’.
The first reference to an understanding of peace as somehow related to the
experience of God suddenly appears, “out of the blue,” as it were, in Judges 6:24: ‘Then
Gideon built an altar there to the LORD, and called it, The LORD is peace.’ Up to this
point, all occurrences of peace in the Bible were of the five basic types previously
described. From this point on, there is a gradual increase of references to peace as a
blessing that comes from God. Peace as a divine blessing is especially apparent in the
Psalms. Here are a few examples: Psalm 29:11: ‘The LORD will give strength unto his
people; the LORD will bless his people with peace.’ Psalm 37:11 ‘But the meek shall
inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace’; Psalm 37:37:
‘Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace’
Still in the Psalms, we discover the appearance of another motif, like a counterpoint
to the main melody, namely the association of peace with righteousness and the keeping
of the commandments of God: Psalm 72:7: ‘In his days shall the righteous flourish; and
abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth’; Psalm 85:10: ‘Mercy and truth are
met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other’; Psalm 119:165: ‘Great
peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them’. Here we have the
Scriptural warrant for the patristic and hesychastic insistence on linking asceticism with
peace.
When we finally reach the pages of the great prophet Isaiah, we encounter, as a
sudden and powerful epiphany, the revelation of the Messiah as the Prince of Peace: “For
unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his

21
shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The
everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace”50 The other major prophets continue, though
with slightly less intensity, the emphasis upon peace as a blessing from God, the
relationship of righteousness and peace, and peace as a sign or revelation of God’s
presence. With Isaiah 9:6, however, it is revealed to the world that peace is a Name of
God Himself. Upon this revelation of Peace as a Divine Name, the entire
patristic/hesychastic teaching on peace is built.
2. Peace in the New Testament.
Comparing the various English translations of the New Testament, we will find that
the instances of peace in the texts run from a high of 109 found in the King James
Version to 90 in the New American Standard, with the Revised Standard, the New King
James, the New International Version showing 91, 98 and 90 instances respectively. The
reason for the higher number in the King James is the result of using the archaic form ‘to
hold one’s peace’ for to be silent or to refrain from speaking. Minus these phrases, the
King James Version’s instances of the word ‘peace’ are equivalent to the Revised
Standard and the other translations.
The New Testament presents a much more condensed, dynamic and focused picture
of peace. For in the fullness of time (kairos) the very one that was prophesied who would
come bearing the name of peace, the Prince of Peace himself, walks among men.
Although Jesus warned his followers that he came not to bring peace, but division (Luke
12:51) and a sword (Matt. 10:34), he preached the Gospel of peace continually, and
embodied in himself the very essence of peace. In the presence of Christ, the apostles and
disciples experienced peace as a power, a kind of energy emanating from the very person
of the Lord. The Lord Himself actually energized his disciples with the power of peace,
breathed peace upon them, invoking the energeia of peace in a truly unprecedented and
dynamic way. He stilled the elements themselves with the invocation of the single word,
peace. He transformed the conventional salutations, ‘go in peace’ and ‘peace be with
you’ into consecrated invocations of genuine liturgic and theurgic power.
Just as the theurgic power inherent in the very presence of “one of the Holy Trinity”
incarnate upon earth transformed a traditional Jewish ritualistic meal into the Holy

50
Isa. 9:6. See also Isa. 9.7; 26.3,12,;27.5; 32.17.

22
Eucharist, so conventional salutations such as ‘go in peace’ and ‘peace be with you’
became something new and life-giving when coming from the mouth of the Lord. The
‘hello-how are you-goodbye’ salutations of the ancient world, when spoken by Jesus,
who is peace incarnate, were transformed into powerful blessings by the theandric,
uncreated energy of Christ incarnate. When Jesus said to those he had healed, ‘Go in
peace and sin no more,’ it is clear he was not mouthing an ancient bromide, equivalent to
‘don’t worry, be happy,’ but was admonishing the healed one to preserve the grace just
given him, grace that is a felt reality that manifests as the integrating and unifying energy
of peace and a healed body and soul.
In the epistles, beginning with the Acts of the Apostles, we find the powerful
theophany of peace that was the very presence of the incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ, now
transformed by the kerygma of the apostles into the ‘gospel of peace’: ‘The word which
God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (he is Lord of all:)51
The transformation of the supreme preacher whom the Orthodox Tradition calls simply,
‘the Apostle’, from Saul to Paul on the road to Emmaeus, was a supreme epiphany of the
God of peace, of which revelation the Epistles give abundant evidence. Starting with
Romans, every epistle begins with the salutation: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’.52 The Epistle to the Romans in particular is clear
evidence that the Church from its beginning understood that the heart of Christ’s teaching
is that God is a God of peace, that Christ’s message was the Gospel of peace, that the
good news was the opening of the "way of peace’, that it is possible to experience peace
with God53, that to be carnally minded is death but to be spiritually minded is life and
peace54, that the Kingdom of heaven is itself peace and the energy of peace55, and that
those who preach the Gospel of peace are to be received with all enthusiasm and joy56.
The same themes are echoed again and again throughout the other epistles, a clear
testimony both to the overwhelming presence of peace in the experience of being ‘in

51
Acts 10: 36
52
Rm 1:7; 1Cor. 1:2; 2Cor. 1:2; Gal. 1:3; Eph. 1:2; Phil. 1:2, Col. 1:2, etc.
53
Rm. 3:17, 5:1, 15:13, 15:33.
54
Rm. 8:6
55
‘For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost’
(Rm. 14:17).
56
‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things’
(Rm. 10:15).

23
Christ’ as well as the presence and power of the experience of peace in the koinonia of
early Church57.
To return to the Gospel of John, Jesus gives ‘His’ peace to the disciples. The Lord
clearly acknowledges that he is not speaking only metaphorically but is giving his
followers something real, tangible, energetic and hypostatic (that is, a ‘virtue’ that comes
from his very Person). His peace is experientially present in the here and now. He
indicates that he wants the disciples to be fully aware that he is not using conventional
speech—‘not as the world gives, give I unto you’ (Jn. 14: 27). Earlier he indicated that
his peace would be different from the world’s peace by telling his followers not to expect
peace from him but “division” (Lk. 12:51) and ‘a sword (Mt. 10:13). The sword that
Jesus brings is the unseen warfare with the passions, the “world” and the demonic.58 The
division that Jesus brings is the separation of the soul from all that leads to slavery,
sinfulness and unrighteousness. But the peace that the Lord gives not as the world gives
is trinitarian, personal, experiential and divinising: He gives the Father, through Himself,
by the Holy Spirit. The scriptural context itself is revealing and symbolic: the 27th verse
of John 14, in which Jesus gives his peace ‘not as the world gives’ is bracketed by the
26th verse, in which Jesus announces the Comforter, whom the Father will send in His
name, and the 28th verse, in which he declares that his going away is really going to the
Father, so all those who love Him should rejoice. Just as the entire reality of the Divine
Trinity is inherent in the ineffable Incarnation of the Son, so the peace that Christ gives is
a deifying interior revelation of the trinitarian life of grace. As St. Maximos writes in his
Commentary on the Lord's Prayer:
For the whole of the Father and the whole of the Holy Spirit were present essentially and
perfectly in the whole of the Incarnate Son. They themselves did not become incarnate,
but the Father approved and the Spirit cooperated when the Son Himself effected His
incarnation. At the incarnation the Logos preserved His intellect and His life

57
‘Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the
sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will,
working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and
ever. Amen’ (Heb. 13:20-21).

58
Note that the three classic enemies of the spirit, the “world, the flesh and the devil” are the mirror
opposites of the three invocations of peace at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy: peace in oneself, for
whole world, and the peace from above.

24
unimpaired: except by the Father and the Spirit He was not comprehended in essence by
any other being whatsoever, but in His love for men [philanthropia] was united
hypostatically with the flesh.59

The peace that Christ gives is the light-giving, deifying energy of Trinitarian love
transmuted into hypostatic life in the incarnation of the God-Man Christ Jesus. Thus the
whole Trinity is present in each and every one of Its uncreated energies. The peace that
Jesus gives to those who keeps His commandments is thus an uncreated energy that
comes with the ‘approval’ of the Father and the ‘cooperation’ of the Holy Spirit. This
peace, given not as the world gives, is essentially the uncreated energy of Divine grace,
both revealed to us and participated in by us as a Name of God: Peace.

The essence of peace: a Name of God

In the living legacy of the Orthodox Patristic tradition as revealed in the Philokalia,
the highest, most noble human concepts, such as unity, truth, beauty, life, love and peace,
are not conceived as ideals or aspirations only; they are understood to be--and actually
are--concrete experiences. Nor are they merely experiences of psychological states
produced by individual effort. They are objective spiritual realities that embrace while
transcending the human sphere. This is so because the highest and greatest human words
and concepts are, according to the Orthodox patristic tradition, names of God.
A name of God, for the Fathers, is a Divine quality, an uncreated energy of God,
distinct as a quality or attribute yet indivisibly one with the utterly simple Divine Nature.
In the human sphere, a Divine name reveals itself as a gift of grace. A name of God is a
word of power through which, for those capable of receiving it, or for those who have
paid the price of spiritual preparation, the uncreated energy and grace of the whole
Divine Presence may be experienced. In the Divine Names of St. Dionysios the
Areopagite, the locus classicus of patristic teaching on the names of God, St. Dionysios
explains this principle as a preface to his whole work:
In Scripture all the names appropriate to God are praised regarding the whole, entire,
full and complete Divinity rather than any part of it, and that they all refer indivisibly,
absolutely, unreservedly and totally to God in His entirety…I am thinking here of the
59
St. Maximos the Confessor, Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 287.

25
divine works, the worship, the unfailing and inexhaustible Cause, the dispensation of
bountiful gifts. Indeed, it seems to me that only through perversity would anyone, reared
on holy Scripture, deny that the attributes of God refer in all their truth and meaning to
the complete Deity. Therefore…I will take it that whatever divine name is explicated it
refers to the entire Deity.60

In the collected writings of the Philokalia, which span over 1400 years, the most
fundamental meaning of peace is as a name of God. All other uses of this word by the
Neptic Fathers flow from this primary meaning. St. Dionysius outlines the nature of
peace as a Divine name:
The first thing to say is this: God is the subsistence of absolute peace, of peace in
general, and of instances of peace. He brings everything together into a unity without
confusion, into an undivided communion where each thing continues to exhibit its own
specific form and is in no way adulterated through association with its opposite, nor is
anything of the unifying precision and purity dulled. Let us therefore contemplate the one
simple nature of that peaceful unity which joins all things to itself and to each other,
preserving them in their distinctiveness and yet linking them together in a universal and
unconfused alliance…Perfect Peace ranges totally through all things with the simple
undiluted presence of its unifying power. It unites all things, joining the farthest frontiers
with what is in between, binding all with the one homogeneous yoke. It grants the
enjoyment of its presence to the outermost reaches of the universe. It grants unity,
identity, union, communion, and mutual attraction to things, thereby ensuring their
kinship For the divine Peace is indivisible and is revealing of all in a single act and it
permeates the whole world without ever departing from its own identity. It goes out to all
things. It gives of itself to all things in the way they can receive it, and it overflows in a
surplus of its peaceful fecundity. And yet because it is transcendently one it remains in its
own complete and utter unity61

The primary thing to note about this passage is not its neoplatonic language, but its
insistence that all genuine manifestations of peace are in reality manifestations of the
presence of God. The Divine presence is the very essence of peace, and every
manifestation of peace, every instance of peace subsists in God as an epiphany of Divine
energy and being.
The second noteworthy element is the emphasis on unity and in particular on unity
in diversity as the quality that most embodies peace. The unity and harmony of creation
as a whole and of each created being as an individual or a species are the result of or a
manifestation of Divine peace. Peace as a name of God is “perfect peace.” It reveals itself

60
DN 2: 1, P.G. 4, 636C-637D. English translation by Colm Luibheid in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete
Works. The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 59-60.
61
DN 11:2--949C-952B, Luibheid, pp. 122-23.

26
as the cosmic principle that grants ‘unity, identity, union, communion, and mutual
attraction to things, thereby insuring kinship.’62 Peace is thus the ground of being in the
universe, as well as the ground of the being of every created thing. Peace is the name for
the immanent presence of God in all things, the invisible yet indivisible bond that creates,
sustains and preserves all things in their uniqueness, in their kinship and in their common
unity in the Cause of all.
The third noteworthy element in this text is implied in the first two elements: its firm
conviction that peace is both a name for the God-created natural state of each created
entity when and as it acts in accordance with its nature, and also is that state to which
every created being and, in fact, the entire created cosmos as a whole, is called. If God is
peace, and peace is present in all Divine activity, then peace is woven into the fabric of
the entire cosmos and is at the core of each created nature. Each being that exists comes
into being from nothing in accord with the Will and Providence of God, so it can be
rightly seen that peace is the adamantine bridge that unites the created with the uncreated.

The peace that passes all understanding: the peace of Christ.

In the Philokalia itself, there are many references to peace. Most of these references
are given in the context of teachings on various aspects of the spiritual path, the struggle
with the passions, the unseen warfare with demons, the practice of the commandments
and the acquisition of the virtues, the nature and powers of the soul, the art of
discrimination and the discernment of spirits, and so on. While illuminating both
individually and collectively, and we will be referring to many of them later, they are not
specifically intended as definitions of the nature of peace. Perhaps the best definition of
peace that reveals its true nature as the Philokalia understands it may be found in the
writings of St. Peter of Damaskos, an 11th c. spiritual master whose writings occupy
more space in the Philokalia than any other author except St. Maximos the Confessor. In
a work entitled 24 Discourses, St Peter gives a rather complete definition of the nature of
peace according to the Philokalia. It is worth quoting this passage in full:

62
Ibid.

27
When the Lord said to the apostles, ‘My peace I give unto you’, He added ‘not as the
world gives’ (John 14:27). He did not, that is to say, give peace in a simple, conventional
manner, as people do when they greet one another with the words ‘Peace to you’, or as
the Shunammite woman did when she said ‘Peace be with you’ (cf. 2Kgs. 2:23. LXX).
Nor did Christ mean the peace that Elisha had in mind when he told Gehazi to say to the
Shunammite, ‘Is there peace with you’ (cf. 2 Kgs. 4:26 LXX)--in other words, is there
peace with your husband, is there peace with your son? No, Christ’s peace is the peace
which transcends every intellect (cf. Phil. 4:7), and which God gives to those who love
Him with all their soul, because of the dangers and battles they have been through. In the
same spirit the Lord also said, ‘In Me you have peace’, and added ‘In the world you will
experience affliction; but have courage, for I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33). By
this He meant that though a person may experience many afflictions and dangers at the
hands of demons and other men, these will be as nothing if he possesses the Lord’s peace.
Again He said, ‘Be at peace with one another’ (Mark (9:50). The Lord said all these
things to them in advance because they were going to fight and suffer for His sake.
In a similar way each of us faithful is attacked and led astray by the passions; but if he
is at peace with God and with his neighbor he overcomes them all. These passions are
the ‘world’ which St John the Theologian told us to hate (cf. 1 John 2:15), meaning that
we are to hate, not God’s creatures, but worldly desires. The soul is at peace with God
when it is at peace with all men, even if it suffers terrible things at their hands. Because
of its forbearance it is not perturbed, but bears all things (cf. 1 Cor. 13:7), wishes good
to all, loves all, both for God’s sake and for the sake of their own nature. It grieves for
unbelievers because they are destroying themselves, as our Lord and the apostles grieved
for them. It prays for the faithful and labours on their behalf, and in this way its own
thoughts are filled with peace and it lives in a state of noetic contemplation and pure
prayer to God.63
This passage is particularly valuable because it contains in summary the entire scope of
the philokalic teaching on peace. The major New Testament texts on the peace of Christ
(John 14:27, 16:33, Gal. 5:22 and Phil. 4:7) are clearly presented as the center and the
ground of the reality, meaning and experience of peace. A very sharp distinction between
the peace of Christ and all other uses of the word “peace” is made right from the start.
The peace of Christ, the peace that passes understanding, is not the conventional use of
peace as a greeting (“peace be with you”). More significantly, the peace that Jesus gives
is emphatically not peace in the sense of the absence of conflict within an individual’s
personal relations with family, friends and society at large, nor is it by extension merely
natural good relations (in the very best sense of the word) in all the interlocking spheres
of the life of individuals or of society. The peace of Christ is a state of being that
‘transcends the intellect (nous); it is beyond understanding, that is to say, beyond the
expectation or horizon of the natural man, beyond the natural psychological powers of the

63
The Philokalia, vol III, transl., Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), pp. 259-60.

28
most focused and integrated of human beings, beyond the reach of the mind stretched to
the limits of its own powers.
Christ’s peace is a supranatural gift. It is a gift of grace, given—note the important
ascetical qualification—‘to those who love Him with all their soul, because of the
dangers and battles they have been through.’ St. Peter here points to the Philokalic
principle, which the authors of the Philokalia of every century never tire of repeating, that
true peace, the peace that Christ gives, is only won at a great price. It is a gift of grace,
freely offered to all, but it is not cheap grace. The peace of Christ cannot be received
unless the receiver loves God with all his being, which is the only fitting preparation for
such a gift. So there is a price, and that price is the total commitment to spiritual combat
with the effects of fallen nature, both within and without ourselves. The peace of Christ is
given to those willing to engage in wholehearted, implacable, unceasing “unseen
warfare” with the passions and against the demons as a way of life.
St. Peter of Damascus points to Jesus’ warning not to expect to find this kind of
peace in the world (‘in the world, ye shall have tribulation’) followed immediately by his
promise that he, and by implication, his peace, has overcome the world. The ‘world’ that
we are told to hate in Scripture is not the created order, because every created being is
created good and loved as such by God. The world the soul must fight is the world of his
own ‘worldly desires’ and the passions produced by the habitual subjection of the spirit to
the demands of these desires.
At the end of this quotation is an important statement that qualifies the typical ascetic
focus of attention on the individual, and shows that the writers of the Philokalia are not
unaware that the inner state of the individual soul and the outer state of the world as
human community are intimately related. To be at peace with God means also to be at
peace with all men. ‘The soul is at peace with God when it is at peace with all men, even
if it suffers terrible things at their hands. Because of its forbearance it is not perturbed,
but bears all things (cf. 1 Cor. 13:7), wishes good to all, loves all, both for God’s sake
and for the sake of their own nature.” The peace of Christ bears directly on and requires
the fulfillment of the “two great commandments of the Law”, love of God and love of
neighbor. Just as love of neighbor is the only reliable sign of love of God (1 Jn:), so love
of neighbor with total forbearance is the only reliable sign that the soul truly participates
in the peace of Christ.
The ascetic focus on the keeping of the commandments and the acquisition of the
virtues in the experience of the peace of Christ is brought out with unmistakable clarity in
the following passage from St. Maximos the Confessor:

29
He who through the practice of the virtues has succeeded in mortifying whatever is
earthly in him, and who by fulfilling the commandments has triumphed over the world of
the passions within him will experience no more affliction, for he will have already left
the world and come to be in Christ, the conquerer of the world of the passions and the
source of all peace (emphasis added). He who has not severed his attachment to material
things will always experience affliction, since his state of mind depends on things that are
naturally changeable, and so it alters when they do. But he who has come to be in Christ
will be totally impervious to such material change. That is why the Lord says, ‘I have
said these things to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will
experience affliction, but have courage, for I have overcome the world’ (cf. Jn. 16:33). In
other words, ‘in Me the Logos of virtue you have peace for you have been released from
the swirl and turmoil of material objects; in the world—that is, in the state of attachment
to material things, you are afflicted because of the successive changes of these things.’
For both he who practices the virtues and he who loves the world experience affliction,
the first because of the toil which such practice entails and the second because of the
futility of material things. But the affliction of the first is salutary, that of the second
corrupting and destructive. The Lord gives release to both: in the case of the first He
allays the toil of ascetic practice through the contemplation attained through dispassion
and in the case of the second He rescinds attachment to corrupted things by means of
repentance.64

This passage clearly reveals how completely the entire hesychast tradition of the
Philokalia has taken to heart the paradox of the Prince of Peace who comes bringing not
peace, but a sword. This paradox is based on a double ambiguity in the nature of both
peace and war, as the Philokalia understands them. For just as peace admits of an
ambiguity of meaning, as we have seen, so too does the concept of “war”. Just as there is
a false peace, a ‘stillness’ that comes from making a ‘treaty’ with the demons, peace with
the passions through servile submission to the fallen world, so too warfare may be either
good or bad. There is a war that is in accordance with nature, the warfare against the
passions, the demons and the influence of the fallen world. There is also a war that is
contrary to nature, a rebellion against God that St. Maximos calls “the war which we
wage against God through the passions”65. The Confessor calls the aforementioned
‘treaty’ with the demons our ‘evil alliance with the world and its ruler’ in which the evil
that we do is a matter of paying ‘tribute in the form of evil to that cunning tyrant and
murderer of souls, the devil’66.

64
Theol. 2: 95, op.cit., p. 162.
65
Centuries on Various Texts (VT) 1:40, op. cit., p. 172.
66
Ibid., pp.172-73.

30
 St. Maximos is representative of the Philokalic fathers in recognizing Christ to be the
source of all peace and as such the conqueror of the world of the passions. Our
psychologizing age has made us all somewhat hard of hearing when it comes to
appreciating the utter realness of the experience described by the Epistles and the
Philokalia as being “in Christ.” Today’s Christians tend to use the phrase “in Christ”
almost casually--we extend greetings “in Christ” and end our letters with “yours in
Christ” and do and say all manner of things “in Christ”. But are we really “in” Christ or
are we merely using conventionally accepted “Christian” language? It is clear from the
passage above that for St. Maximos, to be in Christ is to enter a different world
altogether.67 To be “in the world” is to be in a state of attachment to material things and
to be in thrall to the passions, which toss us to and fro and “tribulate” us. But to be “in
Christ” is be in a different “cosmos”, utterly beyond the tribulation, affliction and
alteration of “this” world. It is to exist in the Cosmos which is Christ Himself, caught up
in the changeless world of divine dispassion, ‘totally impervious to all material change.’
In Christ true peace exists as the grace that harmonizes and unifies the powers of the soul
as it transfigures the body and raises the nous into illumination and leads it toward the
ineffable unity of deification.
A passage of stunning imagery describing the power and the energy of the
experience of the peace of Christ in the whole man is found in the writings of Elder
Joseph the Hesychast:
When through obedience and hesychia a monk’s senses have been purified, his nous has
been calmed, and his heart has been cleansed, he then receives grace and enlightenment
of knowledge. He becomes all light, all nous, all lucid. He overflows with so much
theology that even if three people were to start writing down what they were hearing,
they could not keep up with the current of grace coming out in waves, spreading peace
and utmost quiescence of passions throughout the body. The heart burns with divine love,
and he cries out, ‘Hold back, my dear Jesus, the waves of Thy grace, for I am melting like
wax.’ Truly he melts, unable to bear it. His nous is caught up into theoria. A mixing
occurs; he is transformed and becomes one with God to the point that he cannot
recognize or distinguish himself, just like iron in a furnace becomes one with the fire68

67
The following is a confirmation of St. Maximos’ insight from Elder Joseph the Hesychast who lived on
Mount Athos until 1959, showing the remarkable continuity of Orthodox ascetic experience: ‘A new world
will be created within you, a new spirit, another heaven, which are unknown to you because the people you
have talked with till now have no idea about them.’ Taken from Monastic Wisdom: the Letters of Elder
Joseph the Hesychast, Letter 48 (Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998), p. 239.
68
Ibid, Letter 48, p.240.

31
This passage is striking in its evocative power, and also in its similarity to descriptive
passages of spiritual experiences in the writings of saints and ascetics of the Orthodox
hesychast tradition spanning over a thousand years, such as the Macarian Homilies (4th
cent.) attributed to St. Macarios of Egypt and St. Seraphim of Sarov (19th cent). It clearly
reveals how the ‘whole man’ is involved in the ‘preparation of the gospel of peace’69.
When the senses have been purified, the nous calmed and the heart cleansed, then comes
the grace of enlightenment and knowledge. Then great waves of grace, like a fiery
current, flow irresistibly through the soul and body, spreading peace, which reveals itself
as an ‘utmost quiescence of passions throughout the body’. In this experience, peace is a
definite presence--the very presence of God within the heart, which burns with divine
love, lifting the nous into theoria, and melting the discrete self-consciousness into a
mysterious and mystical union with God.
Peace is the “Logos of virtue”, says St. Maximos the Confessor, present in the soul,
as the soul becomes present in Christ. Maximos uses the phrase “Logos of virtue” with
full consciousness. By it he refers to his teaching, derived from Origen but purged and
transformed by the Confessor of all taint of unorthodoxy, that Christ actually becomes
incarnate in us through the virtues. This teaching simply soars above the level of current
systematic theology which has concerned itself of late with lifeless distinctions between
‘christologies from above” and “christologies from below’. Maximos is concerned with
presenting the reality of Christology from within, yet one that is fully reciprocal with the
cosmic Christ, or Christology ‘from without.’ Keeping the commandments and practicing
the virtues are not merely morally good acts, but are the God-ordained means of
acquiring true peace, which is to be in Christ who is the source of all peace. Yet without
the sword of ascetic struggle, the peace that is Christ cannot be approached or attained.
The paradox of the ‘uncreated peace’ that passes all understanding of the Philokalia
consists in the fact that the ‘peace from above’ is impossible for us to attain unless we are
engaged in total and all-out spiritual warfare, yet the warfare itself is not a method by
which human effort can attain this Divine grace. The grace of the peace from above
comes not from human effort but from God alone. Nevertheless, until we have first begun

69
Feet shod with the preparation of peace.

32
to fight against the devil with all our strength, says St. Maximos, we cannot possibly
reconcile with God.70 St Maximos writes with the trenchant authority of a spiritual
master, when he insists:
For even though we assume the name of faithful Christians, until we have made ourselves
the devil’s enemies and fight against him, we continue by deliberate choice to serve the
shameful passions71.

Making oneself the ‘devil’s enemy’ means above all a conscious commitment to a
lifetime of waging unseen warfare. It means to take up the sword that Jesus brings as a
way of life rather than to accept the ‘peace’ that the devil promotes. Any form of ‘peace’
that is not the presence of Christ himself in the soul will not be of spiritual profit. Thus
the Confessor goes on to add, “And nothing of profit will come to us from our peace in
the world, for our soul is in an evil state, rebelling against its own master and unwilling to
be subject to His kingdom”72. The subject of the Kingdom of God now brings our study
to focus on the relationship of peace and the Holy Spirit.

Peace as the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit

Holy Scripture associates the experience of peace with the presence and the activity
of the Holy Spirit.73 In the patristic period, it was commonly understood that the Biblical
phrase, “Kingdom of God” was equivalent to the Holy Spirit. This understanding of the
identity of the Holy Spirit with the Kingdom of God is based upon the epistles of Paul,
especially Romans, where St. Paul writes: “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink
but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”74. We see evidence of this in
various commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer, two of the most notable being that of St.
Gregory of Nyssa75 and that of St. Maximos the Confessor.76 In both these works, the
phrase, “Thy Kingdom come” is understood to mean the same as “may the Holy Spirit

70
Ibid., p. 173.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
73
Gal. 5:22-23.
74
Rm. 14: 17.
75
St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord’s Prayer, sermon 3 (PG 44-1157C), Eng. trans. H. Graef, Ancient
Christian Writers, vol. 18 (Westminster, 1954), pp. 52-53.
76
St. Maximos the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, op. cit., p. 290-292.

33
come.” St. Maximos states: “The kingdom of God the Father exists in substantial form as
the Holy Spirit.”77
Steeped as they are in Scripture, and adept at discerning the Spirit’s presence, the
elders of the Philokalia clearly associate the experience of peace as the manifestation of
one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic (7th-8th C.) writes:
He who yokes the practice of the virtues to spiritual knowledge is a skilful farmer,
watering the fields of his soul from two pure springs. For the spring of spiritual
knowledge raises the immature soul to the contemplation of higher realities; while the
spring of ascetic practice mortifies our earthly members: ‘unchastity, uncleanness,
passion, evil desire’ (Col. 3:5). Once these are dead, the virtues come into flower and
bear the fruits of the Spirit: ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith,
gentleness, self-control’.78

St. Nikitas Stithatos, (11th c.) the biographer of St. Symeon the New Theologian, and a
spiritual master in his own right, writes a few centuries later:
The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, goodness, long-suffering, kindness, faith,
gentleness, self-control79 …God dwells in those to whom the fruits of the Holy Spirit are
evident and, whether they speak of lowly or exalted things, from them flows, full of
wisdom and knowledge, the unsullied spring80 of the Logos.81

St Mark the Ascetic brings out the supranatural quality of peace as one of the primary
fruits of the Holy Spirit:
The intellect changes from one to another of three different noetic states: that according
to nature, above nature, and contrary to nature. When it enters the state according to
nature, it finds that it is itself the cause of evil thoughts, and confesses its sins to God,
clearly understanding the causes of the passions. When it is in the state contrary to
nature, it forgets God’s justice and fights with men, believing itself unjustly treated. But
when it is raised to the state above nature, it finds the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy,
peace, and the other fruits of which the Apostle speaks and it knows that if it gives
priority to bodily cares it cannot remain in this state82.

St Mark the Ascetic is one of the first to speak of the three primary states of being: that
‘according to nature’, that ‘contrary to nature’ and that ‘above nature’. This theme is
taken up by most of the great hesychast writers, including Maximos the Confessor,
77
Ibid.
78
St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, A Century of Spiritual Texts 74, The Philokalia, vol II, Eng. trans.,
Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, (London: Faber & Faber, 1981, p.30.
79
Gal. 5: 22-23
80
Jn. 7: 38.
81
Nikitas Stithatos, On The Inner Nature of Things, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, p. 115.
82
St. Mark the Ascetic, No Righteousness by Works, 90, op.cit., p. 133.

34
Nicetas Stithatos and Gregory of Sinai, not to mention great ascetics of our own day,
such as St. Silouan of Mt. Athos (d. 1938) and Elder Joseph the Hesychast (d. 1959). The
state ‘according to nature’ is the state that God intended for each created thing. When the
nous/intellect is in this state, according to the Philokalia, it sees truly, that is to say, sees
and knows created things, and especially its own human nature, as they really are. In that
state, it knows that it is itself the cause of sinful thoughts and confesses its sins to God.
Thus the knowledge of one’s own sinfulness is not a pathological religiosity or an
unhealthy wallowing in guilt and shame, but is actually a genuine state of ‘higher’
consciousness, a spiritually healthy knowledge that is grounded in the presence of the
Holy Spirit, and is the only door that opens the soul to the experience of that which is
above nature or supra-natural knowledge and experience. This is the true reason, rather
than excessive piety, that anyone approaching authentic sanctity tends to see him or
herself as a great sinner. One cannot approach the divine without experiencing in some
small way exactly what Isaiah experienced when he cried out in the midst of his vision of
theophany: “Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips and I
dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord
of Hosts’83 Therefore, once the mind and soul are in the state ‘according to nature’, a
state which is the goal of the entire ascetic method of hesychasm, once the soul is
purified by repentance, it is then prepared to enter into—and be entered into by--the
presence of the Holy Spirit, which is the state ‘above nature.’ Indwelt by the Holy Spirit,
Christ being born in the soul through the acquisition of the virtues, the soul experiences
‘uncreated’ supranatural peace, the peace that is the “fruit of the Holy Spirit, and as such,
is beyond the intellect’s power to understand , the peace that passes understanding.
Peace is a manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul. It is a
conscious taste of what the saints call the sweetness of God’s love. Speaking of peace as
a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul, St. Diadochos of Photiki (5th c.), one
of the most profound of the Neptic Fathers, who was himself an important influence on
St. Maximos, writes:
If we fervently desire holiness, the Holy Spirit at the outset gives the soul a full and
conscious taste of God’s sweetness, so that the intellect will know exactly of what the
final reward of the spiritual life consists…It is therefore necessary to work upon the soul
83
Isa. 6: 5.

35
forcefully for a while, so that we may come to taste divine love fully and consciously; for
no one can acquire the perfection of love while still in the flesh except those saints who
suffer to the point of martyrdom, and confess their faith despite all persecution. Whoever
has reached this state is completely transformed, and does not easily feel desire even for
material sustenance. For what desire will someone nourished by divine love feel for such
things. It is for this reason that St. Paul proclaims to us the future joy of the saints when
he says: ‘For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness, peace and joy
in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17), which are the fruits of perfect love. Those who have
advanced to perfection are able to taste this love continually, but no one can experience
it completely until ‘what is mortal in us is swallowed up by life’ (2 Cor. 5:4).84

Here again we see the insistence upon ‘forceful work’ upon the soul as the sine qua non
of every step of spiritual progress toward the experience of peace. Forceful work is
another term for ascetic effort or praxis, which every one of these elders sees as
beginning with the struggle to keep the commandments of the Gospel, developing toward
growing accomplishment to the conscious effort to acquire the virtues, and leads towards
a state in which the passions are transformed or transcended, and the possibility draws
near of tasting divine love even in this life. The “peace from above” is not possible for
the soul to experience without the sword of Christ, which is the sword of both death and
life. What is ‘mortal in us’ must be ‘mortified’, that is to say, made as if dead, and
‘swallowed up by life’. Then the desire for divine love will be nourished in the soul by
the taste of the Kingdom of Heaven as righteousness, peace and joy. St. Diadochos leads
us to a clarified understanding of the effect within the soul of this desire and how it leads
to true peace:
When the soul has reached self-understanding, it produces from within a certain feeling
of warmth for God. When this warmth is not disturbed by worldly cares, it gives birth to a
desire for peace which, so far as its strength allows, searches out the God of peace. But it
is quickly robbed of this peace, either because our attention is distracted by the senses or
because nature, on account of its basic insufficiency, soon exhausts itself. This was why
the wise men of Greece could not possess as they should what they hoped to acquire
through their self-control, for the eternal wisdom which is the fullness of truth was not at
work within their intellect. On the other hand, the feeling of warmth which the Holy Spirit
engenders in the heart is completely peaceful and enduring. It awakes in all parts of the
soul a longing for God; its heat does not need to be fanned by anything outside the heart,
but through the heart it makes the whole man rejoice with a boundless joy. Thus while
recognizing the first kind of warmth, we should strive to attain the second; for although
natural love is evidence that our nature is in a healthy state through self-control,

84
St. Diadochos of Photiki, On Spiritual Knowledge 90, in The Philokalia, vol. I, p.289.

36
nevertheless such love lacks the power, which spiritual love possesses, to bring the
intellect to the state of dispassion85

This text is strikingly experiential; it is a clear description of how the steps to true peace
are engendered in the soul and actually experienced in the body, all through the guidance
and direction of the Holy Spirit. The feeling of warmth, the desire for peace, the longing
for God, the awakening of the powers of the soul to righteousness and their unification in
the quest for peace—all these states of body, mind and soul are signs of the work of the
Holy Spirit in the heart of man, the heart which is the centre of ontological unity in the
being of man. The key point is that the warmth in the heart, which is a sign of the
presence of the Holy Spirit, gives birth to a desire for peace. But this desire is not an
ordinary movement of the desiring part of the soul, but is an effect of the presence of the
uncreated grace of the Holy Spirit in the soul. It is the taste of peace in the heart, which
awakens and energizes the soul to search with all its powers for the Divine Source of
peace.
Yet this taste of God’s sweetness, as St. Diadochos puts it, does not last long, for two
reasons: first, because the power of attention in the soul is weak, and second, because of
the natural infirmity of our fallen nature, which in its undeveloped state is incapable of
containing or “holding on” to such grace. Because this grace is the “eternal wisdom
which is the fullness of truth”, the grace of the presence of the Holy Spirit will return
again, and yet again, giving the soul opportunities to develop its powers of attention and
its capacity to remain in a state of unity with God. Energized by the warmth of the Holy
Spirit, giving a foretaste of love and peace, this grace bestows the power to unify the
divided and otherwise unruly aspects of the soul and thus bringing the nous to the state of
dispassion. Since the state of dispassion, according to the Philokalia, is the absolutely
essential condition for lasting peace, we need now to explore the relationship of
dispassion and peace.

Apatheia and the Pacifying of the Powers of the Soul

85
On Spiritual Knowledge 74, op.cit., p.279.

37
 There are a number of terms used by the Fathers of the Philokalia that all share a
‘family resemblance’ of meaning, even if they also bear a more specific or technical
application. They are: ‘stillness’ (hesychia), ‘rest’, ‘silence’ and, of course, peace. Each
and every one of these terms is invariably associated with the all-important hesychastic
concept of ‘dispassion’ (apatheia). We are not, however, dealing with abstract concepts
here. All of these terms, and this is particularly true of dispassion and peace, are
understood by the Philokalic Fathers to be involved with the pacification of the powers of
the soul86. Bringing peace to the powers of the soul is the direct result of the acquisition
of the grace of dispassion. One of the more graphic terms used by the great elder Nikitas
Stithatos to refer to dispassion is the ‘life-quickening deadness of the Spirit’. In the
passage where this phrase is found, we can see how St. Nikitas presents dispassion, the
‘life-quickening deadness of the Spirit’ as the key, not only to the pacification of the
powers of the soul, but also the key to all the fruits of the Spirit and deifying knowledge,
joy and love:
The gain to be derived from bodily discipline is but limited, says St. Paul (1 Tim 4:8)—at
any rate as long as the earth-bound will of the flesh has not been swallowed up in tears of
repentance, as long as the life-quickening deadness of the Spirit has not supervened in
our body, and the law of the Spirit does not reign in our mortal flesh. But true devotion of
soul attained through the spiritual knowledge of created things and of their immortal
essences is as a tree of life within the spiritual activity of the intellect: it is profitable in
all things and everywhere, bestowing purity of heart, pacifying the soul’s powers, giving
light to the intellect and chastity to the body, and conferring restraint, all-embracing self-
control, humility, compunction, love, holiness, heavenly knowledge, divine wisdom, and
the contemplation of God. If, then, as a result of great spiritual discipline you have
attained such perfection of true devotion you will have crossed the Red Sea of the
passions and will have entered the promised land, from which flow the milk and the
honey of divine knowledge, the inexhaustible delight of the saints.87

The Kingdom of God is direct and immediate participation in the life of the Holy
Spirit Himself, who is perfect love, the fruits of which are righteousness, peace, joy and
divine knowledge. One clearly gets the sense, upon reading and reflection on these
quotations that when the hesychasts speak of righteousness, peace, joy and love, these are
not four different things, but one thing, one reality, one experience that is being described
86
The three powers or aspects of the soul, which the Fathers derive from the tripartite division established
by Plato (cf. The Republic, 434D-441C), are: 1) the desiring or appetitive power (to epithumitkon); 2) the
incensive or irascible power (to thumikon) ; 3) the intelligent or rational power (to logistikon).
87
Nikitas Stithatos, On the Inner Nature of Things 83, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, p. 131.

38
from different perspectives. “Perfect love” is peace. Peace is the perfection of the divine
Presence experienced as righteousness, joy and love. But there is one all-important
qualification--no one can experience this peace and love perfectly unless and until what is
mortal in us is swallowed up by life. The condition, state or virtue that is unanimously
understood by the hesychast tradition to be absolutely essential to the swallowing up of
mortality by immortal life is apatheia, or dispassion. In the Philokalia,, almost every time
peace is mentioned, it is preceded or followed by a word or teaching about love,
knowledge and dispassion.. Even more strikingly, if peace is often linked in the same
passage with love and dispassion, dispassion is almost always paired up with spiritual
knowledge (gnosis).
Dispassion, gnosis, peace and love are the good counterparts of the three evil giants:
ignorance forgetfulness, slothfulness, and their infernal mother, self-love. A good
example of philokalic teaching in which all four are linked is the following from the
writings of St. Thalassios the Libyan:
Just as spring stimulates the growth of plants, so dispassion stimulates the intellect
(nous) to attain a spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of created beings. Keep the
commandments and you will find peace; love God, and you will attain spiritual
knowledge.88

What then is dispassion? According to St. Thalassios, “dispassion is a state in which the
soul does not yield to any evil impulse; and it can be realized only through Christ’s
mercy.”89.St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic defines dispassion as: “the wedding garment
of the deiform soul that is separated from world’s pleasures, has renounced misdirected
desires, and is occupied with devout thoughts and the practice of contemplation in its
purest form.”90 St. Maximos the Confessor in one place defines dispassion in terms of
peace: “Dispassion is a peaceful condition of the soul in which the soul is not easily
moved to evil.”91 This sounds like dispassion is simply a synonym for self-control. But
the philokalic masters make a point of distinguishing dispassion from self-control. St.
Theodoros the Great Ascetic clearly distinguishes the two, thusly: “By dispassion I do not

88
St. Thalassios the Libyan, On Love, Self Control and Life in accordance with the Intellect. IV: 20-21, in
The Philokalia, vol. 2, p. 326.
89
Ibid, I:40, p. 309.
90
St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, A Century of Spiritual Texts, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, pp. 26-27.
91
First Century on Love, Ibid., p. 56.

39
mean abstinence from actual sin--for this is called self-control. I mean the abstinence that
uproots passionate thoughts from the mind and is also called purity of heart.”92 The
distinction between self-control and dispassion is in part the difference between overt
action and inner state. But is it merely the difference between controlling one’s actions
and controlling one’s thoughts? No, it seems to be much more than this.
In his work A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, St Peter of Damaskos makes the
traditional distinctions of the three kinds of Christians: slaves, hirelings and sons. He
indicates that while slaves respond only to fear of punishment, hirelings may be able to
practice self-control and abstain from evil out of “hope for regard.” But only sons are
capable of dispassion:
Sons, being perfect…love dispassion because it imitates God and leads Him to dwell in
them; through it they refrain from all evil, even if no punishment threatens them. For
unless we are dispassionate God in His holiness does not send down His Holy Spirit upon
us, lest we violate His indwelling because out of habit we are still drawn towards the
passions, and so incur greater condemnation.93

Dispassion, then, is a state of being only found in true sons of God, a state in which God
dwells in them, the condition of being deified through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Note also the identification of dispassion with the imitation of God. God is
“dispassionate” by nature. For the soul to experience dispassion is thus to “imitate” God.
To imitate God is to participate by grace in the divine energy that is God’s by nature.
In the second part of this same work, which consists of 24 Discourses on various
spiritual states, one for each of the letters of the Greek alphabet, St. Peter of Damaskos
assigns a letter and gives a separate treatment to self-control, detachment, stillness and
dispassion, thus confirming that the hesychasts distinguish between self-control,
detachment, stillness and dispassion. He gives a marvelous explanation of dispassion and
why it is held in such high regard by the hesychasts.
Dispassion is a strange and paradoxical thing: once someone has consolidated his
victory over the passions, it is able to make him an imitator of God, so far as this is
possible for man. For though the person who has attained the state of dispassion
continues to suffer attacks from demons and vicious men, he experiences this as if it were
happening to someone else, as was the case with the holy apostles and martyrs. When he

92
St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, Ibid., p. 27.
93
St. Peter of Damaskos, A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, English translation in The Phiokalia, vol. 3,
(London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 168.

40
is praised he is not filled with self-elation, nor when he is insulted is he afflicted…. Such
a person is impassible, and yet because of his power of discrimination is acutely aware of
what gives pain94.

Here we see that dispassion is a paradoxical state of being that is similar or identical to
the state of grace martyrs are said to experience at the point of martyrdom, in which state
they are able to endure in a superhuman manner—or as St. Mark the Ascetic would say,
in a manner ‘above nature’--every kind of suffering, because they are raised above it by
Divine grace, and experience the trial as though it were happening to someone else. The
passions have been “consolidated” –a word when used in the Philokalia indicates a
transformation of the passions by “reducing” them to a single power or energy focused on
God. The soul is given the grace of dispassion and becomes an “imitator” of God as far as
human nature will allow.
Continuing in the same passage, St Peter now goes to the very heart of the matter:
Dispassion is not a single virtue, but is a name for all the virtues. A man is not merely
one limb, for it is the many limbs of the body that constitute a man; and not merely the
limbs, but the limbs together with the soul. Similarly, dispassion is the union of many
virtues, while the place of the soul is taken by the Holy Spirit. For all activities described
as “spiritual” are soul-less without the Holy Spirit, and it is by virtue of the presence of
the Holy Spirit that a “spiritual father” is given this title. Yet if the soul does not reject
the passions, the Holy Spirit will not come to it; nor, on the other hand, unless the Holy
Spirit is present can one properly speak of the all-embracing virtue of dispassion. And if
someone were to become dispassionate without the Holy Spirit, he would really be, not
dispassionate, but in a state of insensitivity.95
With this passage, we are able to see why a proper understanding of dispassion is central
to our understanding of peace in the Philokalia. Dispassion is not a single virtue but a
name for all the virtues. That which is the “union of all the virtues” is not itself a virtue
but is the fruit of all the virtues. In other words, apatheia is not something one does, but
is a state resulting from the synergy of one’s efforts and Divine grace, yet not caused by
one’s efforts. Just as one limb or organ of the body has no “virtue” or “potency” of itself
apart from the body as a whole, the body which is the union that gives each limb or organ
its differentiating identity, so dispassion is the union or “body” of all the virtues. Note
that St. Peter emphasizes that dispassion is the union of many virtues only if and as the
Holy Spirit “takes the place of” or indwells the soul.

94
A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Ibid, p. 251-52.
95
A Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Ibid, p. 252.

41
 Dispassion is thus the state in which the soul must participate in order for true peace
to be experienced. This understanding explains why apatheia is held in such high regard
by the hyschastic masters. St. Maximos the Confessor, for example, describes on a
number of occasions a kind of ‘ladder’ of ascetic ascent, beginning with faith and ending
with love, he writes:

Dispassion engenders love, hope in God engenders dispassion, and patience and
forbearance engender hope in God; these in turn are the product of complete self-
control, which itself springs from fear of God. Fear of God is the result of faith in God.96

The progression is as follows: faith-fear of God-self-control-patience/forbearance-hope-

dispassion-love. Now in the Maximian hierarchy of values, love is the highest state of all
and is identified with the state of union with God, or “theology” understood as entering
the “Divine darkness” or the fullness of the state of adoption into Sonship with the
Father. From the foregoing it is most evident that for the Neptic Fathers of the Philokalia,
the grace-filled acquisition of dispassion is intimately linked with the experience of true
peace. If love, understood in Maximian terms as the union of Divine and human in
theologia beyond all knowing, is the ‘holy of holies’ of deification, then dispassion is the
‘holy place’, the place nearest the Divine presence. If dispassion is the union of all the
virtues and is itself a gift of grace alone, then peace is the state of the realization of
dispassion as the ‘ever-moving rest’ of the Kingdom of God, the Divinely given victory
in the unseen warfare. We may see the extremely close relationship, amounting almost to
identity, of dispassion with peace, as well as the necessity of hesychastic asceticism for
its attainment, in the following two passages of great richness, with which I end this
section. They serve as a marvelous summary of the entire purpose of this essay. The first
is from St. Niketas Stithatos:

Dispassion is of two kinds and takes two main forms in those well advanced on the
spiritual path. They attain the first kind of dispassion when they have become adept in the
practice of the virtues. This dispassion, arising in various ways as a result of their toil in
practicing the commandments, at once mortifies the passions and cuts off the impulses of
the fallen self; at the same time it induces the powers of the soul to act in a way that
accords with nature, and restores the intellect to conscious meditation on things divine.
Subsequently, when they embark on the contemplation of the inner essences of created
things, they attain in their wisdom the second and more perfect kind of dispassion.
Bringing inner stillness to their thoughts, this dispassion raises them to a state of
intellectual peace, making their intellect visionary and prophetic to the highest degree:
visionary in matters divine; in insight into supernal realities, and in the disclosure of

96
St. Maximos the Confessor, First Century on Charity 2, op. cit., p.53.

42
God’s mysteries; prophetic in matters human, destined to happen in the distant future. In
both these forms of dispassion, one and the same Spirit is at work: through the first He
controls and sustains, through the second He dispenses the freedom of eternal life.97

According to this Neptic Father, the spiritual son of St. Symeon the New Theologian,
apatheia/dispassion represents in one word the entire ‘ladder of divine ascent,’ as derived
from and practiced in the Sinaite school of the great St. John of the Ladder (7th c.).
Dispassion is itself divided into two types, the first, arising from the practice of the
commandments, the acquisition of the virtues and the practice of natural contemplation,
being a kind of ‘ladder’ to the second, which raises the soul beyond inner stillness to the
state of noetic peace. Yet through both these kinds of dispassion, the Holy Spirit is
leading the soul to ultimate theosis.
Nearly four hundred years earlier, St. Maximos the Confessor, in his
characteristically condensed and all-inclusive manner, outlines his version of the ‘ladder
of dispassion’ that includes, not two but four stages:
The first type of dispassion is complete abstention from the actual committing of sin, and
it may be found in those beginning the spiritual way. The second is the complete rejection
in the mind of all assent to evil thoughts; this is found in those who have achieved an
intelligent participation in virtue. The third is the complete quiescence of passionate
desire; this is found in those who contemplate noetically the inner essences of visible
things through their outer forms. The fourth type of dispassion is the complete purging
even of passion-free images; this is found in those who have made their intellect a pure,
transparent mirror of God through spiritual knowledge and contemplation. If, then, you
have cleansed yourself from the committing of acts prompted by the passions, have freed
yourself from mental assent to them, have put a stop to the stimulation of passionate
desire, and have purged your intellect of even the passion-free images of what were once
objects of the passions, you have attained the four general types of dispassion. You have
emerged from the realm of matter and material things, and have entered the sphere of
intelligible realities, noetic, tranquil and divine.98

Despite the difference in the number of the levels of apatheia, St. Maximos and Nikitas
Stithatos are actually in perfect agreement on dispassion. The Confessor’s four general
types of dispassion are simply a more elaborate version of an identical teaching: that the
ascent to deification proceeds from the acquisition of virtue through the contemplation of

97
Nikitas Stithatos, On the Practice of the Virtues 89, Eng. trans. In The Philokalia, Vol. 4,, p.103.
98
St. Maximos the Confessor, Quaestiones Ad Thalassium 55, PG 90-544CD, English translation in The
Philokalia, Vol. 2,VT 3:51, p.222.

43
visible and invisible realities to the hidden communion with the Divine mysteries. The
key insight for us is that each stage of this ascent is a type of dispassion/peace involving
the cleansing and stilling of our sensible and noetic faculties until we emerge from the
realm of matter and material things and arrive at the antechamber of theologia and Divine
love, having been made worthy of this ascent by the acquisition of the grace of noetic,
uncreated peace. Each stage of deification, according to these Neptic masters, is a kind of
pacification: first, a stilling of the passions, then, a making peace with the powers of the
soul, leading to a providential participation in the divine gift of the theoria of peace and
the peace of theoria, culminating in a grace-induced realizing of, communion with and
actually becoming uncreated peace. All of these stages are united in the Divine Liturgy,
to which we now return, as noetic pilgrims returning to their true home, and hopefully
seeing it anew with eyes illumined by photonoetic faith.

Peace in the Divine Liturgy

If, after having contemplated peace in the company of our Neptic Fathers of the
Philokalia, we are able to share with them the conviction that the idea of peace is itself an
image of one of God’s eternal Names, and as such the revelation of one of the modes of
Divine uncreated energies, if we recognize that Our Lord Jesus Christ bears the revealed
name, the Prince of Peace, not merely as an honorific title, but because He is, as the
Divine Son, peace personified, and if we recognize, in the words of St. Maximos the
Confessor, that the Holy Spirit is the Kingdom of God in substantial form, and as such, is
the very presence and power of the peace that surpasses all understanding, then we are
able to see that, on this side of the Eschaton, the Divine Liturgy is both the supreme
revelation of peace on earth and also the most perfect means of encountering,
participating in and realizing or being perfected by the grace of this peace. In all respects
and in every instance the realization of divine Providence in the world, the Divine
Liturgy presents itself as an ordered ascent from ignorance and sin and disturbance and
warfare into the knowledge of, participation in, and union with God, which is
experienced first and last and always as peace. This insight is confirmed by St. Maximos
the Confessor in his commentary on the Divine Liturgy, the Mystagogia:

44
Consider how the soul in fleeing them [the perpetual war of the things of the world with
each other to the mutual destruction of all] headlong comes as into a church to an
inviolable shelter of peace in the natural contemplation in the Spirit, and how free of any
fighting or disorder it enters it together with reason and before the Word and our great
and true High Priest of God. There it learns, by symbols of the divine readings which
take place, the principles of beings and the marvelous and grand mystery of divine
Providence revealed in the Law and the Prophets, and it receives in each, by the
beautiful instruction divinely given in them through the holy angels who spiritually
communicate to the true understanding, the peaceful meanings with the strengthening
and preserving enchantment of the divine and ardent desire for God by means of the
spiritual appeal of the divine chants singing in it mystically. And consider again how the
soul passes beyond this and concentrates on the one and only summit, the holy Gospel,
which collects these principles together into one and in which preexist in one form all the
principles both of Providence and of existing things in a single burst of meaning.
Following this, it is permitted to those who love God to see by a divine perception with
the undaunted eyes of the mind the Word of God come to from heaven and symbolized by
the bishop’s descent from his priestly throne. He separates as catechumens the thoughts
which are still formed from the senses and divisible because of them from its perfect part.
And thence again it leaves the world of sense as suggested by the closing of the doors of
God’s holy Church, and leads it to the understanding of the material things signified by
the entrance into the unutterable mysteries, and understanding which is immaterial,
simple immutable, divine free of all form and shape, and by which the soul gathers to
itself its proper powers and comes face to face with the Word, having united by a
spiritual kiss both the principles and ineffable modes of its own salvation and teaching
through the symbol of faith to confess this with thanksgiving.

From this moment on the soul is rendered as far as possible simple and indivisible by its
instruction, having encompassed by knowledge and principles of both sensible and
intelligible things. The Word then leads it to the knowledge of theology, made manifest
after its journey through all things, granting it an understanding equal to the angels as
far as this is possible for it. He will teach it with such wisdom that it will comprehend the
one God, one nature and three Persons, unity of essence in three persons and
consubstantial trinity, of persons; trinity in unity and unity in trinity, not one and the
other, or one without the other, or one through the other, or one in the other, or one from
the other, but the same in itself and by itself and next to itself, the same with itself

In this text, St. Maximos sums up in a marvelous way the meaning of the Divine Liturgy
in all its dimensions. Beginning with the entry of the soul into the church as into a
sanctuary--used here in the sense of a place of refuge--the soul fleeing from the dangers
and destructions of the fallen world, locked in a perpetual war of all against all, enters the
church [and this is equally understood by the Confessor to mean entering within the
sanctuary of the inner man (eso anthropos)], to an inviolable shelter of peace. Here in a
striking way, man as image of God and the Church as image of God are so unified that

45
the sacred symbolism and analogies refer equally to both. Yet note that the direction of
the analogy is from church to man, so the primary focus here is the church within the
heart: the soul enters as to a church, and that which makes the shelter of peace inviolate is
the natural contemplation in the Holy Spirit. Entering the thearchic koinonia of the
Divine Liturgy, where the Holy Trinity, the angelic hierarchies and sanctified humanity
are one community, the soul is carried on a stream of grace through the sacred actions
and contemplations of the liturgy into the ultimate presence of the Holy Trinity. The
logos of each person comes face to face with the Divine Logos who is also man, and
enters into communion with the God of peace.
Implied in every line and every word of this amazing text are the five basic principles
of the Orthodox Neptic world view that we discussed above: 1) Orthodoxy as the
therapeutic way of life; 2) hyperapophatic hierarchic world-view; 3) doctrine as
experience; 4) liturgy as theanthropocosmic transfiguration; and 5) ascesis as spiritual
method based upon “photo-noetic” faith. The primary emphasis of the Mystagogia, since
it is a contemplation on the Divine Liturgy, is of course the fourth principle, liturgy as
theanthropocosmic transfiguration--the reconciliation, transformation and transfiguration
of human nature and all created nature in God. Nevertheless, St. Maximos’ liturgical
vision, as revealed in this text and which he shares with the whole Philokalic tradition,
would be unintelligible without understanding the Orthodox Church as a spiritual hospital
dispensing a therapeutic way of life, which way of life is taught through sacred doctrines
that are themselves verbal icons, which act as windows to the spiritual experience
symbolized by the dogma. Nor would it be intelligible without the recognition that such a
concept of Church requires a hierarchic view of the created order which is itself grounded
in a transcendent yet immanent Divine reality. Of greatest importance to the intelligibility
of the Philokalic liturgical vision, as expressed through St. Maximos the Confessor, is the
certainty that the hyperapophatic Divine Reality is itself Personal and tri-hypostatic, and
by the greatest and most mysterious providence is made manifest through the incarnation
of the God-man Christ Jesus. Through the ‘new theandric energy’99 released by His
incarnation, ‘one of the Holy Trinity’ is capable of being participated by us and leading
us to divinisation. This is the reason why St. Maximos, at the ‘high points’ of his

99
Dionysios the Areopagite, Letter 4: 1072A, Eng. translation, in Liubheid, p. 265.

46
contemplation on the liturgy, seems to launch into a kind of hymnody on the Trinity. If
we attempt to follow his ‘thought’ with a prayerful and alert consciousness, we seem to
feel in ourselves at such moments both the joyful lifting of the heart in praise of the
Trinity and, at the same time, a deep inner peace, the communion with and resting of our
inner powers in the God of peace whose tri-hypostatic reality we are hymning with the
saint. Listen with your mind in your heart as the Confessor continues:
…we are to think of both of these distinctly, as was said, first one way, then the other:
one, single, undivided, unconfused, simple, undiminished, and unchangeable divinity,
completely one in essence and completely three in persons, and sole ray shining in the
single form of one triple-splendored light. In this light the soul now equal in dignity with
the holy angels, having received the luminous principles which are accessible to creation
in regard to divinity and having learned to praise in concert with them without keeping
silent the one Godhead in a triple cry, is brought to the adoption of similar likeness by
grace. By this, in having God through prayer as its mystical and only Father by grace,
the soul will center on the oneness of his hidden being by a detachment from all things,
and it will experience or rather know divine things all the more as it does not want to be
its own, nor able to be recognized from or by itself or anyone else’s but only all of God’s
who takes it up becomingly and fittingly as only he can, penetrating it completely without
passion, and deifying all of it and transforming it unchangeably to himself.100

Through this breathtakingly swift, allusive anagogical theoria of the various stages of the
Divine Liturgy, St. Maximos leads the soul to its ultimate point and purpose:
communion/union with God. Hymning the Trinity in concert with the holy angels during
the Cherubic Hymn, the attentive soul rises to equal dignity with the angels, draws to the
point of adoption of sonship through the grace of the descent of the Holy Spirit and the
recognition of God as Father in the Lord’s Prayer and approaches the ineffable union
with God through participation in holy communion. Knowledge of God is union with
God. Oneness with God is only achieved by grace not by human effort, but it is prepared
for by the soul’s detachment from all things leading to the state of dispassion. In this state
of apatheia, and particularly during the Divine Liturgy, when the soul is in the higher
reality of liturgical space and time, in which the ‘new theandric energy’ spoken of by St.
Dionysios totally surrounds and penetrates the soul, God enters within, ‘penetrating it
completely without passion and deifying all of it and transforming it unchangeably to
himself’.

100
St. Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogy 23, English translation found in Berthold, Maximos Confessor:
Selected Writings,(Paulist Press), pp. 204-205.

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 To paraphrase Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, taking peace to be the soul in a state of
beauty, and unity as the condition of the soul in the state of truth: peace (beauty) is unity
(truth); unity (truth) peace (beauty): that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
Unity is peace; peace, unity: this is the teaching of the Philokalia.
Peace equals unity is also the teaching of the New Testament, particularly the
Epistles. One sees this especially in Ephesians and Colossians. The Epistle to the
Ephesians is concerned with the unity of both Gentiles and Israel in Christ. The healing
of the division between these two groups has in the interpretation of the Neptic Fathers
not only a literal historical interpretation, but also a deeper spiritual meaning101. The
elders of the Philokalia invariably see a profound ascetic resonance in such teachings as
these:
For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of
partition between us;

Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in
ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;

And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.

Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.102

The Epistle to the Colossians brings the liturgical/cosmological dimension to bear upon
the ascetic significance of the relationship between unity and peace in an unmistakable
manner:
And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things
unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.

And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also ye are called in one body; and
be ye thankful.103

The Divine Liturgy unites the ascetic/hesychastic and liturgical dimensions within the
supreme act of eucharistic worship. Jesus Christ is our peace, himself the Prince of peace,
whose incarnation is the ‘great mystery’ of divine Providence that has broken down the

101
The Fathers of the Philokalia commonly used allegorical, typological, symbolical or analogical exegesis
in various ways according to need, without formally following a strict system, such as the medieval four
semses: literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical. For a remarkable analysis of the four senses, see Henri
de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l'Ecriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959.
102
Ephesians 2:14, 15, 17; 4:2
103
Colossians 1:20; 3:15

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wall of partition between the law and grace, between circumcision and uncircumcision,
between the first Adam and the New Adam, Who has made peace through the blood of
his cross, and in himself brought reconciliation to all things, both in heaven and on earth.
The Divine Liturgy is on earth the locus and fount of this mysterious, all-powerful,
uncreated peace; we therefore in calling upon him during the Divine Liturgy are given the
grace to let the peace of God rule in our hearts, to which Peace we are called in one body,
in which communion we are purified, reconciled, healed, transformed and transfigured in
praise and thanksgiving, beginning in this life and continuing forever in the next.
With perhaps one exception, all the instances of the word ‘peace’ in the Divine
Liturgy are spoken aloud and meant for all to hear. Besides the prayers for peace in the
various litanies of the liturgy to which we have alluded, there are three moments when
the priest proclaims, ‘Peace be unto all’! These are not merely pious sentiments ritually
expressed, but ‘powerful performative utterances’, as Bishop Kallistos Ware puts it.104.
Each of those moments is an intersection of liturgical time, space and energy in which
Christ himself approaches, an especially ‘thin’ place in the Liturgy when Christ can be
encountered and can enter the soul in person as the uncreated peace that passes
understanding. The first time ‘peace be unto all’ is announced is right before the Gospel,
in which, according to the patristic interpretive tradition exemplified by St. Maximos,
Jesus is mystically and really present in the here and now.
The second instance of the same invocation occurs immediately before an invocation
of the Holy Trinity and the recitation of the Creed, the ‘Symbol of Faith’. Why does the
Orthodox tradition refer to the Nicene Creed as the ‘symbol’ of faith? This is a
fascinating question, the implications of which would take us beyond our immediate
purpose, but, put simply, ‘symbol’ for the Cappadocian Fathers, and their great
interpreters, Sts. Dionysios, Maximos and John Damascene, means an active, dynamic
relationship of archetype/image. The symbol is what it symbolises, on the level of the
symbol. A symbol ignites in the soul the act of ‘throwing together’ the two poles of
archetype and image. A symbol unites archetype, image and percipient in a noetic act: it
‘symbolises with’ its archetype through the theoria in which it is perceived, received and

104
Kallistos Ware, "In Peace Let Us Pray to the Lord": Peace & Healing in the Divine Liturgy, Orthodox
Peace Fellowship retreat in Vézelay, France, April 1999 / fourth lecture-http://www.incommunion.org/kal4.htm

49
participated. In short, a true symbol serves its purpose when it is noetically performed.
Recall Bishop Ware’s ‘powerful performative utterance’. The Creed is not merely a
collection of statements about what Christians are supposed to believe which we
mindlessly recite at the proper time. It is meant to be performed as a conscious act!
Sacred space and time is actually another plane of existence that transcends, yet intersects
our own three dimensional world through the living symbolism of the Divine Liturgy. In
that onto-ecology, alive with innumerable angelic presences and shimmering with noetic
light and the power of the other uncreated divine energies, when ‘peace be unto all’ is
invoked, Christ, the Prince of Peace, draws near at ‘infinite speed’ and conducts the
attentive praying soul to the Holy Trinity. In that holy living Presence, in the stillness of
that uncreated Peace that now seizes the nous/intellect, every phrase of the Creed
becomes a flame that blazes into life in the soul.
The third time that peace is invoked occurs immediately after the congregation has
finished reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and just before the priest elevates the consecrated
Body of the Lord and intones, ‘Holy things are for the Holy!’ Once again, Christ Jesus as
Peace Himself is invoked at a climactic moment in the liturgy, and a crucial moment for
the soul. Having prayed the Lord’s Prayer, which is according to St. Maximos the
‘symbol’ [in the dynamic sense just described] of the personal and real adoption as sons
of God through the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit, we stand before Christ with bowed
head and prepare with all compunction to receive His Body and Blood as we profess with
all the attention we can possibly muster: ‘One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, in the
glory of God the Father. Amen.’ Here the invocation of peace, as in the other two
instances, is the invocation of Christ to enter into our hearts, minds and bodies and, by,
through and in ‘the mercy of peace’ that is holy communion, to make us gods by
adoption through grace.
The prayer and expression of peace in the Divine Liturgy is actually the invocation
and the experience of the soul’s inward relationship to the truth and the good, that is, to
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Peace is thus the soul’s experience of the reality of
God, or, better, the reality ‘around’ God which St. Maximos calls in his Mystagogy
‘divine science, secure knowledge, love and peace in which and by means of which there
is deification’:

50
This whole reality is science because it is the achievement of all knowledge concerning
God and divine realities and virtues which is accessible to man. It is knowledge because
it genuinely lays hold of the truth and offers a lasting experience of God. It is love
because it shares by its whole disposition in the full happiness of God. Finally it is peace
inasmuch as it experiences the same things as God and prepares for this experience those
who are judged worthy to come to it. If God is completely without change and has
nothing trouble him (for what can escape this view?), then peace is an unshaken and
unmoved solidity and an untroubled happiness. Here the entire soul experiences divine
things when it is judged worthy of obtaining divine peace. And this peace makes it pass
beyond, if we may speak this way, the limits not only of malice and ignorance, of lying
and wickedness and vices opposed to virtue, knowledge, truth and goodness which exist
alongside the natural movements of the soul, but even the limits of virtue itself, and
knowledge, and truth and goodness as we know them. It brings us to rest beyond speech
and knowledge in the ultimate truth and goodness of God’s embrace in accordance with
His unfailing promise, so that there is no longer anything at all which can trouble it or
cause it any disturbance in the secret recesses in God. It is in this blessed and most holy
embrace that is accomplished this awesome mystery of a union transcending mind and
reason by which God becomes one flesh and one spirit with the Church and thus with the
soul, and the soul with God.105

Here is the ultimate summation of the nature and meaning of peace as understood in the
Philokalic tradition, and thus, represents the timeless teaching of the Orthodox tradition
as a whole and in its fullness. Peace is first of all the experience of the soul when it
experiences the same things as God. Peace is divine, a Divine Name, a divine state. Since
God is simple, changeless, infinitely serene and untroubled, the soul in this peace is an
unshaken and unmoved stability in happiness and joy. The soul in peace experiences
divine qualities and states of being. The peace invoked in the Divine Liturgy is the peace
that surpasses all understanding, and it transforms our spirit to make us pass beyond not
only all wickedness, trouble, and passion, but all possible virtue, and all truth, knowledge
and goodness as well. Peace as understood in the Orthodox tradition, and as embodied in
the Divine Liturgy, is not a state of virtue, nor a personal acquisition of any kind
whatsoever. Peace is rather a state of grace, a participation in the divine, uncreated
energy of peace, which is the state of being in Christ. Peace is an energy that flows from
the sacred recesses of God the Holy Trinity. It is the conscious experience of God’s
embrace. It is the taste of ultimate truth, goodness and beauty, a foretaste of union with
God in the transformed here and now of the Divine Liturgy.

105
St. Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogy 5, ibid., pp. 193-194.

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 In the Divine Liturgy, and on this plane of existence, only in the Divine Liturgy,
peace as a word and as a concept is restored to its full, Divine/human meaning, which is,
in the words of Fr. Schmemann, ‘life in its quintessence’. In the sanctuary of God’s holy
Church, on the altar in the center of the sanctuary, the true nature of peace is once and for
all revealed as the new theandric energy of Christ. In the sanctuary of the human soul, on
the altar of the nous, the great mystery of the mystical marriage of Christ and His Church
is accomplished (Eph. 5:22). Man the mystical church is borne up upon a current of grace
to rest in uncreated, ineffable peace on the bosom of the Bridegroom in the ultimate truth
and knowledge of God’s embrace.

The Orthodox Peacemaker

Some readers of this essay, who with admirable patience and longsuffering, have
stayed with the argument to this point, may feel that it is now time to ‘come down to
earth’ and deal with the ‘real world’. It is all very well to speak of ‘the Peace from above’
as the true meaning of peace, but even Orthodox Christians, and especially those who are
not monastics, are bound to live in an imperfect world of wars, strife, conflicts, violence,
injustice, slander, envy, maliciousness, hatred, and all the other unpeaceful evil fruits of
our fallen and sinful human condition. We cannot on a regular basis repair to the silence
of the Holy Mountain and contemplate the beauty of uncreated peace in a state of serene
detachment. We may experience moments of true peace in the Liturgy or in the natural
world, but in our own lives what we know on a day to day basis is an uneasy truce,
interspersed between times of open conflict and quiet desperation. The most we can hope
for, it seems, is to pray through our brokenness for peace for our churches, all mankind
and ourselves. By seeming to relegate the Liturgy’s Third Petition for Peace to secondary
status, is not that an unrealistic denigration of the one tool that ordinary Orthodox
Christians have at their disposal?
As the answer to this truly important question, I will not present an argument but an
example. Since the basis of this essay has been the hesychastic understanding of peace in
the Philokalia, it is only appropriate that the example that reveals the practical and social
power in this fallen world of the uncreated peace from above should be also be a

52
hesychast from the Philokalic tradition: St. Gregory Palamas.106 If there is one name that
above every other is synonymous with the heyschastic tradition of the Philokalia, it is
that of St. Gregory Palamas. Revered for his defense of the hesychastic prayer of the
heart against the attacks of philosophical rationalism in the person of Barlaam the
Calabrian, and renowned as the great theological champion of the doctrine of uncreated
Divine essence and energies of God, St. Gregory Palamas has an unparalleled place of
honor in the Orthodox tradition. His life is the perfect answer to the question of the actual
practicality of the doctrine of uncreated peace in the conditions of ordinary life.
Although St. Gregory lived as a hesychast monk from his youth to his dying day, and
although he is commonly and rightfully presented as a great ascetic of the Holy Mountain
of Athos who lived in stillness and practiced the unceasing prayer of the heart and knew
the experience of uncreated light, he was also Metropolitan of Thessaloniki and was
literally embroiled in all the burning social and political questions of the time. The
circumstances in which he lived his life in his later years were far from the peaceful
reclusion of monks living in the wilderness. During his defense of the hesychasts he was
constantly attacked, reviled and slandered by his ecclesastical enemies. As a prominent
elder and ecclesiastical leader, he was caught up in a vicious and violent civil war that
broke out in1341 and lasted for most of the decade between the supporters of young John
Paleologos and the aristocrat John Cantacuzene107. He was condemned and conspired
against by the antihesychast reigning Patriarch of Constantinople. He was arrested by the
Paleologos family and imprisoned for four years. After he was elected to the
archepiscopal seat of Thessaloniki, in 1347 he was prevented from entering the city and
occupying his seat for three years by the Zealot movement of Thessaloniki, which was a
populist, fanatical, violent revolutionary movement supported by the anti-hesychast
nobility and clergy. He was hounded for years by the supporters of Paleologos, was spied
upon, arrested, searched. He was kidnapped by the Muslims and held for ransom for a
year. This is not the life of a man who was preaching peace with no experience of social
conflict. This is a saint who lived in ‘interesting times,’ who was not isolated in some

106
Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, Saint Gregory Palamas as a Hagiorite (Birth of the Theotokos
Monastery, 1997), pp. 201-268. I am indebted to the discussion therein of the social aspects of St.
Gregory’s hesychasm for the examples of uncreated peace in action in the world.
107
Aristides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary
Press, 1994), pp. 290-92.

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monastic wilderness and calling for peace from an ivory tower. I dare say few of us today
would have physically or emotionally survived what St. Gregory went through, much less
remained an Orthodox peace-maker par excellence.
During this period, St. Gregory wrote many letters and gave many sermons to his
flock at Thessaloniki. In them, as well as in his life, we can see the power of uncreated
peace in action, and its practical application in the events of everyday life. In all these
situations, and in every circumstance, St. Gregory spoke and acted as a hesychast and on
the basis of the hesychastic principles of the Philokalia108. It is not possible here to
analyze in detail the personal and social application of St. Gregory’s principles of
uncreated peace. But it is possible to see in his example that the true Orthodox
peacemaker, an experienced hesychast who understands peace without compromise
according to the hesychastic, Philokalic tradition, is powerfully effective in the rough and
tumble of the everyday world. His peacemaking is effective precisely through complete
loyalty and total commitment in all circumstances to the ‘laws of peacemaking’ that we
have outlined in this paper. All the existent evidence shows St. Gregory advocating
peace, seeking to avoid conflict, calming the people, helping to achieve reconciliation
between the two royal combatants in the civil war, accepting slander and imprisonment
with equanimity, remaining silent against all odds when silence was called for, and,
above all, loving his enemies with such an unshakeable love and unbreakable peace that
it can only be the manifestation of Divine grace.
In all these violent vicissitudes of life, St. Gregory remained at peace, preached
peace, practiced peace, made peace, and was himself the manifestation of uncreated
peace. But he was a saint, one might protest, and we are not, so what kind of practical
example is this for us? Yet through his example and teaching, we may know that
Orthodoxy is in essence the cure of the soul, and that hesychasm is its fundamental
expression, and thus requisite for all Christians. Peace in all its forms can only exist in
human beings that are healed or on the path of being healed. The essence of that healing
is the pacification of the powers of the soul, the return of the nous to the heart from its
wandering about in the world, and the passage of every person through the three stages of
the spiritual life, which is theosis: purification, illumination of the nous and theologia or

108
St. Gregory Palamas as a Hagiorite, p. 202.

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deification. Only when the very core of man’s existence is cured, in which the soul
experiences peace and comes to know peace in Person, will man become a maker of
peace. Only this kind of peace, which is uncreated peace, is the core, not only of the
person, but also of society. Peace is the actual substance of authentic community, and is
grounded in true faith in God, which is the substance of things hoped for. When man’s
heart is healed and made peaceful, he is brought to true love, which is communion with
God and with all mankind. Thus uncreated peace, which is the effect of the
transformation of selfish love into unselfish love, as revealed in the life and teaching of
St. Gregory of Palamas, is truly the goal of the prayer ‘for the peace of the whole world,
the good estate of the Churches of God and the union of all’.
In summary, to speak of peace in the Orthodox tradition is to speak first and
foremost of the peace from above and the salvation of the soul. There is no peace if it be
not the peace of Christ that passes all understanding. We are not ‘in peace’ if we are not
in the embrace of God and resting in the Trinity with all our being. There can be no peace
for the whole world, or good estate of the holy churches of God, or union of all men
outside the uncreated peace that flows to us unceasingly from above. There is in reality
no other kind of peace than that peace from above which passes all understanding. Every
other manifestation of peace, to the degree that it contains something of the nature of the
peace from above, is but an image or reflection of that supreme peace, depends entirely
upon it and, to the extent that is humanly possible, participates only in it. The peace from
above is a foretaste of salvation and the kingdom of God. Peace is what salvation actually
feels like. The fact that we cannot hold that peace for long is a sign of the truth of the
Orthodox patristic and hesychastic teaching that we have to work out our salvation in fear
and trembling. Salvation is the healing of all dividedness of body, soul and spirit, to
which the soul is heir because of ancestral sin. Peace is the experience in the microcosm
of human nature of the union in and through Christ of all the divisions of the macrocosm
and the microcosm109. Peace is the state of the soul when it is united with God in love.

109
In Ambiguum 41, St. Maximos outlines the five cosmic divisions which it was man’s original purpose to
unite: 1) the division of the Uncreated from the created; 2) the division of the intelligible world from the
sensible world; 3) the division of heaven from earth; 4) the division of paradise from the inhabited world;
5) the division of male from female. Since the Fall, human nature lost the power to effect this cosmic
function, which has, however, been restored and fulfilled in the Incarnation of Christ. English translation
in Louth (1995), pp. 156-162.

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 The Neptic Fathers of the Philokalia are thus the antidote to the temptation to accept
a concept of peace that is anything less than an uncreated energy, a Divine Name spoken
in the inner recesses of our heart by the Holy Spirit. Peace as understood and taught in the
Philokalia is not a ‘cheap’ peace, but a ‘costly’ peace, which is true peace, the only kind
worth striving for. The acquisition of peace requires the identical ascetic struggle that is
prescribed by the Orthodox hesychastic tradition for the salvation and deification of our
soul, because it is one and the same goal: to attain to true sonship with God. The Divine
Liturgy of Holy Orthodoxy is the one sure and certain ‘place’ where communion with the
peace of Christ is possible even for those just beginning the cure of the soul.
If anyone feels this kind of peace is too lofty and unattainable, let us listen to these
consoling last words from one of our great Godbearing Fathers, Nicetas Stithatos:
Do not say in your heart, it is now impossible for me to acquire a virginal purity, for I
have succumbed in so many ways to the seduction and delirium of the body. For once the
soul engages fervently and strenuously in the labours of repentance and we shed tears of
compunction, then the prison-house is razed to the ground, the fire of the passions is
extinguished, we are spiritually reborn through the abiding presence of the Paraclete,
and once again the soul becomes a palace of purity and virginity. God, who is above
nature, descends with light and ineffable joy into the soul and sits on the heights of its
intellect as upon a throne of glory, bestowing peace on all its inner powers and saying:
‘Peace be with you, peace from hostile passions. I give you My peace, so that you may
act according to your true nature. I leave My peace with you, so that you may be
perfected into what is beyond nature. Through His threefold gift of peace He heals the
soul’s three powers, brings it into triadic perfection and unites it with Himself.110

110
Nikitas Stithatos, On the Inner Nature of Things 50, op. cit., pp. 120-21.

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