Chapter 37

Three Stages of Prayer

One can distinguish three stages of prayer. In the first, it is predominantly external: readings, prostrations, vigils, and so on. People begin here, and some labor for quite a long time before the first signs of prayer or light movements of the prayerful spirit appear. Prayer, as a supreme gift, is granted as if drop by drop, so small, to teach a person to greatly value it. In the second stage, the bodily and spiritual appear in equal strength. Here each word of prayer is accompanied by a corresponding feeling, or inner prayerful movements, moved from within, express and manifest themselves through their word. This is the most widespread prayer, common to almost all. It is customary in one whose spirit of piety is alive. In the third stage, the inner or spiritual predominates in prayer — when without words, without prostrations, without even reflection, without any image, in a kind of silence or stillness, deep in the spirit the action of prayer takes place. This prayer is not limited by time, place, or anything external and can never cease. Therefore it is called the action of prayer, that is, something that remains always. But to reach this last stage, one must first pass through the earlier ones and, consequently, take up all the labors of bodily practice for prayer, such as fasts, prostrations, reading of prayers, vigils, kneeling. Whoever passes through this enters the second stage, when, as Macarius the Great says, you have only to bow and the spirit is already warmed in prayer. As one who does not know the alphabet cannot begin to read, because that would be a waste of time, so too here: one who cannot swim in a shallow river — how can he be sent into the deep sea? Yet even when one reaches the last stage of prayer, external prayer does not cease but also participates in the inner. The only difference is that in the first case the external precedes the inner, while here the inner precedes the external. How then can one take on only the inner when one has not yet learned through labor and experience to move from the outer to the inner! (3, 360–361)