“Watchfulness,” writes St. Hesychius in the Philokalia, “is a spiritual method which, if diligently 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 bestows upon us every blessing of the age to come.” Watchfulness may be called a virtue, but it is also, in the words of St. Hesychius, “a way of embracing every virtue.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ spoke much about the all-important practice of watchfulness. He told His disciples, “Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching. Assuredly, I say to you that he will gird himself and have them sit down to eat, and will come and serve them” (Luke 12:35–37). To impress on people the importance of watchfulness, Christ told parables about it. These include the parable of the five wise virgins and the five foolish virgins, and the tale of the unwise steward, who fell asleep while his master was away.

Our Lord is telling us that, if we wish to be His true disciples, we must at all times be watchful over ourselves. The Holy Fathers of the Church expand on this theme as they teach about the original nature of man, before the Fall. They offer this teaching from their own experience of life in Christ. Through the process of spiritual purification in the Church, the Fathers were able in some measure to return to man’s original state. Some of them—like St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Sinai, and St. Simeon the New Theologian—were able through divine vision to “go back” and behold the state of man before the Fall.

The Fathers teach that before the Fall, man's mind had a single point of awareness, and that, with the Fall, our minds became divided into jumbled memories, thoughts, and images. Our consciousness became fragmented. Through the life of inward prayer, however, we can return to the original one-pointed awareness; we can move away from the state of distraction in which we now live.

In patristic theology, the highest part of the human soul is called the nous, which is variously translated as "mind," "intellect," and "spirit." The nous is the seat of man's personhood: the image of God in man. Potentially, it is pure, formless, imageless awareness. It can stand apart from thoughts and mental images. Once it is purified, it can know God and the inner essences of created things through direct, immediate experience. Its aim is to draw ever closer to God. St. Basil the Great says, "When the nous is not engaged by external affairs nor diffused through the senses over the whole world, it retires within itself. Then it ascends spontaneously to the consideration of God." (It should be noted that St. Basil is speaking specifically of the nous of the Christian who is already striving to follow Christ and already has the Holy Spirit within him through Holy Baptism.)

From this it can be seen why we need to be watchful over our inward state. If we learn to practice spiritual watchfulness, our nous will not be diffused through the senses and will not be in a state of distraction or fragmentation, but will return to a single, one-pointed awareness. That awareness will ascend to God in prayer. The Holy Fathers teach that watchfulness or attention over ourselves is a precondition for true prayer.

St. Simeon the New Theologian writes: "Watchfulness and prayer should be as closely linked together as the body to the soul, for the one cannot stand without the other. Watchfulness first goes on ahead like a scout and engages sin in combat. Prayer then follows afterwards, and instantly destroys and exterminates all the evil thoughts with which watchfulness has already been battling, for attentiveness alone cannot exterminate them. This, then, is the gate of life and death. If by means of watchfulness we keep prayer pure, we make progress. But if we leave prayer unguarded and permit it to be defiled, our efforts are null and void."

Therefore, when we stand in church, and when we are in prayer at other times, we are to gather ourselves within, to turn aside from outward distractions. As we say in the Cherubic Hymn, we are to "lay aside all earthly cares." We are to concentrate our mind, our heart, all our being on God, in devotion and prayer to Him. That's one of the reasons why our church services are often so long: so that, as we stand in prayer, we can let pass all the distractions of the world, begin to focus our minds and concentrate them on prayer, and acquire that one-pointed awareness that belonged to man before the Fall. When we do this, either in our common prayer in the church or in our private prayers, we will gradually begin to separate from our thoughts, from our distractions, and to find that quiet inner peace which stands together with God and apart from thoughts. In the words of St. Theophan the Recluse, "Little by little you will separate from your thoughts. . . . You will find that you have strayed far from your first-created image."

Hieromonk Damascene Christensen is a member of the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood of Platina, California, and the author of Fr. Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works and Christ the Eternal Tao. This article is adapted from a lecture given Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 9, 2004.

This article is excerpted from "Watchfulness: The Inseparable Companion of Prayer"; AGAIN Magazine Vol 27 No 1, Spring 2005. Visit Conciliar Press online at http://www.conciliarpress.com/.