History of
Orthodox Prayer

The peoples surrounding ancient Israel developed rich traditions of addressing their gods, yet these traditions operated on fundamentally different assumptions from those of Israelite prayer. In ancient Egypt, prayer was inseparable from the apparatus of temple ritual and magic. The daily cult ritual, performed by priests on behalf of Pharaoh, consisted of approximately sixty-six ritual episodes: burning incense, breaking the seal of the shrine, anointing the image of the deity, and withdrawing while sweeping away one's footprints. The Hymn to Amun-Ra addressed the god as "Lord of the thrones of the earth, the oldest existence, ancient of heaven." Yet the line between prayer and spell was often blurred beyond distinction. In the Book of the Dead, the deceased needed to speak the right names and recite the right formulas at each stage of the underworld journey. Prayer and incantation were, in practice, the same art.

In ancient Greece, prayer followed a formal pattern visible already in Homer: ritual purification, the lifting of arms toward heaven, invocation of the deity by name and titles, and petition accompanied by sacrifice. The heart of this system was the principle of reciprocity expressed by the Latin phrase do ut des, "I give so that you may give." The entire relationship was contractual: the worshiper offered something of value and expected divine favor in return. In Mesopotamia, prayer was the most systematized of all ancient Near Eastern traditions: formal types classified as incantation prayers, lamentations, petition-prayers, and counter-rituals against evil omens, with priestly specialists serving as essential intermediaries. One might not even know which god had been offended or why; prayer was often an anxious attempt to appease unknown wrath through correct formulae.

The prayer life of Israel grew from its covenant soil into an extraordinarily rich tradition that the Church has never abandoned. At its center stands the Psalter, which the Orthodox Church in America describes as "the divinely-inspired song book of prayer and worship for all of God's People." Virtually every state of the human soul before God finds expression in the Psalms: praising, thanking, blessing, rejoicing, petitioning, repenting, lamenting, questioning, and even complaining. In the Jerusalem Temple, specific psalms were assigned to each day of the week, and the Levitical choir sang them during the sacrificial service. The Psalter contains the full spectrum of prayer: hymns of praise, individual laments, communal laments, psalms of thanksgiving, petitions, and the great penitential psalms.

Fr. Thomas Hopko taught that "the Psalter in the Bible is the main hymnbook of the Orthodox Christian Church the same way as it was the hymnbook of the people of the Old Covenant." Bishop Demetri called the Psalter "a golden thread which runs through the beautiful garment of Orthodox worship." And St. John Chrysostom observed that wherever one looks in the Church, one finds the Psalter "first, last, and central."

Into this waiting came the One for whom Israel had prayed. The Orthodox Church confesses that Jesus does not abolish the prayer of Israel but transforms and fulfills it. Tertullian articulated this in his treatise On Prayer (c. 192 AD): Christ "determined for us, the disciples of the New Testament, a new form of prayer; for in this particular also it was needful that new wine should be laid up in new skins." The most radical transformation was intimacy. Fr. Thomas Hopko observes that Old Testament people did not address God as "Abba, Father" (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). This intimate name was given by Christ, the divine Son. Only through Christ are we made worthy to call upon God as Father "with boldness and without condemnation," as the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom says just before the faithful pray the Lord's Prayer together.

As the Church grew, the prayer life that had begun in the Upper Room and in the Temple courts was gradually formalized, not as a departure from the apostolic pattern but as its organic development. In the second century, Tertullian recommended prayer at least three times daily, plus at the third, sixth, and ninth hours. The Apostolic Tradition (attributed to Hippolytus, c. 215) instructs Christians to pray seven times daily. By the fourth century, the Cappadocian Fathers and Chrysostom had brought this daily rhythm into mature liturgical form, and the rise of monasticism expanded it into the full cycle of the canonical hours.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 184-254) wrote On Prayer (Peri Euches), one of the earliest sustained treatments of the subject. Drawing on 1 Timothy 2:1, he distinguished four kinds of prayer: supplications, prayers of praise, intercessions, and thanksgivings. He taught that prayer transforms the one who prays and insisted on set times, following Daniel's practice, at least three times daily and at the third, sixth, and ninth hours. He devoted roughly half the treatise to an exegesis of the Lord's Prayer, and he recommended praying facing East, with hands lifted, as a symbol of the soul reaching toward the rising Sun of Righteousness. His famous teaching on continual prayer anticipates the monastic tradition: "He prays without ceasing who combines prayer with right actions, and becoming actions with prayer."

In the fourth century, men and women began to withdraw into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to pursue with radical singleness of heart the apostolic command to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). These Desert Fathers and Mothers became the great teachers of the interior life, and their influence on Orthodox prayer can hardly be overstated. St. Antony the Great (c. 251-356), the father of desert monasticism, left his village in Egypt around 270 AD and went into the desert, where, as his biographer St. Athanasius wrote, "the desert had become a city" by the time of his death. St. Pachomius (c. 292-348) founded the first organized cenobitic communities, with regulations that included silence, fasting, manual labor, and long periods of prayer.

Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), a disciple of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, settled in the Egyptian desert and became what scholars have called "the teacher of prayer par excellence for the Greek Christian tradition." His 153 texts On Prayer, preserved in the Philokalia, include one of the most celebrated definitions in all of Christian literature: "Prayer is communion of the intellect with God. What state, then, does the intellect need so that it can reach out to its Lord without deflection and commune with Him without intermediary?" His practical counsel was characteristically direct: "Try to make your intellect deaf and dumb during prayer; you will then be able to pray."

The monastic pursuit of inner stillness, or hesychia, which had begun with the Desert Fathers, reached its fullest theological expression in the Byzantine period through the movement known as Hesychasm. The Greek word hesychia means "stillness, rest, quiet, silence," and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware described its positive content with precision: "Silence is not merely negative, a pause between words, a temporary cessation of speech, but, properly understood, it is highly positive: an attitude of attentive alertness, of vigilance, and above all of listening. The hesychast, the person who has attained hesychia, inner stillness or silence, is par excellence the one who listens." Hesychast practice typically involved acquiring inner stillness, withdrawing the attention inward, repeating the Jesus Prayer, and coordinating the prayer with the rhythm of breathing.

In the fourteenth century, this tradition was challenged by Barlaam of Calabria (c. 1290-1348), an Italo-Greek monk educated in Western Scholastic theology, who encountered the hesychast monks on Mount Athos and was scandalized by their practices. He mocked them as "men with their souls in their navels" and denied the possibility of genuine, experiential communion with God through prayer. He insisted that the divine light the monks claimed to experience was a created phenomenon and accused hesychasm of heresy.

The Jesus Prayer has been called "the prayer of the Orthodox Church" with good reason. It is a summary of the entire Gospel in a single sentence. To say "Lord" (Kyrios) is to confess Christ's divinity, an act possible only by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). "Jesus Christ" joins His human name with His messianic title, affirming His incarnation. "Son of God" proclaims His eternal relationship to the Father. And "have mercy on me, a sinner" is the publican's prayer (Luke 18:13), the cry of the broken heart that God never despises. Fr. John Breck of the OCA describes the Jesus Prayer as "a 'verbal icon' of Christ, which communicates to us the deifying grace or energy of the Risen Lord."

The prayer rope, known as komboskini in Greek and chotki in Russian, is the traditional companion of this prayer. Its origin is attributed to the Desert Fathers. According to one tradition, St. Pachomius devised the knotted rope to help illiterate monks count their prayers consistently. Another tradition tells of St. Antony the Great, who began by tying a leather rope with simple knots for each prayer, only to find the Devil untying them; inspired by a vision of the Theotokos, he devised the cross-shaped knot, formed of seven interlocking crosses, that could not be undone. The ropes are traditionally made of wool, symbolizing Christ's flock, dyed black as a sign of mourning for sins. Monks receive the prayer rope at their tonsure with the words: "Accept, O brother, the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God, in the everlasting Jesus Prayer."

Everything we have traced so far is not merely historical. It lives in the worship of every Orthodox parish, every day, every week, every year. The Divine Liturgy, Vespers, Matins, and the Hours preserve an unbroken continuity with the worship of the earliest Christians. The hymn "O Gladsome Light" (Phos Hilaron), sung at every Vespers, was already considered ancient by St. Basil the Great in the fourth century. The Psalms of David, the biblical canticles, and the prayers of the apostolic Church remain woven into every service. As the OCA catechism affirms: "A defining characteristic of Orthodox Christianity is the intimate and inseparable relationship it preserves between Bible and Liturgy."

The Divine Liturgy is the center of Orthodox prayer life. The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the standard liturgy of most Sundays, and the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, with its longer, more contemplative eucharistic prayers, is celebrated on the great penitential and festal occasions of the year. A third liturgy, the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts (attributed to St. Gregory the Dialogist), is served on weekday evenings during Great Lent. The Liturgy is always "on behalf of all and for all"; it may never be celebrated privately or for exclusively private intentions. Alexander Schmemann captured this beautifully: "The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing."

All of this leads to the deepest truth about prayer as the Orthodox Church understands it. Prayer is not merely speaking to God; it is not even merely listening to God. Prayer is participation in God's own life. This is what the Orthodox tradition calls theosis, deification or divinization: the process by which the human person, through the grace of God, becomes by grace what God is by nature. St. Athanasius of Alexandria gave the classic formulation: "The Son of God became man, that we might become god" (the second word always lowercase, for we never become God by nature but share in His life by grace). St. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote in the second century: "God passed into man so that man might pass over to God." St. Maximus the Confessor taught: "A sure warrant for looking forward with hope to deification of human nature is provided by the Incarnation of God, which makes man God to the same degree as God Himself became man."

This is not an abstract doctrine reserved for theologians. It is the lived reality toward which every prayer, every liturgy, every prostration is directed. Gregory Palamas taught that through prayer, especially the Jesus Prayer practiced in stillness, human beings can truly participate in God's uncreated energies. He wrote: "This mental prayer is the light which illumines man's soul and inflames his heart with the fire of love for God. It is the chain linking God with man and man with God. It allows a man constantly to converse with God. And what other and greater rewards can you wish than this, when you are always before the face of God, constantly conversing with Him?"

The Orthodox tradition of prayer is not a museum exhibit or a textbook subject. It is a living river flowing from the covenant faithfulness of God to Abraham, through the Psalms of David and the longing of the prophets, into the transforming light of Christ, through the hands of the Apostles and the Fathers, into the silence of the desert, up the holy mountain of Athos, and into the parish church where you stand this Sunday morning. What began as Abraham's bold intercession before God continues in the priest's "Let us pray to the Lord." What the publican whispered in the Temple, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner," the monk whispers now on his prayer rope. The uncreated light that shone on Tabor is the same light that fills the Church at Pascha. And the prayer that rises with the incense at Vespers tonight is the same prayer that will rise when the Lord returns.

To pray, in the Orthodox understanding, is not to perform a religious duty. It is to enter into the very life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is the breath of the Christian life, the path of theosis, the way home. As St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote sixteen centuries ago, in words that remain as fresh and urgent as the day they were spoken: "The effect of prayer is union with God." This is what the Church offers. This is what the Church has always offered. Come and see.