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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Communion of man with God is itself a mystery, experienced in prayer and in a spiritual life, which cannot be fully contained in the rational concepts, while the true spiritual life lies in the union of mind and heart, more specific in lowering or immersing the mind into the heart. Saint Mark the Ascetic considers that deep inside the heart, where the mind should immerse, lies the throne or the place where Christ and the Holy Spirit or, more precisely, the Holy Trinity dwells through Baptism. The failure to understand the heart in this respect has determined some authors to adopt the Platonist scheme, making the difference between the mind and the heart, scarcely using the term “heart”. When the term does appear, it is associated with the feelings or it is dealt with as an equivalent of “mind” (nous). The same idea appears in the works of Origene, Evagrius or Dionysius the Areopagite. Other patristic authors continue to use the term “heart” in the sense of the Scriptures, in order to designate the spiritual center of the whole being. Among those one can mention Saint Mark, Diadochus, Hesychius, John and Varsanuphius, John Climacus or Isaac the Syrian. Since the semitic syntaxe of the language offered the Syrian speaking Christians the possibility to grasp the specific language of the Scripture, it came as a logical consequence that the Syrian ascetics, more than the Egyptian ones, be close to the doctrine of heart, with a scriptural character. The Syrian authors added to their literary and theological traditions a profound biblical spirituality, characterized by advanced rhetorical Greek forms, thus bringing their contribution to the formation of the Byzantine spiritual synthesis that will take place later. The two perspectives will be merged and transferred by the Byzantine synthesis of ascetic concept after the 10th century, a synthesis that had emerged in the 5th and the 6th centuries, in the writings of the Syrian and Greek Fathers. Thus we can get a better grasp of the stress that Eastern spirituality puts on the advice regarding the guarding of the heart and on the presence of God in man’s heart.
Keywords: Prayer, heart, spirituality, the Holy Fathers, Old Testament, New Testament, Saint Mark the Ascetic.
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