Embodied Mystery, Spiritual Deepness: Paradoxes of the Heart Inside a Spirituality of Purification

Abstract

Drawing on patristic sources and modern Orthodox authors, this paper explores the paradoxes of the heart as the deepest and most hidden place of the human being. The heart can be both the highest and deepest point of an encounter with God, as well as the highest and deepest place of the secret self. The paper describes the difficulty of searching for the place of the heart in the context of the philosophies of interiority, subjectivity, and self and examines the spatial metaphors involving the centrality of the heart. The paper also considers the dynamics of purification, which places the heart at the crossroads between purifying the body and achieving the transparency of intellect through divine illumination. The heart is revealed as the coincidence of dispassion (apatheia) and the purest and most intense charity (agape), which means regaining the purity of desire (oriented to God). As a space of both hiddenness and revelation, the heart invites an apophatic anthropology.

1. Introduction: Searching for the Place of the Heart

You cannot search for something if you know with all certainty where you will find it. However, you will not start searching for that something unless you have an approximate idea of where you may find it. Searching for the place of the heart is situated within this double dynamic. It links the movement of inner uncertainty (not knowing the place) and the movement of epistemic approximation (expecting the place to be in a certain space). The place of the heart is not a secret place but rather the space accommodating a secret—not the secret of a contained interiority, but a deep mystery. In this place, you cannot contemplate either the origin of modern selfhood or the construction of interiority (Taylor 1989), nor a crystallization of subjectivity (Libera 2007–2014; Taieb 2011). You could ask if this place is synonymous with the vast space of an inner citadel or the architecture of an inner castle or small intimate chamber (Chrétien 2014) or if it is the origin of a certain performativity that links the human to the absolute, the divine, through various acts of speech (Chrétien 2002). Surely, searching for the place of the heart is not an evident endeavor, entangling spatial images and performative aspects.

In this paper, I tackle the paradoxes of the heart at the intersection of the corporeal, affective, cognitive, volitional, and spiritual–mystical dimensions of the human being. I also address the centrality of the heart for a spirituality of purification. I aim to show that for the Eastern Christian tradition, purification practices seek the purity of the heart. Moreover, a pure heart is open to illumination and deification. Searching for the place of the heart is searching for the place of human transparency to the Uncreated. We search for a place of utmost invisibility located in a visible body.

The research presented in this paper builds on patristic studies, highlights patterns in ascetical and mystical theology, and articulates constructive theology and philosophy, with a focus on theological and philosophical anthropology. Methodologically, it combines conceptual archeology, metaphor analysis, and conceptual reconstruction, claiming a proper conceptual space for the “heart” by engaging with paradoxes that can neither be dialectically overcome nor mystically suspended. It also explores the meaning and performative role of spiritual practices described in patristic and modern spiritual texts, placed mostly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, reflecting on them against the background of contemporary re-evaluation of the body and the challenges of incarnational and pneumatological theology.

The concept of the heart is here framed inside theological and philosophical rather than biological or medical anthropology. In such a framework, one might think that the heart remains a mere image, a metaphor, a poetic way of expressing a more abstract, inner, subjective reality. However, I aim to demonstrate that the heart is not just a metaphor (mirroring a spiritual function parallel to a physical organ). Its centrality is not a pictorial determination in an abstract, disembodied space. The heart is considered the center of the whole person, embracing and directing bodily, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. As a physiological concept, the heart has a visible place. As an organ vital to human life, it provides a basic pattern for a deeper theological analysis of the heart as the hidden center of a person in the light of its connection to God. The visible place provides a point of orientation for a search that includes not a self-sufficient centrality, but a centrality anchored in the heart of God. This anchoring opens to an invisible topology and introduces us to the first paradox of the heart.

2. First Paradox: Coinciding Places, Crossing Movements

One of the most interesting paradoxes of the heart is that it is both the highest and deepest point of an encounter with God, as well as the highest and deepest place of the secret self. It is not only the (indescribable) coincidence of the summit and abyss on the vertical plane but also the center that hosts the retreat into secret interiority and the enlargement of the self on the horizontal plane. The heart is the meeting point of ascending and descending movements (toward God) and contraction and expansion dynamics. Descent and contraction are necessary for the search for the place of God in the (to be purified) human interiority, while ascent and enlargement are necessary for the encounter with God and the indwelling of God in the self. The heart becomes the secret region where these movements are possible owing to its iconic constitution and because it bears the seal of the image and likeness of God in humans.

According to the insights of 20th-century Orthodox theologian André Scrima, the human being is characterized by “the living pulsation of his metaphysical limits”, and this pulsation “represents the content of his spiritual dynamic and of the profound dialectic between him [the human] and his Creator” (Scrima 2016, p. 111). Scrima associates what I term here the ascendent movement of the heart with an anagogic and deifying ascension, while the heart’s profound region represents the dynamic of deepness. Finally, the enlargement is present through his mention of an “ocean of deification” and the dilatation of the image of God in the human being to the dimensions of likeness:

The center of emergence of the new states of being remains the same profound region where the image and our likeness of God are inscribed. The anagogic impulse of deifying ascension is received here (this is because the metaphysical propulsion of a human being in the ocean of deification cannot be the result of strictly natural forces, but only of the aspiration of divine love for its creature). The implicit aptitude of being to obtain the unlimited God in his finite limits can be found here. And it is still here, finally, that the ineffable dilatation of the image on the dimensions of the likeness unfolds; by this, the divine icon of the human is established and laminated in the presence of the divine Archetype.

(Scrima 2016, pp. 111–12, revised translation)

For Scrima, the equivalence of the hidden heart (cor absconditus), the inner human (homo interior), and God’s image (icon, eikon, imago) explains the complexity and ineffable dimension of the movements occurring in the heart/interiority. Therefore, he emphasizes the “apophatic incognoscibility of the inner being (co-implicit with the incognoscibility of the divine icon)”, which paradigmatically shows the “the apophatic structure” of the human being (Scrima 2016, p. 117). In this context, the term “apophatic” is applied not only to a theological method that proceeds by negation (from gr. apophasis—negation, in contrast to kataphasis—affirmation) or to an epistemic attitude conscious of the inadequacy of all our concepts, words, and images to express divine realities. It applies to the unfathomable and ineffable realities themselves. It has an ontological or structural scope, which is certainly stronger than defining ways of thinking and speaking about realities.1 Scrima relies on patristic sources to argue that the “inner human”, “the hidden human”, or the “human unidentifiable discursively” resides “in the deep zones where the divine image dwells” (Scrima 2016, p. 116). After mentioning Pauline theology, Origen, and the Cappadocians on this “profound nucleus of being”, Scrima turns to the spirituality of the Desert Fathers, connecting the deepness and center/nucleus imagery to the heart when stating, “Focused on contemplation, the spirituality of the Desert lives plenary and powerfully the reality of the mysterious man of the heart, and this is why the writings of the fathers of the desert abound in references about the mysterious life of the divine image in us” (Scrima 2016, pp. 116–17). Scrima’s references are Evagrius Ponticus, the Spiritual Homilies attributed to Macarius of Egypt (Pseudo-Macarius), and Diadochus of Photike (Scrima 2016, p. 117). Later, this spirituality is transmitted and deepened by Maximus the Confessor, the spirituality of Sinai, and the hesychastic tradition, which fixes, according to Scrima, the “entire great pneumatic tradition” (Scrima 2016, p. 117).

Therefore, the heart embodies the place of a “hidden mystery”; not one that condemns us to skepticism or agnosticism, but rather one that overcomes a “pure negative (or negativist) incognoscibility”—as Scrima puts it, an “eloquent mystery, and not one depleted of meaning” (Scrima 2016, p. 118). As such, the interiority of the heart, the place of the hidden image/divine icon, is also a place of revelation that is characteristic of the deepest levels of understanding, which occurs under the category of “presence” (Scrima 2016, p. 118) Understood as the “organ of the ‘substantial’ participation to the life of Divinity”, the divine icon of the human is considered a “living image” (Scrima 2016, p. 119). In this living icon, as in a pulsating organ, the human can experience the “apex of his fulfillment, the final deification, in which his beginning and his end will coincide” (Scrima 2016, p. 119). The paradoxical dynamic of the inner human of the heart links arché and telos, apex, and abyssos, the deepest nucleus and infinite, untouchable horizons. Paradigmatically, this union is realized in the Incarnation, and the embodied mystery of the human points not only to the movement of ascent and deification but also to the Incarnation: “The Incarnation unveils the essential mystery of the profound conformity between man and God in the person of God-Man Jesus Christ” (Scrima 2016, p. 125).

Therefore, descending to the inner place of the heart means also discovering the path of ascension to God, of deification, the possibility of which is grounded in the hypostatic union of the human and divine natures in Christ. As Scrima puts it in his project for apophatic anthropology, the heart is associated with depth, and the epistemic mode of depth is apophaticism:

Depth is, in fact, the dimension of the mysterious heart, so of the ineffable nucleus of the human being; the specific mode of knowledge of the depth is apophaticism, so precisely the transcending of the clear and distinct categories of discursive knowledge. No one among the geometers enters into the profound heart; if the other three Euclidian dimensions of being could be integrated to the principles of Aristotelian common reason, the heart has its “antinomic logic” that cataphatic knowledge ignores. We can arrive at the hidden man of the heart if we rather descend on the line of his outside manifestations.

(Scrima 2016, p. 160)

The other three “Euclidian dimensions of being” are those mentioned in Eph. 3:18: length, width, and height. Scrima’s language on deepness and the apophatic knowledge specific to the deep heart has Pascalian echoes: we need an esprit de finesse, rather than a geometrical mindset, to enter this deepness. That the heart has an “antinomic logic” that the cataphatic knowledge ignores follows the pattern of the famous thought from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” (Pascal 1991, fr. 690; Michon 1996, 2009) There is no sharp contrast for Scrima between the heart and reason, but the heart has its own antinomic logic that cannot be captured by the narrow focus of cataphatic knowledge, which tries to encapsulate the “essence” of a being into a definition, a concept, or a clear discursive category.

This also enables a new way of engaging with paradoxes and antinomies, including the paradox of uniting the ascending and descending and the contracting and enlarging movements identified at the beginning of this section. Even when Scrima does not address these movements explicitly in this way, he provides a key to understanding all of the contradictions of the “hidden interiority” through the category of “presence”, which has already been touched on. Even if his mention of “melting” is overenthusiastic,2 his method of “knowledge by presence”, which applies to the heart and God in the divine icon of the inner human, is of utmost importance. Nevertheless, body, space, or material and exterior categories are shown to be limited mediums of knowledge, while presence can enable a mode of communication and communion, which can be identified as transparency and perichoresis:3

The apophatic experience of presence melts all the contrasts and removes the contradictions that we encounter if we remain at the surface. Paradoxically, it is precisely these contradictions that are signs of confusion: in depth, the ineffable unity of being is remade in its homogenizations with its Creator, which means a more eminent own affirmation and not yet another confusion of its essential identity. We necessarily imply from here the inherently incommunicable structure of knowledge by presence. The categories of language—and of expression in general—are characteristics of the regime of separation. Body, space, and the exterior separate existences so much that the only way they can communicate between them is by sound or the suggestion of a symbol. Presence, however, is the place of transparency and perichoresis. Distances are suppressed, communication is replaced by communion, and the said word by silence.

(Scrima 2016, pp. 138–39)

Furthermore, Scrima links the category of presence with the presence of the Holy Spirit and speaks not only of the “depth of the deified being” (Scrima 2016, p. 141) but also “of the powerful integration of a creature in the mystery of the presence of the Spirit” (Scrima 2016, p. 140). This integration gives the final and most potent key to understanding the sense of the apophatic anthropology and its relation to the apophatic theology (Scrima 2016, p. 141).

What we have considered in this section is the heart at (or as) the coincidence of places and movements—a coincidence that is puzzling from the perspective of spatial or bodily categories. This “antinomic logic” (Scrima 2016, p. 160), this realization of coincidentia oppositorum, which transcends the discursive categories, is located in the heart as more than a bodily organ, and more than a metaphorical place. Therefore, the heart becomes a concept-image4 in which spiritualization does not mean flight from and denial of bodily realities (following the Pythagorean soma-sêma scheme, which associates the body with an incarcerating place like a coffin), but rather their transfiguration through participation in the divine life. This transfiguration can be associated with the process of pneumatization (transformation through the work of the Holy Spirit), assimilation to the divine (homoiōsis theōi), realization of the perfection of the likeness to God, and deification (theosis). However, this transfiguration also presupposes a long path of ascetical struggles that concern not only the intellectual, affective, and volitional faculties of the human being but also the human body. Turning to the articulation of these struggles in the arena of the heart, I next consider the relationship between the bodily and spiritual aspects of purification and their intriguing intersections.

3. Second Paradox: From Bodily Purification to Spiritual Transparency

One might ask how the purification of the body can affect the purification of the heart and eventually lead to a pure intellect–spirit (nous), transparent to the divine light and recipient of the divine grace. This interconnection between the bodily aspects of purification and the purity of the heart is the second paradox analyzed here. We must refer here to the ascetical resources, which in many cases stem from monastic milieus. Evaluating the ascetical aspect of the developments of monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries, Orthodox theologian Élisabeth Behr-Sigel describes the sense of vigilance and exercise of sobriety fostered by the ascetical practices linked to the body, including fasting, abstinence, and sleep reduction in favor of watchfulness. As she observes, the purpose is to transform the whole human being into the “temple of the Holy Spirit”, enabling the realization of holiness through leading a life of purification:

The monk is an awakened man: a watchman. He submits his body and his thoughts to asceticism, i.e., to an exercise—such is the proper meaning of the term—that prepares the whole human being to become, according to the grace, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Asceticism, in particular bodily asceticism, fasting, continence, and sleep deprivation play an important role in the life of the anchorites.

(Behr-Sigel 1989, p. 56, my trans.5)

Behr-Sigel even considers that this ascetical attitude may have been influenced by a tendency to underestimate the body and make it the subject of higher, ideal realms. This tendency has a role in the context of a “diffuse dualism in the Hellenic and Greco-Roman culture” (Behr-Sigel 1989, p. 56). Therefore, the ascetical attitude of Christian monasticism steps into a world in which the “great cosmic religions” have, in contrast, for a long time been “sacralizing sex” (Behr-Sigel 1989, p. 56). On the other hand, this attitude, which emphasizes the need to discipline and order the desires of the body in accordance with a spiritual principle, can be associated with the myth of the winged chariot from Plato’s Phaedrus (245b–257b), where the appetitive part of the soul (the black horse) must obey the rational part (the charioteer) and coordinate itself with the irascible part (the white horse) (Belfiore 2006). In addition, it is biblical anthropology and its holistic and integrative view of the body and soul that are fostered and confirmed in Christian asceticism: “the human being is one, spirit and body” (Behr-Sigel 1989, p. 57). The progress of the soul cannot ignore the body but must make it its ally in its ascetical struggles. The body is neither the opposite pole nor the “other” pole of the human constitution and is not the “instrument” of the soul in its struggle for perfection. The body must become the partner and co-worker of the spirit on the ascetical path.

The journey of purification, the path of ascetical efforts, which are always fortified and completed by divine grace, leads to impassibility, apatheia, a form of detachment and freedom from passions that is more than the stoic apatheia.6 This much-desired virtue and gift among Christian ascetics is not insensibility nor indifference of feeling, but rather “dis-passion”, the transcendence of the tense and conflicting passions that consume and dissipate our energy away from God. Behr-Sigel’s explanation illustrates this:

But the apatheia of the Fathers is the opposite of an anesthesia of the emotions. It is a renunciation of spiritual greed, of the desire to possess things and people. It does not mean contempt for them. As the fruit of love, it appears as a detachment for a deeper attachment.

(Behr-Sigel 1989, p. 57, my trans.7)

Reaching detachment from greed and the desire to control and possess, and achieving attachment to the deeper, ineffable, divine realities, requires purification and inner struggle. Both purification and ascetic struggle need all the faculties and potentialities of the human, in both its corporeal and spiritual dimensions. They also require a strengthening of will to detach oneself from material pleasures to feed on spiritual delight, which comes from the experience of divine grace in its overabundance. This spiritual delight overwhelms the spiritual senses, but only when the receptivity of the spiritual senses is reopened through the ascetical renouncement of ephemeral and finite pleasures. Such is the conception defended in One Hundred Chapters on Spiritual Perfection (or One Hundred Gnostic Chapters), written by the fifth-century church father and bishop of Photike, Diadochus. In Chapter 44, he explains, “But voluntarily abstaining from what is enjoyable and abundant is constitutive of knowledge and discernment. But we will not gladly forego present delights if we do not fully taste the sweetness of God with all our sense” (Diadochus of Photike 2010, trans. Ermatinger, p. 89). According to such an understanding, the ascetic way is a way of knowledge and discernment, bringing an epistemic and existential transformation. At stake here is not the requirement to follow ascetic rules for the sake of privation, but for the sake of abundance—an abundance of sweetness; moreover, a divine sweetness that appeals to the wholeness of our sensitivity and an integral and no longer fragmented, no longer deficient perception. Diadochus is also pleading for discernment and measure in an ascetical effort to avoid both the superficiality of the mind and the extenuation of the body. His advice in Chapter 45 states:

Just as a body overburdened by the burden of foods causes the mind to be sluggish and lazy, so too when weakened from exaggerated vigilance it brings about a certain melancholy as well as repugnance for the Word in the contemplative part of the soul.… A warrior should not fatigue himself bodily but should have what he needs that he might do battle so that through bodily labors he might be completely purified.

(Diadochus of Photike 2010, trans. Ermatinger, p. 89)

Through his ascetic anthropology, Diadochus appears to develop a Christian version of the Platonic conception of the soul, insisting on the need to make the appetitive part of the soul (the black horse in Phaedrus) obey the spiritual (the reasonable part depicted as a charioteer by Plato). Diadochus also sees an intimate connection between the appetitive part, the “emotions” that attract us to the “ease of pleasures”, and the “flesh”, which is “too pliable” and therefore more vulnerable to “facile attractions” that may be hiding evil suggestions (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 82, trans. Ermatinger, p. 112). Returning to the warrior metaphor—standing for the ascetical person in their quest for divine sweetness—Diadochus stresses that the goal is to access the divine Light and to “delight” in divine righteousness of the “Law of the Lord” (cf. Rom. 7:22; Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 82, trans. Ermatinger, p. 112). Eventually, the way of purification, oriented by the longing for sweetness, grace, and divine delight, returns to the center, to the heart—the origin and receptacle of all human thoughts, emotions, and sense-experiences.8 Therefore, it is essential to keep the heart vigilant, purify the heart, strengthen the heart in the battle against bad suggestions, and make it receptive to God’s light: “It is the heart which produces thoughts, both good and not good. But it is not that it produces such evil thoughts by nature” (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 83, trans. Ermatinger, p. 113). According to Diadochus, purification of the heart is possible by constantly remembering the Name of Jesus Christ and, therefore, keeping a lively relation to Christ through this memory. By remembering the Name, Diadochus means the exercise of the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart: “Let him who wants to purify his heart fire in the memory of the Lord Jesus in every moment, having that as his only meditation and sole preoccupation” (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 97, trans. Ermatinger, p. 125).

The image of fire is significant in Diadochus and is a current metaphor for purification in the patristic literature. The purification of the heart is compared to purifying gold (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 97, trans. Ermatinger, p. 125). The heart also achieves a certain malleability when on fire, but in contrast to the “pliability” of the flesh for its evil suggestions, it is receptive to the likeness of God and the divine light that leads to enhanced brilliance:

Proper to a person who is friendly with virtue is to consume all that is earthly in his heart through the memory of God, so that, little by little, evil is consumed by the fire of the recollection of goodness, and the soul returns perfectly to its natural shine but with an even greater splendor.

(Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 97, trans. Ermatinger, p. 126)

The process of purifying the heart is the process of gaining a stronger attachment to the memory of God through the Name of Jesus Christ until the human being returns not only to the image of God but also to a perfect likeness (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 89, trans. Ermatinger, p. 117). If the clear image (eikon) of God is returned to a natural shine, the greater splendor achieved by the soul is the splendor of likeness (homoiosis). At the same time, this process of purification of the heart concerns the passage from density to transparency, in a holistic approach that embraces materiality and spirituality, the flesh and the spirit, and the visible and invisible struggles. Diadochus’ view of the purification of the heart of all of its dense and earthly components also exemplifies this paradox. There is a similar purification of the spiritual intellect (nous) that is connected to the devotion of the heart to God (Diadochus of Photike 2010, chap. 16, trans. Ermatinger, p. 76).9 Certainly, this view develops in the aftermath of Aristotle’s views on the density and subtlety of physical bodies and also the views on the body, matter, and light in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions. However, it integrates a view of purification as consumption, which enables the passage from density and opacity to diaphaneity and transparency. According to Diadochus, this consummation dissipates evil and restores the soul’s radiance, brilliance, and splendor. A devouring experience also becomes a luminous experience and an act that consumes the density of the heart, owing to its passionate mixture with matter, and that lifts it into the spiritual lightness of impassibility.

Modern theology has been attentive to this paradox, linking bodily purification to spiritual transparency while working on the methods of mystical theology and embodiment theories. Through the perspective of embodiment, theology regains an interest in askesis as a “training programme” and revisits it against new understandings of desire. (Bourne and Adkins 2020, p. 75). For example, it observes that forms of asceticism, such as that proposed by Gregory of Nyssa, mean an “intensification of desire”, as desire is “set aflame” by the participation in the inner trinitarian dynamics of love (Bourne and Adkins 2020, p. 75). The disciplined exercise of spiritual practices is appreciated as producing “increased clarity and insight” and, using an expression of Thomas Aquinas, “the renewal of the senses” (Miles 2008, p. 18). The question of discernment, linked by the patristic and ascetic traditions with the senses of spiritual smell and spiritual taste, appears to regain its connection to olfactory aspects. Smells are reconsidered as markers of salvation, the immortality of purification (Ashbrook Harvey 2006), truth and knowledge (Smith 2007), and healing, holiness, and atonement (Bourne and Adkins 2020, pp. 116–22). However, there is a slight difference in accents in the movements of late ancient and Byzantine ascetic theology and modern trends. While modern trends strive to reassess the body and embodied realities as spiritual (and even eschatological, cf. Sigurdson 2016), late ancient thought considered primarily spiritual realities that could embrace, transform, and make the embodied transparent.

4. Third Paradox: Keeping the Secret—Revealing the Mystery

What is the articulation of secret and revelation in the place of the heart? How do secret and revelation connect with purification and other ascetical practices? In fact, what is the mystery hidden in the depth of the heart, which is also conceived as the “treasury of the heart”?

First, the heart makes visible our fundamental vulnerability, the wounds carried inside because of our non-beneficial attachments, known as pathé (passions) in the ascetic tradition. The spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers is particularly attentive to penetrating this secret of the wounded self and presenting this vulnerability before God and asking for healing. As John Chryssavgis states:

Once we enter the heart (kardia, καρδιά), what do we then discover? This is perhaps the essence of the Desert message. What we discover is that we are not in control of ourselves, that we are wounded. We discover our passions (pathe, πάθη), which are sometimes naively identified with sins and vices, but which are much more than this. Passions are our inner wounds, those deep marks in the space of our heart that require healing.

(Chryssavgis 2003, p. 53)

Therefore, the heart keeps the icon of our vulnerability, as liveliness is always linked to the capacity to be wounded, and our ability to be passionate and attach ourselves through our desires. Discerning the world of inner passions and desires, purifying desires, and orienting our capacity for attachment toward God are movements that are supposed to occur in the heart following the painful discovery of hidden wounds. In this sense, we can recall the saying of Abba Pambo: “If you have a heart, you can be saved” (cf. Chryssavgis 2003, p. 53). Uncovering the secret of our vulnerability can reveal the force of our “pure passion”, which is paradoxically achieved through the perfection of both apatheia (dispassion) and agape (charity) (Chryssavgis 2003, p. 58). Deciphering the mystery of the heart also means finding the key to this coincidence (apatheia-agape). In fact, putting the heart in the place of this coincidence is the golden way of progressing to God, more so than by any other ascetical practice featuring bodily aspects:

The understanding in the desert was that a single vivid experience of authentic, passionate desire for God was sufficient to advance one much more in the ascetic life than any extreme feat of fasting or vigil. In fact, such purified passion, or pure passion, could never be checked or quenched. It could be filled or fulfilled. True passion or desire does not seek to be stopped or satisfied. It can only grow endlessly.

(Chryssavgis 2003, p. 59)

However, regaining the wholeness and unity of the heart to host this unique and endless love takes some considerable time. For the Desert Fathers and Mothers, patience was required to “put together all the variegated parts of the human heart”, and it was through this process that you would authentically and fully become a human being (Chryssavgis 2003, p. 59).

Second, the depth of the heart, when intensely scrutinized, reveals the longing for infinite and pure being without dissolution and decay. Testimony for this secret longing closed in the deepness of the heart is provided by Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, the 20th-century Orthodox spiritual father and mystic, who stated, “My longing for immutable, absolute being, exhausted me. In the depth of my heart I believed that there was some other form of being uninfected with the poison of decay” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 1996, p. 80). In the same way as Scrima, he sees the mystery of spiritual life as the visitation of the heart by God’s word and associates this mystery with an infinitude that manifests itself in the dimensions of height and depth—more precisely as the “height of vision” and “depth of knowledge” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 1996, p. 81). The thoughts of Archimandrite Sophrony also highlight the connection between the heart and the spirit; God’s word comes into the heart, but it is “our spirit” who “is led by some mysterious force and in some inscrutable fashion to the very reality of the Eternal God” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 1996, p. 81).

However, according to Archimandrite Sophrony, the spiritual path encompasses a paradox concerning the suffering included in this longing and encounter with the divine. This suffering may be an echo of the encounter with human vulnerability—visible through the heart—but probably, more deeply, may reflect the pain of the distance that separates the human from the divine. Thus, the suffering of the revelation of human alienation in response to the divine embrace is reflected in the encounter with the divine:

Paradoxical as it may seem, this is just the way in which we sense divine infinity. Our weary thirst for the Living God torments us past bearing, wrenching our spirit from all created things to transport us into an indescribable pit of spiritual space, where there is nought and no one save the God of Love and a vision of his boundlessness. We see no Light, as such, but nor is it dark, since in some strange fashion the abyss is transparent without nothing to hinder the eye from piercing the depths without ever reaching the far brink.

(Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 2006, pp. 44–45)

Third, the heart reveals the image of God and the presence of God in the human being. This unveiling is not a discovery that destroys the hiddenness of God; rather, God’s mystery is enhanced and more intensely received and sensed in the secret chamber of the heart. Attested many times in the patristic literature, this revelation of the eikon of God in the human heart is revisited in the experiential theology of Archimandrite Sophrony. The awareness of our vulnerability can bring the “grace of repentance”, and this, in turn, opens the vision of the heart to an image of the Son, which is understood as a true and consubstantial image of the Father. This vision is not only an act of contemplation of the external deity but also a process of inner transformation of the human termed “recreation.” In the dramatic description of Archimandrite Sophrony:

The grace of repentance reveals in us the Image of the Son of the Father. Oh, how painful this process is! Our heart is pierced with a white-hot sword. How to portray the horror that grips us? And how to relate the act of God’s regeneration in us? The image of the only begotten Son of one substance with the Father, the Logos, kindles a strong desire in us to become like Him in all things. And once again we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: we suffer but in a hitherto-unknown way. This suffering inspires us. It does not destroy. There is uncreated strength in it. We are cast into divine infinity. We are amazed at what is happening to us, surpassed by the majesty of it.

(Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 2006, pp. 46–47, revised translation)

This last paradox of discovering God in the suffering of the heart may lead to a mystical understanding and collaboration with God for the fulfillment of God’s plan. Those two elements show that the approach to God through the heart does not present a dichotomy between contemplation (as associated with mysticism) and action (as associated with co-laboring with God). Contemplation (theoria) and action (praxis) meet and harmonize owing to an encounter with the infinity of God in the depth of the heart.10 Their meeting is possible as a way of assuming another kind of suffering that is neither physical nor psychological pain but rather an existential opening in which divine grace pours from its infinity an “uncreated strength.” This paradoxical movement means that the ascetic exercise is elevated above the level of discipline through bodily practices (e.g., fasting, vigil, prayer involving metanies) and reaches the level of shaping the human iconic identity following the archetype of the iconic identity of the Son—who is the Image of the Father. This process of shaping is not abstracted from an experience or feeling in the heart—an experience of enlightening and burning piercing—which ultimately announces the process of “regeneration” or “recreation.” This regeneration or recreation is not a therapeutic metaphor meaning the reconstruction of human possibilities but rather the re-inscription (as intense and real as human wholeness can bear or even beyond such limits—the “suffering” of a paradoxical and unknown way) of the human in the vocation of receiving and uniting with the infinite divine. This is a transformation of the image already present in the human heart into a more perfect likeness of the personal and loving God. God’s presence (reflecting Scrima’s insistence on the category of “presence”) makes limitless the limited being, and this unlimiting of the limited comes as a “white-hot sword” in Sophrony’s imagery. On the other hand, this transformation is not a purely passive process in which the human is delivered in the hands of divine will. Rather, it is a synergic process in which the human is called to and included in God’s creative process and is elevated to the dignity of a co-worker by the effect of spiritual rebirth:

There is rapture too, in that we begin to perceive God’s will for us. We see ourselves drawn into the creative process of God Himself. We have collaborated with Him in our own restauration from our fallen and distorted state. And lo, He accepts us as co-workers with him in his “field”. Such are the consequences of our rebirth in the Spirit through repentance.

(Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 2006, p. 47)

The vocabulary of collaboration and coworking recalls the Orthodox doctrine of synergy between human will and divine grace, as classically proposed by John Cassian (Cassien 1958) and Maximus the Confessor (see also Lot-Borodine 2011; Naett-Vidovic 2018). However, it also links to the doctrine of deification (theosis) traditionally proclaimed by Orthodox theologians (Lot-Borodine 2011; Russell 2004, 2009, 2024) that has been gaining greater attention on the ecumenical reception spectrum over the past decades (Olson 2007; Meconi 2013; Vainio 2022; Gavrilyuk 2009; Gavrilyuk et al. 2024). According to the doctrine of deification, the human being is called to become God by grace or by adoption, which equates to achieving the perfect likeness to God. Deification can be understood in terms of fulfilled filiation, but also in terms of iconic anthropology. The attainment of perfect likeness presupposes the restoration of the beauty and purity of the divine image imprinted in the human heart and the ascent of the purified heart to God.

5. The Spirituality of Purification: A Path for an Apophatic Anthropology

The spirituality of purification and the discourse on the pure heart that becomes a receptacle for the grace of God can be integrated into apophatic anthropology. This apophatic attitude toward the human stems from the amazement and wonder in front of the human who is recreated by the grace of God, in which infinite longing meets the infinity of God, “casting” the human onto the path of realizing the likeness to God. This attitude of wonder presents the human being in a new light that surpasses discursive understanding and linguistic limits—in the words of Archimandrite Sophrony cited previously, “We are cast into divine infinity. We are amazed of what is happening to us, surpassed by the majesty of it” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) 2006, p. 47). The way to the revelation of this majesty of the “recreated” human—despite, or with, all human vulnerability—by divine uncreated strength has passed through a long history of inner combat in the arena of the heart to purify the whole human being—the flesh and spirit, body, and soul—or to define this wholeness above and beyond the material–spiritual dichotomies, perception, affectivity, will, intellect, and spirit. The recreation of the human being can be seen as a rebirth “unto the boundlessness of eternal life” and the enlargement of the heart as assimilation into the “mystery of the depth, the height, the length and the breadth of the Cross of Christ”, as noted by Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou) (2007, p. 81), echoing Eph. 3:18 and using language that can be compared to Scrima’s approach of the four dimensions. Enlargement of the heart enables us to reach not only a depth that becomes transparent to the depth of divine grace but also an awareness of the vulnerability that is assumed and transformed by encounters with the divine. This transparency remains beyond words and conceptual determinations, piercing the hidden heart (the cor absconditum) to reveal the hidden human being (homo absconditus). This profound human being, hidden from the scrutiny of the created mind and escaping the referential pretension of language, is “the hidden man of the heart” (1 Petr. 3:4; Archimandrite Zacharias 2007). Human hiddenness gains in majesty and wonder when it participates in and mirrors divine hiddenness. A cardiocentric understanding of the human presupposes a way to purity of the heart—this way is also a way to greater mystery and, therefore, a way of apophatic theology.

This intriguing way that leads to the deep heart (neither discursive nor simply dialectic but integrating and even surpassing the play of antinomies and the intersection of opposite movements) is also a way that gives new meaning and dignity to the body. It enables the heart to be discovered as the innermost part of the body, as well as the center of all other intellectual and spiritual potentialities. As Archimandrite Zacharias states, “God has given a great honor to the body of man in that He made it the temple of His Spirit, and the body most interior to this body, as St Gregory Palamas calls the heart, is the place where His Kingdom is manifested” (2007, p. 212). However, this interiority in itself is not a privilege; the true gift lies in the energies that can be hosted in the heart: “Great potential energy is hidden into our deep heart” (Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou) 2007, p. 213). Here, Archimandrite Zacharias means the energy to “refresh and strengthen our being” that comes through prayer from God. But opening the secret treasure of these energies means finding the place of the heart: “Therefore, in order to tap those energies that enable us to carry on with God’s work, it is indispensable to find the deep heart” (Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou) 2007, p. 213). We have arrived back at our starting point, searching for the place of the heart. The spirituality of purification means being able to repeatedly begin this spiral search for depth.

From Diadochus to Archimandrite Zacharias, passing through Gregory Palamas, this spiral is accompanied by a specific practice of prayer: the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart. Central in Eastern Orthodox tradition, this prayer informed the experiential or phenomenological way of writing of many theological thinkers cited here like Elisabeth Behr-Sigel or André Scrima. Moreover, the practice of the Jesus Prayer finds many echoes today, in other different spiritual contexts, and has a wide ecumenical reception (Jungclaussen 2008; Jalics 2009; Bobert 2010; Main 2015). Aiming to bring peace, rest of heart, and tranquility (hesychia), the Jesus prayer also presupposes a journey through the depth of the self. It can be understood as a way of purification (from bad inclinations, thoughts, memories, and desires) but also as a continuous relationship to God, through the Power of the name of Jesus Christ. (Ware 1986; Gather 2010).

Let us recapitulate the paradoxes explored in this paper as an argument for the necessity of an apophatic anthropology. Searching for the place of the heart, which appears to escape the assertive privileges of the modern self, requires searching for a center in the place of, or instead of, the self—au lieu de soi, to borrow Jean-Luc Marion’s phrase (Marion 2008). The spirituality of purification enables us to discover the heart as both a withdrawal toward the “innermost self” (Augustine: interior intimo meo) and an ascension toward the transcendent (Augustine: superior summo meo). Therefore, the place of the heart is situated in the coincidence of these descending and ascending ways, and in the pulsating movement that implies both withdrawal and enlargement. The heart is also the place unifying the bodily ascetic struggles with the intellect’s seeking in an intense longing for God. It is also the “secret chamber” where grace dwells to distribute its light throughout the whole human being, including in the bodily constitution. The heart is the way purification intersects and surpasses exercise (askesis) so that the human reaches the indescribable encounter with the Uncreated as recreation or regeneration. Eastern theology understands the accomplishment of this process as deification (theosis) or likeness with God. In its deepest mystery, the human heart reveals the infinite love of God, who transforms the human into a co-worker with God. While keeping the secret of the inner heart, it reveals the vocation of the wholeness of humanity. The heart beats in the fold that separates and unites mystery and revelation, and its secret treasury can be approached only through an apophatic attitude, with all the creativity that apophaticism presupposes. Therefore, a spirituality of purification that opens to an apophatic anthropology is not a way of privation, but rather a process of enlargement and enrichment that embraces the Uncreated and Unlimited.