Hesychius of Sinai

Venerable Hesychius of Sinai was a Byzantine ascetic writer, a monk and, according to some manuscripts, abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai. He is known as the author of the treatise on watchfulness and virtue, which has remained one of the major writings of Hesychasm and of the Jesus Prayer. He is commemorated on 29 March, according to the Synaxarion of the Church of Greece.

What is known of him

Very little certain is known of his life, and the sources do not agree on the time he lived. The Greek Synaxarion places him in the seventh century and says he was abbot of Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. Modern scholarship offers dates between the seventh and ninth centuries, and also the second half of the twelfth, because his name does not appear in manuscripts before the middle of the thirteenth century, and the oldest manuscript of his work, from 1267 (another source gives 1289), is much later. In manuscripts he is usually given the title Our Holy Father. He should not be confused with Hesychius of Jerusalem, whose writings his were mixed with in manuscripts and old editions. For that reason no separate commemoration has been established for him in the Russian tradition.

His work

His only surviving work is the Soul-⁠profiting and Saving Discourse on Watchfulness and Virtue in Chapters, also called the Centuries or Chapters. The long text has two hundred chapters, in manuscripts between 200 and 203, while the short one has twenty-⁠four chapters in alphabetical order. It is addressed to a Theodulus, and in some manuscripts Theodulus was wrongly taken to be the author. The author gives his name through a play on the word hesychia, stillness. He draws on the Sayings of the Fathers, Evagrius of Pontus, Diadochus of Photiki, John Climacus and Maximus the Confessor.

His theme is watchfulness, that is, attention of the mind, guarding of the mind and resistance to thoughts, joined to the invocation of the name of Jesus Christ and the purification of the heart. The work was printed in Greek in the sixteenth century, entered Migne's Patrologia Graeca and, in a better form, the Greek Philokalia. It was translated twice into Slavonic, survives in more than forty South Slavic manuscripts, the oldest from the first decades of the fourteenth century, and was cited by Gregory of Sinai, Callistus Angelicudes, Callistus and Ignatius Xanthopoulos and, in the Russian tradition, by Nil Sorsky, who calls him Hesychius of Jerusalem. A lost discourse, On the Cross, is also attributed to him.