Gregory of Sinai

Our Venerable Father Gregory the Sinaite, teacher of stillness and of the Prayer of Jesus

Venerable · b. c. 1265, at Klazomenai near Smyrna — d. 27 November 1346, at Paroria in the Strandzha

Commemorated 8 August — Commemoration of the venerable teacher of hesychasm

Gregory the Sinaite (c. 1265–1346) is the father of the fourteenth-century hesychast revival: the monk who gathered up the ancient discipline of inner stillness (hēsychia) and the unceasing Prayer of Jesus, learned it on Sinai and in Crete, planted it on Mount Athos at a moment when, by his own complaint, almost no one there knew it, and then carried it over the Byzantine frontier into the Slav lands, where at Paroria in the Strandzha mountains he formed the disciples — Callistus I of Constantinople, Theodosius of Trnovo, Romylos, Nicodemus of Tismana — through whom his teaching passed to Bulgaria, Serbia, Wallachia and at last to Russia. His five treatises stand in the Philokalia; the whole Athonite defence of the uncreated light waged by Gregory Palamas rests upon the practice Gregory the Sinaite had restored. He reposed at Paroria on 27 November 1346, and is commemorated on August 8.

Klazomenai, captivity, and Cyprus

Gregory was born about 1265, in the coastal village of Klazomenai near Smyrna in Asia Minor, of prosperous parents. He was still a young man — the accounts place it about 1290 — when the Turks of the emirates then eating away at Byzantine Asia carried off the whole household into captivity, and he was taken to Laodicea. The tradition tells that the Christians of the place, hearing the captives sing the services with such beauty, raised the money for their ransom; and Gregory, released, did not go home. He crossed to Cyprus, and there, in the household of a solitary ascetic, received the first monastic tonsure as a rasophore.

Sinai, Jerusalem, Crete

From Cyprus he went to the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai, and there received the great schema — from that mountain comes the name he has borne ever since. At Sinai he passed through the ordinary obediences of a coenobium, cook and baker, and then became a copyist, in which work his gift showed itself: he outdid the whole brotherhood in his reading and in his command of the Scriptures and the Fathers. His asceticism was extreme — fasting, vigils, psalmody, prayer standing through the night — and, as his biographer records without softening it, this made him in that community as much an object of envy as of wonder. He left, went up to Jerusalem and the holy places, and came at length to Crete.

Crete was the turning-point of his life. In a cave near the shore he met an old monk named Arsenios, and from him learned what he had not been taught in the great monasteries: the guarding of the heart (phylakē kardias), watchfulness (nēpsis), and the practice of the Prayer of Jesus — the invocation of the Name, said with the breath, drawing the mind down out of its wandering into the heart. What Gregory received from Arsenios he would spend the rest of his life transmitting.

Athos: the renewal of hesychasm

About 1310 he came to Mount Athos, and went round its monasteries and its hermits looking for men who practised what he had learned. The judgement he formed is the most famous thing his biographer reports of him, and the reason his coming to the Mountain matters: he found many monks admirable in discipline, in obedience, in fasting, in the labour of their hands — and scarcely one who knew anything of watchfulness, of guarding the mind, or of pure prayer; when he asked about theōria, contemplation, they said they had not so much as heard the word. Only in a few solitaries — among them Maximus Kavsokalyvites, the fool-for-Christ of the burnt huts, whose gift of prayer and of clairvoyance Gregory alone on the Mountain recognised for what it was — did he find the thing itself.

He settled at the skete of Magoula, near the monastery of Philotheou, and there he began to teach. Disciples came; cells multiplied around him; and the Mountain became what it has been ever since, the school of the Jesus Prayer. It is essential to see what this meant. Gregory did not invent a novelty. He restored, from the writings of John Klimakos, Symeon the New Theologian and Nikephoros the Hesychast, and from the living tradition of Sinai and Crete, a discipline that had grown rare; and he gave it method, order and a literature. Within a generation the men formed in that school were the leadership of the Byzantine Church, and when the practice was attacked — by Barlaam of Calabria, who mocked the hesychasts' bodily method of prayer — it was Gregory Palamas, of the next Athonite generation, who defended it, and the councils of 1341 and 1351 that vindicated it.

Paroria, and the Slav inheritance

Athos in the 1320s and 1330s was not safe. Turkish raiders came ashore repeatedly, and Catalan freebooters before them; hermits living outside the walls were the first to suffer. Gregory withdrew — first, the accounts say, toward Thessalonica and the neighbourhood of Sozopol, and finally into the wild border country of Paroria, in the Strandzha mountains between the empire and Bulgaria, where he founded the monastery that the tradition calls the "hidden" or "concealed" house, for men who would keep the strict rule of his life. There he had the protection and the money of the Bulgarian Tsar John Alexander, who built a tower against the brigands of the frontier and endowed the community.

Paroria is why Gregory belongs to the history of the Slav Churches and not only to that of Byzantium. Into that wilderness came Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and men from beyond the Danube, and they went out again carrying the prayer: Theodosius of Trnovo, who made Kilifarevo the seed-bed of the Bulgarian revival and whose pupil Euthymius became patriarch; Romylos, who died at Ravanica in Serbia; Nicodemus of Tismana, the organiser of Romanian monasticism; Callistus I, twice Ecumenical Patriarch, who presided at the council of 1351 that sealed the theology of Palamas — and who wrote, about that same year, the Life of Gregory of Sinai, the fundamental source for everything above. Through Bulgaria and Serbia the current reached Russia, and it is the same stream that surfaces again in Nilus of Sora, in Paisius Velichkovsky, and in the Optina elders.

Gregory reposed at Paroria on 27 November 1346, an old man of some eighty years.

Writings

Five works of Gregory stand in the Philokalia as Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth assembled it in 1782:

137 Texts on the Commandments and Doctrines, Warnings and Promises; on Thoughts, Passions and Virtues, and also on Stillness and Prayer — his summa in chapters, of which the most quoted sentence is the warning that to try to grasp the commandments by study and reading without doing them is to mistake a shadow for the thing that casts it.
Further Texts;
On the Signs of Grace and Delusion, written for the confessor Longinos — the classic Byzantine treatise on discernment of spirits, distinguishing the working of grace from plánē, spiritual self-deception;
On Stillness: Fifteen Texts;
On Prayer: Seven Texts — where the method is set down plainly: the sitting posture, the bowed head, the drawing-in of the breath, the mind held in the heart, and the words Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, divided or entire, said without ceasing.

He was also a hymnographer. The canon to the Most Holy Trinity sung at the Sunday midnight office is his, and a canon to the Precious Cross; the Slavonic manuscripts — among them a canon-book of 1407 belonging to Cyril of White Lake — carry a "Canon of Supplication to the Lord Jesus Christ, the work of Gregory the Sinaite." The Athonite tradition further ascribes to him the hymn It is truly meet (Ἄξιόν ἐστιν) in the form now sung, though the story of that hymn is told in several ways and belongs properly to the Mountain's own legend.

Feast and commemoration

August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration — a placing that is more than coincidence to those who keep it, since the light of Tabor is the very thing the hesychast fathers contended for, and the whole controversy of the fourteenth century turned on what the apostles saw on that mountain. His memory is kept on Athos, in Bulgaria (where Paroria and Kilifarevo are his), in Serbia and Romania through his disciples, and in the Russian and OCA calendars. The Greek Menaion for August 8 does not carry him: its synaxarion for the day names Emilian of Cyzicus, Myron of Crete, Theodore of Orobi, the martyrs Eleutherius and Leonidas, and the ten ascetics of Egypt. His repose fell on 27 November 1346.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8

In thee, O Father, was the divine image kept unbroken; for thou didst take up the Cross and follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Gregory, thy spirit rejoiceth together with the Angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Kontakion — Tone 2

Thou didst learn stillness upon Sinai and in the caves of Crete, and didst carry it to the Holy Mountain and beyond the rivers into the lands of the Slavs; and where thou camest, there men learned to call upon the Name. O father Gregory, teacher of prayer, entreat Christ God that we also may guard our hearts.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Gregory the Sinaite is painted as a venerable father of the great schema: an aged monk, long grey beard narrowing to a point, in the dark analavos and koukoulion worked with crosses, one hand raised in blessing or laid upon the breast, the other holding an unrolled scroll — the attribute of the teachers of prayer, and in his case usually inscribed with a sentence on stillness or with the words of the Jesus Prayer itself. Where the hesychast fathers are grouped together — in later Athonite and Balkan wall-painting, and in the composite icons of the fathers of the Philokalia — he stands with Gregory Palamas, Symeon the New Theologian, Nikephoros the Hesychast and Theoleptos of Philadelphia. In Bulgarian and Serbian churches of the region he is shown as the founder of Paroria, sometimes with a small model of the tower or the church.

No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection: Wikimedia Commons returns nothing for Gregory Sinaite, Grigorije Sinaita, Γρηγόριος Σιναΐτης or Григорий Синаит except printed editions of the Philokalia and the Slavonic ascetical books. The Menologion of Basil II cannot supply the gap: it covers September to February only, and in any case predates him by three centuries. A wanted icon is recorded.

Disputed questions

The year of his repose. Two dates circulate: 1310 and 1346. The earlier is an error of compression in some Slavonic notices (it is the date of his arrival on Athos), and the OCA life still reports it while noting that historians prefer 1346. The later date is required by everything else that is known: he was at Paroria under John Alexander, who reigned from 1331; his disciple Callistus, who wrote his Life about 1351, describes his death as recent; and Theodosius of Trnovo, who died in 1363, was formed under him at Paroria. 27 November 1346 is followed here.
Which day is his? His repose was on 27 November, and that is the date the historians give; but the calendars in general use — the Greek Menaion excepted, which does not carry him on either day — commemorate him on August 8, and it is on August 8 that the Russian and OCA calendars list him. Some notices add February 11 and April 6; neither day's published commemoration list bears him, and the April 6 attribution is very likely a confusion with the distinct Gregory the Byzantine (below). This entry keeps August 8 as the primary feast and records November 27 as the historical date of his repose without asserting a second liturgical commemoration.
Not to be confused with Gregory the Byzantine (April 6), a Constantinopolitan who practised asceticism at the Great Lavra on Athos and is remembered as a spiritual guide of Gregory Palamas. The two are separately listed and separately described; the resemblance — a Gregory, on Athos, in the hesychast generation — is what has caused Gregory the Sinaite to be attached to the April 6 date.
Not to be confused with Gregory Palamas (†1359), archbishop of Thessalonica, the theologian of the movement, who was a generation younger and whose defence of the uncreated light presupposes the practice Gregory the Sinaite had restored; nor with Gregory of Sinai the Younger, a later Athonite of the same name; nor with Gregory of Crete or the other Gregorys of this corpus.