Is Hesychasm prayer approved by the Catholic Church?

[Wandile]

Good grief Charlie Brown…

Perhaps a definition of sin might help…

Everything that is not of God is sin…

All consequences of sin (broken windows and divorces and corpses) are of God for the sake of our Salvation…

Sin has consequences…

geo

I think we all agree on this.

I think the discussion was more over where does sin start and where does it end.
So in my analogy of the mud on a person being sin, you could remove the mud (forgiveness) and still have a stain which would be the consequence of sin. But this is stretching the analogy too far

 

[George720]

Noetic means relating to mental activity or the intellect. So saying it bypasses and transcends intellect but is noetic is self contradictory in a sense.

Noesis is the stilling of "mental activity understood as intellection… It is inner stillness, in which God is “seen”… Not normally considered an ophthalmic event, but “seeing” is a reasonable descriptive of its action… Those in such a Divine encounter stop their thinking and are filled with and by God… If they do not, they are not so filled… One’s own thoughts obstruct one from God’s infilling… Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall ‘see’ God, yes?

The word for ‘pure’ means purged…

geo

 

[Wandile]

Wandile:

Noetic means relating to mental activity or the intellect. So saying it bypasses and transcends intellect but is noetic is self contradictory in a sense.

Noesis is the stilling of "mental activity understood as intellection… It is inner stillness, in which God is “seen”… Not normally considered an ophthalmic event, but “seeing” is a reasonable descriptive of its action… Those in such a Divine encounter stop their thinking and are filled with and by God… If they do not, they are not so filled… One’s own thoughts obstruct one from God’s infilling… Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall ‘see’ God, yes?

The word for ‘pure’ means purged…

geo

With this explanation… you are still in perfect agreement with St Thomas Aquinas still. What you’ve described is intellectual activity. I guess I passed over the “intellection” comment by mistake. No, St Thomas is not teaching that we encounter God through reasoning or our thoughts.

St Thomas teaches:

“I say then that [God] can nowise be seen with the eyes of the body, or perceived by any of the senses, as that which is seen directly, neither here, nor in [heaven] : for if that which belongs to sense as such be removed from sense, there will be no sense, and in like manner if that which belongs to sight as sight be removed therefrom, there will be no sight. Accordingly seeing that sense as sense perceives magnitude, and sight as such a sense perceives color, it is impossible for the sight to perceive that which is neither color nor magnitude, unless we call it a sense equivocally. Since then sight and sense will be specifically the same in the glorified body, as in a non-glorified body, it will be impossible for it to see the Divine [essence] as an object of direct vision; yet it will see it as an object of indirect vision, because on the one hand the bodily sight will see so great a [glory] of [God] in bodies, especially in the glorified bodies and most of all in the body of [Christ] , and, on the other hand, the [intellect] will see [God] so clearly, that [God] will be perceived in things seen with the eye of the body, even as life is perceived in speech. For although our [intellect] will not then see [God] from seeing His creatures, yet it will see [God] in His creatures seen corporeally. This manner of seeing [God] corporeally is indicated by [Augustine] (De Civ. Dei xxii), as is clear if we take note of his words, for he says: "It is very credible that we shall so see the mundane bodies of the new heaven and the new earth, as to see most clearly [God] everywhere present, governing all corporeal things, not as we now see the invisible things of [God] as understood by those that are made, but as when we see men . . . we do not [believe] but see that they live."

 

[George720]

Most professional athletes enter into a kind of noesis as they compete and endorphins flow… It is this state of mind that keeps them in sports… The fact of noesis is a feature of being human…

In older times, intellect was the term that translated the Greek term “Nous”… More modernly, Paul was translated as saying: “We have the Mind of Christ…” And many took that to mean “We have the thoughts of Christ…” Better, for English speakers, to just use a transliteration, and say: “We have the Nous of Christ…” It is not Christ’s thinking that we have, but the God-focused purity of heart… For the nous is described as the eye of the heart - It’s deepest and core apperception, prior to sensation and ideas and even concepts not yet ideated… Featuring a Janus-faced ability to regard both God and Creation… Which is why the Byzantine Empire had as its flag the image of the double headed eagle, which the Russian Federation also has…

The problem is that in discipleship terms, our nous is scattered among the cares and concerns of creation, and is not focused at all times on God - “Remember your First Love!”

Hesychastic Prayer is the cause and the result of such a concentration of the nous on God… This is not a matter commonly seen, let alone addressed, in the West, but is THE central issue in the discipling of the Church in the East…

Long philosophic progressions of descriptive conceptualizations are far, far from this essential centrality of Christian focus for which the greatest minds forsake the world and turn to God…

geo