Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
Evagrius's Pure / Imageless Prayer
To pray ‘without distraction’ by laying aside every concept, image, and even mental form of God — letting the bare mind (nous) stand naked and still before the divine, the seed of later apophatic contemplation.
Evagrius’s pure prayer in 5 lines: First quiet the passions and warm up with slow recitation. Then sit in stillness and gather your attention. As any thought arises — even a holy image — do not fight it; lay it aside and return to bare presence. Form no picture of God; let the mind go formless and still. Judge the prayer not by visions but by undistracted, loving attention.
What it is
Evagrius Ponticus (345–399), the desert monk who systematised early Christian contemplative psychology, taught that the summit of prayer is imageless — what he calls pure prayer or prayer without distraction.
His startling definition: “Prayer is the laying aside of thoughts” (On Prayer 70). Not the laying aside of bad thoughts only, but of all mental representation — including images and concepts of God himself.
The praying mind (nous) is stripped bare until it stands “naked,” still, and formless before the divine, which Evagrius describes meeting not as a picture but as formless light. This is the historical taproot of the whole apophatic (“negative way”) tradition: you approach God by un-knowing, by setting down every form the mind can hold.
The Method
Evagrius gives the discipline in compact aphorisms across On Prayer. Reconstructed as a practice:
- Prepare the ground first. Pure prayer is not a beginner’s trick; it rests on praktike — the long ascetic work of calming the passions (see the companion technique on apatheia). Evagrius is explicit: “If you wish to pray, you have need of God” and of a quieted soul. Typically it follows a period of psalmody (reciting Scripture/Psalms), which settles and focuses the mind before silence.
- Sit in stillness (hesychia), and gather attention. Quiet body, quiet place, attention turned inward and upward. The aim is undistracted presence.
- Lay aside thoughts as they arise — including good ones. “Prayer is the laying aside of thoughts” (ch. 70). When any mental content appears — a worry, a plan, a memory, even a pious image — you do not fight it, analyse it, or follow it. You release it and return to the bare attention. Evagrius warns that even seemingly holy images and reasonings must be let go in this state; they still clothe the mind.
- Refuse all images of God. This is Evagrius’s signature instruction. “When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity, and do not let your mind be stamped with the impress of any form” (On Prayer 66, paraphrase). Do not picture light, a figure, a place, a face. Any form the mind grasps is not God but a concept. Let even that fall away.
- Let the mind become formless and still. What remains is “imageless” — bare awareness, “the mind’s own light” (a sapphire-blue radiance, in Evagrius’s imagery), open before God. Evagrius calls the prayer that reaches this state prayer that is “without distraction.” 6. Measure it by love, not by experiences. “He who truly loves God prays entirely without distraction, and he who prays entirely without distraction loves God truly” (On Prayer 113, paraphrase). The fruit is not visions — Evagrius distrusts those — but undistracted, loving stillness. (Sourcing note: “Prayer is the laying aside of thoughts” and the prohibition on forming an image of the Deity are Evagrius’s own statements in On Prayer; chapter numbers follow the standard 153-text recension as translated by Bamberger and others. Renderings are faithful paraphrase of short passages.)
Source & Lineage
Evagrius drew on Origen’s intellectualist mysticism and on Hellenistic philosophy (Platonic and Stoic psychology), forging them into a monastic method in the Egyptian desert. → (mystics and contemplatives / desert fathers).
His apophatic instinct — that God is met beyond all form — passed through Pseudo-Dionysius into the entire Christian negative-theology tradition, through John Cassian to the Latin West, and into Byzantine hesychasm and the Philokalia.
The later Cloud of Unknowing, Carmelite “dark night” mysticism, and modern Centering Prayer all stand downstream of Evagrian imageless prayer.
The Traditions' versions
Apophatic / negative theology — the Cloud of Unknowing, Pseudo-Dionysius: approach God by un-knowing, behind a “cloud of forgetting.” Direct descendant.
- Centering Prayer (Keating, Pennington) — modern distillation: a sacred word to release every thought and rest in God; explicitly Evagrian in structure.
- Open-monitoring / open-awareness meditation — secular and Buddhist (shikantaza, choiceless awareness): rest in bare awareness, let contents pass without grasping. Structurally near-identical to “laying aside thoughts.”
- Nondual “resting as awareness” — contemporary teachers: drop the object, abide as the knowing itself.
- Imageless concentration in Hindu jnana/Advaita — neti neti (“not this, not this”) strips every form, like Evagrius’s refusal of all images.
Common refinements
Starting here. Evagrius is emphatic that pure prayer rests on prior work calming the passions; attempting object-less stillness with an agitated, untrained mind mostly produces restlessness. Build the foundation first.
- Fighting thoughts. The instruction is lay aside, not battle. Wrestling a thought feeds it. Notice, release, return.
- Chasing experiences. Lights, raptures, visions — Evagrius treats these with suspicion, even as possible deceptions. The measure is undistracted love, not phenomena.
- Clinging to a good image. The hardest refinement: even a beautiful, devout image must be released in this state, because any form is still a concept, not the formless reality.
- Skipping the warm-up. Going straight to silence from a busy mind is harder than entering through a few minutes of slow recitation first.