The book provides a comprehensive modern assessment of the Eastern–Orthodox mystical and ascetic (hesychast) tradition. It includes a general introduction, a dictionary of hesychast concepts and an extensive analysis of methodological and hermeneutical aspects of the hesychast experience.

The Introduction explains that our presentation of the hesychasm is based on a certain concept of the mystical experience. We define it as the experience of «primordial orientation in being» and an «event of transcendence» and find that it has a special ability to generate an anthropological strategy or scenario, the realisation of which constitutes a large scale process that includes the formation of adequate versions of disciplines concerned with man and mind. Hence it is conceivable, after decoding the anthropology behind the hesychast experience, to interpret this anthropology as a meta–discourse generating a set of disciplinary discourses for some or all of the human sciences.

Analytical Dictionary of Hesychast Anthropology

This is an attempt at a systematic conceptualisation of the whole sphere of hesychast practice. All the categories of the hesychast experience are defined and described in separate articles grouped in five sections which display successively the anthropological process centered on the mystical ascent to and union with God (τεοσις):

Situation of Man - Orientation of Man - Praxis - Theoria - Eschatology.

Special attention is paid to the key elements forming the core of hesychast practice: bringing one’s mind down into the heart; the Jesus prayer; incessant prayer; pure prayer; vision of Uncreated Light. The basis of each article is formed by data from original ascetic texts and complemented by the considerations of modern Orthodox interpreters as well as the analysis of semantic and conceptual connotations.

Ascesis as an Organon. The Organisation and Hermeneutics of the Hesychast Experience

We start with the observation that the hesychast tradition represents,inter alia, a full–scale organon, i. e., the practical- theoretical canon of a definite kind of complete experience («complete» means completely displaying a certain (φυσις). We reconstruct this «inner» hesychast organon structuring it as follows:

Exposition of the Experience - Qualification - Organisation‑Criteriology - Hermeneutics,

and we complement it symmetrically with another one, the «outer» organon, which has the same structure, but follows the principles of modern epistemology; so that the experience in question is seen in double perspective. The principles of the «outer» organon are dialogical and phenomenological. We find, in particular, a far–reaching affinity between the hesychast «soberness» (νηψις) and husserlian intentionality, but also a distinction between them, the analysis of which suggests how phenomenology might be extended to cover the domain of mystical experience. Many other philosophical, psychological, hermeneutical problems deserving a further study are pointed out, the most intriguing one being, probably, the study of a specific non–aristotelian notion of energy found in hesychasm.