Energetic motives in the translation of spiritual tradition

The article deals with the problem of the content and forms of translation of the Orthodox spiritual tradition, the core of which is the energy paradigm of hesychasm. It is shown that literature is an important channel for the transmission of spiritual tradition. The Russian literary tradition presents religious and educational works of Orthodox ascetics, as well as artistic works that have a Christian orientation and are based on theological and evangelical texts. An important role in maintaining the spiritual tradition of Orthodoxywas played by the development of the concept “righteous man” in the literature. His verbalization was influenced by the Christian religion. This concept has become a fundamental cultural constant. Thanks to the concept of the righteous, writers who were critical of Orthodox Christianity were able to use righteousness instead of holiness and describe less exalted examples of spiritual experience. The images of the righteous are based not on typification of the experience of real people, but on orientation to a moral ideal. Representatives of religious literary studies describe the behavior of the righteous in the paradigm of “spiritual realism”. This allows us to take into account the mystical coloring of the actions and events of the righteous. There are two channels for broadcasting the Orthodox spiritual tradition: inside the Orthodox world and outside it, that is, in new cultural spaces. The reasons for the popularity of Orthodox ideas in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century are shown. This contributed to the penetration of the practice of continuous prayer into Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, as well as into religious groups outside Christianity. The nature of attempts to adapt the practice of continuous Jesus prayer in a foreign cultural environment is described.