A number of Orthodox monasteries have come into being, both in western Europe and in America, where the hesychast way of life can be practiced more intensely.
Thus, into a modern Western world dominated for centuries by an activist time - bound mentality that is antimetaphysical,anticontemplative, and antisymbolic, has been squarely placed the alternative of a contemplative knowledge of human destiny rooted in a way of life in wich theory and practice, wisdom and the method , are inextricably interlocked and whose fulfillment requires a surpasing of all worldly categories, social, political, economic - in short, of that whole realm of the temporal to wich the frenetic activity of modern humanity is confined. Assuredly , behind this antithesis lies another- namely, that between opposed theological and consequently between opposed anthropological orientations. For at the origin of the activist bias of the modern world lies a system of thought wich turns God into a transcendent and unknowable essence that, although responsible for setting the cosmic process in motion, does not interiorly penetrate creation in all its aspects, invisible and visible, incorporeal and corporeal, intelligible and material, but leaves it to follow its own course as though it were a self-subsistent autonomous reality. The corollary of such a conception is that the human mind, equated now with its purely rational function, is itself regarded as something sovereign, cut off from the divine and capable of resolving and determining human destiny on earth independently of revelation and grace. 
In radically condemning such a system of thought, hesychasm affirms what one might call the bipolarity of the divine; for it is continues to mantain the idea of God's transcendence, it no less insists on his total and ineradicable presence in humanity and in every other form of created existence. In other words, it affirms that God breaks through the wall of his transcendence in order to make himself both the active source and the true existential subject of everything created, down to the least particle of matter itself: a source and subject who not only can be known by human beings but who must be known by human beings as a condition of humans themselves possesing anything more than a distorted knowledge of their own being and of the world in wich they live. Such distorted knowledge , of course, is quite inadequate to serve as a guide to any truly constructive action, whatever the goodwill or humanitarian feeling that may lie behind it. In this respect hesychasm not only rejects the profane humanism wich divinizes the human being as an autonomous being, as well as all those concomitant ideological structures whose aim is is to establish the just society in terms of this-wordly categories alone; it also rejects the belief, now so common among Christians themselves, that the Christian life can be reduced to love and service to one's fellow beings, especially in some collective form. This is to say that of Christ's two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor, it gives priority to the first and affirms that the love or service of humanity, or indeed any desirable activity on the level of this world, can be effective, both as a means of salvation and as a truly constructive expression of charity and compassion, only if it springs from a prior love of God actualized in the most literal sense of the word. To act in ignorance of this love and apart from its existential actualization is to divorce what one tries to do from its empowering source and so to fall into a kind of idolatry - the idolatry that consists precisely in valuing things apart from God as if they were self-created and self-subsistent.
