The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian - Homily XVIII, Part II & XIX, Part I

There is something extraordinarily beautiful in the way the aged elders speak to Isaac. They do not flatter him. Neither do they crush his zeal. They recognize that his desire is good, but they also recognize something Isaac himself cannot yet see: even the desire for humility can become a hiding place for pride. Isaac proposes something apparently severe. He will sit publicly outside the church eating in the morning so that people will see him, judge him, and think less of him. He has read of the great ascetics deliberately courting dishonor in order to escape human praise. Why should he not do the same? The elder sees through it immediately. Not because Isaac’s intention is wicked, but because it is premature. The great fathers who behaved strangely before men were not experimenting with humility. They had already passed through long years of obedience, watchfulness, restraint, tears, and purification. Some had become famous through miracles and holiness, and therefore deliberately accepted disgrace in order to escape the poison of human glory. Isaac does not need to manufacture dishonor. Providence will provide enough of it. This is the elder’s remarkable counsel: if you desire humility, do not create theatrical opportunities to be humbled. Receive peacefully the humiliations God permits to come without your choosing. Do not become angry with the person who misunderstands you. Do not defend yourself unnecessarily. Do not despise the one who dishonors you. There is a profound distinction here between seeking the appearance of humility and consenting to be humbled. The first can still contain a hidden movement of the ego. The second crucifies it. We can secretly become proud even of our attempts to destroy pride. We can admire our renunciations, our fasting, our silence, our willingness to be misunderstood. The ego is extraordinarily capable of surviving beneath religious clothing. The elder therefore returns Isaac to measure. There is a time for everything. There are practices appropriate to beginners, others to those who have acquired some stability, and still others that belong only to those purified by long struggle. To seize prematurely what belongs to another stage of the spiritual life is not zeal. It is a failure of discernment. The inexperienced merchant, the elder says, can lose everything by attempting a great venture. He learns first through smaller transactions. So too the soul. We want the extraordinary when God is asking for fidelity to the ordinary. We want some heroic humiliation when God has already placed beside us someone who irritates us. We want great silence while neglecting the silence required not to answer back. We want mystical prayer while resisting the prayer rule before us. We want to imitate the freedom of the saints without first accepting the discipline by which they became free. And then the elder gives Isaac one of the most severe sayings in the entire passage: “Reckon every prayer, wherein the body does not toil and the heart is not afflicted, to be a miscarriage, for this prayer has no soul.” This is not contempt for quiet prayer. Nor does it mean that prayer must always be emotionally painful or physically exhausting. It means that prayer cannot remain exterior to the person praying. Something must enter the fire. The body must learn fidelity. The mind must be gathered. The heart must stand naked before God. Prayer must eventually touch that place within us where repentance becomes more than an idea. The fathers speak so fiercely because they know how easily prayer itself can become slothful. The lips continue. The rule is completed. The appointed words are said. Yet the heart has never appeared before God. We can pray without surrendering anything. We can even cultivate stillness while carefully protecting ourselves from repentance. The elder will not allow Isaac that illusion. Prayer has a soul when the human person is actually present within it. This is why toil and afflict

There is an intensity in the Fathers that can sometimes frighten us. They speak of vigilance, struggle, examination, tears, watchfulness, and the danger of negligence. St. Synkletike tells of a servant of God who watched the movements of his thoughts so carefully that he knew which appeared first, how long each assault lasted, and whether the struggle had grown stronger or weaker than the day before. Abba Nisthero tells the monk to examine himself morning and evening. Abba Isaiah says simply: consider every day where you have fallen short. Nothing about this is casual. The Fathers understood that the heart can grow sleepy. We forget ourselves. We forget God. We become accustomed to movements within us that should trouble us. Resentment settles quietly into the heart. Judgment becomes habitual. Prayer becomes mechanical. Desire scatters itself among a hundred things. We begin tolerating what once would have brought us quickly to repentance. And so they tell us: pay attention. Not anxiously. Not morbidly. But truthfully. There is a zeal necessary for the spiritual life because love itself makes demands upon us. The one who desires God cannot become indifferent to what keeps him from God. The one who desires to love cannot simply make peace with everything within himself that prevents love. Yet there is something crucial here that can easily be missed. Christian self-examination is never meant to leave us staring at ourselves. Its movement is relational. We look within so that we may turn again toward the Other. Toward Christ. This changes everything. Repentance is not primarily the examination of a defective self attempting to repair itself. It is the movement of a wounded person toward the Physician. We look honestly at what we have become because we desire the One into whom we have been baptized. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” This is the deeper measure of the Christian life. Not merely: Have I behaved well today? But: What in me still resists the life of Christ into whom I have been baptized? Where have I refused love? Where have I protected myself rather than given myself? Where have fear, anger, vanity, resentment, or self-will obscured His likeness within me? And then, perhaps most importantly: Will I allow Him to heal me? This is why the Fathers can speak with such severity about negligence while being equally severe about despair. Despair is not humility. It can masquerade as humility because it speaks incessantly about our failures. But its gaze remains fixed upon the self. “I have failed.” “I should be better than this.” “After all these years, I am still struggling with the same thing.” “I have ruined everything.” The Fathers interrupt this monologue. St. Synkletike gives us the image of the ninety-nine sheep. One has been lost. Go find it. Do not burn down the sheepfold because one sheep wandered away. Do not abandon the whole life of grace because you discovered something within yourself that still requires healing. Above all, do not flee from the Master. That may be the most important line in the entire passage. Do not flee from the Master. Our failures often awaken the strange instinct to hide from God. It is as old as Eden. We discover our nakedness and withdraw among the trees. Shame tells us to remain away until we have made ourselves presentable again. But repentance moves in exactly the opposite direction. When you fall, turn toward Him. When you discover anger, turn toward Him. When prayer has become cold, turn toward Him. When an old passion you thought long dead suddenly awakens, turn toward Him. When you discover that after years of prayer you are still capable of pettiness, vanity, impatience, jealousy, or fear, turn toward Him. Do not flee from the Master. Because the Master is good. St. Synkletike says it without qualification: “The Master is good and accepts you whenever you return to Him.” Here the ascetical struggle reveals its deepest character. We

Reflection One: The Spark “I Have Come to Cast Fire upon the Earth” “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” — Luke 12:49 There are moments in the spiritual life when a person becomes aware of a desire that he cannot entirely explain. Nothing outward may have changed. He may have prayed for years, received the sacraments faithfully, struggled against familiar sins, and tried sincerely to live according to the Gospel. Yet somewhere beneath all of this another longing begins to emerge. It may first appear as dissatisfaction.Not dissatisfaction with God, but with everything that has taken His place. Words no longer seem sufficient. Religious activity no longer satisfies as it once did. Accomplishments lose some of their attraction. Even good and necessary things begin to feel strangely secondary. Silence begins to attract us. Prayer becomes less a matter of saying things and more a desire simply to remain before God. The Name of Jesus acquires a sweetness that cannot be explained by the syllables themselves. Solitude no longer feels empty.And somewhere within all of this the heart begins quietly to say: I want God.We may imagine that this is the beginning of our search for Him. St. Isaac the Syrian would tell us otherwise.It is the discovery that God has already begun searching for us. The first movement is never ours.

There is a sentence here from St. Isaac that overturns almost everything we are inclined to think about asceticism: You suppose these things were ordained simply to oblige you to labor. We imagine the vigil primarily as something difficult. Sleep is surrendered. The body is constrained. Psalms are prayed while the world sleeps. Nature protests and the monk remains standing before God. Looked at from the outside, it appears to be an extraordinary act of discipline. But Isaac tells us that if this is all we see, we have not yet understood the vigil. The question is not how much a man can endure for God. The question is what begins to happen within the heart of a man who desires God enough to seek Him in the night. Something is born there. This is why Isaac speaks so fiercely about the following day. The tragedy would not simply be that we failed in some ascetical rule. The tragedy would be that we received something precious and then lived carelessly enough to lose it. Seeking the One Who Has Already Come to Us The night vigil is born from desire. The monk rises because Someone is there. This is what distinguishes Christian asceticism from mere religious exertion. We are not trying to force our way toward an absent God. We are responding to the God who has already drawn near, already called us, already awakened desire within us. The Beloved has come seeking us. And eventually the heart begins seeking Him. There comes a moment in the spiritual life when prayer is no longer adequately described as obligation. The language of duty becomes too small. A man discovers within himself a hunger for silence because silence allows him to hear more clearly. He desires solitude because solitude removes the thousand competing claims upon his attention. He rises in the night because there are hours when the world has become quiet enough for the heart to recognize what it has always desired. Isaac knows this experience. This is why he speaks of Scripture as well. Reading is not merely preparation for prayer or the acquisition of religious knowledge. Scripture “sows” something within the soul. It gathers the scattered mind. It irrigates prayer. It plants the remembrance of God. It makes the understanding subtle enough to perceive things that previously escaped it. Scripture, silence, prayer, vigil—all begin converging upon the one thing necessary. Christ Himself. And once the heart begins to taste this, the whole ordering of life must change. The Day Must Become the Guardian of the Night Here Isaac becomes extraordinarily demanding. What sense is there, he asks, in sowing throughout the night only to scatter the seed during the day? We stand before God in darkness, struggling to gather the mind. Perhaps after a long while the thoughts settle. Something softens. The Name descends more deeply. Scripture opens itself in a way that cannot easily be explained. A stillness appears that we could never manufacture. Then morning comes. And we throw ourselves back into dispersion. Conversation. Curiosity. News. Opinions. Tasks that did not need to be done. Encounters that did not need to occur. Words that did not need to be spoken. The endless grazing of the mind among things. Isaac’s question is devastatingly simple: Why would you do this? Why labor through the night to gather what you willingly scatter during the day? This reveals something essential about the monastic heart. Vigil cannot be isolated from the rest of life. There cannot be one life before God and another life afterward. Isaac says that we must place “no wall of separation” between the night and the day. That phrase is astonishing. The stillness of the night is meant to flow into the day. The remembrance of God cultivated in darkness must become the hidden atmosphere in which we move beneath the light of the sun. The silence of the cell must follow us. The Name must remain near. Our encounters, our speech, our work, even the manner in which we allow ourselves to think must beg

There is something almost frightening about the stories preserved for us in the Evergetinos. They are frightening not because they portray extraordinary wickedness, but because they reveal how quietly the heart can change. The monk described by Palladios is not a beginner. He is a man of profound silence and prayer, one who has surrendered himself so completely to God that even the necessities of his bodily life have been entrusted to Providence. His life has become contemplation. Prayer is his delight. God provides for him in a miraculous manner. He has tasted something of the life of the age to come. And yet the beginning of his fall is almost imperceptible. He sleeps a little longer. His prayer becomes somewhat shorter. His attention wanders. Earthly concerns begin to occupy a little more space within him. Thoughts once immediately rejected are permitted to remain for a moment. Nothing, at first, seems catastrophic. That is precisely the warning. The Fathers understood that the great falls of the spiritual life rarely begin as great falls. They begin with small permissions. Something formerly guarded carefully is treated casually. Something that once troubled the conscience is dismissed as insignificant. A thought is entertained rather than rejected. Prayer is postponed. Vigilance relaxes. A little comfort is allowed to become necessary. The heart whispers that such things hardly matter. But they matter because the heart matters. There is something extraordinarily precious hidden within the human person: the place of communion with God. The Fathers speak of guarding the heart so insistently because they know what has been entrusted to us. Grace has entered there. The Name has been received there. Desire for God has been awakened there. A fire has been kindled that does not originate in ourselves. The spiritual life, therefore, is not primarily the anxious avoidance of infractions. It is the guarding of a treasure. This changes how we understand vigilance. We do not guard ourselves because God is waiting to punish the smallest mistake. We guard ourselves because love is delicate. Communion can be obscured. Desire can cool. The eye of the heart can become clouded. What has become luminous through prayer can gradually become opaque again. The evil one understands this very well. He does not always attempt to tear a person immediately away from God. With someone who has given himself deeply to prayer, such an assault might be too obvious. Instead, he waits. He works through what appears negligible. A little negligence. A little self-confidence. A little relaxation of watchfulness. A thought that seems harmless enough to entertain. The enemy is patient because he knows that a heart need not renounce God explicitly in order gradually to lose sight of Him. Palladios gives us an extraordinary image of this darkening in the bread. At first the monk receives heavenly bread, pure and provided by God. As his interior life becomes disordered, the bread appears grimy and gnawed. Later it is almost entirely spoiled. What is happening visibly to the bread corresponds to what is happening invisibly within the monk. The gift has not ceased to be gift, but his capacity to receive it has become corrupted. The tragedy is not simply that temptation has appeared. Temptation comes to everyone. The decisive moment comes earlier: he notices the diminishment and does not respond to it. He regards the first symptoms as trivial. This is one of the most penetrating insights in the story. The monk does not suddenly decide to abandon his vocation. He fails to take seriously the cooling of his love. The Fathers would have us become sensitive to precisely this. When prayer becomes burdensome, notice. When mercy toward another begins to disappear, notice. When resentment becomes pleasurable, notice. When the imagination begins feeding upon something we would once have rejected, notice. When silence becomes uncomfortable and distraction increasing