February
18, 2001
"Directions
on the Spiritual Life (Part I)" --
St. Isaac of Syria
In this issue, we will begin a new study
on the teachings of St. Isaac of Syria who left us with extensive
teachings on the spiritual life. St. Isaac was born in Nineveh. We know
nothing of his childhood except that he and his brother took up the
monastic life early on, entering the Monastery of St. Matthew. St. Isaac
soon developed a desire for the solitary life, departing the monastery
and settling far away from his monastic community in a lonely cell where
he was able to devote himself fully to God. St. Isaac's brother, who had
since become abbot of the monastery, begged him to return to the
communal life, but Isaac refused even to make a short visit.
St. Isaac was soon called by God to rule
over the Church in Nineveh. Although he ruled well as a bishop, affairs
in the church there soon convinced him that he could not serve as a
bishop. He retired again to his blessed solitude where he remained for
the rest of his life. The writings St. Isaac produced in his solitary
life have served the Church and the faithful well for some fourteen
centuries (he died at the end of the sixth century), certainly a greater
service to the faithful than he would have provided had he remained in
the world as a bishop. He wrote from experience and guided those who
came to him on the basis of his own activity. St. Isaac taught from
practice, not from theory.
These teachings came down to us in
Syriac and Arabic. About half of them have been translated into Greek
and then into Russian. We will study some of these texts over the next
several issues.
DIRECTIONS ON SPIRITUAL
TRAINING
-- Fear of God is the beginning of
virtue; it is the offspring of faith and is sown in the heart, when the
mind is withdrawn from worldly distractions in order to collect its
wandering thoughts into meditation about the future restoration.
-- The beginning of the path of life is
always to be instructing one's mind in the Words of God and to spend
one's life in poverty. Filling oneself with the one helps to gain
perfection in the other. If you fill yourself with study of the Words of
God, this helps toward progress in poverty; and progress in non-
acquisitiveness gives you leisure to make progress in study of the Words
of God. So the two combine to help the speedy building of the whole
edifice of virtues.
-- No one can approach God without
withdrawing from the world. By withdrawal I do not mean change of
physical dwelling place, but withdrawal from worldly affairs. The virtue
of withdrawal from the world consists in not occupying your mind with
the world.
THE NEED TO STUDY DIVINE
SCRIPTURE
-- To drive away the wrong tendencies
previously acquired by the soul, nothing is more helpful than immersing
oneself in love of studying the Divine Scriptures, and understanding the
depths of the thoughts they contain. When thoughts become immersed in
the delight of fathoming the hidden wisdom of the words, a man leaves
the world behind and forgets all that is therein, in proportion to the
enlightenment he draws from the words. But even when the mind floats
only on the surface of the waters of the Divine Scriptures and cannot
penetrate to the very depths of the thoughts contained therein, even
then the very fact that he is occupied with zeal to understand the
Scriptures is enough firmly to pinion his thoughts in ideas of the
miraculous alone, and to prevent them from seeking after the material
and the carnal.
-- In everything you meet with in the
Scriptures, strive to find the purpose of the word, to penetrate into
the depth of the thought of the saints and to understand it more
exactly. Those whose life is guided by Divine grace towards
enlightenment, always feel as though some inner ray of light travels
over the written lines and allows the mind to discern from the bare
words what is said with great thought for the instruction of the soul.
-- If a man reads lines of great meaning
without going deeply into them, his heart remains poor (it gets no
food); and the holy force which, through wondrous understanding of the
soul, gives most sweet food to the heart, grows dim in him.
-- Each thing is usually attracted to
its like. So the soul, being endowed with the spirit, ardently attracts
to itself the content of a saying, as soon as it hears words which
contain hidden spiritual force. Not every man is moved to wonder by what
is said spiritually and possesses great spiritual force concealed in it.
Words which speak of virtue require a heart not occupied with the earth;
and in a man whose mind is burdened with temporal cares, virtue does not
awake thought to love it and seek to possess it.
-- Do you wish to commune with God in
your mind? Strive to be merciful. To the spiritual love which imprints
the invisible image (of God in oneself), there is no other path than
that a man should first of all begin to be merciful in the measure that
our heavenly Father is merciful, as the Lord said (Luke 6:36). END
from E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H.
Palmer, "Early Fathers from the Philokalia," (London:
Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 183 - 185
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