St Isaac The Syrian Quotes

Make peace with yourself, and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.

This life was given to you for repentance, do not waste it in vain pursuits.

Dispassion doesn't mean to no longer feel the passions, but to no longer accept them.

Let us take refuge in the Lord and ascend a little to the place where thoughts dry up and stirrings vanish, where memories fade away and the passions die, where human nature becomes serene and is transformed as it stands in the other world.

Causes or occasions of sin are the following: wine, women, wealth, health of body when excessive, authority or power, and honor or fame and name. “These,” says St Isaac the Syrian, “are not sins in themselves, but on account of our weakness and as our nature is easily drawn by them to various sins, there is need of peculiar caution in regard to them.”2

The fear of death distresses a man with a guilty conscience, but the man with a good witness within himself longs for death as for life.’ Count no man truly wise who, because of this temporal life, enslaves his mind to timidity and fear.

Blessed are those who have eaten from the bread of love which is Jesus. This is the wine that gladdens human hearts. This is the wine which the lustful have drunk and they have become chaste, the sinners and they forgot the ways of unrighteousness, the drunkards and they became fasters, the rich and they became desirous of poverty, the poor and they became rich in hope, the sick and they became courageous, the fools and they became wise. Mystical Treatises, St. Isaac the Syrian, 7th Century

Whoever does not voluntarily withdraw himself from the causes of the passions is involuntarily drawn away by sin.

This is why St. Isaac the Syrian says, “Preserve your inner peace at all costs and do not trade it for anything in this world.” He lived in the seventh century. Because of his virtuous life he lived long.

Heart" in this context is to be understood in the Semitic and biblical sense rather than the modern Western sense, as signifying not just the emotions and affections but the totality of the human person. The heart is the primary organ of our identity, it is our inner-most being, "the very deepest and truest self, not attained except through sacrifice, through death." According to Boris Vysheslavtsev, it is "the center not only of consciousness but of the unconscious, not only of the soul but of the spirit, not only of the spirit but of the body, not only of the comprehensible but of the incomprehensible; in one word, it is the absolute center." ... The aim is not just "prayer of the heart" but "prayer of the intellect in the heart," for our varied forms of understanding, including our reason, are a gift from God and are to be used in his service, not rejected. This "union of the intellect with the heart" signifies the reintegration of our fallen and fragmented nature, our restoration to original wholeness. ... For the heart has a double significance in the spiritual life: it is both the center of the human being and the point of meeting between the human being and God. It is both the place of self-knowledge, where we see ourselves as we truly are, and the place of self-transcendence, where we understand our nature as a temple of the Holy Trinity, where the image comes face to face with the Archetype. In the "inner sanctuary" of our own heart we find the ground of our being and so cross the mysterious frontier between the created and the Uncreated. "There are unfathomable depths within the heart," state the Macarian Homilies. ... usually prayer of the heart comes, if at all, only after a lifetime of ascetic striving. There is a real danger that, in the early stages of the Jesus Prayer, we may too readily assume that we are passing from oral prayer to prayer of the heart. We may be perhaps tempted to imagine that we have already attained wordless prayer of silence, when in fact we are not really praying at all but have merely lapsed into vacant drowsiness or waking sleep. ... Prayer of the heart, when and if it is granted, comes as the free gift of God, which he bestows as he wills. It is not the inevitable effect of some technique. St. Isaac the Syrian underlines the extreme rarity of the gift when he says that "scarcely one in ten thousand" is counted worthy of the gift of pure prayer, and he adds "As for the mystery that lies beyond pure prayer, there is scarcely to be found a single person in each generation who has drawn near to this knowledge of God's grace." One in ten thousand, one in a generation: while sobered by this warning, we should not be unduly discouraged. The path to the inner kingdom lies open before all, and all alike may travel some way along it. In the present age, few experience with any fullness the deeper mysteries of the heart, but very many receive in a more humble and intermittent way true glimpses of what is signified by spiritual prayer.