The First Part: The Ascetical Homilies

The “First Part” is the core collection of Isaac the Syrian’s teaching — eighty-two discourses composed in Syriac, most of them dictated aloud rather than written by hand, that were translated into Greek at the Great Lavra of Mar Saba around AD 800 and thereafter became the primary channel through which the Christian East received Isaac’s wisdom. Transmitted from Greek into Georgian, Slavonic, Latin, and every major Orthodox language, this collection established Isaac as one of the great spiritual masters of the universal Church, even though he lived and died as a bishop in the Church of the East.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / East Syrian)

The Collection Itself

What is conventionally called “the First Part” of Isaac the Syrian’s writings corresponds to the original Syriac collection as edited in the modern critical edition by Paul Bedjan (Paul Bedjan, Mar Isaacus Ninivita: De Perfectione Religiosa [Paris/Leipzig, 1909]). Bedjan’s edition presents eighty-two discourses — in Syriac scholarship often called “memre” (verse homilies) or simply “chapters” — that represent the body of teaching Isaac produced during his years of solitary life and contemplative withdrawal, principally after his brief episcopal tenure in Nineveh. The collection is not systematic in the scholastic sense; it is, rather, a sustained meditation on the interior life of the solitary, moving between practical counsel on fasting, vigil, and the governance of the passions, and soaring passages on prayer, divine love, and the knowledge that surpasses all things.

The genre of these texts is deliberately unpretentious. Isaac calls them “words” or “discourses” (Syriac: memre), and they circulated from an early period as a practical handbook for monks and those aspiring to the hesychast life. Their authority was recognized within the Church of the East during Isaac’s own lifetime, though his influence quickly spread beyond his own communion — a phenomenon examined in the companion file A Saint Across the Divide.

Dictation and Near-Blindness

A detail of biographical and textual importance concerns the mode of composition. Syriac tradition preserves the notice that Isaac in his later years suffered from severely impaired vision, and that much of his teaching was therefore dictated to disciples rather than written in his own hand (Sebastian Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh,” GEDSH [Gorgias, 2011]). This helps explain certain features of the texts: the repetitions, the recursive quality of the argument, the way a single image can be turned and re-turned as though the speaker were circling it aloud rather than organizing it on a page. The homilies bear the character of a living voice; they read, in the best Greek and English translations, as though one is overhearing a man speak to himself in prayer, or to a small circle of disciples who have come to him in the desert.

This mode of composition also had consequences for textual transmission. The oral origin of many discourses means that the boundaries between individual homilies were not always sharply defined in early manuscripts; scribes and editors made decisions — sometimes differently in different manuscript traditions — about where one discourse ended and the next began, contributing in part to the notorious numbering discrepancies discussed in the companion file Text and Translation.

The Greek Translation at Mar Saba

The most consequential event in the transmission history of the First Part is its translation into Greek, accomplished at the Great Lavra of Mar Sabbas (Mar Saba) in the Judean desert, near Jerusalem, around AD 800. The translators are identified by name in the preface to the Greek manuscripts: Abba Patrikios and Abba Abramios, described as “philosophers and hesychasts” (Sebastian Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: the translation of St Isaac the Syrian,” in The Sabaite Heritage, ed. J. Patrich, OLA 98 [Leuven: Peeters, 2001], pp. 201–208). This description is significant: these were not simply learned scribes but men formed in the tradition of interior prayer, who brought to their work both philological competence and the experiential sympathy of practitioners.

The translation was accomplished within approximately a century of Isaac’s death, a remarkably short interval that testifies to the speed with which his reputation had crossed the boundaries of the two great Christian traditions of the East. Mar Saba at the turn of the ninth century was a cosmopolitan monastery — St. John of Damascus had lived and died there, and it was a centre of theological and literary culture in which Syriac and Greek learning intersected (Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba,” OLA 98, 2001, p. 203). The choice of translators was thus natural: men trained in both languages, in the life of prayer, and in the ascetical tradition that Isaac himself represented.

The Greek text produced at Mar Saba is not a rigid word-for-word rendering. Brock has shown that Patrikios and Abramios worked with a high degree of fidelity to their source while also — as any competent late antique or Byzantine translator would — rendering the Syriac idiom into idiomatic Greek rather than producing a Syriac calque (The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [Dana Miller], 2nd ed. [Boston, 2011], Introduction, pp. lxiii–lxix). The result was a text that read naturally to Greek ears while conveying the substance of Isaac’s thought with remarkable accuracy in its major theological contours.

The Pan-Orthodox Reception

From Mar Saba, the Greek translation rapidly became the vehicle through which the Christian East — Greek, Georgian, Slavonic, Romanian, Serbian, Arabic — received and venerated Isaac as a holy Father. Georgian translations appeared early, drawing on the Mar Saba Greek (Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh,” GEDSH, 2011). The Slavonic translation became foundational for Russian monastic spirituality; generations of starcy and hesychast masters formed themselves on Isaac’s words in Church Slavonic. Latin translations, made from the Greek, gave the medieval West access to at least a portion of his teaching, though the Western reception was far more limited.

The Greek Isaac is the “Philokalic” Isaac — the Isaac included in and around the Philokalia tradition, cited by the compilers of that anthology and by the entire stream of hesychast spiritual literature from the fourteenth century onward. When Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain or Paisios Velichkovsky appeal to Isaac’s authority, they are appealing to this Greek text, this tradition of transmission. The ecclesial paradox — that the man being venerated as an Orthodox Church Father had in fact been consecrated bishop in a communion that Chalcedonian Christianity regarded as heretical — was largely unknown or set aside throughout most of this reception history. For the Orthodox faithful, Isaac spoke with the undivided voice of holy tradition. The question of his ecclesiastical identity is addressed at length in A Saint Across the Divide and need not be rehearsed here.

The Question of Author-Name Substitutions

One of the more complex questions in Isaac scholarship concerns the references to other authorities embedded in the homilies. In the original Syriac, Isaac cites figures whose authority was natural within the Church of the East but problematic or unknown in the Chalcedonian world: most notably “the Blessed Interpreter,” a title used within the Church of the East for Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose christology had been condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople (553). In the Greek and in certain West Syriac manuscripts that precede the Mar Saba translation, these references appear altered: “the Blessed Interpreter” becomes John Chrysostom or “Abba Martinianos”; citations from Evagrius of Pontus — a figure deeply influential on Isaac but condemned in his Origenist form — appear under the name “the divine and great Gregory.”

Popular accounts have sometimes attributed these substitutions to Patrikios and Abramios themselves, as though the translators deliberately disguised sources they knew would be controversial. The scholarly evidence points in a different direction. [Disputed: the author-name substitutions were already present in the West Syriac Vorlage the Mar Saba translators received, per Brock (“Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba,” OLA 98, 2001) and the HTM editors; the alterations were not introduced by the translators but entered the tradition earlier, in the West Syriac transmission stage; popular accounts wrongly credit (or blame) the translators for changes that preceded their work.] This distinction matters for how we evaluate the translators’ fidelity: by the evidence available to scholars, Patrikios and Abramios translated what was before them; the theological editing had already been done.

Understanding this point also illuminates why modern critical scholarship — represented above all by the work of Sebastian Brock and by the editorial apparatus in the Holy Transfiguration Monastery edition — emphasizes the importance of comparing the Greek with Bedjan’s Syriac and with the Second Part manuscripts when reconstructing what Isaac actually wrote and whom he actually cited.

Scope and Character of the Homilies

The eighty-two discourses of the First Part range widely across the landscape of the ascetical and contemplative life. Some are short and intensely practical — on the proper use of the cell, on the dangers of unnecessary speech, on the relationship between bodily discipline and the prayer of the heart. Others are extended meditations that approach the character of mystical treatises: the famous discourses on solitude, on “stillness” (hesychia), on the three modes of knowledge, on the “world” and what it means to die to the world, on divine love as the consuming fire that draws the soul beyond all created things. Isaac’s cosmology and his theology of divine mercy are present throughout; the extended treatment of the “merciful heart” — one of the most celebrated passages in all of patristic literature — is found in what the HTM English edition numbers Homily 71 (see The Merciful Heart for full discussion).

The homilies presuppose a reader who is already committed to the monastic life in some form, and more particularly to the tradition of solitary or semi-eremitic living that Isaac himself exemplified (see The Solitary). Yet they have never been confined to that readership. Lay readers and priests in every generation of Orthodox Christianity have turned to them for spiritual sustenance. Something in Isaac’s voice — the combination of rigorous asceticism and boundless tenderness, of self-knowledge and wonder at divine love — has spoken across every boundary of vocation and culture.

References

Paul Bedjan, Mar Isaacus Ninivita: De Perfectione Religiosa (Paris/Leipzig, 1909).
A. J. Wensinck, Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923).
The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Dana Miller), 2nd ed. (Boston, 2011).
Sebastian Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: the translation of St Isaac the Syrian,” in The Sabaite Heritage, ed. J. Patrich, OLA 98 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), pp. 201–208.
Sebastian Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH) (Gorgias Press, 2011).
Marcel Pirard (ed.), critical edition of the Greek Ascetical Homilies (Holy Monastery of Iviron, Mount Athos, 2012).