The Merciful Heart

The most famous passage St. Isaac the Syrian ever wrote, and the center of his whole spiritual vision: the description of the merciful heart that burns for the entire creation — for men, for birds, for animals, even for the demons — and cannot bear to see any harm done to any creature without offering tearful prayer for it. For Isaac, this all-embracing compassion is not a sentiment but the very goal of the ascetic life, the sign that a soul has been remade in the likeness of God.

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

The Passage

In the homily that Western readers know best, Isaac asks a question and answers it in words that have echoed through the entire later tradition:

“And what is a merciful heart? It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips his heart and by his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation. For this reason he offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles, because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, HTM Homily 71, p. 491; = Wensinck Homily 81)

A note on the reference is warranted, since this passage is cited in several incompatible ways. In the Holy Transfiguration Monastery English (translated from the Greek) it stands as Homily 71; in Wensinck’s translation from Bedjan’s Syriac it is Homily 81; and it circulates loosely online as “Homily 74” and in paraphrases that soften the wording (Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian, Cistercian Studies 175, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000, who cites the passage among Isaac’s most characteristic; the verbatim wording above is the HTM text, whose distinctive marker is the phrase “the family of reptiles”). [Disputed: the merciful-heart homily is numbered 71 in the Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Greek-based) edition and 81 in Wensinck's (Syriac-based) translation; a looser "Homily 74" citation also circulates. The divergence is a numbering artifact across the Greek and Syriac recensions, not a difference of text.]

What Mercy Means for Isaac

It is essential not to read this passage as poetic excess. For Isaac, the merciful heart is the telos of asceticism — the point of the whole long discipline of solitude, fasting, vigil, and tears. The ascetic does not labor in order to become hard, self-possessed, and invulnerable; he labors in order to become soft, porous, and unable to bear the suffering of any living thing. The “burning” of the heart is the precise opposite of the burning of passion: it is the heart set alight by a compassion so total that it overflows the boundaries of self, of kind, and even of the saved and the lost.

Three features of the passage repay attention. First, its universality: the merciful heart prays not only for fellow human beings but for animals, for “the family of reptiles,” for the enemies of the truth, and for the demons — for everything that exists, without exception. This is the same boundlessness that, carried to its eschatological conclusion in the Second Part, becomes Isaac’s hope that mercy may have the last word (see Isaac and the Last Things); the merciful heart is the experiential root of which the universal hope is the doctrinal flower. Second, its involuntariness: Isaac does not say the merciful man chooses to pity all creatures, but that he cannot bear to see them suffer — mercy has become his nature, no longer his decision. Third, its tears: the merciful heart is a weeping heart, and the connection between compassion and tears is, for Isaac, organic rather than incidental (see Solitude and Tears).

“In the Likeness of God”

The phrase that closes the passage — the compassion that burns “in the likeness of God” — gives the whole teaching its theological foundation. Mercy is not, for Isaac, one virtue among many; it is the specific way in which a creature comes to resemble its Creator, because mercy is the deepest truth about God. The merciful heart is the image of God restored in man, the point at which the ascetic life touches deification (see Orthodoxy Guide: Theosis). To become merciful is to become like God; and because God’s mercy reaches all things, the merciful heart reaches all things too. This is why, for Isaac, there is no contradiction between the most extreme withdrawal from the world — the solitary in his cell, weeping — and the most extreme embrace of it: the more deeply the solitary enters his solitude, the wider his heart grows, until it can hold the whole creation in its prayer.

Isaac binds this to his teaching on humility, which he calls “the raiment of the Godhead”: “Humility is the raiment of the Godhead. The Word who became man clothed Himself in it… Every man who has been clothed with it has truly been made like unto Him who came down from His own exaltation” (HTM Homily 77). The merciful heart and the humble heart are, for Isaac, the same heart seen from two sides: humility is the emptying that makes room for compassion, and compassion is the overflow of the humble heart that no longer defends itself against the world’s pain.

The Reach of the Passage

No single sentence of Isaac’s has traveled further. It stands behind the cosmic compassion of the Russian spiritual tradition — the love that, in Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima, bids us “love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand,” and “love the animals, love the plants, love everything” (see Isaac in Russia). It is quoted by twentieth-century Orthodox and Western writers alike as the highest expression of Christian mercy. And it gives the lie to any reading of the ascetic tradition as world-denying or severe: at its summit, Isaac places not detachment but a tenderness so vast it weeps for reptiles. The merciful heart is, for Isaac, what the saint is — and the proof that the God whom the saint has come to resemble is, before all else, love.

See Also

References

  • The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Dana Miller). 2nd ed. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011. (The merciful heart, Homily 71, p. 491; humility as the raiment of the Godhead, Homily 77.)
  • Wensinck, A. J. Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923. (The merciful heart, Homily 81 — the Syriac-based numbering.)
  • Alfeyev, Hilarion. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. Cistercian Studies Series 175. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (The merciful heart among Isaac’s most characteristic teachings; mercy and the likeness of God.)