Wonder and Pure Prayer: The Summit of Isaac’s Mystical Teaching

Isaac the Syrian’s most arresting claim is that the highest state of prayer is not prayer at all: pure prayer passes over a boundary beyond which the very activity of praying ceases and the mind is seized by wonder. This teaching, embedded in a rich Syriac vocabulary borrowed and transformed from Evagrius, John of Apamea, and Dionysius, became one of the formative influences on the entire Eastern Christian hesychast tradition.

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

Pure Prayer and the Boundary Beyond It

The companion article Solitude and Tears traces Isaac’s account of the ascending stages of prayer — from bodily forms through prayer of the heart — up to the threshold of what he calls slota dakitha, “pure prayer.” The present article takes up what lies beyond that threshold, which is, in Isaac’s teaching, the most important thing he has to say about the life of prayer.

The key passage occurs in Homily 23 of the HTM edition (= Homily 22 in Wensinck’s Syriac-based translation) [Disputed: homily numbering differs across the Greek/HTM, Bedjan’s Syriac, and Wensinck editions; HTM numbers are used here]:

“Therefore, there exists no prayer beyond pure prayer. … All its movements introduce the spirit by grace into that which is beyond prayer. Beyond this boundary there is awestruck wonder and not prayer.” (The Ascetical Homilies, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [HTM], 2nd ed., Boston, 2011, Homily 23, p. 239)

The statement is of extraordinary theological precision. Isaac does not say that pure prayer is the highest state; he says that pure prayer is the limit of prayer as such, and that beyond it lies something that prayer’s own movements introduce but cannot itself be. “All its movements introduce the spirit by grace into that which is beyond prayer.” Prayer, at its culmination, becomes self-surpassing. The activity does not fail; it succeeds so completely that it produces a state to which the word “prayer” no longer applies.

Isaac calls this state “awestruck wonder” — a translation of the Syriac temha or tehra, which corresponds to the Greek ekstasis. The word is important: it is not sleep, not trance, not unconsciousness, not the annihilation of the self. It is wonder — the cognitive-affective state proper to one who has encountered something so far beyond expectation that the ordinary instruments of comprehension are suspended. The mind is not absent; it is overwhelmed. The difference is everything.

The Vocabulary of the Ascent: Syriac and Greek Sources

Hilarion Alfeyev, whose monograph The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Cistercian Studies 175, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000) remains the most thorough scholarly analysis of Isaac’s mystical teaching in English, has mapped the full vocabulary that Isaac deploys in this region of his thought. The mapping reveals a thinker who is both indebted to his predecessors and genuinely transformative of what he inherits.

Pure prayer (slota dakitha) is, in Isaac’s schema, the culmination of the faculty of attention — the state in which the mind’s habitual distractedness has been overcome and its power gathered into a single undivided orientation toward God. This is where Evagrius of Pontus (346–399) had also located the summit of prayer: pure prayer as imageless, conceptless attention (proseuchē without logismoi). Isaac inherits this framework but does not stop at Evagrius’s stopping point.

Beyond pure prayer, Isaac posits what he calls slota ruhanayta — “spiritual prayer” — a term he borrows from John of Apamea, a fifth-century Syriac theologian who had developed a tripartite anthropology (body, soul, spirit) and a corresponding tripartite account of the spiritual life (Alfeyev, Spiritual World, pp. 214–218). For John of Apamea, “spiritual prayer” designated the activity proper to the highest part of the human person, the pneuma or spirit, when it is taken up into direct relationship with the divine Spirit. Isaac appropriates this vocabulary but presses it further: even “spiritual prayer” is, for him, a preliminary to the state of wonder; it is the mode of prayer proper to the transition zone between pure prayer and the awestruck silence beyond.

The states that Isaac describes at and beyond this limit carry a cluster of interlocking names. Temha/tehra (wonder, ekstasis) is the primary term for the experiential quality of the state. Te’orya — transcribed directly from the Greek theoria — denotes the contemplative dimension: the beholding of divine realities that occurs in this state. Isaac’s use of theoria connects him explicitly to the tradition running from Evagrius through Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius), whose influence on Isaac is considerable and much discussed in the secondary literature (Alfeyev, Spiritual World, pp. 224–230).

Perhaps the most evocative of Isaac’s terms for the summit is rawwayuta, conventionally translated “sober inebriation” — a paradox borrowed ultimately from Philo of Alexandria and taken up by Macarius, Gregory of Nyssa, and others (Alfeyev, “Prayer in St Isaac of Nineveh,” conference paper, Melbourne, 1995). The paradox captures something essential: in the state of wonder, the mind is simultaneously more itself than it has ever been (hence “sober” — not the chaos of drunkenness but the opposite of ordinary constrictedness) and more overwhelmed than it can bear in the ordinary way (hence “inebriation”). The faculties are not destroyed; they are taken up into a mode of functioning that exceeds their ordinary range.

In this state, Isaac says, the intellect is “swallowed up by the Spirit” (Alfeyev, Spiritual World, p. 219, citing Ascetical Homilies HTM Homily 22). The phrase is intentionally extreme. It borrows the vocabulary of engulfment, of being consumed. But the consumption is not annihilation: what is swallowed up is the mind’s own activity, its own initiative, its own movement — not the mind itself. The mind remains; its self-directedness is what is suspended.

Not Impersonal Absorption: The Personal God of Wonder

At this point a theological clarification becomes pressing, and Alfeyev insists upon it with some urgency: the state of wonder that Isaac describes is emphatically not the impersonal absorption of the self into an undifferentiated Absolute that characterizes certain non-Christian mystical traditions (Alfeyev, Spiritual World, pp. 220–221). The comparison to Buddhist nirvana or to Neoplatonic henosis in its more extreme forms has been raised by some scholars, and Alfeyev judges it misleading.

Isaac’s wonder is the capture of the mind by God — by a God who is, throughout Isaac’s theology, irreducibly personal, creative, and above all merciful (see The Mercy of God). The relationship is not dissolved but intensified: what the ordinary mind cannot sustain — direct, unmediated presence to the living God — is exactly what the mind in wonder is given to sustain, precisely because its own self-activity has been stilled. The God who “swallows up” the intellect is not a vacuum but a person; the swallowing is an embrace.

This is consistent with the structure of Isaac’s theology as a whole. His God is not a metaphysical principle but the source of a love so excessive that it created the world for no reason other than love, and that will not ultimately be defeated by human sin (see the discussion of universal hope in the collection’s seventh section). The wonder that terminates the life of prayer is, in this light, the experiential correlate of that love — the moment when the soul, having been prepared by decades of ascetic labor, tears, hesychia, and progressive purification of prayer, is finally ready to be held directly by what has been seeking it all along.

Isaac’s Place in the Hesychast Lineage

The influence of Isaac’s prayer-teaching on the subsequent Eastern Christian tradition is difficult to overstate. He became what George Maloney called a “doctor of hesychastic mysticism” (cited in Nel Grillaert, “‘Raise the people in silence’: Traces of Hesychasm in Dostoevskij’s Fictional Saint Zosima,” Dostoevsky Studies New Series XV, 2011, p. 52). His Ascetical Homilies were translated into Greek at the monastery of Mar Saba in Palestine in the late eighth or early ninth century, and it was through this Greek translation that he entered the mainstream of Byzantine and, subsequently, Slavic spirituality — a process traced in detail in The Greek and Slavonic Isaac.

The lineage within which Isaac sits can be drawn with reasonable precision. From Evagrius of Pontus he inherits the vocabulary of pure prayer, the centrality of the nous, and the critique of fantasy (phantasia) as the primary obstacle to contemplation. From John of Apamea he inherits the tripartite anthropology and the category of “spiritual prayer.” From Dionysius the Areopagite (as filtered through the East Syrian tradition) he inherits the apophatic dimension — the insistence that the highest knowledge of God is a kind of unknowing, that wonder is not a failure of knowledge but its highest form. The lineage then continues through him: John Climacus (see St. John Climacus) engages parallel territory in the Ladder of Divine Ascent; Symeon the New Theologian (see St. Symeon the New Theologian) intensifies the experiential and pneumatological dimensions that Isaac had opened up; Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas (see St. Gregory Palamas) bring the hesychast synthesis to its dogmatic culmination in the fourteenth-century controversy over the divine energies and the Taboric light — a controversy whose terms had been prepared, in part, by Isaac’s account of the mind “swallowed up by the Spirit.”

The Jesus Prayer (see Jesus Prayer) is the liturgical-ascetic practice most closely associated with the hesychast tradition. Isaac himself does not explicitly teach the Jesus Prayer in the form it took in later hesychasm, but the spiritual architecture within which the Prayer operates — the stages of interiorization, the passage through pure prayer, the hope of wonder beyond it — is one that Isaac did more than almost any other writer to articulate and commend.

Nil Sorsky and the Russian Reception

The Russian dimension of Isaac’s influence deserves particular attention. Nil Sorsky (Nil of Sora, 1433–1508), generally regarded as the first Russian theologian of hesychasm, drew upon Isaac with unusual directness and depth, especially for his account of contemplation and his emphasis on tears (The Tradition of the Elders [Predanie] and Rule [Ustav]; see Isaac in Russia). Nil’s use of Isaac shaped the Transvolga “Non-Possessor” movement and its spirituality of radical interiorization, and the trail from Nil runs forward through the Optina elders and the modern starets tradition into figures as disparate as Theophan the Recluse and the characters of Dostoevsky.

Grillaert’s study of hesychasm in Dostoevsky’s fictional elder Zosima (Brothers Karamazov) traces specifically Isaacian elements — the theology of tears, the universal compassion, the merciful heart extended even to those outside the Church — in Zosima’s teaching, arguing that Dostoevsky’s engagement with Isaac was substantive and literary-theological rather than merely decorative (Grillaert, Dostoevsky Studies XV, 2011, pp. 47–88). The Isaac who reaches the modern world has traveled from the mountains near Nineveh through Mar Saba, Constantinople, Mount Athos, the forests of Vologda, and the pages of the nineteenth century’s greatest novel.

References

The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Dana Miller), 2nd ed. (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011). [Homily 23, p. 239 (= Wensinck Homily 22) for the key pure-prayer/wonder passage.]
A. J. Wensinck, Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923). [Homily 22 in Wensinck’s numbering.]
Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian, Cistercian Studies Series 175 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000).
Hilarion Alfeyev, “Prayer in St Isaac of Nineveh,” conference paper delivered at Melbourne, 1995.
Sebastian Brock, ed. and trans., Isaac of Nineveh: “The Second Part,” Chapters IV–XLI, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 554–555, Scriptores Syri 224–225 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995).
Nel Grillaert, “‘Raise the people in silence’: Traces of Hesychasm in Dostoevskij’s Fictional Saint Zosima,” Dostoevsky Studies New Series XV (2011), pp. 47–88.