Mystic Treatises

Isaac was a monk of the Church of the East — the church of the Persian empire, which the West would later call Nestorian — who was made bishop of Nineveh by Mar George the Katholikos in the monastery of Beth ‘Abe, in the second half of the seventh century. He held the pastoral staff for five months. Then, for a reason which God knows — the old notice of his life offers nothing more — he resigned his see and went away to live in the mountains: first among the anchorites of Beth Huzaye, at last in the monastery of Rabban Shabur, where he read until he went blind, and where he died. The two Syriac notices that preserve his life are translated in full in Wensinck’s introduction.

What he wrote in that solitude are these 82 chapters on the behaviour of solitaries — on fear and love, on tears, on the degrees of knowledge and of faith, on the stillness he calls the drunkenness of God, on the limit where prayer itself is taken away. They are not a system; Isaac says the same things many times, the way a man does who is describing a country he lives in. The first six chapters form a connected series, the Six Treatises on the Behaviour of Excellence, and stand first below; the remaining seventy-six go on as the book goes on, treatise by treatise, to the registers at the end.

He belongs on this shelf beside Dionysius, whom he read and cites: an apophatic writer not by argument but by experience, for whom the approach to God is a stripping — of things, of images, at last of prayer itself. He is one of the very few writers received as a saint and a father on every side of the church’s divisions — East and West, Chalcedonian and not — while remaining, all along, a bishop of the church his readers called heretical.

Chapters VII–LXXXII. Each number opens its chapter; rest on one to see its printed title.

Arent Jan Wensinck (1882–1939), the Leiden orientalist, made this translation from the Syriac text edited by Paul Bedjan — De perfectione religiosa (Paris & Leipzig, 1909) — and published it at Amsterdam in 1923. It was the first complete rendering of Isaac into any modern Western language, and for most of a century it remained the only complete English. His English is deliberately close and sometimes strange — he translates what the Syriac says, not what a smoother sentence would prefer — and his notes trace Isaac’s echoes of Dionysius, Plotinus and the Greeks.

His introduction opens with the question every reader of Isaac inherits: the relation of the Syriac original to the Greek translation through which Isaac reached the rest of the church. The Greek differs totally in the sequence of its chapters, lacks some of the Syriac’s 82, and adds four treatises which appear to belong not to Isaac but to John Saba. Wensinck prints the correspondence table and translates the Syriac order — the book as Isaac’s own church read it.