Light from further East

Monday was the feast of St Isaac the Syrian, sometimes called Isaac of Nineveh because he was briefly bishop of that city in the sixth century before going off into the mountains of what is now Iraq to be a hermit and to become, according to Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, "one of the most widely read spiritual writers on Mount Athos. His name is known to every monk in Russia and he is venerated as a saint in the Russian Church. [And] we have seen ordinary believers, neither monks nor theologians, who know entire passages of Isaac by heart and are able to quote long passages from his discourses."

"[...] Word of St Isaac has crossed not only time but also confessional barriers. As early as the ninth century he was read by the Byzantine and Syrian Orthodox Churches, as well as by [Isaac's own] Church of the East; each group produced its own recension of his writings. In the fifteenth century Isaac broke into the Roman Catholic world while remaining at the same time one of the most popular ascetical writers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In our day his writings continue to draw the attention of Christians who belong to various traditions but share a common faith in Jesus and are engaged in the quest for salvation. During one scholarly conference, after I had delivered a paper on the practice of prayer in St Isaac, three people came up to me, one after another: a cistercian nun, a protestant layman, and a buddhist monk. All three were wondering how much of Isaac's teaching of prayer, which I had expounded, was consonant with their own tradition. Then a franciscan friar informed me of the existence of St Isaac of Nineveh's retreat house in New Zealand: the house is run by both Catholics and Anglicans."

Not bad, I think, for an obscure mountain solitary who belonged to a church (often now called the Assyrian Church) which has been out of communion with with everyone else since the fifth century - and usually derided as heretical as well. St Isaac's writings are important because they are clearly based on his (and his tradition's) actual experience of God, and not just on academic speculation. Helpful though the latter can often be, it's the music the matters, not the score.