The Conferences 10.5–10.14

Isaac: “It is no wonder that a most simple man, never instructed at all about the substance and nature of the Godhead, could until now be held or deceived by the fault of rusticity and the habit of an old error, or, to put it more truly, continue in his former error. This comes, not as you think from a recent delusion of the demons, but from the ignorance of the old paganism. For according to the habit of that error, by which they worshiped demons shaped in human figure, even now they think that the incomprehensible and ineffable majesty of the true God must be adored under the circumscription of some image. They believe that they hold or have nothing if they have not set before them some image which they can continually address when they are at prayer, carry about in their mind, and keep always fixed before their eyes. Against this error of theirs that saying is fittingly aimed: “And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man.” Jeremiah also says: “My people have changed their glory for an idol.” Although this error has grown into some people’s minds from the origin we have described, it has nevertheless been contracted, through lack of learning or rusticity, also in the minds of those who were never polluted by pagan superstition, under color of this testimony which says: “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” so that even the heresy called that of the Anthropomorphites has arisen on the occasion of this detestable interpretation, which with obstinate perversity maintains that the immense and simple substance of the Godhead is composed with our features and human shape. But anyone who has been instructed in the catholic doctrines will abhor this as pagan blasphemy, and so will come to that most pure quality of prayer which will not only mix no likeness of the Godhead and no bodily features (which it is wicked even to speak of) into its supplication, but will not admit into itself even the memory of any word, or the appearance of any deed, or the form of any shape whatever.

“For, as I said in the earlier conference, every mind in its prayer is either raised up or shaped according to the measure of its purity, withdrawing from the contemplation of earthly and material things just so far as the state of its purity has carried it forward, and making it see Jesus with the inner eyes of the soul either still humble and in the flesh, or glorified and coming in the glory of his majesty. For those cannot behold Jesus coming in his kingdom who, still held in a sort of Jewish weakness, cannot say with the apostle: “Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” Only those gaze on his divinity with the purest eyes who, rising from lowly and earthly works and thoughts, withdraw with him to the high mountain of solitude. That mountain, free from the tumult of all earthly thoughts and disturbances and set apart from the admixture of all vices, raised high by the purest faith and the eminence of the virtues, reveals the glory of his face and the image of his brightness to those who deserve to behold him with the pure eyes of the soul. Jesus is indeed seen also by those who live in cities, towns, and villages, that is, who are in the practical way of life and engaged in works, but not in that brightness in which he appeared to those who can climb with him the said mountain of the virtues, that is, Peter, James, and John. For so in solitude he appeared to Moses and spoke with Elijah. Our Lord, wishing to confirm this and to leave us examples of perfect purity, although he, the very fountain of inviolable holiness, had no need of the outward help of withdrawal and the benefit of solitude to obtain it (for the fullness of purity could not be stained by any filth of the crowds, nor could he be defiled by human company who cleanses and sanctifies all that is polluted), nevertheless withdrew alone to the mountain to pray. By the example of his withdrawal he teaches us that if we too wish to call upon God with a pure and whole disposition of heart, we should likewise withdraw from all the restlessness and confusion of the crowds, so that while still living in this body we may fit ourselves at least in some part to a kind of likeness of that blessedness which is promised to the saints in the future, and that God may be to us “all in all.”

“For then that prayer of our Savior will be perfectly fulfilled in us, in which he prayed to the Father for his disciples, saying: “that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and they in us,” and again: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us,” when that perfect love of God, with which “he first loved us,” has passed into the disposition of our heart too, this prayer of the Lord being fulfilled, which we believe can in no way be made void. This will come about when all our love, all our desire, all our zeal, all our effort, all our thought, all that we live, all that we speak, all that we breathe, will be God, and that unity which now exists of the Father with the Son and of the Son with the Father has been poured into our understanding and mind; that is, that as he loves us with a sincere, pure, and indissoluble love, we too may be joined to him with a perpetual and inseparable love, so united to him that whatever we breathe, whatever we understand, whatever we speak, is God. So we shall reach, I say, that end we mentioned before, which the same Lord in his prayer longs to be fulfilled in us: “that they may all be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they too may be made perfect in one,” and again: “Father, those whom you have given me, I will that where I am, they also may be with me.” This, then, ought to be the goal of the solitary, this his whole intention: that he may deserve to possess the image of future blessedness in this body, and begin in a way to taste beforehand in this vessel the pledge of that heavenly life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection: that the mind, refined from every fleshly condition, may be raised daily to spiritual things, until its whole life and every movement of the heart become one continual prayer.

Germanus: “The greatness of our amazement grows beyond our admiration for that earlier conference, on account of which we have hurried back here. For the more we are inflamed with desire for perfect blessedness by the incitement of this teaching, the more we fall into despair, not knowing how we can seek or obtain a discipline of such height. Therefore, since what we had begun to turn over in long meditation in our cell must perhaps be set out in a wordy account, we ask you to allow us patiently to explain it, although we know that your blessedness is not usually offended by the follies of the weak, which should be brought into the open for this very reason, that what is absurd in them may be corrected. As far as our opinion goes, then, the perfection of any art or discipline must begin from certain soft rudiments and first be imbued with easier and very tender beginnings, so that, nourished as it were with a kind of reasonable milk, it may grow little by little and be brought up, and so climb gradually and step by step from the lowest to the highest. When it has entered on the plainer first principles and, so to speak, the gates of the profession it has taken up, it will consequently reach the inner chambers and the lofty summits of perfection without toil. For how could any boy pronounce the simple combinations of syllables unless he had first carefully learned the forms of the letters? Or how will one gain quick skill in reading who is not yet able to join together short and very brief groupings of words? And by what method will one who is poorly instructed in the skill of grammar attain either rhetorical eloquence or philosophical knowledge? Therefore I do not doubt that this most sublime discipline too, by which we are taught to cleave to God continually, has certain foundations of instruction; once these are laid most firmly, the lofty summits of perfection can then be raised upon them. We faintly suspect that its first principles are these: that we should first know by what meditation God may be held or thought of, and then how we can keep this same subject, whatever it is, without wavering, which we do not doubt is the summit of all perfection. And therefore we want to be shown some subject for this remembrance by which God may be conceived in the mind and held perpetually, so that, keeping it before our eyes, when we feel we have slipped away from it, we may have at hand something to which we can at once return when we come to ourselves, and take it up again without any delay of going round about and without difficulty of searching. For it happens that when we have wandered from spiritual contemplations and turn back to ourselves as from a deadly sleep, and, as if awakened, look for a subject by which we might revive that spiritual remembrance which has been buried, we are held up by the delay of the search itself, and before we find it we fall back again from our effort, and before any spiritual insight is born the intention conceived in the heart vanishes. It is quite certain that this confusion happens to us because we do not keep firmly before our eyes something specific, like a formula, to which the wandering soul could be called back after many twists and various excursions, and enter, as it were, a harbor of rest after long shipwrecks. So it comes about that the mind, continually hindered by this ignorance and difficulty, is always wandering and tossed about as if drunk among various things, and does not hold long or firmly even the spiritual thing which has occurred to it by chance rather than by effort, since, always taking in one thing after another, it does not notice their end and departure any more than their entry and beginnings.”

Isaac: “Your inquiry, so minute and subtle, is an early sign of approaching purity. For no one will be able even to ask about these things, I will not say to look into them and discern them, unless diligent and effective effort of mind and watchful care have carried him forward to search out the depth of these questions, and the constant intention of a disciplined life has made him, through practical experience, attempt the threshold of this purity and knock at its doors. And therefore, since I see you standing, I will not say before the doors of that true prayer we are discussing, but already feeling its inner chambers and interior with the very hands of experience, as it were, and on the point of touching some of its parts, I do not think I shall have much labor in bringing you, who are already wandering about within its hall, into its sanctuary too, as far as the Lord shall guide; nor do I think that you will be held back by any obstacle of difficulty from seeing into the things that are to be shown. For he is close to knowledge who wisely recognizes what he should ask, and he is not far from understanding who has begun to understand what he does not know. And therefore I do not fear to incur the charge of betrayal or of lightness if I disclose what, in the earlier treatment of the perfection of prayer, I had withheld from the discussion; for I think that its power would have been opened to you, set as you are in this practice and pursuit, by God’s grace even without the service of our words.

“Therefore, following the method which you have most wisely compared to the teaching of little children (who cannot otherwise receive the first teaching of the letters, nor recognize their strokes nor draw their shapes with a steady hand, unless they grow accustomed to copying their forms by constant looking and daily imitation, using certain models and patterns carefully pressed into wax), we must hand on to you the formula of this spiritual contemplation too. Fixing your gaze always most tenaciously on it, you may learn either to turn it over profitably in unbroken continuity or, by its use and meditation, to climb to higher contemplations. This, then, will be set before you as the formula of the discipline and prayer you are seeking, which every monk who is striving for the continual remembrance of God should grow used to meditating by the unceasing turning of the heart, all the variety of thoughts driven out; for he will not be able to keep it in any other way unless he has been freed from all bodily cares and anxieties. As it was handed down to us by a few who were left of the most ancient fathers, so it is disclosed by us only to very few, and to those who truly thirst. For keeping the perpetual remembrance of God, then, this formula of devotion will be set before us inseparably: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Not without reason has this verse been chosen out of the whole body of the Scriptures. For it takes up all the feelings that can come upon human nature, and it fits every state and all assaults quite properly and suitably. It contains an invocation of God against every danger; it contains the humility of devout confession; it contains the watchfulness of constant care and fear; it contains the consideration of one’s own frailty, confidence in being heard, and trust in a protection always present and at hand. For whoever continually calls on his protector is sure that he is always present. It contains the ardor of love and charity; it contains an awareness of snares and fear of enemies, by whom, seeing himself surrounded day and night, one confesses that he cannot be freed without the help of his defender. This verse is an impregnable wall, an impenetrable breastplate, and a most strong shield for all who are troubled by the attacks of demons. It does not allow those who are in acedia and anxiety of mind, or depressed by sadness or any thoughts, to despair of the remedies of salvation, since it shows that the one it calls upon is continually watching our struggles and is not far from those who pray to him. It warns us, when we are in spiritual success and joy of heart, that we must not be lifted up at all or puffed up by our prosperous state, which it testifies cannot be kept without God as protector, since it implores him not only always but also quickly to help. This verse, I say, is found necessary and useful for each of us in whatever condition he lives. For whoever wants to be helped always and in all things shows that he needs God as helper not only in hard and sad things but equally in prosperous and joyful ones, so that as God rescues him from the former, he may make him remain in the latter, knowing that in neither can human frailty survive without his aid. I am troubled by the passion of gluttony; I seek foods the desert does not know, and in the squalid solitude the smells of royal dishes are thrust upon me, and I feel myself dragged, much against my will, toward desire for them: I must therefore say: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am urged to anticipate the hour fixed for the meal, or I struggle with great pain of heart to keep the measure of due and customary sparingness: I must cry out with groaning: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Because of the assault of the flesh I need stricter fasts, but weariness of stomach forbids me, or dryness and constriction of the bowels deter me: so that effect may be given to my desire, or else that the heat of carnal lust may subside without the remedy of a stricter fast, I must pray: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Coming to the meal when the lawful hour prompts, I shrink from taking bread and am kept from all eating that nature needs: I must cry out with a wail: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” When I want to apply myself to reading for steadiness of heart, a headache interrupts and prevents me, and at the third hour sleep knocks my face against the sacred page, and I am forced either to go beyond the time set for rest or to anticipate it; finally, the heaviest pressure of sleep compels me to cut short the canonical measure of the synaxis and the psalms: likewise I must cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Sleep taken from my eyes, I see myself worn out for many nights by devilish sleeplessness, and all the refreshment of night’s rest shut out from my eyelids: I must pray with sighs: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” While I am still engaged in the struggle with the vices, the titillation of the flesh suddenly pricks me and tries by a pleasant delight to draw me to consent while I sleep: lest the strange fire, blazing up, burn the sweet-smelling flowers of chastity, I must cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I feel the incitements of lust extinguished and the generative heat grown cool in my members: that this virtue that has been won, or rather the grace of God, may remain longer or for ever in me, I must say intently: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am disquieted by the goads of anger, love of money, and sadness, and am driven to break the gentleness I had set before me and held dear: lest I be carried away by the disturbance of rage into the bitterness of gall, I must cry out with the deepest groaning: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am tried by acedia, vainglory, and the elation of pride, and my mind flatters itself with a subtle thought about the negligence or lukewarmness of others: lest this pernicious suggestion of the enemy prevail in me, I must pray with all contrition of heart: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I have acquired the grace of humility and simplicity by laying aside the swelling of pride through constant compunction of spirit: lest “the foot of pride come against me” again “and the hand of the sinner move me,” and I be pierced more gravely by elation at my victory, I must cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I seethe with countless and various wanderings of the soul and instability of heart, and I cannot restrain the scattering of my thoughts, and I cannot pour out my very prayer without the interruption and phantasm of empty figures and the going over of words and deeds, and I feel myself so bound by the dryness of this barrenness that I feel myself unable to bring forth any birth of spiritual thoughts at all: so that I may deserve to be freed from this squalor of soul, from which I cannot extricate myself with many groans and sighs, I shall of necessity cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Again, I feel that I have obtained, by the visitation of the Holy Spirit, direction of soul, steadiness of thoughts, and eagerness of heart with ineffable joy and ecstasy of mind, and in the overflowing of spiritual thoughts I have received, by a sudden illumination of the Lord, the revelation of most holy meanings that were previously quite hidden from me: so that I may deserve to remain longer in them, I must cry anxiously and often: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Surrounded by the terrors of demons at night I am harassed, and I am disquieted by the phantasms of unclean spirits; the very hope of salvation and life is taken from me by the horror of fear: fleeing to the saving harbor of this verse, I shall cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Again, when I have been restored by the Lord’s consolation and, heartened by his coming, feel myself surrounded as it were by countless thousands of angels, so that I suddenly dare to seek out the encounter and challenge to combat of those whom I used to dread worse than death, and whose touch, or rather nearness, I felt with horror of mind and body: so that the vigor of this steadfastness may by God’s grace remain longer in me, I must cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” The prayer of this verse, then, must be poured out with unceasing continuity: in adversity, that we may be rescued; in prosperity, that we may be kept and not lifted up. Let the meditation of this verse, I say, turn unbroken in your breast. Do not cease to sing it while you are at any work or service, or on a journey. Meditate on it while sleeping and eating and in the last necessities of nature. This turning of the heart, become for you a saving formula, will not only keep you unharmed from every attack of demons, but will also cleanse you of all the vices of earthly contagion and lead you to those invisible and heavenly contemplations and carry you on to that ineffable ardor of prayer that very few have experienced. Let sleep steal upon you as you meditate on this verse, until, formed by its unceasing exercise, you grow used to singing it even in your sleep. Let it be the first thing that comes to you when you wake; let it anticipate all your thoughts as you awake; let it hand you over, as you rise from your bed, to the bending of the knees, and from there lead you on to every work and action; let it accompany you at all times. You shall meditate on it, according to the lawgiver’s precepts, “sitting in your house and walking on the way, sleeping and rising.” You shall write it on the threshold and doors of your mouth; you shall place it on the walls of your house and in the inner chambers of your breast, so that this chant may be your prayer bowing down when you kneel to pray, and, when you rise from it and go about all the necessary business of life, it may become your upright and continual prayer.

“Let the mind hold this formula, this one, unceasingly, until, strengthened by its unceasing use and continual meditation, it casts off and rejects the riches and ample wealth of all thoughts, and so, restricted to the poverty of this verse, comes with ready ease to that gospel beatitude which holds first place among the other beatitudes. For he says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And so one who becomes an outstanding poor man through such poverty will fulfil the prophet’s saying: “The poor and needy will praise the name of the Lord.” And indeed what greater or holier poverty can there be than that of the man who, knowing that he has no protection and no strength of his own, asks daily help from another’s bounty, and, understanding that his life and substance are sustained at every moment by divine aid, not without reason professes himself the Lord’s true beggar, crying to him humbly every day: “But I am a beggar and poor; O God, help me”? And so, rising by his illumination to that manifold knowledge of God too, he may then begin to be fed on more sublime and more sacred mysteries, according to what is said by the prophet: “The high mountains for the stags, the rock a refuge for the hedgehogs.” This fits quite properly the sense we have described, since whoever persists in simplicity and innocence is harmful or troublesome to no one, but, content with his simplicity alone, wishes only to protect himself from becoming the prey of those who lie in wait; having become a spiritual hedgehog, he is protected by the continual covering of that rock of the gospel; that is, fortified by the remembrance of the Lord’s passion and by unceasing meditation on the said verse, he escapes the snares of the attacking enemy. Of these spiritual hedgehogs it is also said in Proverbs: “And the hedgehogs are a feeble people, who have made their houses in the rocks.” And indeed what is feebler than a Christian, what weaker than a monk, to whom not only is no vengeance for injuries allowed, but not even a mild and silent disturbance is permitted to spring up within? But whoever, advancing from this state, not only possesses the simplicity of innocence but, armed also with the virtue of discernment, has become a destroyer of poisonous serpents, having Satan crushed under his feet, and has reached by his eagerness of mind the likeness of the rational stag, will feed on the mountains of the prophets and apostles, that is, on their highest and most sublime mysteries. Nourished by their continual pasture, and taking into himself all the feelings of the psalms, he will begin to sing them in such a way that he utters them with deep compunction of heart, not as though composed by the prophet but as if produced by himself, like his own prayer; or at least he will consider that they were directed to his own person, and will recognize that their sayings were not fulfilled only then by or in the prophet but are carried out and fulfilled in himself every day. For then the divine Scriptures lie open to us more clearly, and in a way their veins and marrow are laid bare, when our experience not only grasps but even anticipates their meaning, and the sense of the words is disclosed to us not by exposition but by proofs. For taking up the same disposition of heart in which each psalm was sung or written, and becoming as it were its authors, we shall go before its meaning rather than follow it; that is, gathering the force of what is said before we gather knowledge of it, we shall in a way remember, as we meditate on them, what has been done in us or is done in daily assaults; and as we sing we shall recall what our negligence has produced in us, or our diligence gained, or divine providence bestowed, or the enemy’s prompting cheated us of, or slippery and subtle forgetfulness taken away, or human frailty brought upon us, or improvident ignorance deceived us in. For we find all these feelings expressed in the Psalms, so that, seeing what has befallen us as in a most clear mirror, we may recognize it more effectively; and so, taught by our feelings as teachers, we may touch these things not as heard but as seen, and bring them forth from the inner disposition of the heart not as committed to memory but as implanted in the very nature of things, so that we penetrate their sense not by the text we read but by the experience that has gone before. And so our mind will reach that incorruption of prayer to which, as far as the Lord deigned to grant, the order of the conference ascended in the earlier discussion: prayer that is not only occupied with the sight of no image, but is marked by no utterance of voice or words, and is brought forth with the fiery intention of the mind, through an ineffable ecstasy of heart, with an insatiable eagerness of spirit; prayer which the mind, carried beyond all senses and visible matter, pours out to God with “groanings that cannot be uttered” and with sighs.

Germanus: “We think that you have set out quite openly and clearly not only the teaching of this spiritual discipline we asked for, but perfection itself. For what can be more perfect or more sublime than to embrace the remembrance of God in so brief a meditation, and by turning over a single verse to pass beyond all the bounds of visible things, and in a way to enclose the feelings of all prayers in a short phrase? And therefore we ask that one thing that remains be explained to us: how we can hold firmly this very verse which you have given us as a formula, so that, as by God’s grace we have been freed from the follies of worldly thoughts, we may likewise keep hold of spiritual ones without wavering.

“For when our mind has taken up a passage of some psalm, it slips away without our noticing and, unaware and dazed, rolls on to the text of another Scripture. And when it has begun to turn this over within itself, before it has been fully examined, the memory of another text arises and shuts out meditation on the earlier subject. From this too it is carried to another as a new meditation slips in, and so the soul, always rolling from psalm to psalm, leaping from the text of the gospel to a reading from the apostle, and tumbling from this also to the words of the prophets, and carried from there to certain spiritual histories, is tossed unsteady and wandering through the whole body of the Scriptures. It can neither reject nor keep anything at will, nor finish anything with full judgment and examination, having become only a toucher and taster of spiritual meanings, not their begetter or possessor. And so the mind, always changeable and wandering, is drawn this way and that as if drunk even at the time of the synaxis, discharging no duty fittingly. For example, when it prays, it recalls a psalm or some reading. When it sings, it meditates on something other than what the text of the psalm itself contains. When it recites a reading, it turns over something to be done or remembers something done. And in this way, receiving and letting go nothing in a disciplined or timely way, it seems to be driven by chance assaults, having no power to keep what delights it or to remain in it. It is necessary for us above all, then, to know how we can carry out these spiritual duties fittingly, or at least keep this very verse which you have given us as a formula unwaveringly, so that the beginnings and ends of all our thoughts may not drift in their own fickleness but may lie in our control.”

Isaac: “Although I think this was sufficiently explained the other day when we were discussing the state of prayer, yet since you ask for the same things to be repeated to you, I shall speak briefly about the steadying of the heart. There are three things that make a wandering mind stable: vigils, meditation, and prayer; constancy and continual attention to them give the soul stable firmness. But this can in no way be grasped unless all the anxieties and cares of the present life have first been cast off by the tireless constancy of work, work devoted not to love of money but to the sacred uses of the coenobium, so that we may be able to fulfil that apostolic command: “Pray without ceasing.” For he prays very little who is accustomed to pray only at the time when the knees are bent. But he never prays who, even with bended knees, is distracted by any wandering of heart. And therefore, such as we wish to be found when we pray, such we ought to be before the time of prayer. For the mind at the time of its supplication must be formed by its previous state, and when it prays it is either raised to heavenly things or sunk into earthly ones by those thoughts on which it dwelt before prayer.” Thus far Abba Isaac set out the second conference on the character of prayer to us in our astonishment. We greatly admired his teaching on the meditation of the said verse, which he had handed on to be kept by beginners as a kind of first instruction, and we desired to practise it most tenaciously, since we thought it brief and easy; but we found it quite a lot harder to observe than that former pursuit of ours, by which we used to run about everywhere through the whole body of the Scriptures in varied meditation without the bond of any perseverance. It is clear, then, that no one at all is excluded from perfection of heart by lack of learning, nor is rusticity an obstacle to attaining that purity of heart and soul which lies most briefly at hand for all, provided only that they keep a sound and whole intention of mind toward God by continual meditation on this verse.