Saint ’Ishâq of Nineveh
Today, the twenty-eighth of January, is the Orthodox feast day also of Mâr ’Ishâq مار إسحاق, or Saint Isaac, the Syrian of Nineveh. Mâr ’Ishâq was at one point the Bishop of Nineveh, but resigned the office after five months in order to dwell in desert solitude in the mountains.
Mâr ’Ishâq was born in Beth Qatraye – modern-day Qatar – on the Persian Gulf, around the year 613. At the time there was a flourishing community of Christians there, though they fell into schism from the other Persian Christians around the year 648. The schism between the Christians of Beth Qatraye and the Christians of Persia ended in 676, when Catholicos Mâr Gîwargîs visited Qatar and made reconciliation with the elders of Beth Qatraye at the Synod of Dairin. As part of the agreement, Mâr Gîwargîs appointed ’Ishâq as bishop of Nineveh (now Mosul in Iraq) at this time; according to ’Ishâq’s hagiography, the consecration was held at the Monastery of Beth ‘Abe on al-Zâb al-Kabîr in what is now northern Iraq.
Mâr ’Ishâq struggled as a bishop for the people of Nineveh. The people of Nineveh have long had a reputation for hardness of heart, and this was something Mâr ’Ishâq tried to address. There is one anecdote from his brief time as bishop there that is particularly illustrative. Two men came before the holy father, the very first day after his consecration as bishop, in bitter dispute – one of them a debtor and the other his creditor. The creditor was demanding the immediate return of his loan, with interest. The creditor exclaimed to Mâr ’Ishâq: ‘If this man refuses to pay back what belongs to me, I will be obliged to take him to court.’ Mâr ’Ishâq answered him: ‘Since the Holy Gospel teaches us not to take back what has been given away, you should at the very least grant this man a day to make his repayment.’ The exasperated creditor burst out: ‘Leave aside for the moment the teachings of the Gospel!’ and Mâr ’Ishâq’s reply to this was: ‘If the Gospel is not to be present, what have I come here to do?’
Personal hardheartedness like this was only half of the story, however. There were also bitter doctrinal disputes between the Persian and the Miaphysite residents of Nineveh, and Mâr ’Ishâq had little interest in refereeing such disputes. Mâr ’Ishâq abdicated his bishopric onto someone else, and went into Mount Matout, a remote refuge in the mountains of Khuzestan in Iran. Matout was apparently a mountain which many anchorites chose to struggle against their passions. There he lived a life of solitary prayer, asceticism and contemplation.
After living for some time in Khuzestan, Mâr ’Ishâq returned to Nineveh and retired to the monastery of Rabban Shabir in nearby al-Qûš. There he spent his days immersed in the studies of the Holy Scriptures, in committing to writing his purest thoughts on the nature of God and on the ascetic struggle, and – not keeping this light hidden to himself – also teaching the monks, postulants and students at Rabban Shabir the mysteries of God. So committed was he to spreading the teachings of divine love, and committing them to writing, that he spoilt his eyes in reading and transcribing. By the end of his life he was fully blind, but he continued by dictating his writings to his students, who wrote them down for him. We see a description of his ascetic habits in the Studia Syriaca:
They called him the second Didymos, for indeed, he was quiet, kind and humble, and his word was gentle. He ate only three loaves a week with some vegetables, and he did not taste any food that was cooked. He composed five volumes, that are known unto this day, filled with sweet teaching.Mâr ’Ishâq reposed in the Lord at the age of eighty-six, around the year 700. His legacy as a saint of the Church – he is glorified both in the Eastern Orthodox Church and in the Church of the East – is assured. But although we can see from his short bishopric that he preferred not to enter into the Christological disputes of his day, nonetheless his writings were not without controversy. His hagiography mentions a particular bishop of Beth Garmai, a certain Daniel bar-Tubanitha, who disputed three points of his ascetical writings, but, according to Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk, no extant sources inform us of the nature of Daniel’s dispute with Mâr ’Ishâq. The ‘three propositions’ of Mâr ’Ishâq which prompted such controversy in the Christian East ‘remain’, in his words, ‘an enigma’. However, already by 900, Mâr ’Ishâq’s writings were accepted as authoritative and holy in the Church of the East. When his ascetical writings were translated from Syriac into Greek about 100 years later, they were elevated among the works of the holy Church Fathers almost at once among the Byzantine church authorities, and incorporated into the apophthegmatic Synagogē of Paul Evergetinos around 1050. The holy Qatari Syrian was quickly thereafter venerated as a Father of the Church among Orthodox Christians in the Eastern Roman Empire.
For Mâr ’Ishâq, the greatest and deepest truth about God is His nature and personality as love. Such love was the Incarnation, so important to ’Ishâq’s thought, and the concomitant interruption of ‘normal’, fallen reality that it embodied. It’s important to stress that to ’Ishâq, the acknowledgement of God’s reality as love is not mere sentimentality. This is not a reality to be lightly or cavalierly acknowledged. ’Ishâq’s vision of divine love is as ineffable, pure, protean creative power, far beyond human comprehension. The inexhaustible reserves of God’s self-giving, of His forbearance, of His constant and unchanging, meek and sustaining nature are in fact a terrible reality to attempt to grasp. For example: when Mâr ’Ishâq speaks of hell, it is not as a willing and conscious torment inflicted by a wrathful God upon sinners. In Mâr ’Ishâq’s telling, the all-pervading presence and reality of God’s love is given to all souls without distinction. For the soul mired in sin, unrepentant, the presence of this creative, persistent and boundless healing power is perceived as pain – pain at the very core and foundation of one’s being.
There is in Mâr ’Ishâq’s work an eschatological expectation that approaches Origen’s and Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of apokatastasis, but this expectation is (perhaps blessedly) not informed by Greek metaphysical speculations inherited from, say, Plotinus. What governs this vision is the understanding that every created being and act of God, down to the most miserable and fleeting of creatures, is in fact an act of love and partakes in the providence and care of God, and thus cannot but partake in the ends of God’s will, that the ‘world will be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him who performed all these things’.
Mâr ’Ishâq takes this teaching to some uncomfortable extremes. He anathematises any who would ascribe vengeance to God, and even insinuates that such people are engaging in hæresy: ‘The man who chooses to consider God as avenger, presuming that in this manner he bears witness to His justice, the same accuses Him of being bereft of goodness!’ And he goes further than this. He goes so far as to say it is wrong to ascribe justice to God, for this would abrogate the consideration of God’s mercy. The only possible reaction to the love of God is one of gratitude, and at that gratitude for something given gratuitously and not earned. Only from such a posture of gratitude is it possible to acquire the merciful heart toward all things which Mâr ’Ishâq emphasises.
’Ishâq’s writings reflect a desert spirituality, however far removed from Ægypt he was both theologically and gæographically. From a posture of gratitude, the beloved of God may begin to emulate God by loving her neighbours with the same kind of selfless and all-giving dispassion. The diminution of the self – stilling and silencing the self – becomes something desirable. For that one needs to flee from her neighbours, not because she does not love them, but because their lack of silence produces a false image. True stillness can only begin from gratitude toward God’s total and all-sustaining love. The purpose of this stillness is the acquisition of humility which is a fundamental likeness to God. ’Ishâq is quite insistent that humility is not the natural state of the fallen human being (and is thus contrasted with gentleness, mildness and meekness, which are traits of the ‘natural’ fallen human being and which are not necessarily humility), it has to be relearnt. Asceticism and stillness are not ends in themselves, nor are they deserving of reward: in ’Ishâq’s accounting these disciplines and works are meant to teach humility. All subsequent spiritual progress is rooted in humility; as such humility is a subject which – as Metropolitan Hilarion says – Mâr ’Ishâq returns to time and time again.
Mâr ’Ishâq taught primarily monks and ascetics, but his teachings are not all meant to stay merely among monastic communities or eremitical cells. As Metropolitan Hilarion says: ‘Every Christian who now reads Isaac can find something appropriate to himself.’ Mâr ’Ishâq speaks of the ihidaya, the ‘solitary’ or the hermit, as the exemplar of the Christian life. But the way he uses the Syriac term is such that – without abridging the specific context of the ‘solitary’ hermit he is ideally addressing – every soul before God, regardless of vocation, is an ihidaya. (This is fitting: God being boundless and inexhaustible, even wild and terrifying, as Love, every soul is called to respond!) Every soul can prostrate herself in gratitude before God. Every soul can learn humility by taking up a fitting burden of prayer and asceticism, and giving thanks for the mercy which is shown. May our remembrance of this great and illuminated ascetic serve to kindle in us gratitude and show us the way to humility. Holy Mâr ’Ishâq, meek, gentle and humble ascetic, teacher of Christ to the ages, pray unto Him who loves all of creation, that we sinners may be saved!
He that thundered on Sinai with saving laws for man
Hath also given thy writings as guides in prayer unto monks,
O revealer of unfathomable mysteries;
For having gone up in the mount of the vision of the Lord,
Thou wast shown the many mansions.
Wherefore, O God-bearing ’Ishâq,
Entreat the Saviour for all praising thee.
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