On Ascetical Life (Popular Patristics Series)

Mary Hansbury offers a fresh presentation of On Ascetical Life by Isaac of Nineveh, whose monastic anthropology had a major influence on all of Byzantine spiritual literature. According to St. Isaac, the way toward God was threefold: the way of the body, the way of the soul, and the way of the spirit. In the first stage, the person begins with a total preoccupation with the passions and moves toward God by means of bodily works: fasting, vigils, and psalmody. The next stage involves a struggle against thoughts foreign to the nature of the soul, turning from created objects to the contemplation of God’s wisdom and a transformation within. And as the person arrives at a total openness of the soul to the future hope, he or she proceeds to the final stage of unified knowledge—an attitude of wonder and praise in continual prayer to God, leading to the freedom of immortal life given after the resurrection.