Nativity -- Day 3

I've recently discovered the Russian bishop: Hilarion Alfeyev. His Grace has an impressive repertoire of publications and articles. One of these articles is: St. Isaac of Ninevah and Syrian Mysticism. Here are some excerpts:

The idea of God as love is central and dominant in Isaac’s thought: it is the main source of his theological opinions, ascetical recommendations and mystical insights.

Divine love is beyond human understanding and above all description in words. At the same time it is reflected in God’s actions with respect to the created world and humankind: ‘Among all His actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and the end of His dealings with us’.[2] Both the creation of the world and God’s coming on earth in flesh had the only aim, ‘to reveal His boundless love to the world’.[3]
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And what is a merciful heart? - It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.[29]
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When you attain to the region of tears, then know that your mind has left the prison of this world and has set its foot on the roadway of the new age, and has begun to breathe that other air, new and wonderful. And at the same moment it begins to shed tears, since the birth pangs of the spiritual infant are at hand. For grace, the common mother of all, makes haste mystically to give birth in the soul to the divine image for the light of the age to come.
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Question: And whence does a man know that his has attained to the perfect love of God? Answer: When the recollection of God is stirred in his mind, straightway his heart is kindled by the love of Him and his eyes pour forth abundant tears. For love is wont to ignite tears by the recollection of beloved ones. A man who is in this state will never be found destitute of tears, because that which brings him to the recollection of God is never absent from him; wherefore even in sleep he converses with God. For love is wont to cause such things.[11]
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Abandonment has been an experience of the whole of humanity since the fall of Adam. It is both an experience of believers and of unbelievers. However, for a believer it is an experience of the temporary absence of God, which gives place to an intense feeling of presence, whereas for an atheist it is an experience of constant and irreparable absence. An atheist considers the absence of God as the norm, whereas a believer endures the feeling of absence as a very strong and most painful suffering. He cannot cope with the absence of God: even though in his mind he knows that God has not forgotten him, his soul and heart thirst for conscious experience of God’s presence. The life in God is accompanied with the feeling of God’s presence, and when this feeling is lost, one cannot find calm until it returns.
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The periods of darkness and abandonment are compared by Isaac with winter, when natural life almost completely ceases, but the seeds lie in the depth of earth, waiting for spring, when they bring forth shoots. One should not fall into despair but rather wait patiently until the afflictions, despondency and abandonment that one has endured bring their fruits.[18]
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The theme of prayer is undoubtedly the most frequently discussed and most thoroughly developed theme in St Isaac of Nineveh. When reading his works, one not only receives a clear idea about how he and other members of the Church of the East prayed in his times: one also gains a detailed picture of the theory and practice of prayer in the whole of the Eastern Christian tradition.
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Spiritual prayer, according to Isaac, is participation in the age to come, the experience of paradise on earth. The experience of contemplation which the saints have in the future life is given to one in one’s earthly life through ‘spiritual prayer’: ‘The soul does not pray a prayer, but in awareness she perceives the spiritual things of that other age which transcend human conception; and the understanding of these is but the power of the Holy Spirit. This is noetic contemplation, not the movement and entreaty of prayer, although it has its starting-point in prayer’.[10]
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In Isaac the term ‘contemplation’ very often appears as a synonym for the ‘vision of God’. He speaks of the supernatural state of the soul, which is ‘her movement in the contemplation of the transubstantial Deity’.[2] In this state, the soul ‘rushes forward.., and on the wings of faith she soars aloft, taking leave of visible creation; she becomes as one drunken in awestruck wonder of her continual solicitude for God; and by simple, uncompounded vision, and by unseeing intuitions concerning the Divine nature’.[3] At the same time Isaac emphasizes that the righteous cannot see the essence of God: when one is raised to the contemplation of God, one sees not God’s essence, but ‘the dark cloud of His glory’.[4] One can see only a reflection of God’s essence, though this vision will be fuller in the age to come: ‘The more a man becomes perfect with respect to God, the more he follows after Him. But in the age of truth, God will show him His face, although not His essence. For however much the righteous enter into the contemplation of Him, they behold an enigma of His vision, like an image that is seen through a mirror;[5] but yonder they behold the revelation of the truth’.[6]