Abraham of Nathpar

Abraham came from Nathpar, a village in Adiabene, the old kingdom around Arbela in what is now northern Iraq. He belonged to the Church of the East, the Syriac-speaking church that lived outside the Roman Empire under Persian rule, and he wrote in Syriac for readers who had never seen Greek.

He was a monk, and by report also a missionary, working in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the generation that saw the great monastic renewal of the East Syriac church spread out from Mount Izla near Nisibis. Almost nothing of his outward life is recorded. What survives is what he wrote.

His best-known work is a short treatise on prayer. It is not a theory of prayer; it is a set of instructions for a man who keeps failing at it. He wrote about what to do when the mind wanders, when the words go dry, when the body will not settle, when a person is tempted to quit because the prayer feels like nothing. He treated distraction as a normal condition to be worked with rather than a disqualification.

He also wrote admonitions on steadfastness, discourses against those who chase after empty things, and letters of counsel to monks. Two treatises long circulated under the name of Evagrius Ponticus, the Protrepticus and the Paraeneticus, have been reassigned by modern Syriac scholarship to Abraham instead, which tells you how easily an Eastern writer's name could be lost in transmission.

His theology is plain and practical rather than speculative. He assumes that the ordinary Christian is meant to pray continually, that the discipline is learned slowly, and that God is patient with beginners. He warns against measuring yourself against other people's progress. He also wrote against heresy, defending the faith of his church against rival teachings in a region where Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and competing Christian confessions all pressed on the same villages.

His writings passed into the wider Syriac tradition and were read alongside Isaac of Nineveh and John of Dalyatha. They reached English readers only in the twentieth century, when Sebastian Brock gathered the Syriac teachers on prayer into a single volume and put Abraham's treatise among them.

He is a reminder that the church of the fathers was never only Greek and Latin. While Rome argued over Justinian's edicts, a monk in a Persian province was writing quiet chapters on how to keep praying when prayer is hard, and his readers were Christians the empire had never governed.

Sources: Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (1987); the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage; Syriaca.org, the Syriac reference portal.