Isaac of Nineveh

Isaac was born in Beth Qatraye, the Christian region along the western shore of the Persian Gulf, in what is now Qatar. He became a monk young. Around 676 the East Syriac patriarch George I, travelling in the region, consecrated him bishop of Nineveh, the old Assyrian city across the river from Mosul.

He lasted five months. The sources say he asked to be released. One story has him confronted on his first day by two Christians arguing about a debt, one refusing to forgive it even after hearing the Gospel read, and Isaac concluding that if this is what the Gospel accomplishes here, he had better go back to the desert.

He went to the mountains of Khuzistan and lived as a hermit, then joined the monastery of Rabban Shabur. He read so much that he went blind, and dictated the rest of his work to disciples. He died there, probably around the year 700, and was buried in the monastery.

What he dictated is one of the great bodies of spiritual writing in any language. He wrote about solitude, about the discipline of the body, about the stages of prayer, and above all about the mercy of God, which he insisted was not a department of God's character but the whole of it.

He asked what a merciful heart is, and answered: a heart on fire for the whole creation, for men, for birds, for beasts, for demons, for every created thing; a heart that cannot bear to see any harm or grief in creation, and therefore prays even for the enemies of truth. He wrote that God's love does not change toward the damned; the same love that is heaven to those who accept it is torment to those who refuse it. He wrote that he who has seen his own sin is greater than he who has raised the dead.

Here is the strange part of his story. Isaac belonged to the Church of the East, a communion the Greek and Latin churches regarded as heretical. It made no difference. His homilies were translated into Greek at the monastery of Mar Saba in Palestine within a century or two of his death, and from Greek into Arabic, Georgian, Slavonic, Latin, and eventually every European language. He is read as a saint by Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant readers alike, and he is in the Philokalia. Dostoevsky owned him. Almost no other writer has crossed that many walls.

A second and third collection of his discourses were rediscovered in the twentieth century in a single manuscript at Oxford.

Sources: Isaac of Nineveh, The Ascetical Homilies; Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life; The Philokalia; William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature.