Standing at the Boundary of Fire

Why prayer ends where God truly begins

Synopsis of The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 23 paragraphs 7-13:

St. Isaac refuses to flatter our ideas about prayer. He dismantles them with frightening calm. He tells us that everything we ordinarily call prayer supplication request thanksgiving praise belongs to a realm that is real and necessary yet still preliminary. Prayer in this sense is movement. It reaches toward something it lacks. It asks to be delivered healed forgiven sustained enlightened. And this movement is not false. It is simply not final.

Here is the offense of his teaching. Even pure prayer the kind almost no one attains remains bounded. It is accepted by God but it does not yet cross into God. It stands at the veil. It does not pass beyond it.

St. Isaac forces us to confront how rare purity truly is. Among thousands scarcely one fulfills the commandments with integrity. Among thousands scarcely one reaches pure prayer. And beyond that beyond even pure prayer there is scarcely one soul in all generations who has been carried by grace into what lies past it. These words are not meant to discourage. They are meant to shatter presumption. They strip prayer of fantasy and return it to truth.

Prayer is still a care. Even at its most ardent it is still a reaching. It still involves motion desire intention orientation. And because it moves it can be mixed. A single wandering thought a single foreign image brought unknowingly to the altar renders it impure. St. Isaac is merciless here. He says such prayer offers an unclean animal upon the noetic altar of the heart. Not because the person is wicked but because prayer tolerates no division.

Yet when prayer becomes pure something astonishing happens. The soul does not become active. It becomes sealed. The entrances of the heart are closed. Thoughts are shut out not by effort but by ardor. The gaze of the soul is drawn inward beyond the veil. Even here prayer reaches its limit. This is the farthest prayer can go.

And then St. Isaac does something that unsettles even devout readers. He says plainly that what lies beyond cannot be called prayer at all. To call it spiritual prayer is already a misunderstanding. Anything that can be prayed is inferior to what is spiritual. Anything spiritual is free of movement. To speak of praying spiritually is nearly blasphemous because prayer implies motion and motion implies lack.

Here the Fathers shock us by their restraint. They knew the temptation to claim experiences to name states to speak prematurely. So they refused precision. They borrowed words freely prayer theoria knowledge vision not because these names were accurate but because no accurate name exists. What lies beyond prayer has no form no movement no distinction. It belongs to the age to come and can only be hinted at through parable.

St. Isaac insists that prayer itself is a mediator. It stands between the natural state and the spiritual. As long as the mind moves it remains in the natural realm even if that movement is holy. When the mind is taken into the other realm prayer ceases. Not because prayer is rejected but because it has been surpassed. The saints do not pray there. They dwell. They do not ask. They behold. They do not move. They are held.

This is the terrifying implication. Prayer is not the summit. It is the threshold. It prepares the soul for something it cannot produce and cannot sustain. The moment the soul tastes that future blessedness even briefly it forgets itself forgets the world forgets prayer itself. Not in distraction but in wonder.

St. Isaac leaves us here at the edge. He does not tell us how to cross. He tells us only this. Be faithful to prayer. Be ruthless about purity. Do not imagine that prayer itself is the goal. And do not name too quickly what God alone performs.

Prayer ends where God truly begins.