To Kindle What We Have Not Yet Become

St. Isaac the Syrian on the Humility of Spiritual Writing and the Fire It Seeks to Awaken

“For by my own struggles I have not been vouchsafed to experience even one thousandth part of what I have written with my hands.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 23

There is something almost unbearable in the humility of St. Isaac the Syrian.

He has spoken of the highest mysteries of the spiritual life. He has described the purification of the heart, the stillness of the mind, the sweetness of divine love, and the soul’s entrance into the wonder of God. His words have nourished generations of monks and Christians seeking the narrow way. They have become a refuge for the afflicted, a light for those wandering in darkness, and a summons to those who have grown weary of the struggle.

And yet, having written of such things, Isaac makes a confession that should arrest every one of us who presumes to speak or write about God.

He has scarcely experienced a thousandth part of what he has described.

We might be tempted to regard this as an expression of conventional humility, the sort of pious disclaimer that spiritual writers sometimes place before their work. But to read Isaac in this way would be to misunderstand both the man and the nature of the spiritual life he seeks to communicate.

He is telling us something far more unsettling.

It is possible to speak truthfully of realities into which we have scarcely entered. It is possible to recognize the beauty of holiness while remaining painfully conscious of our distance from it. It is possible to bear witness to a fire by whose warmth we ourselves have only begun to be touched.

And perhaps most importantly, it is possible to do all of this without falsehood, provided we never confuse the knowledge of divine things with their possession.

This distinction is essential.

For the Fathers, knowledge of God is never merely the accumulation of religious ideas. It is not mastery of a theological vocabulary or familiarity with the writings of holy men. It is participation in the life of God. It is the gradual healing and transfiguration of the human person through repentance, prayer, obedience, humility, and grace.

One may know the language of this life without yet having acquired its spirit.

One may write beautifully about stillness while remaining inwardly agitated.

One may speak of surrender while still clinging desperately to control.

One may describe the freedom of the saints while remaining bound by fear, resentment, vanity, or the need to be understood.

Isaac knows this.

Indeed, it is precisely because he knows it that his words possess such extraordinary authority.

He does not stand above the reader as one who has arrived. He stands alongside him as one who has glimpsed something so beautiful that he cannot remain silent, even while recognizing how little of it has become his own.

His authority does not arise from claiming spiritual attainment. It arises from his refusal to claim what he has not received.

And here we encounter something that is almost entirely foreign to our age.

We live in a world where the ability to speak about something is readily mistaken for the possession of it. Religious language can become a form of identity. Spiritual insight can become a means of establishing authority. Even the writings of the saints can be gathered, arranged, explained, and presented in ways that leave the heart fundamentally untouched.

We may become interpreters of a life we have never truly begun to live.

Worse still, we may gradually lose the capacity to recognize the difference.

Isaac will not permit this confusion.

He places an abyss between what he has written and what he has personally experienced. Yet he does not regard that abyss as a reason for despair or silence.

Why?

Because the purpose of his writing is not to establish his own holiness.

It is to awaken desire.

He writes, as he tells us, for the kindling and enlightenment of souls. He hopes that someone, somewhere, encountering these words, might be stirred by the beauty of what is described and begin to seek it.

Notice the extraordinary tenderness of this hope.

He does not demand that his readers immediately attain the heights of contemplation. He does not imagine that the mysteries he describes can be acquired simply through intellectual understanding. He does not even presume that his words will necessarily produce the fruit he desires.

He hopes that perhaps someone might be roused.

Perhaps a heart grown cold will begin to burn.

Perhaps a soul exhausted by its own failures will discover that another life is possible.

Perhaps someone who has spent years confusing religious activity with communion with God will suddenly recognize what has been missing.

Perhaps the words will awaken a hunger that no earthly thing can satisfy.

And perhaps that hunger will lead the person to take a single step toward the reality of which Isaac speaks.

This is enough.

For Isaac, the written word is not the destination. It is a threshold.

The description of divine love is not divine love itself. The explanation of prayer is not prayer. The contemplation of another man’s holiness is not the acquisition of holiness.

But such words may become instruments of grace. They may pierce the hardness of the heart. They may reveal the poverty of our present condition without crushing us beneath it. They may give us courage to desire what we once believed impossible.

And this is why Isaac begins not by praising the nobility of spiritual writing but by glorifying God.

“Glory be to Him Who richly pours forth His gifts upon men!”

Everything begins in wonder.

That sinful human beings, clothed in flesh and burdened by weakness, should be permitted even to speak of divine mysteries is itself an astonishing mercy.

Isaac does not imagine that his understanding has been secured by the greatness of his own struggles. He attributes it to the generosity of God, who has softened the hardness of his heart through the Scriptures and the instruction of the Fathers.

He has received what he now seeks to hand on.

And what he hands on does not belong to him.

This is the proper poverty of the spiritual writer.

He is not the source of the light. He is not even necessarily its clearest reflection. He is someone who has been allowed to see enough to know that the light is real, and who desires that others should turn toward it.

There is a great freedom in this.

We need not pretend to possess what we are still seeking. We need not disguise our poverty beneath the language of spiritual accomplishment. We need not wait until we have become saints before we can speak gratefully of the holiness of God.

But neither may we use the beauty of what we write as a substitute for repentance.

The danger is not that we speak of things beyond our experience. The danger is that we become satisfied with speaking of them.

This is where Isaac’s confession becomes a judgment upon us.

How easily we can be moved by the writings of the Fathers and yet remain unwilling to relinquish the smallest attachment.

How readily we can admire their humility while fiercely defending our own opinions.

How deeply we can be touched by their accounts of divine love while remaining cold toward the person immediately before us.

We can spend a lifetime reading about the desert without ever allowing God to lead us into one.

We can describe the healing of the heart while resisting the very wounds through which that healing must come.

And we can mistake the consolation of beautiful spiritual language for the costly transformation to which it points.

Isaac’s words expose this danger without extinguishing hope.

He does not say, “Because I have experienced so little, these mysteries should remain unspoken.”

Nor does he say, “Because I have written of them, I have attained them.”

He holds together two truths that our pride continually seeks to separate.

God is infinitely generous.

And we are infinitely poor apart from His mercy.

The spiritual life begins to deepen when we cease defending ourselves against either truth.

There is also something deeply consoling here for those who have spent many years seeking God and find themselves still struggling with the most elementary movements of repentance.

We may have read the Fathers for decades. We may have taught their writings, prayed their prayers, and attempted to order our lives according to their wisdom. Yet when suffering strips away our familiar supports, when fear exposes our attachments, when disappointment reveals the hidden demands of the ego, we may discover that we have scarcely begun.

This discovery can be devastating.

But it can also be the beginning of truth.

Perhaps the most important fruit of years spent with the Fathers is not that we have become capable of speaking their language, but that we have finally begun to recognize the distance between their words and the actual condition of our hearts.

And perhaps, by grace, that recognition will become prayer.

Not the prayer of someone who has mastered the spiritual life.

The prayer of someone who has at last understood his need.

Lord, I have spoken of Your mercy, but I have scarcely learned to trust it.

I have written of surrender, but I am still afraid to let go.

I have praised the freedom of the saints, but I remain attached to so many things.

I have described the beauty of silence, but my heart is still filled with noise.

I have spoken of Your love, but I have barely begun to receive it.

Have mercy on me.

This is not a failure of spiritual understanding.

It may be its first genuine fruit.

For the writings of the Fathers are not given to us so that we might become spectators of their holiness. They are given so that their witness might awaken within us the desire to enter the same life of grace.

They do not ask us merely to admire the mountain.

They invite us to begin the ascent.

And even here we must be careful. The ascent is not accomplished by the violence of self-will. The transformation Isaac describes is not something we manufacture through religious exertion. It is the work of God in a heart that has become willing to receive Him.

Our struggles matter. Our repentance matters. Our fidelity in small things matters.

But grace remains grace.

The fire is God’s.

This, I think, is the great beauty of Isaac’s confession.

He is not ashamed that his experience falls so far short of the mysteries he describes. He is humbled by it. He is filled with gratitude that God has permitted him to glimpse such things at all. And he is moved by love to offer that glimpse to others.

He does not need his words to prove anything about himself.

He wants them to become the occasion for another soul’s awakening.

What a different understanding of spiritual writing this gives us.

To write not so that others might admire our insight, but so that they might desire God.

To speak not so that our experience might appear extraordinary, but so that the mercy of God might become believable.

To draw upon the Fathers not to borrow their authority, but to submit ourselves, along with our readers, to the truth they have received.

And above all, to remember that the most beautiful words we write may still stand as a summons to our own repentance.

Perhaps this is why Isaac’s writings remain so powerful.

They do not close the mystery by explaining it.

They open the heart toward it.

They leave us not with the satisfaction of having understood, but with the ache of longing.

And this longing, when purified by humility and sustained by grace, is already a beginning.

We may never experience a thousandth part of what the saints have known. We may reach the end of our lives still painfully aware of how little we have loved, how imperfectly we have prayed, and how often we have resisted the mercy offered to us.

But if their words have taught us to hunger for God, to repent without despair, to persevere without presumption, and to seek Him with an increasingly undivided heart, then they have accomplished something immeasurably greater than the communication of religious knowledge.

They have helped kindle a fire.

And perhaps the writer himself, having spent so many years pointing others toward that fire, will discover that the mercy of God has been quietly kindling it within his own heart as well.

Not through the beauty of what he has written.

But through the poverty he has finally consented to acknowledge.

For in the end, the purpose of the Fathers is not to teach us how to speak beautifully about God.

It is to bring us to the place where words begin to fall away, where the heart becomes still, and where we finally allow ourselves to be loved and transformed by the One of whom they speak.

The words are only kindling.

The fire is God Himself.