On Ascetical Life

Popular Patristics Series

St Isaac of Ninevah produced a monastic anthropology that has been a major influence on all of Byzantine spiritual literature. The way toward God was threefold: the way of the body, the way of the soul, and the way of the spirit. In the first stage, the person begins with a total preoccupation with the passions and moves toward God by means of bodily works: fasting, vigils, and psalmody. The next stage involves a struggle against thoughts foreign to the nature of th...