Isaac of Stella, Sermons

lays down its opinion: it calls blessed the sons of strangers, whose right hand is a right hand of iniquity, and whose mouth speaks vanity, because of full storehouses overflowing from one into another, sheep big with young, fat oxen, and the rest that belongs to uncertain riches, and to a peace that is no peace, and to foolish gladness. Against this the Wisdom of God, the Father's own Son, the right hand of the Father, the mouth that speaks truth, declares that the poor will be blessed, they who are to be kings of the eternal kingdom. As if He were saying: You are in error, you must be corrected; you seek beatitude, but it is not where you seek it. You run, but off the road. This is the way; by this way one goes to beatitude. Voluntary poverty for My sake, that is the way: the kingdom of heaven in Me, that is beatitude. You run hard, but badly: the faster, the farther from the way. Poverty is the way, not blessedness. One travels by the way in order to arrive. Let us not be afraid, brethren: let us, the poor, hear the Poor One commending poverty to the poor. One who has tried it is to be believed. Poor He was born, poor He lived, poor He died. To die indeed He willed; to become rich He would not. Let us then believe the Truth about the way to life. If it is rough, it is short, and the beatitude is eternal. If it is narrow, it leads to life, it leads out into broad places, and will set our feet in a spacious place. But it is steep, for one goes upward, one makes for heaven. Therefore it is worth our while to be unencumbered and not to walk laden. What do we want? Do we seek beatitude? The Truth shows the true one. Do we seek riches? The King bestows kingdoms and makes kings. The worst plague of curiosity has ensnared men; what is enough is easily had; it is for superfluities that men sweat. Five yoke of oxen excuse them from the heavenly wedding (Luke 14), at which fullness is taken from poverty, sufficiency from want, primacy from the last place, dignity from lowliness, rest from labour. For this reason Elisha slew his oxen, that he might follow Elijah the more freely (1 Kgs. 19). and let us in like manner follow Christ. We must pause here today, brethren, so that on the second day we may begin the second sermon, on the second virtue, helped by the very Word of the Father, through Whom and for Whom we speak; Who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

SERMON II. ON THE SAME FEAST, II.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land (Matt. 5). Upon the evil of curiosity follows the vice of pride. That wisdom which is not from above, but earthly, sensual, devilish, full of zeal and contention, has bought a farm, so that it may be set over others and may never be without a quarrel, reckoning domination to be its beatitude. This wisdom, then, brethren, truly devilish, the firstborn offspring of the devil himself, which aspired to set its throne above the other stars, troubled and troubling, the disciples left behind together with the crowd, and were found worthy to hear: Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land. He does not say this land or that, or any portion of land however large, but the land. Who ever, by his own sweat, his own industry, his own money, his own fists, anything but a part of the land

has obtained? And this few have been able to do, many have not: but who has been able to possess it? What need is there to acquire by long labour what must soon be lost? Heaven to the poor, the land to the meek: what is left to the contentious? Or what more do they want, who want to become rich? Those for whom heaven and earth are not enough, what is left them? Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? How long will you love vanity and seek after lying? (Ps. 4.) The vanity of earthly domination is a counterfeit of dignity, a counterfeit of beatitude. Why do you stay in a part? Why do you desire so little? Why do you aspire to a small thing? The whole is promised, the way is shown; one walks by poverty, one hastens by meekness. To the poor man the beatitude of heaven is owed, to the meek the beatitude of the land. What, I ask, remains for the wretched contentious but the misery of hell? What will you do, you rich? What, you powerful? There is need of deliberation. On one side money, on the other meekness. The robber is at hand. If you defend the money, you lose meekness; if you hold to meekness, you suffer the loss of the money. I fear for both sides, lest at one stroke the robber take away the money and the devil the patience. O would that that money had never been, my dearest brethren, which in these evil days cannot be possessed together with meekness, which cannot be carried on the way by the disciples of Jesus! Perhaps for this reason the wisdom that is from above (Jas. 3), first indeed chaste, then peaceable, taught that neither purse nor money should be carried on the way; that one should contend with no one at law, let the one who takes away have more besides, not ask back what has been taken, hold fast to meekness, which is the way to beatitude. Praising certain people, Paul says: You gladly bear with the foolish, being wise yourselves. If anyone devours, etc. (2 Cor. 11.) O Lord Jesus, who today believes our report, and to whom has this way of Thine been revealed in his own life? O way exceedingly narrow, how few walk along it! This way of Thine was in this great sea, and Thy footsteps are not known today. This, which Thy Apostle names wisdom, is today the height of folly, sloth, idleness. Woe is me, brethren, how these things are read everywhere and almost everywhere neglected! The Carthusians, however, hear these things in some measure with ears to hear: they are therefore glad to have little, so as not to contend much. They possess few things, so as not to provoke the world against themselves. The Grandmontines do so the more, who possess nothing. For the Grandmontine, a wayfarer of heaven, will sing empty-handed before the robber of the world, and happily so: except that they are reported to greet a good many people on the road. Let them see to it. What concern is it of ours to judge another's servant? I say nothing of others, whose hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob; and whose hand is against all, and the hand of all against them. But the meek will possess in eternity the land of the living with as great happiness as ease, while we, bold and vigorous for God, fight against the precept or counsel of God, in time, for the land of the dying. The meek, therefore, shall inherit the land, and shall dwell upon it for ever and ever (Ps. 36), that is, the face of God, which alone and always remains unmoved, however all else revolves, just as the earth the other

elements revolve. For a generation comes, and a generation passes away, but the earth stands. There follows:

Blessed are those who mourn. These things could have sufficed, brethren, to correct the erring, had not the devil's malice spread more widely, and the cancerous evil crept deeper and nearer into the marrow. Cerberus still lies hidden, and shakes his third head, namely the prudence of the flesh, which is hostile to God, which is wise for itself alone, whose glory is in confusion, whose dwelling is the wind; whoever dwells in it cannot please God. What use to me, it says, are heaven and earth? What use riches heaped up to the harm of their owners? What use powers that are always fearful and always to be feared? All these things are outside; I am anxious for myself. Soul, you have many goods, feast and drink (Luke 12). What more has a man from all his labour under the sun? (Eccl. 1.) Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die (1 Cor. 15:32). Fool, you heap up treasure and do not know for whom; the rich man has coins, but he does not have life. Live while you live. Why do you destroy yourself before your time? You suffer from lethargy, you have forgotten yourself. Begin to know yourself, to love yourself, to possess yourself, to be kind to yourself, and you will be blessed. This, brethren, is that last error, worse than the former ones, that pit of misery, that mire of dregs, that joy whose end mourning will seize; and perhaps too late, when there can be no consolation. Therefore that sublime Wisdom, Whom it pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe in Him, mercifully calls back to the way those who so wretchedly err, saying:

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. As if He were saying: The way to joy is mourning; to consolation, desolation; to finding the soul, losing it; to possessing it, casting it away; to loving it, hating it; to keeping it, despising it. If you wish to know yourself, to possess yourself, enter into yourself, and do not seek yourself outside. You are one thing, what is yours another, what is around you another. Around you is the world; yours is the body; you yourself were made within, in the image and likeness of God. Return, then, transgressor, to the heart. Outwardly you are a beast, in the image of the world: whence man is also called a lesser world; inwardly you are a man in the image of God, whence you can be deified. So then, when man has returned into himself, like that younger prodigal son, where does he find himself but in a far country, in the region of unlikeness, in a foreign land, where he may sit and weep, while he remembers his father and his fatherland? If he feeds swine and is hungry, does he not find in himself matter for mourning? If many hired servants in his father's house have bread in abundance, while he, the son, an exile and poor, seeks husks for his belly in vain, does he not readily find tears for his eyes? (Luke 15.) O Adam, where are you? Perhaps still under the shade, so as not to see yourself, you sew together leaves of folly to cover your shame, seeing the things that are outside, around you, and the things that are yours; for such are the eyes that are open to you. Look within, see yourself; there are things there that should shame you more, that make the outward things shameful to you. Return within, transgressor, to the soul; see and lament it, subject to vanity and iniquity, and, so that it cannot emerge, to captivity. Go out to the flesh: see, and mourn

it, subject to corruption, to mortality, and, so that it cannot rise up, to infirmity. And not to be long, dearly beloved: no one who enters into himself, who knows himself, who penetrates the abyss of his own misery, his own ignorance, his own difficulty, his own passions, who measures his own conscience, is moved to tears, pricked to mourning, stirred to lamentation, more at the funeral of some kinsman, where men mourn readily, than at that of his very self, who is the nearest of all because the most inward. Why does he pity another who does not pity himself? It is clear, then, brethren, that we are outside ourselves, behind ourselves too and not ahead, in the end either forgetful of ourselves or wholly ignorant of ourselves, whenever we laugh, joke, delight in idle things, feed on tales, and indulge in words that move laughter, gorge ourselves in revelling and drunkenness, and run off into the other softnesses of the body. Hence it has always been the care of sober Wisdom to invite us to the house of mourning rather than to the house of feasting, that is, to call man back into himself when he was outside himself, saying: Blessed are those who mourn. And elsewhere:

Woe to you who laugh now (Luke 6). He wept Who bids us weep; that He laughed we do not read. The tears of the sisters merited the raising of their brother. The tears of the sisters made the Raiser weep (John 11), so that you too, by weeping, may raise yourself. Come, brethren, it is a serious matter that is in hand; what we have undertaken is a manly thing. Elijah, going into the desert, sent away his servant (1 Kgs. 19). Let us take nothing childish with us, let nothing follow us; above all let us never go back to anything childish. The body, says the Apostle, is dead because of sin: but the spirit lives because of righteousness (Rom. 8). So let what lives in us weep and pray, that what lies dead and stinks may one day rise again. Unhappy man that I am, says one who mourns his dead, who will deliver me from the body of this death? (Rom. 7.) But consolation follows: The grace of God through Jesus Christ. O how great a care it was once to the holy Fathers and prophets, to whom almost everything they did and suffered befell in figure, to weep for their dead, to keep solemn days of mourning, and often to draw them out to seven days, on account of the week of time! And we, for whom they wept, guffaw with wanton spleen, and we are dying, or rather have long been dead and stink: we neglect and are neglected: there is no one who bewails his grief before he goes whence no one returns: no one who moves the kind Jesus to tears. O sisters, what are you doing? What are you doing, active one, why do you not labour and weep? What, contemplative one, why do you not pray and weep? Why is there not mourning everywhere, desolation everywhere, both indoors at home and outside in the street, until Jesus groans and, troubling Himself, says, not so much to the dead man as to death: Come out, so that this mortal may be swallowed up by life. At last, brethren, let us at some time be corrected by the teaching of heavenly Wisdom, and whether busy or at leisure, let us be wretched and mourn. Let us weep before the Lord, Who is kind in forgiving, turning to Him in fasting, and in weeping and lamentation over ourselves, so that one day, according to the multitude