Isaac of Stella, Sermons

with amendment of deed all these things profit, and receive the wage of labour: but without it they do harm, and come as witness for a just condemnation. There is still something that might be said of these hours and vinedressers in another way, and perhaps more deeply; but, as we have said, overtaken by the hour, we have touched on what you have heard by grazing it rather than treated it by discourse. Hence we have preferred to keep for another beginning, to be spoken to your fraternity, what the very Wisdom of God, the Word of the Father, Christ the Lord, will deign to give on this matter in answer to your prayers, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns. Amen.

SERMON XVII. ON THE SAME FEAST II

Of this day, most beloved, which in the Gospel parable is divided into morning, third, sixth, ninth, eleventh hour and evening, for labour and for the wage of labour (Matt. 20), what we said yesterday we by no means change today: namely, that conversion to God in sense and affection is taken as day, as turning away is taken as night, in which no one can work. For there are in men sense and appetite, according to which they are called animals, and by these they are set apart from the beasts by no eminence: yet if reason is placed beneath them, so as to rule over both, they will indeed exist at once as animals in sense and affection, and as men in rational mind and in penal mortality, necessarily to die after sin and for sin: they who before sin and without sin were able not to die. In those, then, in whom sense or affection does not yet follow reason, but struggles against it, and, for shame! as happens in some, reason itself is abused against itself: these, however astute, cunning, sensible, gracious or gentle, are yet not men: or if for the sake of a way of speaking they are called men, then, since they walk with their head downwards, they are shown to be not so much men as monsters born of men. To man, says the poet (Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, line 84), He gave an uplifted face. In such men, most beloved, reason, which is alone, sometimes indeed struggles, but is yet overcome, and is dragged away captive. For woe to him who is alone, for if he falls, there is none to lift him up. But sometimes, of its own accord, nerveless, broken and unmanned, it follows, gives way, and gladly hands itself over to every filthiness. The first, then, are bad, the second worst: both are sons of night and darkness, but some love their night, others desire the day; some have nothing of man, others little; some are free, others bound. Both are in darkness, both walk in darkness, made the prey by night of the beasts of the forest, that is, of carnal passions and worldly desires, and of the young lions, that is, of the spiritual wickednesses in the heavenly places, as it is written: Thou hast appointed darkness, and it is night; in it all the beasts of the forest shall pass through, the young lions, etc. (Ps. 103). So long, then, as a man turns towards himself, whether to his own sense, or to his will, or even to his reason, though he has advanced so far as to put off the beast of burden and put on the man, he certainly neither escapes the night nor goes on into the day. To myself, says the Seer,

my soul is troubled: therefore he began to be mindful of God, as of the day (Ps. 39). For God is wholly light, and in Him alone there is no darkness at all. For the holy angels, though they find morning in Him, yet come upon evening in themselves: for them, by the evening of themselves and the morning of God, one day, or the first, is completed. In Himself, then, God alone finds day: He Who, when by prevenient grace He begins to shine upon the rational mind, makes morning for it; and divides between darkness and light.

The pre-dawn morning of the spiritual day, then, is grace, which goes before reason, and turns it from itself to God; and leads it from the darkness of ignorance, or, as has been said, of impotence, or even of malice, into the day of wisdom, virtue and justice, that is, of Christ the Lord. Yet I do not think that only one day ought to be called Christ's; for He Himself mentions several, saying: Abraham your father rejoiced to see My days: and he saw them, and was glad (John 8). For there is a day of fear, a day of love, a day of joy, a day of labour, a day of rest, a day of exultation. Let us exult, says the Prophet, and be glad in the day which the Lord has made (Ps. 117). A day of the cross, a day of the tomb, a day of resurrection. He will revive us, it says, after two days; on the third day He will raise us up (Hos. 6). The sixth day, on which all work is completed; the Sabbath, on which there is rest from all work: the Lord's day, on which one rises again to new joy, and to a solemn day among the thick boughs, even to the horn of the altar, that is, to the glory of the passion, the fruit of labour, the height of the cross. O blessed soul, which, still weighed down by an earthly dwelling, could be in the spirit on the Lord's day, and hear a voice behind it (Rev. 1), which would that I might hear even far off before me! But we meanwhile, most beloved, restraining this impulse of the spirit, and measuring ourselves by ourselves, let us return to the day of fear, the day of weariness and dread, that we may begin to be weary with Christ and to dread with Him; and in the day of His labour and sweat to labour with Him and to sweat with Him, to suffer with Him too, and to be crucified with Him. For on the day of His contest the Lord Jesus truly bore all things for us; and mystically shaped for us the things we must bear. To one going out, then, from darkness and the shadow of death, that is, from turning away from God and turning perversely to the world, or to himself, in order to be converted to God, as from the back of the head to the front, there first comes the memory of past evils, fear of those to come, weariness of what has been done, and dread of what must be suffered. For he begins to recall that he has lived badly, and to fear lest he die worse; and conscience, accusing itself, is found the first labourer in the vineyard. And this is the penitent's first grace, and the hour of conversion; but what memory recalls it offers to the heart, that is, to the affection: for affection is thought to have its seat in the heart, as sense in the head. The rational sense is recognized as existing in three things, namely in wit, reason and memory: which are believed to flourish and to exercise their proper offices in distinct and ordered cells in the head of animals, the front, the crown and the back of the head. To the sense, then, returning from behind to before, as the Apostle says, the things that

are behind forgetting, stretching forth to those that are before (Phil. 3), there first comes, as has been said, the memory of things past; and he begins to see in what things he was while he was in evil. Affection too, or affectus, is understood as twofold. For the heart is affected in two ways towards all things offered to it by those three, namely by love or by hatred: from which, because of time, whose mutability the heart follows, being mutable and temporally variable, arise those four well-known and named affections, the foundations of all virtues or vices, and their common matter, and, so to speak, the elements of all virtues or vices. Of these Philosophy, consoling her pupil, sang thus:

Drive away joys, / drive away fear, / and put hope to flight, / nor let grief be present. / Clouded is the mind, / and bound with reins, / where these hold sway. (Boethius, On the Consolation of Philosophy, book I, metre 7, lines 25–31.)

So, according to present, past and future, from love arise joy and hope, from hatred fear and grief. Further, love and hatred themselves flow from concupiscibility and irascibility; so that, as the head is found to have three chambers, so the heart has two: and the whole soul itself, completed in sense and affection by natural perfection, exists as concupiscible, rational and irascible. Hence to the transgressor returning to the heart irascibility comes first, which was last for him as he went away: and in the whole soul it stands as the third part. Hence not unfittingly at the third hour the second grace is sent into the vineyard, so that whatever conscience rationally accuses through memory, compunction, or inner grief, may torment it all through irascibility according to quality and quantity, so that all that once tasted sweet in life through delight may be bitter in memory through compunction, as it is written: I will recount to Thee all my years in the bitterness of my soul (Isa. 38). So recollection works first, afterwards bitterness. In the morning recollection, at the third hour bitterness. It is wretched and foolish to forget one's sins; more wretched to remember them without penitence of heart; most wretched to delight in them by going over them again. At the sixth hour, since work belongs to the number six, good affection itself works: for affection gives its name to the work, and from the fruit of the work the quality of the intention is recognized. For, as the poet says, you may detect the inner disposition from the outer. Changed affection of the heart, then, necessarily changes the exercise of the body. For the motion of the heart uses the motion of its body as a lord, as a slave subject to itself. Hence, just as the motion of the body is in itself foreign to choice, so it is foreign to judgement. For judgement concerning obedience or disobedience, concerning virtue or vice, rightly belongs to the motion of the heart alone, to which alone freedom of choice is given by God. As, then, turned away from God and taking delight with evil, he yielded the members of his body to serve that which he himself served,

that is, to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity: so, converted to God, he yields the same members to serve justice unto sanctification.

At the sixth hour, then, the third grace is sent into the vineyard, bodily exercise, so that as grief cultivates the inner man, so labour may cultivate the outer, chastening him by abstinence, wearying him by work, wasting him by vigils. For when man goes out from the darkness of the flesh into the light of the world, he is born indeed to labour, but begins with grief; and in like manner he who goes out from the darkness of carnality into the light of spirituality begins indeed with grief, and rises to labour, as it is written: Man is born to labour (Job 5). Yet what follows, and the bird to flight, accords excellently with this sequence which we are weaving. For by the name of bird the reason of the mind itself is rightly understood: which excels the beasts as walking animals, and is connatural with the angels. Hence at the ninth hour the fourth grace is sent into the vineyard, when, above the active life, which is carried on by the exercise of the lower soul, it is raised up on the wings of reading, meditation and prayer to seek God, and is directed to loving Him. Wherefore, as at the ninth hour reason, so at the eleventh delight is sent into the vineyard. For what remains after the active life but the speculative, which is consummated in the vision of God and in delight? But since in this toilsome pilgrimage, where all things are in part and nothing is found perfect, neither is consummated, neither is the one shown to have reached the ten nor the other the twelve. Delight, then, comes later, labours less, but receives first. In the way of Thy commandments, it says, I have delighted, as in all riches (Ps. 118).

Whatever sweetness, delight and pleasantness, then, we feel in our exercises and wearinesses, we doubtless taste as of the wage of labour, since indeed, before we begin to delight in the discipline of the Lord and to love it, all things under the burden of the day and the heat are scarcely endured, scarcely borne; in grief and constraint, under fear and murmuring, they afflict us with weariness and sloth. But when at the eleventh hour, as the fifth grace, charity is joined to discipline, and good affection to labours, which makes one delight and rejoice in all things, through it every burden becomes light and the yoke sweet, and there begins a kind of setting of fear and labour, of weariness and sadness; and a rising of love and pleasantness, of fervour and gladness, the evening of the first day and the morning of the second, that is, a certain delight and enlarging of the heart, and a certain inner exultation and exhilaration of the mind: which doubtless no one knows but he who receives it: the beginning of perfection, which ends the beginning; the beginning of fullness, doing away with what is in part: the beginning, finally, of perfect charity, which casts out fear, takes away labour, wipes away grief. So when memory has long laboured, when irascibility and bodily exercise have borne the burden of the day and the heat, when rationality too has sweated last, concupiscibility, coming last, seizing first, ends the labour, begins the wage;