Isaac of Stella, Sermons

they themselves know to be good and excellently prepared, yet when they ought to taste it, their strength fails them and their appetite is dulled, the savour is faint, because the palate is without taste: so also to us, still weak because of sin, the leisure once longed for has less savour, and the quiet long sought, the solitude of the place, the desertedness of the world, meditation, prayer, reading, the very word of God. Yet when we have been healed, we shall find it alone savoury; all toil will be taken away, there will be no distaste, but a full, easy and joyful refreshment. Let us not, then, flee from it, let us not loathe the life-giving food of our soul: holy custom itself will make it wholesome and savoury and sweet, so that it alone delights, if it alone is taken; the grace and charity of God helping our weakness in all things, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, God. Amen.

SERMON XXII. ON THE SAME FEAST, V.

Since, my brethren, languishing for want of books, you require of us a living voice in place of reading, the necessity lies upon me to say something. Having often tried, then, to inquire what it is that we seek, we often slip back: for as searchers of majesty we are thrust back by glory. We seek things too high for us; but if it is done devoutly, it is well done. We have, then, from what was said before, that God is none of all things; and yet that He is not something, nor a middle between something and nothing; but that He is above all things, understood not by abstraction but truly and properly; and that all things are from Him, and that apart from Him nothing can be. And that He Himself, even if nothing else were, always is nevertheless, He from whom all things can come into being. It remains, then, to inquire with the utmost care what He is, who has already graciously shown Himself one, simple, immovable. Everything that is truly simple must be the very thing that it has. We must therefore ask what He has, in case by this it may become known what He is. And not to wander through many things, I ask whether He has reason and affection: if He does not have them, He does not seem to be the best; if He has them, [neither does He seem] the highest. For reason and affection are in some subject, and cannot be without a subject. Wherefore, if, having them, He is that very thing, He can in no way be without a subject; and then the substance itself is lower. What shall we say, brethren? Altogether, either He has or He has not, and all that He has, He is. Otherwise He is made of diverse things, and is neither one, nor simple, nor immovable. But if He is reason and affection, or virtue or wisdom — which indeed He is, if He has them — where is what we established above with so much labour, namely that He is none of the things that are, but above all things, and that all things are from Him? And if that is true, these things are from Him like the others. If, then, He has these, how is He the highest? If He does not have them, how is He the best? Woe to us! We have failed, searching with searching. I thought I held the whole: I have lost the whole. Would that I had not known letters! Truly there is darkness in light, and much more in much light. The Lord indeed is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all; but from His inaccessible light darkness flows into us. For there are two things that beget darkness: namely, a want

and a superabundance of light. Turn away your eyes from me, says the very fount of light, for they have made me flee away (Song 6:4). O Lord, since Thou hast lit my lamp until now, lighten, I beseech Thee, these my darknesses also.

If we say, brethren, what we often read and believe without doubting, namely that God is His own wisdom, His own reason, His own virtue, His own justice, it is indeed easy to say but hard to understand. What is God, if He is justice; or what is justice, if it is God? Either He will be below substance, or it will be above quality. The one is unworthy, the other impossible. But perhaps, just as He is unity, not number nor quantity, but the fount and origin of number; and just as He is simplicity, not quality nor form, but the principle and origin of form, or of measure; and immobility too, not motion nor weight, which is borne by motion, but the principle of motion and of weight: so, surely, He is not wisdom, nor a form of quality, nor a kind of learning, but the fount and origin of wisdom, and likewise of justice, and of virtue and the like; so that He ought not to be called wisdom, nor any such thing, just as He is not called number, nor measure, nor weight, but the principle, fount and efficient cause of all creatures, above all things. Yet He is called number without number, measure without measure, weight without weight; so that He may also be called wisdom without quality, justice and virtue without affection and habit of mind. Yet we believe it is better said if He is called super-wisdom, super-justice, and so of the rest, just as He is called super-substance: not, however, so that it is said what He is, but so that He is not passed over in silence altogether; or so that, since He is none of all things, He may be posited by the removal of all things, He of whom negations are more true. For we come nearer by denying all things of Him than by affirming some one of all things. Hence, as regards the proper character of His own divine theology, just as He neither has nor is substance, so He neither has nor is wisdom; but as regards the poverty and straits of our rational theology, this and that is said of Him. And as regards symbolic and, in a manner, sensible theology, He is even called heaven and earth, sun, fire, lion, ox, bird, wood, stone, gold; and all things are said of Him the more freely by a likeness either of nature, or of office, or of use, inasmuch as none of all things is said of Him properly. Wherefore, just as He is called heaven and such things by metaphor, so He is called substance, wisdom and the like, by that trope whose contrary is the one called hyperbole. For the latter oversteps the truth and exceeds belief; the former does not reach to the truth, nor come near to the proper sense. For we say what we can, we who wish to speak of the ineffable, of whom nothing can be said properly: it is necessary either to be silent or to use borrowed words.

You see, brethren, what straits we suffer, with what poverty of words we languish, desiring to say something properly of the unutterable, to teach of the incomprehensible. All this indeed [I do], so that you may not only believe others, but may yourselves understand that what God is cannot be understood or comprehended. But neither

this, dearly beloved, by our weakness, or dullness or obtuseness, but by His own power and subtlety. Hence those holy and sublime and winged seraphim, with wings that signify the flight of contemplation, were seen to veil His face and feet, inasmuch as it was not their own ignorance that veiled from them the beginning and the end, but the super-wisdom of the incomprehensible God. For as by seeing nothing we see invisible darkness, and by hearing nothing we hear inaudible silence, so surely, by not seeing and not bearing the superabundant and unbearable light, we see Him who is invisible — not indeed as blind men, but as men overcome by the light. Truly, O Lord, I have laboured in seeking Thee, and my spirit has failed, not away from Thee but in Thee. My soul longs and faints for Thy courts; the spirit faints in gazing on Him whom it longs for; the soul faints and melts in delighting in Him whom it beholds. Yet, quickened by delight, ever fresh and eager to gaze, and helped by gazing to delight, I am borne as on two middle wings towards Thee, into whom the angels desire to look. Hence, though I am dust and ashes, since I have once begun, I will yet ask Thee one word about Thyself: that is, since Thou art the fount and origin of the things aforesaid, how art Thou this? This, brethren, we think must be asked because we are well aware that these things can be taken in different ways. For a spring is the beginning and origin of a river; but the water that flows is recognized as of the same nature with, and the same as, that from which it flows. Likewise the root is the beginning of the tree, and its genus is the beginning of every species. The seed too is the beginning of the shoot, the seed-bed of the seed, the elements of the seed-bed, and of the elements that which is called silva, or primordial hyle: and in all these, and in whatever is of this kind, contemplating the natural beginning, where nature brings forth, as it were, the body from the head, or like from like, or effects from natural causes, we further observe that every craftsman is the beginning of his own work. Yet one craftsman goes before and surpasses nature itself, while another only imitates it. The latter, always beginning something from something, does not in any work exceed the image of nature: for example, from gold he can work or make only what is golden, from stone what is of stone, from wood what is wooden; because he is only an imitator of nature. In the work of anyone whatever, since three things are always necessarily found — matter, form and cause, that is, from what, in what manner and why it is made — when he himself by whom it is made, that is the craftsman, is counted in, four diverse principles necessarily occur: the material, the formal, the final and the efficient. But he who is able to take something from nothing, or to turn what was taken into nothing, or to change something into a different species, to increase without addition, to diminish without subtraction, is manifestly a craftsman before nature and above nature, indeed the author of nature, and is necessarily of a nature unlike everything that he works. Since, then, one may be called beginning, or fount, or origin, in as many ways as occur for the present, that way which is worthier than the rest, and more sublime and more excellent,

is, befits God, the highest and most excellent of all — who would doubt it?

Unity, then, is not number but the beginning of number: not the final, nor the formal, nor the material beginning, nor the natural one according to the seminal causes of things, or the proportion of like things, or the unity of a body, but altogether the efficient beginning, by which number is and without which it could not be at all; of another nature, of an unlike essence. Unity is one, since every number is many; simple, since number is composite; unchangeable, since number is divisible. Truly existing in itself, it nevertheless gives to others an existence unlike its own. For the number two, though it is a number and has from unity the being that it is, does not exist as the same thing that unity itself is; and yet nothing truly exists in the number two except unity. For what is two but one twice, or unity [twice]? But neither is unity in two as a part in a whole; rather, it is in it as its efficient beginning, without which it cannot be. For where is two, if there is no unity? And where unity is said somewhere to be a part of two, or the simple of the composite, or time of eternity, the meaning of the saying must be weighed from the reason for saying it: otherwise, if unity is one part of two, what will the other be? If it is another unity, then there will be two unities; and if two, none at all. For unity, existing before all things, is the beginning of all things; but that there should be two beginnings of all things is impossible. For if they are equal, neither will be the beginning of the other, and therefore not of all things, nor before all things, nor truly and properly one. There is, then, no unity except one, and it is one by its own unity. Two, then, as we have said, is truly one twice, and not two ones, or two unities; and every number is as many as the times it is one — unless someone is too little able to lift himself from the things numbered, and from the quantity attaching to them by which they are numbered, to this unity of number of which we speak. There is, then, nothing in numbers that truly exists and ought truly to be called the existence of number, except unity, which is not number, nor a part of number, nor of the same nature, yet produces number: existing before number, without which number would not exist, and in which number truly exists, because number has it existing within itself. And it is likewise with the simple and the composite, and with the immovable and the movable. For no reasoning allows two simples or two immovables, one of which, after all things, would contain them from nothing, while the other, above all things, would rule them and move them to something. There are, then, three — one, simple, immutable — and these three together are one, likewise simple, and equally immutable: which alone — or rather, that which alone and as one truly exists in all things — does not subsist; and if it withdraws itself, there is no longer anything that either stands by or stands in all things. And since all things in themselves exist vainly and emptily, as the Wise Man says: Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2), in Him they exist living and eternal, or rather as eternity and life, as the blessed apostle says: What was made in Him was life (John 1:3–4). In Him, then, are all things, but there they are what He is: He is here and in all things, the essence of all things — not indeed the mutable [essence], according to which they are vanity, which