Metr. Hilarion, indirectly describing himself (273)

Today, February 10th (January 28th according to the Julian calendar), the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of St. Isaac of Syria, a revered ascetic writer and philosopher from the 7th century. In all of this time, his writings have only grown in stature, serving as a spiritual manual for generations of priests, monks and laymen — an unlikely journey for the legendary Middle Eastern recluse, who valued his solitude so much that he fled to the desert after being offered a bishopric, and who certainly never imagined that world in distant 2020 where, improbably, there is still a grateful audience for him.

St. Isaac lived on the periphery of the Christian world. All that we know about his biography comes from “‘The Book of Chastity’ by the 9th-century eastern Syrian historian Isho’dnah, Bishop of Basra, which contains brief vitae of famous ascetics of the Persian Church, and a western Syrian source whose time and place of writing are unknown.” (Hilarion, 19). However, the entirety of what Isho’dnah had to say about St. Isaac fits into a single page — most of what we can get out of it is that St. Isaac lived on the territory of present-day Iraq and Iran, and, by cross-referencing the name of the patriarch who unsuccessfully ordained him Bishop of Nineveh, we can also narrow down the time frame to the end of the 7th century. By then, this region had been cut off from the rest of the Christian world, and its political and intellectual centers in Rome and Constantinople, as a result of the Muslim conquest of Persia. In fact, formally, St. Isaac never belonged to the Orthodox Church. His denomination, which is now commonly called the “Church of the East,” had already drifted away from Byzantine influence as early as the 5th century.

The twelve apostles, as illustrated in a Syrian Bible
used by the Church of the East.

The early history of Christianity, up to the 8th century, can also be seen as the history of heresy. It is a chronicle of an arduous effort by many generations of theologians to develop some sort of coherent, internally consistent explanation of who Jesus Christ really was, and by extension, of the nature of God Himself; along the way, many otherwise pious and well-intentioned men fell away from the faith or (in the case of those who went too far into Platonism) lost it entirely. In a way, such an effort is intrinsically impossible to complete, because eventually it has to face those aspects of God that cannot be explained — and, in fact, that was exactly the conclusion that it reached. For example, according to Orthodox dogma in its final form, Jesus Christ is simultaneously human and Divine (fully human and at the same time fully Divine), and, according to the 4th Ecumenical Council held in 451 AD in Chalcedon, these two natures are present in Him “without mixture, without change, without division, without separation.” This formulation is very precise and at once completely contradictory: Christ’s humanity is not separated from His Divinity, but also not combined with it, and all that we can say about it for certain is what it is not, and not what it is. In a certain sense, this assertion admits the impossibility of understanding the nature of God through purely rational instruments. But that is also exactly why it was adopted as dogma — in order to truly believe, one must first freely accept the limitations of reason, and true dogma should something that can never be proved logically.

All of the great heresies can be seen as attempts to solve these fundamentally irreconcilable logical contradictions using simple, neat rational constructs. The first such heresy was Arianism (3rd century AD), which held that the Son of God was created by God, and therefore is not fully Divine; such an assertion is far easier to grasp than the complicated Chalcedonian formulation, but, unfortunately, also leaves no place for God’s love and self-sacrifice, which it delegates to a subordinate being. (Peculiarly, present-day “spiritual seekers,” who prefer to see Jesus as “a great spiritual teacher” without any divine authority, have come full circle to a vulgarized form of Arianism.) As the years went on, the heresies also became more sophisticated; in particular, the Church of the East took the side of one Nestorius, who at one point was Patriarch of Constantinople, but who was condemned at the 3rd Ecumenical Council for offering an overly dualistic interpretation of Christ, i.e., that the human and Divine natures of Christ existed separately (the Chalcedonian phrases “without division, without separation” were intended as a repudiation of Nestorianism).

Nestorius.

Perhaps this seems like very fine hair-splitting (and, very likely, political concerns had just as much to do with the break between Churches as theological ones), but it goes to show St. Isaac’s unique position among Orthodox saints. As Metr. Hilarion’s book shows, St. Isaac never openly dissented from the official stance of his church, although “it seems to us that nothing explicitly Nestorian can be found in his Christology [either]” (Hilarion, 48). In his writings, St. Isaac frequently cites non-Chalcedonian thinkers such as Theodore of Mopsuestia (a major influence on Nestorius) and Evagrius the Solitary (anathematized in 553 AD), although the content of these particular citations is for the most part non-Nestorian and uncontroversial. The medieval monks who translated St. Isaac into Greek came up with an elegant work-around for this issue: they kept most of these quotes, but simply re-attributed them to various Orthodox Fathers, such as St. Gregory the Theologian. In other words, Byzantine clergy strongly rejected Nestorianism and many major thinkers associated with it, and yet for some reason gave St. Isaac the exact opposite reception, going to great pains to scrub all references to Nestorianism from his work in order to free him from this association.

The work in question is classified into two “volumes.” The first volume has a long history, having been translated into Greek in the 9th or 10th century; this Greek text was then translated into Latin and subsequently various European languages. It was hugely influential on Orthodox monastic thinking; Metr. Hilarion notes that St. Isaac “is one of the most-read authors at Holy Mt. Athos” (273), and he was also greatly revered in Russia. He is referenced twice in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, both times in a very striking way:

from The Brothers Karamazov (Book 3, Chapter I)

from The Brothers Karamazov (Book 11, Chapter VIII)

(Anyone who has read The Brothers Karamazov remembers the latter scene. It will soon become clear why Dostoevsky chose to mention St. Isaac of Syria specifically.)

Pages from Bodleian MS syr. e. 7.
(Photograph in the 2nd ed. of Metr. Hilarion’s book.)

The second volume, on the other hand, was largely unknown to the Orthodox world until very recently. “Scholars knew that the second volume existed since the time of [Paul] Bedjan [A Catholic scholar and historian working around the turn of the 20th century. -FL], who published fragments from it based on a manuscript, later lost (in 1918). However, in 1983, Prof. Sebastian Brock discovered, in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, another manuscript that contained the full text of the second volume and could be dated around the 10th or 11th century.” (Hilarion, 37) The manuscript in question, designated as “Bodleian MS syr. e. 7” in the Oxford archives, “originates from the monastery of mar Abdisho and belonged to rabban Isho from the village of Beth. The manuscript is written in eastern Syrian Estrangela…[and] was acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1898…[it] has been preserved almost entirely, except for the first and last leaves (the text in the beginning and ending of the manuscript has been damaged). The final page has an inscription which begins with the words: ‘With the help of God and thanks to the grace of Jesus Christ, the second volume of mar Isaac, bishop of Nineveh, is finished. It has been copied by a man sinful and insignificant, who was devoid of righteousness and succeeded only in evil, named Markos…'” (37-38n) The sensational practice of “finding” long-lost medieval manuscripts is quite dubious, but, to be fair, they often take the form of collections of disjoint texts that happened to have been accessible to the scribe at the time, rather than individual published “books.” Many such objects were acquired in bulk, simply assigned a catalog number and left to gather dust in university archives; there may be no detailed understanding of what is actually in them for many years, until a dedicated scholar comes along. In any case, however, the Bodleian manuscript is not the sole source for St. Isaac’s second volume. Metr. Hilarion lists (39n) nine such sources:

Brock’s translation of the 2nd volume.

Looking at this, you can see what it is like to study early Christian history, how little is actually known or can be verified about it, and how fragmentary the sources can be. In fact, even though there are multiple sources for this text, this alone does not prove that it was truly written by St. Isaac, and we will see later that there are some doubts in this regard; but, even if all of the sources are genuine, it doesn’t mean that you may freely go and study them. Indeed, even if Sebastian Brock just happened to stumble across a nearly-complete copy of St. Isaac’s elusive second volume, this happened nearly 40 years ago, and to this day it is not that easy to actually access Brock’s translation of this text, to say nothing of the original manuscript that he studied. The most complete version of St. Isaac’s second volume (in English) was published in 1995 by the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, vols. 554-555) and has to be specially ordered from their printing office for 40 euros a copy, but even this publication only includes about half of the extant text, namely Conversations 4-41; according to Metr. Hilarion, “Among 41 Conversations included in the 2nd volume, approximately half of the length is taken up by Conversation 3, which in turn contains 400 chapters under the heading ‘Chapters of Knowledge.'” (43) The first three Conversations were instead translated into Italian by a different scholar and, for some reason, only published in that language. Due to the obscurity and incompleteness of these publications, the Western Christian world has basically had no opportunity to seriously study them or discuss their significance.

Which brings us to Metr. Hilarion’s own book, and its author. Hilarion (Alfeyev), now one of the most influential hierarchs in the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church, was part of the new generation of monastics that took the tonsure in the late 1980s and found themselves at the forefront of the Orthodox revival in Russia in the early 1990s. He earned a Ph.D. in theology at Oxford in 1995, where he worked with Sebastian Brock and had first-hand access to the aforementioned manuscript — perhaps that was his main reason to go to Oxford in the first place. He translated a significant portion of the second volume into Russian, which has now been made publicly available to Russian readers. Around the same time, he wrote The Spiritual World of St. Isaac of Syria, which provides a much more concise introduction to St. Isaac’s thought and summarizes the state of scholarship on the topic. In 2013, he organized an international conference in Moscow, with published proceedings, on the subject of “St. Isaac of Syria and his spiritual legacy,” where Brock was an invited speaker. Overall, it is fair to call Metr. Hilarion a leading expert on St. Isaac — apparently he even photocopied some mysterious “third volume,” which is otherwise virtually unknown. (The conference proceedings, which came out later, do mention that it has now been translated into Italian.)

But then, we’re not archaeologists; we’re just trying to understand what this is all about.

First page of St. Isaac’s first volume.
14th-century Russian manuscript.

Aspiring monks throughout the ages loved St. Isaac for his rigorous asceticism. His thoughts on this subject are quite similar to those of other Desert Fathers, especially St. John Climacus; many parts of St. Isaac’s first volume recall The Ladder of Divine Ascent, for example this passage on the importance of fasting:

first volume, Homily 21

Also highly reminiscent of St. John Climacus is the following classification (first volume, Homily 4) of the subtle movements of the mind — thoughts that seemingly appear out of nowhere:

first volume, Homily 4

At the same time, St. Isaac’s psychological analysis does not have the same exacting precision, or the same level of detail, as St. John’s. It makes sense: the Ladder is intended in large part for monastic mentors (the last chapter is explicitly addressed to a “pastor”), who must be able to discern their spiritual children’s movements of soul, often based on unclear or contradictory outward appearances, and identify their underlying causes. But St. Isaac was a hermit writing for other hermits; he clearly viewed communal monastic living as being inferior to solitary prayer, and openly exhorted his readers (who, he believed, would be monks) to seek silence and flee from all contact with other human beings. Both the first and second volume are quite consistent in that regard:

first volume, Homily 69 (Hilarion, 86)

second volume, “Chapters of Knowledge” (Hilarion, 84)

St. Isaac’s understanding of “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life” is very literal. At one point (first volume, Homily 23) he explicitly says, “The commandment to love your neighbor is contained in [silence]. Do you wish to follow the commandment of the Gospel by acquiring love for your neighbor in your soul? Separate yourself from him, and then the flame of love for him will be kindled in you, and you will rejoice when you see him, as if you had seen an Angel of light.” He places solitude and prayer above any tangible works; to him, charity “is the work of laymen, and if it is the work of monks, then imperfect ones, who do not remain in silence” (first volume, Homily 13). For the true monk, life should consist only of repentance, tears, and prayer for the world.

first volume, Homily 41

Sts. Ephraim and Isaac of Syria
(commemorated on the same day).

The experience of tears is a central theme in St. Isaac’s writing. In Homily 21 of the first volume, he is asked, “What are the precise indications and close signs, by which one might feel that one has begun to see the [spiritual] fruit, hidden in his soul?” (In other words, “How can I know that I am making progress?”) St. Isaac replies, “When one is honored with the blessing of many tears, which flow without compulsion, because tears serve as a certain boundary between bodily and spiritual things, between the passionate condition and purity. Until one accepts this gift, all his works still take place only in the outward man, and he has felt nothing of the potency of the mysteries of the spiritual man. For, as soon as one begins to abandon the body of the present age, and finds oneself having crossed the boundary of what is contained in our nature, then one soon attains this blessing of tears. And these tears…lead one up to the perfection of God’s love.” (Hilarion, 140) Sometimes, tears are a kind of reward, bringing joy to the monk: “When the memory of God has arisen in [the monk’s] mind, then his heart immediately stirs with love for God, and his eyes abundantly issue tears. For it is proper for love to shed tears through the memory of what it loves.” (142) But, often, tears are a reflection of the monk’s sorrow and feelings of abandonment. According to St. Isaac, an inevitable and especially difficult challenge of monastic life is the feeling of being abandoned by God:

second volume, Conversation 9 (Hilarion, 112-113)

Perhaps this is where St. Isaac’s psychological understanding reaches its greatest depth. Instead of studying the subtle influence of sin on the human mind (as does St. John Climacus), he prefers to focus on the emotional state of the monk who is sincerely doing his best, but for whom God still seems to be out of reach. Indeed, he writes (first volume, Homily 45), “Not all passions make their attack in the form of tempting thoughts. For there are also passions that show only sorrows to the soul: sloth, despair, grief do not attack with tempting thoughts and delights, but only impose a heavy burden on the soul.” To the person suffering from these sorrows, St. Isaac speaks with understanding and reassurance, promising that it will not last long and offering practical advice: “During such times of temptation, when one’s mind is so clouded, he should fall upon his face in prayer, and not stand up until strength and light come to his aid from Heaven, supporting his heart in undoubted faith.” (Hilarion, 116) If that fails —

first volume, Homily 88 (Hilarion, 117)

Illustration for the first volume, 1802 edition.

Perhaps, in all of St. Isaac’s writing, his words of encouragement and advice during “clouded” times were what resonated the most with Orthodox monks across thirteen centuries. Yet, he was not only a source of emotional support and spiritual comfort, but also a religious thinker. He did not present his philosophy systematically — both the first and second volume freely jump between topics, so that one Homily or Conversation might discuss fasting, while the next might praise seclusion and the one after that might contemplate the nature of God — but his thinking was sharply original in many ways. One of the best-known examples is the following passage, which delineates a striking, unexpected contrast between mercy and justice:

first volume, Homily 89

This is an unconventional way of looking at things. Justice is viewed as a fundamental moral concept in most cultures, including ours. It is the standard by which we evaluate societies and political systems. In ancient Greece, justice was the central problem of philosophy (the question “what is justice?” is the starting point of Plato’s “Republic”); from there it made its way into Roman Catholic theology as one of the “cardinal virtues.” Most Christians of any denomination would probably agree with the statement that “God is just,” and in fact, the idea of God’s absolute justice is for many people one of the most attractive aspects of the idea of God. But St. Isaac rejects it as a moral value. According to him, “in justice there is a portion of malice,” and that necessarily makes it a quality that God does not possess. In God’s eyes, justice is inferior to “mercy,” which outweighs any sin that could be imagined.

And here he is together with St. John Damascene,
in an Orthodox church somewhere in France.

Mercy, according to St. Isaac, comes from love. He is a true spiritual successor to St. John the Theologian in professing love as the essence of God — he takes this belief further than any other ecclesiastical writer in Christian history. To him, God’s love is truly infinite and given as a gift to all of creation, regardless of who “deserves” it more. In the second volume he asserts: “Just as, in the mind of the Creator, there is no created nature that might be ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ than another, but rather in His mind everything that He has brought into being exists eternally — and not so that He knows one thing before or after another, but all of them equally without any one coming earlier or later, by even one second — so there is no one ahead or behind in His love: with Him there is no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in principle. On the contrary, just as there is equality and stability in His mind, so there is equality and stability in His love.” (Hilarion, 57) But long before this material came to light, he was famous for his poetic evocations of love and mercy, as they appear in the heart of the monk who gradually comes closer to God:

first volume, Homily 48 (Hilarion, 61)

According to St. Isaac, Christ’s death on the Cross should be understood purely as an expression of God’s love. In the second volume, he writes, “I say that God did all of this for no other reason but to show the world the love that He possesses. His purpose was to make love grow within us, once we have understood this, so that we would become captives of His love, for by the death of His Son He brought forth this manifestation of the great power of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is called love. The death of our Lord was not for our redemption from sin or for any other purpose but to make the world know the love that God has for all creatures.” Here St. Isaac is challenging the “legalistic” interpretation of redemption, according to which Christ carefully designed his sacrifice because it would only be “valid” enough to appease God’s sense of justice (would have “enough” value to serve as “ransom” for humanity) if every part of it were to proceed in a certain specific way. Having already rejected the idea of justice as the central principle of Divine nature, St. Isaac cannot accept such an interpretation; he even seems to poke a bit of fun at it as he continues: “If all of these amazing works had been intended only to redeem us from sin, it would have been sufficient to redeem us in some other way. What arguments could be made if He had done all this through an ordinary death? But He died in this highly unusual manner so that you might understand the meaning of the sacrament: He tasted death in the terrible suffering of the Cross.” (73-74) There is no specific “mechanism” of redemption that God could be required to follow; He chose this particular form only because it served as the clearest expression of His love.

Here he is somewhere in the Middle East.

One might say that St. Isaac’s belief in God’s love constituted the entirety of his philosophy. Most likely, he did not have the same kind of formal education in logic and rhetoric as, for example, St. John Chrysostom or St. Gregory the Theologian. He expresses himself in sharp, poetic insights that can only be granted to a “merciful heart,” steeped in the conviction that “with love He brought the world into being; with love He guides it, in its current temporary form of existence; with love He will bring it to that wondrous transformation, and love will overwhelm it in this great mystery of Him Who worked all of this; in love, the entire history of creation is completed.” (55) This conviction leads him to increasingly unconventional, radical conclusions, such as his legendary vision of hell:

(Hilarion, 258)

I am sure that Dostoevsky read this fragment and was deeply moved by it. This is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, none other than St. Isaac appears on Smerdyakov’s table. Smerdyakov committed murder for money. Maybe he didn’t really believe Ivan’s speech that “all is permitted” (that was just a convenient excuse), but he clearly didn’t experience any moral qualms about it, and fully planned to use the money to start a new life. And yet:

from The Brothers Karamazov (Book 11, Chapter VIII)

Smerdyakov feels no guilt, but his crime has crushed him all the same, and the money has become meaningless. This is exactly St. Isaac’s vision of hell: God’s goodness torments sinners who have deprived themselves of the comfort of believing in Him, and are left alone with their own evil. If Smerdyakov could have brought himself to believe that God existed and was punishing him, he might have found it more bearable.

And yet…St. Isaac cannot simply abandon these wretched sinners to their fate. He repeatedly returns to the problem of hell. He never once doubts that it exists, that it inflicts unimaginable torment, or that sinners deserve to go there, but he cannot reconcile this with his profound belief in the primacy of mercy over justice. His most radical views on this are expressed in the second volume — for which reason its authenticity has been disputed — but even in the first volume he repeatedly asserts the powerlessness of hell:

first volume, Homily 90

Elsewhere in the first volume — but this time, in a homily that was left out of the medieval Greek translation — St. Isaac grows bolder:

(Hilarion, 259)

Illustration from a 14th-century Russian manuscript.

Although it remains “unknown” whether hell has an end, the idea seems to be rather clearly suggested. So, perhaps it is not surprising that, by the end of the long-lost second volume, St. Isaac has finally decided to embrace the full implications of his thinking and state them explicitly:

second volume, Conversation 39 (Hilarion, 267-268)

As Metr. Hilarion summarizes, “The belief that most of humanity will suffer in the fires of hell, while only a small handful of the elect will rejoice in the Kingdom of Heaven, was deeply alien to St. Isaac. He is convinced that, on the contrary, the majority of people will find themselves in the Kingdom of God and only a small number of evildoers and sinners will go to hell — and even then, only for as long as is necessary for them to obtain forgiveness for their sins.” (268) Even though St. Isaac may not always unequivocally insist on it, clearly his hope is that all of humanity will eventually be forgiven, that hell will not last forever, but be “abolished.”

Needless to say, this conception contradicts the eschatological teaching of the Orthodox Church, and really any Christian church. The standard moral objection to the belief in universal salvation is that it equates good and evil — the goodness of the righteous is essentially deprived of value since one can now be saved without making the least effort to be good. One could also say that, in this way, free will is denied, since certain sinners may simply refuse to be with God, preferring to remain in hell with their hatred and pride even when given the choice to go to Heaven; perhaps that is the one objection that St. Isaac, full of love for God, could never have imagined. In Christian history, belief in universal salvation or apocatastasis usually came hand in hand with many other deviations from Church doctrine, most notably in the person of the 3rd-century neo-Platonist philosopher Origen, whose teaching was condemned by the 5th Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 553 AD).

In light of this, it seems bizarre that one of the preeminent Holy Fathers might have sympathized with (or even wholeheartedly embraced) such a doctrine. For this reason, there has been some controversy regarding the authenticity of St. Isaac’s second volume, whose “miraculous” discovery in the late 20th century is, admittedly, not very reassuring. The best and most convincing arguments in this regard have been made by Hieromonk Nikon (Skarga), a resident of Optina Monastery in Russia, who conducted a detailed linguistic analysis of the second volume and concluded that Conversations 38-41, in which universal salvation is clearly asserted, as well as the entirety of the “Chapters of Knowledge” (which, indeed, are organized in a completely different way from the rest of the text, making them appear very much out of place), are a forgery that had been deliberately inserted into a collection of genuine writing by St. Isaac. In other words, Fr. Nikon acknowledges the authenticity of a large part of the manuscript, but reproaches Metr. Hilarion’s uncritical (in his view) acceptance of the entire thing.

St. Gregory of Nyssa (11th-century mosaic).

Yet, St. Isaac was not the only Orthodox saint to have believed in universal salvation. The 4th-century Orthodox philosopher St. Gregory of Nyssa, younger brother of St. Basil the Great, who worked and interacted with some of the greatest luminaries of Christian thought — thinkers who helped establish all of the fundamental Church dogmata — and who certainly had no association with Nestorianism (which did not exist in his time) or any other such system, at one point wrote the following:

St. Gregory of Nyssa, ch. 21 of On the Making of Man

Essentially this argument is the same as St. Isaac’s: only God is infinite, and God did not create sin, therefore sin is finite and will at some point cease to exist. If anything, St. Gregory’s version has more Ancient Greek influence since it has a very Aristotelian emphasis on “motion,” whereas St. Isaac has a much more purely evangelical basis in God’s love and mercy. Notwithstanding, there has never been any question in the Church regarding St. Gregory’s sainthood; as Metr. Hilarion explains, “On the contrary, the 6th Ecumenical Council included his name among the ‘holy and blessed fathers,’ and the 7th Ecumenical Council called him ‘the father of fathers.’ As for the Council of Constantinople in 543 AD and the 5th Ecumenical Council, which condemned Origenism, it is quite instructive to observe that, although St. Gregory’s teaching of universal salvation was well-known to the Fathers of both Councils, it was not equated with Origenism. The Fathers of the Councils understood that there is a heretical understanding of universal salvation…but there is also an Orthodox understanding of it based on 1 Corinthians 15:24-28.” (271n)

The last statement, of course, is also controversial. In fact, the overall historical consensus in the Church is that St. Gregory was in error with regard to universal salvation. But, if he and St. Isaac were in error, it was an error born of their overzealous vision of universal Christian love. St. Isaac, in particular, shows much less Platonic influence than even St. Gregory, much less Origen. He occasionally skirts close to Platonic hierarchical imagery (which he most likely absorbed indirectly through the Areopagitic corpus, rather than through any actual Platonic text), but it is difficult to imagine or express a more anti-Platonic view of the universe than the following:

first volume, Homily 18 (Hilarion, 255)

I imagine Plato listening to this with cold, contemptuous impatience. No ranks, no masters — then what’s the point?! To a Platonist, the superiority of the world beyond physical reality follows precisely from its more perfect hierarchy. But to St. Isaac, the infiniteness of God will overrule any distinctions between human beings: one might say that hierarchy is a defect of the universe, a consequence of original sin and not a reflection of God’s intent. The radical egalitarianism of this view at least has a Christian origin.

Metr. Hilarion concludes (emphasis in the original), “Perhaps, in his theological search, St. Isaac went further than traditional Christian dogmata allow, and peered at something that was meant to be inaccessible to human reason… The eschatological views of St. Isaac of Syria, St. Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers belong to the realm of private theological opinions and cannot be perceived as an expression of the dogmatic teaching of the Church. At the same time, they should not be equated with the heretical Origenism that the Church had condemned. Neither St. Isaac of Syria, nor St. Gregory of Nyssa, despite the radical tone of some of their statements on eschatological subjects, believed that the question of universal salvation had been settled. They simply expressed the hope, which, perhaps, is shared by many Christians — the hope that, in spite of justice, each person will have the possibility of salvation by the mercy of God.” (271-272)

All I can add is that this question, if viewed in isolation, has little bearing on the reasons why St. Isaac is loved and revered in the Orthodox Church. I doubt that anyone who ever decided to venerate or pray to St. Isaac did so specifically because of his views on universal salvation. But even if he held those views, and even if they were wrong, nonetheless they were driven by his profound love for all creation — the same quality that is so valued by the faithful, and that led the Byzantines to bring St. Isaac’s writing into the heart of Orthodox monasticism even as they rejected his theological authorities. And surely he knew how his statements on salvation would be received…and perhaps he, too, had doubts as to whether God would look upon them favorably. Perhaps, in his insistence that everyone would go to Heaven, he was like St. Anthony’s shoemaker —

Evergetinos, Chapter 45

— and isn’t that enough, for one lifetime?

Fresco of St. Isaac (early 16th century).
Cathedral of the Dormition, Moscow.