A popular Orthodox blogger recently posted on a certain Fr. Alexander Golitzin [http://greesons.typepad.com/paideia/2010/08/fr-alexander-golitzin-liturgy-and-mysticism.html], referring to him as, "one of the best kept "secrets" of Modern Orthodox academics." He is a Patristics scholar and a Professor of Theology at Marquette. After poking around a bit on the web I came upon a review he wrote of The Spiritual World of St. Isaac the Syrian, by Met. Hilarion Alfeyev (another Orthodox Christian worth knowing something about). Below is a worthy excerpt from a worthy review:

"Humility appears to mark a kind of boundary-line for Isaac between human striving and divine grace. “Tears” (129-42), the subject of chapter five, likewise signal the “birth-pangs of the spiritual infant” (136-7) as at once indicating the recognition of sin and so bitter tears of repentance, on the one hand, and the transition to a life in grace (the sweet tears), on the other. Cultivation of that life is the subject of the book’s longest chapter, number six “On Prayer” (143-216), reflecting St Isaac’s own ruling focus on the “conversation with God.” Here we find extensive discussion (and insistence) on the outward forms of prayer (daily office, standing, prostrations, spiritual reading), a fascinating analysis with accompanying citations of Isaac’s theology of the Cross (163-73) both as icon and as link between heaven and earth, and between the Old Testament and the eschaton (with the latter pair framed by the vocabulary of the tabernacle and abiding within it of the Shekinah ), together with his stress on intercession in the fashion of the Eucharistic anaphora (205-7) and characterization of “true prayer” as a standing before God “in the dark cloud of his glory” like the angels (212). There is, however, for Isaac a step beyond “pure prayer”: the “wonder” of “The Life in God,” which forms the subject of chapter seven (217-268). Here we return to “silence,” the “dark cloud,” and the “sudden” visitation of God’s Presence, and, with these themes, to very frequent reminiscences of Dionysius Areopagites (218-23). Along the way, Alfeyev provides an introduction, accompanied by extensive quotations, to Isaac’s technical vocabulary for this highest, and very rare stage of Christian life: contemplation (te’oriya , borrowed from the Greek theoria ), visions (hezwe ), insights (sukkale ), and revelations (galyane ), together with overshadowing (magganuta ), wonder (temha , Isaac’s equivalent to the Greek ekstasis ), and the various stages of knowledge (id’ata ) which culminate in the knowing which is “unknowing,” recalling again Dionysius in Mystical Theology I.3.

The book’s concluding chapter, “The Life of the Age to Come” (269-97), returns to the opening discussion of Isaac’s insistence on God as love. Here attention is devoted, following a brief account (270-3) of the monk’s duty to meditate on the age to come, to Isaac’s belief in universal salvation. For him, God who is love cannot be overcome by sin, nor will the divine mercy prove powerless even for the demons. Like his contemporary, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac understands the divine love to be at once the joy of the blessed and the (for Isaac, though not for Maximus) temporary torment of the damned. All is God’s love, and hell is therefore a teaching device (283-91), “a kind of purgatory,” in Alfeyev’s words (290-1). Further, Isaac “resented the widespread opinion that the majority [of people]...will be punished in hell” (294). For him, this is “blasphemy.” Only the most hardened sinners will be obliged to enter the Gehenna of fire, and then only for a time. This does not, however, vitiate ascetical striving for Isaac. Separation from God is the only true suffering, a judgement begun in this life and only revealed (again temporarily) at the eschaton. The whole purpose of Christian living is to know and to love the loving God. Alfeyev concludes by observing that Isaac’s unusual – but not unheard of (cf. Origen, Gregory Nyssa, Diodore of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia) – understanding of the last things derives from his deepest experiences, his knowledge of and encounter with God’s presence (293).

Only the most grace-proof could fail to be moved by this book. Isaac is himself cause for “wonder,” a note echoed at the beginning by Bishop Kallistos account of his own growing love for this desert hermit (9-12), and at book’s end by what I take to be an autobiographical account, phrased in the third person, of Alfeyev’s own love affair with the saint, which began during the author’s novitiate (299). It is hard not to love this old man of the desert. “He speaks,” wrote the Catholicos Yuhanna ibn Barsai, “the language of the heavenly ones” (28).