Monastic Life
Isaiah belonged to the tradition of Egyptian desert monasticism centered on Scetis, the celebrated wilderness south of the Nile delta whose Kellia, or 'Cells,' housed monks living in scattered solitude under the guidance of elders. According to the accounts of his life he was first a monk there in the early fifth century, and tradition relates that for a time he lived on a mountain.
He subsequently left Egypt for Palestine, where he passed his later years as a recluse near Gaza. The sources describe him reposing in great old age, having devoted his life to ascetic discipline and the writing of counsel for the soul.
Teaching and Writings
Isaiah was the author of a body of spiritual discourses, transmitted under the title Asceticon, a collection of roughly thirty discourses on the ascetic life. His counsels address the inward struggle of the monk: how to repel the assaults of wicked thoughts, the guarding of the heart, detachment from worldly things, the right discerning of Scripture, and the keeping of stillness in communion with God through ascetic discipline.
His teaching proved enduringly influential in Eastern Orthodox monasticism, and the Asceticon survives in a remarkable range of translations across the Christian East, including Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Arabic, and Georgian versions. The breadth of this transmission testifies to the esteem in which his ascetic writings were held well beyond their original setting.
Question of Identity
The figure of Isaiah is the subject of some scholarly discussion. Tradition, following Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, placed him in the later fourth century as a contemporary of Abba Macarius the Great, while modern historians more commonly locate his life in the fifth century. Some scholars have further proposed that an Isaiah of Scetis and an Isaiah of Gaza may have been two distinct figures, the Asceticon having been composed by the former and later revised by the latter. The Orthodox tradition venerates the ascetic father under the single commemoration recorded here.
