The life of St Isaiah the Solitary
He is best known for the collection of sayings and counsel attributed to him, including the short work on guarding the intellect that was later gathered into the Philokalia, urging watchfulness over one's thoughts as the foundation of the spiritual life.
Modern scholars, however, are genuinely divided over whether this is the memory of one long life or of two distinct monks bearing the same name, an earlier Isaiah of Scetis and a later Isaiah of Gaza, whose sayings and writings may have become combined in transmission over the centuries. Some hold the two were the same man; others treat them as separate figures whose traditions merged. The Church's received tradition, reflected in the title given him here, honors him as a single father, and it is that tradition, rather than the unresolved scholarly question, which this account follows.
