A Syrian philocalic author of the importance of Abba Joseph Hazzaya is worthy of a more extensive presentation than the lines of a simple “prologue” can do. First of all, for the simple reason that his writings appear for the first time in Romanian. Secondly, because the modern reader of spiritual literature, although he usually has an unreserved admiration for the Syriac authors, is almost always acquainted only with Saints Ephrem and Isaac; and if the reader also happens to have theological studies, then his admiration risks being stifled and his piety censored by the few and truncated historical and dogmatic information provided by textbooks. Both situations, neither of them happy, are symptoms of the same malady: a deficient and distorted knowledge of the history, culture, spirituality and doctrine of the Syriac Church, or what specialists call the “third great current of the Christian tradition”, which emerged from the primary apostolic tradition, alongside the other two: Greek and Latin. What does the mind of the suppliant see, hear, and feel when, after having been cleaned from sins by deeds, he passes “through the door of love” into the land of contemplation? What temptations meet him there? What landmarks does the uncharted path lie before him? Who are the enemies now and in what way are they acting? Who friends, who helpers? What is the general strategy of the struggle in this phase, and what must the monk who has reached this point do, and in particular, what must he stop doing? How can genuine contemplations be distinguished from deceptive visions? Do we stop somewhere, at one of the contemplations, or do we move on? If so, how far…? Only those who have been troubled by such questions, searching in vain for clear and detailed answers, will be able to understand what the “treasure” of Joseph Hazzaya, or, if you like, the “Joseph Hazzaya treasure”, consists in.

In fact, even the nickname Hazzaya (the Seer), which his contemporaries have already given him, says about our author that he was, first of all, a man of spiritual experience, a living knower of the multiple forms of seeing the uncreated divine light, while the rich culture that is apparent in his writings is the intellectual instrument that helped him to express his hermit experiences and contemplations. In the final analysis, the writings of the Abba Joseph Hazzaya are, it must be said, a disturbing testimony to the vision of God, just as the writings of St. Simeon the New Theologian or St. Gregory Palamas were to be in the Byzantine world.