Isaiah

Isaiah is known only as a correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450), to whom Isidore addressed some thirty-two surviving letters in the early-to-mid-5th-century milieu of Pelusium and the eastern Nile Delta. The address lines repeatedly call him a soldier ("To Isaias, a soldier"; "To Isaiah the soldier"), and the letters themselves are overwhelmingly admonitory: Isidore rebukes him for arrogance and overweening pride despite his "obscure and undistinguished parents," warns him against gathering an armed mob in the wilderness and plotting against his neighbors while likening himself to David, and charges him with condemning everyone, raging, and madness. To curb him Isidore invokes divine judgment and forbearance (citing Isaiah 42:14) and argues for the immortality of the soul, quoting Plato's Phaedo, while also touching on the temptations of money, the contrast between the busy and the withdrawn (hesychast) life, and the dangers of despondency. He is otherwise unattested outside Isidore's correspondence.