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St Symeon the New Theologian (969-1022): Byzantine spiritual renewal in search of a precedent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisite Hymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. The Vita which we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997
References
1 There are now several English versions of selected works: Maloney, G. A., Hymns of Divine Love (Denville, N.J., 1975)Google Scholar; De Catanzaro, C., trans., Sr Symeon the New Theologian: The Catechetical Discourses (New York, 1980)Google Scholar [hereafter cited as Cat. for the textual reference, and Catanzaro for pagination and commentary]; McGuckin, P., Symeon the New Theologian: The Practical and Theological Chapters and the Three Theological Discourses (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1982)Google Scholar.
2 Considered here only from the ecclesiological viewpoint, that is, the notion of the reception and transmission of Tradition (Paradosis).
3 The chronology was established by I. Hausherr in his monograph, Un grand mystique byzantin: Vie de Syméon le Nouveau Théologien, 949–1022, par Nicétas Stethatos, Orientalia Christiana, 45 (Rome, 1928) [hereafter Vie]. In a recent paper I have argued that further political and external correspondences to those Hausherr had first noted add extra support to his basic schema. The late Prof. Christou has argued an alternative scheme, locating events seven years later, but this seems to me unconvincing, and gives undue weight to the hagiographer Nicetas, who is generally much confused in his narrative. Cf. my ‘Symeon the New Theologian and Byzantine monasticism’, in A. Bryer, ed., Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism (London, 1966) [= Papers of the 28th Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1995].
4 Cf. Cat. 16; 22; 35 (Eucharistic Prayer 1); Cat. 36 (Eucharistic Prayer 2); Ethical Discourse 5.
5 Vie, pp. lxiii-lxv.
6 Cf. C. Holl, Enthusiasmus und Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mönchtum (Leipzig, 1898), pp. 37–8.
7 Cat. 5.15 (Catanzaro, p. 107); Cat. 29.2 (Catanzaro, p. 310).
8 Cat. 4.16 (Catanzaro, p. 88); Cat. 22.6 (Catanzaro, p. 248); Cat. 28.13 (Catanzaro, p. 306).
9 Cat. 29.5 (Catanzaro, pp. 313–14).
10 Particularly in the light of what Hausherr has to say about his reliance: ‘Un des rares auteurs qu’il parait avoir lus, saint Grégoire de Nazianze’, Vie, p. 3 n. 2.
11 The extent of that indebtedness has been expounded most recently by Alfeyev, H., ‘St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition’ (Oxford University D.Phil, thesis, 1995)Google Scholar.
12 Turner, H. J. M. Cf., St Symeon the New Theologian and Spiritual Fatherhood (Leiden, 1990)Google Scholar.
13 Orations 27–31, esp. Oration 27.3: PC, 36, col. 13.
14 The text is given in Vie, pp. lxiii-lxv. The specific quaestio given to Symeon related to the orthodoxy of his Trinitarian thought. The reply, as Hausherr notes, amounts to 84 verses, with only 30 related to the subject in hand, and the remainder dedicated to the premise that only the initiate can be a theologian.
15 It was precisely designed to attack the logical propositionalism of the extreme Arian school of Aetius and Eunomius.
16 PC, 65, cols 905–30.
17 Ibid., cols 929–66.
18 ‘While he derived profit from all its passages, there were only three that, if I may say so, he fixed in his heart. The first was the one that reads as follows: “When you seek healing, take heed to your conscience. Do what it says, and you will find profit”.’ Cat. 22.2 (Catanzaro, p. 244).
19 Quasten, J., Patrology, 3 vols (Utrecht, 1975), 3, p. 506 Google Scholar: ‘At all events the author here comes into the open against the Messalians by energetically repudiating their basic principle, the identification of grace with mystical experience.’
20 Cat. 6.1 (Catanzaro, p. 119).
21 1 Pet. 2.9. Cf. Cat. 6.2 (Catanzaro, p. 120).
22 Many of the sayings of Arsenius (a highly cultured and learned teacher at the court before he entered the desert at Scete) are found in the Apophthegmata patrum, and as such were standard elements of monastic lore. Symeon could mean the Doctrina et exhortatìo (PC, 66, cols 1617–22), but it is more likely that he means the Kephalaia, or sayings, in the Apophthegmata.
23 Catanzaro, p. 121 n.1.
24 Cat. 6.2-4 (Catanzaro, pp. 120–2).
25 For a fuller elaboration of the argument, see Florovsky, G., Bible, Church, and Tradition: an Eastern Orthodox View (Belmont, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar.
26 Cf. Third Theological Chapter (3.4): McGuckin, Symeon the New Theologian, pp. 72–3.
27 Matt. 7.15-20.
28 In Cat. 26 (Catanzaro, pp. 274–83) Symeon sets out his Typikon of the daily observances of the St Mamas community. It is quintessentially ‘Studite’ in character, and completely unremarkable and unobjectionable as far as his community could have been concerned.