Section 02: The Hymns of Divine Love
St. Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Love — fifty-eight poems of more than eleven thousand lines, the most personal of his writings and the fullest record of his inner life. This section treats the collection as a whole, its composition and transmission, and its daring erotic-mystical and luminous registers; and it follows the single great theme of the Hymns and Catecheses alike: God experienced as light, a personal encounter with Christ that anticipates the later dogmatic articulation of St. Gregory Palamas.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| The Hymns of Divine Love | The fifty-eight hymns and their ~11,000 lines; the late-life outpouring and Niketas Stethatos’ editing (the transmission question); the daring erotic-mystical register, with Hymn 15’s frank language of bodily union handled reverently and honestly; and the first-person voice judged without precedent in Christian writing since Augustine |
| The Light of Symeon | The vocabulary of light: God experienced as light; the relation to the Tabor tradition and to Palamas’ later dogma of essence and energies; light as personal encounter with Christ rather than symbol (Symeon’s anti-nominalism); and the Trinity disclosed within the light |
How to Use
- Read The Hymns of Divine Love for the work itself — its scale, its composition, its boldness, and its singular personal voice.
- Read The Light of Symeon for the theology that the Hymns enact: the vision of the uncreated light, and its place between the neptic Fathers and the hesychast synthesis of Palamas.
A Note on Editions
The critical edition of the Hymns is Johannes Koder’s in Sources Chrétiennes (156, 174, 196), with translation by Joseph Paramelle and Louis Neyrand. The English renderings cited are Daniel K. Griggs’, Divine Eros (Popular Patristics Series 40) and George A. Maloney’s earlier Hymns of Divine Love. The Hymns reach us through the editing of Symeon’s disciple Niketas Stethatos, and the files note where that editorial mediation bears on interpretation.
Cross-References
- For the first vision of light that founds this whole theology, see Constantinople and Symeon Eulabes.
- For the later dogmatic defense of the uncreated light, see St. Gregory Palamas: The Light of Tabor.
- For the doctrine of deification that Hymn 15 presses to its limit, see Theosis.
References
- St. Symeon the New Theologian. Hymnes. Critical text by Johannes Koder; translation by Joseph Paramelle and Louis Neyrand. Sources Chrétiennes 156, 174, 196. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969–1973.
- St. Symeon the New Theologian. Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Translated by Daniel K. Griggs. Popular Patristics Series 40. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010.
- McGuckin, John Anthony. “Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros.” Spiritus 5, no. 2 (2005): 182–202.
- Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.