The Hymns of Divine Love

St. Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Love — fifty-eight poems, more than eleven thousand lines — composed largely in his contemplative final years and transmitted through the editing of his disciple Niketas Stethatos. The file treats their composition and transmission, their daring erotic-mystical register (with Hymn 15’s frank language of bodily union, handled reverently and honestly), and the scholarly judgment that their first-person voice is without true precedent in Christian writing since Augustine.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work

The Hymns of Divine Love (Greek Hymnoi tōn theiōn erōtōn, “hymns of the divine loves/erotic longings”) are a collection of fifty-eight poems running to more than eleven thousand lines, composed in a mixture of Byzantine verse forms — chiefly the political fifteen-syllable line, with stretches of the iambic and the anacreontic (Koder, introduction to Hymnes, SC 156; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, ch. on the Hymns). They are the most personal of all Symeon’s writings: where the Catecheses address monks and the Ethical Discourses argue, the Hymns simply pour out the inner life of a man who believes himself to have seen God, alternating between adoration, lament, theological reflection, and a frank record of mystical experience. The critical edition is the work of Johannes Koder, with translation and notes by Joseph Paramelle and Louis Neyrand, in three volumes of Sources Chrétiennes: SC 156 (Hymns 1–15), SC 174 (Hymns 16–40), and SC 196 (Hymns 41–58) (Koder, Hymnes, SC 156, 174, 196; Cerf, 1969–1973).

Composition and Transmission

By the testimony of Niketas Stethatos, who edited Symeon’s whole corpus, the Hymns were the late-life outpouring of the saint, composed and gathered especially in the roughly thirteen years he spent after 1009 in retreat near Chrysopolis, at the restored monastery of St. Marina (Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon §§109–112; trans. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, ch. 1). Niketas not only edited but arranged and prefaced the collection, and it is to his editorial hand that we owe the form in which the Hymns survive. This raises a genuine transmission question: how much of the ordering, titling, and even shaping of the poems reflects Symeon and how much reflects his disciple’s presentation. The point is not to doubt their authenticity — Koder’s critical work treats the corpus as substantially Symeon’s — but to register honestly that, as with the Life, we receive Symeon partly through Niketas (Greenfield, introduction, DOML 20; Koder, Hymnes, SC 156, on the manuscript tradition).

The Hymns also differ from Symeon’s prose in their occasion. The Catecheses were spoken to a community and the Ethical Discourses argue a case; the Hymns answer to no audience but God. Niketas reports that they welled up unbidden, often after the Eucharist or in the night vigil, as the overflow of a heart that could not contain what had been given to it — Symeon himself frequently describing the experience and only then breaking into address to God (Niketas, Life §§109–112; Alfeyev, ch. on the Hymns). This accounts for their formal looseness: they are not constructed poems in the classicizing manner so much as transcribed prayer, veering without warning between narrative, doxology, lament, and dogmatic statement. The roughness is part of the testimony; Symeon is not performing eloquence but recording what happened to him.

The Daring of the Hymns

What sets the Hymns apart is their nerve. Symeon describes union with God in the most intimate language available to him — the language of love between persons, including its bodily register — pressing the biblical and patristic theme of the soul as bride of Christ further toward the literal than almost any writer before him (McGuckin, “Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Eros”; Griggs, introduction to Divine Eros, PPS 40). The very title insists on erōs, the word for desiring love, not merely agapē. This is mysticism that refuses to be merely conceptual: God is not discussed but longed for, embraced, possessed and possessing.

The most famous and most startling instance is Hymn 15, where Symeon, building on St. Paul’s teaching that our bodies are “members of Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:15), takes the doctrine of deification to its boldest expression. He insists that the whole human person, every member of the body, becomes through grace a member of Christ — so that Christ is truly present even in what is most humble and most carnal in us. In Daniel Griggs’ rendering Symeon writes that we become “members of Christ — and Christ becomes our members,” and he does not flinch from naming the body’s lowest parts as thereby sanctified and made Christ’s own (St. Symeon, Hymn 15; trans. Griggs, Divine Eros, PPS 40; cf. McGuckin, “Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Eros”). The frankness is deliberate and theological: Symeon’s point is the totality of the Incarnation’s reach — that deification leaves no part of the human being outside Christ, and that to be scandalized by the body’s inclusion is to underestimate what God has joined to Himself. It must be read as he meant it: not as titillation but as the most uncompromising possible statement that the Word became flesh, and that flesh is therefore capable of bearing God. Honesty about the passage’s frankness and reverence for its intent are not in tension; Symeon intends both the shock and the holiness.

A Voice Without Precedent

Scholars of Byzantine literature regularly observe that the sustained, intimate first-person voice of the Hymns is something genuinely new — that this degree of autobiographical self-disclosure, the naming of one’s own ecstasies and failures before God, is unparalleled in Eastern Christian writing and finds its nearest counterpart only in the West, in Augustine’s Confessions. Symeon is, on this reading, the most personal religious writer the Greek tradition had produced, and arguably the most autobiographical Christian voice since Augustine (the comparison is a recurring scholarly judgment; see McGuckin, “Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Eros,” who stresses that the Hymns’ “most profound first-person intimacy” is “quite unlike anything that had yet appeared in Byzantine spiritual writing”; cf. Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on Symeon’s autobiographical method). The comparison is attributed and approximate — Symeon did not know Augustine, and the genres differ — but it captures something real: in the Hymns the wall between doctrine and confession dissolves, and theology becomes a man speaking, in his own voice, of what God has done to him.

What makes this voice theologically significant, and not merely a literary curiosity, is its claim. Symeon does not offer his experience as a private feeling to be admired; he offers it as evidence — proof that the realities the Fathers described are still given, that the apostolic experience of the Spirit did not lapse with the apostolic age. The first-person voice is, in this sense, a polemical instrument. When Symeon names his own ecstasies, he is answering the churchmen of his day who taught that the conscious vision of God belonged to a closed past; his “I have seen” is the rebuttal of their “no one sees now” (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on Symeon’s polemics; McGuckin, “Symeon’s Hymns of Divine Eros”). The intimacy and the argument are one. This is why the Hymns matter to the later tradition: they are the most direct testimony in Orthodox literature that the life of grace is a thing seen and felt, and not merely believed.

Place in the Corpus

The Hymns are the lyric summit of a body of work that also includes the Catecheses (the catechetical addresses to the monks of St. Mamas, critically edited by Krivochéine and Paramelle in Sources Chrétiennes), the Theological and Ethical Discourses, the Chapters, and the Letters. Where the prose teaches, argues, and instructs, the Hymns simply show — the same theology of conscious grace and the vision of light, but in the register of praise rather than persuasion. They are best read alongside the Catecheses, whose autobiographical “George” narrative the Hymns presuppose and amplify; the prose gives the doctrine its frame, the poetry gives it its fire (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, chs. 4–7; Alfeyev, ch. on the Hymns; see The Light of Symeon).

See Also

References

  • St. Symeon the New Theologian. Hymnes. Critical text by Johannes Koder; translation and notes 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.
  • St. Symeon the New Theologian. Hymns of Divine Love. Translated by George A. Maloney. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, c. 1975–1976.
  • Niketas Stethatos. The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Edited and translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • McGuckin, John Anthony. “Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Christian Mystical Tradition.” Spiritus 5, no. 2 (2005): 182–202.
  • Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • Krivochéine, Archbishop Basil. In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986.