The Catecheses

St. Symeon the New Theologian’s Catechetical Discourses are the thirty-four chapter talks he gave as abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople (c. 980–998) — sustained oral instruction to his monks, later transcribed. They are the most personal and pastoral of his works: from the disguised autobiography of his own vision of light (Discourse 22) to his teaching on the tears of repentance (Discourse 5), they press a single demand — that the grace of God be sought and known consciously, and that no one say it is impossible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Genre: An Abbot’s Instruction

The Catecheses (Greek Katēchēseis, “instructions”) are not treatises composed at a desk but chapter talks: addresses delivered orally by Symeon as hēgoumenos (abbot) of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, ordinarily in the setting of the monastic office, to the brethren under his charge. They belong to a recognizable Byzantine genre — the abbot’s spoken catechesis to his community, in the tradition of Theodore the Studite’s instructions — but they are distinctive in their intensity, their autobiographical candor, and their refusal to let the monastic form substitute for the experience it is meant to serve (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; McGuckin, “Introducing Symeon the New Theologian”).

Their setting governs their tone. Symeon is speaking to men who have already renounced the world, taken the habit, and entered obedience — and precisely to such men he insists that the habit and the rule are not enough. The discourses range across repentance, renunciation, detachment, almsgiving, dispassion, the remembrance of death, compunction and tears, the keeping of the commandments, and union with the indwelling Trinity (de Catanzaro, The Discourses, Introduction by Maloney). The pastoral exigency is everywhere: he is fighting the formalism of monks who supposed that, having received baptism and the tonsure, they possessed all the grace they needed without ever feeling it.

Because the talks were delivered orally to a community that knew the speaker, they have a directness and an intimacy that the more systematic Theological, Ethical, and Practical chapters lack. Symeon addresses the brethren as “my brothers” and “my children,” interrupts his exposition to plead with them, recounts his own experience to shame their complacency, and returns again and again to the same handful of convictions — that grace is meant to be felt, that tears are the road to it, and that no excuse for spiritual mediocrity is admissible. The repetitiveness is itself pastoral: he is not building an argument once but pressing a demand over months and years upon men who keep slipping back into routine (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ; de Catanzaro, Introduction). For this reason the Catecheses are, of all Symeon’s works, the closest we come to hearing the saint’s actual voice as a father of souls.

The Text: Critical Edition and Translation

The Greek critical edition of the Catecheses was produced for Sources Chrétiennes, the text established by Mgr Basile Krivochéine with French translation by Joseph Paramelle, in three volumes (Paris: Cerf, 1963–1965): SC 96 (Catecheses 1–5), SC 104 (Catecheses 6–22), and SC 113 (Catecheses 23–34, with two appended Thanksgivings) (Sources Chrétiennes catalogue). The thirty-four discourses thus form a single corpus, transmitted together with the two prayers of Eucharistia.

The standard English rendering is C. J. de Catanzaro’s Symeon the New Theologian: The Discourses, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), with an introduction by George A. Maloney, S.J., and a preface by Basil Krivocheine. It translates the same body of Catecheses, which is why “Discourse” and “Catechesis” are used interchangeably below, with the number matching de Catanzaro’s volume.

The Famous Discourses

Discourse 22 — The Vision of “George”

The most celebrated of the Catecheses is Discourse 22 (“On Faith”), in which Symeon recounts the conversion-vision of a young layman named George (de Catanzaro, The Discourses, Discourse XXII, “On Faith”). George is universally understood — by Symeon’s biographer Niketas Stethatos and by modern scholarship alike — to be Symeon himself under a pseudonym, recounting his own experience in Constantinople when he was about twenty years old, while still living in the world but under the direction of his spiritual father, Symeon the Studite (Eulabes) (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 2; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, OUP 2000).

The narrative: as the young man stood at night repeating the short prayer his elder had given him — “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner” — a flood of divine radiance descended from above and filled the place. He lost all awareness of his surroundings, no longer knew whether he was in a house or under a roof, saw nothing but the light around him, was wholly united to immaterial (non-material) light, and thought that he himself had been transformed into light; the whole world vanished, and he was filled with tears and ineffable joy (Discourse 22; cf. the parallel Philokalic “On Faith”). Symeon attributes the vision explicitly to the prayers of his elder. The episode is the experiential nerve of his whole theology: the vision of the divine light is not a literary figure but something he claims to have undergone.

The disguise of “George” is part of the point. By telling the story in the third person Symeon can hold up the experience as a paradigm rather than a boast — this is what God does, and not only for the great ascetics but for a young layman still in the world who simply prayed under obedience to a holy elder. The elder had given George a book of Mark the Monk and the short repentance-prayer; the vision came not after years of desert solitude but in the midst of an ordinary urban life of work and prayer. Symeon thus uses his own autobiography to make a doctrinal claim about the accessibility of the vision of God — a claim he develops directly elsewhere in his works (Alfeyev, OUP 2000; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 2). Discourse 22 is therefore not a private memoir inserted into a sermon but the demonstration on which the sermon’s whole exhortation rests: if it happened to George, it can happen to the brethren, and they have no warrant to say it cannot.

Discourse 5 — Repentance and Tears

Discourse 5 (in the opening cluster, SC 96) treats repentance and compunction expressed through tears (penthos) — the godly mourning that cleanses the soul. Symeon distinguishes the bitter tears of repentance and fear from the sweet tears of joy that arise from the Spirit’s indwelling; tears are at once the labor of the penitent and a sign of grace received. For Symeon, tears are not an optional adornment of piety but the ordinary medium through which baptismal grace is renewed and made conscious — a theme that runs through the Catecheses and links his teaching on repentance to his teaching on the Eucharist (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ; de Catanzaro, The Discourses, Discourse IX, on repentance and tears).

The “Royal Way”

Symeon, like the Fathers before him, takes up the patristic motif of the “royal way” (basilikē hodos) — the middle road that avoids the extremes of laxity on one side and presumptuous excess on the other, the discerning path of obedience and measure. [The motif is a standard one across the Catecheses and the ascetic Fathers; the precise discourse number is not fixed here, the location not having been verified against de Catanzaro’s text or index.] Its force in Symeon is pastoral: the conscious experience of grace he demands is not an invitation to reckless self-direction but is to be pursued under an elder and within the common life.

The Pastoral Refrain: “Do Not Say It Is Impossible”

The single most quoted line of Symeon’s spirituality is a refrain against despair and against the formalist’s excuse that holiness belonged only to a vanished age. In its most famous verbatim form it stands not in the Catecheses but in Hymn 27 of the Hymns of Divine Love:

“Do not say that it is impossible to receive the Spirit of God. Do not say that it is possible to be made whole without Him. Do not say that one can possess Him without knowing it. Do not say that God does not manifest Himself to man. Do not say that men cannot perceive the divine light, or that it is impossible in this age. Never is it found to be impossible, my friends. On the contrary, it is entirely possible when one desires it.” (Hymn 27, Hymns of Divine Love)

The Catecheses carry the same charge in prose. In Discourse 29 Symeon turns directly on those who say it is impossible for the Christians of his own day to keep the Gospel commandments, to receive the Holy Spirit consciously, and to become like the holy Fathers — calling such people, in effect, opponents of God, for their position implies that the Spirit has withdrawn from the Church (Discourse 29; cf. McGuckin; Alfeyev, OUP 2000). The distinction is worth keeping: the famous litany of “do not say” is Hymn 27; Discourse 29 is the prose polemic that makes the same case. Both are aimed at the same target — the resigned, nominal Christianity that excuses its own coldness by declaring the heights closed.

This is the pastoral exigency of the whole corpus. Symeon’s monks were not pagans to be converted but professed religious to be roused; and the danger he saw in them was not unbelief but the deadly assumption that the form of the life — the office sung, the rule kept, the sacraments received — could stand in for its substance. Against that assumption the Catecheses press their one demand: do not say it is impossible.

The refrain is more than rhetorical encouragement. It encodes Symeon’s conviction that despair about the possibility of holiness is itself a kind of unbelief — a practical denial that the Holy Spirit is still given as fully as in the days of the apostles and the Fathers. To say “it is impossible in this age” is, on his reading, to make the Church’s saints a closed catalogue and to imply that grace has somehow diminished with time. He will not concede an inch of that ground. The same urgency that makes him recount his own vision under a pseudonym makes him forbid his monks the comfortable excuse that such things were for an earlier and holier generation. The Catecheses are, in this sense, a sustained assault on spiritual resignation, mounted by a father who is convinced that what he has seen, his children can see too.

The Place of the Catecheses Among Symeon’s Works

The Catecheses form one of three principal blocks of Symeon’s authentic prose, alongside the fifteen Ethical Discourses (or Theological and Ethical Treatises, translated by Alexander Golitzin as On the Mystical Life) and the shorter chapters — the Practical and Theological Chapters and the Theological Discourses (translated by Paul McGuckin) — to which is added the great poetic corpus of the fifty-eight Hymns of Divine Love (edited in Sources Chrétiennes by Johannes Koder). Where the Ethical Discourses argue and the Hymns sing, the Catecheses exhort: they are the genre in which Symeon’s theology is delivered as direct pastoral address. The themes are continuous across all of these — conscious experience of grace, the baptism of tears, the vision of the light, the role of the spiritual father — but the Catecheses present them in their original setting of the abbot speaking to his monks, which is why they remain the natural point of entry into his thought (de Catanzaro, Introduction; Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 1, Introduction).

References

Symeon the New Theologian. Catéchèses. Greek text ed. Basile Krivochéine; French trans. Joseph Paramelle. 3 vols. Sources Chrétiennes 96, 104, 113. Paris: Cerf, 1963–1965.
Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. de Catanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Introduction by George A. Maloney, S.J.; preface by Basil Krivocheine.)
Symeon the New Theologian. Hymns of Divine Love. Translated by George A. Maloney. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1976. (Hymn 27.)
Krivocheine, Basil. In the Light of Christ: St Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Translated by Anthony P. Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986.
Alfeyev, Hilarion. St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
McGuckin, John A. “Introducing Symeon the New Theologian.” In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.