Against Formalism

The polemical edge of St. Symeon the New Theologian’s teaching falls on nominal, formalist Christianity: the assumption that, having received the sacraments and kept the rules, one possesses the grace of God whether or not one ever feels it. Symeon answered that the unconscious possession of grace is no possession at all — a claim that scandalized the learned clergy of his day and led to his exile. From it modern readers have drawn a democratizing conclusion: that every Christian, not monks only, is called to sanctity. His hardest sayings, about unworthy clergy and grace received without compunction, must be read in context — for he is not a Donatist; and the famous “Three Methods of Prayer” printed under his name is not, on the scholarly consensus, his at all.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Against Nominal Christianity

Symeon lived and taught in a Christian capital where, in de Catanzaro’s summary of the situation, “Christianity had descended into formulae and church ritual, which for many people replaced the earlier emphasis on actual and direct experience of God” (de Catanzaro, Introduction to The Discourses). Against this, Symeon argued that the life of a Christian must be far more than the observance of rules — and that to suppose one possesses the Holy Spirit while feeling nothing is self-deception. The polemic is the negative face of his teaching on conscious experience: if grace is meant to be known en aisthēsei, then a grace that is never perceived, never wept for, never made conscious, is a grace claimed in name only.

He pressed the point to its sharpest edge in denying that the gifts of the saints belonged only to a vanished age. To say that the charisms have ceased — that the Christians of the present cannot keep the commandments, receive the Spirit consciously, or see God as the Fathers did — Symeon treated as a grave error, since it implies the withdrawal of the Spirit from the Church (Discourse 29; Encyclopedia of Religion, “Symeon the New Theologian”; Alfeyev, OUP 2000). This is the burden of the “do not say it is impossible” refrain treated in The Catecheses: the formalist’s resignation is, for Symeon, not humility but a heresy about grace.

The Dignity of Every Christian: The Democratizing Reading

From Symeon’s insistence that the conscious experience of God is the calling of every baptized Christian, modern interpreters have drawn a democratizing conclusion — that sanctity and the vision of the divine light are not reserved to monks or to the canonized few but are the proper inheritance of all. The clearest statement of this reading is John McGuckin’s:

“All his writing denies that mystical union with God is exclusively reserved for the canonized saint of the hagiography, or reserved to the unusual times of life, but is rather like air and water for a living creature, the substantial meaning of all existence.” (McGuckin, “Introducing Symeon the New Theologian”)

Kallistos Ware supplies the explicitly universal scope: “the vocation of every baptized Christian without exception is to advance … to a conscious awareness of the Spirit” (Ware, “Personal Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 1997). The democratizing emphasis, then, is properly attributed to these modern readers, who find it latent in Symeon — not advanced as Symeon’s own slogan. He himself addresses monks most directly, but the principle his interpreters draw out is that the call is to all.

A caution is in order so that the democratizing reading is not overstated. Symeon was an abbot speaking to monks, and the bulk of his concrete exhortation presupposes the monastic life of renunciation, obedience, and unceasing prayer. He does not flatten the difference between the monk’s vocation and the layman’s, nor does he promise the vision of the light cheaply. What his interpreters rightly observe is that the principle on which he insists — that conscious experience of the Spirit is the goal of the Christian life as such — is not in its nature restricted to monks, and that Symeon’s own paradigm-case, the youth “George,” received the vision while still a layman living in the world. The democratizing conclusion is thus a legitimate development of his premises rather than a slogan he himself coined; it says that the door Symeon opened for his monks is, in principle, the same door open to every baptized Christian who will seek the Spirit in earnest.

The Hard Sayings: Unworthy Clergy — Without Donatism

Symeon’s most difficult statements concern the relation between holiness and clerical office. He teaches that the spiritual power “to loose and bind and celebrate the Eucharist and teach is not given to those who were chosen and ordained only by men” — that is, ordination by men alone, without the Holy Spirit, does not confer the charismatic authority of the spiritual father (cf. the “Letter on Confession,” in Golitzin, trans., On the Mystical Life, vol. 3; Turner, Spiritual Fatherhood). He holds, on the precedent of his own unordained elder Symeon the Studite, that confession may licitly be heard by a monk who possesses the Spirit, the criterion being “purity of heart” rather than ordination. And to confessors he warns: “do not dare give absolution without having received in your heart the One who takes away the sin of the world” (cf. Ethical Discourse 6).

The decisive “hard saying” is his account of how the charism of binding and loosing passed to the monks:

“It was transferred … to God’s elect people, I mean to the monks. It was not that it had been taken away from the priests and bishops but rather that they had made themselves strangers to it.” (“Letter on Confession”; trans. Golitzin, vol. 3)

That final clause is what keeps Symeon clear of Donatism. The charism is forfeited by neglect, not abolished in a way that nullifies orders: the sacraments of an unworthy priest remain valid; what such a priest loses is the living spiritual authority he failed to cultivate, not the validity of the Mysteries he celebrates. The scholars are united on the substance. Krivocheine: in Symeon “we can find no statement about the invalidity of the sacraments administered by unworthy priests or any rejection of the hierarchy” (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ). Alfeyev notes that the East never tied sacramental validity to the minister’s worthiness as the West sometimes did, and that Symeon relocates the question onto the recipient — the reality of the sacrament “depends not on the sacrament itself, but on the spiritual condition of the one who receives it” (Alfeyev, OUP 2000). This is precisely the anti-Donatist move: efficacy for the communicant turns on the communicant’s own state, not on the minister’s. Turner is the most cautious, registering a genuine, unresolved tension in Symeon between the charismatic and the institutional rather than a clean acquittal (Turner, Spiritual Fatherhood).

What Symeon does not hold, then, is that an unworthy priest’s Eucharist is no Eucharist, or that grace received without compunction is no grace objectively given. What he holds is that grace received formally, without repentance and conscious participation, profits nothing in the recipient — the Mystery may be received “unto judgment” (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:29). The label sometimes attached to this — “unfelt sacraments” — is a modern gloss, not Symeon’s phrase, and is best avoided as a way of naming his concern.

It is worth being precise about where the genuine difficulty in Symeon lies, since careless summary can make him sound more extreme than he is. The difficulty is not a denial of sacramental validity — on that the texts and the scholars are clear — but a relocation of spiritual authority from office to holiness. Symeon really does teach that the charism of binding and loosing belongs in the first place to those who have the Spirit, and that an unordained holy monk may exercise it while an ordained but worldly cleric may have forfeited it. This is a strong claim, and Turner is right that it sits in unresolved tension with the institutional structure of the Church rather than being smoothly reconciled to it (Turner, Spiritual Fatherhood). But it is a claim about who possesses living spiritual fatherhood, not a claim that the Mysteries fail in the hands of the unworthy. Read at this altitude, Symeon is neither a Donatist nor an anti-institutional rebel; he is a witness, pressed to the edge, to the conviction that office without holiness is empty — while holiness, even without office, is full of the Spirit. The formalism he attacks is precisely the inversion of this: the assumption that office and observance suffice without holiness at all.

The Pseudo-Symeon “Three Methods of Prayer” — Excluded Here

A famous treatise, “The Three Methods of Prayer” (also “On the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention”), is printed under Symeon’s name in the Philokalia and gives one of the earliest written descriptions of the psychophysical hesychast technique — resting the chin on the chest, regulating the breath, and searching within for the “place of the heart.” On the scholarly consensus this text is not genuinely by Symeon the New Theologian. Irénée Hausherr’s critical edition argued for pseudonymous authorship (La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, Orientalia Christiana 9, no. 36, Rome, 1927 — the subtitle itself reads “attributed to Symeon the New Theologian”), and the work is conventionally assigned to “Pseudo-Symeon,” dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, with Nikephoros the Monk among the proposed authors; the editors of the English Philokalia note that Symeon cannot be the author (Hausherr, 1927; Philokalia, English trans., vol. 4, editorial note on the text; cf. the note at Nikephoros the Monk). Martin Jugie urged caution before rejecting the attribution outright, but the prevailing judgment remains against authenticity.

For that reason this treatise is excluded from Symeon’s genuine corpus here, in keeping with the rest of this repository, which already marks it as disputed. The fuller account of its attribution, and its prudential use within the neptic tradition, is given in the repository’s treatment of the Jesus Prayer (cross-link below), where it is noted that the Philokalia prints it under Symeon’s name while modern scholarship, following Hausherr, generally regards it as pseudonymous. The genuine Symeon of the Catecheses, the Ethical Discourses, and the Hymns is the Symeon presented in this collection.

References

Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. de Catanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Symeon the New Theologian. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. Translated by Alexander Golitzin. 3 vols. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995–1997. (Vol. 3 includes the “Letter on Confession.”)
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.
Turner, H. J. M. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Spiritual Fatherhood. Byzantina Neerlandica. Leiden: Brill, 1990.
McGuckin, John A. “Introducing Symeon the New Theologian.” In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Ware, Kallistos. “Personal Experience of the Holy Spirit According to the Greek Fathers.” Conference paper, Prague, 1997.
Hausherr, Irénée. La méthode d’oraison hésychaste. Orientalia Christiana 9, no. 36. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1927.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. (Editorial note to “The Three Methods of Prayer.”)