Experience of Grace

The signature teaching of St. Symeon the New Theologian is that the grace of the Holy Spirit must be experienced consciously and perceptibly — en aisthēsei, “in awareness” — and not merely possessed in name. Against those who claimed to have the Spirit from baptism while feeling nothing, Symeon insisted that the indwelling of God is meant to be known; that the grace of baptism is renewed and actualized in the “second baptism” of tears; and that the vision of the divine light in this life is the norm of the Christian calling, not its rare exception. The scholarship — above all Hilarion Alfeyev — argues that, for all its apparent novelty, this teaching stands squarely within the Orthodox tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Grace Must Be Consciously Experienced

The core of Symeon’s spirituality is the claim that the Holy Spirit is not possessed unconsciously or imperceptibly: the Christian who has truly received the Spirit knows it, in awareness and perception — Greek en aisthēsei, which Symeon also calls the “perception of the heart.” Metropolitan Kallistos Ware framed this as the heart of Symeon’s witness: the goal is to experience the indwelling Spirit “in a conscious and perceptible way” (Ware, “Personal Experience of the Holy Spirit According to the Greek Fathers,” 1997).

Symeon’s polemic was directed against those who said the opposite — that grace dwells in the soul from baptism whether or not it is ever felt. He writes against them with unusual sharpness in the Ethical Discourses:

“Here I am again, writing against those who say they have the Spirit of God unconsciously … who, confessing they felt nothing whatever in their baptism, still imagine that the gift of God has indwelt and existed within their soul, unconsciously and insensibly, from that moment up to the present time.” (Ethical Discourse 5; trans. Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 2)

A nuance must be preserved, lest Symeon be misread. He does not deny that grace can work unconsciously at first; what he condemns is remaining content in unconscious possession. Ware notes that Symeon allows for an initial, unperceived working of grace — in infancy “we were sanctified without being aware of it” — which is meant to pass over into conscious awareness and then into illumination (Ware, 1997, citing Catecheses 2 and 26). The trajectory runs from implicit to explicit: grace given in the Mysteries is to become grace consciously known. The man “who has the whole Christ within him” cannot, on Symeon’s logic, truthfully say he has nothing — and the sustained burden of the Ethical Discourses is exactly to forbid that self-deceived denial. [Disputed: the often-quoted sentence in this form circulates without a secured discourse-and-line citation; its verified equivalents are Ethical Discourse 5, quoted above, and Hymn 27, quoted below.]

The positive counterpart of the polemic is the refrain of Hymn 27:

“Do not say that it is impossible to receive the Spirit of God … Do not say that one can possess Him without knowing it. Do not say that men cannot perceive the divine light, or that it is impossible in this age.” (Hymn 27, Hymns of Divine Love)

The term aisthēsis (“perception,” “sensation,” “awareness”) is the technical center of this teaching, and it has to be understood rightly. Symeon does not mean a crude bodily sensation or an emotional thrill; he means a real, conscious perception of a spiritual reality — the soul’s direct awareness of the Spirit’s presence, as concrete and undeniable as the body’s perception of warmth or light, yet operating in the spiritual faculty Symeon and the Fathers call the nous (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ; Ware, 1997). It is this insistence on conscious perception, as opposed to a grace merely inferred from the fact of one’s baptism, that gives Symeon’s spirituality its distinctive intensity. The whole question, for him, is whether a Christian has felt God or only believes, on the strength of the Mysteries received, that God must be present somewhere within. Symeon will not let the second stand in for the first.

Baptism Actualized: The “Second Baptism” of Tears

Symeon teaches two baptisms: the first by water, the second by tears. The “baptism of tears” is not a rival to the sacrament but its conscious actualization — the bringing-to-awareness, through repentance and weeping, of the grace already given in the water of baptism. “Repentance is the renewal of the baptismal grace,” he teaches (Ethical Discourse 10; cf. Golitzin, vol. 1). In the Practical and Theological Chapters he draws the relation precisely:

“In the first baptism, water symbolizes tears and the oil of Chrismation prefigures the inner anointing of the Spirit. But the second baptism is no longer a type of the truth, but the truth itself.” (Practical and Theological Chapters 1.36; trans. McGuckin)

This language has to be handled with sacramental-theological care, and the scholarship handles it so. Symeon does not deny or replace water baptism; he affirms it, including infant baptism, holding that baptized infants are sanctified and kept by the Holy Spirit. The “second baptism” of tears is, in the scholars’ formulation, “the full realization of sacramental baptism, not a new and different grace” (Grobnicu, in International Journal of Orthodox Theology, 2016; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ). At the same time the careful reader does not pretend the proximity to Messalianism is absent: some of Symeon’s formulations sound, on the surface, near to the view that personal experience counts more than the sacramental life — and the resolution is exactly that the baptism of tears completes the Mystery of Baptism rather than denying it (Grobnicu, 2016). Symeon is thus charismatic and sacramental, not anti-sacramental.

The Vision of God as the Christian Norm

Symeon held that the conscious vision of the divine light is the calling of every baptized Christian — the norm of the Christian life, not an exceptional charism reserved to a handful of mystics. Pope Benedict XVI summarized the point in a general audience: “For Symeon this experience of divine grace did not constitute an exceptional gift for a few mystics but rather was the fruit of Baptism in the life of every seriously committed believer” (Benedict XVI, General Audience, 16 September 2009). Symeon presents his own visions, accordingly, not as unique to himself but as the standard to which every Christian is called.

A second nuance keeps this from becoming triumphalism: Symeon holds the vision to be the birthright of all while lamenting that almost none attain it — “only one in a thousand, no, one in ten thousand” reaches the heights of contemplation (Maloney, The Mystic of Fire and Light). The norm is universal; the actual attainment is rare — and the gap between the two is precisely what his preaching exists to close. The paradigmatic instance is his own vision of light as the youth “George,” recounted in Catecheses 22, where the light “filled the whole room,” the seer “saw nothing but light around him,” and “it seemed to him that he himself had been transformed into light” (de Catanzaro, The Discourses, Discourse XXII, “On Faith”).

Alfeyev: Symeon Within the Orthodox Tradition

The central modern argument that Symeon belongs inside the tradition, not outside it, is Hilarion Alfeyev’s St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition (Oxford, 2000), which began as his Oxford doctoral thesis under Kallistos Ware. Despite Symeon’s reputation for novelty and the intensity of his visionary claims, Alfeyev contends that his mysticism is “absolutely traditional, in the Orthodox sense of the term”:

“It is my conviction that in Symeon we find a mysticism which is absolutely traditional, in the Orthodox sense of the term, and I shall try to prove this in the course of this study.” (Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, p. 3)

Alfeyev’s method is to trace Symeon’s concepts back to their roots in the tradition, presenting the work as “a study of the mystical nature of tradition and the traditional nature of mysticism” (Alfeyev, p. 4). The sources he foregrounds are Scripture and the daily liturgical and reading cycle of the monk, the Studite monastic tradition (the elder Symeon the Studite), Gregory of Nazianzus — the Father on whom Symeon most depends — and ascetic writers such as Mark the Monk and John Climacus. (Alfeyev’s thesis has not gone unchallenged: Barbara Crostini’s review faulted its method as “hagiographical and apologetic,” a book whose conclusion informs its handling of the evidence; Catholic Historical Review 89, 2003.) The upshot, on Alfeyev’s reading, is that Symeon’s insistence on the conscious experience of grace is not a private innovation but a vivid restatement of what the Greek Fathers already held.

The argument matters because Symeon is, on the surface, the most personal and seemingly innovative of the Byzantine mystics — so much so that he was suspected in his own day of novelty and even of Messalianism, and he has sometimes been read in the modern period as a lonely prophet of religious experience set against an ossified institutional Church. Alfeyev’s case cuts against both readings. Where Symeon appears most idiosyncratic — the autobiographical visions, the demand for conscious perception, the language of the second baptism — Alfeyev shows the seeds already present in the Fathers and in the liturgical and ascetic texts Symeon read daily. The conclusion is not that Symeon is tame, but that his fire is the tradition’s own fire: he is, in Alfeyev’s reading, a witness to how traditional Orthodox theology is when it is taken with full seriousness, and how naturally the patristic inheritance issues in mysticism when it is actually lived rather than merely repeated. Krivocheine, who edited the Greek text of the Catecheses and knew Symeon’s corpus as well as anyone in the twentieth century, reaches a kindred judgment: that Symeon’s most startling claims are extensions of the Church’s own faith in the indwelling Spirit, not departures from it (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ).

References

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.
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. The Practical and Theological Chapters and The Three Theological Discourses. Translated by Paul McGuckin. Cistercian Studies 41. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.
Symeon the New Theologian. Hymns of Divine Love. Translated by George A. Maloney. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1976. (Hymn 27.)
Alfeyev, Hilarion. St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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.
Ware, Kallistos. “Personal Experience of the Holy Spirit According to the Greek Fathers.” Conference paper, Prague, 1997.
Maloney, George A. The Mystic of Fire and Light: St Symeon the New Theologian. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1975.
Grobnicu, Mihai-Iulian. “The Baptism of Tears in the Theology of St Symeon the New Theologian.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 7.4 (2016).
Benedict XVI. General Audience, 16 September 2009. Vatican.