The Ethical Discourses

St. Symeon the New Theologian’s Ethical Discourses — fifteen sustained treatises preserved among his Theological and Ethical Treatises — are the most systematic part of his corpus, the place where his mystical theology is worked out at length rather than glimpsed in aphorism or sermon. Ranging from the cosmic sweep of salvation history to the eternal “eighth day” of the Sunday after Pascha to the doctrine of deification, they are where Symeon’s dogmatic content lives. They are read here in Alexander Golitzin’s translation, On the Mystical Life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Edition

Among the prose of St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the longest and most developed treatises are gathered in the collection his disciple Niketas Stethatos transmitted as the Theological and Ethical Treatises. Within it, the Ethical Discourses number fifteen sustained treatises, edited critically by Jean Darrouzès under the title Traités théologiques et éthiques (ed. and trans. J. Darrouzès, Sources Chrétiennes 122 and 129, Paris: Cerf, 1966–1967). They were given to English readers for the first time by Alexander Golitzin in the three volumes of On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Popular Patristics Series 14, 15, 16, 1995–1997). Golitzin renders the discourses in volumes I and II and devotes volume III (Life, Times, and Theology) to situating them — placing Symeon, against older caricatures of an isolated enthusiast, as “a thoroughly traditional representative of central themes in Greek patristic thought,” above all the doctrine of deification (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. III, passim).

Unlike the Catecheses, which are oral instructions delivered to his monks, and unlike the brief, gnomic Chapters (see The Practical and Theological Chapters), the Ethical Discourses are composed treatises in which Symeon can pursue an argument over many pages. For this reason they carry the greatest weight of Symeon’s properly theological reflection: where the Hymns sing his experience and the Catecheses exhort, the Ethical Discourses reason.

The Range of the Discourses

The fifteen treatises move across a remarkable range. Golitzin’s first volume gathers those devoted to the Church, the sacraments, and the last things — Symeon’s treatment of salvation history “from creation leading to the glory of the eschaton,” including a sustained section on the cosmic dimension of redemption (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. I, The Church and the Last Things, introduction). The second volume gathers those on virtue and the Christian life — the discipline of the active life, dispassion, the keeping of the commandments, and the inner transformation that ascesis serves (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. II, On Virtue and the Christian Life).

The treatises are not abstract. Many are occasioned by questions, objections, or controversies within Symeon’s own monastic world — answers to those who doubted that grace could be consciously perceived, or who thought the vision of God reserved for the apostolic age, or who were scandalized by Symeon’s insistence on the necessity of a Spirit-bearing spiritual father. The polemical edge gives the discourses much of their energy: Symeon argues, cites Scripture and the Fathers, anticipates objections, and presses his case. This is what makes them, for all their mystical fervor, genuinely theological in the disciplined sense — they reason toward conclusions and defend them, rather than merely report experience.

Within this range three strands are especially characteristic of Symeon and especially important for his place in the tradition.

Mystical Exegesis

Symeon reads Scripture as a description of what happens, or ought to happen, within the soul. The events of salvation history — creation, fall, incarnation, resurrection — are not only past facts but realities to be realized in the believer now. This interiorizing, mystical exegesis is the engine of the discourses: the biblical narrative becomes the map of the soul’s own passage from death to the conscious experience of the risen Christ. It is the same conviction that drives all his work, that grace must be consciously known, here given its scriptural foundation (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. III; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, pp. 327–377).

The Eternal “Eighth Day”: The Sunday After Pascha

One of the discourses develops Symeon’s teaching on the Sunday after Pascha (the Sunday of St. Thomas, Antipascha, the “Renewal” or “New Sunday”) as the figure of eternity. In the patristic reckoning the week of seven days images the age of this world; the “eighth day,” falling beyond the seven, images the age to come, the unending day of the Resurrection that has no evening. The image was an ancient one — it runs through Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Maximus — but Symeon gives it his characteristic interiorizing turn: the eighth day is not merely future but already breaking in upon those who have been raised with Christ in this life, so that the eternal day of the Kingdom is something the saints begin to experience now (cf. Symeon, Ethical Discourse on the eighth day; Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. I, with Golitzin’s notes; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, ch. on eschatology). The “rest” of the eighth day is the unending sabbath of those who have entered, even now, into the light of the risen Christ. The teaching joins Symeon’s eschatology to his mysticism: the last things are not only awaited but tasted, and the resurrection is not only a doctrine to be confessed about the body’s future but a present reality to be experienced in the soul. This collapsing of the distance between the “already” and the “not yet” — without dissolving the genuine futurity of the bodily resurrection — is one of the most distinctive notes of Symeon’s eschatology and a chief reason the Ethical Discourses repay close reading.

Deification (Theosis)

The summit of the discourses is the doctrine of deification — that the goal of the Christian life is the conscious participation of the whole human person in the life of God, the becoming-by-grace of what God is by nature. Golitzin’s whole reading turns on this: that Symeon, far from being a rogue mystic, sums up “the doctrine of deification (theosis) as summing up the Christian hope,” and stands therein in direct continuity with Athanasius, Maximus, and the Greek Fathers (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. III). For Symeon deification is inseparable from the vision of the divine light: to be deified is to see and be filled with the uncreated light of God, the same light of Tabor, and to know it as such. This is the teaching that, two centuries later, the Athonite hesychasts would invoke as their precedent (see Toward Palamas).

Symeon presses deification with a boldness that has always startled readers. He does not soften the claim that the Christian, filled with the Spirit, becomes by grace what Christ is by nature — a son of God, a partaker of the divine nature in the literal sense of 2 Peter 1:4, joined to Christ so intimately that the members of the believer’s body become members of Christ. The incarnation, for Symeon, is not a past event commemorated but a present reality reproduced: as the Word once took flesh of the Virgin, so Christ is conceived and born anew within each believer who receives Him in the Spirit. This is among the most daring strands of his theology, and it is precisely in the Ethical Discourses that it is set out at length and defended, rather than merely asserted in the white heat of a hymn (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, chs. on deification and the divine birth; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition).

Theological Weight

Modern scholarship reads the Ethical Discourses as the most systematic Symeon — the part of the corpus where his characteristic claims are not merely asserted from experience but defended and connected. Symeon was never a systematic theologian in the scholastic sense; he wrote, as McGuckin puts it, “from his own immediate experience” (McGuckin, introduction to the Cistercian Practical and Theological Chapters). But within his work the Ethical Discourses come nearest to system, integrating his theology of grace, his sacramental and ecclesial vision, his eschatology of the eighth day, and his doctrine of the light into a single account of the Christian hope. They are, accordingly, the natural place to look for Symeon’s dogmatic content, and the indispensable corrective to any reading that would reduce him to an emotional enthusiast.

The point of Golitzin’s third volume is precisely this rehabilitation. An older scholarship was tempted to read Symeon as an idiosyncratic visionary, a “mystic” standing somewhat apart from the dogmatic mainstream, even a forerunner of an individualistic spirituality. Golitzin’s close reading of the discourses dismantles that picture: Symeon emerges as “a thoroughly traditional representative of central themes in Greek patristic thought,” whose every major claim — deification, the divine light, the conscious presence of the Spirit, the cosmic scope of redemption — has deep roots in the Fathers he inherited (Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. III). What is new in Symeon is not the doctrine but the urgency and personal directness with which he presses it, and his insistence that what the Fathers taught is to be experienced, here and now, by every Christian. Krivocheine, the first great modern editor of Symeon, and Alfeyev, who set him within the wider Byzantine tradition, both build their portraits of Symeon’s theology in large part from this material, and both reach a kindred conclusion: that Symeon’s originality lies not in departing from the tradition but in living it with a peculiar intensity (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition). It is for this reason that the Ethical Discourses, more than the Hymns or even the Catecheses, are the document to which one turns to see how Symeon the mystic and Symeon the theologian are one and the same man.

See Also

References

  • Symeon the New Theologian. Traités théologiques et éthiques. Edited and translated by Jean Darrouzès. Sources Chrétiennes 122 and 129. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1966–1967.
  • Symeon the New Theologian. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. Translated by Alexander Golitzin. 3 vols. (I: The Church and the Last Things; II: On Virtue and the Christian Life; III: Life, Times, and Theology). Popular Patristics Series 14–16. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995–1997.
  • 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.
  • Krivocheine, Basil. In the Light of Christ: Saint Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), Life — Spirituality — Doctrine. 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.