The Practical and Theological Chapters

St. Symeon the New Theologian’s Practical and Theological Chapters — three “centuries” of short numbered sentences (kephalaia) on the ascetic and contemplative life — are his contribution to the great monastic genre of the spiritual century. From this larger corpus the Philokalia drew its selection of 153 chapters, the form in which most readers first meet Symeon’s teaching on watchfulness, dispassion, and the vision of the divine light.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Author and His Setting

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) was born at Galatai in Paphlagonia and came to Constantinople, where he placed himself under the direction of the monk Symeon the Pious (Symeon Eulabes, “the Reverent,” of the Stoudios monastery), the spiritual father whose memory he would honor with a veneration so fervent that it later drew official censure. After a period at the great Stoudios monastery he transferred to the small monastery of St. Mamas, of which he became abbot (hegoumenos) some three years later, and where the bulk of his teaching was delivered to his monks. A controversy with Stephen of Nicomedia over Symeon’s unauthorized cult of his departed elder led to his exile across the Bosphorus, where he settled near the ruined oratory of St. Marina and composed much of his written corpus; he was later partly rehabilitated (Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience of 16 September 2009; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1). The honorific “the New Theologian” — a title the tradition otherwise reserved to St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory of Nazianzus — marks the singular authority his witness to the conscious experience of God came to carry.

The Work and Its Title

Among the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian, abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, stands a collection of brief, numbered chapters on the spiritual life. In the critical edition of Jean Darrouzès the work bears the full title Chapitres théologiques, gnostiques et pratiques — “Theological, Gnostic, and Practical Chapters” — and is arranged in three “centuries,” that is, three sets of roughly one hundred chapters each (Symeon, Chapitres théologiques, gnostiques et pratiques, ed. J. Darrouzès, Sources Chrétiennes 51, Paris: Cerf, 1957). The threefold heading reflects the threefold subject matter the Byzantine tradition assigned to such collections: the practical chapters treat the active life of ascesis and the keeping of the commandments; the gnostic (or natural-contemplative) chapters treat discernment and the contemplation of created things; and the theological chapters treat the knowledge of God himself, the summit toward which the whole ascent is ordered.

As with the genuine Symeon generally, the chapters were gathered and transmitted by his disciple and biographer Niketas Stethatos (c. 1005–c. 1090), who edited the master’s corpus after his death and is the channel through which it reached the later tradition (Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ, pp. 33–55; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1).

The Genre: The Spiritual Kephalaia

The “chapter” (kephalaion) — a self-contained sentence or short paragraph, gathered with others into “centuries” of roughly a hundred — is one of the most characteristic literary forms of Eastern Christian monasticism. It is deliberately aphoristic rather than discursive. Each unit stands alone, fit for memorization and slow, prayerful rumination, yet the chapters are arranged so that a teaching accumulates across them. The form is itself ascetical: it resists cursory reading and compels the reader to pause, to return, to chew over a single sentence in the cell.

The genre is not a neutral container but shapes what can be said in it. Because each chapter must stand alone, the form favors the distilled maxim over the developed argument; because the chapters accumulate, it favors a teaching that can be approached from many angles and circled back upon. It suits a master who teaches not a system to be mastered once but a way to be walked daily, and it presupposes a reader who will live with the text over years rather than read it through once. Symeon, who insisted above all on the lived and repeated experience of grace, found in it a fitting vehicle.

The genre descends above all from Evagrius of Pontus, whose Praktikos and Gnostic Chapters established the model, and reaches its classic Greek-patristic expression in St. Maximus the Confessor, whose Four Hundred Texts on Love and Chapters on Theology and the Economy are the great exemplars Symeon inherited (see Centuries on Love). Symeon’s own Chapters take their place squarely within this lineage; and the genre runs on past him — through his disciple Stethatos, whose own three centuries stand in the Philokalia, and into the fourteenth century, where St. Gregory Palamas cast his most systematic work in precisely this mould (see The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters). The number 150, with its resonance of the Psalter, and the number 100, with its resonance of fullness, are the conventional measures of the form; Symeon’s three centuries and the Philokalic 153 are variations within it.

The Philokalic 153 Texts

When St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth compiled the Philokalia (Venice, 1782), they included under Symeon’s name a set of 153 chapters, headed in the English translation “One Hundred and Fifty-Three Practical and Theological Texts” (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber, 1995). This Philokalic selection is the form in which Symeon’s chapters became most widely known.

Two textual points should be kept clear. First, the number 153 is itself symbolic — it is the number of fish in the miraculous catch of John 21:11, a figure the Fathers read as signifying completeness, and the same count chosen for Diadochos of Photike’s On Spiritual Knowledge. Second, the Philokalic collection does not correspond exactly to the three centuries of the critical edition: the editors of the Philokalia drew on Symeon’s chapters and on the manuscript tradition to present a selection of 153, so that the relation between the Venice text and the Sources Chrétiennes edition is one of overlapping selection rather than identity (Darrouzès, SC 51, introduction; Philokalia, vol. 4, introductory note to Symeon). The repository’s verified treatment of the genuine corpus follows the critical edition for the underlying text while recognizing the 153 as the Philokalic form in which the chapters circulated.

What the Chapters Teach

The chapters move along the familiar arc from ascetic struggle to the vision of God, but with the immediacy and insistence on personal experience that mark everything Symeon wrote. The practical chapters set out the foundations: repentance, tears, obedience, the cutting off of one’s own will, the keeping of the commandments as the indispensable condition of all advance. Faith without works, Symeon insists, is dead; the commandments are not preliminaries to be left behind but the very road on which grace travels.

The gnostic and theological chapters turn to the fruit of this labor — apatheia (dispassion), pure prayer, and the knowledge of God that is no mere conclusion of reasoning but a real participation in the divine light. Here Symeon’s distinctive note sounds most clearly: that the grace of the Holy Spirit is to be consciously experienced, not merely believed in the abstract. He is famous for insisting that the one who claims to possess the Spirit while feeling nothing of His working deceives himself; the saints know the light they see. As McGuckin observes, Symeon “wrote as he had taught — from his own immediate experience,” and the chapters are accordingly studded with first-hand testimony to the vision of light (McGuckin, introduction to Symeon the New Theologian: The Practical and Theological Chapters and the Three Theological Discourses, Cistercian Studies 41, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982).

A characteristic chapter on the Trinitarian indwelling reads: the one who has within himself the light of the all-holy Spirit, unable to bear the sight of it, falls prostrate and cries aloud, beside himself, seeing what is beyond nature (cf. Symeon, Chapters III; Philokalia vol. 4). Another insists that knowledge of God by hearsay is to knowledge by experience as a description of a city is to the city itself. The chapters thus distil, in compressed and quotable form, the whole of Symeon’s larger teaching: that the goal of the Christian life is the conscious, transforming vision of God already in this life, and that this vision is offered not to a few extraordinary ascetics only but to all who truly repent and keep the commandments.

Several themes recur with insistent regularity across the three centuries. Repentance and tears are the gateway: Symeon will not allow that the spiritual life can advance without the gift of compunction, the weeping that washes the soul and prepares it to receive grace. The conscious presence of the Spirit is the touchstone of authenticity: to claim baptism and the Christian name while feeling nothing of the Spirit’s working is, for Symeon, self-deception, for the grace given in the sacraments is meant to be awakened and known. The keeping of the commandments is not preliminary discipline but the very substance of love for Christ, who Himself bound love and obedience together. And the divine light crowns the whole: the chapters return again and again to the light that the purified soul beholds, a light Symeon identifies with God Himself and with the radiance that shone on Tabor. The progression they describe is therefore not a technique but a transfiguration — the soul passing from death through repentance to the conscious experience of the risen and glorified Christ.

It is worth stressing how democratic Symeon’s vision is. Where some currents of the tradition reserved the highest contemplative gifts for a rare elite of perfected monks, Symeon insists that the vision of God in light is the proper inheritance of every baptized Christian who will undertake the labor of repentance — a conviction that gave his teaching both its power and its capacity to provoke. This refusal to confine the experience of grace to a spiritual aristocracy is among the things that most clearly mark him out, and it is the same conviction that, transmitted through the Philokalia, would arm the hesychasts against the charge that the vision of light was a presumptuous novelty.

Textual History and Place in the Corpus

The Chapters belong with Symeon’s other major prose works — the Catecheses (oral instructions to his monks; ed. Krivocheine and Paramelle, SC 96, 104, 113) and the Theological and Ethical Treatises (the Ethical Discourses; ed. Darrouzès, SC 122, 129) — as part of the corpus assembled and published by Niketas Stethatos. Where the Catecheses are sermons and the Ethical Discourses sustained treatises (see The Ethical Discourses), the Chapters offer Symeon’s teaching in its most concentrated, memorizable form. It is largely through this concentrated form, carried in the Philokalia, that Symeon’s experiential theology of the light passed to the Athonite hesychasts of the fourteenth century and beyond (see Toward Palamas).

See Also

References

  • Symeon the New Theologian. Chapitres théologiques, gnostiques et pratiques. Edited and translated by Jean Darrouzès. Sources Chrétiennes 51. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1957.
  • 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.
  • The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4. Compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Macarius of Corinth. Translated by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. (Includes “St Symeon the New Theologian: One Hundred and Fifty-Three Practical and Theological Texts.”)
  • 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.