The Three Methods and the Question of Attribution

The treatise On the Three Methods of Prayer — the classic description of the hesychast psychosomatic technique, transmitted under St. Symeon the New Theologian’s name and printed under it in the Philokalia — is no longer regarded by scholarship as Symeon’s own work. Irénée Hausherr’s 1927 study established the case for pseudonymity, and the consensus since holds the text to be pseudo-Symeon. The misattribution mattered: it was partly through this “Symeon” that Barlaam attacked the hesychasts — a controversy whose irony is that the great witness to the experience of divine light was being invoked over a method he very likely never wrote.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

What the Text Is

On the Three Methods of Prayer (also titled, in the manuscripts, Method of Holy Prayer and Attention) is a short treatise describing a discipline of interior prayer. It distinguishes three “methods” or degrees of attention, commending the third — the descent of the mind (nous) into the heart — and it gives the psychosomatic technique its most explicit description: a seated, bowed posture, the regulation of the breath, and the focusing of attention inward toward the region of the heart, all in service of the unceasing invocation of the Jesus Prayer (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber, 1995). It is, in effect, the most concrete “how-to” of the bodily method that the fourteenth-century Athonite hesychasts practiced, and it is printed in the Philokalia among Symeon’s works.

The Attribution Scholarship

The text reached the Philokalia, and centuries of readers, under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian. Modern scholarship does not accept the ascription. The decisive study is Irénée Hausherr’s La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, published in Orientalia Christiana IX (Rome, 1927), which edited the Greek text, translated it, and argued in detail that it cannot be the work of Symeon the New Theologian — that it belongs rather to the later hesychast milieu and circulated pseudonymously under his prestigious name (Hausherr, La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, Orientalia Christiana IX, 1927). Among the candidates discussed for the actual authorship, Nikephoros the Monk (Nikephoros the Hesychast, fl. later 13th century), the figure most associated with the written description of the psychosomatic method, is frequently named.

Hausherr’s case rested on several converging considerations: the manuscript tradition is unstable and assigns the work variously; its style and vocabulary diverge from the secure corpus of Symeon edited from the genuine manuscripts; and its very subject — a step-by-step description of bodily technique as the organizing frame of prayer — is foreign to the way the authentic Symeon writes about prayer, which is dominated by repentance, tears, and the conscious reception of grace rather than by posture and breath. The work fits far more naturally in the later hesychast milieu of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where the explicit written description of the psychosomatic method belongs, than in the eleventh-century world of Symeon and his elder. Hausherr accordingly published the treatise as the first exposition of the hesychast method, “attributed to Symeon the New Theologian” — the qualifying phrase doing deliberate work (Hausherr, La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, 1927).

The current consensus follows Hausherr: the treatise is not Symeon’s, and is properly cited as pseudo-Symeon. This repository marks the attribution consistently across its files. The verified treatment in The Jesus Prayer records the disputed status in a structured note — that the treatise “is transmitted under the name of St. Symeon the New Theologian and is printed under it in the Philokalia… modern scholarship, following Irénée Hausherr’s 1927 critical edition, generally regards it as pseudonymous, with Nikephoros the Monk among the suggested authors” — and the same judgment governs the treatment of the method in St. Gregory Palamas: hesychast formation. The point is worth stating plainly: the genuine corpus of Symeon, as edited in the Sources Chrétiennes series and translated by McGuckin and Golitzin, does not include On the Three Methods of Prayer.

Why the Misattribution Mattered

The pseudonymity is not a mere bibliographical footnote, because the text stood near the center of the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy. When Barlaam of Calabria encountered the prayer of the Athonite and Constantinopolitan monks around 1337–1338, the psychosomatic method — the posture, the breathing, the gaze toward the heart — was exactly what scandalized him; he caricatured the monks as men who located the soul in the navel (the omphalopsychoi, “navel-souls”) and ridiculed the technique as a gross materialization of prayer (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, pp. 134–142). Since the treatise describing that method circulated under Symeon’s name, Barlaam’s attack fell, in part, on “Symeon” — that is, on a text the great mystic almost certainly did not write.

Barlaam’s mockery fastened on the bodily dimension above all. He derided the monks as omphalopsychoi — “navel-souls” — caricaturing the technique of bowing the head toward the chest and fixing the gaze toward the heart as a crude claim that the soul resides in the navel and that God can be seen with bodily eyes. The caricature was unfair, but it was effective precisely because the written description on which it fastened was real and circulated under a great name (Meyendorff, Study, pp. 134–142).

Herein lies the controversy’s irony. Symeon the New Theologian was the supreme witness of the Byzantine tradition to the conscious vision of the uncreated divine light. His name was attached to a manual of bodily technique; and through that misattributed manual his authority became entangled in a dispute about a method, while the deeper thing for which Symeon really stood — the experience of the light itself — was the very thing Palamas had to defend on its own ground (see Toward Palamas). St. Gregory Palamas’s first task in the Triads was accordingly not to defend the technique as such but to explain the genuine Christian anthropology behind it — that the human person is a unity of soul and body, that the body too is destined for glory and even now shares in the grace given to the soul, so that the bodily disciplines of posture and breath are fitting aids to the gathering of a scattered mind. The method, rightly understood, is an aid to attention, never a means of coercing God; the vision of the light, where it is granted, is His gift and not the technique’s product (Meyendorff, Study, pp. 134–142; The Philokalia, vol. 4). That Palamas had to argue this at length, against a caricature fastened to a pseudonymous text, is the measure of how much mischief the misattribution caused.

What Symeon Actually Taught About Prayer

Set beside pseudo-Symeon, the difference of the genuine Symeon is instructive. In his authentic works — the Catecheses, the Hymns, the Ethical Discourses, and the Practical and Theological Chapters — Symeon says comparatively little about bodily posture and breathing and a great deal about repentance, tears, the keeping of the commandments, and the conscious reception of the Holy Spirit. His insistence is not on a technique but on a condition of soul: that the one who truly repents and obeys Christ’s commandments is granted, even in this life, the conscious experience of grace and the vision of the divine light (Symeon, Catecheses, ed. Krivocheine and Paramelle, Sources Chrétiennes 96, 104, 113; Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ; Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition). Where pseudo-Symeon offers a method of attention, the real Symeon offers a theology of grace consciously experienced — and warns, as the whole neptic tradition warns, that the vision is God’s gift and never the product of any technique.

None of this is to say that the genuine Symeon was hostile to the body in prayer, or that the psychosomatic method is alien to his spirit. The method, rightly used, serves the very recollection Symeon prized, and the later tradition that produced and transmitted On the Three Methods of Prayer could fairly claim Symeon as a kindred witness to the unity of body and soul in the life of grace. The correction is narrower and exact: a particular technical treatise is not from Symeon’s pen, and to cite it as his — as the Philokalia‘s heading invites — is to mistake the later hesychast codification of method for the eleventh-century mystic’s own teaching. Keeping the two apart honors both: the real Symeon is not reduced to a drill-master, and the genuine wisdom of the psychosomatic tradition is not made to depend on a false signature.

The distinction matters for the integrity of Symeon’s reception: his standing as a forerunner of hesychasm rests not on a manual of posture wrongly bearing his name, but on the genuine and revolutionary insistence, throughout his authentic corpus, that the Christian is called to see and be transfigured by the light of God here and now (see The Ethical Discourses and The Practical and Theological Chapters).

References

Hausherr, Irénée. La méthode d’oraison hésychaste. Orientalia Christiana IX/2 (no. 36). Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1927.
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 the treatise printed as “The Three Methods of Prayer,” ascribed to Symeon the New Theologian.)
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Translated by George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.
Symeon the New Theologian. Catéchèses. Edited by Basil Krivocheine, translated by Joseph Paramelle. Sources Chrétiennes 96, 104, 113. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963–1965.
Krivocheine, Basil. In the Light of Christ: Saint 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.