The Reception of St. Symeon the New Theologian

The long road by which a monk suspected of heresy and exiled in his own lifetime became a universally venerated Father and a hidden source of the hesychast tradition: from his disciple Niketas Stethatos — who edited his works and wrote the Life that founded the cult — through the medieval manuscripts, the mixed legacy of the Philokalia (the authentic 153 Chapters beside the pseudonymous Three Methods), the Russian reception through St. Theophan the Recluse, and the twentieth-century scholarly recovery (Krivochéine, Alfeyev, Golitzin, Turner, Griggs), to Symeon’s place — and its misreadings — in contemporary spirituality.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Niketas Stethatos: The Editor and the Cult

Almost everything the Church knows of Symeon’s life, and almost everything it possesses of his works in ordered form, passes through a single hand: that of his disciple Niketas Stethatos (c. 1005–c. 1090), a monk of the Stoudios monastery. Niketas did two decisive things. First, he edited and arranged the entire corpus — the Catecheses, the Theological and Ethical Discourses, the Chapters, and the Hymns — into the collections in which they have been transmitted, supplying titles, ordering, and in the case of the Hymns a defensive preface. Second, more than thirty years after Symeon’s death he composed the Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian, the saintly biography that is the foundation of the cult (Greenfield, The Life of Saint Symeon, DOML 20, introduction; the Life dates from the second half of the eleventh century, “written more than thirty years after Symeon’s death”).

This double role is the central fact — and the central problem — of Symeon’s reception. The methodology requires that hagiographical claims be pinned to their earliest written attestation and never simply “verified” as historical fact (see METHODOLOGY.md §3.5), and here the earliest attestation is also an interested one. Niketas was not a neutral chronicler but Symeon’s apologist, writing to rehabilitate a master whose memory was still clouded — “in his own time a cloud of controversy surrounded him and the suspicion of heresy tainted his reputation long afterward” (Greenfield, DOML 20, introduction) — and the Life is, in the scholarship’s words, a text “teeming with material that would cement the establishment of a saint’s cult.” Modern scholarship therefore reads it as what it is: indispensable but partisan, to be weighed, not transcribed (Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on Niketas as source). What is beyond dispute is that without Niketas there would be no ordered corpus and no Symeon-cult at all; the disciple made the saint available to the centuries.

The Medieval Transmission: A Quiet Presence

Between Niketas and the hesychast revival of the fourteenth century, Symeon’s presence in Byzantine theology is real but quiet. His works survived in the manuscript tradition — the Catecheses, Hymns, and Chapters are preserved in numerous Byzantine codices — but he was not a school author cited in the manner of the great dogmaticians, and his most radical claims (the necessity of conscious experience of grace, the open invitation to the vision of the light) were not the common coin of middle-Byzantine theology. He was read, copied, and revered in monastic circles, above all on the Holy Mountain and in the Stoudite tradition, rather than debated in the capital’s controversies (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3).

The decisive turn came with the hesychast revival. When the fourteenth-century controversy forced the Church to articulate its theology of the uncreated light and the perceptible experience of grace, Symeon became newly usable: a Father, earlier than the controversy and untainted by it, who had already said that the divine light is seen in this life and that grace must be consciously known. St. Gregory Palamas drew on him; the hesychast tradition claimed him as a forerunner. The road from Symeon to Palamas is treated in Section 08. The point for reception is that Symeon’s stature grew as the questions he had answered prematurely became the Church’s official questions.

The Philokalia: A Mixed Legacy

Symeon’s entry into the central anthology of Orthodox spirituality — the Philokalia compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth (Venice, 1782) — both crowned and complicated his reception. The Philokalia carries him in its fourth volume, and the mixture there is the methodological crux of his transmission.

On the one hand it preserves authentic Symeon: the 153 Practical and Theological Chapters (the kephalaia), a genuine work in the classic “chapters” genre, terse aphoristic units on the ascetical and contemplative life (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 4; McGuckin, The Practical and Theological Chapters, Cistercian Studies 41). On the other hand it prints under his name the celebrated Method of Holy Prayer and Attention — the “Three Methods of Attention and Prayer,” which describes a bodily technique for the Jesus Prayer (posture, breathing, the inward gaze) and which became, through the Philokalia, one of the most influential texts in the practice of the prayer of the heart. Yet this text is now generally judged not authentic: “of unknown author, though perhaps understandably attributed to St. Symeon the New Theologian,” and dated rather to the later Palaiologan period than to Symeon’s own (so the standard assessment; cf. the discussion at myriobiblos.gr and the scholarship surveyed at Wikipedia, “Symeon the New Theologian”; treated in detail in method-attribution.md). The mixed legacy is exactly this: the Philokalia both secured Symeon a permanent place at the heart of the hesychast canon and welded to his name a pseudonymous method that has shaped how generations practiced the Jesus Prayer in his name. Sorting the authentic from the attributed is a continuing task of the scholarship, and the methodology requires the dispute be named, not hidden (see METHODOLOGY.md §3).

The Russian Reception: Theophan the Recluse

The Philokalia carried Symeon north. Translated into Church Slavonic by St. Paisius Velichkovsky (the Dobrotolyubie, 1793) and then into Russian and greatly expanded by St. Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) in the five-volume Russian Dobrotolyubie (1877–1889, under the auspices of the Russian Panteleimon monastery on Athos), Symeon entered the bloodstream of Russian Orthodox spirituality (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, The Philokalia, vol. 1, introduction; OrthodoxWiki, “Philokalia”). Theophan did more than translate the Philokalia selections: he rendered larger bodies of Symeon’s homiletic work into Russian, paraphrasing and arranging freely in the manner that characterized his whole Dobrotolyubie project, which “included other texts not in the Greek original as well as paraphrases or omissions.”

This Russian Symeon has a direct line into the modern English-speaking Church, and the connection is a verified and load-bearing one for this repository. Fr. Seraphim Rose‘s principal Symeon translation — the seven homilies on the creation, fall, and redemption of man, published as The Sin of Adam and Our Redemption (1979) and reissued as The First-Created Man — was made not from the Greek but from Theophan’s nineteenth-century Russian (see ../../seraphim-rose/06-patristic-translations/symeon-new-theologian.md). The transmission thus runs Symeon → the Philokalia → Velichkovsky’s Slavonic → Theophan’s Russian → Rose’s English: a four-stage chain in which a Byzantine abbot reaches a twentieth-century American convert through the Russian recluse who had reshaped him. Naming that chain — and the fact that Rose worked at one remove from the Greek — is part of reading him honestly.

The Twentieth-Century Recovery

The modern, critical recovery of Symeon belongs to the second half of the twentieth century and is, fittingly, in large part the work of Russian émigré scholarship. Archbishop Basil Krivochéine (1900–1985), with Joseph Paramelle, produced the critical edition of the Catecheses in the Sources chrétiennes series (SC 96, 1963; SC 104, 1964; SC 113, 1965), part of the larger critical edition of Symeon’s works carried out between 1957 and 1973 by Darrouzès, Krivochéine, Koder, Paramelle, and Neyrand in nine Sources chrétiennes volumes — the textual foundation of all subsequent study. Krivochéine crowned the edition with his synthetic study In the Light of Christ (French 1980; English, SVS Press, 1986), still the standard theological introduction.

A second wave of scholarship made Symeon available and interpreted in English. Hilarion Alfeyev’s Oxford monograph, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2000), is now the standard study of his place within the patristic inheritance — though it has drawn criticism for reading Symeon too smoothly into later Orthodox consensus. Alexander Golitzin translated the Ethical Discourses as On the Mystical Life (3 vols., SVS Press, 1995–1997); H. J. M. Turner edited the Epistles (Oxford, 2009) and wrote on Symeon as spiritual father; Daniel K. Griggs gave English readers the complete Hymns of Divine Eros in Divine Eros (Popular Patristics 40, SVS Press, 2010); and C. J. deCatanzaro had earlier translated the Catecheses as The Discourses (1980). Through this body of work the controversial monk became one of the best-edited and most studied of the Byzantine mystics (survey at Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition; SVS Press and Oxford catalogues).

Symeon in Contemporary Spirituality — and Its Misreadings

Symeon’s modern appeal is unmistakable and rests on a single feature: his insistence on personal, conscious experience. In an age suspicious of merely institutional or notional religion, his demand that every Christian perceive the grace of baptism, his vivid first-person accounts of the vision of the light, and his contempt for a faith that goes through the motions speak with extraordinary directness. This is precisely what Fr. Seraphim Rose seized on — a patristic precedent for the conviction that authentic Orthodoxy requires the inner transformation of the heart, not only correct doctrine and practice (see ../../seraphim-rose/06-patristic-translations/symeon-new-theologian.md).

But the same feature invites misreading, and the methodology asks that the sensitive point be handled with care (see METHODOLOGY.md §4). Symeon’s “experience” is not the modern cult of subjective feeling, nor the affective enthusiasm of the charismatic movements, nor a warrant for spiritual individualism set loose from the Church. His experience is ecclesial and sacramental to the root: it is the conscious activation of baptismal grace, it unfolds under obedience to a spiritual father (his own veneration of Symeon Eulabes is its model), it is ordered to the Eucharist and to tears of repentance, and it is disciplined by the whole ascetical tradition. To read him as a freelance mystic of “experience” against the institutional Church inverts him — for Symeon the inner experience is the Church’s own life made conscious, not an alternative to it (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ). Rose himself read Symeon this way, as a witness against the charismatic counterfeit, not for it (see True Orthodoxy). The reception of Symeon is still contested at exactly the point where it is most alive: whether his “conscious experience of the Holy Spirit” is read inside the Church that bore him or outside it.

References

Niketas Stethatos. The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. Catechetical Discourses. Critical edition with French translation: Krivochéine, Basile, and Joseph Paramelle, eds. Sources chrétiennes 96 (1963), 104 (1964), 113 (1965). Paris: Éditions du Cerf. [Part of the nine-volume SC critical edition, 1957–1973, by Darrouzès, Krivochéine, Koder, Paramelle, and Neyrand.]
St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. Translated by Alexander Golitzin. 3 vols. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995–1997.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Translated by Daniel K. Griggs. Popular Patristics Series 40. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2010.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Practical and Theological Chapters and the Three Theological Discourses. Translated by Paul McGuckin. Cistercian Studies 41. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. 4 (the 153 Chapters; the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention) and vol. 1 (introduction on Velichkovsky and Theophan). London: Faber and Faber, 1979–1995.
Krivochéine, Archbishop Basil. In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Translated by Anthony P. Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS 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. The Epistles of St Symeon the New Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; and St. Symeon the New Theologian and Spiritual Fatherhood. Leiden: Brill, 1990.
“Symeon the New Theologian,” “Philokalia,” and “Theophan the Recluse,” OrthodoxWiki / Wikipedia (used to locate the Dobrotolyubie publication data, the SC edition volumes, and the pseudonymity of the Three Methods; followed to the editions and to Krivochéine and Alfeyev for terminal citations).
St. Symeon the New Theologian. The First-Created Man: Seven Homilies. Translated from the Russian of St. Theophan the Recluse by Fr. Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press (first published as The Sin of Adam and Our Redemption, 1979).