St. Symeon the New Theologian and the Two Poles of the Church’s Life

He was called an “enthusiast,” and he was opposed by powerful members of the hierarchy of the Church, but he is not John Wesley.

He taught that Christians may experience a “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” but he is not a contemporary Pentecostal preacher.

This charismatic Christian is St. Symeon the New Theologian, who lived in a monastery in Constantinople in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.

Symeon is an important figure in Eastern Orthodoxy, but he is relatively unknown to mainline and evangelical Christians in the West. However, among Pentecostals around the globe, Symeon is one of the most studied saints in the Christian tradition. Symeon’s importance to Pentecostals is a sign of the increasing theological sophistication of this very important, growing communion of the Christian Church.

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) was born in Galatia to parents who were part of the provincial nobility. He finished his secondary education at the court of the Byzantine emperors. At the age of fourteen he met the man who would become his spiritual father, Symeon the Studite–so-called because he was a monk of the famous monastery in Constantinople, the Studion, which became the model for the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Greece. While young Symeon wanted to enter the Studion at age fourteen, his spiritual father made him wait until he was twenty-seven years old. In the meantime, Symeon managed a great household while living the life of a monk in the evenings. After he was finally admitted into the Studion, the abbot requested that he leave after only a few months. Then Symeon the Studite led him to a small, run-down monastery nearby, the monastery of St. Mamas. Within three years, he was made a monk, ordained priest, and elected abbot of St. Mamas. He remained at St. Mamas for twenty-five years until he was exiled by Archbishop Stephen, the chief theologian in the emperor’s court. He retired to a small town on the Bosphorus where he built a small community of monks and lived in relative solitude. Even though the patriarch of Constantinople ended his exile and even offered him the office of archbishop, Symeon elected to remain until his death with his disciples at his place of retirement which he called St. Marina.

St. Symeon the New Theologian is one of only three saints of Eastern Orthodoxy who are called a “Theologian.” The others are the apostle John and Gregory of Nanzianzus. It seems that the designation “New” was originally used to distinguish between Symeon and his spiritual father, Symeon the Studite, i.e. “Symeon the New.” Later the saint was honored as a “theologian.” In the Eastern Christian tradition, the term “theologian” designates knowledge of God that is given through prayer rather than mere intellectual brilliance or academic learning.

As a “Theologian,” Symeon’s Christian life is distinguished by Symeon’s experience of the divine. Indeed, he is the first saint in the Eastern Orthodox tradition who spoke at length about his own mystical experiences of the presence of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because he spoke so much about his own experience in the Holy Spirit and taught a “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” he is viewed by contemporary Pentecostals as a significant model and teacher.

Symeon wrote down his messages to his monks in Discourses, and he also wrote Hymns of Divine Love and several theological treatises. Some other spiritual writings, including his “centuries” (a traditional compilation of one hundred maxims), are included in the treasury of Orthodox spirituality, the Philokalia. Two of his writings are included in Writings From The Philokalia On Prayer Of The Heart, Tr. by E. Kadloubovsky and G.E.H. Palmer (London:  faber and faber, 1951, reprint 1991).

The Discourses represent Symeon’s instructions to his monks at St. Mamas, and they are his most personal writings, including accounts of two dramatic visions which he had during his life. An English translation of the Discourses by C.J. De Catanzaro is a volume in The Classics of Western Spirituality, Symeon the New Theologian:  The Discourses (Mahwah, New Jersey:  Paulist Press, 1980).

The most important characteristic of Symeon’s teaching is that everyone who believes in the triune God by faith in Jesus Christ may experience the transformation of the Holy Spirit here and now. In Discourse XXXIII, Symeon interprets the meaning of being baptized with the Holy Spirit. He says that “unless one is baptized with the Holy Spirit, he does not become a son of God or a fellow-heir with Christ (cf. Rom. 8:17).” It is by the Holy Spirit that we obtain genuine knowledge of God.

In Discourse XXII, Symeon describes one of his dramatic visions. While he was a monk, one night he was standing and praying,”God, have mercy upon me, a sinner,” and “suddenly a flood of divine radiance appeared from above and filled all the room.” In this vision, his “mind ascended to heaven,” and he saw Symeon the Studite whom he knew had interceded for him.

In Discourse XVI, he told his fellow monks about his experience of ecstasy in the light which occurred to him while he was still a layman. He began to pray, “Holy God,” and he was filled with tears of desire for God. He fell prostrate, and “behold, a great light was immaterially shining on me and seized hold of my whole mind and soul, so that I was struck with amazement at the unexpected marvel and I was, as it were, in ecstasy.”

It is interesting to compare St. Symeon with two saints of the Western Church who lived in the same general epoch — St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). St. Symeon accentuates personal experience of the Holy Spirit. By contrast, St. Anselm concentrates on intellectual apprehension of divine revelation. St. Bernard is a Western counterpart to St. Symeon with his language of “embrace, kiss, ecstasy, and marriage” to describe the union of the soul with the Word, but St. Bernard’s mysticism is couched in familiar Western Christian language which is less biblical and personalistic than the rhetoric of St. Symeon.

While Symeon had ecstatic experiences in the Spirit, it is necessary to observe that most of his teaching emphasized the necessity to obey the teaching of Jesus, to practice fasting and self-control, and exercise repentance with tears. Indeed, he counseled that experience of the light of the Holy Spirit comes to those who are weeping in repentance because of their sins. Moreover, these instructions are given in accordance with the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity and other dogmas.

In Discourse XXXIII, Symeon makes clear that receiving the Holy Spirit is conditioned on a deep repentance: “Display a worthy penitence by means of all sorts of deeds and words, that you may draw to yourselves the grace of the all-holy Spirit. For this Spirit, when He descends on you, becomes like a pool of light to you, which encompasses you completely in an unutterable manner. As it regenerates you, it changes you from corruptible to incorruptible, from mortal to immortal, from sons of men into Sons of God and gods by adoption and grace — that is, if you desire to appear as kinsmen and fellow-heirs of the saints and enter with all of them into the kingdom of Heaven.”

Symeon’s emphasis on the strenuous moral effort entailed by living according to the grace of the Holy Spirit may call to mind the name of the American Christian sect, the “Pentecostal Holiness Church,” because of Symeon’s integration of experience of the Spirit with commitment to holiness. His view is epitomized in the first of Symeon’s “Practical and Theological Precepts” in the Philokalia: “Faith is (readiness) to die for Christ’s sake, for His commandments, in the conviction that such death brings life; it is to regard poverty as riches, insignificance and nothingness as true fame and glory and, having nothing, to be sure that you possess all things. But above all, faith is attainment of the invisible treasure of the knowledge of Christ, regarding everything visible as dust or smoke.”

Symeon would not be a saint or a “theologian” of the Orthodox communion if he were not orthodox in both his theology and spirituality. However, it is true that he pushed the envelope of the canons of the Church by his distinctive emphases. In particular he encountered criticism from the hierarchy because he taught that those who were baptized by the Holy Spirit and who experienced the light of the Holy Spirit, like his spiritual father Symeon the Studite, a layman, had divine authority to receive confession and to absolve sins. His fervent teaching about experiencing the Spirit was viewed as dangerous by his main opponent, Archbishop Stephen, who managed to obtain Symeon’s exile.

By his life and teaching, Symeon embodies how the life of the Church includes the two poles of institution and charism. As St. Irenaeus said, the Father has two “hands,” the Son and the Spirit. The incarnate Son Jesus Christ instituted the Church on earth, and the Holy Spirit constitutes the Church daily. Symeon lived on the charismatic pole of the Church, but in a way that manifested his recognition of its necessary institutional pole.

The Eastern Christian communions have always recognized these two poles. Indeed, in Eastern Christianity there is a continual open tension between the bishops and the monks, between the authority of the Church as an institution and the authority of the Church as a charismatic communion of the Holy Spirit. The late Father John Meyendorff wrote in Catholicity and the Church (New York:  St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), “The Spirit bestows upon the bishops a ‘certain charisma of truth (charisma veritatis certum [St. Irenaeus]), but He never becomes prisoner of an institution, or the personal monopoly of any human being. ‘Where the Church is,’ writes St. Irenaeus again, ‘there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace; but the Spirit is Truth.’ It is not the Church which, through the medium of its institutions, bestows the Spirit, but it is the Spirit which validates every aspect of Church life, including the institutions.”

As Pentecostals today have discovered, St. Symeon the New Theologian is a guide for how to be a member of the Church that is instituted by Christ and constituted by the Holy Spirit. In the Church both institution and charism, the law of Christ and the light of the Spirit, belong together. In this way, the Church is saved from a deadly institutionalism and also from an antinomian Spiritualism. The Spirit gives life, not the letter, but the life that the Spirit gives is knowledge of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son, and power to live according to his commandments.