Christian Faith as Experience: Symeon the New Theologian.

In Macarius and in Diadochus, we noted the identification of the Christian faith itself with a conscious-experience of God. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) becomes a prophet of that idea in Medieval Byzantium. Disciple of a Studite monk, the “New Theologian” — a title given to him by his later admirers in order to identify him with John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus, both often called “Theologians” in Byzantine literature — started his monastic life as a novice at the Studion. But the strict regimentation of the big monastery was obviously foreign to his temperament, and he withdrew to the small community of St. Mamas, also in Constantinople, where he was soon elected abbot and ordained priest. His leadership at St. Mamas lasted more than twenty-five years but ended in a conflict when a monastic party in his commmunity complained to the ecclesiastical authorities about the demands he imposed on his monks. Exiled, then rehabilitated, Symeon spent his last years composing spiritual writings quite unique in their mystical originality, their poetic quality, and their influence on later Byzantine thought. His works include Catechetical Discourses addressed to the monks of St. Mamas, Theological and Ethical Treatises, fifty-eight hymns, and several minor writings.

Symeon has often been classified as a major representative of the hesychast tradition in Byzantium following in the line of Evagrius and Macarius and anticipating Gregory Palamas. This classification should be accepted only with reservations however since Symeon neither makes any specific mention of “prayer of the mind” nor insists on any clearly formulated theological distinction between “essence” and “energy” in God. But it is clear that Symeon stands for the basic understanding of Christianity as personal communion with and vision of God, a position, which he shares with hesychasm and with the patristic tradition as a whole. Like all prophets, he expresses the Christian experience without definite concern for precise terminology. It is therefore easy to find him at variance with any established tradition or with any theological system. In the midst of the tradition-minded Byzantine society, Symeon stands as a unique case of personal mysticism but also as an important witness of the inevitable tension in Christianity between all forms of “establishment” and the freedom of the Spirit.

Often autobiographical Symeon’s writings are centred on the reality of a conscious encounter with Christ, and here, it is obviously that he follows Macarius. “Yes, I beg you,” he addresses his monks, “let us try now, in this life, to see and contemplate Him. For if we are deemed worthy to see Him sensibly, we shall not see death; death will have no dominion over us [Rm 6:9].” ²⁰ The notion of “sensible” vision makes Symeon, as well as Macarius, a border on Messalianism; but it is generally known today²¹ that Symeon’s intent differs fundamentally from that of the sectarians who defined “experience” in opposition to the sacramental structure of the Church. What Symeon wants to make clear is that the Kingdom of God has indeed become an attainable reality, it does not belong only to the “future life,” and it is not restricted to the “spiritual” or “intellectual” part of man alone in this life but involves his entire existence. “Through the Holy Spirit,” he writes, “the resurrection of all of us occurs. And I do not speak only of the final resurrection of the body... [Christ] through His Holy Spirit grants even now the Kingdom of heaven.”²² And in order to affirm that this experience of the Kingdom is not in any sense a human “merit,” a simple and due reward for ascetic practice, Symeon insists on its “sudden” and unexpected character. In passages where he recalls his own conversion, he likes to emphasize that he was not aware of who was pulling him out of the “mud” of the world to show him finally the beatitude of the Kingdom.²³

Symeon’s prophetic insistence that the Christian faith is an experience of the living Christ met with resistance; the legalistic and minimalistic view of Christianity, limiting the faith to the performance of “obligations,” seemed much more realistic to monks and laymen alike. For Symeon, these minimalists were modern heretics:

Here are those whom I call heretics [he proclaims in a homily addressed to his community]: those who say that there is no one in our time in our midst that would observe the commandments of the Gospel and become like the holy Fathers... [and] those who pretend that this is impossible. This person has not fallen into some particular heresy but into all the heresies at once, since this one is worse than into all in its impiety... If anyone speaks in this way, he destroys all the divine scriptures. These anti-Christs affirm: “This is impossible, impossible!”²⁴

Symeon was involved at the end of his life in violent conflict with Stephen, a former metropolitan of Nicomedia who had become a syncellus, administrative official, of the patriarchate, on the issue of the canonization of his spiritual father, Symeon the Pious, which he had performed in his community without the proper hierarchical sanction. The New Theologian was given an opportunity to raise the question of authority in the Church by opposing the charismatic personality of the saint to that of the institution. His statements on this problem can be very easily interpreted as anti-hierarchical in principle: according to Symeon, if one accepts the episcopate without having received the vision, one is nothing but an intruder.²⁵ On this point, Symeon reflects a frame of mind, which had existed in both ancient and Byzantine Christianity, in pseudo-Dionysius, and in the Macarian tradition of monasticism; but the subjectivism, which may be involved in such an interpretation, is an ecclesiological problem in itself.

Here as always, Symeon is not directly concerned with rationalization; his purpose is to formulate the tension between the Kingdom and “this world,” to affirm that the tension between the “institution” and the “event” is built into the very existence of the Church in history. The New Theologian’s realistic sacramentalism shows clearly that this tension, not the denial of the sacramental nature of the Church, is his true concern. The Byzantine Church canonized Symeon the New Theologian, and generations оf Eastern Christians have seen him as the greatest mystic of the Middle Ages. By doing so, Byzantine Christianity has recognized that in the Church the Spirit alone is the ultimate criterion of truth and the only final authority.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 534