St. Symeon the New Theologian

There is a particular spiritual sublimity that seems to glow from the pages of early Christian theology and mysticism in their linkage of the Trinity and contemplation.  One gets a sense of mystery and profundity that is rarely found today.  In fact I think linking the Trinity to spirituality in most literature usually ends up as little more than the affirmation of the platitude that God is community.  But even with that necessary affirmation of our communal God, I think the difference between say, St. Symeon, and many recent invocations of Trinitarian spirituality and theology is the difference, crudely put, between first and third person perspectives.

Often God-as-community is spoken about in the third person, so to speak, as an “object,” or reified set of criteria, which can then be utilized as a sort of paradigm for community.  The church then, in a sense, becomes a sort of “deictic,” sign of this Trinitarian community—which in and of itself is unobjectionable.   But mere deictic “correspondence,” with its Trinitarian “referent” always contains a dangerous irony in that while it is an attempt to re-incorporate Trinitarian thought into theology, it nonetheless keeps the Trinity at bay as a sort of quasi-exterior exemplar or archetype.  It “abstracts,” the trinity from the actual economy of salvation to create an “ideal type” of communal structure immanent to the Godhead itself which then serves paradigmatically as a precedent for certain sorts of ecclesial structure.

Symeon does not speak in this manner however.  Whatever he might think of the Trinity as a social criterion (and I think at many levels he would find much to both like and dislike), the fact is that it appears for Symeon the very recognition of the mystery of the Trinity itself, is already to be caught up into its operation and economy.  He does not—and indeed cannot—stand at a distance, as it were, from the Trinity to view it as a “criterion,” at all.  It is telling that he uses the term “outer wisdom” to speak specifically of illegitimate natural-philosophical approaches to God.  These literally have an “objectifying” tendency where they cause God to stand “outside,” us as an object of the intellectual gaze.  Its counterpoint for Symeon is the “interior” wisdom given by the Spirit (which appears to be none-other than the Spirit itself).  The Trinitarian relations cannot be modeled point for point (or however analogously) in an ecclesial “correspondence,”;  the church is Trinitarian not in this sort of abstract equivalence, but is caught up into the life of the Trinity itself. “These are mysteries,” he writes, “which are unveiled through an intelligible contemplation enacted by the operation of the Holy Spirit in those to whom it has been given—and is ever given—to know them by virtue of the grace from on high.” (114) and “For if no one knows the Son except the Father, neither does anyone know the Father except the Son and whomever the Son may wish to reveal the Father’s depths and mysteries to.  In effect, He says ‘My mystery is for Me and My own.’” (Ibid.)

As Moderns I do not think we have yet escaped our tendency, however good our intentions, to view the Trinity (and all doctrine) as “data” to assent to.  Thus when a modern says “we accept the Trinity by faith alone,” and when Symeon says the same thing (113) two very different things are meant.  The modern means by it “I (subject) believe (in order to be orthodox) in the Trinity (object).”  Or “I (subject) will act in community (in order to be orthoprax) analogous to the Trinity (object).”  What Symeon seems to mean by “one instead accepts [the Trinity] by faith alone” is “God has incorporated me into Christ by the Spirit before the Father.”  One cannot “know” God by our own power, or even (Evangelical sensibilities be damned!) “from just reading scriptures (!).” (113)  Rather this knowledge is an indication that Christians are “these…the ones who, moved by the divine Spirit, know the equality of honor and union of the Son with the Father.” (115) The logic being only God can reveal Himself, thus if a human comes to know God, this is God acting through the human, God is “knowing himself,” as it were, through man.  God is in a sense both subject and object in the circle of knowing.  We are bound to the Trinity only in a recognition of the prior gift and presence of God working already in us.

In fact one can say that the Trinity, far from being a model of action per se, is invisible to those who act in evil. “God has blinded their [the evildoers] intellect and hardened their heart, so that seeing they see not, and hearing they do not understand.” (116)  The Trinity is not a model for proper being in the sense that we understand “model,” either in a physical or a metaphorical sense as an “exemplar” to be followed (a blueprint, a criteria, etc…).  Rather the Trinity is, to use contemporary idiom, the “grammar” of proper Christian action already underway through the initiation of the Spirit.  Thus the catenae of Symeon’s questions:

Have you, O’brother, renounced the world and what is in the world?  Have you become one who possesses nothing, and submissive, and a stranger to your own will?  Have you acquired meekness and become humble?  Have you fasted to the supreme degree, and prayed, and kept vigil?  Have you acquired perfect love for God, and have you regarded your neighbor as yourself?  Do you intercede with tears for those who hate and wrong you, and are hostile to you, and do you pray that they may be forgiven… (117)

            While these exhortations in no “specific” sense sound Trinitarian (whatever that might mean) they are nonetheless deeply saturated by its “ternary” grammar.  For “it is not possible otherwise to pray lovingly out of a compassionate heart for one’s enemies, unless, by our co-operation with the Good Spirit and our contact and unity and contemplation of God, we have come into the possession of ourselves as pure of every stain of flesh and spirit.” (118).  And earlier: “knowledge of these things is for them whose intellect is illumined daily by the Holy Spirit on account of their purity of soul, whose eyes have been clearly opened by the rays of the Sun of righteousness, whose word of knowledge and word of wisdom is through the Spirit alone…” (114).  Indeed Symeon even makes the somewhat startling claim that the catechumen stands outside the church as one “who cannot reflect the glory of the Lord with the uncovered countenance of his intellect.” (119)  (Not knowing what that even means, I apparently find myself outside amongst the uninitiated!)

            All of this must not be reduced to mere epistemological questions, either.  Rather this mode of knowing God, as God initiates us into Himself, is the very form of salvation as deification.  God is “encompassed like a treasure by the earthen vessel of our tabernacle, the Same who is in every respect both incomprehensible and uncircumscribed.”  Thus “Without form or shape He takes form in us who are small…This taking form in us of the Good who truly is, what is it if not surely to change and re-shape us, and transform us into the image of His divinity?” (120)  Thus repentance “through confession and tears, [is] like a kind of medicine and dressing, cleanses and clears away the wound of the heart and the scar which the sting of spiritual death had opened in it.” (123)  Indeed in a disgusting reversal of images sin is seen as an opening for the indwelling of the Devil in us rather than God’s light, and this is represented under the figure of a worm “who slips in immediately into the heart, and is found to dwell,” when one has been “pricked by the sting of death which is sin,” and the Devil-worm slips his way into the wound (123).  In an even more disturbing image (though rightly so), those who continue to sin, “actually take pleasure in these wounds.  Nor is that all, but they are eager in fact to scratch them and add still other wounds to them, thinking that health is the satisfaction of their passions.” (124).  The ambiguous phrase “thinking that health is the satisfaction of their passions,” seems to mean, to follow Symeon’s imagery, that the sinner believes the momentary passion which finds alleviation in scratching the itch (though aggravating the wound) is true health.  This reversal of indwelling-imagery is in itself a negative demonstration of the necessity for us to be caught up into the Trinity by the Trinity itself to be saved.

            Symeon ends the Ninth Ethical Discourse with a question from his interlocutors that reminded me of Plato’s paradox of knowledge in the Meno dialogues.  In those dialogues the question that Meno poses, and Socrates tries to answer, is how can one learn if one has no previous knowledge of the object being inquired into?  That is to say, if I do not know what I am to learn, how can I ever learn it?   But if I know it how did I know it without such learning?  The question posed to Symeon is alike but in a slightly different key: “’But you,’ says my interlocutor, ‘are you such a [saint] yourself?  And how shall we recognize that you are such?’” (126).  In other words the question being posed is a culmination of a prior dilemma: Symeon has accused his interlocutor(s) of meddling in knowledge they know nothing of.  If we are to follow Symeon’s logic, this is not just due to a deficiency in their own understanding.  Rather they do not possess the Spirit of God, they are outside the church as catechumenoi because they are not yet caught up in the mysterion of the Trinity (125).  How then are they to identify Symeon as himself holy?  Because surely if they could do that, they themselves have the Spirit, as sainthood is nothing else than the fruits of the Spirit in a person; and the ability to recognize these fruits is again nothing other than the purification of the Spirit in another.  This thus appears to put Symeon in the horns of a bull-sized dilemma: for if they can recognize his authority to rebuke them, then Symeon’s rebuke is itself destroyed, for they do in fact have the Spirit.  And if they in fact cannot identify Symeon as a holy one, then again his rebuke is nonsensical and worthless because his claims to authority are unverifiable.

            Symeon’s retort has a measure of comedy in it (though I doubt he would ever see it that way).  He admits to them that they cannot identify him as holy, for they are worse off than old Isaac, who, though blind, could still recognize the voice of his son.  But these doubters cannot even hear.  “How are you able to know a spiritual man?  Not at all, certainly…If then you are also fleshly because of unbelief and wickedness because of neglect and transgression of the commandments, I say that you have fattened your heart and have stopped up its ears, and that the eye of your soul has been veiled by the passions.  How in that case would you be able to recognize a spiritual and holy man?” (126).  However in an ironic way this attack that admonishes his opponents for being both blind and deaf to God, far from being a complete stoppage to their knowledge of God, has provided them with a first step.  Because immediately after, Symeon goes on: “My fathers and brothers, I beg you instead that we strive in every way for each of us to know himself…for it is impossible for a man who has not recognized himself before hand so as to be able to say with David, ‘but I am a worm and no man,’ or again with Abraham, ‘I am but dust and ashes,’ to understand any of the divine and spiritual Scripture in a spiritual way.” (127).  This is because no one “can become even a receptacle of the Spirit’s charismata without meekness and humility.”  Thus in a delightfully ironic turn of fate Symeon’s accusation that his opponents are blind and deaf turns into, should their admission be forthcoming, the absolute possibility of vision and sight.