"Both My Finger And My Penis Are Christ"

St. Symeon the New Theologian on the God who takes our shameful things and makes them glorious

Do not fear the title of this entry. The following passage is among the most sacred passages penned in all of church history. It is scandalously holy. Its holiness is only possible because of its scandal, and it’s scandal is the fruit of its holiness. Few portions of text, East or West, dogmatic or mystical, in all of christian history can exceed its sheer weight of shame and glory. The majestic scandal of the cross of Jesus Christ burns throughout it, singeing the soul and consuming it in the flame of Divine Love.

I have elsewhere introduced St. Symeon the New Theologian, the holy man who authored this hymn—though it is without much reserve that the reader will be led to see the author of this hymn is God Himself, guiding and sanctifying the pen of the Byzantine monk—and so, to avoid redundancy, I will withhold any unneeded biographical introduction. (The only historical note needed for the reading of this passage is to know that St. Symeon’s birth name was George. After having been tonsured into the monastic life he took on the name of his spiritual father St. Symeon the Studite. He henceforth became known as St. Symeon the New¹. In the final section of the passage below Symeon the New speaks of Symeon the Studite, not himself. Without this knowledge, you have have otherwise been mislead to think Symeon praises himself. He does not.)

Apart from that note I will only say here, that if the reader suffers from shame brought on through sin; from addiction; from the heavy burden of passions and lusts; from the kind conscience which is heavy with the anxious weight of trauma or any such malady spiritual, psychological or physical; that such a reader ought to pray and prepare themselves to meet the gracious and humble God of our Lord Jesus in Symeon’s words. For when God’s saints speak God’s Word faithfully and truthfully it bears no less power than when God says it Himself—for God Himself is His Word, spoken eternally in God by the Father and in the last days by Mary for our salvation. As the scriptures say “once God has spoken, twice have I heard it” (Ps62:11). That same Word—“one and the same Son” in Chalcedon’s creed—is spoken to us by God and born witness to by the apostles and prophets in scripture, and by the saints of the Church for our salvation. It is my judgment that Symeon’s words below simply are the Word of God, for they faithfully bear witness to Jesus Christ; to, as the Lutherans say, “God deep in the flesh”. As such they bear the power to cleanse your soul with the “washing of the water of His Word” (Eph5:26).

The passage may excite shame, or embarrassment. But, it is precisely this excitement that the Word of God intends. He intends to incite this sense of shame or blushing because as it rises to the surface of our souls He is able to heal it, and wash it away with holy tears, in the baptism of the River of the Spirit (Jn7:37). “We proclaim” says the Apostle “Christ crucified, a stumbling block…” (1Cor1:23); and St. Peter says Jesus Christ is “a stone that makes them stumble and a rock that makes them fall” (1Pet2:8) It is important to remember that “they stumble because they disobey the Word” (1Pet2:8). Though you may be scandalized, do not stumble in disobedience, but obey the Word and receive the whole Christ into the whole of yourself. Be scandalized but do not resist His deifying grace; be offended but do not disobey. Turn and be healed.

May God bless you, wash you, and save you through the gospel witnessed to by Symeon’s holy words. I will offer a brief reflection to follow:

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“How shall anyone not tremble, when they understand this entirely, considering that You are with us now, and unto all ages, (Mt 28.20) and that You make each person a home and You dwell within everyone, and You become a home to all, and in You we dwell, each one of us entirely, Savior, with You entirely, You alone are with each one alone, and You are entirely alone above us? And so now You are securing all awesome things in us. What awesome things? Listen to just a few of the many, for even if what we have said surpasses all astonishment, then all the same, listen now to things more awesome! We are made members of Christ, and Christ becomes our members, (1Cor6.15) and Christ becomes my hand and the foot of all-wretched me, and wretched I become the hand of Christ and the foot of Christ. I move my hand and my hand is Christ entire. For, understand me, the divine divinity is indivisible! I put my foot in motion and behold, it flashes as Himself. Do not say that I blaspheme, but accept these things and fall down and worship Christ Who makes you like this! For if you also wish, you shall become his member, and thus every member of each one of us shall become a member of Christ, and Christ our members, and He shall make all shameful things decent (1Cor12.23–24) by the beauty of his divinity and by his glory He shall adorn them, and when we are united to God we shall at the same time become gods, not looking upon the indignity of the body at all, but completely made like Christ in the whole body, and each of our members shall be the whole Christ. For while we become many members He remains one and indivisible, and each part is the whole Christ himself. And so thus you well know that both my finger and my penis are Christ. Do you tremble or feel ashamed? But God was not ashamed to become like you, “yet you are ashamed to become like Him? [You may respond:] “I am not ashamed to become like Him. But in saying He is like a shameful member [the penis] I suspect that you speak blasphemy.” So then, you suspected badly, for there are no shameful members! They are hidden members of Christ, for they are covered, and on account of this they are more revered than the rest, (1Cor12.23) as hidden members of Him Who is hidden, they are unseen by all, from Whom seed is given in divine communion, (1Jn3.9) awesomely deified in the divine form, from the whole divinity itself, for He is God entire, He Who is united with us, oh spine-chilling mystery! And thus it truly becomes a marriage, unutterable and divine: He unites with each one, and again I shall say these things for pleasure, and each is made one with the Master. And so if you will put the whole Christ on your entire flesh, (Rom 13.14) then you shall understand everything that I say and have no cause for shame. But if not entirely, but if you put upon your soul only a small patch—I am speaking of the immaculate inner garment which is Christ—then your old cloak is patched in just one place, (Mt 9.16) and you are ashamed of all the remaining members, retaining the whole body as more dirty, then how shall you not blush seeing how you have put on filthy garments? I said frightful things about holy members, and about seeing much glory and illuminating the mind, about rejoicing and taking to heart nothing carnal, but still you see your flesh as defiled, and in your mind you go through your disgusting practices, and your mind always crawls in such things like a worm. Wherefore you attribute to Christ and to me your sense of shame, and you say: “Are you not ashamed of the shameful members? And what is more, you bring Christ down to shameful members.” But again I say to you: look at Christ in the womb and notice the things in the womb, and escaping the womb, and from whence my God went out and passed through! And there is something more you shall find concerning what I have said, and the things He accepted for our glory, so that no one imitating Him need be ashamed whether one says or suffers the things that He has suffered. Being truly and entirely God He became fully human, though not divided, He by all means became a perfect man, (1Cor1.13) but He is God himself, whole in all of his members. 

Thus it happened even now in the final age. Symeon the holy, the pious Studite, he was not ashamed about the members of any person, neither to see any naked people nor to be seen naked; he possessed the whole Christ, he was the whole Christ himself, and all his members and the members of every other he always saw one and all as Christ, and he remained unmoved, innocent, and dispassionate, since he was the whole Christ himself, and he saw all the baptized, who have put on the whole Christ as Christ. But if you are naked and your flesh were to touch flesh, then you become mad for women like an ass or a horse, (Jer5.8) so how dare you calumniate the saint, and why do you blaspheme against Christ Who is united to us, and Who has given dispassion to his saints? Furthermore He makes himself a bridegroom—do you hear?—each day, and the souls of all become brides, to whom the Creator is united, and again they to Him, and spiritually it becomes a marriage, as befitting a god He unites to these souls.He does not utterly spoil them, God forbid, but even if previously ruined, He would receive them and unite Himself to them, immediately He makes them incorrupt, and they see all the things that were previously defiled by corruption as holy, incorrupt, entirely healed over. They glorify the compassionate one, they yearn for the beautiful one, and they are all united to the whole of his love, what is more, they acquire the holy seed, as we said, receiving the whole transformed God within themselves. And so, fathers, are these things not the truth? Have we not spoken out rightly concerning divine realities? Have I not said things identical and equal to the Scriptures?”²

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(1. Symeon says elsewhere that divine scriptures “indicate that there are three places where the mind likes to dwell”. That is, where one starts, the journey or middle position, and where one ends. But, Symeon says more: “I would say myself that there are really two such places—not that I want to teach the contrary to Scripture, God forbid, but I do not count the middle position between the first and the last”³. He has not changed his testimony here. For Symeon it is certain that there will be a journey for each of us, a sacred path of repentance and ascesis through the narrow gate of salvation for our sanctification. However, he warns, the mind is called not to count the “middle position” between the first place and the last place. There is only “before” (Gal3:23) Christ and “after” (Gal3:25) Christ. The journey is decisively not from before to after. It is from unbelief to faith.

There is the Old Man and the New Man, Adam and Christ, and there is no middle position between the two. Any account of our sanctification, therefore, which finds its reality in the middle position, in the natural here and now, is rooted in delusion and deception. Christ Jesus “is our life” (Col3:4) and so to imagine myself living in a space between the old Adam and the New Adam—as some chimeric mixture of the two—is to imagine not only a false self, but a false Christ. In the Gospel of Christ we set out on our journey to God already in God. For it is written “we are created in Christ Jesus” (Eph2:10) and “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom11:36). To go “to Him” is to go “through Him” is to be “from Him”. This is what Symeon pronounces of the gospel when he says: “You are with us now, and unto all ages, (Mt28.20) and that You make each person a home and You dwell within everyone, and You become a home to all, and in You we dwell, each one of us entirely, Savior, with You entirely, You alone are with each one alone”. Each one of us dwells entirely in the Savior who dwells entirely in us. This cannot be merely the End of our story, but must be its Beginning also. For the Word of the Gospel says of Himself: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Rev22:13) He is both the “Author and Finisher of our faith” (Heb12:2).

(2. Though lovely and thoroughly biblical there is an implicit danger—a common one in various modern christian circles—in this interpretation of our salvation, which Symeon here helps us avoid. What is often heard when we speak in the ways outlined above is that the heavenly self, the true self, the righteous inner man is the real me; and the me that sins, and struggles, and is impassioned with lusts and desires is a sort of un-real me. Though this is true, in an absolute sense, it falls short of reckoning with the reality of sin and therefore it loses the gospel’s power to save me from my sins. The apostle says “God proves His love for us, in that while we were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom5:8). The path of our sanctification never demands of us that we pretend we do not sin, or that when we do sin we simply repeat the mantra to ourselves “that is not who I am”.

That kind of spirituality can painfully obscures the love of God. For it is often rooted in the fear that God would not love me in my sins, or as a sinner; possessed of this kind of spirituality we become like Adam who hides himself from God when he sins, fearing that God’s love cannot abide with us in our sins. This interpretation is not mine alone, but Symeon’s. Elsewhere the saint says: “Would not He, then, who as you hear every day suffered such great things for [Adam and Eve] in order to recall them from that long exile, have had compassion on them if they had repented in paradise? How would He have failed to do so?… I believe this would have happened!”⁴ If God would have restored Adam and Eve through repentance, then what kept them from repenting? This question touches on the mystery of iniquity, and the effects of sin upon us. “Had they repented while they were still within paradise, they would have received that paradise and nothing else” Symeon says confidently, “but they were cast out for their impenitence.”⁵ Sin makes us to be ashamed, and shame produces unholy fear, fear which hides from God and produces impenitence. Adam’s shame, and the lie which sin made him to believe, brought him to hide from his healer, and blame the woman God gave him to love. Fear that God’s love cannot really touch my sins, generates within me a fear that leads me to pretend I have not sinned, to hide myself from the loving gaze of God, and produces all manner of vice and malice against the neighbors God has given me to love.

This fear leads us to pray like the Pharisees who cannot imagine God’s love reaches to the depths of despair and sinfulness, and so must pretend to be righteous of their own power, praying: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” (Lk18:11). The tax collector, however, who prays “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Lk18:13) has allowed Jesus Christ to show Him the Love of God “in the inward parts” (Ps51) even the ugly bits—and he, Jesus says, “went down to his home justified rather than the other” (Lk18:14)

God’s love is not simply for some abstract me apart from the me who is tempted and tried by the passions of the flesh. God loves me as I am; or rather, God’s love for me makes me what I really am. God cannot save who I am pretending to be. He has no dealings in the world of illusion. Hence, Symeon says “Christ becomes my hand and the foot of all-wretched me, and wretched I become the hand of Christ and the foot of Christ.” Refusing to “count the middle position” does not mean for Symeon, that he cannot recognize the wretchedness of the world which has been wrought in his own heart, soul and body. Rather, it means the Spirit of the Living God has taught him in the furnace of divine mercy to see this wretched heart and body already loved, washed, taken up into God’s own life, justified, and glorified in the Son. This is the mystery of the Totus Christus (the Whole Christ—Jesus Christ and the community of His whole Body). As Jenson says “as the individual Christ, the totus Christus is sinless; as the community related to the one Christ, the totus Christus is sinful. God as the Christ of the community is "the chief of sinners"; as the one before whom the totus Christus stands, he is the righteous judge of sin.”⁶ Here, even if the saint falls or sins the gospel has taught the eyes of his heart to repent, to weep, and to remember the gospel. In this Gospel we are wholly identified with the Risen Christ, and the Risen Christ is wholly identified with u. He says: “I move my hand and my hand is Christ entire. For, understand me, the divine divinity is indivisible! I put my foot in motion and behold, it flashes as Himself.” He predicts that his readers own sinful conscience, laced with a religious disposition, will be scandalized by this proclamation of divine love and accuse him of blasphemy, wherein he responds: “Do not say that I blaspheme, but accept these things and fall down and worship Christ Who makes you like this!”

(3. Now, an opposite danger opens before us. Perhaps we become convinced of God’s love for us as sinners but we remain content to be sinners and embody another kind of impenitence. Neither Symeon nor the gospel will permit us this over-correction. After all, in the Annunciation, Jesus receives His Holy Name—to be worshipped and adored forever and ever—because “He will save his people from their sins” (Mt1:21). That is, through God’s making us to share in the life of His Son through the preaching of the Word of the Cross and our sacramental baptism into Him, Jesus’ power and will is to actually deliver us from our sins and the passions of the flesh. For “how can we who died to sin go on living in it?” (Rom6:2), and “they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts” (Gal5:24). Christ’s total identification with sinners does not make a sinner out of Christ, but makes Christs out of sinners! As God told St. Augustine “I am the food of grown men, grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me.”⁷

Symeon believes, quite radically to the modern ear, that God’s Word, in the form of His commandments and teachings in scripture, makes our total obedience to Him possible—when heard in His faith, they create His obedience in us. Whether it be the rejection of seats of honor, the love of God above all earthly kin, the turning of the cheek to a violent strike, rejoicing in persecutions, etc. Symeon holds that we can and must obey all of God’s commands by the grace of God. Those, he says, who do not believe that God’s grace empowers us to actually be as holy as God is holy are “wretches!” who have “remained in the uncleanness of your defilements and your iniquities!”⁸ “Faith” he says “is not merely the belief that Christ is God. It is the most comprehensive faith which includes all the holy commandments which are spoken by Him. It somehow contains all His divine commandments and believes in them nothing is unimportant, not even a dot, but that everything down to the last iota is life, and leads to eternal life.”⁹ As our Lord taught “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt5:19). If one believes, therefore, all the sacred doctrines of holy scripture and the church and does not believe that God has given us the grace to live free from sin then “how” Symeon asks “can such a person be called a believer? Shall he not rather be condemned as an unbeliever, or even worse than an unbeliever?”¹⁰

While Symeon’s gospel witness has on the one hand borne witness to God’s love for us as sinners, whose love pierces deep into the murky depths of sin and shame and there in our fearfulness makes us wholly and entirely One with the Son; and on the other hand this union and identity has begotten a grace to obey the Word of God completely and entirely, to truly “obey from the heart” (Rom6:17). It has also called for penitence and tears. That we may be are when we poison our souls with sins, and to bring that sin to God’s love freely and unhindered by shame.

(4. Two radical extremes, often considered poles of Christian preaching and spirituality to be balanced, are here not balanced in a middle position but rather are united precisely in their extremity in the God-Man Jesus Christ, who unites every opposite in Himself. God’s love knows no bounds. As St. John Climacus says: “The mercy of God has no limits, nothing is too great for it. That is the reason why anyone who despairs of it is the author of his own death.”¹¹ And, Olivier Clement comments on this passage saying: “The ultimate sin is to despair of God's mercy. That is to limit it, to make our ego its limit, whereas it is boundless.”¹² In the gospel this boundlessness becomes the foundation of all my life and being, enveloping me wholly in the Mercy of the Son of God. In it I am kept from the kind of impenitence which kept our ancestor Adam from repentance. I humbly fall into the hands of God, I plunge myself into the abyss of God’s mercy and forsake even the garment stained by the flesh (Jd1); in His abyssal depths I find that God’s love truly does “endure forever” (Ps136) and “extends to the heavens” (Ps36:5). But, this love really saves me. It heals me of my sins.

The way to the one is through the other. Freedom from sins will never come through any rigid ascesis alone. It will never become reality for us if our pursuit of it is founded on the anxious removal of sins so that the soul may believe God loves her. Only when we have become so ruthlessly conquered by the love of God to no longer fear being naked—warts and all—before Him can we receive the power to walk as Jesus Christ walked. St. Symeon believed “when our master descended from on high He by His own death destroyed the death that awaited us. The condemnation that was the consequence of our forefathers transgression He completely annihilated.” And, more! “By holy baptism He regenerates and refashions us, completely sets us free from the condemnation, and places us in this world wholly free instead of being oppressed by the tyranny of the enemy.”¹³ For us, then, it must be that we begin our journey to holiness with condemnation and shame “completely annihilated” by the Cross of Jesus, then shall the Lord “make all shameful things decent”. God’s act of taking our sins as His own in Jesus Christ, perfectly corresponds to our act of being justified in Him, and baptized in His Holy Spirit. Just so, and only so, is sin truly destroyed by the whole and entire Trinity. As Eriugena says “the Father burns, the Son burns, and the Holy Spirit burns (for together They burn away our transgressions and transmute us, a burnt offering, by the action of θέωσις or deification, into the Unity which is Theirs.”¹⁴

To make this point St. Symeon scandalously says: “For while we become many members He remains one and indivisible, and each part is the whole Christ Himself. And so thus you well know that both my finger and my penis are Christ.” Knowing that sin has made us to fear God’s identifying of Himself with our shameful members, Symeon shows just how deep the incarnation reaches. My finger and my penis are Christ. What shameful things we associate with these organs. “Do you tremble or feel ashamed? But God was not ashamed to become like you, yet you are ashamed to become like Him?” God is not ashamed to become like us. On the cross He went so far as to “become sin” (2Cor5:21) so that we might become “the righteousness of God in Christ” (2Cor5:21). The spine chilling mystery! There is no depth of human experience God considers alien to His triune life and love. He simply will not relent, in His love for us, to make us holy. This is why St. Augustine, speaking of the ‘valley of weeping’ in Psalm 84, says “[Jesus] came down to you, but in such wise that He remained in Himself; He came down to you so that for you He might become a valley of weeping, but He remained in Himself so that he might be for you the mountain of your ascent.”¹⁵ The entire economy of the Holy Incarnation is that God, “for us” and for our salvation, became all that we are so that we might become all that He is.

This fact is what the gospel’s promise aims to convince our deepest heart of. It is objectively true in the proclamation of the gospel by the Church that God has taken our sins as His own—has “become sin” (2Cor5:21)—and has in exchange clad us with His own glory and divinity (Rom8:29-30). It remains for us to hear this Word and repent, to “mix it with faith” (Heb4). We cannot make the righteousness of God our own, without allowing Him to have our shame and sin as His own. This is after all, what Symeon says the whole of scripture proclaims: “What is the aim of the incarnate dispensation of God's Word, preached in all the Holy Scriptures” he asks. “The only aim is that, having entered into what is our own, we should participate in what is His.”¹⁶

As St. Gregory of Nyssa said “the Bridegroom made me beautiful through His love, having exchanged His very own beauty for my disgrace. After taking the filth of my sins upon Himself, He allowed me to share in His own purity, and filled me with His beauty. He who first made me lovely, from my own repulsiveness has showed His love for me.”¹⁷ If our heavenly Bridegroom has found us lovely, and beautified us by the gaze of this love, then we sin against the truth if we do not see ourselves as He we are in the Son. This is why St. Symeon, in our main passage, scolds his imaginary interlocutor: “still you see your flesh as defiled”. The interlocutor does not see his flesh as members of the Incarnate Christ, and so “in your mind you go through your disgusting practices, and your mind always crawls in such things like a worm. Wherefore you attribute to Christ and to me your sense of shame.” The eye does not yet see as the gospel demands it see. It does not yet see that “there are no shameful members”. Symeon conspires, here, to have the gospel more perfectly proclaimed; more directly addressed to our hopes and fears.

“He is seen by me and He looks at me, He Who looks upon all things” Symeon says “Amazed, I am astonished at the shapeliness of his beauty, and how the Creator stooped down when He opened the heavens and displayed his unspeakable and strange glory to me.” Here in this exchange of gazes, the soul offers up its whole self: the righteous and justified soul in Christ, and all its sins and wretchedness at once. The sins and the passions give way to the all-penetrating light of God and the soul becomes “altogether lovely”. Here in the mutual glance of love God is “shining upon all my members with his rays, folding his entire self around me He tenderly kisses all of me. He gives his whole self to me, the unworthy, and I take my fill of his love and beauty, and I am filled full of divine pleasure and sweetness. I partake of the light, and I participate in the glory, and He illuminates my face like that of the one I yearned for, and all my members become bearers of light. Then finally I become more beautiful than the beautiful, I am richer than the rich, and more powerful than all the powerful greater than kings, and much more honorable than all visible creation, not only more honorable than the earth, and everyone on earth, but even more than heaven and everyone in heaven, for I have the Creator of all things to Whom is fitting glory and honor now and forever. Amen. (1Tim1.17)”¹⁸

Christ makes us as lovely as He is by nature—‘more beautiful than the beautiful!’ “Do not say that I blaspheme, but accept these things and fall down and worship Christ Who makes you like this!” Here in this Mystery the words “my finger and my penis are Christ” disclose their truly salvific power. No member of my body lay outside the scope of the Incarnation, and therefore—no matter how shameful—there is no part of me which cannot be healed of sin, and made instruments of God’s love. Prayer, contrition, tears, and fasting are the practices by which God makes us to know and understand the love He has for us; by which and in which we exist. The heart of Christian spirituality is borne witness to, and disclosed in this scandal. God saves us from our sins through the cross, wherein God takes our deepest shames, sins, traumas, and fears through suffering them in His own body. He bears them for us. Further, He becomes them for us—this way, and only this way, are we healed. He does not eschew our shameful members, our hidden sins, our having been sinned against. He takes the whole lot of them as His own. This is the “aim of the incarnate Word preached in all the scriptures”; and Symeon’s testimony of it, he believes, is “identical and equal to the Scriptures” in it’s content.

If we thus come to know and comprehend these holy scriptures, and the power of God (Matt22:29), “then [we] shall understand everything that I say and have no cause for shame”. Amen

1. He is not called the New Theologian, as if to say his theology is “new” or any such thing. Rather, he is St. Symeon the New—as opposed to the Studite—who is also a theologian of the church. To avoid such a clunky moniker he is Symeon the New Theologian.

2. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Divine Eros, Hymn 15.129-234 (SVS Press, 2010; Daniel Griggs) pg86-90

3. St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Practical and Theological Chapters 1.78

4. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse V.8.331-339 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg99

5. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse V.9.340-43 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg99

6. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology vol. 1, V.5 pg85-86

7. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions VII.10

8. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse V.13.555-558 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg104

9. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse VII.6.157-163 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg134

10. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse VII.6.194-196 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg135

11. St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 5 (Olivier Clement’s trans. from Roots of Christian Mysticism (New City Press, 1995) pg155)

12. Olivier Clement, Roots of Christian Mysticism (New City Press, 1995) pg155

13. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse V.9.381-387 (Paulist Press, 1980) pg100

14. John Scotus Eriugena, Peryphyseon VI.743A (Dumbarton Oaks, 1987)

15. St. Augustine of Hippo, Exposition of Psalm 119.1 (New City Press, 2015)

16. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Practical and Theological Chapters 120 (Cistercian Publications, 1982)

17. St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Homily 2

18. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Divine Eros, Hymn 16.17-41 (SVS Press, 2010; Daniel Griggs) pg92-93