"I do not count the middle position between the first and last..." -- The Gospel according to St. Symeon the New Theologian

St. Symeon the New Theologian and the immediacy of salvation and theosis

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022AD) was a monk, mystic and one of the more controversial figures in church history¹. Though throughout his spiritual life he was in constant tension with his Byzantine ecclesial authorities, landing him in exile, he was ultimately recognized by the church to be not only a saint, but one of only three figures endowed with the moniker “theologian”. Some may see Symeon’s sainthood as being recognized in spite of his proto-protestant critique of the church’s seduction by worldly imperial power and how it had corrupted the archbishops, bishops and priests of his day, making them “good for nothing… falling foul of spirits of deceit and idle chatter, and perishing”²; but the discerning will see that his canonization is not in spite of his prophetic critique, but because of it. St. Symeon is now remembered as being the [among] the first mystics in the Eastern tradition to speak openly and in the first person about his experience of God, of theosis. As such, he is one of the largest influences to the classic collection of texts on prayer and ascetic devotion The Philokalia. In this passage from this great pentecostal saint and “mystic of fire and light” we will see the gospel secret to a fruitful life of prayer. In the journey of the soul into the infinite depths of God, the scriptures forbid the mind to “count the middle position between the first and the last”. May you be edified (or deified), and encouraged by St. Symeon and by my reflections below:

“The divine Scriptures indicate that there are three places where the mind likes to dwell. 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. What I mean is that if a man travels from one city to the next or from one region to another, he does not name his entire passage after one town or region, especially if he has seen many beautiful things along the way. When the [sacred writer] left Egypt for the promised land and settled there, he recalled everything that had happened during his travels and recounted them to everybody. But he did not talk about passing from a first to a second city or region, and then from a second to a third. No, he spoke of passing from slavery to freedom, from darkness into light, and from captivity to a re-establishment in his own fatherland. This applies to our human minds too, but here it is usually a case of passing from passibility to impassibility, from the slavery of the passions to the freedom of the Spirit, from unnatural obsessions (which the spiritual law speaks of as a captivity) to the transcending of nature, from the stormy seas of life to a gentle calm beyond the world, from the bitterness of the cares and sorrows of this life to a joy that cannot be described and the banishment of all care, and from a multitude of desires that throng around and trouble us to one single desire: to possess and love God completely”³

• God does not have a relation to us; rather, God is His relation to us: Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. As the divine apostle says “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1Tim2:5). That this is true means that our relation to God in Jesus Christ is always immediate. The same One who is God is truly man thus He mediates God to us and us to God without any medium, that is He does so immediately. There is no middle position between the gospel baptizing us “in Christ” and our previous natural state “without Christ”. As Eckhart says “the nature of the medium shrinks from the union the soul desires with God”⁴. This is why the gospel’s descriptive grammar for Jesus’ ministry of the kingdom of heaven is riddled with the greek adverb εὐθέως (G112, eutheos, straightway, immediately, forthwith). Jesus touches blind people and immediately they are made to see (Mt20:24), He touches a woman laid down with a fever and immediately she is cured (Mk1:31), He touches a leper and immediately the leprosy is healed (Mk1:42), those oppressed by demons fall at His feet and with a word immediately the demons are routed. The gospel is precisely the unveiling of this wondrous and miraculous immediacy! “If any man be in Christ, [he is a] new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2Cor5:17), and that immediately. This means that our adoption, by the Spirit, into the life and person of Christ— “He is our life” (Col3:4)—furnishes us immediately with the whole of His righteousness, fullness, glory, identity, holiness, blamelessness and grace now to be unveiled and uncovered by faith, prayer and ascesis. As St. Maximus says, Jesus “consider[s] what he accomplished for us as something that He, in His love of humanity, [is] accountable for—or rather, in His goodness, He reckon[s] to us the glory of the accomplishment”⁵.

• If this true then any account of our sanctification which takes account of “the middle position between the first and the last”, is rooted in delusion and phantasm—imagining Jesus without me and me without Him. “Christ is not only the head of the church” says Bonhoeffer “but also the church itself. Christ is head and also every member.”⁶ Therefore to imagine myself somewhere, in a middle position, between the first Adam and the Last Adam is not only to imagine a false self but a false Christ. For Christ “is my life” (Col3:4) and therefore to behold Christ truly with the “eyes of our understanding” (Eph1:18) is to gaze upon Him “as in a mirror” (2Cor3:18)—to see me in Him and Him in me, and the two of us as One “even as the Father and [He] are One” (Jn17:21). “Such is Christ’s last wish, [His] supreme prayer before returning to His Father” says St. Elizabeth of the Trinity commenting on this verse “He wills that where He is there we should be also, not only in eternity but already in time… It is important then to know where we must live with Him in order to realize His divine dream”⁷. This “where” is the crux of the issue, if we live in some unholy mixture of old and new, a middle position between first and last we can never realize His divine dream. This presents us with a major hurdle in our sanctification, as St. Anthony the Great says “the cause of all evils is delusion, self-deception, and ignorance of God”⁸, and St. Evagrius adds “wherever evil enters, there is also ignorance; the hearts of the holy will be filled with knowledge”⁹. To live our lives under the persuasion of a false vision of ourselves—a familiar spirit—with which we identify is to fall under the power of a deluge of carnal temptations, having lost the power that “passes from passibility to impassibility”. As St. Gregory of Sinai says “the influx of evil thoughts is like a flowing river; they contain the suggestion with which later there occurs a sinful identification, which covers (floods) the heart like a deluge of water”¹⁰, it is this “sinful identification” of ourselves with the old man, that delusional fantasy of me without Christ, that therefore we must be liberated from by the gospel. Our sanctification, therefore, consists in gazing, with faces unveiled, upon the glory of the Lord “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Cor4:6) as we are “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2Cor3:18); and that until we receive from the Lord identity with Him and Him alone. The Last Adam, the Truth and not some abstract “middle position” partly sinner and partly justified.

• Symeon does not say that there is no journey, no pilgrimage, from the old man to the New; only that the mind is not permitted by scripture to “count the middle position” between the two. Certainly those who hear the gospel and believe it find themselves on a journey, a lifetime of sanctification, as pilgrims unto God. In the gospel Jesus Christ has come to us, found us mending the nets of our father Adam in the boat of our natural life and called to us “follow me” (Mt4:18-22) and we, His disciples are to “immediately leave the boat and [our] father and follow him”(vs22). And, where is it in the gospel that He is going, where do we follow Him?: “I am going to My Father” (Jn14:28) and “He had come from God and was going to God” (Jn13:3). The believer is, therefore, called by the gospel to follow the Lord Jesus in His ascension to His Father in Heaven, His going to God. But, “no one has ascended into Heaven except the One who descended from Heaven, the Son of Man” (Jn3:13). If we are to make the journey, then, we must receive the “end of our faith” (1Pet1:9) now, seeing and believing ourselves to be wholly in the Son and clothe ourselves with Him in the knowledge of God. We must be like those who gaze into “the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere” and not like “those who look at themselves in a mirror; and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like” (Js1:23-25).

• All of this to say we begin our journey into God already in God—we join the Lord in “coming from God and going to God” (Jn13:3), for “from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever” (Rom11:36)—we take for our starting place that sacred breath uttered from our crucified God: “it is finished” (Jn19:30). As Robert Jenson says “The decisive gospel-insight is that if we only pray to God, if our relation to God is reducible to the ‘to’ and is not decisively determined also by ‘with’ and ‘in,’ then it is not the true God whom we identify in our address, but rather some distant and timelessly uninvolved divinity whom we have envisaged…the particular God of scripture does not just stand over against us; he envelops us. And only by the full structure of the envelopment do we have this God.”¹¹ Therefore the spiritual life is a life lived not only to God, but from God and through God and with God, and the “middle position” of an unclean conscience is washed away by this glorious good news! God is only experienced as the God who “justifies the ungodly” (Rom5) by enfolding us in Himself, taking our flesh as His own, and adopting us as His own Son. This is the beginning of the gospel, and only upon this foundation— “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ!” (1Cor3:11)—can we progress and become perfect sons of our Father in heaven (Mt5:45, 48). As Schonfeld says of Eckhart: "What is new in Eckhart's teaching, rests in the fact that he thinks of God's immediacy not [simply] as the goal of an inner development, but in general as the starting-point of the spiritual life”¹². We start in the End, in Jesus Christ the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End and, living from this Ground, we “do not count the middle position” so that we may “possess and love God completely”. Amen

1. A few good resources:

Divine Eros: The Hymns of St. Symeon the New Theologian translated by Daniel K. Griggs, published by SVS Press in Popular Patristics series (Vol. 40)

The Practical and Theological Chapters; and, Three Theological Treatises translated by Paul John McGuckin, published by SVS Press

The Philokalia: Volume 4 translated by G.E.H Palmer, Phillip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian by Hannah Hunt, published by Cascade Books

The Epistles of St. Symeon the New Theologian edited and translated by H.J.M. Turner, and published by Oxford University Press

Symeon the New Theologian: The Discourses translated by C.J. DeCatanzaro, and published by Paulist Press

The Life of St. Symeon the New Theologian by Nicetas Stethatos, translated by Richard P.H. Greenfield and published by Dunbarton Oaks Medieval Library

St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition by Hilarion Alfeyev

And,

On The Mystical Life Volumes 1, 2 & 3 translated by Alexander Golitzin and published by SVS Press

2. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Epistle 1.290-309

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

4. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on the Wisdom of Solomon 283-284

5. St. Maximus the Confessor, QThall. 21.7

6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (1932-1933 Berlin, Christology Lectures) pg59

7. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, Complete Works Vol. 1, Heaven In Faith 1

8. St. Anthony of Egypt, Philokalia Vol. 1, On The Character Of Men And The Virtuous Life 1.26

9. St. Evagrius of Pontus, To Monks in Monasteries and Communities 1.24

10. St. Gregory of Sinai, On Commandments and Doctrines, Warnings and Promises; on Thoughts, Passions and Virtues, and also on Stillness and Prayer: One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Texts 1.64

11. Robert Jenson, Triune Identity pg51

12. From Bernard McGinn’s Presence of God Vol. 4: Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, pg163 footnote 452: Schonfeld, Meister Eckhart Geistliche Ubungen, 37