Venerable Simeon the New Theologian on the spiritual transformation of man

“The apologetic work of Pavel Valentinovich Chelyshev (born 1954) is devoted to the ontology, epistemology and anthropology of St. Simeon the New Theologian (+1021). Armed with religious and philosophical knowledge, the author examines the legacy of the ascetic, who, according to Archbishop. Vasily (Krivosheina) “for us will forever remain a person of deep personal mystical experience, who, moreover, managed to express it in a stunning way. Its significance is incomparable and unsurpassed in Orthodox spirituality of all times. We also admire the remarkable freedom of his spirit, which, however, knows how to live with the ascetic and dogmatic Tradition of Orthodoxy.” Archpriest Alexander Troitsky, chief bibliographer Synodal Library of the Moscow Patriarchate. Our time, using the term of K. Jaspers, is the axial time of transition to new cultural values. But culture develops successfully only when it is organically connected with history. Therefore, it is necessary to solve the problems of today, based on the spiritual experience of our predecessors. In this regard, I propose for consideration the worldview of the Byzantine thinker St. Simeon the New Theologian (949–1022), standing at the very origins of Russian Christian culture. We will talk about the main thing in his teaching, about the spiritual transformation of man. St. Simeon the New Theologian is a unique phenomenon of Christian culture. He is the “mirror” of Orthodoxy. Church history knows of only three cases of such a high assessment of theology. The first in this row is St. Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian. The second Theologian is the name given to the largest representative of Eastern patristics, a member of the Cappadocian circle of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and, finally, the third - St. Simeon the New Theologian. He is a schemamonk-ascetic and church leader, preacher and sophisticated theologian-philosopher, contemplative mystic and inspired poet, who most fully expressed the dogmatic Tradition of the Church. This is the value of his work for us, people of the 21st century, cut off from the Orthodox and cultural national tradition in times of hard times. According to Rev. Nikita Stifat, who wrote the life of his teacher (6), St. Simeon was born into a family of provincial nobility in the Paphlagonian village of Galata, near the famous Cappadocia. The thinker lived most of his life in Constantinople, first as a novice of the Studite Monastery of the “Unsleepless”, then as a monk of the small monastery of St. Mamanta. After Patriarch Sergius unjustly expelled him from the capital, St. Simeon becomes rector of the prayer house of St. Marina, where he ends his life’s journey from an unknown illness. It is important that Rev. Simeon is an Orthodox Christian, who through mystical contemplation learned all the dogmas of Orthodoxy and on this basis developed his anthropology in the form of a dialectical teaching about the interaction of God and man in the process of the spiritual transformation of the latter. In his anthropology, Rev. Simeon proceeds from the objective position that God (Logos) became man to carry out the work of the first fallen man (Adam), but “did not then make all people gods through this” (5, vol. 3, p. 39, hymn 3). The work of the second Adam (Christ) was done, human nature was corrected from the leprosy of original and all subsequent sin, spiritualized and ascended to Heaven, to Paradise. However, according to Rev. Simeon, the subjective factor is also important here. A person must also work, make his contribution to the salvation of the soul. He must go through his own path in life and in this historical movement find his human face in order to later become a god. People must become gods through work: through faith, hope, love, fulfilling the commandments, prayer and participation in the sacraments of the Church. In other words, we need synergy (from the Greek synergetikos - joint, coordinated action) of God and man, when each side bears the measure of its responsibility in the matter of salvation. True, this measure is different. According to Rev. Macarius and etc. Simeon, of the five parts, only one belongs to the human will, while the other four are due to Divine grace. We must recognize the obvious asymmetry of efforts. Is a person’s spiritual path everything? begins with faith, under which St. Simeon understands, following Ap. Paul, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). She is the original original virtue. But faith should not be abstract, but concrete. St. Simeon specifically stipulates this point, highlighting the main meanings of the Christian faith as recorded in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Faith is a bridge and mediator between God and man. After all, says St. Simeon, “The Divine never appeared to anyone without faith” (5, vol. 2, p. 36, word 57). Why? There are several reasons for this. Communication between individuals is based on trust - without voluntary consent, good ceases to be good, turning into evil and violence, even if this good is God himself. Lack of faith separates a person from God. Faith is combined with hope, and hope leads to love, which is above all, for God is love. But love is different. People have invested and are investing in this word a variety of contents, which in most cases have nothing to do with Christian love. This latter manifests itself in special gifts. A person who loves with Christian love is long-suffering, merciful, does not envy, does not become arrogant, does not seek his own, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, is not proud, does not act outrageously, and is not irritated (cf. 1 Cor. 13:4-8). According to Rev. Simeon, it is not enough to simply believe in God. We must believe in God as a Person and, most importantly, put our faith and our worldview into practice, materializing it. After all, faith is manifested precisely through works, through the fulfillment of commandments. And this is a normal requirement if we want to remain on the basis of common sense. It must be said frankly that any worldview has its practical side. There is nothing strange or unusual in this requirement, anything purely religious and mystical. St. Simeon constantly emphasizes that the main matter of faith is human participation in the life and Sacraments of the Church. The fact is that a person needs to be involved in Christ, to be grounded in the Divinity itself, in order to know this Divinity. Moreover, this justification should not be formal, but real, organic, natural. This is what happens in the Church, which St. Simeon understands within the framework of Orthodox Tradition as a kind of living divine-human organism, and not a simple community of people based on economic, political, aesthetic, ethical or some other earthly interest. In this organism, each person is a certain individual member, an organ, and collectively all people are the single body of Christ. The seven Sacraments of the Orthodox Church (baptism, confirmation, repentance, communion, unction, marriage, priesthood) allow a person to live in Christ, in the grace of the Holy Spirit. St. Simeon, like no other Church Father, not only publicly noted the significance of the Church Sacraments for the spiritual life of a person, but also confirmed his convictions with deeds. It is known, for example, that he communed with the Body and Blood of the Savior every day, tearfully confessing his sins. Nevertheless, according to Bishop Hilarion (Alfeev), daily communion was an ideal in the Church rather than a widespread practice (3, pp. 125–144). In this context, it is necessary to recall the teaching of St. Simeon about a person’s conscious, meaningful attitude towards his life. This consciousness should extend to all aspects of human existence, and, above all, to what is directly related to the salvation of the soul. So, if God provides the reality and power of the Sacraments, then a person must really participate in them and be aware of their action. If a person does not realize and does not “assimilate” the grace of the Holy Spirit given in the Sacraments, then, according to St. Simeon, he is not a real Christian, but a “miscarriage” who does not know the One who gave birth to him (5, vol. 3, p. 215, hymn 46). St. Simeon extends this rule to all Orthodox people. It applies to the laity, and to monks, and to priests, and to bishops, and to patriarchs. Position in the church hierarchy does not play any role in this situation. God does not look at persons and positions. As he says, “a warrior’s king will not be preferred, a slave’s ruler will not be preferred: each one will either become famous or be ashamed by his deeds” (9, p. 345). Today, these thoughts about consciousness acquire particular relevance in the age of total unconsciousness, in the age of manipulation of mass consciousness in various spheres of social existence. It is also important to emphasize that the bl. Augustine, St. Simeon and many other Orthodox theologians, with varying degrees of categoricalness, insist that simple, formal membership in the Church does not bring any benefit to anyone. No one can automatically, without conscious effort, change and achieve eternal life. We must be aware of our sinful life and creatively strive to correct it and further spiritualize it. In one of the hymns of St. Simeon with an angry denunciation addresses in the name of Christ himself the Kings, Bishops, priests, and laity, whom he accuses of a variety of sins committed in knowledge and ignorance, consciously and unconsciously. And it must be said, Bishop Hilarion (Alfeev) explains, that these denunciations against the church people and hierarchy, “at the clergy are not unfounded: what he writes corresponds to reality to one degree or another, and therefore remains relevant to this day” (7, p. 191). If faith, fulfillment of the commandments, participation in the Sacraments is the beginning of the spiritual path and the constant foundation of the knowledge of God, then continuous prayer is necessary. In prayer, a person communicates personally with God. In this regard, Rev. Simeon even writes a special work called “The Word on the Three Types of Attention and Prayer” or “The Method of Sacred Prayer and Attention.” Some modern researchers question the fact that the authorship of this small work belongs to St. Simeon. The archbishop speaks about this. Vasily (Krivoshein) (1, p. 432). He is echoed by Bishop Hilarion (Alfeev), stipulating that “regardless of the attribution, the question of which remains open, the Method is a classic work of Byzantine monastic literature and is of undoubted spiritual value” (3, pp. 45–46). A.G. Dunaev, who specially studied the problem of the authorship of this work, notes in the compiler’s Preface to the collection “The Path to Sacred Silence” that, on the one hand, “in the church tradition, the authorship of the work was firmly established with St. Simeon the New Theologian,” and on the other hand, “in recent decades, the opinion has become stronger in science that in fact St. Simeon the New Theologian is not the author of the treatise...” Analyzing the arguments “for” and “against”, he concludes that it is currently impossible to resolve this issue completely. (8, p.5). He repeats this conclusion in the Appendix to the book, when he insists that “the question of authorship... remains insoluble without special paleographic and philological research.” (8, p. 171). Since the question remains open for modern theological science, in this situation we will join the church tradition, which attributes the authorship of this work to St. Simeon the New Theologian. Common sense also speaks in favor of this choice: before St. Simeon was honored with a constant vision of the Holy Spirit in connection with daily communion; in his youth he had to go through all the stages of asceticism and prayerful feat under the guidance of his elder teacher and friend, St. Simeon the Studite of Reverence. Therefore, later, knowing well the prayer practice of that time, he could well have formalized the experience of his spiritual work in writing in the form of a treatise “On the Three Ways of Prayer.” But this, of course, is just an assumption. In his opinion, the first image of prayer is false and leads a person to madness. The meaning of this prayer is that a person naturally imagines heavenly beauties in his mind and induces his soul to divine lust so that even tears flow from his eyes from tenderness. The second image of prayer is associated with the fact that the mind fights external enemies without seeing the internal ones. Only the third type of prayer leads to success. The mind must unite with the spiritual heart of a person and send prayers to the Lord from the depths (8, p. 20). Prayer ends with contemplation of God (see 4). Wanting to explain his understanding of the process of knowledge of God, St. Simeon distinguishes two forms or stages of contemplation. The first method is associated with ecstasy, when a person seems to come out of himself and fall into a frenzy, unable to withstand the meeting with a new, supernatural reality. It is characteristic that similar processes occur with mystics from various countries and peoples. At the second stage, nothing outwardly strange or unusual occurs. Contemplation becomes a mundane daily task. What does a person learn about God in this contemplation? The knowledge that God is the light of love in which there is no darkness. St. Simeon develops the Orthodox teaching about God as spiritual light, spiritual sun. He insists that there are two suns, a physical one for the visible material world, and a spiritual one for the invisible otherworldly reality. Contemplation of this spiritual light, staying in it transforms a person spiritually, ontologically transforms his nature and personality. It is important here not to confuse the means and the goal of the Christian life. Fasting, almsgiving and even prayer, and all other good deeds are only a means. What then is the purpose of the Christian life? There is only one goal - “acquiring grace” that “deifies” a person. Through the contemplation of light, a person can and must become god by grace, by adoption. It is important to understand that right now, in this life, the process of transformation, transformation must begin. Deification begins from the moment of a person’s spiritual birth from God. It occurs in the Sacrament of Baptism, when God moves into a person. A person becomes, as it were, “pregnant” with God, a God-bearer. Some saints were called God-bearers by the church people. One can recall in this context at least St. Ignatius the God-Bearer, Bishop of Antioch. Spiritual “pregnancy” goes through a number of stages. First, God unites with the human soul. This happens in the same way as it happened in Christ: unmerged, indivisible, unchangeable, immutable? Divine light mixes with the soul without confusion and begins to enlighten it. Man becomes the church of the living God. Then not only the soul, but also the mind undergoes gradual change and transformation. Such a changed mind is called the mind of Christ. Later, through the soul and mind, divine energies pass to the body itself, to the whole person. In this state, a person overcomes death itself. But people, including saints, continue to die. How to explain this fact? Archbishop Vasily (Krivoshein) explains that St. Simeon taught about three stages of deification, during earthly life, after death and in the general resurrection (1, p. 430). In other words, unity with God begins here, in this earthly life, but will acquire its fullness at the end of time. One of the symbols of the beginning of transfiguration are the holy relics of the righteous, which remain incorrupt for many centuries and even millennia. They mark the victory of life over death. But the darkness of this world has not yet been completely destroyed. Soteriology of St. Simeon includes a developed demonology, which was common at the time. Like any Christian, he believes in the existence of evil forces, demons and devils. The Thinker constantly reminds us that the world lies in evil and worries about this. Orthodox theology, although sometimes speaks of evil as a lack of good (Augustine), nevertheless, as a rule, takes the opposite position. According to Rev. Simeon, evil is a foreign phenomenon in space. It is a product of the pride of the free will of rational beings, first of fallen angels, and then of sinning people. The source of evil is the devil, who at the beginning of time rebelled against God, the archangel Dennitsa (morning and evening dawn) and lost his angelic dignity, his rank in the universe, but not his strength and reason in his fight against God. As Rev. explains. Simeon, Satan - the ruler of the world, plays with the world as with a small bird, for “there is no one like him on earth... He is king over all the sons of pride” (Job 41:25). Therefore, for Christians, life is not a carefree, empty pastime, but a battle, an endless struggle with the fallen angel and his minions. From personal experience of fighting demons, St. Simeon draws a number of conclusions. According to the theologian, the devil is a multi-skilled ancient warrior who knows his business well. He fights against people in different ways. First of all, he tries to convince a person that he, a fallen angel, does not exist, that a person does everything based on his understanding. Secondly, he tries to formulate a false worldview (Judaism, pagan philosophy, various heresies), which leads a person away from the path of salvation in the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Thirdly, Satan is trying to replace a person’s spiritual life with a sensory-material one. But what's wrong with it if a person gets pleasure from his life? Indeed, there is nothing wrong with this as long as some higher spiritual values ​​are preserved. If these values ​​are relegated to the background and forgotten, then the person begins to degrade. Leading an exclusively plant or animal life, a person loses his human dignity. Bodily life satisfies only the needs of the body and, in fact, does not differ from the life of animals: sleep, food, sexual impulses - these are the range of its interests. But in the end, a person loses his rank in the universe, just as Satan lost it before. It is about such people that the Bible says that “they are flesh” (Gen. 6:3). But, according to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, this is not even the most important thing. The worst thing, as always, remains “behind the scenes”: “harmless” worship of one’s body and material values ​​leads a person to spiritual slavery. He becomes the servant of a fallen angel. The Bible speaks unequivocally about such people: “their god is their belly” (Phil. 3:19), like Satan’s. In this way they became like him. Their god becomes Satan, the prince of heaven, the master over all the sons of pride, the master of this material world, who has no equal here. The fallen angel, seducing man with the visible beauty of this world, catches people like a bird catcher. He places some kind of bait in front of a person’s thoughts, and underneath it he lays out sin like a net. Therefore, Christians must fight the flesh, the world and the devil behind all these sensual pleasures. Finally, Satan simply intimidates a person or uses a roundabout maneuver, inducing false chastity, mercy, meekness into the ascetic, or forcing him to perform feats not according to reason. This internal battle with demons is not like ordinary wars between people. The most terrible thing is that she does not know compromises and goes on incessantly, because demons do not know holidays and days off. As a result, many Christians cannot withstand this struggle with a demon skilled in doing evil, they cease to control the situation and begin to do evil, voluntarily or involuntarily, falling under its power. However, most people, according to St. Simeon, is not at all tormented because he fell away from God and became the sons of the devil. They quickly get used to this new state of slavery. Moreover, they even remain satisfied with the plight they are in and try to settle into it with maximum comfort. Gradually, a community of people united by the tyranny of the devil emerges - the anti-church or the church of the evil ones. And no technical or cultural progress is able to weaken the power of the fallen angel, for this slavery is based on immorality and lack of spirituality. Our modern culture clearly demonstrates this. According to Rev. Simeon, only in Christ and through Christ is spiritual warfare possible. Only in Christ does a person become a warrior who puts the enemy to shame. Or rather, as the Venerable insists. Simeon, in every Christian it is Christ who fights and defeats the enemy. But this takes a lot and a long time to learn. The usual way is this. A person rises to the heights of spiritual perfection and falls down, seduced by the devil. He rises and the battle begins again to end with the spiritual transformation of the ascetic. It is in struggle that character is formed and hardened. St. Simeon, based on Church Tradition and his personal experience, painted a picture of the salvation and spiritualization of a person walking the path of prayer and ascetic deed. But he knew very well about the variety of paths to human transformation, speaking, for example, about the path of voluntary martyrdom in peacetime without tyrants and persecutors. In this situation, a person, only out of love for God, suffers hourly from the violence of fallen angels and the destructive passions of the flesh, cutting off his will to pleasure. Indeed, people go to God and achieve immortality in different ways. The prayerful feat of the reverend fathers is one of these opportunities. The Church glorifies the prophets, and the Apostles, and the passion-bearers, and the martyrs with their confessors, and the fools for Christ, the saints, the noble princes, the righteous - all those in whom Christ was portrayed in some way. After all, each era dictates its own rules for competitions. The battle for Truth can take place anywhere, both in the human soul and in public life. Therefore, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, summing up the results of the twentieth century, canonized almost one and a half thousand people who suffered from the atheistic Soviet regime to the rank of new martyrs and confessors of Russia for conciliar veneration. Exactly a thousand years separate us from St. Simeon the New Theologian. During this time, many events happened in human history. However, few people in our time are able to accept the teachings of St. Simeon about the conscious vision of God and spiritual transformation in this life, here and now. Humanity is suspicious of the calls of spiritual life, perceiving it as just another hoax. It prefers solid ground underfoot and a piece of bread and butter. And this has its own bitter truth, since man is a complex being, and not an incorporeal angel. He needs to eat, drink, bear children and dress well. And the fact that he will become a god after death brings little comfort to anyone in this life. But such a position is a verdict to oneself, dooming a person to a meaningless plant and animal existence, from the vicious vicious circle of which it is necessary to get out through spiritual renewal and transformation of a person. St. Simeon the New Theologian, in a poetic hymn entitled “The Path to Contemplation of the Divine Light,” sums up his theology and philosophy, his life ideals, indicating the way to achieve the Divine Light. Let us quote these lyrical lines so that Russian people in the 21st century, tormented by doubts or unbelief, courageously recognize the possibility of spiritual transformation as their national ideology, which for centuries has been leading the people along the path of Holy Russia, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Life and Light, along the path of Christ. To complete the picture and accurately reproduce the meaning of the verses, we will use both the interlinear prose translation of Hieromonk Panteleimon (Uspensky) and the modern literary poetic translation of Abbot Hilarion (Alfeev), who was recently ordained a bishop. In the translation of Hieromonk Panteleimon (Uspensky) this hymn looks like this: Who wants to see this Light, He must keep the following in his heart: (Beware of) bodily passions and obscene defilements, Gods and all anger and indignation, And dispersion and memory malice, And don’t judge people at all; And to be in the very thought and heart Purest from carnal filth, Meek, humble, calm, Frank and child of the world, Abstaining from food and drink And unremittingly engage in prayer; The beginning and the end of all this To have the head of virtues is love (5, vol. 3, pp. 279–280). The modern literary translation of Bishop Hilarion (Alfeev) looks like this: Who wants to see this non-evening light, He must always watch his heart From passionate movements, from bad thoughts, From anger, embarrassment, hypocritical oaths. I must pay attention to myself and not remember anger, Don't judge people even in the thoughts of your heart Be internally pure, frank in words, Be sincere, meek, calm, humble. Let his meal not be rich, Let him keep prayer and fasting unremittingly. And all his feats, and any business, And let every word be done with love (7, p. 164). 1. Archbishop Vasily (Krivoshein). St. Simeon the New Theologian. – Nizhny Novgorod, 1996. 3. Hegumen Hilarion (Alfeev). Venerable Simeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. – M., 1998. 4. Priest Oleg Klimkov. Experience of silence. Man in the worldview of the Byzantine hesychasts. – St. Petersburg. – 2001. 5. St. Simeon the New Theologian. Creations in three volumes. – Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra, 1993. 6. Venerable Simeon the New Theologian. Rev. Nikita Stifat. Ascetic works in new translations. – Klin, 2001. 7. Venerable Simeon the New Theologian. Come, true Light. Selected hymns translated by Hieromonk Hilarion Alfeev. – St. Petersburg, 2000. 8. The path to sacred silence. Little-known creations of the holy hesychast fathers. – M, 1999. 9. Orthodox Prayer Book. Psalter. – M., 2000