Divine Desire in the Hymns of Symeon the New Theologian
With the kind permission of Professor Derek Krueger, below is an excerpt from his chapter, “Divine Fantasy and the Erotic Imagination in the Hymns of Symeon the New Theologian” in Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium, edited by Bronwen Neil & Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 315–341.
In addition to many prose treatises and catechetical lectures, Symeon the New Theologian wrote over the course of his life a great many poems called variously “hymns” and “love songs”, although they were neither set to music nor intended to be sung. Around 1035, Symeon’s self-proclaimed disciple, Niketas Stethatos, edited and published a corpus of some fifty-eight of these poems, some of them quite long, totaling over 10,000 verses in three different meters. While it is tempting to read the hymns as intensely personal, the poet consistently engages in ethopoeia, or speech-in-character, constructing a poetic subject engaged in theological meditation and aflame with fervent desire for God. Through the poems, Symeon models a contemplative and impassioned monastic “I” to assist in the formation of monks’ interior lives, first those in his charge while abbot of the Monastery of St Mamas in Constantinople, and then, after his exile, across the Bosporus at the Oratory of St Marina.
In exploring the love of God through unabashedly erotic discourse, Symeon recasts celibacy. Contrary to expectations, here asceticism does not, in fact, require a negation of desire. For Symeon, monastic discipline is not precisely the opposite of sex. Symeon’s sexualised spirituality in itself reveals the impact of the erotic imagination on Symeon’s theology and his understanding of the monastic subject. He cannot convey or understand the love of God independent of human emotions and experience. Symeon redirects the focus of desire toward God. Desire for God becomes for Symeon its own sort of erotic orientation, a “facing East” full of fantasy and longing. To this end, Symeon invigorates an affective piety that structures devotion to God along novelistic lines for romantic love. Symeon’s hymns celebrate such a devotional form in the Orthodox East a good century before the emergence of a similar discourse in the Roman Catholic West in the 12th century, particularly in the writings of the Cistercians, and long before the early modern divine erotics of John of the Cross and John Donne.
Late ancient and Byzantine novelists emplotted longing, or pothos, in diverting and formulaic narratives. In his dedicatory epigram introducing Rodanthe and Dosikles, Theodore Prodromos enumerates the elements of his own tale and the romance genre as a whole:
While Symeon does not engage all these elements of narrative tension and excitement, he draws heavily on the pains and agonies of desire, on the phases of the love-plot that has not yet reached its consummation. In doing so, he fans the flames of desire for God, fusing devotion and the erotic imagination.
For Symeon, the vocabulary of love and longing shapes an affective piety, a way both to describe and instill an emotional relationship with God that is not simply pleasurable and which plays upon a perception of divine absence. The prose prayer that stands at the opening of the collection of the Hymns invokes God’s presence, calling on him to appear. “Come, You whom my miserable soul has desired and desires, Come the Alone to the alone, because I am alone, as You see!”[2] The opening of Hymn 52 borrows from the speeches of separated lovers in fiction, full of sorrow and longing. “Who shall comfort the suffering of my heart?” The next line glosses this by revealing the identity of the beloved: “But when I said ‘suffering’ I disclosed my yearning for the Savior.”[3] Symeon does serious theological work here too, equating the yearning itself with the presence of God, so that God is not simply love, but pothos.
In stricter theological terms, where God is understood as omnipresent or even immanent, it is not God’s presence that is the product of fantasy, but the very idea of God’s absence. By positing a distance between the “I” and God, Symeon creates a space that he fills with emotion. In counterpoint to a theology of presence, Symeon predicates passionate devotion on a theology of imagined absence. Indeed, the fantasy of an absent lover and the impassioned experience of tension and torment generate a powerful counterpleasure.
The longing for God leads to the telos of consummation, but only through an elaborate sequence of twists and turns. As Hymn 18 explains,
When I have it [love], I do not look upon it,
I quickly hasten to grasp it, and it flies clean away.
I am completely at a loss, and I burn, and I learn to beg,
and to seek out with weeping and much humility.[4]
The “I” declares its powerlessness, identifying itself as the subject of divine caprice. Indeed, the poem seems to celebrate the subject’s erotic suffering and especially his subversive pleasure in not knowing when the beloved will appear. In the subsequent lines, when God does appear, his identity is veiled, his presence at once detectable and alien. For Symeon’s masochism to play out, God must tease him cruelly, allowing for gratification in God’s deferral or withdrawal.
I cry out in distress, I am bound tight wishing to grasp it,
and everything is night, and my wretched hands are empty.
I forget everything and I sit and lament,
without hope of thus seeing it [love] ever again.
But when I wail much and want to stop,
then love comes mysteriously, and grabs my head,
and mingles with tears, I know not who it is,
and it shines upon my mind with an exceedingly sweet light.
But whenever I know who it is, love quickly flies away,
leaving for me the fire of its divine desire.[5]
Operatic in its lament and its characterisation of an inconstant, if not abusive, lover, the hymn depends on a very strange construct of divine love. Far from a denial of pleasure, Symeon hungers for Christ in tantalising foreplay. Possessing this God and being possessed by him are the very goals of piety: “I make merry in love’s beauty, I often embrace it, / I kiss it, and fall down in worship, I have great thankfulness / to those who have arranged for me to see what I was desiring.”[6] Even as he thanks those who have taught him religion, he takes his pleasure in his subjugation to Christ. Indeed, the poem frames a safe space for role-playing in which Symeon explores erotic liberation through submission.
Although he locates himself deep in the fantasy of being humiliated by God, the poetic “I” is, to some extent, aware that the God he experiences as absent is not entirely absent. And yet the partial apprehension or possession of God only feeds the longing. In Hymn 8, Symeon bemoans that the more he is “purified and illumined” (8.41), the more his desire for God builds.
For in an infinite depth, in an immeasurable height,
who shall be able to find a middle or an end?
I know that it is great, but I do not know how great.
I long [ἐπιποθῶ] for more and I continually groan,
because even though I suppose it to be much, what is given is small
compared to what I suspect exists far away from me
when I see the very thing that I desire, and I seem to have nothing,
not entirely sensing the wealth [already] given to me.[7]
Symeon’s longing blinds him to a God who by definition is beyond perception. He does not and cannot know the God that he desires. Symeon concedes that his longing is greedy and almost churlish, and he compares his love of God to a longing for sunshine and to sweet sensations that “drag the soul to a longing [εἰς πόθον] that is divine and beyond telling. / This soul who sees burns [with passion] and is inflamed by longing [τῷ πόθῳ].”[8] Indeed, if one is afforded a mere glimpse of God, “Who shall not long for Him?”[9] While many have come to love (ἠγάπησαν) God through the sense of hearing, and have come to have faith because of the word of Christ (8.82; compare Rom 10:17), those who have “participated in his vision and light / being known and knowing Him, how shall they not long for Him?”[10] Privileging the vision of God over the hearing of the Gospel, Symeon combines a standard hierarchy of the senses with a romantic trope of love at first sight, a torment predicated on the overwhelming power of seeing and participating in the love object’s resplendent beauty.
In addition to many prose treatises and catechetical lectures, Symeon the New Theologian wrote over the course of his life a great many poems called variously “hymns” and “love songs”, although they were neither set to music nor intended to be sung. Around 1035, Symeon’s self-proclaimed disciple, Niketas Stethatos, edited and published a corpus of some fifty-eight of these poems, some of them quite long, totaling over 10,000 verses in three different meters. While it is tempting to read the hymns as intensely personal, the poet consistently engages in ethopoeia, or speech-in-character, constructing a poetic subject engaged in theological meditation and aflame with fervent desire for God. Through the poems, Symeon models a contemplative and impassioned monastic “I” to assist in the formation of monks’ interior lives, first those in his charge while abbot of the Monastery of St Mamas in Constantinople, and then, after his exile, across the Bosporus at the Oratory of St Marina.
In exploring the love of God through unabashedly erotic discourse, Symeon recasts celibacy. Contrary to expectations, here asceticism does not, in fact, require a negation of desire. For Symeon, monastic discipline is not precisely the opposite of sex. Symeon’s sexualised spirituality in itself reveals the impact of the erotic imagination on Symeon’s theology and his understanding of the monastic subject. He cannot convey or understand the love of God independent of human emotions and experience. Symeon redirects the focus of desire toward God. Desire for God becomes for Symeon its own sort of erotic orientation, a “facing East” full of fantasy and longing. To this end, Symeon invigorates an affective piety that structures devotion to God along novelistic lines for romantic love. Symeon’s hymns celebrate such a devotional form in the Orthodox East a good century before the emergence of a similar discourse in the Roman Catholic West in the 12th century, particularly in the writings of the Cistercians, and long before the early modern divine erotics of John of the Cross and John Donne.
Late ancient and Byzantine novelists emplotted longing, or pothos, in diverting and formulaic narratives. In his dedicatory epigram introducing Rodanthe and Dosikles, Theodore Prodromos enumerates the elements of his own tale and the romance genre as a whole:
These [are the adventures] of the silvery girl Rodanthe with the lovely garland
and of the valiant and comely youth Dosikles,
the flights and wanderings and tempests and billows, brigands,
grievous eddies, sorrows that give rise to love [ἐροτοτόκοι μελεδῶνες],
chains and indissoluble fetters and imprisonments in gloomy
dungeons, grim sacrifices, bitter grief,
poisoned cups and paralysis of joints,
then the marriage and the marriage bed and passionate love.[1]
and of the valiant and comely youth Dosikles,
the flights and wanderings and tempests and billows, brigands,
grievous eddies, sorrows that give rise to love [ἐροτοτόκοι μελεδῶνες],
chains and indissoluble fetters and imprisonments in gloomy
dungeons, grim sacrifices, bitter grief,
poisoned cups and paralysis of joints,
then the marriage and the marriage bed and passionate love.[1]
While Symeon does not engage all these elements of narrative tension and excitement, he draws heavily on the pains and agonies of desire, on the phases of the love-plot that has not yet reached its consummation. In doing so, he fans the flames of desire for God, fusing devotion and the erotic imagination.
For Symeon, the vocabulary of love and longing shapes an affective piety, a way both to describe and instill an emotional relationship with God that is not simply pleasurable and which plays upon a perception of divine absence. The prose prayer that stands at the opening of the collection of the Hymns invokes God’s presence, calling on him to appear. “Come, You whom my miserable soul has desired and desires, Come the Alone to the alone, because I am alone, as You see!”[2] The opening of Hymn 52 borrows from the speeches of separated lovers in fiction, full of sorrow and longing. “Who shall comfort the suffering of my heart?” The next line glosses this by revealing the identity of the beloved: “But when I said ‘suffering’ I disclosed my yearning for the Savior.”[3] Symeon does serious theological work here too, equating the yearning itself with the presence of God, so that God is not simply love, but pothos.
In stricter theological terms, where God is understood as omnipresent or even immanent, it is not God’s presence that is the product of fantasy, but the very idea of God’s absence. By positing a distance between the “I” and God, Symeon creates a space that he fills with emotion. In counterpoint to a theology of presence, Symeon predicates passionate devotion on a theology of imagined absence. Indeed, the fantasy of an absent lover and the impassioned experience of tension and torment generate a powerful counterpleasure.
The longing for God leads to the telos of consummation, but only through an elaborate sequence of twists and turns. As Hymn 18 explains,
When I have it [love], I do not look upon it,
I quickly hasten to grasp it, and it flies clean away.
I am completely at a loss, and I burn, and I learn to beg,
and to seek out with weeping and much humility.[4]
The “I” declares its powerlessness, identifying itself as the subject of divine caprice. Indeed, the poem seems to celebrate the subject’s erotic suffering and especially his subversive pleasure in not knowing when the beloved will appear. In the subsequent lines, when God does appear, his identity is veiled, his presence at once detectable and alien. For Symeon’s masochism to play out, God must tease him cruelly, allowing for gratification in God’s deferral or withdrawal.
I cry out in distress, I am bound tight wishing to grasp it,
and everything is night, and my wretched hands are empty.
I forget everything and I sit and lament,
without hope of thus seeing it [love] ever again.
But when I wail much and want to stop,
then love comes mysteriously, and grabs my head,
and mingles with tears, I know not who it is,
and it shines upon my mind with an exceedingly sweet light.
But whenever I know who it is, love quickly flies away,
leaving for me the fire of its divine desire.[5]
Operatic in its lament and its characterisation of an inconstant, if not abusive, lover, the hymn depends on a very strange construct of divine love. Far from a denial of pleasure, Symeon hungers for Christ in tantalising foreplay. Possessing this God and being possessed by him are the very goals of piety: “I make merry in love’s beauty, I often embrace it, / I kiss it, and fall down in worship, I have great thankfulness / to those who have arranged for me to see what I was desiring.”[6] Even as he thanks those who have taught him religion, he takes his pleasure in his subjugation to Christ. Indeed, the poem frames a safe space for role-playing in which Symeon explores erotic liberation through submission.
Although he locates himself deep in the fantasy of being humiliated by God, the poetic “I” is, to some extent, aware that the God he experiences as absent is not entirely absent. And yet the partial apprehension or possession of God only feeds the longing. In Hymn 8, Symeon bemoans that the more he is “purified and illumined” (8.41), the more his desire for God builds.
For in an infinite depth, in an immeasurable height,
who shall be able to find a middle or an end?
I know that it is great, but I do not know how great.
I long [ἐπιποθῶ] for more and I continually groan,
because even though I suppose it to be much, what is given is small
compared to what I suspect exists far away from me
when I see the very thing that I desire, and I seem to have nothing,
not entirely sensing the wealth [already] given to me.[7]
Symeon’s longing blinds him to a God who by definition is beyond perception. He does not and cannot know the God that he desires. Symeon concedes that his longing is greedy and almost churlish, and he compares his love of God to a longing for sunshine and to sweet sensations that “drag the soul to a longing [εἰς πόθον] that is divine and beyond telling. / This soul who sees burns [with passion] and is inflamed by longing [τῷ πόθῳ].”[8] Indeed, if one is afforded a mere glimpse of God, “Who shall not long for Him?”[9] While many have come to love (ἠγάπησαν) God through the sense of hearing, and have come to have faith because of the word of Christ (8.82; compare Rom 10:17), those who have “participated in his vision and light / being known and knowing Him, how shall they not long for Him?”[10] Privileging the vision of God over the hearing of the Gospel, Symeon combines a standard hierarchy of the senses with a romantic trope of love at first sight, a torment predicated on the overwhelming power of seeing and participating in the love object’s resplendent beauty.
Notes
[1] Theodore Prodromos, Dedication to Rodanthe and Dosikles, lines 19–24 (Agapitos 2000,
175–176; trans. Jeffreys 2012, 19–20).
[2] ἐλθέ, ὃν ἐπόθησε καὶ ποθεῖ ἡ ταλαίπωρός μου ψυχή· ἐλθέ, ὁ μόνος πρὸς μόνον, ὅτι μόνος εἰμί, καθάπερ ὁρᾷς: Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, proem. 18–20 (Koder 1969–1973, 1:150; trans. Griggs 2010, 33).
[3] Τίς μου παραμυθήσεται τὸν πόνον τῆς καρδίας; πόνον δ’ εἰπὼν ἐδήλωσα τὸν τοῦ σωτῆρος πόθον: Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, 52.1–2 (Koder 1969–1973, 3:198; trans. Griggs 2010, 366).
[4] Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, 18.43–46 (Koder 1969–1973, 2:78; trans. Griggs2010, 120).
[5] Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, 18.75–84 (Koder 1969–1973, 2:80; trans. Griggs
2010, 121–122, modified).
[6] κάλλους αὐτῆς κατατρυφῶ, συχνῶς ἀσπάζομαι ταύτην / καταφιλῶ καὶ προσκυνῶ, χάριν ἔχω μεγάλην / τοῖς ἐμὲ προξενήσασιν ἰδεῖν, ἥνπερ ἐπόθουν: Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, 18.117–119 (Koder 1969–1973, 2:84; trans. Griggs 2010, 123).
[7] Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns8.44–51 (Koder 1969–1973, 1:218; trans. Griggs 2010, 59, modified).
[8] Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns8.55–56 (Koder 1969–1973, 1:218; trans. Griggs 2010, 60, modified).
[9] τίς ἰδὼν οὐ ποθήσει;: Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns8.81 (Koder 1969–1973, 1:220; trans. Griggs 2010, 61, modified).
[10] οἱ δὲ καὶ θέας τῆς αὐτοῦ καὶ φωτὸς μετασχόντες / γνωσθέντες καὶ γνωρίσαντες αὐτὸν πῶς μὴ ποθοῦσιν;: Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns 8.84–85 (Koder 1969–1973, 1:220; trans. Griggs 2010, 61, modified).
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