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During a recent retreat at which the meaning of prayer was being
discussed, several of the people present expressed their great dismay when
the speaker moved from what they perceived to be “spiritual” issues to
questions of dogma. Dogma was
felt to be peripheral, an “external” forced on us from the outside and
to be contrasted with an “inner,” more genuine Christianity. At another parish on a different occasion, there was a great deal
of discomfort when the retreat master spoke of Orthodoxy not as some
“thing” in itself but as essentially an experience of the Crucified
and Risen Lord. Both of these reactions reflect a spiritual schizophrenia
that plagues much of contemporary American Christianity – the divorce
between intellect and feeling, mind and heart – that often leaves our
lives as Christians barren, without direction or content.
Symeon, an eleventh century saint whom the Church honors as “the
New Theologian,” offers contemporary Orthodox Christians a paradigm of
the unity between dogma and experience. Both his teaching and the witness of his life illustrate that dogma
and prayer, spirituality and theology, can never be separated from the new
life in Christ; and that the dogmatic structures of the Church such as the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which we recite during the Liturgy every
Sunday serve as signposts and guides for prayer and the “inner” life.
Symeon was born at Galatia, a part of Asia Minor, in 949 A.D., the
son of well-to-do provincial nobility. Symeon was a young man of twenty when he first experienced the
glory of God. As the most
intensely personal of the Byzantine fathers, Symeon’s writings include
the following description of that initial experience, written in the thirdc
person out of humility:
“One
day while he was standing in prayer…a divine illumination appeared from
above, filling the whole place. But
when this happened, the young man had no more way of discerning whether he
was in a house or under a roof, since he saw only light everywhere. He did not even know whether he was walking on the earth…but
having given himself up entirely to this immaterial light…he was flooded
with tears, a joy and inexpressible gladness.”
Symeon attributed this experience to the prayerful intercessions of
his spiritual father, Symeon the Studite, a monk of the famous monastery
of Studion in Constantinople. It was to be the first of many such extraordinary experiences
which forever changed Symeon’s life.
Abandoning a successful career, Symeon became a monk and was
eventually ordained a priest. As a spiritual father, hymn-writer and thinker, Symeon
insisted that the meaning of dogma and the task of theology is to
articulate and communicate these experiences of the Lord of Glory, to
share the gifts which had been given to him with others. For him, experiencing the Crucified and Risen Lord is the content
of the Church’s dogmatic formulations. Without this inner experience, dogma has no meaning and is little
more than empty words without content. Conversely, a Christian who lacks an awareness of the great dogmas
of Christianity easily becomes submerged in a sea of subjective
experience, an experience without the objective “facts” of dogma upon
which all truly Christian experience must be based. Thus, the dogmas of the Church are not a set of “alien”
formulations which we must adhere to because some ecclesiastical authority
is forcing us to do so; but rather, the documentation of the deepest and
most profound human experiences which, transcending time and space, are
handed over from generation to generation as a light in our darkness.
And the church is not an institution arbitrarily forcing us to
follow its rules, but a community inviting us to still our hunger and
thirst for the Truth at its table.
It is significant that in later life, Symeon came to regard his
initial experience at the age of twenty as relatively rudimentary. It was the starting point rather than the destination; the
beginning of the race rather that the finish line. It was an experience granted to him quickly, easily and with little
effort on his part. It was
the basis upon which he was to build with asceticism and an openness to
God’s presence. Symeon saw
the spiritual life as a process of growth and development. Christianity is not something that one “has” merely by virtue
of baptism. It is a life in
which one constantly enters more and more deeply into the presence of the
Lord of Glory.
The writings of Symeon constitute an invaluable treasure in the
life of the church. They
point to the essential unity of experience and thought in the Christian
life, indicating the error of mere dogmatic formalism or an experience
without roots in the soil of tradition. Symeon’s approach is “wholistic” – to borrow a phrase
from contemporary medicine – and precisely for that reason offers us a
genuine witness to the Truth.
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