Christian Neoplatonism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Arguing that the real meaning of orthodoxy is not a set of official dogmas but “correct glorification,” the present study pleads for the possibility of divergent theological concepts within orthodoxy and for the methodology of understanding “Symeon through Symeon” without the projection of our own concept of orthodoxy, identified with the letter of the teaching of the fourteenth-century Hesychasts, into Symeon’s thought. Through philological analysis, this essay shows that, concerning the role of the body in the final mystical vision of God, Symeon’s oeuvre displays some contradictions. Symeon often quotes St Paul (2Cor 12:2), stating that, in the moment of the vision, the saints do not know whether they are in the body or without the body, because this is impossible to judge. Yet, in Hymn IX, verse 9, Symeon seems to say that in the unifying vision the saint is raptured outside the world with his body, while Nicetas Stethatus, Symeon’s pupil and the editor of his works, adds here a marginal note stating that this doctrine is to be found in another, unspecified work of Symeon. However, a thorough scrutiny into the loci where Symeon speaks about the final rapture seems to reveal that at no other place does he teach such a doctrine. Rather, he adds many times that, according to his own – necessarily speculative – view, in the rapture the saints must be without the body, in a completely immaterial state, and so do they become capable of contemplating the immaterial God. Not only this but also the descriptions of the descent into the body and the corporeal world after the vision are reminiscent of Plotinus’s comparable descriptions of the mystical union of the soul and her subsequent descent into our world. The difference, which is that of a non-Christian Platonist mysticism and a Christian Platonist spirituality, seems to be that another kind of vision is also possible in the body – represented in Symeon’s poetry by the metaphors of the pit, the darkness and the grave of the soul – due to the descent of the Light, that is, Christ, into the darkness, that is, the corporeal world. Finally, based on the above reconstruction, the study argues that the only locus where Symeon seems to teach a rapture with the body is due to the editorial intervention of Nicetas, this fact also being testified to by the latter’s misleading marginal note, and that Symeon’s mysticism typically belongs to the intellectualist type of mysticism, being very close to that of Evagrius. Yet, it is to be considered a fully orthodox teaching, among other reasons because it ignores the metaphysical dimension of Evagrius’s doctrine, condemned as unorthodox in the sixth century, and lays all its emphasis on spirituality.