The Sight of God in the Theology of Saint Symeon the New Theologian [18]

Here, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

Our greek font.

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Thus, the spiritual knowledge is an enlightenment, is a divine revelation for the believer.

Triadology, according as we understand from the symeonian discourse, is a dogma that we can experience if we live the sight of the divine light.

It is not only a veritable expose of Tradition, but also a mysterious lighting and a divine reality to which we accede, an internal cohabitation with Trinity, because the Trinity dwells in us by Her grace and thus lives up to Himself.

Those who accede, through the Ghost, to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity, they see the glory of God and they don’t have the reflex of the curious seekers^[1] in those mysterious of God. The spiritual experience destroys from bud the tendency for cerebralization of the Trinity’s mystery.

For the spiritual man the Trinity is not a distant object of research and that has nothing to do with himself, but is the source itself of man’s spiritual life, because he lives in the deep communion with Trinity.

But in the communion with the trinitarian God we enter as response at His more-loving initiative to us. And therefore we not only bring us to Him, but we want to bring the whole cosmos to fulfill into God’s glory.

For that the matter is a structure with rational and spiritual foundation and has right sense the spiritualisation, its transfiguration, our bodies are made ​​of this matter, through the sight of His glory we personalize and we sanctify in us the matter of our body and this irradiance of divine light extends and to what is around us.

Symeon recognizes those who know, through the enlightenment, the dogma and the truth of the Trinity, because they can give details about this reality by the discovery of the Trinity in their being.

At the beginning of the Hymn 31, praising Most beautiful Trinity, our Father affirms the initiative of the Trinity in the personal discovery of the faithful and the fact that, in ecstasy, is seen the beauty but not the being of the Trinity^[2].

The being beyond being (ouvsi,a| u`perou,sioj) of God is unknown both to Angels and men^[3].

Light of the Trinity but is the reality that we impart in ecstatic mode and this is the subject that Symeon wanted to clarify in his entire opera.

The reality of the sight and the possibility of the God’s sight by any christian in part is the quintessence of the symeonian theology.

The Hymn 33, which has right the prolegomena a extended triadological confession, puts light of Trinity face in face with the human reality made after the image and likeness of God^[4].

The first man, like as strouqi,on euvtele,j (the humble sparrow), alias dra,konta (the serpent) the old and great, fell because they lost the light of the Trinity^[5].

To experience again the communion with the Trinity, in Church, is the consequence of the sight of the Trinity’s light and the feeling of the grace in our being, which gives us to live a paradoxical relation with God, through that the Trinity is in us through His glory and we in the glory of Trinity, being together with Trinity.

The light’s sight is a irrepressible interior reality for who lives of it. The light sparkles on our soul and body and makes them shine^[6].

Of course, our being full of light does not shine a light on to see it all (it’s here about the uncreated light) but, in the first line, sees the one who lives it and other spiritual people, who would see the ecstatic during his sight.

He who lived the light sees himself invaded by light and in light he sees the mysteries of God, what God wants to reveal to him.

The consciousness’s state of ecstasy and, evident, the awareness and the remembrance of it is marked in the Hymn 34.

The sight of the Trinity’s light is a „th.n e[nwsin evn gnw,sei  (union into understanding/ in state of consciousness),…evn aivsqh,sei (in sensation),…pei,ra| (experience) kai. o`ra,sei (and sight)”^[7].

All four members of the symeonian statement catalogs the ecstatic’s sight right a total experience and a direct link with the glory of the Trinity.

The sight of God is a vision without a external mediation, namely is not produced with the aid of a heavenly Power, but is a direct view of the glory of God, through the work of the Holy Ghost.