The Byzantine mystic, writer, and monastic leader Symeon the New Theologian is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church. The Life was written more than 30 years after Symeon's death by his disciple and apologist Niketas Stethatos. This translation, based on an authoritative Greek edition, makes it accessible to English readers for the first time.
Raised a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus would become one of the most influential philosophers in the Stoic tradition. While exiled in Greece by an emperor who considered philosophers a threat, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy at Nicopolis. His student Arrian of Nicomedia took careful notes of his sometimes cantankerous lectures, the surviving examples of which are now known as the Discourses of Epictetus. In these discourses, Epictetus explains how to gain peace-of-mind by only willing that which is within the domain of your will. There is no point in getting upset about things that are outside of your control; that only leads to distress. Instead, let such things be however they are, and focus your effort on the things that are in your control: your own attitudes and priorities. This way, you can never be thrown off balance, and tranquility is yours for the taking. The lessons in the Discourses of Epictetus, along with his Enchiridion, have continued to attract new adherents to Stoic philosophy down to the present day. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
This book is a study of the mystical nature of tradition, and the traditional nature of mysticism, and of St Symeon as both a highly personal and very traditional ecclesiastical writer. The teachings of St Symeon (late tenth to early eleventh century) created much controversy in Byzantium and even led to a short-lived exile to Asia Minor. For the first time in modern scholarship St Symeon's attitude to Scripture and to church worship, his relations with his spiritual father, Symeon the Studite, and the Studite tradition in general are examined. Separate chapters are dedicated to Symeon's cycle of daily reading, to his attitude to hagiographical literature, to his trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, anthropology, and mysticism. Special attention is also paid to the links between Symeon and preceeding authors such as Gregory Nazianzen. In this book Dr Alfeyev aims to redress the balance existing in the modern scholarly approach to Symeon and, more generally, to the Byzantine mystical tradition. By examining Symeon from within the tradition to which both he and the author belong Dr Alfeyev breaks new ground in original research.
St Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) is regarded as one of the most significant figures in Byzantine mysticism. His four epistles are now published in their entirety for the first time in this scholarly edition using the Greek text, established by Joseph Paramelle, It is edited with an introduction, translation and notes by H. J. M. Turner.
St. Symeon the New Theologian was abbot of the monastery of St Mamas in Constantinople at the turn of the eleventh century. He was also perhaps the most remarkable and certainly the most forceful advocate of the mystical experience of God in the history of the Byzantine Church. Though they were on occasion suppressed by ecclesiastical authorities wary of his fierce enthusiasm, as well as of his claims to charismatic authority, St Symeon's writings survived in the Orthodox Church and continued to play a vital role in the several renewals of spiritual life and prayer which has sustained the Church in its often difficult history over the past millennium.
Symeon the New Theologian transformed the Evagrian tradition of hesychia, with its insistence on absolute solitude remote from the affairs of men, and practised it in a monastery in the very heart of Constantinople. A champion of Orthodoxy, and of monks, he composed works which became perhaps the most important source of the hesychast movement on Mount Athos two centuries after his death. Always the spiritual master rather than the systematic theologian, Symeon wrote as he had taught--from his own immediate experience.
Saint Gregory of Nazianzus stands as the founding father of the Byzantine religious synthesis, and his own conception of the vision of God as light made him an important figure for Byzantine spiritual writers. This study is a critical analysis of the man, his writings and inner life in the English language. It offers an insight into the mind of one of the greatest protagonists of Nicene theology and opens a window onto the world of late antiquity and the place of the Christian Church in it.
This is a collection of seven of Saint Symeon's homilies which deal with the fall of Adam and our redemption by Christ. For St. Symeon, theology is life -- the true "words of God" which speak to the Christian heart and inspire it to struggle for the Kingdom. These profound homilies on Adam and the future age are of special value because they give the theological foundation of the Christian life of struggle. The First-Created Man offers a vision of the beginning and the end of all things, which is essential to understanding the purpose of our existence here on this earth, and what lies beyond it.
