Ave. Simeon says, following the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, about the greatness of love: "He who is therefore devoid of love and all these things, tell me where he will appear, what he will do, how he dares... call yourself faithful?" 1153

Having spoken in the above expressions about uncreated love, which is in the midst of creatures, St. Simeon speaks of his mystical experience of love as a revelation of light: "I sit in my cell by night or by day, and love invisibly and knowingly dwells with me. Being beyond all creatures, visible and invisible, she is again with everyone, as the creator of everything. It is fire and radiance, it becomes a cloud (??????) of light, it becomes the sun. Like fire, it warms my soul and inflames my heart, and leads me to lust and love for the Creator. Like a luminous radiance, it flies all around me, quite inflamed and inflamed by the soul, leaving bright rays for my soul and making my mind brilliant, showing it capable of the height of contemplation, making it seeing. This is what I used to call the flower of fear."1154 After this, St. Simeon tells us that the vision suddenly disappeared, love flew away, and he searched in vain for it, not being able to find the uncreated ray. Then the ray returns and disappears again, and this is repeated several times.1155 Finally, love "suddenly found itself cognitively in me again, in my heart, in the middle, like a luminary, indeed, like the disk of the sun, it became visible" (1156). "Appearing in this way and showing herself cognitively," continues St. Simeon, "she bared my mind and clothed me with the tunic of intellectual feeling (????????? ??????), separated me from the visible and united me with the invisible, and granted me to see the Uncreated and to rejoice... that I have united with the Uncreated, with the Incorruptible, with the Beginningless, invisible to all. That's what love is!" 1157 Pr. For this reason, Simeon urges everyone to acquire love: "Let us run, faithful, with strength, let us hurry, sluggish, with effort! Slow, let us arise in order to take possession of love, or rather, to become partakers of it, and thus to pass from those here and together with it to stand before the Creator and Master, standing together with it outside the visible (things)."1158 Without love there is no salvation, it is the queen of virtues, "The first of the virtues, the queen and mistress, is indeed love. She is the head of all, clothing and glory"1159... "Virtues without love are withered (flowers), and useless. And he is not clothed with divine glory who does not have love; and even if he has all the virtues, he stands naked and, unable to bear his nakedness, would rather hide himself."1160 Love is the Divine Spirit: "The Creator came to earth, took on soul and flesh, and gave the Divine Spirit, which is love".1161

In all these passages, love is contemplated as the uncreated manifestation of God in man, or, more often, as the Divine power that unites us with the Uncreated, it is even identified with the Holy Spirit, less often with Christ. In any case, the meeting of the created with the Uncreated takes place through love and in love. This is a great miracle, filling St. Simeon with wonder.

In addition, St. Simeon raises the question of the knowledge of God in the Hymns. He says that he does not know God as He is in Himself, but that God reveals Himself by His love: "That Thou art we know, and Thy light we see, what Thou art and what it is, no one knows. Yet we have hope, and we hold faith, and we know the love which Thou hast bestowed upon us, which is boundless, ineffable, incomprehensible, existing in light, in light unapproachable, in light acting (????????) all."1162 Here, love, identified with light, is depicted as divine "energy," as evidenced by the following: "It is called Thy hand".1163 In another place, St. Simeon says that love is the essence of God, but explains in what sense the word "essence" can be applied to God, Who surpasses all essence. "Love," he says, "is not a name, but a divine essence, participatory and unparticipatory, at any rate divine. That which is participatory is comprehensible, but that which is greater than it is not yet comprehensible. Wherefore I have told thee that lust is comprehensible, and that it is hypostasized (???????????) as partaking and apprehensible... For that which is devoid of essence (????????) is nothing, and is both said and is... but that which is indescribable, how do you call hypostasis?" 1164 Although the theological terminology of this passage is not very clear, and even somewhat confused, it is still possible to understand that St. Simeon, while affirming the real Divine character of love as a manifestation of God, does not, however, identify it with God as He is in Himself. In addition, he himself emphasizes that our words are inaccurate and insufficient when we talk about God. It is especially important here that St. Simeon says that the essence of God is both communicable and unattainable, since God is above all essence.

To what has been said in this chapter about love as the divine power that unites the created with the uncreated, as the action of the Holy Spirit and the appearance of Christ, as the light that fills us with joy, and, finally, about the queen of virtues, we must add what St. Simeon says about human and practical expressions of love. As we have already seen, it is the force that unites people and makes them one soul and one body,1165 it gives rise to the fatherly love of spiritual fathers for their spiritual children, even to the point of being ready to sacrifice their own salvation for the salvation of their children. We talked about this in detail in the chapter on spiritual leadership. However, for St. Simeon, these are only the consequences of the original fact of divine love, which is the door for the appearance of Christ in the flesh and the vision of the light that adores us. Consequently, it is possible to briefly express St. Simeon's teaching about love in his own words: "O deifying (????????) love, which is God".1166

5. Deification

Grace-filled deification, in which man, without losing his created state, becomes "a partaker of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) and a god by adoption, is an ancient theme of Christian spirituality.1167 For St. Simeon, as well as for the ancient Holy Fathers – St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Maximus the Confessor, in order to limit ourselves to them alone,1168 this is the highest spiritual state that a person can attain and to which all Christians are called. Ave. Symeon the New Theologian often speaks of it in his writings. For him, the Incarnation has as its goal deification, or, in other words, the Incarnation, the source of deification: "God the Word took from us flesh, which He did not have by nature, and became man, which He was not; but He conveys to those who believe in Him from His Divinity, Whom no angel or man ever had, and they become gods, which they were not, by position and by grace (????? ??? ??????). For in this way they are given the power to become sons of God; That is why they have become, and always become, and will never cease to become."1169 Deification is, therefore, a constant process, a person takes part in it by observing the commandments, it is the only way to deification. "Thoughts to me," says St. Simeon, "the body is a palace, and the royal treasure of each of the people is the soul, which God, united with it through the fulfillment of the commandments, filled with divine light and made it itself a god through unity and grace. Everyone who walks along the above-mentioned path of virtues comes to this divine state; it is absolutely impossible to pass through otherwise and, bypassing this or that dwelling, to find oneself in another by means of any means."1170 Ave. Simeon speaks in the same sense when he speaks of "adoring humility" (???????? ???????????) 1171. Or, as he himself says: "Let us remember only the commandments of the Saviour Christ... that we may become gods by position and grace".1172 Here "by position" or "by adoption" (?????) is obviously contrasted with "by nature" (?????) – a common expression of patristic writing, which has precisely this meaning.