Hymns of Divine Love

Hymns of Divine Eros — ecstatic first-person accounts of the vision of uncreated light

Tradition: Byzantine Orthodox mystical theology

I have seen the Light — the uncreated fire breaks into the monk's cell and transforms the body itself

The Hymns of Divine Love (Hymnoi ton Theion Eroton) are fifty-eight ecstatic poems by Symeon the New Theologian, the most radical experiential mystic of the Byzantine tradition. Written in a free-flowing Byzantine Greek that breaks with the formal conventions of hymnography, they are first-person accounts of encounters with the uncreated divine light: the monk seated in his cell is suddenly flooded with luminous presence, the boundaries between self and God dissolve, the body itself becomes radiant. Symeon insists that these experiences are not metaphorical but literal — the light is the uncreated energy of God, perceptible to the purified soul and even to the transfigured body. The hymns scandalised the ecclesiastical establishment because they claimed that direct personal experience of God is available to every Christian who repents and prays, regardless of clerical rank. They are the most important anticipation of the fourteenth-century Hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas and remain central to Orthodox spiritual life.