Volume I: The Church and The Last Things; On the Mystical Life, The Ethical Discourses: St. Symeon the New Theologian

Popular Patristics Series Volume 14 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 his writings were on occasion suppressed by ecclesiastical authorities wary of his fierce enthusiasm, as well as his claims to charismatic authority, St Symeon's works 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. The treatises on the mystical life, usually rendered as The Ethical Discourses, comprise St Symeon's most extensive treatment of the experience of God. They are appearing here for the first time in English. Volume I selects those treatises devoted to the Church, the sacraments and the last things. Syme