Symeon’s incarnational theology: a mysticism based in the body

At the beginning of his First Ethical Discourse, Symeon details the new creation, arguing that our raised bodies will be ‘wholly spiritual and immutable (πνϵυματικὸν ὅλον καὶ ἄτρϵπτον)’Footnote ³ transformed from Adam’s form into Christ’s, and this extends beyond human bodies to the whole of creation, which together will experience a ‘re-birth into an immaterial, spiritual dwelling place, beyond any perception of the senses’.Footnote ⁴ Symeon’s emphasis on immateriality and lack of sense perception might suggest a scheme wherein the body is viewed as a prison from which to escape. But this is a simplistic reading of Symeon’s view of the body, one that fails to recognise his idea of graduated spirituality. Instead of an either/or dichotomy of materiality vs. immateriality, spiritual vs. bodily, Symeon understands bodies to be on a spectrum, sorted by degree of likeness to God’s spiritual being. In a section on angels, Symeon notes, ‘what is beyond sensible perception (Τὸ οὖν ὑπὲρ αἴσθησιν ὂν) and spiritual (πνϵυματικὸν) is quite incomprehensible for us…So, how could we define what is neither seen or grasped in any way, or who in his right mind would try?’Footnote ⁵ Yet he attempts to describe this spectrum of spiritual being, arguing that compared to the ‘absolutely immaterial and bodiless nature of divinity’, the angels are ‘somehow embodied and circumscribable’Footnote ⁶; while compared to humanity, angels are ‘wholly bodiless, ungraspable, and invisible’.Footnote ⁷

Symeon’s idea of a spiritual body is complicated throughout his discussion of the afterlife. He uses phrases, such as ‘a body wholly spiritual’ and ‘embodied in a bodiless way (οἱ ἀσώματα κϵκτημένοι τὰ σώματα)’,Footnote ⁸ and notes that we may become like the angels ‘if not in nature than in dignity’.Footnote ⁹ His ambiguous language leaves space for a rather undeveloped view of the afterlife, though a beautiful one: he describes the kingdom of heaven as ‘a single great hearth’, where each soul exudes a radiant splendour, lights reflecting the ‘primary and divine light’.Footnote ¹⁰ This image of light defines his mystical experiences as he finds himself in the presence of Christ. Immediately after this image is introduced, Symeon writes that he has addressed these matters ‘sufficiently’ and is turning instead to ‘solid teaching – so far as is possible – concerning how all the saints are united to Christ and become one with Him’.Footnote ¹¹ It is in the next section that Symeon’s unique theology begins to take shape, one marked by the realities of the body, specifically the body of Christ’s incarnation. He asserts that saints are united to Christ ‘as members of His body’.Footnote ¹²

Though it is tempting to immediately label Symeon a gnostic while he focuses on the immateriality of the risen body, this quick judgement ignores that the crux of his theology is described through his own lived experiences, specifically those of the senses. His overarching questions are not concerned with the afterlife, but with participation in Christ in the here and now. To attend to this, he uses multiple bodily images that depend on the senses. Whether or not we experience these same senses in the eschaton is not his overall concern, for he is writing to monks and mystics who are depending upon their bodily lives to experience Christ in the present. In Daniel Griggs’s introduction to Symeon’s hymns, he argues that ‘Symeon’s doctrine [is] incarnational…[Symeon] deeply believed in Providence and that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, one may encounter Christ in one’s daily life: in the events of the day, in reading Scripture, by participating in a Christian community’.Footnote ¹³ These events, marked by time and the movement of the body, fill Symeon’s discourses with descriptions of how he tangibly experiences Christ.

Symeon’s understanding of participation in and experience of Christ is often described in bodily terms and sense perceptions, his lived reality shaping his theological understanding. Symeon’s hymns are rich in imagery of the body, both Christ’s and his own. One of his primary concerns throughout the hymns is theosis, as he asks in Hymn Six: ‘How do you turn humans into gods,/ How do you become one with human beings?’Footnote ¹⁴ Symeon’s interest in theosis is not merely philosophical, but intensely personal; in his poetry, he details his own spiritual experiences and how he imagines participation with Christ in both his spirit and body. In Hymn Seven, he writes,

But Symeon’s understanding of the physical body as a way to participate in Christ becomes even more specific: a recurring motif in Symeon’s discourses is his use of tears as a sign of spiritual awakening. John Anthony McGuckin, in his article ‘Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros,’ writes that Symeon ‘stressed the necessity for direct personal experience in the life of the Spirit, underlining the need for regular tears as a sign of the action of the Spirit within the heart of a true believer, even insisting that without tears a monk should never approach the sacrament of the Eucharist’.Footnote ¹⁶ This bodily expression emphasises Symeon’s dependence on the body not only to express deep spiritual longing but also to connect to the body of Christ as constituted by the church; as Hannah Hunt points out, Symeon considered baptism the ‘first initiation into a demonstration of belonging to the Christian family’, tears signifying for him ‘a second baptism’.Footnote ¹⁷ This metaphorical connection between tears and baptism grounds Symeon’s spiritual experiences in his own body through his senses and – importantly – through a physical, secreted ‘substance’ of his body. Hunt notes that this ‘physicality of tears, light, the contact of his body on the ground’ is a way for Symeon to experience God’s love as ‘substantial’ during one of his visions. His visions are not out-of-body moments, not ‘mere intellectual abstractions’,Footnote ¹⁸ but crucially in-the-body movements – visceral, sensual, substantial.

Perhaps Symeon’s most striking bodily language is found in Hymn Fifteen, where he claims that we are ‘completely made like Christ in the whole body,/and each of our members shall be the whole Christ’.Footnote ¹⁹ Derek Krueger explores his imagery in this particular hymn and posits that Symeon ‘focuses on the monk’s body as a locus of deification through the incarnation’,Footnote ²⁰ asserting that Symeon’s theology is located particularly in bodily desires and experiences. In line 160 of Hymn Fifteen, Symeon strikingly says that God is present even ‘in his penis’, demonstrating that every member of the physical body is encompassed by God’s salvific love.

While Symeon expresses this mostly through the male body, as seen in Hymns Fifteen and the Tenth Ethical Discourse, he does not ignore the female body as a way to express how Christ relates to humanity; in fact, his poetry and discourses are replete with images of maternity. In the First Ethical Discourse, Symeon uses various metaphors to describe how the saints are united to Christ. After referring to the saints as members of Christ’s body, and then using the nuptial metaphor found commonly in Scripture, Symeon proceeds to describe unity with Christ as Christ entering the saints’ wombs, just as he entered Mary’s: ‘just as God, the Word of the Father, entered into the Virgin’s womb – even so do we receive the Word in us, as a kind of seed, while we are being taught the faith’.Footnote ²¹ He begins with this conception language and then quickly extends to pregnancy: ‘He is present in the body bodilessly, mingled with our essence and nature, and deifying us who share His body, who are become flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone’.Footnote ²² In the Tenth Ethical Discourse, he even compares Christ’s presence to a baby leaping in the womb, the mother ever aware of its presence.Footnote ²³

Symeon’s use of the maternal body appears also in his hymns, sometimes referring to Christ in Mary’s womb (e.g. in Hymn Fifteen) and sometimes alluding to pregnancy, such as in Hymn Twenty, when the soul ‘contemplates you inside herself’.Footnote ²⁴ A similar line occurs in Hymn Twenty-Three, as Symeon wonders ‘How shall I find you entirely,/ you who carry me about (πϵριφέροντά) within you? Who will give me possession of you, you whom I carry around (πϵριφέρω) within me?/ How are you both outside all creatures,/ and again within them?’Footnote ²⁵ His paradoxical language of the uncontainable Christ being contained is common in the hymns as Symeon attempts to understand how unity with Christ functions in terms of physicality. Christ as embryo seems to haunt his poetry, as if he longs for – even experiences – the indwelling, yet cannot comprehend it.

The New Theologian’s attention to women’s bodies, specifically related to pregnancy, is remarkable for a monk who never had children or experienced the reality of the maternal body. On the one hand, his metaphorical use of pregnancy elevates the maternal experience as being worthy of describing Christ’s presence. On the other hand, Symeon’s imagery is dependent upon a specific view of Mary that emphasises her virtue of purity – especially treasured in late antiquity – limiting the metaphorical use of the maternal body and perhaps displacing other female experiences.

What Symeon offers is a fecund metaphor that needs to be carefully considered for what it theologically discloses, yet it also must be critiqued for its limited understanding of the pregnant body. By attending to women’s voices – particularly female theologians who write about the maternal body – I intend to both question and enrich Symeon’s metaphor. Christ’s presence can be explored not only in the bodies imaging Mary by carrying an embryonic Christ but also in bodies who bear embryos in an intensely physical, embodied experience.

Female voices: incarnate realities

In her work Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation for the Christian East (Reference Frost2019), Carrie Frost details the challenges that women face while participating in Orthodox theology.Footnote ²⁶ Even now, when there are women welcomed into the academic study of theology within the Orthodox church, the logistics of the church prevent their voices from affecting broad change. Female iconographers must be blessed by the church in order to paint inside churches; female theologians can work in academia but are rarely appointed as theological advisors; female scholars can offer changes to the liturgy – especially in practices such as the churching of women – but the authorities must choose to listen.Footnote ²⁷ These particular challenges are uniquely modern, but in the history of the Orthodox church, there is a general absence of the female voice. Frost notes encouraging shifts where female theologians are speaking from their experiences, but she especially calls for mothers to carve out a space for themselves to do theological work concerning the maternal body. She writes, ‘The changeability of the maternal body has no other parallel in human life; no one else endures such dramatic physical transformations under normal circumstances…[it] inevitably entails an elemental embodiment, giving mothers a singular incarnational reality’.Footnote ²⁸

No doubt Symeon himself would have been appreciative of such a recognition of the body as a way to understand Christ’s work in the world, had it been available to him. His own physicality is foregrounded in the hymns especially as he considers what the unity of Christ entails in the present moment, his body included. Frost is also appreciative of the images of motherhood found in both iconography and hymnography of the Orthodox church but is careful to observe that rarely is serious theological work done on the topic, and if it is, it often displays a misunderstanding of maternal embodiment. She calls motherhood ‘ferociously physical’, an act that ‘anchors my attention in my own skin’, an antidote to living ‘in the abstractions of the mind’.Footnote ²⁹ This is surely the limitation of Symeon’s metaphor of an embryonic Christ: detached from the intensely physical experience of motherhood, it is a metaphor that becomes distant from embodiment, one no longer concerned with blood and bones but a rather sanitised image of the body that comes nowhere near Symeon’s lucid descriptions of the male body. This sanitisation is clearly seen not only in theology but also in the Orthodox practice of churching prayers, said for women when they return to church after giving birth. The language in the prayers suggests impurity, which is often associated with sin in the Christian tradition.Footnote ³⁰ In practice, then, the maternal experience is seen as something that needs to be cleansed rather than celebrated or theologically explored.

Frost agrees with Symeon that ‘deification is not a gnostic process…nor an academic one…the spirit and the mind are involved, to be sure, but their workshop is the body’.Footnote ³¹ She goes on to consider the changes in the maternal body, including conception, pregnancy, birth, postpartum and breastfeeding. As Frost describes her pregnancy with triplets, she notes that her ‘health problems multiplied, ultimately including severe edema, insomnia, gestational diabetes, and cholestasis’.Footnote ³² Yet she considers this ‘the most satisfying suffering [she has] ever known’, given that each continued day of suffering meant more growth for the children in her womb.Footnote ³³

Another mother in theology also discusses the intense physical effects of pregnancy in her book Motherhood: A Confession.Footnote ³⁴ Natalie Carnes, writing in the form of Augustine’s Confessions, delves into a confessional memoir about motherhood that is overflowing with theological reflection. Like Frost, she writes ‘pregnancy and nursing were difficult and inconvenient, but they also pressed me into a new relationship with my fleshly self’.Footnote ³⁵ This experience included more than a growing and shrinking belly; Carnes details the loss of calcium and other vitamins that a woman’s body experiences during the gestational process. The baby will take what it needs from the mother’s body, which often results in cavities and declining vision and can even lead to later complications such as osteoporosis.Footnote ³⁶ And this is not only during pregnancy itself; in birth and in nursing, a mother often experiences the tearing of her own flesh and nerve damage. Yet Carnes sees this physical suffering as a way to identify with God’s own self-giving: ‘I realized I was playing a role no sane person claims with a straight face and no Christian accepts without fear and trembling. I was – as my body swelled and I lumbered ungracefully around the house – like a god to you’.Footnote ³⁷ Carnes understands her daughter’s dependence on her maternal body, yet also switches the roles: ‘In your need of me, you were also God to me. You were the God who comes to us in Christ needing food, drink, and shelter, the Christ who comes as a stranger, patient, and prisoner…Little one, least of these, you were Christ to me’.Footnote ³⁸ Unlike Symeon, Carnes’ metaphor of Christ in the womb is not a silent embryonic Christ, but one that, in sheltering the least of these, demands the sacrifice – and often the suffering – of the bearer.

Throughout her narrative, Carnes asserts that ‘the central drama of parenthood is not of two wills becoming one; it is of one will becoming two, as the parent helps bring the child’s will into fullness’.Footnote ³⁹ Her own ‘divided self’ – a result specifically of motherhood – progresses as her daughter matures and depends on her less and less; Carnes wonders at one point, ‘What kind of rebirth can restore me to wholeness?’Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet this division also brings about attunement, as she learns to pay attention to another whose will does not align with hers. This complex understanding of the emotions and experiences of motherhood offers a different perspective on our interaction with Christ – what if He is not One we merely host, but One whose separateness demands our attention? While Symeon employs the metaphor of pregnancy to further consider how he shares in Christ’s essence, Carnes’ emphasis on her child’s separateness pushes back.

Mother Maria Skobtsova, a saint in the Orthodox church, also addresses separateness and suffering in terms of motherhood. A mother of three herself, she fled from Russia during the Soviet regime and ministered to women in Paris for years as a nun.Footnote ⁴¹ In her essay ‘On the Imitation of the Mother of God,’ Mother Maria focuses almost solely on Luke 2.35: ‘a sword shall pierce her soul’. Like Symeon, she writes of a spiritual pregnancy: ‘Every man is also the image of the Mother of God, who bears Christ in herself through the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ⁴² Yet her ‘destiny’ is not one of glory or unity but of suffering: ‘the Mother of God, the human soul, is drawn to Golgotha in the footsteps of her son, and cannot help being drawn there, cannot help bleeding’.Footnote ⁴³ Her theology of co-participation, co-suffering with the neighbour is enriched with this particular depiction of motherhood as a way to suffer with, rather than contain, Christ. Mother Maria herself experienced this, not only as a mother who lost all three of her children during her lifetime but also as one who responded to the tragedy of watching her youngest daughter die from meningitis by accepting a universal maternal role. She writes: ‘I feel that the death of my child obliges me to become the mother of everyone’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Her proposed image of motherhood is not containment but one continuous image from conception to cross, from incarnation to sacrifice.

Symeon’s descriptions of the male body, as well as his nuptial imagery, are vivid and visceral. But his work with the maternal body lacks a physicality that is supplied by these mothers who understand the reality of the maternal experience. It is noteworthy that all three of these mothers – Frost, Carnes and Maria Skobtsova – focus in their theological work on the physicality of motherhood being specifically related to sacrifice and suffering. The child leaping in the womb may bring comfort for a moment, but the journey of pregnancy and motherhood is marked by joy and loss, blessing and sacrifice, growth and suffering. As Carnes, Frost and Skobtsova all reveal, the complexities of the maternal body are a rich resource for theological reflection – experiences that Symeon had no access to but recognized as important for embodied theology.

Symeon’s understanding of the female body, however, was greatly influenced by the Orthodox perception of the Virgin Mary. How does the Mother of God inform Symeon’s embodied theology?

Imitating the mother of God: who is the Theotokos?

On the walls in the outer narthex of the Chora Church in Istanbul, Turkey, two images face each other: the Virgin Mary, Christ enclosed within her, and the Pantokrator, Christ enthroned. But what is particularly captivating about these images is the inscription above each: ‘The container of the living’ above the Pantokrator and ‘the container of the uncontainable’ above the Virgin Mary. Though Symeon did not live to see these mosaics created, they reflect the Byzantine theology of Mary that he was familiar with, in a place very near his home.Footnote ⁴⁵

In her work The Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, Miri Rubin impressively describes the history of Mary from the Gospels to the present age.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though Mary is a minor character in the New Testament, she had become a matter of theological (and therefore political) importance by the time of Constantine, whose attempt to establish a state religion accelerated early doctrinal disputes. Christological disagreements became political debates, and at their centre was, of course, the incarnation. These debates were concerned not only with Christ’s body but also with the body from which he came. Rubin asserts that the claim made at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) became foundational for all future considerations of Mary: ‘This Son, the divine Logos, having been born in flesh from Mary the mother of God and made incarnate…’Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet Rubin goes beyond doctrinal statements to detail how Mary played a role in the ethical lives of Christians: ‘In North Africa and Syria traditions of Christian virginity, a lifestyle that gained respect from non-Christians had developed amongst men and women. Mary was invoked in writings for such virgins: by Tertullian, Athanasius and by the Cappadocian Fathers of Asia Minor, who dwelt in particular on the nature of Christ’s birth of a virgin’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mary’s purity in these accounts extends beyond her initial conception of Jesus to also encompass her painless birth experience and her sexual abstinence after birthing Christ. Imitating Mary in her motherhood, then, also meant imitating her purity, which raised her – like the mosaic in the Chora Church – above the physical realities of the maternal body.

This emphasis on Mary’s purity is what Symeon’s own theology inherited. In the First Ethical Discourse, Symeon describes her flesh as ‘all-pure and holy’ and her blood as ‘all-immaculate’.Footnote ⁴⁹ He states that the birth did not ‘abolish her pregnancy’Footnote ⁵⁰ and titles her as the ‘ever-Virgin’.Footnote ⁵¹ But some women push back on this narrative. Frost points out that this claim that Mary’s maternal body did not suffer in pregnancy or birth is in no way an official part of Orthodox theology and suggests that it is an unhelpful stance. She writes: ‘My sympathies as a constructive theologian chafe at single-minded expressions of Mary’s birth as supernatural in character, for Christological reasons (his humanity is dependent on her humanity) and Mariological reasons (she is human, not a goddess), and I understand her experience as akin and accessible to us mundane mothers’.Footnote ⁵² These theologies surrounding Mary have a direct effect on how the maternal body is viewed in Christian spaces, especially in late antiquity and the medieval periods. Frost notes, ‘consecrated virginity was valorized at the expense of family life, including motherhood, which led to a negative view of the human body and sexuality, including the maternal body’.Footnote ⁵³ To theologically understand the unique embodiment of the maternal body, it takes not only female voices speaking from their unique positionality but also a renewed interest in how Mary’s perceived body has affected our own.

Rubin notes that, like the depiction in the Chora Church, early representations of Mary were majestic ones, depicting her enthroned.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is partially due to the emphasis on Mary as bearer of God and, at the same time, Christianity becoming a state religion: Mary’s enthronement is a political statement of Christ’s own power. Yet, in Mother Maria’s own art, Mary is depicted as Mother Maria understands her – a suffering mother, pierced by the sword. While serving Jewish refugees in Paris, Mother Maria was arrested by the Nazis and taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she later died. Yet even during her imprisonment, she continued to lead theological discussions, pray with the women around her and embroider icons. One of the last icons she created is a version of the hodegetria form, which means ‘the one who shows the way’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Mother Maria’s rendition, Mary’s head is gently reclining towards an infant Christ, but it is not an infant Christ enthroned. It is an infant Christ on the cross, and the cross doubles as a sword – Mary’s hand at the hilt, the end resting on her maternal body. This image of Mary is shocking not only because of the crucified infant but also because of Mary’s own present suffering, the red tint on her cloth denoting her own shedding of blood.

Mother Maria’s icon, though, remains firmly in the tradition of Orthodox iconography as a form of hodegetria. Like many icons of an enthroned Mary, the Mary in Mother Maria’s icon is also gesturing towards Christ’s name with her right hand, pointing the way towards salvation. The form of hodegetria reminds viewers to follow Christ, but it also invites viewers to imitate Mary in their own lives, pointing to Christ through their words and actions. The mimesis of Mary has been important throughout the Christian past, often in terms of her purity, but also because she is the God-bearer. In his hymns and discourses, Symeon’s images of the saints ‘carrying’ Christ in the womb enrich this imitation. In the First Ethical Discourse, he writes:

Symeon here offers a beautiful vision of how all the saints become not just like Christ but like his mother, bearing the Spirit and sharing in Christ’s flesh.

But Symeon’s version of imitation is not the only one. And depending on the emphasis in various Marian theologies, how one conceives of imitating her can shift what part of her motherhood is most prominent. In Mother Maria’s theology, imitation of Mary consists of being pierced – and therefore suffering – on account of another. She writes, ‘And if we turn away from what is revealed to us in the glorified image of the Mother of God, if we take her only in her earthly path, that is, where it is possibly to speak of “imitating” her, that is quite enough to enable a Christian soul to understand some of the possibilities opened up to it’.Footnote ⁵⁷ These ‘possibilities’ lead to co-suffering with the neighbour, as Mary co-suffered with Christ: ‘Our neighbor’s cross should be a sword that pierces our soul. Our soul should co-participate in its neighbor’s destiny, co-feel, co-suffer’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Mother Maria’s imitation becomes immensely wrapped up in the embodied, suffering Christ, but in a way that is communally focused, outwardly defined.

In her recent work Women and the Gender of God, Amy Peeler focuses on the imitation of Mary in terms of her willing discipleship.Footnote ⁵⁹ She notes: ‘The nature of her submission to God, her free decision to submit…not only avoids but even overturns the implications of oppressive force. She thoughtfully and willfully humbles herself…in her strong submission, she sets the template for all disciples, female and male’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Miri Rubin also applies Mary’s willingness to women who bear children in general, pointing out that ‘in women’s capacity to act as a generous host, to contain a body in her body, there is an act of tremendous hospitality: the act is so great that it often threatens to destroy the mother herself’.Footnote ⁶¹ This ‘yes’ of Mary, her willing discipleship, highlights her humanity and autonomy.

Most similarly to Symeon, Natalie Carnes uses Mary’s pregnancy and birth to characterise the communion of saints in the church. However, Carnes allows her description to become much more tangible and embodied – something that Symeon’s theology of the painless labour of Mary does not allow for. Carnes writes,

Carnes’s metaphor for the church is only possible given particular conceptions of Mary and of motherhood that recognise the distinct physicality of the maternal experience. Imitating the Mother of God is a powerful motif, but defining what exactly her role is might be just as important – a Mary who is defined only by sexual purity and painless birth is a different model of motherhood than a Mary who willingly became the bearer of Christ, whose body swelled and shifted and laboured and bled, who suffered involuntarily at the death of her child.

Towards a theology of pregnancy: apophaticism and incarnation

Symeon’s depiction of the maternal body may have been limited by his understanding of Mary and by distance from the maternal experience, but his mystical theology offers powerful descriptions of the human relationship with God that can enrich his descriptions of the maternal body. I want to return to Symeon’s theology as a source for exploring the maternal experience. Though his metaphor of pregnancy is lacking physicality, other theological themes in his work can inform a theology of pregnancy that more closely aligns with the maternal body.

In The Second Thanksgiving, Symeon describes a mystical experience which began when he was feeling distant from God, when God ‘became silent’ and was ‘hidden from [his] eyes’. To address this, he contemplates an icon of the Theotokos. This does not lead him to thoughts of Mary, but to Christ, as Symeon relates the Theotokos to himself: ‘I knew that I knowingly have You within me’.Footnote ⁶³ Charles Barber notes that ‘it is remarkable that he chooses to pray to an icon of the Mother of God…yet, having done this…it is Christ who has appeared to him in his heart’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Barber goes on to explore the ‘disjunction’ between ‘the perception of a material object’ and Symeon’s spiritual visions.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet this is an opportunity to consider both parts of Symeon’s experiences – sensing the absence and mystery of God and contemplating the Theotokos – as closer in meaning than Symeon himself understands: that even the Theotokos, the God-bearer who held the incarnate Christ, experienced the hiddenness of God.

In the image of the pregnant Mary in the Chora Church, the Christ child is surrounded by a circle that represents the womb. Inside the circle and forming a background for Christ is a dark blue colour. This is not unique; many icons portray Christ in the midst of a dark blue background, especially images of the Transfiguration and the Ascension. This iconographic tradition signifies apophatic theology: Christ may be incarnate and tangible, but the triune God remains inexhaustible, indescribable and incomprehensible. The darkness is to remind us that though Christ is God incarnate, knowledge of the Divine is limited and inexhaustible. Symeon depends heavily on apophatic theology in his hymns. It is one of his paradoxes: as he comes to experience God in his mystical visions, he struggles to describe what that experience actually is. Symeon’s use of metaphor – including Christ’s indwelling described in terms of a house, or a light, or a pregnancy – gives him some of the language he longs for. Yet his hymns are still full of questions that attempt to grasp the unknowable God.

In Symeon’s opening prayer to his hymns, he prays, ‘Come, hidden mystery. Come, nameless treasure. Come, ineffable reality. Come, incomprehensible face’,Footnote ⁶⁶ all apophatic phrases that allude to the unknowability of God. In contrast to Symeon’s comforting depiction of pregnancy, of Christ being continuously present like a child who leaps in the womb, the iconographic depiction of a Christ surrounded by a dark, apophatic womb is perhaps more like what the maternal body experiences in pregnancy. Symeon uses imagery of the womb to compare to moments of Christ’s presence, but this should be held in tension with the apophatic view. Part of what pregnancy entails is this exact hiddenness, namelessness and incomprehensibility. It does not solidify a person’s character but divides it. As Carnes notes, ‘The central drama of parenthood is not of two wills becoming one; it is of one will becoming two, as the parent helps bring the child’s will into fulness’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This separateness is characterised by a difference that demands attention and attunement, coming to know another that came from one yet is not the same, that is particularly in pregnancy an ‘incomprehensible face’. The womb as apophatic also more accurately describes the anxiety that most pregnant mothers experience in carrying a child to term: it is often more disorienting than comforting.

Another source in Symeon’s work for a deeper understanding of the maternal body is the physicality that he associates with the male body. As Krueger notes, Symeon claims that Christ comes to each member, including his genitalia. Symeon’s incarnational theology also emphasises the physical aspects of the daily liturgy, such as bowing and tears. These bodily acts are visceral, experiential and substantial. Symeon’s mysticism is not one located out of the body but one grounded in the body, and this is exactly the sort of embodied theology that mothers cannot avoid. His use of womb imagery begins to speak towards this embodied theology, but it is even more enriched by the physical description of mothers such as Carnes, Frost and Mother Maria. This physicality leads to even more fruitful metaphors between pregnancy and Christ: the hospitality of the mother is not an easy hospitality but requires sacrifice in the form of calcium, iron and often mental health – yet the very foetus that demands so much of the mother also leaves behind foetal cells that flock to areas of injury, healing the maternal body in a sort of exchange.Footnote ⁶⁸ So Christ demands we take up our cross and allow ourselves to be pierced by the cross, to suffer alongside the neighbour – yet He remains with us to dry every tear and mend every broken bone.

A more physical depiction of the maternal body also presses into the materiality and goodness of all creation as women’s bodies become part of the process. God’s creation is tangible, and it is good; and God calls good the amniotic fluid and the life-sustaining placenta, the tiny bones and the cord that stretches between two bodies. And the restoration of creation, begun in the very sacrifice of Christ, is also tangible, and it is good; as the blood and water rushed from Christ’s side, so the blood and water that escape a woman’s body as she ushers forth new life is not a thing to be purified by prayer but a tangible image of her own life-giving sacrifice, an echo of the incarnate God. Symeon, I think, would have said this explicitly had he both the freedom and the language: the freedom to speak of a maternal experience that was not confined by a particular view of Mary and the language of the intense physicality that defines the pregnant body. In the end, each body is a bi-une icon, as Mother Maria describes in her essay on the Mother of God: we imitate both Christ and Mary, carrying a cross while experiencing its piercing, and we cannot help but bleed.