When men search for God with their bodily eyes they find Him nowhere, for He is invisible. But for those who ponder in the Spirit He is present everywhere. He is in all, yet beyond all.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that God cannot be perceived through physical senses and can only be understood spiritually.
Symeon The New Theologian emphasizes that the search for God through physical means is futile, as God is fundamentally invisible and can only be experienced through spiritual contemplation. This understanding implies that the divine is omnipresent and exists beyond material existence, accessible to those who seek deeper wisdom and connection with the spiritual essence of life.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the nature of faith and divine presence.
Through repentance the filth of our foul actions is washed away. After this, we participate in the Holy Spirit, not automatically, but according to the faith, humility and inner disposition of the repentance in which our soul is engaged. For this reason it is good to repent each day as the act of repentance is unending.
When your consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realises its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.
Your true character Is most accurately measured by how you treat those who can do 'Nothing' for you
Prayer is the preface to the book of Christian living; the text of the new life sermon; the girding on of the armor for battle; the pilgrim's preparation for his journey. It must be supplemented by action or it amounts to nothing.
For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in "On Liberty." The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good.
History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!
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