Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon the New Theologian was a Byzantine monk, priest, abbot, mystic, and poet of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and one of only three saints in the Eastern Orthodox tradition to be styled Theologian, together with John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus. He was born in 949 at Galate in Paphlagonia, in Asia Minor, into a family of the provincial aristocracy. As a boy he was sent to Constantinople for education and lived under the care of a relative connected with the imperial court. He received the capital’s usual grammatical schooling but did not continue into higher rhetorical studies, and he entered court service. In his early twenties, under the spiritual direction of the Studite monk Symeon Eulabes (also called Symeon the Pious), he underwent a conversion marked by a vision of radiant divine light. That experience became the ground of his later insistence that knowledge of God is given in personal, conscious encounter, not by book learning alone.

After a period in which he combined life at court with strict ascetic practice, he entered the Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople. Friction with the community, related in part to his attachment to his spiritual father, led him to transfer to the monastery of Saint Mamas in the same city. There he received the monastic tonsure, was ordained priest, and, while still relatively young, was appointed abbot. As abbot he worked to restore coenobitic discipline and a serious liturgical and ascetic life. Over many years he instructed his monks in catechetical discourses, presenting repentance, tears, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and the vision of uncreated light as the proper horizon of Christian life, and as something not reserved to a spiritual elite. He also wrote hymns of a strongly mystical and often autobiographical character, later gathered as the Hymns of Divine Love, together with theological and ethical treatises and letters.

His emphasis on experiential theology, his criticism of merely formal or academic religion, and his public veneration of Symeon Eulabes as a saint after that elder’s death brought him into conflict with some of his own monks and with senior clergy, above all Stephen of Nicomedia, a patriarchal syncellus. The dispute mixed doctrine, canonical procedure, and the cult of an elder who had not been formally glorified. Symeon laid down the abbacy and in 1009 was banished from Constantinople. He withdrew to Paloukiton, near Chrysopolis on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, and established a small monastery dedicated to Saint Marina. He continued to write and to direct disciples in exile until his death on 12 March 1022. He was buried at that monastery. His disciple Nicetas Stethatos later wrote his Life, edited his works, and helped to establish his cult.

Symeon’s writings became a major source for later Byzantine spiritual theology and for the hesychast tradition, which appealed to his witness concerning the vision of divine light and the possibility of theosis in this life. He was never a bishop, patriarch, or pope. He lived as a celibate monk and is not recorded to have married or to have had children. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as a saint, principally on 12 March, the day of his death; in some Greek usage the feast is observed on 12 October so that it does not fall in Great Lent. He is also recognized in the wider Christian tradition, including the Roman Catholic Church, though without a modern papal process of canonization.