Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon was born in 949 in Galatia, in Asia Minor, to a provincial noble family, and was sent to Constantinople for the career his relatives expected. He entered imperial service in his teens. He also met, at about fourteen, a monk of the Studios monastery named Symeon the Studite, Symeon the Pious, who became his spiritual father and told him to read a particular book on prayer and to keep an icon of Christ in mind.

What happened to him while he was still a young layman in the world decided the rest of his life. He describes it himself, in the third person, in one of his discourses: praying at night, he saw a light, and the light was personal, and it filled the room and then himself, and he did not know whether he was in the body. He was about twenty. It happened again later, more than once.

At twenty-seven he entered the Studios monastery, was moved on because of the intensity of his attachment to his elder, and went to the small monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, where he was made abbot about 980. He led it for twenty-five years.

He was not an easy abbot, and his message made the church establishment nervous. Symeon taught that the direct, conscious experience of God is not a rare gift for a handful of ancient saints, but the normal Christian inheritance, that a believer who has not consciously received the Holy Spirit has not yet received what baptism promises. He said it in sermons to his monks, in hymns, and in letters. He said that a spiritual father with real experience of God is worth more than an office-holder without it, which is the part that got him into trouble.

He was opposed by Stephen of Nicomedia, a senior official of the patriarchate. Symeon was forced out of his abbacy in 1005 and exiled across the Bosphorus in 1009. Friends helped him rebuild a ruined chapel at Chrysopolis, and he stayed there, refusing an offered restoration, until his death on 12 March 1022.

He left the Catechetical Discourses, the Ethical and Theological treatises, the Practical and Theological Chapters, and the Hymns of Divine Love, fifty-eight poems, some of the most personal religious verse in Greek, in which he simply describes what he saw and asks how such a thing can be given to a man like him.

The Eastern church gave him a title it has given only twice before, to John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus: the Theologian. He is the bridge between the desert fathers and the hesychasm of Gregory Palamas three centuries later.

Sources: Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses and Hymns of Divine Love; Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon the New Theologian; The Philokalia, vol. IV; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology.