Byzantine Culture

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Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon the New Theologian taught that direct conscious experience of divine light is normal Christian life, not an exception. His hymns, his conflict with the church authorities, and his exile.

Orthodox Christianity gives the title “the Theologian” to three men: John the Evangelist, Gregory of Nazianzus, and a monk of eleventh-century Constantinople who quarrelled with his bishop, was exiled across the Bosphorus, and wrote religious poetry of a directness that has no parallel in Greek.

Symeon (949–1022) argued for a proposition that sounds modest and was explosive: that a Christian who has not consciously experienced the presence of God has not yet begun. Not that such experience is available to a few advanced ascetics — that it is the ordinary content of baptism, available now, and that anyone who denies this is denying the gospel.

Life

He was born about 949 in Paphlagonia to a provincial aristocratic family and sent to Constantinople for the education that leads to imperial service. He had a place at court and a career ahead of him.

At about twenty, according to his own account and that of his disciple Niketas Stethatos, he had an experience of light while praying — a flood of divine radiance in which he lost awareness of his surroundings — and, after some years of hesitation and relapse, entered the monastery of Stoudios under the direction of an older monk also called Symeon, known as Symeon the Pious (or Eulabes).

The Stoudios authorities objected to the intensity of his attachment to his spiritual father, and he moved to the small monastery of St Mamas, where he became abbot around 980 and remained for about twenty-five years.

The Teaching

Three claims run through the Catechetical Discourses he preached to his monks, the Ethical and Theological Discourses, and the fifty-eight Hymns of Divine Love.

Experience is essential. The sacraments and the church’s structures are real, but grace received unconsciously is grace not yet appropriated. Symeon speaks of a “second baptism,” of tears, in which what was given at the first is made actual in awareness.

The experience is of light. His descriptions are specific and repeated: an unbounded, formless light, both seen and not seen, in which he is aware of God’s presence and of being addressed. He insists it is not a metaphor.

Holiness, not office, confers spiritual authority. This is the claim that caused the trouble. Symeon held that the power to bind and loose belongs properly to those who have received the Spirit consciously, and can pass to a monk who is not a priest; a cleric who has not received it exercises an office without the reality. He was not denying the validity of the sacraments; he was denying that ordination alone makes a spiritual father.

The Hymns

The Hymns of Divine Love are unlike anything else in Byzantine literature. They abandon the conventions of hymnography — no liturgical function, no fixed metre in the usual sense, no acrostic — and use a first-person voice of startling immediacy.

He describes his own experiences without the distancing devices the tradition provided, addresses God with something close to erotic intimacy, and uses imagery of the union of Christ with the body of the believer that later copyists sometimes softened. Hymn 15, on the presence of Christ in every part of the body, has been the most frequently censored.

The theological register is deliberate. Symeon thought that reticence about the experience of God had allowed the church to become a machine that ran without it.

The Conflict

Two conflicts defined his later life.

The first was over the cult of his own spiritual father. Symeon instituted an annual commemoration of Symeon the Pious, complete with icon, hymn and feast, on his own authority — canonisation being a matter the church authorities considered theirs. The elder had also been a controversial figure, and the celebration grew increasingly elaborate.

The second was the wider claim about spiritual authority, which the syncellus Stephen of Nicomedia — a learned and well-connected ecclesiastical official — pressed as a doctrinal error.

Around 1009 Symeon was tried before the standing synod, the icon of his spiritual father was destroyed, and he was exiled to the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. He settled at a ruined chapel near Chrysopolis and rebuilt it as a small monastery. An offer of rehabilitation and an archbishopric came later; he declined, and remained where he was until his death in 1022.

Reception

Symeon was never condemned as a heretic, and his cult began among his own disciples almost immediately. Niketas Stethatos edited his works and wrote his life, carefully framing the more difficult passages.

His influence surfaced decisively three centuries later. The hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century turned on precisely the claim Symeon had made — that the light seen in prayer is really God — and Gregory Palamas cited him as authority. A treatise on the method of prayer attributed to Symeon, describing posture and breathing, is almost certainly by a later writer but transmitted his name into the practical hesychast tradition.

Through the Philokalia of 1782 and its Slavonic and Russian translations, Symeon reached nineteenth-century Russia, and from there the broader modern revival of Orthodox spirituality described in Byzantine legacy in Russia.

Why He Still Matters

Symeon is the sharpest available corrective to a particular caricature of Byzantine religion: the picture of a ritualised, hierarchical, backward-looking church in which everything had been settled by the Fathers and nothing remained but repetition.

He was an eleventh-century abbot in the imperial capital, in the reign of Basil II, telling his monks that the tradition was worthless unless it happened to them personally, and getting into serious trouble for it. That such a figure existed, was exiled, and was later canonised and given the highest title the Orthodox church confers, says something about the tradition that the caricature misses entirely.

What the Hymns Sound Like

Symeon’s poetry is unlike anything else in Byzantine literature, and a brief description of its manner explains both its power and the trouble it caused.

He writes in the first person about his own experience, which liturgical poetry does not do. He addresses God directly and intimately. He uses the fifteen-syllable “political verse” of popular Greek poetry alongside more formal metres — a register choice that put him outside the conventions of hymnography as the tradition understood them.

The imagery is the difficulty. He describes union with Christ in terms drawn from marriage and from the body, and he pushes the incarnational logic further than any Byzantine writer before him: if Christ took a human body, then every part of the believer’s body is a member of Christ. Hymn 15 works this out explicitly, member by member, and copyists softened it; the passage has been omitted from editions and translations more than once.

The theological point underneath is serious and is the same one that surfaces in the hesychast controversy three centuries later: the body participates in salvation, and a spirituality that treats it as an obstacle has mistaken the Incarnation.

The Trial and Its Terms

The conflict with Stephen of Nicomedia is documented well enough to see what was actually at issue, and it was not what either side said it was.

The formal charges concerned the unauthorised cult of Symeon the Pious — the annual commemoration, the icon, the hymn — which was a matter for the church authorities rather than for a monastery to decide.

The substantive dispute was about where spiritual authority comes from. Symeon taught that the power to bind and loose passes to those who have received the Spirit consciously, and can rest with a monk who is not ordained. Stephen, a learned official of the patriarchate, understood correctly that this cut at the foundations of the institution he served.

Symeon was not condemned for heresy. He was found to have acted improperly, his spiritual father’s icon was destroyed, and he was exiled across the Bosphorus around 1009 — a disciplinary outcome rather than a doctrinal one, which is why his rehabilitation was possible later.

Offered restoration and an archbishopric, he declined and stayed at the ruined chapel he had rebuilt at Chrysopolis. He had made his point and had no further use for the institution’s approval.

Niketas Stethatos

Everything known about Symeon comes through one man, and that is worth keeping in view.

Niketas Stethatos was Symeon’s disciple, wrote his Life, edited and published his works some thirty years after his death, and arranged his rehabilitation and the translation of his relics.

Niketas had an editorial programme. He arranged the works, supplied the framing, and presented a Symeon whose more difficult claims were set in a context that made them defensible. The Life is hagiography with a purpose: to establish the sanctity of a man who had been tried and exiled by the church that was now being asked to venerate him.

Niketas was also a considerable figure in his own right — a monk of Stoudios who wrote on the spiritual life, and who took a prominent part on the Greek side in the confrontation with Cardinal Humbert in 1054, described in the Great Schism.

Scholars have therefore had to ask how much of the Symeon we read is Niketas’s construction. The consensus is that the works are authentically Symeon’s — their voice is too distinctive and too awkward to be an editor’s invention — but that the framing, the arrangement and the biography are advocacy.

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