Symeon's spiritual father was a monk of the Studios monastery, also called Symeon, whom he regarded as a saint and whose feast he began celebrating in his own monastery on his own authority, with an icon and a liturgy. The elder had a reputation in the city that was not uniformly good, and this was provocative.
Stephen, a former metropolitan of Nicomedia and a considerable figure at the patriarchal court, took it up, and the ensuing conflict ran for years. Behind the argument about a cult lay a much larger claim that Symeon had made repeatedly: that the authority to bind and loose belongs to those who have received the Spirit, and that it follows spiritual attainment rather than ordination automatically. A monk without office who has seen the light may be a father to others; a bishop who has not may not. For an institutional church this is not a small suggestion.
He was tried by synod and exiled across the Bosphorus, where he founded another small community and continued writing. Some of the charges were later lifted and a return offered, which he declined. He died in exile in 1022, was canonised, and became one of the principal authorities of the hesychast tradition three centuries later, so that the monk the hierarchy removed is now read in the Philokalia by the church that removed him.