Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon writes about his own experience in the first person, in detail, which almost nobody in the Byzantine tradition did. He describes a light that is not a metaphor and not a symbol, filling him, addressing him, leaving him weeping and unable to say afterwards whether he had a body at the time. His Hymns of Divine Love are extraordinary in their directness, and in places their erotic frankness about union with God embarrassed later copyists.

The doctrine he built on it is the reason he was a problem. Symeon held that the conscious experience of the Holy Spirit is not an extra given to a few specialists in the ancient past but the normal condition of a Christian life, that a person who has not had it should say so honestly rather than assume it happened invisibly at baptism, and that anyone who denies it is possible now is calling the promises empty. He preached this to a metropolitan monastic audience, and it was heard as an accusation, which is roughly what it was.

His nickname, the New Theologian, was probably not a compliment when it was first used. The Byzantine church reserved the title theologian for John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus, and applying it to a contemporary abbot suggested pretension. It stuck, and has come to mean what it says.

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.