Symeon the New Theologian

The title "New Theologian" was given to Symeon as a provocation. His opponents meant it as an accusation: he was setting himself alongside John the Evangelist (the first "Theologian") and Gregory of Nazianzos (the second) — an act of presumptuous self-elevation. Symeon accepted the title. He thought his critics had fundamentally misunderstood what theology is.

For Symeon, theology is not the intellectual study of doctrines about God. Theology is speaking from direct experience of God — or it is nothing. The title they intended as an insult, he wore as a description of his vocation: he had seen, he had experienced, and he was compelled to speak.

He was born in 949 in Galatia — central Turkey — to a noble family, received a good secular education in Constantinople, and had a promising career at court ahead of him. As a teenager he was given a copy of Evagrios's Praktikos by a monk named Symeon the Studite, who would become his spiritual father, and something in him was seized.

Then, one night — he was still in his late teens — while repeating words from the Psalms in prayer, a divine light flooded his awareness. He lost all sense of the room, his body, his circumstances. There was only light, and in the light, a presence of overwhelming love and beauty. He does not know how long it lasted. When it passed, he wept.

This experience was the axis around which his whole subsequent life rotated. A few more years of court life, then the monastery. He entered the Studios monastery in Constantinople in 977 and placed himself under the guidance of his spiritual father, the elder Symeon the Studite.

His life as a monk and later abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas was marked by persistent controversy. The core issue was always the same: Symeon insisted that conscious, experienced awareness of the Holy Spirit — an interior perception, not merely an inference — was not exceptional mystical privilege reserved for the few but the birthright of every baptized Christian. To be Christian and not have this experience was, for Symeon, to be Christian only in name.

This was not what his contemporaries wanted to hear. The Byzantine church of the tenth and eleventh centuries was, in many respects, a church in which Christianity had become cultural inheritance rather than personal transformation. Symeon's insistence that the bare fact of baptism, without the lived transformation of the heart, was spiritually insufficient — that the clergy who did not have such experience should not present themselves as spiritual guides — was experienced as a direct attack.

He was eventually tried and exiled from Constantinople. He spent the last years of his life in a small chapel dedicated to St. Marina across the Bosphorus, surrounded by his disciples, writing the Hymns of Divine Love — among the most extraordinary poems in the Byzantine tradition, first-person accounts of union with God in the form of odes, written in a voice of trembling, passionate astonishment.

He died in 1022. He was eventually venerated as a saint. The tradition of theologians is three: John the Evangelist, Gregory of Nazianzos, Symeon. All three are people for whom theology was not an academic discipline but an act of witness — speaking, however inadequately, about what had been seen. Symeon earns the title.