Constantinople and Symeon Eulabes

The formation of St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022): from a provincial Paphlagonian family into the service of the Byzantine court, through the decisive meeting with the lay elder Symeon Eulabes (the Pious) of Stoudios and a first vision of divine light as a young layman, to his entry into the Stoudios monastery around 977, the conflict there over his attachment to his elder, and his transfer to the small monastery of St. Mamas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Provincial Family and the Capital

Symeon was born in 949 in Galate (Galatai), a town in Paphlagonia on the Black Sea coast of northern Asia Minor. His parents, Basil and Theophano, belonged to the Byzantine provincial nobility — landed gentry of the kind that routinely sent its talented sons to the capital to enter imperial service (Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon §1–3; trans. Greenfield, DOML 20; cf. Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1). Almost everything we know of Symeon’s outward life comes from this Life, written more than thirty years after his death by his disciple and editor Niketas Stethatos; it must be read with the discipline proper to a disciple’s hagiography — a portrait shaped by veneration and apologetic aim, not a neutral chronicle (Greenfield, introduction to The Life of Saint Symeon, DOML 20).

The world into which Symeon was born was, by Byzantine reckoning, a confident one. The mid-tenth century was the age of the soldier-emperors — Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes — and of a cultural revival that prized both military success and the polished learning of the capital. For a provincial family of standing, the obvious ambition was to place a gifted son in that world of office and patronage. Symeon’s later renunciation of secular learning and court advancement therefore has to be measured against what he gave up: not poverty, but a clear path to status in the most sophisticated state of its day (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1).

As a boy Symeon was sent to Constantinople, to the household of relatives, for the elementary “grammatical” education of the capital. According to Niketas he declined the higher rhetorical and philosophical curriculum, an abstention his later writings would turn into a principle: that the knowledge of God is given not by secular learning but by purification and grace (Niketas, Life §2–3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1). He entered the service of the court and, per Niketas, rose to the dignity of spatharokoubikoularios — a chamberlain’s rank held by eunuchs and trusted attendants of the imperial bedchamber, charged with the imperial insignia — while also managing the affairs of a patrician’s household (Niketas, Life §3; the precise rank is given by Niketas and is here pinned to his testimony, as the Life is the sole source). He also appears to have held a place in the senate. This was a young man of the world: well-placed, materially comfortable, on the threshold of a successful secular career.

The Meeting with Symeon Eulabes

The turning point was a man, not a book. While still a layman in his teens, Symeon came under the spiritual direction of Symeon Eulabes — “Symeon the Pious,” also called Symeon the Studite — a simple, unordained lay monk of the great monastery of Stoudios who had acquired a reputation for sanctity and discernment (Niketas, Life §4–6; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on the figure of the Studite elder). For some six years the elder kept the young Symeon under instruction in the world before receiving him into the monastery, giving him the writings of St. Mark the Ascetic and the ascetic counsel that would form him. The bond between disciple and elder became the defining relationship of Symeon’s life — and, in time, the occasion of his deepest controversies. His unembarrassed insistence that he owed everything to this single charismatic father, and that such a living, Spirit-bearing father is necessary to the spiritual life, is one of the most distinctive and contested features of his teaching.

That the elder was a layman — unordained, holding no office — is essential to what Symeon drew from him. Symeon’s whole later theology of charismatic authority is rooted here: the conviction that holiness and the power to guide souls flow from the conscious possession of the Holy Spirit, not from canonical rank. The Studite gave Symeon a model of a man with no institutional standing who was nonetheless a true spiritual father, and Symeon spent his life defending the implications of that model — including the right to venerate such a father after his death, which would ultimately bring about his own condemnation (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, chs. 1, 3; Alfeyev, ch. 1). The ascetic writings the elder pressed on him — those of St. Mark the Ascetic above all — taught a religion of the heart: hidden tears, ceaseless prayer, attention to the inner movements of grace. From the beginning Symeon was being formed not as a scholar of God but as a practitioner of His presence.

The First Vision of Light

It was during this lay period, while still living and working in the capital, that Symeon received his first vision of the divine light. He recounts it in his Catechesis 22, under the persona of a young man named “George” — an autobiographical account told in the third person, a literary veil over his own experience that scholarship and the repository’s existing verified note treat as a thinly disguised self-portrait (St. Symeon, Catechesis 22 [SC 104]; trans. deCatanzaro, The Discourses, Discourse XXII; cf. Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 2; Alfeyev, ch. 1; see also Fr. Seraphim Rose: Symeon translation).

According to that account, “George,” about twenty years old (c. 969–970), stood one night at prayer, saying with his nous rather than his lips the words “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” He had been keeping a hidden ascetic rule of tears and prostrations after the teaching of St. Mark the Ascetic. Then:

“Suddenly a flood of divine radiance appeared from above and filled all the room. As this happened the young man lost all awareness [of his surroundings] and forgot whether he was in a house or under a roof… For he was wholly in the presence of immaterial light and seemed to himself to have turned into light.” (Catechesis 22; trans. deCatanzaro, The Discourses, Discourse XXII)

Niketas adds that within the radiance the young man beheld his own spiritual father, Symeon Eulabes, standing in still greater glory — the elder’s intercession folded into the vision (Niketas, Life §5; Krivochéine, ch. 2). The experience left him in tears and “ineffable joy.” It is the seed of Symeon’s whole theology: God known not as concept but as light, given to a layman in the middle of the city.

The Worldly Interlude and Entry to Stoudios

The vision did not at once produce the monk. By his own testimony, “George” returned to his affairs and his worldly life, and the grace receded — an interval Symeon would later recall with sharp self-reproach as years lost to negligence (Catechesis 22; Krivochéine, ch. 2). The pull of the world held him for several years more. Only around 977, at about the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, did he finally renounce his position and enter the monastery of Stoudios as a monk, placing himself wholly under Symeon Eulabes (Niketas, Life §6–11; Alfeyev, ch. 1; the dating c. 977 is Krivochéine’s, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1).

Conflict at Stoudios and the Move to St. Mamas

Symeon’s time at Stoudios was short and turbulent. The problem, as Niketas frames it, was precisely the intensity of the young monk’s attachment to his elder: his total devotion to Symeon Eulabes, and his refusal to relax it for the sake of the house’s common discipline, scandalized other monks and ran afoul of the abbot of Stoudios. A monk owed obedience to the institutional structure of the monastery; Symeon owed his whole heart to one charismatic father within it. The tension proved irreconcilable, and Symeon was required to leave Stoudios (Niketas, Life §11–14; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, ch. 1). Here already, in miniature, is the great theme of his career: the collision between charismatic, Spirit-given authority and the ordinary structures of the Church — a collision Symeon never resolved in favor of structure.

With his elder’s blessing, Symeon transferred to the small and then-decayed monastery of St. Mamas (Mamas tou Xerokerkou) in Constantinople. There he was tonsured, ordained, and — within a remarkably short time, around 980 — made abbot, beginning the quarter-century of reforming labor that would make him both famous and embattled (Niketas, Life §§14–33; Krivochéine, ch. 1; see St. Mamas and the Abbacy).

Reading the Sources

A word on confidence is owed at the outset of any treatment of Symeon’s life. The outward facts — the dates, the rank, the conflict at Stoudios, the figure of the elder — rest chiefly on Niketas Stethatos, and Niketas wrote a generation after the events, as Symeon’s devoted disciple, editor, and advocate. His aim was to establish Symeon’s sanctity and to vindicate his memory against those who had opposed him in life. This does not make the Life unreliable, but it does make it a hagiography, with the shape and purposes of that genre: the holy man is set against unworthy opponents, his sufferings are read as vindications, and his every gift is magnified. The inner life, by contrast, we have from Symeon’s own pen — in the Catecheses and the Hymns — and there the testimony, however veiled by the “George” persona, is first-hand. Throughout this compendium the practice is to pin claims that rest on Niketas alone to his testimony, and to let Symeon’s own voice carry the weight wherever it can (Greenfield, introduction, DOML 20; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1).

References

Niketas Stethatos. The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Edited and translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. Catéchèses. Edited by Basile Krivochéine; translated by Joseph Paramelle. Sources Chrétiennes 96, 104, 113. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963–1965.
Krivochéine, Archbishop Basil. In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022): Life — Spirituality — Doctrine. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986.
Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
McGuckin, John Anthony. “Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Christian Mystical Tradition.” Spiritus 5, no. 2 (2005): 182–202.