St. Mamas and the Abbacy

St. Symeon as abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, c. 980–1005: the restoration of a decayed house, the reform program that demanded a conscious, experiential spiritual life of every monk and anticipated the Catecheses, the revolt of some thirty monks that drew in the patriarch, and his resignation in 1005 in favor of his disciple Arsenios — together with the portrait of his daily life preserved by his disciple Niketas Stethatos.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Abbot of a Ruined House

Around 980, only a few years after entering monastic life, Symeon was ordained priest and installed as abbot (hegoumenos) of the monastery of St. Mamas (Mamas tou Xerokerkou) in Constantinople, a small foundation that had fallen into physical and spiritual disrepair (Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon §§14–33; trans. Greenfield, DOML 20; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1). He would hold the office for roughly twenty-five years. Niketas describes him rebuilding the monastery materially — its fabric, its church, its discipline — while pouring his energy into the far harder restoration of its interior life (Niketas, Life §§33–37). The outward repair of St. Mamas is, in the Life, a sign of the inward reform Symeon sought; as a disciple’s account it is pinned to Niketas’ testimony.

The Reform Program

Symeon’s reform was not primarily a matter of stricter rules. Houses with strict rules already existed; Stoudios was one. His demand was more radical and more interior: that each monk pursue, and actually attain, a conscious, felt experience of the grace of the Holy Spirit — that the monastic life be lived not as the external performance of an ordo but as a real, perceived encounter with God, marked by repentance, tears, and the vision of the divine light (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on Symeon’s pastoral program). His weekly catechetical addresses to the brethren — later gathered as the Catecheses (Catechetical Discourses), the critical edition of which is Krivochéine and Paramelle’s in Sources Chrétiennes — are the surviving record of this teaching: urgent, autobiographical, unsparing toward merely formal religion (St. Symeon, Catecheses [SC 96, 104, 113]; trans. deCatanzaro, The Discourses; cf. Fr. Seraphim Rose: Symeon).

Two emphases gave the program its sharpest edge:

Frequent communion with tears. Symeon urged his monks to approach the Eucharist often, but never mechanically — only with compunction and the conscious awareness of grace, so that to receive without “seeing” the One received was, in his terms, to receive in vain (Krivochéine, ch. 6; Alfeyev, on Symeon and the Eucharist).
The living spiritual father. Symeon held up his own elder, Symeon Eulabes, as the model of the Spirit-bearing father to whom a disciple owes total disclosure and obedience — a teaching that exalted charismatic authority and would soon set him against the wider Church (Niketas, Life §§72–93; Krivochéine, ch. 3).

This was, in effect, the Catecheses lived before they were written down: the demand that the inner life be real, conscious, and verifiable in experience.

It is worth dwelling on how unusual this emphasis was. Byzantine monasticism had long and venerable traditions of discipline, liturgy, and obedience; what Symeon added was an insistence that none of these was sufficient unless it issued in a felt and conscious participation in grace. He pressed his monks not to be satisfied with the diligent performance of the rule, however exact, but to seek and to expect the actual perception of the Holy Spirit — the tears, the warmth, the light. To those content with external observance this was disturbing, even presumptuous: it seemed to make of extraordinary mystical experience a norm to be required of ordinary monks. To Symeon it was simply the logic of baptism: the Spirit is genuinely given, and what is genuinely given can and must be genuinely known (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, chs. 3, 6; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on the conscious experience of grace). Here the abbot was teaching, at the level of a single community, the conviction that would make him a permanent figure in the Orthodox tradition: that the goal of the Christian life is not correctness but communion, and that communion is something one perceives.

The Revolt of the Monks

Such intensity provoked resistance. Niketas reports that some fifteen years into the abbacy — placing the episode around 996–998 — about thirty monks rose against Symeon, on one account during or just after the Divine Liturgy, in open revolt against the severity of his demands. They broke out of the monastery, smashing the locks on the gate, and carried their complaint to the patriarch, Sisinnios II (Niketas, Life §§38–40; the figure of thirty monks and the appeal to the patriarch are Niketas’ and are pinned to his testimony; cf. Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, ch. 1). The patriarch sided with the abbot: the ringleaders were disciplined and, by Niketas’ account, sent into exile, and Symeon was confirmed in his office. The Life presents this as a vindication of the holy abbot against the rebellious — the characteristic shape of a disciple’s hagiography, and to be read as such.

Resignation, 1005

Symeon governed St. Mamas for several more years, but in 1005 he resigned the abbacy, handing it over to his disciple Arsenios while remaining in the monastery as an elder (Niketas, Life §§58–59; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, ch. 1). The motives Niketas assigns are a desire for stillness (hesychia) and the freedom to devote himself wholly to prayer and writing after twenty-five years of governance; the resignation was a voluntary withdrawal, not a defeat, and Symeon remained an honored presence in the house he had rebuilt.

The resignation freed him for a more contemplative life — and, as it happened, placed him on the road toward the great public conflict of his last years. With the abbacy behind him, Symeon gave fuller and more public rein to his veneration of his departed elder, Symeon Eulabes, instituting a yearly liturgical commemoration of him as a saint and even commissioning an icon. It was this — the public cultus of an unordained lay monk, raised by his disciple to the honors of a saint without ecclesiastical process — that drew the opposition of Stephen of Nikomedia, a learned former metropolitan serving as a senior patriarchal official, and led through a protracted dispute to Symeon’s condemnation and exile near Chrysopolis in early 1009 (Niketas, Life §§72–93; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, chs. 2–3; see Fr. Seraphim Rose: Symeon for the exile and its aftermath). The seeds of that final controversy were already present in the abbacy: the same exaltation of charismatic, Spirit-given authority over institutional structure that had ended his time at Stoudios now set him against the patriarchal establishment itself.

The Portrait of His Daily Life

For Symeon’s manner of life as abbot we depend almost wholly on Niketas, who knew him only at the end and wrote as a devoted disciple — testimony to be received as veneration’s portrait, not a neutral diary (Greenfield, introduction, DOML 20). Niketas paints an ascetic of relentless vigil: long nightly prayer with tears, minimal sleep and food, manual care for the house, and an unbroken interior attention to God, from which his catechetical addresses flowed as overflow rather than composition (Niketas, Life §§33–37, 70–72). He describes a man who wept readily, who could be severe toward complacency and tender toward the penitent, and whose authority over the brethren rested on the conviction that he spoke from what he had himself seen and received. The portrait is hagiographical in genre and idealizing in tendency; yet it coheres with the voice of Symeon’s own writings, in which the same restless insistence on real, conscious communion with God is everywhere audible (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, chs. 1, 3).

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. Catéchèses. Edited by Basile Krivochéine; translated by Joseph Paramelle. Sources Chrétiennes 96, 104, 113. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963–1965.
St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
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.