Exile and Vindication

Condemned by the synod in January 1009, St. Symeon was sent across the Bosphorus to Paloukiton, where he made his home in a ruined oratory of St. Marina. When the patriarch, alarmed at the protests of Symeon’s powerful disciples, offered to recall him and even to consecrate him a bishop, Symeon refused every honor that did not include the vindication of his elder’s veneration. He spent his last thirteen years gathering a small community around the restored chapel, reposing on March 12, 1022. The translation of his relics in 1052 and the writing of his Life by Niketas Stethatos secured the cult of the very man the Church had once exiled.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Exile of 1009

The sentence of the synod sent Symeon out of the capital. In January 1009 he was conveyed across the Bosphorus to Paloukiton, a small place near Chrysopolis on the Asiatic shore opposite Constantinople (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1). Niketas dramatizes the destitution of the moment: Symeon, he says, was set down alone, without provisions, in the depth of winter — an image meant to underscore the injustice of his treatment and the patience with which he bore it (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20).

At Paloukiton Symeon found a deserted and ruined oratory dedicated to St. Marina (the chapel is named for St. Marina in Niketas’s Life; some secondary accounts give the dedication as St. Macrina) (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20). Far from being broken by the sentence, Symeon set about restoring the place. A wealthy lay disciple, Christopher Phakourites (Phagouras), purchased the surrounding land and underwrote the foundation, and the ruined oratory became the nucleus of a new monastic settlement (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

Niketas presents the whole episode in the register of hagiography. The injustice of the sentence, the destitution of the winter arrival, and Symeon’s serene acceptance are arranged to display the saint as a confessor who rejoices in suffering for righteousness’ sake — the persecuted holy man whose vindication the narrative is built to secure. The events behind the framing are credible and are accepted by scholarship, but the reader should hear them as Niketas tells them: as the trials of a saint, not as the minutes of a tribunal (Greenfield, introduction to the Life; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

The Refused Rehabilitation

Symeon’s exile did not silence him; it amplified him. He had by this time a substantial following, including men of rank, and these disciples — Niketas names the patrician among them — petitioned the patriarch Sergios II to lift the sentence (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). Anxious that the affair might reach the emperor and grow into a public scandal, and moved by the manifest holiness and influence of the exile, Sergios moved to reconcile.

According to Niketas, the patriarch’s offer was generous to the point of extravagance. He proposed not only to lift the exile and restore Symeon to St. Mamas, but to consecrate him archbishop of an important see (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). This is the measure of how far the calculus had shifted: the man condemned as a troublemaker was now to be elevated to the episcopate.

Symeon refused. He would accept no rehabilitation that did not also vindicate the veneration of his elder — the very point over which he had been condemned (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). An archbishopric purchased by the abandonment of Symeon Eulabes was worth nothing to him. In the end the patriarch, unable to move him and unwilling to compel him, gave Symeon his blessing — in Niketas’s words — to “live together with your disciples and act according to your good pleasure” (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20). Symeon chose his ruined chapel and his free community over high office in the capital.

The Community at St. Marina

For the remaining years of his life Symeon presided over the small community gathered at the restored oratory of St. Marina. Released from the institutional frictions of St. Mamas, he was free to teach, to write, and to guide his disciples as he saw fit. It was here that he composed or completed much of the work for which he is remembered — the Hymns of Divine Eros among them — and here that the form of his spiritual fatherhood reached its maturity (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

The most consequential of the disciples was Niketas Stethatos, a monk of the Studion, who collected and edited Symeon’s writings, compiled the posthumous edition of his works, and — at length — wrote the Life that is our principal source for the whole affair. Niketas’s biography is an act of advocacy: it presents Symeon as a wronged saint and is the foundation on which his cult was built (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Greenfield, introduction). Niketas would in time become a significant theologian in his own right and a defender of Symeon’s spiritual teaching, transmitting the penthos and light mysticism of his master into the later tradition (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1; see The Gift of Tears).

The choice Symeon made — the ruined chapel over the archbishop’s throne — was thus not a retreat from influence but the securing of it on his own terms. From the freedom of St. Marina came both the mature corpus and the disciple who would make Symeon a saint.

Repose (March 12, 1022)

St. Symeon reposed at the monastery of St. Marina on March 12, 1022, the date generally accepted by scholarship (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). He died still uncanonized, still under the cloud of the synodal condemnation, in the obscurity of an exile’s monastery.

Posthumous Vindication

The reversal came within a generation. Niketas records that he was prompted to write the Life after Symeon appeared to him in a dream, reminding him of a neglected promise. In 1052 — roughly thirty years after Symeon’s death — his relics were uncovered and translated to the capital, and from this point his recognition as a saint was secured (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Greenfield, introduction; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). The man exiled for venerating an uncanonized elder became himself a venerated saint, his cult propagated by the very Life his disciple wrote.

On the formal status of his canonization, the scholarship is careful. There was in this period no centralized, juridical canonization procedure of the kind that later developed; sainthood was established by the spread of a local cult — the translation of relics, the composition of an office and a Life, the report of miracles, and liturgical commemoration — rather than by a single synodal decree (Greenfield, introduction to the Life; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). Symeon’s recognition belongs to this older, organic pattern. There is a fitting irony in this: the man condemned for promoting an unauthorized cult of his elder became a saint by exactly the same organic process — relics, Life, office, miracles, feast — through which he had honored Symeon Eulabes. The cult he was punished for keeping was vindicated in the cult that grew up around himself. Niketas’s Life both recorded the persecution and was the chief instrument of the vindication, so that the very text written to defend Symeon became the foundation of his veneration (Greenfield, introduction; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). His feast is kept on March 12, the day of his repose, but is widely transferred to October 12 because March 12 customarily falls within Great Lent, when full festal commemorations are not held (OrthodoxWiki, Symeon the New Theologian, used to locate the feast dates; the dual dating is standard in the liturgical books).

What the Affair Shows

The Symeon–Stephen controversy is regularly read by scholars as a paradigm case of a recurring Byzantine tension: the authority of the charismatic holy man against the authority of the institutional Church (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3). Symeon grounded his teaching, and his right to make a saint, in personal experience of God; the hierarchy grounded its order in office and canon. The episode shows how unstable that boundary could be — how a patriarch could move from sending incense for a disputed feast, to ordering icons defaced, to offering the exile a bishopric, all within a few years.

It also shows the long horizon of vindication in Orthodox memory. The Church that condemned Symeon in 1009 received him as a saint by 1052 and, in time, granted him the rarest of titles — “the New Theologian,” ranking him with John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus as one who speaks of God from sight rather than from study. The man who lost the synodal contest won the longer judgment of the tradition.

Modern scholars are careful, however, not to flatten the affair into a simple morality tale of holiness wronged by power. Stephen and the synod were not merely jealous bureaucrats; they were guarding a real principle — that the recognition of saints belongs to the Church as a body and not to the private enthusiasm of an abbot, however holy. The danger of unregulated local cults was genuine, and the hierarchy’s caution was not without warrant (Greenfield, introduction to the Life; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). What the episode dramatizes is the irreducible tension between two goods the Church must hold together: the freedom of the Spirit, who raises up living saints and bestows the experiential knowledge of God, and the order of the institution, without which discernment dissolves into private claim. Symeon embodied the first with uncompromising force; Stephen represented the second. That the tradition ultimately canonized Symeon — without thereby abolishing the hierarchy’s role in recognizing sanctity — is itself a sign of how Orthodoxy has tried to keep both goods alive (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3).

See Also

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. Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Translated by Daniel K. Griggs. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010.
  • 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 Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • “Symeon the New Theologian.” OrthodoxWiki (used only to locate the feast dates of March 12 and October 12; biographical chronology cross-checked against Greenfield, Krivochéine, and Alfeyev).