The Conflict with Stephen of Nicomedia

The defining controversy of St. Symeon’s later life pitted him against Stephen, a former metropolitan of Nicomedia who served as synkellos — a senior official of the patriarchal court and the emperor’s chief theologian. What began as a public theological challenge over the inner distinction of Father and Son in the Trinity widened into a six-year synodal campaign (c. 1003–1009) whose deeper object was Symeon’s public, liturgical veneration of his uncanonized spiritual father, Symeon Eulabes the Studite. It ended with the destruction of the elder’s icons and Symeon’s exile.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Antagonist

Stephen of Nicomedia (often called Stephen the synkellos) was, by the time of the dispute, a former metropolitan who had resigned his see and taken up residence at the capital as a high patriarchal official and court theologian. He was a man of formidable learning — versed in rhetoric, philosophy, and the technical apparatus of Trinitarian dogmatics — and he enjoyed the prestige of office and imperial proximity (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 2–3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1). He thus embodied precisely the type Symeon had spent his career indicting: the man who speaks about God from books and credentials rather than from the purified nous and the vision of the divine light.

Symeon, abbot of the Monastery of St. Mamas (St. Mammas) in Constantinople, was by contrast a charismatic teacher whose authority rested on claimed experience. He had governed St. Mamas for roughly a quarter-century, enforcing a fervent liturgical and ascetical discipline and delivering the Catechetical Discourses that are his major prose legacy; his rigor had already provoked a revolt among some of his own monks before the public clash with Stephen (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 2; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). The collision with Stephen was thus as much a clash of two conceptions of authority as of two men: the authority of office, learning, and the canon against the authority of the holy man who has seen the divine light.

The very title later given to Symeon — “the New Theologian” (ho Neos Theologos) — encodes the stakes of the quarrel. In Orthodox usage the title “Theologian” is reserved for those who know God from direct experience: it had been borne before only by St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory of Nazianzus. To call Symeon “Theologian” is to affirm precisely the claim Stephen contested — that genuine theology proceeds from vision, not from the schools (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ; Alfeyev, St. Symeon).

The Trigger: The Trinity Question

According to Niketas Stethatos, the open breach came when Stephen put to Symeon a deliberately scholastic question — a challenge framed to test, and embarrass, the unlettered mystic before an assembly. The question concerned how, within the one Godhead, the Son is distinguished from the Father: whether the distinction is “in thought” (notionally, by mental abstraction) or “in actuality” (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). The form of the question was itself the provocation, demanding that the mystery of the Trinity be resolved into the categories of the schools.

Symeon’s reply is preserved at length in Hymn 21, one of his Hymns of Divine Eros. There he refuses to play on Stephen’s ground. He warns against importing such distinctions into the contemplation of the Trinity at all, anchors his answer in the apophatic theology of St. Gregory the Theologian (Gregory of Nazianzus, the namesake “Theologian” whose mantle Symeon’s own title invokes), and turns the question back on his interrogator: it is presumption, he argues, for one who has never seen God to dare to teach about the inner life of God (Symeon, Hymn 21; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). The poem is, in effect, a manifesto: theology is the fruit of experience, and the syllogism is no substitute for the seeing of the heart.

The encounter crystallized the difference between the two men. As Alfeyev characterizes it, Stephen emphasized reason, philosophy, and rhetoric, whereas Symeon’s theology was charismatic and apophatic, doubting the very capacity of reason to comprehend the mystery (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). Symeon’s outrage in Hymn 21 is precisely that Stephen dared to teach about the inner relations of the Godhead without the spiritual experience Symeon held to be the only ratification of theological speech.

What was at stake was therefore an epistemology of the knowledge of God. Stephen’s question assumed that the relation of Father and Son could be specified by drawing the right conceptual distinction — that the Trinity is, in principle, an object of analysis. Symeon answered that the only one fit to speak of how the Son proceeds from the Father is the one who has been granted to see God; for everyone else, the honest course is the apophatic reticence of the Fathers. The duel is often read by scholars as a precursor to the great fourteenth-century confrontation between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria, where the same two epistemologies — experiential illumination versus discursive reason — met again over the vision of the divine light (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1; on Symeon’s anticipation of Palamism, Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ). Symeon stands three centuries before Palamas as a witness that theology is, in the strict sense, the speech of those who have seen.

The Deeper Issue: The Cult of Symeon Eulabes

The Trinity duel exposed the antagonism, but it was not the substance of the formal proceedings. The charge on which Stephen pressed Symeon before the patriarchal court concerned something more concrete and, to the hierarchy, more dangerous: Symeon’s public veneration of his own departed spiritual father, the monk Symeon Eulabes (“the Pious,” or the Studite, d. c. 986–987).

Symeon owed everything to this elder. It was under the Studite’s direction that the young Symeon had received the formation and the first experience of the divine light that redirected his life (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1–2; see Seraphim Rose: Translation of St. Symeon). In gratitude and conviction, Symeon honored him as a saint: he commissioned an icon of the elder, composed encomia and a liturgical office for him, and kept an annual feast in his memory at St. Mamas, lighting lamps and offering incense before his image (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

The difficulty was canonical. Symeon Eulabes had been a simple, unordained monk of the Studion who had never been formally numbered among the saints by any authority, and reports circulated of moral irregularities in his earlier life. To venerate him liturgically — with icon, office, lamps, incense, and an annual feast — was, in the eyes of Stephen and others, to usurp a prerogative that did not belong to a private abbot and to honor a man, in the words of the charge as Niketas reports it, “far from saintly” (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20). Symeon’s veneration of his elder thus became the test case for a larger question that the Byzantine Church had no settled procedure to answer: who has the authority to make a saint?

For Symeon the question answered itself. His whole theology rested on the conviction that holiness is real, present, and recognizable — that the saints of the present age are as genuine as those of antiquity, and that to deny this is to deny the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. To honor Symeon Eulabes was, for him, not an act of private devotion but a confession of faith: a witness that God still raises up bearers of the Spirit and that the Church must acknowledge them. The cult of his elder and his polemic against a merely external, “spiritually dead” Christianity were therefore one and the same cause (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

Symeon refused every offered compromise. Niketas records that he would not confine the observance to a quiet private commemoration, declaring that it was his duty to honor the fathers and the saints (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3). On this point he would not yield.

The Years of Synodal Pressure (c. 1003–1009)

The conflict unfolded over roughly six years, from about 1003 to the exile of January 1009 (Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3). It was not a single hearing but a sustained campaign of synodal sessions, summonses, and negotiations.

The position of the patriarch — Sergios II of Constantinople — was, at first, not unfavorable to Symeon. Niketas reports that the patriarch initially tolerated, even supported, the veneration: he is said to have sent candles and incense to St. Mamas for the feast of the Studite (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; cf. Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). The patriarch was thus caught between the prestige and persistence of Stephen and the manifest holiness and following of Symeon — a tension that would define the whole affair.

The Destruction of the Elder’s Icons

The most dramatic episode of the proceedings — and the one Niketas dwells upon with greatest indignation — was the assault on the icons of Symeon Eulabes. Having failed to extract a compromise, Stephen prevailed upon the patriarch to order the icons of the Studite removed from St. Mamas; according to Niketas, many of these images were then destroyed, defaced, or covered over with soot, their inscriptions effaced so that the elder could no longer be venerated as a saint (Niketas, Life of Symeon, ed. Greenfield, DOML 20; the episode is summarized in Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1).

This account is pinned to Niketas’s hagiographical narrative; it is told to vindicate Symeon and to cast Stephen and the court as persecutors of a saint, and the details belong to that partisan source rather than to neutral documentation. Read with that caution, it remains the principal witness to how the dispute reached its crisis: an icon defaced is, in Niketas’s telling, the visible sign of the Church’s refusal of the cult — and the precipitant of Symeon’s removal from the capital.

When Symeon still would not abandon the veneration, the synod condemned him, and in January 1009 he was sent into exile across the Bosphorus (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. 1). That exile, the patriarch’s subsequent offers of rehabilitation, and the long posthumous vindication are treated in the companion file.

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 (Hymn 21). Translated by Daniel K. Griggs. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010.
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 Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.