“The New Theologian”: The Title and Its Claim

St. Symeon (949–1022) is the third and last of only three figures the Orthodox Church names “the Theologian” — after St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory of Nazianzus — and the only one whose very surname, ho Neos Theologos, “the New Theologian,” is built against the two before him. This file examines what the title asserts (theology as the vision of God, renewed in every generation, against the claim that the apostolic age sealed off the experience of grace), the scholarly case that “new” began as a pejorative and was transfigured by his disciples, and his two feasts — March 12, the day of his repose, and October 12, the transferred commemoration.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Three Who Bear the Name

In the whole tradition of the Orthodox Church the unqualified title ho Theologos — “the Theologian” — has been given to only three persons. The first is St. John the Evangelist, “John the Theologian,” whose Gospel opens with the Logos and who, in the iconographic tradition, is the eagle that gazes into the divine darkness. The second is St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Gregory the Theologian,” the Cappadocian bishop whose Five Theological Orations gave the fourth-century Church its classic confession of the Trinity. The third, and chronologically last, is St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the Byzantine abbot and poet of the vision of the divine light (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; the threefold list is developed from the side of Gregory in the parallel collection at ../../st-gregory-the-theologian/09-legacy-and-reception/the-theologian-title.md).

The threefold list is itself a piece of theology. It is not a ranking of learning or of literary output: Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa wrote more dogmatic prose than the three who bear the name, and none of them is “the Theologian.” In the Orthodox sense, theologia is not in the first place an academic discipline or a system of propositions; it is the knowledge and confession of the Holy Trinity that arises from purification and illumination — the contemplation of God as He gives Himself to be known. Evagrius of Pontus fixed the formula the tradition would keep: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (Evagrius, On Prayer 60). The name marks those who, in the Church’s judgment, spoke from the vision of God and not merely about God. That Symeon stands in this company is the Church’s verdict that his writings are not speculation but the articulation of genuine experience — the same vision the hesychast Fathers would defend, and St. Gregory Palamas would conciliarly vindicate, three centuries after him (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1).

What the Title Asserts: Theology as Vision Renewed

For Symeon the word “theologian” carries its full ascetical weight: it names one who has seen. His own most distinctive teaching — and the one that earned and explains the title — is that the vision of God in the divine light is not the privilege of a past golden age but the standing offer of the gospel to every generation, refused only through the weakness of present faith. The claim is pressed most fiercely against those who consigned the experience of grace to the apostolic past. In the twenty-ninth of his Catechetical Discourses Symeon turns on exactly that excuse:

“There are many who say every day, and we, too, hear them as they say it: ‘Were we living in the days of the apostles, and like them had been found worthy of seeing Him, we too would have become holy like them.’ They do not know that He is the same who speaks to the whole world both then and now” (Symeon, Catechesis 29; trans. deCatanzaro, The Discourses, CWS, p. 308).

The argument is the heart of his theology and the inner meaning of his title. The Holy Spirit who descended at Pentecost is not a figure receding into history but the living God who “speaks to the whole world both then and now”; if the saints of old saw the light and we do not, the difference lies not in the dispensation but in us. To deny that grace can still be consciously perceived — that one may possess the Spirit and yet have no awareness of His presence — Symeon treats as the gravest of errors, a practical denial of the Spirit’s work (Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on the conscious perception of grace; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 7). This is theologia as Symeon understands it: not the elaboration of new dogmas but the testimony that the vision which made the first theologians can make theologians still. The title, in this register, is a claim about the present tense of the Church. The contemplation crowns the spiritual life — standing, as in the wider tradition, above the contemplation of creatures (cf. St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation).

The Attestation: A Mockery Transfigured

When and how Symeon came to be called “the New Theologian” is a question the methodology requires to be handled carefully, because the popular account and the scholarly account diverge (see METHODOLOGY.md §3). The sobriquet is not the gift of a council, as Gregory’s “the Theologian” came to be linked (loosely) to Chalcedon. It belongs instead to the decades after Symeon’s death and to the editorial work of his disciple Niketas Stethatos, in whose milieu the name is first firmly attached to him (Greenfield, The Life of Saint Symeon, DOML 20, introduction).

The most striking feature of the scholarship is its judgment about the tone of the name. Archbishop Basil Krivochéine — the saint’s modern editor — argued that the epithet “was perhaps first given to him by his opponents” and that it “had a nuance that sounded pejorative to conservative Byzantine ears, but it was quickly appropriated by Symeon’s disciples with enthusiasm” (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1). The logic is precise. While “theologian” was the highest of honors, the prefix “new” was, in the Byzantine register, anything but: “newness or innovation in Byzantine theology was an attribute normally associated with heretics, and it therefore seems likely that this sobriquet was originally given Symeon by his enemies” (so the standard scholarly account, following Krivochéine and Alfeyev; cf. Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, on the title). To call a man a new theologian, in a culture that prized continuity and suspected innovation, was to insinuate that he had invented his own theology — that he was a self-appointed authority claiming visions the Fathers had not claimed. It was an accusation of presumption.

What the disciples did with the slur is the heart of the story. Niketas and Symeon’s other devotees took the contemptuous adjective and turned it into a crown: “new” no longer meant “innovating” but “renewing” — Symeon as a theologian of the same order as John and Gregory, raised up anew in a later and colder age to prove that the vision had never ceased (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1; Alfeyev, St. Symeon and Orthodox Tradition, ch. 1). The transfiguration of the title thus mirrors Symeon’s own argument: just as he insisted the Spirit “speaks both then and now,” so his admirers insisted that a true theologian could arise now as truly as then. The mockery became the confession.

Modern scholarship preserves the tension rather than resolving it. The “fideist” or traditionalist reading (Krivochéine, Alfeyev, Golitzin) hears in “the Theologian” the contemplative sense — “not in the sense of a theologian working out new dogmas, but as one who has reached the heights of contemplation” (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 1) — and so reads Symeon as renewal, not rupture. A more critical reading (J. A. McGuckin) is readier to take the “new” at something nearer its original force, calling Symeon “one of the least representative mystics of the eastern Christian tradition” and stressing the genuinely disruptive edge of his claims (McGuckin, in the scholarship on Symeon’s spiritual authority). The honest disposition is that both poles are real: the name was born as a charge of novelty, and the Church received it as a charter of renewal — and the saint himself, by his fierce insistence that grace is no less available now than in the apostolic age, gave the Church grounds for the second reading.

His Feasts: March 12 and October 12

Symeon reposed on March 12, 1022, at his small monastery across the Bosphorus, and that date is his proper feast — the day of his falling-asleep (Greenfield, The Life of Saint Symeon, DOML 20; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, ch. 3). But March 12 almost always falls within Great Lent, the penitential weeks in which the Church suppresses or subdues the festal commemoration of saints. To keep the memory of so great a Father from being repeatedly swallowed by the fast, a second commemoration was appointed on October 12. The tradition credits the arrangement to St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), the compiler of the Philokalia, who composed the liturgical service of St. Symeon and, “because of the Great Lent period,” set its celebration on October 12, “so that for some centuries St. Symeon was celebrated instead on October 12” (Greek hagiographical tradition, summarized at theodialogia.blogspot.com and OrthodoxWiki, “Symeon the New Theologian”). Today both dates are kept: October 12 as the principal festal commemoration with its proper service, and March 12 as the historical day of his repose.

The doubling is itself a small monument to Symeon’s place in the Church. It was the hesychast world of the eighteenth century — Nikodemos and the Philokalia — that lifted his feast onto a footing where it could be solemnly sung, an act of liturgical recovery exactly contemporary with the Philokalia’s recovery of his texts (see reception-history.md). The saint who in his lifetime was suspected, tried, and exiled, and whose veneration of his own spiritual father had once scandalized the patriarchal court, is now commemorated twice in the Orthodox year as one of the three Theologians.

References

St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980 — for Catechesis 29 (“He is the same who speaks to the whole world both then and now,” p. 308).
Krivochéine, Archbishop Basil. In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022): Life — Spirituality — Doctrine. Translated by Anthony P. Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986 — for the title as a pejorative appropriated by the disciples, and the contemplative sense of “theologian.”
Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 — for the title’s origin among Symeon’s opponents (innovation associated with heresy) and its appropriation.
Niketas Stethatos. The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. Translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013 — for the milieu in which the title is first firmly attached to Symeon, and the date of repose.
Evagrius of Pontus. Chapters on Prayer 60 (“If you are a theologian, you will pray truly…”). In The Philokalia; trans. Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4.
“Symeon the New Theologian,” OrthodoxWiki; theodialogia.blogspot.com, “Saint Symeon the New Theologian” (used to locate the feast-date tradition and the title-as-mockery account — followed to Krivochéine and Alfeyev for the terminal citation): repose March 12, 1022; commemoration transferred to October 12 by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite because March 12 falls in Great Lent; both feasts now kept.