The life of St Symeon the New Theologian
He entered monastic life himself, was ordained priest, and within a few years became abbot of the small monastery of Saint Mamas in Constantinople, where he served for a quarter century and taught that direct experience of divine light was open to any believer who sought it earnestly, not reserved to a distant few. His insistence on venerating his own elder as a saint, and his teaching on this immediate experience of God, put him at odds with the court theologian Stephen of Nicomedia, and around 1009 the patriarch exiled him from the capital to a remote spot near Chrysopolis. Public sympathy for Symeon eventually pressed the patriarch to lift the sentence and offer him a bishopric, which he declined, choosing instead to remain at the small monastery of Saint Marina he had restored there, where he spent his last years writing and guiding a following drawn from the city he had left. He died in 1022, leaving hymns and theological writings later gathered by his disciple Niketas Stethatos, and a title, the New Theologian, given by the Church to only two others before him.
