The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian

Publication Data: Cambridge, MA/London, United Kingdom: Harvard University Press, 2013
Format: hardcover
Number of Pages: xxvi + 422
Dimensions (l × w × h): 21.0 cm × 14.0 cm × 2.8 cm
Additional Information: dust jacket, one bookmark ribbon
ISBN: 978‒0‒674‒05798‒2

   
Niketas Stethatos
Translated by Richard P. H. Greenfield

No. 20 of Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

“Symeon the New Theologian, who lived from ca. 949 to 1022 CE, was a Byzantine mystic, a prolific writer, and a monastic founder and leader who is now revered as a saint by the Orthodox Church. His reputation has grown widely in recent years, to the point where he is considered by contemporary Orthodoxy to be one of its most influential spiritual thinkers, sharing only with John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzos the epithet ‘the Theologian.’ In his own time, however, Symeon was more than just a religious figure: a member of a powerful aristocratic family, he and his work cannot be disengaged from the complex social and political world of Constantinople during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Moreover, during his lifetime and indeed long afterward, a cloud of controversy and suspicion hung around him, something which tainted his reputation and prevented his work from becoming widely known until the later twentieth century. The work entitled The Life and Conduct of Our Father among the Saints Symeon the New Theologian, Elder and Superior of the Monastery of Saint Mamas Xerokerkos, written by his disciple Niketas Stethatos more than thirty years after his death, may thus be considered interesting and important simply because of its principal subject, but it is also an unusually valuable piece of Byzantine hagiography in other ways, providing glimpses into the often bitter politics of monasticism and the considerable ambivalence that lay behind the construction of sanctity and the negotiation of orthodox at the zenith of the medieval Byzantine Empire.”
—“Introduction”

CONTENTS

Introduction
The Life of Saint Symeon the New Theologian
Notes on the Text
Notes to the Text
Notes to the Translation
Bibliography
Index