Symeon the New Theologian transformed the Evagrian tradition of hesychia, with its insistence on absolute solitude remote from the affairs of men, and practiced it in a monastery in the very heart of Constantinople. A champion of Orthodoxy, and of monks, he composed works which became perhaps the most important source of the hesychast movement on Mount Athos two centuries after his death. Always the spiritual master rather than the systematic theologian, Symeon wrote as he had taught--from his own immediate experience. As his disciple-biographer wrote: "Having arrived at this degree of union with the Spirit...he has become for the people of Israel, the monks the river of God, filled with the water of the Spirit".
