Klöster im Hochmittelalter

The Mind as Cell and the Body as Cloister | 121
pervagatio – spiritual and physical wandering – ⁵⁵ are explicitly represented not as
breaches of the monastic virtue of stability, but as acts supporting spiritual withdrawal
from the world. The fact that Symeon was actually a contemporary of Eberwin
and Richard’s, and that both men had actually been closely involved with him,
makes the relevance of this latter narrative all the more acute to our understanding
of how thinking about seclusion and eremiticism evolved in Richard’s circle during
the crucial years between c. 1025 and the early 1030s.
The origins of the Vita Symeonis are well documented. During their journey,
Eberwin and Richard made the acquaintance of Symeon of Syracuse, a man whose
life so far had seen a constant alternation between the emeritical and the cenobitical.
Symeon eventually traveled to Francia, passing through Normandy and Verdun
(where he was received by Richard), and ending his journeys in Trier. In 1027 or
1028 –1030, he acted as guide to Archbishop Poppo of Trier’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem;
upon his return, Symeon withdrew as a hermit to the Porta Nigra, the former
Roman gatehouse of Trier. There, he died in June 1035. In the same year, Eberwin
drafted a biography, which he intended to use as evidence towards the man’s canonization.
In Eberwin’s original account, at the beginning of his monastic/eremitical
career Symeon – like Eberwin and Richard in 1026 –1027 – visits the holy places of
the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension; he then joins a man living as a hermit in
a tower alongside the river Jordan, but is rejected because he first needs to acquire
the discipline of living in a monastery. Symeon enters a monastery, then moves to
another one, and eventually retires to a cave near a river. From there, he remains in
contact with his former community, and returns from time to time. Crowds of visitors
make him decide to rejoin the monastery, which he then abandons, only to return
again, living a life of strict abstinence. After resuming his eremitism once again,
he is once again recalled by his abbot. In Antiochia, he meets Richard, “whom he
adopts as a father”. Subsequent parts of the Vita recount his travels to Francia,
Verdun, and eventually Tholey; his journey to Trier with Poppo; and his death and
a handful of miracles.
Richard’s near-contemporary and critic Peter Damiani († 1072/1073), also a former
cleric, challenged the notion that the monastery was the best environment to
pursue mimicry of Christ, judging that hermits were better suited to operate a form
of self-judgement by subjecting himself to voluntary acts of extreme self-denial. In
contrast, Eberwin states that the monastic discipline in Symeon’s last community
before leaving the Near East was such, that “he who wished to fast was not pro-
55 Many of Richard’s monastic contemporaries interpreted pilgrimage similarly; see Giles Constable,
Monachisme et pélerinage au Moyen Âge, in: Revue historique 258, 1977, pp. 3 –27, here pp. 12 f.