Simeon Stylites

He was the opposite of the Armani and Rolex-wearing Christian televangelist. He didn't demonstrate the victorious Christian life with good health, perfect hair and teeth, a trophy wife and huge campus with a Las Vegas-style stage show. But he was a hero to thousands of follower who traveled from all around the world to come and sit under him. Literally sit under him. For 37 years.

Simeon was born around 390 AD in the Syrian desert, just before the Rome was divided into Eastern (Byzantium) and Western empires in 395 and Syria was absorbed into Christian Byzantium. He was the son of a shepherd and at age 13 heard a sermon on the Beatitudes that impressed him greatly. Under his mother's influence he dedicated himself increasingly to religious disciplines.

During this time in Eastern Christianity in general and in the Syrian desert region in particular the dominant model for spirituality was "asceticism." The term comes from the greek word askēsis, meaning practice, training or exercise. In ancient Greece athletes and warriors lived lives of askēsis to perfect their bodies and skills. Over time the term came to be associated with spiritual training as one abstained from worldly pleasure or disciplined one's body and mind to perfect one's soul. Judaism and Christianity always had some ascetic elements: John the Baptist, the fasting of Christ and the spiritual disciplines of the apostles.

During the fourth and fifth century Christian ascetics in the Syrian desert sought more and more rigorous ways to discipline themselves and subdue earthly passions in pursuit of communion with Christ. One hermit dwelt in a cave on the top of a mountain and who for the space of twenty-five years never turned his face to the west (presumably the direction of the cave's entrance). Another hermit stood upright for many years, absorbed in contemplation, without ever lying down. Church fathers record another who passed ten years in a tub suspended in midair from poles.

The young Simeon was determined to grow closer to God through ascetic self-denial. At 14 and 15 years old his fasting grew ever more severe. By the time he was 16 he was already living full-time in a monastery but found even that life too worldly and tried even harder to mortify his flesh.

On one occasion, moving nearby, he commenced a severe regimen of fasting for Great Lent and was visited by the head of the monastery, who left him some water and loaves. A number of days later, Simeon was discovered unconscious, with the water and loaves untouched. When he was brought back to the monastery, it was discovered that he had bound his waist with a girdle made of palm fronds so tightly that days of soaking were required to remove the fibres from the wound formed. At this, Simeon was requested to leave the monastery.

He then shut himself up for three years in a hut, where he passed the whole of Lent without eating or drinking. He later took to standing continually upright so long as his limbs would sustain him.

After three years in his hut, Simeon sought a rocky eminence on the slopes of what is now the Sheik Barakat Mountain and compelled himself to remain a prisoner within a narrow space, less than 20 meters in diameter. But crowds of pilgrims invaded the area to seek him out, asking his counsel or his prayers, and leaving him insufficient time for his own devotions. This at last led him to adopt a new way of life.

Simeon was distracted by the crowds that considered him a holy man and sought his advice and blessing. Seeking somewhere that he could be alone and free of their interruptions he found a stone pillar in some ruins of an ancient temple nearby. He built a little platform on the top and climbed up, determined to live the rest of his life above the troubling crowds.

The other monks wondered at his motives: could it be a sort of ascetic One-upmanship?

When the monastic Elders living in the desert heard about St Simeon, who had chosen a new and strange form of asceticism, they wanted to test him to determine whether his extreme feats were founded in humility or pride. They decided to tell Simeon under obedience to come down from the pillar. If he disobeyed they would forcibly drag him to the ground, but if he was willing to submit, they were to leave him on his pillar. St Simeon displayed complete obedience and humility, and the monks told him to stay where he was.

His first pillar was about four meters high (12 feet) but his followers kept building him newer, taller pillars. Eventually he sat on a pillar about 15 meters (45) feet in the air, with a little platform and railing around it to keep him from falling off (on a windy day?).

People came in even larger numbers as Simeon became an international spiritual hero. Some were disciples or miracle-seekers, some were tourists that came from all around the world to see the famous hermit. They sat below, watching, praying, hoping for a blessing or words of wisdom. Eventually he could not ignore the crowds and devoted some time each day to interacting with them:

Simeon made himself available to these visitors every afternoon. By means of a ladder, visitors were able to ascend, and it is known that he wrote letters, the text of some of which survived to this day, that he instructed disciples, and that he also delivered addresses to those assembled beneath, preaching especially against profanity and usury.
In contrast to the extreme austerity that he demanded of himself, his preaching conveyed temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from fanaticism.

Simeon lived on the pillar, an international celebrity for 37 years. Edward Gibbon, in his epic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes Simeon's existence as follows:

In this last and lofty station [he] resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty- four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless count.

Simeon eventually died on top of the pillar and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He launched a whole new movement, the stylites or "pillar saints." Maybe the best description and perspective on them is offered in this [edited] passage from The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Simeon had a continuous series of imitators, more particularly in Syria and Palestine. St. Daniel Stylites had been a disciple of St. Simeon and was visited by both the Emperor Leo and the Emperor Zeno. Simeon the Younger lived near Antioch; St. Alypius, whose pillar had been erected near Adrianople in Paphlagonia. Saint Alypius after standing upright for fifty-three years found his feet no longer able to support him, but instead of descending from his pillar lay down on his side and spent the remaining fourteen years of his life in that position.

There were many others besides these who were not so famous and even women Stylites were known. One or two isolated attempts seem to have been made to introduce this form of asceticism into the West but it met with little favour. In the East cases were found down to the twelfth century; in the Russian Orthodox Church it lasted until 1461.

Probably the best justification of these excesses of austerity is to be found in the fact that they did, in an age of terrible corruption and social decadence, impress the need of penance more than anything else could have done upon the minds and imagination of Eastern Christians.

Simeon's pillar has toppled, but if you visit Syria today you can see it's base, with a stone resting atop to mark it: