In Constantine P. Cavafy's 1917 poem, “Simeon,” a young cultured aesthete (probably from Antioch), writes his friend Mebis about a recent chance encounter with the famous stylite that left him “shattered, unnerved, and aghast,” and entirely unfit to resume his sophistic career in belles lettres:
Ah, don—t smile; for thirty-five years, think of it—
winter, summer, daytime, night, for thirty-five
years he's been living, martyring himself, atop a pillar.
Before we were born—I—m twenty-nine years old,
you are, I think, younger than I am—
before we were born, imagine it,
Simeon climbed up that pillar.
And since that time he has stayed there facing God.Footnote 1
Simeon had a similar effect on a contemporary of Cavafy's fictional aesthete and fellow Antiochene: Theodoret bishop of Cyrrhus, who in 444 wrote a history of the monks of Syria, the Historia Religiosa.Footnote 2 Theodoret was in a privileged position to write such a history. First of all, he was of Greek parentage and educated in the Hellenistic paideia at Antioch. Furthermore, his mother was devoted to the local monks and consecrated her son to the monastic life at birth. True to his education, Theodoret cast his local Syrian monks as classical Greek athletes and heroes and exemplars of Christian piety. The climax of his history is the chapter on the life of Simeon. Had Cavafy's young aesthete read Thedoret's Historia Religiosa, he might have been less impressed by Simeon's virtuoso athleticism. Compared with his contemporaries, Simeon's fervent asceticism was none too extreme. Several of his fellows lived as “grazers” in the wild country, anticipating the angelic life.Footnote 3 Eusebius of Teleda, once distracted from the reading of the gospels by a pleasant hilltop view, made lifelong penance by chaining his neck to his belt, so that he was always stooped.Footnote 4 Marcianus and after him Baradatus lived in wooden huts too small in which to stand or lie and yet were open to the elements.Footnote 5
Quite literally, what made Simeon stand out among his contemporaries was his pillar. This pillar has commanded a great deal of attention from antiquity forward: some condemned the practice from the start; others revered the stylite and made pilgrimage to receive his blessing; still others followed suit and mounted their own pillars. Two of the three vitae of Simeon (chapter 26 of Theodoret's Historia Religiosa and the anonymous Syriac vita) offer explicit explanations for this strange innovation in ascetic practice, while a third vita (by a certain Antonius) offers an interesting, implicit explanation.Footnote 6 Some recent scholarship, however, has been interested in the possible pagan antecedents of stylitism, chiefly the “pillar-dwellers,” whom Lucian of Samosata mentions in his De Dea Syria.Footnote 7 Although the debates in scholarship regarding pagan antecedents are very interesting, they fail to account for a peculiar feature mentioned in all three vitae: when Simeon sets out on his own to perfect a demanding ascetic regime, his first move was not to ascend the pillar but instead to descend, to go underground. All three vitae mention some sort of inaugural descent (sometimes by angelic command), followed by a subsequent ascent. These three witnesses suggest that we should interpret Simeon's stylitism within the broader context of his entire solo ascetic career, a career that is governed by what I am calling (following Mircea Eliade) a peculiar “geometry.”Footnote 8 Modern scholars have fixated on the pillar alone and so have been blind to the way in which the pillar serves as but one, albeit culminating, movement in Simeon's ascetic career. Rather surprisingly, given his ambivalent reputation in the contemporary study of religion, Eliade's discussion of the axis mundi, or cosmic pillar, offers a helpful framework for interpreting the peculiar “geometry” of Simeon's asceticism.
Stylitism in Scholarship
Although all three of the vitae—which seem to come from independent sourcesFootnote 9—agree that Simeon's stylitism was an innovation and nowhere mention a pre-Christian analog, some recent scholarship has exercised itself with the question of stylitism's antecedents, specifically its connection to the practice of ascending pillars in the cult of Atargatis in Hierapolis, as recorded in Lucian's De Dea Syria.Footnote 10 This trend, however, is a response to a longstanding scholarly refusal of the possible influence of pagan pillar pieties on Simeon.Footnote 11 Some of this traditional reluctance may indeed stem from “theological discomfort that the origins of stylitism [lie] outside the spectrum of a monolithic Christian asceticism,”Footnote 12 but it may equally stem from the fact that the historical ligaments that connect Simeon to Hierapolis are somewhat strained.
The first to suggest the connection between Simeon's stylitism and its possible pagan antecedents was Jules Toutain in his 1912 article, “La légende chrétienne de Saint Siméon et ses origines païennes.”Footnote 13 In 1968 and again in 1970, G. R. H. Wright strengthened the case for this connection by comparing the iconography of stylites (Simeon and others) with the depiction of pillars and trees from the ancient Near East.Footnote 14 He reproduced two stelai from the region in which Simeon was active, each of which depicts a saint living atop a pillar, being served by an attendant on a ladder and receiving a crown of flame from a bird (see figs. 1 and 2). Wright takes these to be “local and contemporary” representations of Simeon, undertaken “perhaps even within [his] lifetime.”Footnote 15 To these two stelai Wright compares a third, a millennium older but from the same region. This Syro-Hittite stele from Tell Halaf shows a surprising similarity to the stelai of Simeon (see fig. 3): a ladder is set against a column or tree and a man ascends with instruments to tend the crowning foliage. The tree, Wright tells us, is the “Sacred Tree” that the attendant artificially fertilizes, a pervasive feature of religions of the ancient Near East.Footnote 16 Wright suggests not that Simeon necessarily modeled his behavior on the ancient Syro-Hittite practice but that “the composition alone of the St. Simeon stelai has served to raise the issue that those who formed the iconography of the saint were not unmindful of the God of vegetation figured in the Sacred Tree.”Footnote 17 A thousand years separates the two, and so Wright suggests two “intermediary vehicles—intermediate in time, place and religion. These vehicles are the Hierapolis Cult and Christ Crucified.”Footnote 18
In his baffling work, De Dea Syria, Lucian, the second century Syrian satirist, mentions a cult at the temple of Atargatis in Hierapolis in which phallobates or “phallus-climbers” play a prominent role. Lucian tells us that outside the temple of this cult were erected two pillars—he calls them phalloi—which were associated with a strange rite:
[28] It is within these propylaea [of the temple] that the phalli stand which Dionysus erected, themselves three hundred fathoms tall. One of these two phalli is climbed twice a year by a man who lives on top of the phallus for a span of seven days. The reason for his ascent is supposed to be this. Most people think that he converses with the gods up there and asks blessing for the whole of Syria, and they hear his prayers from near at hand….
[29] The ascent goes like this. He encompasses himself and the phallus with a small rope, and then climbs up on bits of wood nailed to the phallus at a distance of about a foot apart. As he ascends he yanks up the rope on both sides like a charioteer. If someone has never seen this, but has seen the climbing of date-palms in Arabia or in Egypt or elsewhere, then he will know what I am talking about.
When he has reached the end of his ascent, he casts off another rope which he has brought with him, this time a large one, and hauls up what he desires, wood and clothes and equipment, from which he fashions a seat like a nest and sits in it, and stays there for the number of days I mentioned. Many visitors put gold and silver, or bronze, which they use as money, into a basket that lies before the phallus, each announcing his own name. A helper who stands alongside calls it upward. On learning the name, he makes a vow on behalf of each one, and as he prays beats a bronze artifact that sounds loud and shrill when struck. He never sleeps, because if sleep were ever to seize hold of him, then a scorpion would climb up and wake him and do him mischief: such would be his punishment were he to fall asleep. Their story about the scorpion is sacred and of divine import, but whether it is true I cannot say. I should have thought that the fear of falling also contributes greatly to sleeplessness.
[30] So much for the phallobatai.Footnote 19
How far back this pillar cult stretched in history no one knows, but Wright contends that it was operative well into Simeon's day. If so, then Jacob Burkhardt's assessment in 1852 may well be right: “Could such an obscene cult be better atoned for in the Christian period than by a saintly penitent ascending the pillar to serve God after his own manner not for weeks but for decades on end?”Footnote 20 Following Burkhardt's suggestion, Wright argues that Simeon's interpreters understood his stylitism as the Christian appropriation of a pagan practice, the sanctification of a site and symbol of pagan power.Footnote 21
This brings us to our second “intermediary vehicle”: the figure of Christ Crucified. As Christ is the second Adam who undoes the effects of original sin through his death, so the Cross on which he works that salvation becomes the second Tree of Life.Footnote 22 It was an association especially common in Syriac Christianity;Footnote 23 Ephrem the Syrian sings:
The tree of life is the Cross
Which gave radiant life to our race.
On top of Golgotha Christ
Distributes life to men.Footnote 24
Wright produces three stelai in which Symeon atop his pillar is replaced with a cruciform figure (fig. 4). According to this iconography, then, stylitism is understood to be a form of imitatio Christi, more specifically imitatio crucis. For his iconographers, then, Simeon in effect mounts a pagan pillar—what would be to them a Tree of Life, a symbol of fertility—and appropriates its meanings just as he transforms them by christening them with his own cruciform practice.
Some years after Wright's pair of articles, Han J. W. Drijvers weighed in on this debate.Footnote 25 He essentially split Wright in two: contra Wright, Drijvers found no evidence of any continuity between pagan pillar pieties and Simeon's stylitism; but following Wright, he argues that not only their iconographers and hagiographer, but the stylites themselves (including Simeon) were engaged in an ascetic practice of imitatio Christi. In her 1988 article, “The Sense of a Stylite,” Susan Ashbrook Harvey took issue with the imitatio Christi interpretation, more specifically the notion that his hagiographers understood his pillar as a recapitulation of the cross: “Absent from all [three vitae of Simeon] is the image of the crucifix: the suffering death by which Christ's victory was won.”Footnote 26 If Simeon's contemporaries understood his ascent up the pillar as a cruciform imitatio Christi, Harvey asks, then why did none of the three vitae make that point?Footnote 27 At play in this debate, just behind the scenes, is the vexing question of whether our surviving sources, iconographic or literary, allow us to infer any particular motivation or understanding on the part of the historical Simeon.Footnote 28 In other words, is our interpretive enterprise limited to his iconographers and hagiographers, or are we permitted to offer inferential interpretations of Simeon himself? Both Wright and Harvey restrict the scope of their inquiry to Simeon's interpreters, while Drijvers ventures a hypothesis regarding the motivations of Simeon and other stylites themselves. I shall return to this question below.
Wright has found another critic in David Frankfurter, who exposes his attachment to “pan-fertility goddess” theories advanced by the British Myth and Ritual school.Footnote 29 These wide-ranging theories of “archetypal patterns” and “migration of symbols” have come under attack in recent years.Footnote 30 The most important error in Wright's argument, Frankfurter says, is his tendency to generalize about Near Eastern piety, especially as he moves from classical Mesopotamia to sixth-century Hellenized Syria with ease. Nor is Frankfurter convinced that the cruciform iconography of Simeon atop his pillar reveals anything more than the “theological reassessment” of a handful of sculptors.Footnote 31 Frankfurter, even more so than Toutain, seems keen to peel away the interpretive layers laid on Simeon by his iconographers and hagiographers (whose perspective is compromised by their theological lenses) and to get at the stylite himself.
Frankfurter aims to rethink the parameters of the debate by first rereading Lucian's De Dea Syria. He argues that Lucian has conflated two religious practices, namely the phallobates and the temple cult of Atargatis. The fact that Lucian admits that the pillars are outside the temple precinct should alert us, Frankfurter says, that there were two different religious practices in Hierapolis and that Lucian is very likely assimilating a local but diffuse pillar religion to the Hellenized cult center devoted to Atargatis. After all, Lucian does call the pillars phalloi and says that Dionysus erected them in his own honor.Footnote 32 Frankfurter interprets Lucian's choice of the word phallos and the attribution to Dionysus as ironic instances of his “interpretatio Graeca,” that is, Lucian's persistent prejudice against local understandings of religious practice. Thus,
the word phallos—so shocking to subsequent scholars—the suggestion of the pillar's sexual connotations, and even the pillars— association with Hierapolis all derive from Lucian's particular way of describing Hierapolis, and his quintessentially Hellenistic proclivity towards mixing and matching religious practice under Greek rubrics, whether or not indigenous explanations exist.Footnote 33
According to Frankfurter, then, we must pry away Lucian's Hellenistic lens in order to see the phallobates as an expression of “a more basic ‘pillar symbolism— [that] occupied the religious consciousness of second century Syrians in the neighborhood of Hierapolis.”Footnote 34 Furthermore, drawing on a wealth of scholarship on the Christianization of late antique Syria, Frankfurter argues that such local, de-centered practices and pieties persisted well into the fifth and sixth centuries and indeed co-existed and even cross-pollinated with Syrian Christianity during those centuries. One of the problems that such local, de-centered practices pose for the historian is that they tend to leave far fewer remains than the temples and other cult centers. In order to reconstruct these practices and the mentalité they presume, the historian (Frankfurter avers) must cast the net more widely.
Accordingly, Frankfurter cites two iconographic forms native to late antique Syria as evidence for this “more basic” pillar symbolism. The first is the Arabian baetyl cult, wherein small conical stones are set in high places regarded as sacred. Although these small monuments do not amount to pillars on the scale of Simeon's, they do witness to the fact that “throughout Greco-Roman Syria and Arabia … there was a continuous religious tradition of erecting monoliths as symbols of political stability and connection with sacred power.”Footnote 35 The second is the so-called “crescent standard,” a pole (or later, a pillar) on which is perched an inverted crescent or pair of horns. Originally, this ancient symbol (attested as early as the second millennium B.C.E.) stood in for a divinity that would or could not be rendered anthropomorphically.Footnote 36 And although the symbol seems to have a Mesopotamian provenance, versions appear in Syria well into the Common Era, including at another temple of Atargatis in Dura Europos.Footnote 37
Besides these iconographic forms, Frankfurter also highlights the facts that stylitism took root and spread quickly in the region and that devotion soon centered as much, if not more, on the pillar as on the person of the stylite. All this would seem to suggest that the pillar was a well-established sacred symbol and that Simeon was no innovator.Footnote 38 Here is where Frankfurter meets the greatest challenge to his argument, for neither Theodoret nor the author of the Syriac vita mentions any such continuity, and indeed they explicitly frame Simeon's pillar as a divinely ordained innovation in devotional practice. Surprisingly, Frankfurter does not argue that the two hagiographers are suppressing the continuity but that they have missed it entirely. On Frankfurter's construal, the hagiographers would only be interested in whether and how the saint faced down the Greco-Roman gods, whose cults (like that of Atargatis at Hierapolis) loomed large on their horizon. Because they (correctly) perceived no continuity between the Hellenized cult centers and Simeon, Frankfurter argues, his stylitism could genuinely appear to them as a novelty.Footnote 39 In other words, the hagiographers, like Lucian, were so blinded by these Hellenized cult centers that they did not note the way in which Simeon's pillar participated in the wider, local, and de-centered religious landscape of late antique Syria. This is an intriguing hypothesis, but one that is hard to falsify because it posits a blind spot in the hagiographers, a failure to perceive what was, if Frankfurter is correct, all around them. Could both hagiographers have simply and independently missed what is to Frankfurter so clear in retrospect?
What are we to make of this debate regarding stylitism's antecedents? Harvey and especially Frankfurter bring cogent criticisms to bear on Wright's often loosely associative arguments. What I find most promising, however, is where Wright and Frankfurter overlap. Both suggest that Simeon's pillar was not a sacred symbol created ex nihilo but grew out of and therefore appealed to local traditions. Wright wants to weave Simeon into a grand narrative wending from ancient Mesopotamia, through Christ on the cross, to fifth-century Syria. Frankfurter also wants to weave Simeon into a narrative, albeit less grand: a far-reaching pillar piety—local but also widespread because de-centered. They agree, however, that the pillar was a sacred symbol around which revolved a whole constellation of meanings and associations, including for Simeon's contemporaries fertility, accumulated spiritual power and presence, and communication with the divine.
Digging and Building, Descending and Ascending: Simeon's Pillar in the Context of His Solo Ascetic Career
Theodoret of Cyrrhus
In chapter 26 of his Historia Religiosa, Theodoret of Cyrrhus speaks as an eyewitness of the life of Simeon. We learn from the bishop that Simeon was converted to the ascetic life—what he calls philoponia and philosophia—much as Antony was, by hearing the Gospel read in church. He asks a nameless bystander how someone might gain what the beatitudes offer, and he is told to pursue “the solitary (monadikos) life.”Footnote 40 The earnest young shepherd then flees to a local martyrion in order to pray.Footnote 41 His prayer gives way to sleep and a strange dream:
‘I seemed to be digging [ὀρύττειν] a foundation [θεμέλια],— he said, ‘and then I heard someone standing there tell me that I had to deepen the ditch [βαθύνειν τὸ ὄρυγμα]. I deepened it as he ordered and then attempted to rest awhile, but he again commanded me to do this a third and a fourth time, he finally said that it was deep enough, and ordered me to build [οἰκοδομεῖν] from now on without trouble as if the toil was over and the building would be no trouble.—Footnote 42
It will be some time before Simeon sets out on his own (after years of trying the coenobitic life) to pursue an ascetic career for which he will become (in)famous. But this dream serves as an omen of what is to come: Simeon will indeed build, not only a pillar but also two other spaces for himself. Beyond the predictive quality of the dream, however, we should note the commands to go down, to descend, to dig, and then to go up, to ascend, to build. These are the vectors that will govern the “geometry” of Simeon's subsequent asceticism.
Simeon's dream also recalls Jesus— simile from Luke 6:47–48 (RSV):
Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building [οἰκοδομοῦντι] a house, who dug deep [ἔσκαψεν καὶ ἐβάθυνεν], and laid the foundation upon rock [ἔθηκεν θεμέλιον ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν]; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built [διὰ τὸ καλῶϛ οἰκοδομῆσθαι].
Theodoret's choice of words echoes Luke's: digging deep (βαθύνειν), building (οἰκοδομεῖν), and laying a foundation (θεμέλιοϛ). This raises the question of whether, at least for Theodoret, both Simeon's digging and building are a form of imitatio Christi. We will return to this question in more detail below.
What follows on this dream, in Theodoret's telling, is a dozen years of ascetic practice in the company of others—first two years in unknown circumstances “with some nearby ascetics” and then ten years in a monastery or “school of philosophy” in the village of Teleda under the guidance of a certain Heliodorus. Simeon soon runs afoul of the community for his excessive deprivations and extravagant mortifications, chief of which is his wrapping tightly around his trunk a rough palm leaf rope that cuts into his skin such that he leaves a trail of blood. This and other spectacular breaches of discipline force the superiors to send Simeon away.
What is most interesting is that Simeon, as soon as he is free from the community and its discipline, straightaway does something reminiscent of his dream from years before—he descends: “So he left and came to the more uninhabited parts of the mountain. There he found a cistern, waterless [λάκκον τινὰ …ἄνυδρον] and not too deep, and he lowered himself down into it and sang hymns to God.”Footnote 43 But his descent is not to last. After just five days, the superiors of the monastery repent of their decision and go looking for the young athlete. Shepherds lead them to the cistern, where with great difficulty the monks retrieve Simeon.Footnote 44 Not satisfied to return to the community, Simeon goes to the village of Telanissos at the foot of the mountain on which he will eventually mount his pillar. There at the foot of the mountain, he takes up the philosophical life on the surface, rather than in the depths, of the earth: “He found there a small hut and spent three years confined in it.”Footnote 45 He then leaves the hut and ascends the mountain at whose summit he
ordered a circular wall to be made and had a chain of twenty cubits long made out of iron. He fastened one end of it to a huge rock and attached the other to his right foot, so that even if he wanted to he could not leave the confines. He remained inside, keeping heaven always before his eye and forcing himself to contemplate what lies beyond the heavens, for the iron fetter could not hinder the flight of the mind.Footnote 46
Into this open-air theatre of philosophy—quite literally “in the round”—wanders the chàrepiskopos Meletius, who, seemingly not at all impressed, remarks to the aspiring holy man that the iron fetter is superfluous “since right reason sufficed to place rational fetters on the body.”Footnote 47 Simeon relents and has a smith break his shackles, but his acceptance of Meletius's challenge reveals that he has already and all along been conquering his body with his mind. The leather hide that lay between his ankle and the iron fetter is removed to reveal no less than twenty large bugs. Simeon has permitted them to remain (he could easily have crushed them with his hand) and bite him incessantly in order to train his body to yield to his mind. And so Meletius, while correct, is exhorting Simeon to a practice in which he is already accomplished.
His reputation grows, though at what point in his ascetic career he begins to attract followers is not entirely clear. What is clear, at least according to Theodoret, is that these cloying crowds are what at first drive Simeon up a pillar: “He found [this excess of honor] annoying and tedious and therefore devised the standing on a column.”Footnote 48 Theodoret frames the pillar as a practical measure: just as Jesus retired to a boat to escape the crowds, so Simeon ascended a pillar. One wonders as to the efficacy of this escape, however, since his first pillar is said to have been only six cubits high.Footnote 49 As the pillar increases in height—eventually reaching a height of thirty-six cubits—what began as a practical measure to escape the crowds of admirers becomes a means for Simeon “to soar to heaven and leave this earthly sojourn.”Footnote 50 Just as quickly as Theodoret frames the pillar as a practical measure, however, he insists that the pillar must also be a “divine dispensation.”Footnote 51 There were evidently some “fault-finders” who were not favorably disposed towards Simeon's pillar practice.Footnote 52 Theodoret reminds these critics how often God has singled out his prophets for extraordinary public devotions. God has enjoined upon Simeon “this extraordinary novelty to draw everyone by its strangeness to the spectacle and make the proffered counsel persuasive to those who come.”Footnote 53 Theodoret, therefore, seems to waffle between explanations: Was it a practical measure or a special dispensation from above? Either way, the practice is, according to Theodoret, clearly an innovation, one of those “new and manifold modes” of devotion that God introduces to win back our flagging attention.Footnote 54
Antonius
In his vita of Simeon, Antonius offers an account largely compatible with Theodoret's. Here, the young monk Simeon is also said to have tightly wrapped his torso in a rope hidden under his cloak. After a year in such a state, his rotten flesh gives off such a stench that his fellow monks cannot stand to be near him or his worm-infested bed. His secret discipline is discovered, and after fifty days of convalescence at the monastery, he is encouraged to leave. He does so and flees to “a well [ϕρέαρ] near the monastery which contained no water, but many unclean, evil spirits lived [in] it: not only unclean spirits, but also unimaginable numbers of asps, vipers, serpents and scorpions so that everybody was afraid to pass by that place.”Footnote 55 Although Antonius does not mention any dream of digging and building, as Theodoret does, his Simeon does inaugurate his solo ascetic career with a similar descent, here into a well rather than a cistern. Whatever exactly he was doing at the bottom of the well (“making the sign of the cross” amidst “the hordes of wild beasts”Footnote 56), it is cut short after just a week, when a fearful dream convinces the abbot to find Simeon and return him to the monastery. When the monks find him at last in the bottom of the well, Simeon complains and beseeches them: “[B]rothers and servants of God, grant me a little time to die. That I cannot fulfill what I set out to do is too much for me.”Footnote 57
Simeon only agrees to return to the monastery when the abbot acknowledges him as his teacher.Footnote 58 But after three years of continual weeping, Simeon once again unexpectedly leaves the monastery to flee to a “sparsely inhabited place” near the village of Talanis (presumably another rendering of Theodoret's Telanissos). Reminiscent of the angel's command that he build, as mentioned by Theodoret, Simeon first builds for himself an open-air enclosure from unmortared stones.Footnote 59 He stands in the middle of this circle (there is no mention here of a tether or shackle) for four years, “through snow, rain and burning sun, and many came to him.”Footnote 60 Only now does he build and mount his famous pillar at first only four cubits high. Once “his fame [starts to] spread everywhere,” crowds begin to arrive and they build two open-air enclosures around his pillar, much like the open-air enclosure in which he had spent the previous four years.Footnote 61 After seven years, the crowds build him another pillar (or add to the existing pillar), this one thirty cubits high, on which he stands for fifteen years. Finally, the crowds extend this pillar to forty cubits, whereupon Simeon's “fame … spread throughout the whole world.”Footnote 62 Antonius tells us that, all in all, Simeon “stood on different pillars for forty-seven years.”Footnote 63
Unlike Theodoret, who waffles between explanations of Simeon's pillar, Antonius offers no explicit apologia. He does, however, offer an implicit explanation by way of juxtaposition. After narrating how Simeon first mounts his own pillar, followed by the taller pillar built by the crowds, Antonius immediately remarks, “Holy Simeon imitated his teacher, Christ.”Footnote 64 This raises the question of whether Antonius understands Simeon's ascent of a pillar to be a kind of imitatio Christ. For Antonius, what explicitly links Simeon to Christ is the fact that he “perform[s] many healings”: “Calling on [Christ], [Simeon] made the lame walk, cleansed lepers, made the dumb speak, made paralytics move about with ease, healed the chronically ill.”Footnote 65 But for Antonius at least, the two are inextricably linked: Simeon only begins healing people when he is atop his pillar. In this case, the healings and the pillar would both seem to be part of an imitatio Christi.
When the monks pull Simeon from the well against his will, he pleads with them, “[G]rant me a little time to die. That I cannot fulfill what I set out to do is too much for me.”Footnote 66 This would seem to suggest that, according to Antonius, if there were a consistent motivation for Simeon's solo asceticism, it is his desire to mortify himself, to die—but to die to what precisely is unclear. And if we take the pillar as the culmination of his ascetic career, as the fulfillment of his interrupted desire to die, then one episode from his final ascetic stage (that is, atop a forty cubit pillar) comes to have peculiar significance for appreciating his imitatio Christi. Just as he is established on his new pillar, Simeon becomes victim to the devil, who smites him on his thigh, resulting in a wound that becomes putrid, forcing him to stand on one foot for two years. This putrid wound produces “huge numbers of worms” that fall to the ground, such that “those near him had no other job but to collect them and take them back from where they had fallen.”Footnote 67 Simeon tells his followers, echoing eucharistic language, “Eat from what the Lord has given to you.”Footnote 68 The worms from Simeon's putrid wound have become the eucharistic elements, the body and blood of Christ. This living death atop a pillar transforms Simeon into Christ himself, whose body is given to his followers to eat. It would seem that for Antonius Simeon's stylitism is indeed a kind of imitatio Christi or perhaps even a kind of imitatio crucis.
Finally, this imitatio crucis finds some corroboration in Antonius's description of Simeon's death atop his pillar:
Such a crowd was gathering that the mountain could not be seen because of their numbers and the smoke from their incense, the wax tapers, and the innumerable burning lamps. The sound of the weeping men, women, and children could be heard at a great distance, and the whole mountain was shaking from the screeching of the birds which gathered and circled round the enclosure of the saint.Footnote 69
Specifically, the mountain shaking is reminiscent of the description in Matt 27:51 of how when Jesus “yielded up his spirit” on the cross, “the earth shook, and the rocks were split.” Nor is Antonius alone in making the connection between the death of Simeon and the death of Jesus. In his homily on Simeon, Jacob of Serug writes that when the saint died, “the rocks in the walls wept with [his disciples] and the mountains quaked…. Creation stood still and groaned in pain.”Footnote 70
The Syriac vita
The Syriac vita portrays Simeon as a rustic shepherd, unread in scriptures and unlearned in religion. After his conversion in church, he receives a vision while tending to his sheep: “He saw a man come and stand above him—he looked like lightning, his outer garments were like the sun and his face like rays of fire.”Footnote 71 This man of light leads Simeon up a mountain, where he issues the imperative, “Take and build.”Footnote 72 Simeon pleads ignorance, and so the man shows Simeon how to build a sanctuary in which to worship God—a covered sanctuary of stone, open to the west. This vision is reminiscent of the dream Theodoret mentions, except that in that dream an angel commands the saint to dig before he builds.
In the Syriac vita, Simeon's digging comes later, when he has already joined the monastery. We are told that “[Simeon] dug himself a spot in a corner of the garden up to his chest. All summer he stood in it in the hot and sultry weather and it was like a fire.”Footnote 73 On another occasion, after some of his fellow monks were stirred to jealousy by the devil, Simeon “went off and dug in the corner where the wood was placed and confined himself—the brethren thought that he had really left. But after thirty days one of those appointed weekly went to bring the wood and he dug and brought up the warrior: he found him shut up and standing in the corner.”Footnote 74 Satan also attacks Simeon directly in the form of “thick haze which suddenly struck his eyes and took way his vision.”Footnote 75 Simeon asks his brothers, “Take me down to the sepulcher”; after thirty days underground a flash of lightning lights up the sepulcher where he is staying and restores his vision.Footnote 76 In these instances, Simeon is beginning to experiment with a solo asceticism centered on digging and descending.
These experiments form the backdrop to his final descent. Though according to Theodoret Simeon leaves the monastery and lowers himself into a dry cistern, and according to Antonius it is an empty well, the Syriac vita tells of how Simeon sought out a “cave, very dark and foreboding” in which to spend Lent.Footnote 77 But after Lent, when Simeon does not return, the abbot suspects that his young charge is living in the nearby cave and so sends his monks to retrieve him. The Syriac vita also gives us the fullest account of what Simeon was doing underground. As in Antonius's account, the cave is filled with “serpents and vipers” but also with “leopards and wolves.”Footnote 78 Yet this cave is no accidental menagerie. It is Satan himself who commands these beasts and with whom Simeon must contend:
But the saint did not worry about [Satan and the beasts], but was completely occupied with heaven—he would make the sign of the cross on his breast and on his forehead and send them scampering for their lives. Suddenly [Satan] disappeared and [the beasts] vanished like smoke before the wind and much light shone inside the cave.Footnote 79
Just as in the episode in the sepulcher, this final descent into the cave provides an opportunity for the divine light to vanquish the devil or Satan. Given this litany of diggings and descents, it is perhaps significant that the abbot (under pressure from the jealous monks) dismisses Simeon with these words: “Arise, go wherever the Lord is preparing for you.”Footnote 80 In fact, this dismissal marks the end of the subterranean stage of Simeon's asceticism and inaugurates a brief terrestrial interregnum.
Simeon moves on to the village of Telneshe and the nearby monastery of Maris bar Barathon. The monks build for Simeon “an enclosure on the mountain,” which, in an effort to intensify his ascetic practice, he later tears down so as to stand openly day and night for all to see.Footnote 81 Later, he decides to shut himself up for three years although his friends convince him to reduce his confinement to just a year and a half. He chains himself in place, just as Theodoret describes, although in the Syriac vita he seems to have a roof over his head during this protracted imprisonment. After this terrestrial interregnum Simeon mounts his pillar, at first little more than a “stone” two cubits high. As in other versions, this stone becomes an increasingly tall pillar: eleven, seventeen, twenty-two, and finally forty cubits.
Recall that Theodoret seems to waffle between explanations for the pillar: Was it a practical measure to escape the crowds or an extraordinary dispensation from above? There is no such vacillation in the Syriac vita, whose apologia begins with these questions: “What made it necessary or required that he mount on a pillar? Could he not please our Lord on the ground or at most in that corner?”Footnote 82 Indeed he could have, the anonymous hagiographer answers, but God ordains for his elect on earth modes and manners of preaching fitting to each age and place. In the fifth century, it seems, God “saw his creation as if asleep” and so sent Simeon, who “by his affliction” would awaken the world from its heavy torpor.Footnote 83 This is confirmed by a vision in which Simeon is visited by an angel who for three days stood atop a stone three cubits high on which Simeon used to burn incense.Footnote 84 The angel performs his prayers standing and kneeling, and with a stern look convinces Simeon that he should follow suit. Simeon is “happy and content so to stand” for three months, until he has a proper column made for himself.Footnote 85 Later, when Simeon is planning to increase the height of his pillar, he again is visited by an angel, who instructs him to make his new pillar forty cubits high and in three sections “for the sake of the Trinity.”Footnote 86 Like Theodoret, the author of the Syriac vita presents stylitism as a divinely-ordained innovation in devotional practice.
A vision earlier in the narrative may help us connect the furious digging and descending Simeon does early in his solo ascetic career with his later ascent of the pillar. Before he confines himself in his enclosure, Simeon receives a vision that his friend Mar Shemshi will die while he is sequestered away for Lent. The vision deserves to be quoted in full:
For [Simeon] had this vision: there was a tree bearing many fruits, it was beautiful to look at and its top-branches were adorned and loaded with fruit. Its leaves delighted the eye. Now there was a branch sprouting up from it. Along came a splendid-looking man leading four men carrying axes in their hands. He said to them, ‘Cut that branch off that tree, for it is getting big and preventing a lot of fruit.— Now there was another man standing beside him and he also was beautifully dressed and good to look at. He said to the first man, ‘Let us make it another companion.— But he answered and said to him, ‘It does not need a companion. It alone is sufficient both for insiders and outsiders.— When the branch had been cut off from the tree, the man ordered the four men saying, ‘Now dig down deep and put the root of the tree on a rock. Then fill in the sides, and shore it up strongly so that it will not be shaken. For it will bear much fruit, and strong winds and tempests and powerful storms will beat on it.— Once they had gone deep and set and shored its root, at that moment it put forth new buds and luxurious growth. Its vines grew strong on all sides, and it bore a hundred times more than before. From under the root of that tree a strong, heavy flow of water spouted forth: it covered the mountains and the hills and gushed forth and spread out on all sides. Suddenly much animal life appeared and innumerable birds of all species and types both large and small. They were arriving and coming from all quarters, eating from the fruit of that tree and drinking from the spring. As many as ate and drank from it, so much more the fruits of the tree increased in bounds and the spring was strong and vigorous. Now the tree was the saint, the branch cut off his brother Mar Shemshi who died as he had said during that Lent.Footnote 87
Here it is the beautiful man and his companions (angels, presumably) who dig to the root of the tree—which here is the saint himself—and establish it upon a firm rock foundation. In the earlier episodes from the Syriac vita, however, it is the saint who digs and descends.
The Syriac vita charts a progression of Simeon's asceticism, as do Theodoret and Antonius, from one centered on digging and descending to one centered on building and ascending. This vision suggests that the progression is not accidental. The descent and the ascent should be understood together, complementary just as a tree requires roots firmly grounded if it is to weather storms. Coded in this vision is an interpretation of what Simeon is up to (or down to, as it were) when he digs: he is preparing himself for the adversaries he will face when he is on his precarious pillar.
Curiously, this vision figures the saint as a fertile tree or, more precisely, as a tree that comes into full bloom once it is pruned and it roots are firmly grounded, a tree that bears enough fruit and gushes enough water to sustain the entire surrounding flora and fauna. This would seem to strengthen Wright's hand when he argues that Simeon's interpreters viewed his pillar as the true Tree of Life—a commonplace symbol, so he asserts, in Near Eastern pieties. The Syriac vita makes this point explicitly. And the sixth-century historian Evagrius Scholasticus, who visited the cult of Simeon that had grown up around his empty pillar, remarks how the locals would circumambulate his pillar with their livestock as if it were a sort of Tree of Life freely bestowing fertility.Footnote 88
Mircea Eliade and the Axis Mundi
Scholarship on Simeon's stylitism has preferred to consider his pillar in isolation from the earlier ascetic career he undertakes upon leaving the monastery perhaps because the pillar is perceived as the real innovation in his asceticism and as such begs explanation. But all three vitae agree that the pillar is simply the final movement in a series of peculiar ascetic practices, progressing from digging and descending to building and ascending. In all three vitae Simeon's descent into a subterranean space (cistern/well/cave, among others) prepares the way for his ascent to a super-terranean space (a pillar of ever-increasing height). Between his devotions below and above ground, Simeon spends years on the human plane: in a small hut on a mountain;Footnote 89 in an open-air ring of stones, chained in place so that he has only the area of his circle in which to move;Footnote 90 and others. By digging holes and building pillars over the course of his solo ascetic career, Simeon in effect runs a continuous shaft from below the earth to the surface of the earth to the sky. In short, he establishes an axis mundi.
Simeon's stylitism would then seem to correspond with the account of sacred space and the axis mundi forwarded in the mid-twentieth century by the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Given the obvious connection between the phenomenon of stylitism and the centrality of the pillar in Eliade's analyses of symbolic space, it is surprising that scholars have not engaged him more directly on this point. Eliade, however, does seem to lurk in the margins of scholarship on Simeon. In his introduction to the vitae of Simeon, Doran argues that the stylite should be understood within the tradition of the so-called “stationary” saints, those whose peculiar devotional practice is to stand motionless.Footnote 91 This is, Doran notes, a “common shamanistic experience” and so directs the reader to Eliade's work on shamanism.Footnote 92 Doran does not develop this connection with Simeon although Eliade speaks at length in that book about shamans— initiatory dreams and their practice of ascending pillars.
When he is discussing the baetyl cult, Frankfurter suggests that one way of inferring the “function and significance” of these conical stones is to read them as axes mundi. This nod to Eliade is repeated in a pair of footnotes later in his article. In the first, Frankfurter attempts to tease out the meaning of a contemporary South Arabian practice where boys repeatedly ascend and descend a pair of poles in order to ensure that many boys will be born the following year; he likens this practice to the “rope tricks” performed in Arabian markets and cites a famous essay by Eliade on precisely that phenomenon.Footnote 93 Finally, when Frankfurter is finishing his case for a more “basic ‘pillar symbolism,—” of which both the phallobates and Simeon are expressions, he directs the reader to Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane “for a very cogent analysis of the pillar as axis mundi—that is, as vertical mediator of worlds and sustainer of cosmic stability.”Footnote 94
In what follows, I will move Eliade from the margins to the center of our interpretation and propose that his account of the axis mundi aids in our understanding not only of Simeon's pillar but also of his entire ascetic career. My appeal to Eliade to help explain Simeon's stylitism is not meant as a defense of his overall morphological project or to argue that his theories have purchase beyond the scope of this phenomenon.Footnote 95 Those are questions that outstrip the resources of this article and this author. I wish only to suggest that Eliade provides us a helpful lens through which to view stylitism because it allows us to organize seemingly disparate details in Simeon's life and ascetic practice and corresponds with the hagiographers— own descriptions of the phenomena.Footnote 96 In addition to his description of the axis mundi, I borrow Eliade's term geometry Footnote 97 to name what I have shown to be a consistent theme in all three vitae, namely the way in which Simeon's ascending his pillar is one among several vectors that govern his ascetic career.
For Eliade's understanding of the symbols and sacred space, we would do well to follow Frankfurter's advice and look to his popular book, The Sacred and the Profane. There, Eliade is concerned with how space is differentiated, how a “hierophany” erupts in the midst of undifferentiated space and thereby establishes a node or center of the sacred.Footnote 98 Space becomes organized according to its proximity to the sacred, and consequently humans are oriented within that differentiated space. We thus orient ourselves in a world colored in shades of the sacred and the profane.
According to Eliade, one of the paramount human symbols of the eruption of the sacred into the profane, or the establishment of a differentiated world of space, is the pillar or axis mundi. Here is his neat articulation of the fourfold structure of a hierophany:
(a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld); (c) communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi: pillar (cf. universalis columna), ladder (cf. Jacob's ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc.; (d) around this cosmic axis lies the world (=our world), hence the axis is located “in the middle,” at the navel of the earth”; it is the Center of the World.Footnote 99
Points (a) and (c) quite obviously apply to Simeon: he mounts a literal pillar which marks a break in the homogenous space of his rural Syrian landscape. Let us begin by looking more closely at (b) and (d) to see how they correspond to Simeon atop his pillar.
In terms of point (b), Simeon's mounting a pillar does allow passage and communication between worlds. He has regular contact with Satan and angels, and people bring him their prayers on the understanding that he has the ear of the divine. Of course, this privileged communication does not arise simply because he lives his life forty cubits closer to heaven; rather, his holes and his pillar are the meeting-place among three worlds: the underworld of evil spirits, the surface world of humans, and the heavenly world of angels. Simeon's descent into the cistern/well/cave, where Satan and “unclean and evil spirits” live, can be understood as his inaugural communication with the underworld. His subsequent devotions put him on the plane of his fellow humans. In his hut and his open pen and by means of his ascetic displays, he establishes himself as a local spiritual authority. As pilgrims begin to flock to him, he mounts his pillar, thereby completing the three movements and opening a line of communication from the underworld to the heavenly world.
This relates to point (d). Two of the three vitae acknowledge that Simeon's pillar, although located in rural Syria, seems to constitute the center of the world. Here is Theodoret's version:
As his reputation spread everywhere, all hurried to him—not just those in the neighborhood, but also those who lived many days— journey distant…. As they all come from every quarter, each road is like a river: one can see all collected in that spot a human sea into which rivers from all sides debouche. For it is not only inhabitants of our part of the world who pour in, but also Ishmaelites, Persians and the Armenians subject to them, the Iberians, the Homerites, and those who live even further in the interior than these. Many came from the extreme west: Spaniards, Britons, and the Gauls who dwell between them.Footnote 100
Simeon becomes for Theodoret the sea into which all rivers empty, the point to which all roads lead. According to the Syriac vita, the young Simeon—still a shepherd—is visited by a man who “looked like lightning” and who promises the awestruck boy: “If you succeed and prosper, your name shall be great and be magnified among the nations from one end of the earth to the other, and kings and judges with everyone else under their authority will obey your word and ordinance.”Footnote 101 The omen proves right, for indeed the elder Simeon, according to Theodoret, is consulted by both the Roman emperor and the Persian king.Footnote 102 For hundreds of years the Eastern Mediterranean was caught between the ebb and flow of Rome and Persia. Their dominion defined the region: they were the Scylla and Charybdis, particularly for such unfortunate buffer states as Syria.Footnote 103 There is no greater witness to the fact that Simeon had come to occupy a place at the center of the world in the minds of his contemporaries than that the rulers of these empires, among many other local kings, sought his counsel.
Furthermore, sacred space can admit more than one center.Footnote 104 Simeon's pillar does not displace Jerusalem or Rome (or Seleucia-Ctesiphon); rather, his pillar takes it place among a constellation of centers. Reading Theodoret's Historia Religiosa, we imagine that the Syrian landscape was a small galaxy of such centers.Footnote 105 A hierophany can appear in the form of a human just as easily as it can in the form of an object or monument. Eliade makes this point explicitly in Shamanism where he speaks of “those who, as it were, incarnate the sacred, because they live it abundantly, or rather “are lived” by the religious “form” that has chosen them (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.).”Footnote 106 Following Eliade in Shamanism, we might understand saints as hierophanies that organize undifferentiated space. Consequently, centers can move although Simeon never does.Footnote 107
The site of the irruption of the sacred—be it an object or a human—must endure a split existence: “By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.”Footnote 108 The split existence of a hierophany reveals an interesting dimension to the anxieties Simeon's contemporaries express concerning exactly who or even what he was. Simeon's contemporaries and even his hagiographers struggle to give an adequate description of him. Theodoret fears that his account may seem to some to be nothing more than a fictional tale, “for what took place surpasses human nature” and “what lies outside the limits of what is natural … is considered a lie by those uninitiated in divine things.”Footnote 109 But even those initiated into divine things find Simeon a stumbling block, as Theodoret tells us of a deacon who is so impressed with the fact that Simeon neither eats nor sleeps that he demands of the saint, “Tell me, in the name of that truth which has converted the human race to itself, are you human or an incorporeal nature?”Footnote 110 Likewise at the monastery that suffered young Simeon's stay, where (according to Antonius) the exasperated abbot reaches his wits— end over Simeon's refusal to temper his asceticism: “Are you some kind of spirit? Go somewhere else and die away from us. Wretch that I am, am I to be tempted by you? For if you are really a man from real parents, surely you would have told us who your father and your mother and kinsfolk are and from whence you came?”Footnote 111 Although his hagiographers are always quick to reject the suggestion that Simeon is anything other than fully human, these remarks bear witness that some of his contemporaries questioned whether Simeon was quite entirely in or of this world. If he and his pillar constitute a hierophany, then the answer to the deacon and the abbot's question, “Which are you?” must be “Neither and yet both.”
Crucially, Eliade also insists that any hierophany, insofar as it “organize[s] a space … repeat[s] the paradigmatic work of the gods.”Footnote 112 From this perspective, if Simeon establishes an axis mundi, a hierophany that organizes the space of rural Syria, then he is repeating the paradigmatic work of the Christian God. This means that Simeon is recapitulating such paradigmatic events as creation, fall, and redemption. The pillar would then become aligned with the Tree of Life and the Cross, while Simeon himself would become aligned with Adam and the second Adam, Christ.
This returns us, in conclusion, to a question much debated in scholarship on Simeon: the issue of imitatio Christi in his life, which must be addressed on two levels, that of Simeon's interpreters (iconographers and hagiographers) and that of the saint himself. By situating the pillar in the wider context of Simeon's entire solo ascetic career, we have seen how his pillar completes an ascetic program begun in holes, a final ascent that mirrors prior descents. Just as all three of the vitae bear witness to this fact, so too does each provide an interpretation of Simeon's asceticism as a form of imitatio Christi. Theodoret mentions a dream wherein Simeon is commanded to dig a deep foundation on which to build, a dream that recalls Luke 6:47–48. While a truncated version of the same imperative is mentioned in the Syriac vita—“take and build”—a different vision serves as an interesting pair with the dream from the Historia Religiosa. In the vision from the Syriac vita, Simeon appears as the Tree of Life, and attending angels establish the roots of his tree on a rock foundation so that it can weather subsequent storms. Earlier in that same vita, when Simeon enters the cave and defeats Satan, he seems to be securing a firm foundation for his future. It is, of course, not a final defeat of Satan, who continues to harass him atop his pillar but a defeat that will allow the saint to stand firm in his resolve, even if at times (according to Antonius) only on one foot. Antonius provides the clearest endorsement of Simeon's imitatio Christi when he remarks that the “Holy Simeon imitated his teacher, Christ.”Footnote 113 He adds a most striking dimension to this interpretation when he figures Simeon and the worms falling from his putrid wounds as Christ and his eucharistic body. Finally, Antonius describes Simeon's death atop his pillar in a manner that recalls Jesus— death on the cross. We can safely conclude that each of the three vitae figure Simeon's asceticism as a form of imitatio Christi, and even perhaps in the case of Antonius, as a form of imitatio crucis.
Such a conclusion, however, is restricted to the level of Simeon's interpreters and so relatively safe. But what of Simeon himself: Did he understand himself as pursuing a kind of imitatio Christi? We can never be certain because we have no sources in which Simeon speaks for himself. What we have instead are his three vitae, as well as some iconography and homilies devoted to his memory. The three vitae are thought to be independent of one another and thus represent three complementary, but not dependent, traditions regarding Simeon. Are we warranted in taking these three vitae as a sort of triangulating witness, whose consensus on the broad brushstrokes of Simeon's imitatio Christi could be explained by the fact they each capture something of Simeon's own motivations and understanding? Another way to put the matter is to wonder whether, if all three of his hagiographers independently interpreted Simeon's asceticism as a form of imitatio Christi, it is such a stretch to imagine that Simeon would have too. Although I am inclined to think that the hagiographers are following, and no doubt developing, Simeon's own interpretatio sui and that Simeon himself understood his peculiar asceticism as recapitulating the work of Christ (in Eliade's terms, “repeating the paradigmatic work of the gods”), I cannot be certain. And so Simeon, who despite the fact that he lived his life standing atop a pillar, again resists our efforts to fix him in place.
