Symeon the Stylite

Symeon was a Syrian shepherd boy who entered the monastery of Heliodorus at the age of sixteen, around 406. Even by the rigorous standards of Syrian monasticism, his ascetic discipline alarmed his brothers — at one point he was found to have wrapped a rope made of palm fibers so tightly around his waist that it had cut into his flesh. He was sent away as too extreme. He moved to a remote stylobate at Telanissos in the Syrian hills, took up the life of a pillar-saint around 423, and remained on a pillar for the next thirty-seven years.

The pillars were not modest. According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who interviewed Symeon personally and wrote the earliest and most reliable account, Symeon began on a four-cubit pillar (about six feet), then progressed over the years to a twelve-cubit pillar, then a twenty-two-cubit, and finally a thirty-six-cubit pillar — approximately fifty feet high, with a railed platform on top about six feet across. The pillar was not a feat of personal endurance for its own sake. Symeon's stated reason was the protection of solitude: the constant streams of visitors who came to see him made any ordinary cell impossible. The pillar made him visible to all but accessible to none.

Pilgrims came from across the Christian world. Theodoret records visitors from the Roman empire, Persia, Armenia, the Arab tribes, the Indians, and the Ethiopians. Symeon preached daily from his pillar to crowds gathered below. He arbitrated tribal disputes (his preaching is credited with the conversion of several Arab tribes), refused to mediate in private quarrels he considered petty, and corresponded with the emperors Theodosius II and Marcian on theological matters. He was a participant by letter in the Council of Chalcedon in 451, supporting its Christological definition.

Symeon died on his pillar on July 24, 459. The pillar's base became a place of pilgrimage immediately. The emperor Zeno built a massive cruciform church (Qalaat Semaan) around the base of the pillar in the late 5th century — once the largest church in the Christian world, its ruins still stand in northern Syria. Symeon's witness inspired a stylite movement that lasted for 600 years across the Syrian and Anatolian Christian world — including Symeon Stylites the Younger (521–597), Alypius the Stylite (515–640), and others, until the Arab conquest of the 7th century slowly ended the practice. Stylitism survived in Syria into the medieval period, in some Russian Orthodox cases as late as the 15th century, and as a literary trope into modern times. The witness was specific: the body offered openly to God, no privacy, no escape — visible to all and accessible only by ladder.