Simeon Stylites

Simeon Stylites, also known as Simeon the Elder or Symeon Stylites, was a Christian ascetic of the fifth century who became famous as the first of the stylites, monks who lived atop pillars as a form of extreme devotion and withdrawal from the world. He was born around the year 390 in Sis (also called Sisan), a village in the Roman province of Cilicia, in the Amanus mountain region near the border with Syria, in what is now southern Turkey. His family was Christian; his father worked as a shepherd. According to the early accounts, including those of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who wrote about Simeon during the saint's lifetime, and later Greek and Syriac lives, Simeon as a boy was moved by hearing the Beatitudes proclaimed in church. This experience led him to leave pastoral work and seek a monastic life while still in his teens.

He entered a monastery, often identified with the community at Eusebona (Tell Ada) in northern Syria. There his fasting and bodily mortifications were so severe that they alarmed his fellow monks. One well-known episode describes him wearing a rough rope next to his skin until it ate into his flesh. He was eventually dismissed from the monastery for the excess of his asceticism. Simeon then lived as a hermit, first in a hut and later in a confined space on a mountainside, where he continued prolonged fasts, including a Lenten fast that, according to the sources, he survived with little or no food. As his reputation for holiness and reported miracles grew, crowds of pilgrims and petitioners gathered around him, making the solitude he sought impossible.

In order to remain apart from the throng while still offering a public witness, Simeon adopted the unusual practice of living on a pillar. He is said to have begun this way of life around 423, first on a modest column and then on successively taller ones. The final pillar, at Telanissus (modern Deir Semaan) northwest of Aleppo, is described in the sources as some fifty to sixty feet high, with a small platform on which he stood or sat, exposed to sun, rain, and cold. He remained there for thirty-seven years. From the pillar he preached, gave spiritual counsel, mediated disputes, and received visitors who climbed a ladder to speak with him. He corresponded with emperors, including Theodosius II and Leo I, and with bishops. Chalcedonian tradition preserves a letter in which he is presented as supporting the Council of Chalcedon; non-Chalcedonian traditions also claimed his authority. He observed a strict rule of prayer, fasting, and nearly continuous standing, and he is reported to have converted many, including groups from among the Arab tribes.

Simeon died on 2 September 459. Those who attended him found his body bent in an attitude of prayer. His remains were brought to Antioch and buried there with public honors. In the decades after his death a great pilgrimage complex, Qal'at Sim'an, was constructed around the remains of his pillar; it became one of the most important Christian shrines of late antique Syria. Simeon's example gave rise to other stylites, notably Daniel the Stylite near Constantinople and later Simeon Stylites the Younger on the Wondrous Mountain. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Oriental Orthodox churches. His principal feast is kept on 1 September in the East and on 5 January in the Roman calendar. Contemporary and near-contemporary sources, especially Theodoret's account, the Life by his disciple Antonius, and a Syriac life, form the basis of what can be known; later hagiography added miraculous details that historians treat with caution.