Simeon

The personal name Simeon (Greek Symeon; also rendered Simon in some Latin and vernacular sources) belongs to a large number of biblical, patristic, and medieval figures commemorated as saints. No single verified biography, see, or century can be attached to the bare name alone. The earliest and most widely known is the aged Jerusalemite of Luke 2:25–35, called Simeon the God-receiver (Theodochos) in Eastern tradition, who took the infant Jesus in his arms in the Temple and spoke the canticle Nunc dimittis. Scripture gives neither his birth nor his death, nor a city of origin beyond his presence in Jerusalem. Later homiletic and apocryphal literature, including material connected with the Presentation and with legends of the Septuagint translators, expanded his story, but those expansions are not historically verifiable. Western martyrologies have listed him on 8 October; Byzantine calendars keep 3 February (and the Presentation on 2 February). He is not recorded as a bishop, monk, or pope.

A second, historically better-attested holy man is Symeon Stylites the Elder, a Syrian ascetic of the fifth century. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts, especially Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s Religious History, describe him as a monk who, after a period in monasteries of northern Syria, took up residence on a pillar at Telanissus (modern Deir Semaan) near Antioch and remained there for decades until his death in 459. Tradition places his origin in a village on the Cilician–Syrian border (often named Sisan or Sis). He was not married, had no recorded children, held no episcopal or patriarchal see, and founded no religious order in the later canonical sense, though stylitism became an imitated form of eremitical life. His principal shrine is the great martyrium of Qal‘at Sim‘ān. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 5 January; the Byzantine rite on 1 September. A later pillar saint, Symeon Stylites the Younger (sixth century), lived on the Wondrous Mountain near Antioch and should not be conflated with the Elder.

Other bearers of the name who appear in reliable ecclesiastical historians include Simeon son of Clopas, whom Eusebius of Caesarea, drawing on Hegesippus, identifies as a kinsman of Jesus and as the second bishop of the Jerusalem church after James; he is said to have been crucified in the reign of Trajan in the early second century, at a legendary advanced age that cannot be converted into a verified year of birth. In the middle Byzantine period, Symeon the New Theologian (born in the mid-tenth century in Paphlagonia, died in the early eleventh century) was a monk, abbot, and mystical theologian of Constantinople, associated with the monasteries of Studios and Saint Mamas and later with a community on the Asian shore; he was not a patriarch. Still later, Simeon of Syracuse (also called Simeon of Trier), a recluse who died at Trier in 1035, was canonized in the eleventh century by Pope Benedict IX. Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavic churches likewise commemorate patriarchs, catholicoi, and local monks named Simeon or Symeon, none of whom can be identified from the name alone.

Because the subject of this entry is identified only as Simeon, none of the specific years, places, offices, feast days, or patronages that belong to any one of these men can be entered in the structured fields without conjecture. Patronages in later devotion have included, for particular Simeons, the Presentation of children and a holy death (the Gospel Simeon), and the region of Antioch or Aleppo (the Elder Stylite), but those attributions are not transferable to an unspecified namesake. The present record therefore leaves biographical particulars blank and confines itself to distinguishing the principal historical and liturgical figures who share the name.