Symeon the Stylite

Origins and early life

Symeon was born around 390 in the village of Sisan (Sis), on the border country between Cilicia and northern Syria, to a family of shepherds. He passed his boyhood tending his father's flocks, unlettered and unremarkable. The turning point of his life, recorded in all the early Lives, came in his early teens: kept from the pasture one winter Sunday, he heard the Beatitudes read in church and asked a bystander what such blessedness meant and how it might be won. The answer — prayer, fasting, hardship, and the monastic life — struck root at once. The tradition relates that he then spent a night in prayer and saw a vision of himself digging a foundation, being told repeatedly to dig deeper before he could build: an image the hagiographers took as the pattern of his whole ascetic career.

He presented himself first at a nearby monastery, where he lay at the gate for days without food until he was admitted, and after initial formation moved to the large and celebrated monastery of Eusebona at Teleda, where he remained about ten years.

Ascetic struggle

Even among Syrian monks — the most austere in Christendom — Symeon's severities were found excessive. He fasted beyond the rule, and at one point bound a rough cord of palm fibre so tightly about his waist, next to the skin, that it embedded itself in his flesh and was discovered only when the wound began to fester; the abbot, fearing both for Symeon's life and for the effect of such rivalry-provoking feats on the community, eventually dismissed him from the monastery.

Symeon withdrew to the village of Telanissos (Telneshe, the modern Deir Sem'an), at the foot of the rocky height where he would spend the rest of his life. There he first enclosed himself in a hut, where — according to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who knew him personally — he passed an entire Great Lent without eating or drinking, a feat he repeated annually thereafter. He next chained himself to the rock of the summit within a small circular enclosure (a mandra), until Meletius, the visiting chorepiscopus of Antioch, remarked that the will, not iron, should bind a man; Symeon had the chain struck off.

Crowds now came in such numbers, each seeking to touch him or carry off a relic-thread from his garments, that around 423 he adopted the expedient that made him famous: he mounted a pillar. The first was low — a few cubits — but successive pillars rose higher, until the last stood some forty cubits (perhaps eighteen metres) above the enclosure. On its small platform, exposed to the Syrian sun and the winter storms, he stood for about thirty-six years until his death, never descending. He bowed in prayer so continuously that visitors tried to count the prostrations and gave up in the hundreds; Theodoret records an observer abandoning the count at 1,244.

The pillar was not a flight from humanity but a pulpit. Twice daily Symeon preached to the crowds below, settled lawsuits, reconciled enemies, healed the sick brought to the base of the column, and gave rulings that carried from village disputes to imperial policy. The Bedouin Arabs of the desert came in their thousands, and the Lives record whole encampments renouncing idols at his word. Pilgrims are attested from Persia, Armenia, Georgia, Arabia, Spain, Gaul, and Britain; Theodoret says that in Rome small images of Symeon were set up in the workshops for protection — a remarkable early witness to the devotional use of images of a living saint.

Emperors sought his counsel. Theodosius II wrote to him and heeded his protests; the empress Eudocia, drifting toward the monophysite party after Chalcedon, was recalled toward the orthodox confession partly through his letters; and Leo I received Symeon's written support for the Council of Chalcedon (451) when its authority hung in the balance in Syria — a significant fact, since the later Syriac non-Chalcedonian tradition also claimed his memory.

His mother Martha, who had long sought to see him, was refused entry to the enclosure, since women were not admitted; the tradition relates that she died nearby and that Symeon had her coffin brought to the foot of the pillar, where he prayed over her. She is herself venerated as a saint, chiefly in the Syriac and Maronite tradition, and lies at the foot of his column in what became the great martyrium of Qalʿat Simʿān.

She is not to be confused with the other Martha. The mother of Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain, the Younger Symeon, was also named Martha, and it is she — Martha of Antioch, widow of John the perfumer, who died in 551 and is buried at the foot of the Wonderful Mountain south-west of the city — who is commemorated in the Byzantine calendar on July 4. Two stylites named Symeon, two mothers named Martha, and two mothers' graves at the foot of two columns on opposite sides of Antioch: the Greek calendars say only "Martha, mother of Symeon the Stylite," and leave the reader to supply which Symeon. This Martha has no July 4 commemoration.

Repose

Symeon died on his pillar in 459, aged about seventy. His death was discovered when he remained motionless in prayer for three days; his disciple Antonius, author of one of the Lives, describes finding the body bent in the attitude of prayer. The report brought out the population of the countryside, and the Patriarch Martyrius of Antioch, with six bishops and an escort of Gothic soldiers under the magister militum Ardaburius, conducted the body in procession to Antioch — the escort being needed because the villages along the route attempted to seize the relics for themselves.

Relics and translations

The body was received in Antioch with unprecedented honours and enshrined in the great church; the city, which had recently suffered earthquake, regarded the saint's relics as its new wall and protector, and successfully resisted the emperor Leo's request that they be surrendered to Constantinople. Portions of the relics were later distributed; the head was long claimed by several centres, and smaller relics spread through both the Greek and Syriac worlds.

Veneration and later cultus

Within a generation of his death, the emperor Zeno's era saw the construction (c. 475–491) of the vast cruciform martyrium of Qal'at Sim'an ("the fortress of Symeon") around the pillar itself: four basilicas radiating from a central octagon enclosing the column, at the time among the largest church buildings in the world. The remnant of the pillar, whittled away for centuries by relic-seeking pilgrims, survived as a boulder on its base into modern times; the site, a UNESCO World Heritage location, was damaged during the Syrian civil war (the pillar-base itself was struck in 2016).

Symeon founded not merely a shrine but a way of life. Stylitism — the ascetic vocation of the pillar — continued for a millennium: Daniel the Stylite took up the practice at Constantinople within Symeon's own lifetime and inherited his very mantle; Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain (the "Younger," †596), Alypius of Adrianopolis, Luke the New Stylite, and many others followed, and the type entered the standard iconographic and hymnographic repertoire of the Church.

In the Byzantine rite his feast on September 1 coincides deliberately with the Indiction, the opening of the church year, so that the first saint the Church commemorates annually is the man who stood between earth and heaven; the liturgical texts of the day interweave the new year and the stylite.