Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Stylites and Holy Men

Simeon the Stylite stood on a column for nearly forty years and became the most famous man in the Roman East. The stylite movement, its logic, and the social role of the Byzantine holy man.

Sometime around 423, a Syrian shepherd’s son named Simeon, who had already been walled into a hut, chained to a rock and buried to the neck by way of ascetic practice, climbed onto a low platform on a pillar in the hills east of Antioch. He stayed there, moving to successively higher columns, for about thirty-seven years, and died standing in 459 at a height of some fifteen metres above the ground.

He was the most famous man in the eastern Roman Empire. Emperors wrote to him, Persian and Arab visitors came to look, and after his death a church complex was built around the column that was for a time the largest in the world.

The stylites are the extreme case of a phenomenon that runs through Byzantine religious life: the holy man whose authority rests on nothing but his asceticism, and who becomes, precisely for that reason, an arbiter, patron and judge in the society he has withdrawn from.

Simeon the Elder

Simeon was born around 390 near the Syrian-Cilician border, joined a monastery as a teenager, and was expelled — his austerities were so extreme that the community judged him a danger to himself and a disruption to them. The rope he had tied around his waist had grown into the flesh and had to be cut out.

He moved to Telanissos (Deir Semaan), lived in an enclosure, and began to attract crowds. The pillar, according to his biographers, was a response to the crowds rather than a display for them: it removed him from being physically touched by petitioners while leaving him available to be consulted.

His day consisted of prostrations — a visitor is said to have counted 1,244 and given up — psalmody, and, in the afternoon, hearing petitions from the crowd below. He settled disputes, denounced usurers, arbitrated between villages, wrote to bishops and emperors, and preached to visitors twice a day. He took no food during Lent.

Three contemporary lives survive, in Greek and Syriac, and one of them is by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, a bishop who knew him personally and wrote while he was still alive — an unusual advantage in hagiography.

The Movement

Simeon had imitators for eight centuries. The best documented are:

Daniel the Stylite (409–493), near Constantinople, who stood on a column at Anaplous on the Bosphorus for thirty-three years and intervened decisively in imperial politics, denouncing the usurper Basiliscus and forcing his climb-down over Chalcedon. His Life is one of the best sources for late fifth-century Constantinople.

Simeon the Younger (521–592), on the “Wonderful Mountain” near Antioch, who mounted a column as a child and stayed for sixty-eight years, with a monastery built around him.

Alypius, Luke the Stylite, and a scattering of others through to the twelfth century and beyond, including stylites in Georgia and, much later, in Russia.

The practice spread beyond Syria but never took root in the west. A Frankish attempt at Trier in the sixth century was stopped by the local bishops, who told the man to come down — a small illustration of a real difference in religious temperament between the two halves of Christendom.

Why a Pillar

Several explanations have been offered, and they are not exclusive.

Separation. The column removes the ascetic from the ground, from being touched, from women, from ordinary human contact, while leaving him visible and audible.

Visibility as vocation. Unlike the desert hermit who disappears, the stylite is a public spectacle. This is asceticism as witness — a permanent, unmissable demonstration.

Endurance as prayer. Standing without rest, exposed to weather, is an unbroken offering. The physicality is the point; the body itself becomes the liturgy.

Local precedent. Syrian religion before Christianity included sacred pillars, and Lucian describes a man who climbed a column at Hierapolis twice a year. Whether there is genuine continuity or only coincidence is argued.

The Holy Man in Society

The wider significance of the stylites was set out in an influential 1971 article by Peter Brown on the rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity, and the framework it established still shapes the field.

The argument, in brief: in the villages of Syria and Anatolia, ordinary mechanisms of dispute resolution — patronage, kinship, civic institutions — were weak or compromised. The holy man supplied an alternative. He was outside the system by definition, owed nothing to anyone, could not be bribed, and derived authority from a source the whole community recognised. He therefore became a patron: settling disputes over land and water, negotiating with tax collectors, standing surety, exorcising, healing, and cursing where necessary.

The evidence for this is extensive in the hagiographies, which are full of exactly this kind of business — much more of it, in fact, than of miracles in the spectacular sense. The relationship to village life is described in the Byzantine village.

Brown’s model has been criticised for over-generalising from Syrian material and for underrating the holy man’s dependence on existing elites, and the debate continues. What is not disputed is that these figures held genuine social power.

Healing and the Alternative to Medicine

Holy men were also, in practice, the medical system available to most people. Their shrines produced collections of healing miracles, and the accounts are circumstantial — symptoms, previous treatments, failures of physicians, the remedy prescribed in a dream.

Byzantine attitudes here were not simply anti-medical. Physicians appear in the miracle collections without hostility, and the standard pattern is that the doctors are tried first and the saint is the recourse when they fail. The relationship between the two systems is discussed in Byzantine medicine.

Qal’at Sim’an

The complex built around Simeon’s column in the 470s and 480s, at imperial expense, is one of the great buildings of late antiquity: four basilicas arranged in a cross around a central octagonal court containing the pillar.

It survived remarkably well for fifteen centuries in the limestone hills of north-western Syria, part of the group of “Dead Cities” designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 2011. The column itself had been reduced over the centuries by pilgrims chipping off fragments, leaving a boulder a few metres high.

The site was damaged by an airstrike in May 2016 during the Syrian civil war, with the remains of the column and parts of the basilica affected. Assessment has been difficult.

Afterlife

The stylite is one of the two or three images of Byzantine religion that reached the modern western imagination, generally as a symbol of pointless extremity — Tennyson wrote a dramatic monologue putting self-regarding pride into Simeon’s mouth, and Buñuel made a film of it.

The Byzantine assessment was different and worth stating. These were not men who had withdrawn from society; they were men society came to, in enormous numbers, with practical problems. Simeon on his pillar heard more petitions in a year than most bishops, and the crowd at the bottom of the column understood perfectly well why they were there.

Theodoret’s Account

The most valuable source on Simeon is a bishop who knew him, disapproved of the practice, and wrote about him anyway while he was still alive.

Theodoret of Cyrrhus included Simeon in his Religious History, a set of thirty portraits of Syrian ascetics compiled around 440 — meaning roughly twenty years into Simeon’s time on the column and about nineteen years before his death.

Theodoret is a useful witness precisely because he is not a naive one. He is a sophisticated theologian, active in the Christological controversies, writing for an educated audience that he expects to find the stylite’s behaviour bizarre. He addresses that directly, arguing that God has always used strange signs to attract attention, and that the extremity is a means rather than an end.

He supplies the circumstantial detail that makes the account credible: the rope that had grown into Simeon’s flesh, the sequence of increasingly high columns, the daily schedule, the crowds of Arabs, Persians, Armenians and Iberians, the two sermons a day, and the petitions.

He also says he counted 1,244 prostrations and stopped counting.

The Syriac Life, written at the shrine after Simeon’s death, and a later Greek life by Antonius, supply more miracles and less restraint. Reading Theodoret first, then the others, is a short course in how hagiography develops.

The Practical Business

What the sources actually show the holy men doing, as opposed to what they are famous for, is administration.

The hagiographies record them:

  • Settling boundary disputes between villages and between individuals
  • Arbitrating over water rights, a recurring cause of violence in the Syrian and Anatolian countryside
  • Intervening with tax collectors and imperial officials on behalf of communities
  • Standing surety for debtors and persuading creditors to write off debts
  • Writing letters of recommendation to officials and bishops
  • Negotiating between landlords and tenants
  • Adjudicating inheritance disputes
  • Interceding for condemned criminals

Simeon corresponded with emperors and with the bishop of Rome, intervened in the doctrinal disputes of his day, and was consulted by the empress Eudocia. Daniel the Stylite came down from his column exactly once in thirty-three years — to walk into Constantinople and denounce the usurper Basiliscus for his religious policy, which contributed to Basiliscus’s climb-down.

None of this is incidental to the vocation. A man visibly outside the systems of patronage, kinship and obligation that governed everyone else was the only available neutral party, and the village knew it.

Brown’s Argument and Its Critics

Peter Brown’s 1971 article “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” reshaped the field, and the subsequent argument is worth following.

The original thesis: the holy man functioned as a patron and arbitrator in societies where traditional structures of authority had weakened, deriving power precisely from his exteriority — he had renounced family, property, sex and position, and was therefore incorruptible in a way no local notable could be.

The criticisms, accumulating from the 1980s: that the model generalises from Syrian evidence to the whole eastern Mediterranean; that it underrates the holy man’s dependence on episcopal and aristocratic patronage; that it treats hagiography too readily as social description; and that it makes the holy man a functional solution to a sociological problem, which is not how anyone involved understood it.

Brown’s own revisions, published in 1983 and 1998, accepted much of this. He moved from the holy man as patron to the holy man as exemplar — a figure whose significance was that he demonstrated what a transformed human life looked like — and acknowledged that the earlier model had been too tidy.

The exchange is a good example of a field working properly: an influential thesis, serious criticism, and an author revising in public.

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