St. Simeon the Stylite – July 27 I Shemavaon Desthunni

Here perhaps strangest, most miraculous of all the Saints; Simeon the Stylite. He was born in 389 in a Cappadocian village Sisan (Sis), in Cilicie, a little town near the border of Syria. His father was a shepherd, and he himself spent the first years of its life to keep the herds. It was here in the mountains where he learnt calmness and contemplation growing in solitude and silence. He was thirteen years old, when one day, in the church, he was converted by the first sermon he ever heard. The priest spoke on the text “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. On asking how best to become pure in heart and so see God, Simeon was told that joining a monastery was good and he at once became a monk.

Lit by the grace, set ablaze desire of the perfection, he is put himself in prayer, falls asleep and saw a dream: He said he repeatedly heard a voice telling him to “dig deeper, dig deeper dig deeper, dig ever deeper.” Finally, the voice says to me: “It is enough! Now you can raise a building as high as you will like it.”

Simon, who was known for his asceticism and holiness, joined a monastery, but often withdrew into a desert and passed the whole Lent without eating. It is not hard to believe that in one Lenten season he stood erect for twenty days, then sat in meditation for another twenty days, during which time his only sustenance was water. On the Resurrection Day, the Holy Communion returned all his strength to him. As of this moment, he takes the resolution to spend every year thus the time of the Lent. After ten years he obtained permission from his superiors to leave the monastery and become a hermit. He was called, he said, to give up movement. He built himself a round enclosure and shackled his leg to a chain fastened to a pole in the middle of it so that he could not leave. The bishop of Antioch ordered him to remove the chain, and Simeon immediately complied.

But crowds had begun to come in ever-increasing numbers to ask for his prayers. Crowds were soon around him, attracted by its miracles. So he flees to a mountain to escape the trade from the men; but the extraordinary contest increased during the day. It was they who first made Simeon think of living higher up, out of their reach. He built a platform three metres high, to prevent people from grabbing him while he was at prayer. A bit of leather snipped from his garment was a valuable relic during his lifetime, so we can imagine his predicament. Besides, the whole point of his immobility was, in Simeon’s mind, not only stability but also verticality. He was choosing Heaven, denying to himself wandering, distraction, the horizontal. He built himself successive pillars (styloi in Greek)–a six-metre one, an eleven-metre one, and finally a stylos twenty metres high. So, rising year by year, reached finally the height of forty bent, or about twenty meters, on which it lived approximately thirty-six years, between heaven and earth. From there the nickname comes to him from Stylite, word which means, in Greek, the inhabitant of the column.

The hours of its day were shared between the prayer, the preaching and the charity organizations; the night occurred almost whole in the discussions with the Sky. He prayed all night, bowing frequently and low (this being his only exercise): one witness stopped counting after his 1,244th bow. He slept very briefly towards dawn and was ready to greet the crowds that thronged around him every day. Pilgrims came to Antioch in Syria from distant places–we hear of Arabs, Persians, Armenians, Spanish, British, French–and then walked a short distance into the country to where the saint’s pillar stood. They would beg for his prayers, listen twice a day to his gentle, practical and briefly expressed thoughts, ask him to settle disputes, and pray for miracles that frequently occurred. Most of the time, however, the saint stood in silent prayer.

Simeon the Stylite spent thirty-seven years of his life standing on a pillar. He ate as little as possible, and did his utmost never to sit or lie down: he would tie himself to a pole fixed to the top of his pillar so as to sleep upright, or, on other occasions, he would sleep leaning on the balustrade that also prevented him from blowing off his perch during storms. He had no roof, and no walls apart from the open balustrade; a leather garment, long hair, and a beard were all he had for protection against the elements. Modern people, masters of sewerage as we have become, shudder at the thought of what happened to his admittedly meagre excrement.

By the end of his life, Simeon was embodying his ideal of purity of heart with the unlettered shepherd’s naïveté that never left him: he had reduced his distance from God in the most concrete manner he could imagine; he was like a flame burning atop a candle. He had “dug deeper” and ended up high, in this extraordinary place. Having left human society behind, he had made himself available to it unceasingly.

Considered to be by far the greatest ascetic in all Christendom, Simeon sat or stood stoically atop his pillar, which over the years beckoned thousands of Christian pilgrims who came to view this amazing spectacle and to hear the wisdom of the solitary anchorite, whose weather-beaten visage inspired countless numbers to reaffirm their faith in God and his only begotten Son. Added to the wonder of his durability under the most demanding circumstances was his power of miraculous healing through the power of the Lord, as a result of which he came to be venerated as a saint while still alive. The ruins of St. Simeon’s pillar are still evident in Syria and are considered a shrine to the greatest ascetic of them all who died in A. D. 459 after establishing a precedent which many followed later but none were able to equal. Our Church commemorates Shemavaon Desthunni him on 27 July and in the 5th Thubden in each Holy Eucharist.