St. Symeon the Stylite

Symeon was born about the year 388 at Sisan in Syria, the son of shepherds, and entered monastic life while still young. His austerity was severe enough that the community he first joined asked him to leave it, and he went on alone, living for a time enclosed and then on a small hill, where the crowds who came to him for prayer and counsel grew until he had no stillness left.

In 423 he answered that crowd in a way nobody had answered it before: he built a pillar and lived on top of it. The first was low, a little more than nine feet high. He raised it more than once over the years, and the last stood, so far as the accounts allow us to say, over fifty feet from the ground. There was a railing at the top and no shelter. He remained there, through the heat and the winter rain of the Syrian uplands, for about thirty-six years.

It was not a retreat from people. From the pillar he preached twice a day, settled quarrels, wrote to bishops and to emperors, and received a stream of visitors from as far as Gaul and Britain, so that the pillar became one of the best known places in the Christian East. Both those who admired him and those who doubted him agreed on the strangeness of it, and the bishops of Syria tested his obedience before they accepted the manner of his life.

He died on his pillar on Friday the second of September, 459. His body was carried to Antioch, and a great church, the Qal'at Sim'an, was raised around the pillar itself, whose remains still stand. The Church keeps his memory on the first of September, the beginning of the church year, one day before the day of his death.

After him the way of the pillar was taken up by others for centuries, in Syria, in Asia Minor, at Constantinople and later in the Russian lands. Daniel the Stylite, who knew him, carried it to the capital, and Symeon of the Wonderful Mountain took his name and his manner of life near Antioch a century later.