Paperback: In the flood of Christian ascetics who withdrew from late antique society to seek God alone, Simeon chose a novel escape.
He mounted a pillar.
There, he remained for the rest of his life, a focus of pious pilgrimage, the object of veneration and curiosity. To him came supplicants with all kinds of problems: personal anguish, sickness and pain, infertility, personal sin and social injustice. Whole villages sent delegations for advice when plagues or wild beasts threatened. In a harsh world, individual seekers travelled great instances to speak with him and sometimes emulated the even harsher life he had chosen for God.
In The Lives of Simeon Stylites (1992), three accounts, of Simeon's (d 459 AD) life are translated - two (Simon, Symeon) from Greek and one (The Stylite) from Syriac - by Robert Doran, Professor of Religious Studies at Amherst College in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. Three Lives of Simeon was written by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, who wrote it while the saint was still alive; 'Antonius', a work of unknown date and provenance; and a Syriac life dated to 473, the longest of the three lives.
'When we look at Simeon from our modern point of view,' he observes, 'we see a brutal life of self-inflicted pain. When his contemporaries looked at him, they saw a life transformed, a man transfigured, a world redeemed.'
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