§ 37. ST. SYMEON AND THE PILLiVB SAINTS. I'Jl
skeleton. He never ate before sunset. Prajers, psalm singing, Bible recitations, and basket weaving were liis employment His cell was only five feet high, lower than his own stature, and more like a sepulchre than a dwelling. He slept on tho ground. He cut his hair only once a year, at Easter. Tlie fame of his sanctity gradually attracted hosts of admirers (once, ten thousand), so that he had to change his residence several times, and retired to Sicily, then to Dalmatia, and at last t(j the island of Cyprus, where he died in 371, in his eightieth year. His legacy, a book of the Gospels and a rude mantle, he made to his friend Hesychius, who took his corpse home to Palestine, and deposited it in the cloister of Majumas. The Cyprians consoled themselves over their loss, with the thought that they possessed the spirit of the saint. Jerome ascribes to him all manner of visions and miraculous cures.
§ 37. St. Sijraeon and the Pillar Saints.
Respecting St. Symeon, or Siiueon Stylites, we Lave accounts from three contemporaries and eye witnesses, Anthony, Cosmas, and especially TnEODOKET (Hist. Relig. c. 2G). The latter composed his narrative sixteen years before the deatli the saint.
EvAGHius : H. E. i. c. 13. The Acta Sanotoritm and Butler, snb Jan. 5. Uhlemann: Symeon, der erste Siiulenheilige in Syrien. Leipz. 1846. (Comp. also the fine poem of A. Tennyson : St. Symeon Stylites, a monologue in which S. relates his own experience.)
It is unnecessary to recount the lives of other such anchorets; since the same features, even to unimportant details, i-epeat themselves in all.' But in the fi.fth century a new and quite original path " was broken by Symeon, tlie father of tlie Stylites or pillar saints, who spent long years, day and night, summer and winter, rain and sunshine, frost and heat, standing on high, unsheltered pillars, in prayer and penances, and made the way to heaven for themselves so passing hard, that one knows not whether to wonder at their unexampled self-denial,
* A peculiar, romantic, but not fully historical interest attaches to the biography of the imprisoned and fortunately escaping monk Malchus, with his nominal wife, which is preserved to us by Jerome.
* Original at least in the Christian church. Gieseler refers to u heathen preeo "ieut; the ^aWofianh \n Syria, mentioned by Lucian, Dc Dea Syria, c. 28 and 29.
192 XniRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
or to pity their ignorance of the gospel salvation. On tliis giddy height the anchoretic asceticism reached its completicn. St. Sy.meon the Stylite, originally a shepherd on the borders of Syria and Cilicia, when a boy of thirteen years, M'as powerfully afibcted by the beatitudes, which he heard read in the church, and betook himself to a cloister. He lay seveisi days, without eating or drinking, before the threshold, and begged to be admitted as the meanest servant of the honse. He accustomed himself to eat only once a week, on Sunday. During Lent he even went through the whole forty days without any food ; a fact almost incredible even for a tropical climate.' The first attempt of this kind brought him to the verge of death ; but his constitution conformed itself, and when Theodoret visited him, he had solemnized six and twenty Lent seasons by total abstinence, and thus sui'passed Moses, Elias, and even Christ, who never fasted so but once. Another of liis extraordinary inflictions was to lace his body so tightly that the cord pressed through to the bones, and could be cut ofi' only with the most terrible pains. This occasioned his dismissa. from the cloister. He after^vard spent some time as a hermil upon a mountain, with an iron chain upon his feet, and was visited there b}' admiring and curious throngs. "When this failed to satisfy him, he invented, in 423, a new sort of holiness, and lived, some two days' journey (forty miles) east of Antioch, for six and thirty years, until his d(!ath, upon a pillar, which it the last was nearly forty cubits high;^ for the pillar was
' Butler, 1. c, however, relates something similar of a contemporary Benedictine monk, Dom Claude Leante : "In 1731, when he was about fifty-one years of age, he had fasted eleven years without taking any food the whole forty days, except what he daily took at mass ; and what added to the wonder is, that during Lent he did not properly sleep, but only dozed. He could not bear the open air ; and toward the end of Lent he was excessively pale and wasted. This fact is attested by his brethren and superiors, in a relation printed at Sens, in 1731."
" The first pillar, which he himself erected, and on which he lived four years, was six cubits {Tr-fixet^'") high, the second twelve, the third twenty-two, and the fourth, which the people erected for him, and on which he spent twenty year?, waa thirty-six, according to Theodoret ; others say forty. The top was only three feet in diameter. It probably had a railing, however, on which he could lean in .sleep ot exhaustion. So at least these pillars arc drawn in pictures. Food was carried up ta the pillar saints by their disciples on a ladder.