The Pillarist

The pillarist, or stylite, as he would usually be termed, is a man who has positioned himself between heaven and earth. Having ascended the pillar, he isolates himself from those on the ground, but he does so not in order to make his elevated physical position match, in some crude way, an interior disposition of arrogant superiority. The pillar is an unforgiving place, exposed to the elements, precarious in space, and dangerous to both ascend and descend. It is not the location for a throne room; nor, being often high enough to evoke dizziness or vertigo in those unfamiliar with such heights, is it a place for the arrogant. One mistake can remind the pillarist, with perhaps fatal results, that God can only be perceived with humility, and that the pillar itself, though inanimate, demands a certain humility of its inhabitant by virtue of its design.

The pillar is an instrument then of humility, of extreme asceticism, and, somewhat paradoxically to both of these, notoriety. The most famous stylite was Saint Simeon the Elder, the first pillarist of Christian asceticism, a man so extreme in his devotions that a monastery ejected him after he nearly died from a particularly harsh penance he had induced upon himself—though, as orders go, it’s most likely that his ejection was warranted due to his taking it upon himself to apply the mortification, as he had done it in secret and without the explicit approval of his superiors. Ah, youth.

After his expulsion, St. Simeon’s first abode was in the wilderness, chained to a rock on a hill. It wasn’t long until, as Alban Butler informs us, he found that pilgrims had begin to see him for advice. Seeking to escape the distractions, he looked at last to the pillars.

The practice of pillar hermitage was short-lived, as monastic and isolationist practices in the Church go. St. Simeon ascended his first pillar in 423, inspiring others—perhaps inadvertently—to do the same for the next couple of centuries. Although the use of pillars specifically was mostly limited to the regions in and around Syria, elevated asceticism was not uncommon to Christian hermitage; there remains a monk to this day that occupies a small cottage atop a natural pillar in Georgia. Similarly, although it is not his abode, there is an Ethiopian Orthodox priest that ascends a cliff face daily to offer the Most Holy Sacrifice in an ancient but continually-used church carved out of a cave.

To live atop a pillar is not the same as living on top of a tower. It’s not infrequent to accuse our social and cultural elites to be living in ones made of ivory, for instance; safe from the impacts of their actions and deluded with sophistries that have no real-world application. Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley spring to mind. But towers are spacious, usually fortified, easily-defended. They have rooms and stairwells, chambers, and are built in order to fulfill some function of safety. A tower is not a pillar. You can relax at the top of a tower. You can’t do that on top of a pillar, where all that separates you from the earth is a wooden platform, exposed to the elements, and anywhere between twelve to seventy feet of open air.

The pillar St. Simeon spent the last ten years of his life was alleged, on quite reasonable grounds, to have been forty cubits high. That’s between sixty and seventy three feet. There was a staircase made just to get within speaking distance of him.

As demanding as his self-styled asceticism was, attacked by the elements, Syriac sun, and at first, the suspicion of fellow ascetics and the ridicule of common people, accounts of Simeon’s openness, humility, and accessibility are notorious. When visited by a group of desert fathers, who feared his extremism to be a sign of egoism, they asked that he come down—a test to prove his absolute obedience to the early Church’s authority and to demonstrate his utmost humility, though this was unannounced. He did so, without question and without hesitation.

Before he ascended his first pillar, St. Simeon had a dream. As Butler writes, in The Lives of the Saints:

At length, falling asleep, he had a vision, which he often related afterwards. He seemed to himself to be digging for the foundation of a house, and that as often as he stopped to take a little breath, which was four times, he was commanded each time to dig deeper, till at length he was told he might desist, the pit being deep enough to receive the intended foundation, on which he would be able to raise a superstructure of what kind and to what height he pleased. “The event,” says Theodoret, “verified the prediction; the actions of this wonderful man were so much above nature, that they might well require deep foundations to build such a structure securely.”¹

God is both the foundation and the sky. He must be found below, and upon Him must the tower be built; He must be found also above, as ascending the pillar places the stylite closer to Heaven. The taller the pillar, the greater its foundation. This is a spiritual exercise as much as it is, in the cases of so many real stylites of old, a physical one. Closeness with God comes with prayer, introspection, reflection, and with the steady development of the interior life. The outward dressings of a Christian life—community, benevolence, charity, etcetera—all start from a humble interior disposition that is ordered around prayer. This is not to say, of course, that the exterior life of a Christian should be ignored for his interior one; in fact, it’s almost the opposite: the greater emphasis a man puts on his interior life, and the more he yearns to know God and to love Him by prayer, his exterior life will develop as a consequence. To love God is to fulfill man’s telos, and so also is it in man’s telos to live in the world. By fulfilling the former, the latter is also supplied.

This unity is seen in the life of St. Simeon. His advice to the pilgrims who came to see him, always in need, was considered down-to-earth and reasonable in almost every case. He wasted no time in offering his prayers for those who came to him, and he addressed the public, by some accounts, twice a day. It is not in spite of his extreme asceticism that he was so humble, that his advice was so reasonable; it is because of it. The foundation of his faith was dug deeply into his interior life, which allowed his virtues to ascend as high as the pillar he called his home.

This should be our praxis going forth. Not to live on top of pillars, per se, or to undertake extreme asceticism; a vast majority of people are not called to lives devoted to those intensities. But we are called to live the lives we were born into, be it to get married or join the priesthood, to work, to get sick, to suffer, to carry our crosses in imitation of Him who carried His to Calvary. To do this, our interior lives must be properly ordered, our priorities maintained, our minds clear, our balance perfect. We are given our crosses; we must build our pillars. To do that, dig deeply, as St. Simeon did in his vision, until you hit bedrock.

There is a safety that can be found in faith when atop the pillar, not in spite of but because of its precariousness. The stylite does not stand on his pillar to look down upon those who haven’t their own; he stands with his eyes uplifted toward God. As we look upon the world and its errors, we have only to look upwards to remind ourselves of hope.

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1Butler, Alban, The Lives of the Saints, revised by Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater (Notre Dame: Burnes & Oates, 1956), 35.