Journal of Early Christian Studies

The relationship between charismatic and institutional authority has been a favorite theme for scholars of Late Antiquity. This was, after all, an era of flamboyance. Striking figures dotted the landscape: Antony of Egypt in his desert, Simeon the Stylite on his pillar, and their like. With public adulation immediately intense, the ecclesiastical structure had to articulate and cement its own religious authority, while at the same time negotiating a means whereby the charismatic authority of the holy man or woman could be subsumed into the normative order of religious life as it was now being defined by men of institutional power.

Without doubt, the most influential and pervasive paradigm by which scholars have approached the problems of this situation has been that developed by Peter Brown. Peter Brown has attempted to account for the social and political impact of the great ascetics by examining the shifts in the locations wherein power (social, political, economic, cosmological) was exercised during this era of massive change. In a series of essays extending over the past twenty-five years, Brown has suggested several key images for charismatic authority: in 1971 (“Rise and Function”), the Holy Man as patron, an individual locus of power whose authority extended beyond the civic and into the cosmological realm at a time when traditional sociopolitical structures were in upheaval; in 1983 (“Saint as Exemplar”), the Holy Man as exemplar, the carrier of collective cultural memory whose authority derived from his capacity to express change in terms that hallowed tradition; and in 1995 (Authority and the Sacred), the Holy Man as negotiator, one player among many in the huge enterprise of negotiating religious and thus political change. Hence Brown has argued progressively for less emphasis on the holy man [End Page 523] as individual, and more emphasis on the tradition and/or social matrix out of which the holy man acted. ¹

A different tack has been taken up in recent years, particularly with respect to Egypt, by scholars such as David Brakke and James Goehring. ² Here scholars have considered the various modes of religious authority in competition with one another, crystalized in the tension between episcopal and ascetic authority. These they have shown to be reconciled rhetorically in the ancient texts by a spatial demarcation: the authority of the bishop dominated in the location of the city, while that of the charismatic ascetic governed the desert in which the ascetic dwelled (and to which the ascetic was rhetorically confined) as a different location. In the Syrian Orient, however, the conflict was not played out through the polarized images of city and desert, but across the ambiguous space of countryside, the domain of the church’s extended authority as exercised through itinerant priests and scattered village parishes.

In this study, I want to suggest another route by which to approach the problem, namely, the role of religious ritual as both a process and a rhetoric of mutual inclusion for charismatic and institutional authority. I shall suggest that ritual allowed a demarcation of the holy man or woman that granted the charismatic a collective identity, at the same time that it defined the collective identity of the church as one summed up and culminating in the person of the charismatic. I shall use the case of Simeon the Stylite because he has been the figure most often cited in support of Peter Brown’s work, and, indeed, by Brown himself as emblematic of the entire situation: the holy man (“in his splendid isolation”) perched on his towering pillar atop a mountain, apart from the world yet within reach, midway between heaven and earth, rendered wholly “other” by his extreme ascetic practices and thereby wholly effective as the intersection between human and divine, between civic and imperial, between social and ecclesiastical spheres of activity, need, and response.

To this end, I return to the hagiographical presentations of Simeon the [End Page 524] Stylite the Elder (d. 459) and his namesake Simeon the Stylite the Younger (d. 592). The vitae of the two Simeons present these stylite saints as involved in various levels of sacred ritual. Scholars (including Brown) have attended closely to the sociopolitical ramifications of the highly stylized ritual structures of askesis, prayer, and community interaction by which the stylites as individual holy men conducted their daily lives. However, the vitae attend further to the collective ritual activity of these saints, indicating their pronounced participation in the celebration of the eucharistic liturgy (a consideration almost entirely omitted from scholarly discussion of these saints). The Lives of these two saints place extraordinary emphasis on the integration of the stylite’s ascetic practice into the liturgical life of the worshiping community, both monastic and civic. These hagiographical texts carry a liturgical agenda specifically addressed to the nature of religious identity, the institutional means by which that identity is constructed, and the nature of the body which conveys that identity. Thus, I shall argue, the defining ritual process through which the stylite acquired his identity and crafted his role was not a ritualized activity (an individual ascetic practice) that rendered him “not human” or “the stranger,” as Peter Brown has described it. ³ Rather, the stylite’s defining ritual context was the eucharistic liturgy of the gathered body of the church, the collective presentation of the Christian salvation drama. Christian liturgy enacted in ritual the process by which the human person was redeemed from the diminished existence of fallen mortality, and restored to the completeness of God’s original creation. It was a ritual that transformed its participants into persons wholly human. I shall argue that hagiography positions the stylite in precisely this location and identity. The liturgical context is critical, indeed foundational, to the nature of the authority granted to the stylites in Late Antiquity and to the meanings generated by their work.

The significance of this emphasis can be seen if we review the texts with an eye for liturgical activity and how it functions within the hagiographical narrative structure. ⁴ [End Page 525]

While I am primarily concerned with these vitae as texts—as narratives that construct particular interpretations of the stylite saints—I also assume that the high degree of liturgical activity these texts describe is more than literary device or narrative strategy. That is, my working assumption is that these texts deliberately foreground and integrate into their narrative patterns what was in fact an identifiable feature of the saint’s ascetic labors and good works. Religion throughout the ancient Mediterranean world was characterized by the public performance of sacred rituals that demarcated the shared sociopolitical order and the place of each member within it. Late Antiquity is marked by elaborate religious ceremonial that provided the mechanisms of social definition and power dynamics across the political order. ⁵ Hence, when our texts describe the extended ritual patterns of prayer, prostration, and chanting (through which the stylite conducted his ascetic labors or his activities of healing or judgment) or the formal processional action through which petitioners both individual and collective approached the saint for counsel, healing, or blessing, I imagine that these activities were in fact conducted through such ritualized modes of interaction. These behavioral patterns carry a long cultural memory in the Mediterranean, across religious traditions. ⁶ Here we see the Christianization of very ancient modes of religious expression and efficacy, through such behavior as procession, gesture, stance, and speech. The hagiographical use of these bodily articulations served in part to establish the particular meanings this ritual language conveyed in its Christian usage. ⁷ [End Page 526]

And so to the texts.

Three hagiographies survive to us about Simeon the Elder, all written from locations close to the saint himself: Chapter 26 of Theodoret of Cyrrhos’ History of the Monks of Syria, written ca. 444 when the saint was still alive and at the peak of his fame; the Greek vita by the monk Antonios, apparently a disciple in the monastic community that served Simeon on his pillar; and the lengthy Syriac vita, also written from within the community of disciples that served Simeon, both of which were produced not long after the saint died in 459. ⁸ From the perspective of ritual practice, these three texts present Simeon’s career as a process in which the saint moves from a position of estrangement to one of engagement with and inclusion in the life of the church as a worshiping community, a liturgical community. Interestingly, this is cast in all three hagiographies as a deliberate rejection of the existing monastic institution, to establish a devotional life—albeit in a redefined monastic form—specifically enacted within the church in its civic location. ⁹

The narrative frame for all three texts draws a careful perimeter around the saint’s career. Each begins with the story of Simeon’s conversion as a youth from the naive piety of his childhood to the ascetic life that defined his mature vocation, a conversion that happened in church one day when he heard the gospel reading with sudden comprehension. ¹⁰ The context of Simeon’s conversion and the means by which it happened were hence the liturgical celebration of the Word, the public ritual of proclaiming and explicating scripture. At the other end of the [End Page 527] story, the Life by Antonios and the Syriac Life close their narratives with elaborate descriptions of the funeral rites by which Simeon was buried many years later (Theodoret wrote long before Simeon’s death). Simeon’s career is clearly understood in these vitae as a career conducted within the rituals whereby the church defined the course of Christian life. What, within this ritual frame, constituted this career?

Again, in all three hagiographies, Simeon is reported to have begun his ascetic career as a monastic failure, incompatible with the communal monastic life to such a degree that he was expelled from two monasteries before he changed his course. ¹¹ In these early years, Simeon is portrayed as every monk’s nightmare: a rebellious individual in the midst of community life. As such, he was always and profoundly out of order. He did not participate in the collective worship rituals; he did not follow the calendar of the community. Instead, he pursued his own routines of fasting, chanting, and ascetic practices. He did not obey his abbots. The idiosyncratic and idiorhythmic extremes of his discipline clashed with the carefully dictated order followed by the rest of the brethren, upon which their harmony as a community depended. The results were chaos for everyone. Not only did Simeon himself stick out as a wild extremist, but further, the monks fell into disastrous bickering among themselves, disturbed by jealousy, competitiveness, envy, and strife. The abbot in each case was helpless, unable to maintain any authority over Simeon, and as a result also unable to maintain the order of the community as a whole. Simeon’s ascetic practice, like Simeon’s body, remained without order, and so, too, the practice and body of the worshiping community in its monastic location. The monastery could not contain Simeon; his expulsion was necessary for everyone’s well-being: his own as he continued to court death by his practices, and that of the monks as their communal life unravelled.

Simeon’s productive career as a holy man at long last begins when he leaves the monastic setting and enters into the care of the diocesan structure of the ecclesiastical institution. It is this process that both Theodoret and the Syriac vita record at length, although from different perspectives. ¹² According to both, Simeon’s devotional activity is set aright by the local church, as he takes up his practice on the mountain outside the village of Telneshe. Discipline, form, and order are laid upon his ascetic labors by Mar Bas, the local periodeutes (itinerant priest), [End Page 528] who sets immediate constraints on Simeon’s practices with respect to extent and duration. ¹³ Theodoret reports that the efforts of Mar Bas were supported in like manner by Meletios, the chorepiscopos of the region. ¹⁴ The Syriac vita adds that the priest of Telneshe owned the land upon which Simeon conducted his stasis, and also provided at his own expense whatever the saint wore. ¹⁵ In sharp contrast to his monastic experience, here Simeon bows to authority, obedient to every order these clergy set upon him.

Slowly and steadily the periodeutes Mar Bas subsumed Simeon’s vocation into the life of the church, forcing Simeon to undertake his great feats of mortification within a clearly defined ritual context. The eucharistic liturgy was celebrated at the commencement and conclusion of these exceptional efforts, administered by Mar Bas directly to Simeon. ¹⁶ In due course, Mar Bas brought Simeon’s practice into accord with the ecclesiastical calendar, so that his most severe practices were undertaken during Lent, the forty-day period of penitential abstention in which the church commemorated Christ’s forty days in the wilderness and prepared for Easter. The most notorious of Simeon’s undertakings to be tied by Mar Bas to the Lenten period was his forty-day fast without food, an effort which in the early years brought Simeon annually to death’s door. ¹⁷ Theodoret claims that, as the years went by, and as Simeon’s prayer practice became increasingly tied to the liturgical life of the larger church body, Simeon’s ability to endure this period of severe deprivation increased. ¹⁸ However, there was no denying the piercing significance of the eucharistic celebration by which Mar Bas and a host of attending clergy each year broke the saint’s Lenten fast, returning Simeon to health by means of the holy oblation even as the cycle of the church turned from death to life.

According to the Syriac vita, Lent was also a time in which particularly significant events in the saint’s career took place. Simeon mounted his first standing stone during Lent; during Lent, the highest of his pillars was built, upon which his greatest achievements would be performed. ¹⁹ It was in Lent that Simeon was taught by an angel to pray in his peculiar [End Page 529] form of prostration; ²⁰ and it was in Lent that he was miraculously healed of the gangrenous ulcer which had consumed his leg and nearly killed him. ²¹ On this latter occasion, we are told, when the end of Lent arrived and the people awaited Simeon’s restoration from his fast, the eucharist was administered to him by no less than Domnus, Bishop of Antioch, with full retinue—so mighty was the achievement of this cure held to be. Perhaps most important, however, is the exegesis the Syriac vita gives to the gospel account of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. Here the text presents this biblical story as providing the cosmological meaning of Christ’s work: the combat with Satan that is fought in and with Christ’s humanity, in which Christ’s victory is wrought and manifested by means of his body. The Syriac vita presents Simeon’s ascetic practice on the pillar, and particularly his annual Lenten fast, as the iconic image of this very gospel account, holding the exact same cosmological import. ²²

Over and over again, Theodoret and the Syriac vita mark the activities and events of Simeon’s vocation as culminating or reaching their resolution in his reception of the eucharist from the hands of Mar Bas or another of the area clergy. Here, I think, is our clue to the careful structure that defined Simeon’s daily practice as he ministered to the endless streams of pilgrims and supplicants that flowed to his pillar each day—“a human sea,” as Theodoret termed it. ²³ For this is what Theodoret tells us: “He spends the whole night and the day up till three p.m. [the ninth hour] in prayer. After three p.m. he first delivers the divine teaching to those present and then, after receiving the request of each and effecting some healings, he resolves the quarrels of the disputants. Around sunset he then begins his conversation with God.” ²⁴ What we have here, of course, is the basic structure of the eucharistic liturgy as it [End Page 530] was celebrated at the time: first, the proclamation and exposition of scripture; then, the litanies of supplication and petition (in fact repeated at several points in the service); then, the reconciliation or peace, an action viewed as early as Irenaeus of Lyons as essential to the efficacy of the eucharist itself; ²⁵ and finally, communion between the human and the divine.

The liturgical structure of Simeon’s day is highlighted further by the role our hagiographies often give to the manner by which villages and towns brought their concerns before the saint. In these cases, the priest of the community would petition on behalf of his flock, or the priest would lead the community in holy procession to the pillar, carrying tapers and swinging censers. ²⁶ The separate segments of Orthodox liturgy then (as now) were joined together by processions, in which clergy and attendants chanting prayers and litanies moved in solemn order back and forth between the people of the church community and the altar of God. It is this continual movement between the human and divine spheres that the eucharistic commentaries of Simeon’s era stress (e.g., those by Theodoret and Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite). ²⁷ By such ritual movement did supplicants approach the saint; within such a ritual context did he respond. Liturgical rites mediated the saint’s ascetic endeavors in relation to the larger worshiping community, tying them to the life of the church, and specifically to the church as it constituted a civic entity.

The Syriac vita conveys this vividly in its account of the time when Simeon literally went “on strike” against the civic duties he was required to carry out as holy man. ²⁸ Simeon had heard that people complained about his demands—the rich, because he commanded their response to the needs of the poor and oppressed, and the poor, because he admonished them to conduct their lives with upright devotion. Burdened to the extreme by the weight of patronage, and deeply grieved by human recalcitrance, the saint in fury simply stopped. He told his disciples to refuse all who came, regardless of purpose. For thirty days the needy came to find no relief for their hunger nor advocacy for their oppression; the wealthy came to find no one to receive their largesse for distribution or to direct their course. “So both sides went away distressed.” ²⁹ At last a frightful divine vision browbeat the saint into submission and sent him [End Page 531] back to work. When Simeon had stopped his ministry of patronage, the entire leitourgia—public service—of the community had ground to a halt. Without him, civic order could not be maintained. The saint’s liturgical activity, then, could not be extricated from its civic ramifications. Moreover, his ascetic discipline had purpose only when practiced within the discipline of the church as a civic community.

Theodoret’s chapter on Simeon can almost be read as a handbook of church order; his overall emphasis is on the form and structure of Simeon’s vocation and activity in relation to these same aspects of the institutional life of the church. By contrast, the Syriac vita reads like the mystagogical commentary to the handbook; its concern is the symbolic layers of meaning contained in each act and event of the saint’s career. For example, Theodoret stressed Simeon’s obedience to ecclesiastical authority (and not least to Theodoret’s own episcopal prerogative) in terms that ring clearly of an agenda of social control: the charismatic saint is depicted as obedient to the insitutional authority of the church, and therefore in no way a threat to that authority, despite his massive public veneration. The Syriac vita, however, tells us the revelatory purpose served by the saint in this regard: for when Simeon received his great charge from Moses and Elijah to care for the poor, the suffering, and the needy of the world, he was charged too with the task of caring for the priests and canons of the church, for ensuring that they be treated with proper reverence and obedience. ³⁰ The church institution was shown to be as much in need of his ministry as any of the oppressed who sought his succor. Indeed, his solicitude for the clergy was the hallmark of his career, according to this text: “All the priests of God were like sons to the blessed father [Simeon], and he embraced them under the arms of his prayers like a mother her children.” ³¹ Simeon’s relationship to the clergy is set up as essential to the prophetic vocation to which his Lord had called him. Without appropriate order in the church’s sacramental offices as in her rites, Simeon’s charge to serve and heal could not be fulfilled. His labors were hence never solitary, nor independent of the ecclesial whole.

The Syriac vita, more than any other text about Simeon, presents the saint in liturgical terms. Here there is only unceasing worship. Imagery and activity are liturgical in reference, as we have seen, but, more pointedly, this text demands the ritual engagement of the reader or listener by emphasizing the sensory experiences of the witnesses who [End Page 532] encountered the saint—whether pilgrims or disciples—as being precisely those bodily sensations that accompany liturgical actions. Sensory imagery guides the reader or listener throughout this text, always with reference to how liturgical activity elicits and utilizes sensory experience to convey divine encounter, revelation, and redemption. There are sacred smells: Simeon burns incense in fervent yet uncomprehending devotion prior to his conversion, and offers it with still greater fervor thereafter. ³² Simeon becomes incense when the angel leads him to take the place of the incense on the altar and thereby take up his stance on the pillar. ³³ In Simeon’s own body, the disciples experience the stench of mortality transformed into the clear fragrance of sanctity. ³⁴ There is sacred touch. Prostrations, signing the cross, and anointings with oil, water, dirt, and hnana (the holy mixture of all three) accompany the saint’s every action. ³⁵ Indeed, the first public miracle Simeon performs after leaving the monasteries is to bless a flask of oil, causing it to gush forth in such quantities that years later the oil was still “a healing and help” for all who came. ³⁶ There is holy taste, and not only that of the eucharist that repeatedly marks Simeon’s course: When Simeon ends one of his great fasts, the food that had been left with him as meager sustenance is found to be uneaten; this food Mar Bas and the regional priests and deacons distribute to all the people for a blessing, just as the disciples of Christ had fed the 5000 with the five loaves and two fish that Christ had blessed on the mountain. ³⁷ There is sacred sight: Simeon’s visions are received in blazing light, just as his disciples time and again climb the ladder to find him transfigured, radiant and light filled. ³⁸ There is holy hearing. References to the Old Testament prophets as to the work of Christ are laced through this text like lectionary readings, proclaiming God’s Word to the faithful. ³⁹

The Syriac vita links every sensory experience to its liturgical counterpart. ⁴⁰ I have argued elsewhere that the hagiographies about Simeon the [End Page 533] Elder stress the encounter with Simeon, whether by pilgrims or monks, as a sensory one, by stressing the bodily experiences the encounter elicits. ⁴¹ Simeon is thus shown to have revealed the divine to the human not only through activity in and with his own body, but also through the sensory experiences he caused within the body of the witness—and I mean here not the recipient of his miracles, but the witness of those works. The believer who read or heard these stories, then, was not a passive spectator as human and divine encountered one another in the locus of Simeon’s body. The texts portrayed the stylite’s practice as a process whereby the saint’s body was remade and fashioned anew to become a channel for the holy in the physical realm. Further, these texts portrayed the faithful witness to that re-creation as one whose own body was also changed, rendered conducive to divine expression in and through human experience. In the case of the witness, that change was indicated through the sensory qualities that accompanied the encounter with Simeon. Thus, through the hagiographer’s craft, the witness became an active participant in the task of bridging between human and divine, understanding the accomplishment of that bridge not only by the saint’s activity, but also by the witness’ own physical response to it (if one can stand near to a gangrenous stylite and smell not rot but the sweet aroma of Paradise, one’s own body as well as his has been changed). Because these sensory experiences are presented through the lens of liturgical and therefore collective reference, their inclusion in the texts serves to incorporate the reader or listener into the same ritual process that joins Simeon to the larger church.

When we turn from the texts about Simeon the Elder to the Life of Simeon the Younger, we see the same themes of liturgical process brought to more elaborate levels. Written by an unidentified contemporary a good century and more after the latest of the vitae of the Elder, the text follows a similar strategy of liturgical reference and sensory engagement. A sketch of this enormous vita will suffice to make the point. ⁴² [End Page 534]

The Life of Simeon the Younger is a boon for the liturgical historian, providing detailed descriptions of the structure and content of various ritual practices the saint is said to have followed. It contains more references to the use of incense than any other hagiography known to us. ⁴³ It quotes the prayer used to bless the incense; ⁴⁴ it quotes the Trisaghion (the Thrice-Holy Hymn). ⁴⁵ It indicates how many and sometimes which psalms were chanted, when and how the Lord’s prayer was used, when the creed should be recited, and what sacred texts other than scripture one could employ in prayer. It indicates the proper order of various kinds of services, marking the sequences of censing, kneeling, petitions, preaching, recitation of prayers, laying on of hands, processions, and hymns. ⁴⁶ The attention to this kind of detail is notable, not least because it contrasts substantially with the parallel material in the texts we have considered thus far. In those texts, we had liturgical imagery in the broad sense and references to liturgical activity without elaboration. With the Life of Simeon the Younger, we have a remarkable specificity of information on the ritual activity that constituted this saint’s practice and career (or that constituted the liturgical life known by the writer).

At the level of narrative we find a similar situation. The liturgical imagery of the vitae of Simeon the Elder is rendered into concrete events within the narrative account of Simeon the Younger. ⁴⁷ Even the story’s [End Page 535] outline conveys the liturgical agenda. Simeon’s grandparents were perfumers. ⁴⁸ His mother when newly wed awoke from a vision foretelling the life of her illustrious son to find a ball of incense in her hand, its scent so sweet that it defied the understanding of all who smelled it. ⁴⁹ This Simeon mounted his first pillar at the age of seven, and with him we find the first explicit identification of the stylite as living crucifix. ⁵⁰ This Simeon is anointed with perfumed oil in visions, and divinely protected from marauding Persians by clouds of sweet fragrance. ⁵¹ Delicious scents waft from him. ⁵² In fervent prayer he can burn incense without fire; ⁵³ in turn, if a pilgrim of suspect motives brings him incense for his usage, Simeon can burn it so that it smokes a lethal stench carried throughout the land. ⁵⁴ Supplicants who pray for his intercession find themselves surrounded by perfume. ⁵⁵ Ordained to the priesthood, this Simeon must have his pillar of great height built with a column and ladder sufficiently substantial to support the comings and goings of communicants receiving the eucharist from his hands. ⁵⁶ His visions frequently show him the celestial liturgy as it is being celebrated, drenched with heavenly fragrance. ⁵⁷ When the monastery runs out of food, Simeon’s liturgical blessing, chanted in procession as the food bins are censed, causes supplies suddenly to appear in unimaginable quantities. ⁵⁸ Portions of the liturgy provide the ritual mechanisms for all authoritative events: consecrating a new pillar, revealing demonic possession, intercessory healing. Supplicants in distant lands and places can pray to this Simeon [End Page 536] for help or healing and find his intercession effective. Simeon himself exhorts that incense be offered on these occasions. In fact, it is the supplicant earnestly offering incense while invoking the help of Simeon that dominates the stories of his miracles in this text, ⁵⁹ and that dominates the iconography on the clay tokens made for pilgrims who visited the pillar. ⁶⁰ In the case of Simeon the Elder, the local ecclesiastical structure had appropriated the saint into its center through eucharistic practice. By contrast, Simeon the Younger exercised his priestly office specifically as a liturgical one from his pillar, relocating the ecclesial community into himself as center. ⁶¹

At every point in the texts I have discussed, the crucial factor is the liturgy. ⁶² Liturgy is the instrument by which the stylite’s devotion is harnessed and brought to fruitful order. Liturgy works the process by which the stylite’s body is rendered healed, holy, and efficacious. Liturgy provides the mechanisms by which the stylite can be approached—by anyone, great or small—and by which he can respond in turn. Liturgy binds the stylite’s ascetic activities to the daily working life of the world around him. Liturgy binds him to his church; liturgy binds him to his Lord.

Liturgical imagery framed and defined every gesture, stance, and activity of the stylite’s body in these texts. ⁶³ The issue is not whether each [End Page 537] particular episode or ritual described refers to an actual rite. The power of the text depends rather on the liturgical resonances carried by the language and ritual imagery. The liturgy known to everyone who heard or read these texts provided the overarching frame of reference by which the separate pieces of the story were held together in a loosely defined ritual association. Thus, liturgical activity determined that the stylite’s askesis was not only a discipline, but also a transformation in which the Old Man was cast off and the New Man put on; ⁶⁴ ultimately, liturgy transfigured the ascetic body of the stylite into the ecclesial body of the church. By this process of ritual representation, the stylite became not the stranger par excellence, but one whose body—triumphant and glorious as that of the Second Adam himself— imaged the body of the worshiping community in that form it gained through the salvific process of the liturgy. Although the stylite has represented to scholars the individual ascetic virtuoso, who by his very singularity could wield the power of institutions, in fact, I would argue, these texts in the end present us with no individuals. Yes, the stylite was patron, exemplar, and negotiator. He was all this because his body held within itself and displayed through its visible activity the ecclesial body of the church, an institution which during the period of Late Antiquity managed to appropriate and absorb the various traditional institutions by which power was exercised in political, economic, and social realms.

As mechanisms of social control, these texts go far to reconcile the poles of charismatic and institutional authority. They do so by their stress on the ritual process of liturgical practice. However, ritual activity negotiates order through strategies that both uphold social order and reconfigure it at the same time. ⁶⁵ Simeon’s body achieved discipline and efficacy as it came to be molded and shaped by the ritual practices of the church institution. In turn, his ascetic practice caused the church itself to reshape the practices of its own body. For to include Simeon within the eucharistic liturgy of the church, the church had to move that liturgy outside its own walls: the clergy ministered to Simeon where he was, on a mountainside, on a pillar. By that move, the sacred order enacted within the space of a sanctuary—contained within the walls of a church building—was now found to be enacted in the landscape itself. In the great cities of the empire this was the era of the stational liturgy: a liturgy performed throughout the urban space of its community, a liturgy that [End Page 538] claimed that space by public ritual as Christianity’s own. ⁶⁶ I think we find a similar process here. This is a move that returns us to the most traditional forms of religious practice known in the Mediterranean world: a public practice that inscribes the life of the individual into that of the civic community. ⁶⁷ In the process of Christianization, this was more than a matter of social control; it was a matter of redefining landscape and the identities that populated it, the ordering of the diffused space of the countryside.

Ritual provides a location of meaning and purpose for each participant in its process. Its power lies precisely in the multivalence of its activities, as it negotiates between tradition and circumstance, continuity and change. If we are to understand what Simeon’s work as holy man meant, we must understand the profundity of its ritual context. Consider the words with which another great Syrian holy man, John Chrysostom, summoned his congregation to the eucharist: “Let us . . . approach this table. . . . Let there be no Judas present, no one avaricious. . . . Let us also go out to the hands of the poor. . . . Let no inhuman person be present, no one who is cruel and merciless, no one at all who is unclean. I say these things to you who receive, and also to you who minister.” ⁶⁸ These words are the sum of the stylite’s hagiographical tradition as it functioned in its sociopolitical context.

At Simeon’s pillar, the poor and the powerless, the wealthy and influential, the clergyman, the bishop, the nun, the monk, the layperson all had a place of necessary value. This was so because the stylite exercised a ritual practice dependent upon mutually inclusive ascetic and liturgical meanings. We should not be surprised if the implications reverberated throughout the sociopolitical structures of Late Antiquity. ⁶⁹ The body was fashioned anew, and with it, human order as well.