1Demons, the sick and the obsessed : these are the deuteragonists in the drama staged in the Ancient Life of Symeon the Younger, their cries resounding in a multitude of voices, their physicalness defining the urgent need for answers in a space that is condendus : evil here is never an abstract presence, it is broken into the many ills defeated by the stylite in his daily exercise of power, amidst a throng of figures anticipating the most imaginative t riptychs by Hieronymus Bosch.

2The Ancient Life of Symeon the Younger we here refer to, is the oldest remaining biography of this Christian ascetic who lived in the Antioch region between 521 and 592 AD :1 stylitism, as an ascetic bios entailing stasis on the top of a pillar or on several pillars of increasing height–from which the ascetic does not descend, if not under exceptional conditions–,2 was by then an established practice not only in Syria but also in the heart of the empire, in the Byzantium banlieue,3 where none other than an emperor, Leo I, had ordered the erection of the most impressive of columns for the benefit of Daniel the Stylite.4

3The founder of this ascetic practice, Symeon the Elder, came in his turn also from northern Syria, where he lived between c. 390 and 459 : the information we have about his life reveals the gradual definition of a bios which still had to conquer and establish its own role in the already extremely rich background of Syrian, and generally Eastern Christian, asceticism. The biographies of Symeon the Elder, in particular the famous one included in the Historia Religiosa by Theodoret of Cyrrhus,5 denote a process of construction of consensus culminating in the reversal of the dialectic relationship between normality and deviance, transformed in that between normality and sanctified exceptionality. From the status of a deviant practice, whose xeniteia6 might plunge the ascetic into adiaphoria and become therefore suspiciously demoniac,7 stylitism evolves to the level of gaining such a degree of recognition as to become a significant breeding ground for Byzantine saints and to entertain particularly close relationships with the dimension of power and its exercise.

4In The Ancient Life of Symeon the Younger we find a representation of sanctity in forms and stylistic elements which had been by then largely codified ; there is no need to show the process of ascetic construction of the ‘sanctified’ body, the process is instead stressed as something naturally taken for granted ; it represents a kind of holiness defined, so to say, ab origine. Sanctity here is in fact not represented as in fieri, but rather as in actu : the ascetic process, which in the biographies of Symeon the Elder constructs the holiness of the stylite, seems here instead to represent the semantic code through which holiness is communicated, the signifier of an already largely established signified. Symeon the Younger does not in fact need to “make an ascetic of himself,” as he is one even before being born : it is his body, or rather his bodily habitus, which first of all becomes a sign of this ; a body which “makes choices” even before the saint has acquired the faculty of speech. And it is indeed in relationship to the body–as the instrument and place where the “correct choice” seems to ontologically be situated–that the theme of abstention from sacrificial meats is developed. If on the one hand the issue is related to the Pauline reflection on meat s acrificed to idols8 and moreover reminds of patristic arguments against pagan sacrifices, on the other hand it is posed here in definitely peculiar terms : it is in fact the holy body which enacts, on the stage of the world, the refusal of the pagan θήσία, in the name of the only καθαρὰ θήσία, that of the onlybegotten “Our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”9

5While, as we will see, from the top of his pillar, as a central figure on the stage, Symeon daily re-actualises the deaThon the cross and resurrection of Christ, as a newborn he already effects a new order of the real, affirming renewed demarcation lines, separating left and right, hot and cold, healthy and sick, pious and impious, Christian and pagan. And it is indeed the body, or rather the display, the spectacle of Symeon’s body, which enacts this cosmicisation of the real, ritually and before any logos, reaching the point of exasperating the peculiar trait of stylitic ascesis represented by theama : the stylitic bios in fact, above and beyond the different historical and individual variations and above and beyond the specific intent of each biographical representation, emerges as having a peculiarly performative nature, as it is constructed and defined by means of the relationship with one or more spectators, be they the saint’s relatives, the monks and the archimandrites of the monastery where the ascetic debut takes place, or the more or less important pilgrims with which the stylite converses from the top of the pillar. The public is not simply the passive receiver of the ascetic performance and plays instead an important role in its definition. This ascetic-spectator relationship becomes constant from the very moment in which the stylite climbs on the pillar : while the individual can evade mankind in the solitude of prayer, his persona is always present and becomes a permanent spectacle, even when he is not interacting with pilgrims by means of miracles and prophecies or simply acting as a mediator. The persona of the stylite, rather than his body, gains definition by means of a fully performative ascesis, a performance which is not only a visual display but becomes also to some extent ‘interactive’ : the fasting, the vigil, the resistance to pain manifested by the open and ulcerous wounds are theama, but a theama which is not only ‘seen’ but also “acted upon” by the spectators themselves. They in fact interact with the ‘living’ body of the saint, not only with his relics : they touch him, they ‘discover’ him under his garments, they ‘unmask’ him, they smell him, they ‘draw’ from him as from a living relic, to the point of “trying” him to verify his holiness.10

6And the very bodily person of Symeon the Younger becomes i mmediately eloquent, even before he has climbed on the pillar, even before he has mastered the logos : his ascesis belongs, before his birth, with that of his mother Martha. Martha’s parents had forced her to marry and to abandon her will to offer her body pure to the Lord ;11 she therefore adopted, almost as a form of compensation, a particularly austere lifestyle regimen. While the choice of such a bios is depicted as a form of compensation for the loss of “social virginity,” the conception of Symeon is represented as a co mpensation for the loss of “virginity” tout court : the woman in fact–relates the biographer –, realising she had lost “the ornament of virginity”–τò καλλώπισµα τῆς παρθενίας12 –and that through marriage she had reached the world,13 visits the shrine of John the Baptist at the gates of Antioch14 to pray God for the gift of offspring that would prove “εἰς λειτοήργίαν τῆς τοῦ δεσπóτοή ἡµῶν Ἰηστοῦ ἀγαθóτητος.”15

7And it is indeed the liturgical mission and the ritual dimension which specifically define the life of the saint consecrated by the Baptist : as during her stay at the shrine waiting for the divine answer the woman does not simply tearfully beg for God’s grace, but spends instead entire days and nights feeding only on bread and salt, drinking water and sleeping on the ground,16 it is the Baptist himself, with in a ritual of incubatio, who invites the woman to unite with her husband and prophesises the conception of her son. He–the Baptist would later tell her upon appearing to the woman a second time–shall be called Symeon, “he will consume neither meat nor wine, nor other foods prepared by the techne of man :” “Kρεῶν ἢ oἴνοή ἢ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν ἀπὸ ἀνθρωπίνης τεχνης σκεαήαζοµένων οὐ µεταλήψεται.”17 The woman will have to carefully observe these prescriptions so that he “λειτοήργòς γὰρ ἔσται … Kήρίoή τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡµῶν.”18

8The Baptist takes care of announcing what the child shall eat, thereby founding a personal orthopraxis : bread, honey, salt, and water as a drink. As opposed to the Vitae of previous stylites, in which we observe the saint as he gradually and arduously constructs his own ascetic journey, the biography of Symeon the Younger depicts the saint triumphing from the very start and manifesting as a saint since his very childhood, by means of an exceptionality of the bodily habitus which does not require learning : the absence of an ascetic techne is somehow mirrored by the presence of those foods which do not belong to the ambit of human techne. While such a dietary regimen belongs in the wave of the Syrian ascetic tradition of evoking the “dreadful freedom of angels,”19 the possibility for man to regain to a certain extent “the angelic condition of Adam in the paradise lost,”20 it at the same time echoes motifs of late-ancient anti-sacrificial thought (neo-platonic and neo-pythagorean in particular21), although this tradition has to be kept clearly separated from the Christian tradition which “on the one hand condemned […] pagan sacrifices as they were addressed to demons, and on the other hand recognised in the deathof Christ and in the s acramental rituality connected to it (in particular in the Eucharist) a well defined sacrificial reality.”22

9The biography appears to be rooted in this perspective : Symeon’s diet is such an important marker as to resolve in itself the exceptionality of the saint with in the annunciation.23 The Baptist, who had announced the Lamb of God24 whose sacrifice would take upon itself the sins of the world, in the ‘annunciation’ to Martha defines the ascesis of the child exclusively by means of the dietary regime, with out even mentioning the future choice of the pillar. Dietary orthopraxis seems to be a sufficient manifestation and guarantee of being “εἰς λειτοήργίαν,” founded, before Symeon’s birth, on the one hand on the Baptist’s revelation, and on the other hand on the mother’s behaviour.

10John the Baptist moreover sanctions the exceptionality of Symeon’s bodily praxis : he invites in fact Martha, once she has given birth to the child, to suckle him solely from her right breast. In no way–he says– is the child to touch her left breast, since τῶν γὰρ δεξιῶν ἐστι τò παιδάριoν25 : he belongs to the “right side” of things, the right side which in New Testament texts marks the glory of Christ’s Resurrection. Suffice it here to mention the Judgment scene in Matthew 25, 31-46, in which it is said that when the Son of Man comes with all his angels, seated on his throne of glory, he shall separate the sheep from the goats and he will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left, saving the former and condemning the latter to the eternal flame.

11As this is the prediction of the Baptist, Symeon’s belonging to “the right side of things” is concretely manifested : after giving birth to the child painlessly,26 Martha, despite the Baptist’s prescriptions, offers the child her left breast ; the child not only refuses the left breast avoiding to touch it, but tries to get away from it with all his might, crying desperately.27 This episode gives an account of a somehow paradoxical ‘culturalisation’ of the body, considering that it is performed by a newborn during breastfeeding. Symeon, moreover, not only guides his body and defines the space around himself by distinguishing left from right, he also acts on the bodies of others, thus foreshadowing his future thaumaturgic activity. The biographer relates in fact that Martha, concerned about providing the baby with adequate nourishment, attempts several times during the same day to feed him also from her left breast : Symeon perseveres in refusing this.28 During the following night the body of the woman transforms : the left breast, which she had impudently offered the baby, shrinks and becomes similar to that of a man ; the right breast remains instead unaltered.

12While this mutation takes place unseen and by night, the ‘mutated’ body is subsequently openly exhibited by Martha who is afraid and surprised by what has happened to her : she in fact not only shows her breast to her friends, she also tells them what she has seen and how the “evil” thought– logismos–of offering the baby her left breast had come to her.29

13Even though the Baptist had already ratified Symeon’s belonging to the right side of things and his abstention from meat, the baptism of the child marks an actual fundamental discrimen : the biographer relates in fact that, from the moment of baptism, every time his mother ate of the “meat of the sacrificer”– κρέα θύτοή30– Symeon refused to drink her milk and fasted for the entire day.

14This appears to be a particularly significant point : while it seems to bear witness to a still-existing connection–at least at a rhetorical level– between consumption of animal meat and sacrifice,31 it above all reveals the i ntention of the biographer to affirm the absolute incompatibility of ‘pagan’ eating habits and the holy politeia founded on the baptismal rite. The latter is of course not self-referential and assumes a guiding role, by means of its nomothetic function, which inevitably has an impact on the modus vivendi of those around the Saint, also on those who, like Symeon’s mother, already belong in the Christian and ascetic context : Martha, first interlocutor of the saint, has somehow anticipated the future interlocutors of the child, as of the moment of baptism will in fact abstain from the consumption of sacrificial meat.32 The child, whose bodily habitus seems to be ontologically-founded, moreover belongs to a dimension which is ‘other’ than the earthly : the author of the Life relates in fact that after baptism, when he was only two years old, Symeon kept on repeating for seven days consecutively : “I have a father and I do not have a father, I have a mother and I do not have a mother,” expressing–comments the biographer–by means of these words “on the one hand his detachment from earthly things and on the other hand his progress and ascension towards spiritual and heavenly things.”33

15The extraordinary status of the child is generally manifested by a peculiar attention to the care of the self : his mother–the biographer relates–could not bring Symeon near to warm water as the child would immediately fall silent ; she recognised the will of God as the root of the child’s behaviour and thus abstained from “εἰσαγαγεῖν ἐν βαλανείῳ.”34 Abstention from sacrificial meat is however presented as the conditio sine qua non in order for Symeon to be able to become a “sacred vessel” and “precious repository,”35 in order for him to climb the pillar, directly inspired by God, at only seven years of age. The biographer tells us that God himself had suggested that Symeon should have a column built close to the one of John, the stylite whose monastery the child had visited to pursue askesis : “once the column had been erected, Symeon stood on his feet up there,” having only a small loggia for shelter.36

16The posture of the stylite is ‘signified’ by the biographer by means of the image of the crucified Christ :37 he appears in fact to the child Symeon and grants him the choice of the pillar, inviting the ascetic to be strong and virile–σὺ δὲ ἴσχήε καὶ ἀνδρίζοή –,38 completing the re-actualisation of the καθαρὰ θήοία began and ultimately made possible by the abstention from sacrificial meat. The stasis on the pillar and the ὑποµονή, the exceptional capability of enduring pain, will “show” to everyone the image of the cross– ὁ τύπος τοῦ σταήροῦ – : Christ himself demands this of Symeon.39 As of this moment “the servant of God”–the biographer relates–“forgot his own body and led an angelic life : he lost memory of the past to stretch out towards the future, imagining new mortifications day after day.”40 This forgetfulness of the body is manifested in the forms of competitive asc eticism and finds its legitimisation in the consecration of Symeon operated by high ecclesiastical authority : the archbishop of Antioch Efrem himself recognises in the stylite child the image of crucifixion and triggers the movement of crowds towards him.41

17The child, who has been able to distinguish right from left since the days of breastfeeding, proves to be equally precocious in obtaining consent from a church, which has by now digested ascetic practices seen with suspicion only a century before. In this case, perhaps more than in any other, Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s considerations apply : according to her, the action of the ascetic, who “enacted the image of Christ,” “was more than imitation : in the image of Christ, the holy one could do what Christ had done.”42 It is no coincidence that, directly after giving an account of the ecclesiastical l egitimisation of Symeon’s stasis as an image of the cross, the biographer describes on the one hand the movement of the masses towards the stylite43 and on the other hand the most gruesome ascetic excesses by means of which Symeon seems to make of himself a complete martyr : the child asks in fact for a thick rope and then coils it tightly around his body ; the rope is so tight and coarse that his flesh is consumed all the way to his hips and his blood flows in streams. Symeon of course resists in disregard of the pain, until the wound becomes infected and produces a terrible stench which brings on him the attention of others.44 There is another particularly significant episode : his biographer tells us in fact that Symeon remained in a squatting position for a whole year ; as a consequence his lower limbs became gangrenous, to the point of becoming glued to each other and emitting an horrible foetor of putrefaction.45 The body of the child, saved by divine intervention and strengthened by baptism, resists to what would prove unbearable for a man. He survives a disease which leads to putrefaction of the flesh and thus foreshadows death : the wounds, manifestation and proof of the καρτερία and of the ὑποµoνή of the saint, and re-actualisation of the ὑποµoνή of Christ, are overcome thanks to divine intervention and seem to prefigure worldly and otherworldly salvation for all those who turn to the saint seeking relief, a concrete salvation from diseases, from infertility, from demons, or from the Persians. And with in this rich symbolic constellation the theme of abstinence from sacrificial meat plays once again a very relevant role, in a borderland like roman Syria in the Justinian and post-Justinian age, where “bearing witness” to the abstention from sacrificial meat by means of the ascetic martyrdom meant stressing boundaries which were felt as being dangerously precarious and faint : proclaiming the redeeming value of the καθαρὰ θήοία implied a ffirming the value of civilisation against the impending b arbarism of Persians at the gates of Antioch. The biographer does not in fact hesitate to connect the tragic event of the Persian sack of Antioch in 54046 with the offering of libations and sacrifices to demons performed by some of the town’s inhabitants ; such instances of anomia provoke the wrathof God. God himself anticipates the event appearing to Symeon, who had by then been on the pillar for a long time : the inhabitants of Antioch offer τράπεζα, σπονδή and φήσία to the demons, causing the ‘jealousy’ of God.47 Because of this–God tells Symeon–they will be given into the hands of an ethnos devoid of sense and wisdom ἀσύνετος, i.e. the Persians.48 God, seeing that men betray the “New Testament” abandoning the καθαρὰ θήοία, punishes Antioch delivering the town to the barbaric fury. There are many levels interwoven in this hagiographic discourse nearing more and more a “discourse of truth,” and they are held together by the figure of the saint who resolves them in the stasis on the pillar : interceding with God, he has the Persians leave Antioch. Symeon, who as a newborn refused sacrificial meat and as a child subjected himself to a regimen of fasting so harsh as to be unbearable even for an adult, becomes λειτοήργóς of the Lord and in so doing he safeguards not only the people of Antioch, but the whole of roman Christianity opposing barbarism.

18Only the cross has the power to redeem, and the body of the stylite, constructed by means of an ascesis which refuses sacrificial meat from the very beginning, enlivens on earThthe event of the cross and procures salvation from the Persians : some of them, after setting Antioch on fire and slaughtering its inhabitants, pass by the column of the stylite on the Wondrous Mountain and try in vain to conquer it,49 but are ultimately forced to desist. In another case, divine glory miraculously hides from the sight of a belligerent Persian maniple the saint and all those who had g athered at the foot of his pillar seeking refuge.50

19Sacrifices to demons not only are powerless against barbarity, they moreover precipitate man into catastrophe, with in a logic in which civilisation is earned by the sacrifice of Christ :51 it is no case that, in this biography, the refusal of meat sacrifices is a parallel theme along with the traditional condemnation of astrology and divination. So, during one of the terrible earthquakes that struck Antioch during the sixth century, the Ἑλληνίζοντες and those who were lost in “the error of astrology”52 are given to predicting the total destruction of the town, while Symeon instead intercedes with the Saviour of the world who subsequently puts an end to the seism. There are moreover several episodes in which the stylite, healing bodies by means of his thaumaturgic action, provides also healing from the “Hellenic malady :” it is the case–just to mention one example among many–of a citizen of Antioch–an Ἕλλην–afflicted by a cruel disease, who is granted his health only after having ‘anathemised’ Aphrodite and all other idols–πάντα τὰ εἴδωλα–and having invoked, by intercession of Symeon, the help of Christ incarnated in the womb of the “Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God.”53

20When an entire life led ‘ritually’ as a permanent liturgy is substituted to pagan sacrifices, re-actualising the sacrifice of Christ, it cannot but prove ‘effective’ as opposed to the failure of the latter : whereas sacrifices and divination cause deaThand destruction, it grants salvation for the soul and, before that, for the body.

21Considering that the permanence of pagan elements is variously attested in Syria during the sixth century, to the point that the a ccusation of p aganism addressed to Gregorius, patriarch of Antioch, was able to cause an affaire with vast and various implications,54 the clash testified by the biography is perhaps to be seen as taking place more on a hermeneutic than on an evenemential level. What in fact appears to be profoundly at stake is the “maîtrise du sens :”55 while historical sources relate the actual destruction of the opposing faction identified as ‘pagan enemy’ during the Justinian and post-Justinian age,56 the Ancient Life tells us of an equally harsh ‘destruction’ operated on the level of a founding narration, in which the antipagan controversy, as well as the equally dramatic anti-Jewish polemic, seems to illusively re-consolidate the Christian front, which in actuality was fragmentary, or rather torn apart, on the theological and political level.57

22This biography stages a ‘performance’ in which the stylitic bios appears as an extraordinary means of communication, since the sacrifice of the saint is resolved not in the punctual moment of death, as in the case of martyrdom, but in the exceptional capability of resisting ‘alive’ to wounds which would prove ‘deadly’ for others, continuously re-actualising the most f undamental and redeeming event of all : the incarnation, deathand Resurrection of Christ. The ‘white martyrdom’ of Symeon–which was after all not that bloodless–seems to become an anaphora of the sacrifice of Christ, an act of memory and faithin salvation. The Ancient Life of Symeon the Younger appears more than ever as a “discourse of truth :” it narrates in a crude and at times violent way, in which the physicalness of bodies communicates the whole precariousness of existence ; the punitive miracles of the stylite child play a role equal to that played by the miracles of salvation in the process of ordering the cosmos ; the succession of healings and exorcisms becomes hyperbolic, the sign of an age marked by recurring epidemics of plague, earthquakes and wars, an age in which evil itself becomes hyperbolic. To an equal extent, the representation of thaumaturgic work as an expression of a ‘vindictive’ divine justice assumes in the Ancient Life of Symeon the Younger a relevance unheard of in the Greek biographies of previous stylites : it seems to ratify the necessity of a pact of submission along with the pact of mediation. The punishments inflicted by Symeon the Younger proliferate to define the “constitutive dissymmetry,”58 the negative reciprocity founded on a disproportion between giving and receiving : the saint, crowned, resembles more an emperor than a philosopher.

23Symeon’s biographer aims at “the sign of horror,” hits his target, and points it out for the reader, suggesting as a solution a ‘wondrous’ body : while this seems to liturgically incorporate the redeeming event par excellence, it also proposes a new system of sense in which the proof of legitimacy seems to proceed by destruction of the opposing order, a destruction beginning from the ‘innocent’ abstention of a child from sacrificial meat.59