Afterlives of the Saints. Colin Dickey

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      Saint Simeon never spread the gospel in a foreign, dangerous land, and he didn't spend his life devoted to charity and improving the life of his fellow humans. He was not martyred for his faith. He became a saint simply for standing on a pole in the desert for a really long time, which says as much about the time he lived in as about his current reputation. He was born in the Syrian town of Sis around 390 C.E. and joined a monastery when he was sixteen. He took to the monastic life and its deprivations immediately, but he didn't get along well with the other monks. Eager to prove his soul's purity and his scorn for his physical body, he took to waiting until the rest of the monks had gone to sleep and then hanging a heavy stone around his neck to stand vigil all night long. He sought a mastery of his own body, a denial of basic needs like sleep, as proof that his spiritual self was superior to his physical self. But it didn't always work; annoyed that his body, in its weakness, would occasionally fall asleep, Simeon started standing on a small wood log so that if he fell asleep he'd fall off and wake up. It was this behavior that finally alerted the other monks to what he was doing. Bothered by his excessive piety, which they thought bordered on hubris, they asked him to leave.

      He ended up in Antioch and gradually became famous as a holy man. He attracted so much attention that, weary of the constant crowds, Simeon wandered out into the desert, where he found the column he first mounted. He eventually moved to increasingly higher posts and spent the last thirty years of his life on a pillar more than sixty feet high. Unlike Blaine or Dean, he did not have a catheter to handle bodily needs; one church historian described excrement running down the side of Simeon's pillar "like wax dripping down a candle." He stayed there until he died.

      Simeon was not alone; there are records of at least ten other saints who were revered for standing on poles, including Alyspius, who had two smaller pillars constructed on each side of him for those seeking his counsel (one for monks and one for nuns), and may have even outlasted Simeon's record (contemporary sources claim he was up there for about fifty years). These ascetics were known as "stylites," from the Greek stylos, meaning pillar or column— the pole sitters. But even as more and more hermits climbed atop pillars to escape the world, Simeon, the first of them, remained the most well known, the originator of a strange craze that swept the desert in the fifth and sixth centuries.

      Temperatures in the Syrian desert can get down into the 40s in the winter; there are stories of one stylite who was found covered in frost after three cold days— brought down from his pillar, he was found to still be very much alive. In February and March come the rains, followed by sandstorms. And then comes the summer, when the temperature ranges from a low of 104 to highs in excess of 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

      At that temperature, the arteries begin to dilate in order to help dissipate the heat, which leads to a drop in blood pressure. The heart beats faster, trying to keep up, but as the body continues to lose water through dehydration, blood pressure drops further. Fainting, confusion, and hallucinations are common; in addition, the dilated blood vessels can allow for the accumulation of fluid just under the skin, a potentially dangerous condition once known as dropsy. Muscles contract unexpectedly and stay rigid; the body goes into shock.

      But modern medical literature can only tell us so much about the stylites. Even having read the multiple stories— some firsthand— of these pole sitters, it seems simply inconceivable to me that a person, poorly hydrated and malnourished, could last even a few weeks exposed to such conditions, let alone several decades. Perhaps the stories are just fanciful exaggeration. Perhaps Simeon and the others survived due to some extremely rare and lucky constitutions or due to some fluke of physiology. Perhaps it was a miracle.

       Idon't know what really happened, and I've decided that it's not worth asking these questions. You can't treat a saint as you would an ordinary human. When I think of the saints, what comes to mind are the "replicants" in Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner, androids of advanced strength and intelligence whom their creator describes as "more human than human."

      This is the phrase that always comes to my mind when I think of the saints. Unlike the Christ, they are not divine, though divinity may pass through them. They may be miraculous, but even so they remain fully, stubbornly mortal. But while they participate in a common humanity, they lie at the very limit of that humanity— they have pushed what it means to be human to the breaking point, and then beyond. They have taken their own humanity and shattered it.

      As with replicants, there's something dangerous about the saints. To see someone standing on a pole for thirty-five hours is to be impressed; to think of someone standing on a pole for thirty-seven years is to question all notions of will and self, devotion and sanity. Imagine for a moment what you've done in the past thirty-seven years— the cities, countries, continents you've visited; the jobs you've held; the accomplishments you could list; the lives of your children. Then imagine the gesture that renders all of that meaningless, that replaces it with a few motions: sitting, standing, eating, shitting. Praying. We know of repressive regimes that have forced such horrors on dissidents and other prisoners, but willfully to impose that obliteration on oneself for so long seems beyond comprehension.

      In Blade Runner, the replicants are dangerous because they're perfect. They are a threat because they reveal our own limitations, our own obsolescence. It's why they have a four-year lifespan built in, why they're banned from Earth and hunted by crusaders like Harrison Ford's Lieutenant Deckard. Perfection is dangerous; СКАЧАТЬ