After the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, there was no longer an easy and straight path to martyrdom. Without persecution, torture, and execution, many saints turned to self-inflicted punishment: self-flagellation, deprivation, asceticism. "I have no greater enemy than my body," Francis of Assisi wrote. "We should feel hatred for our body, for its vices and sinning." But few still consider this mode of worship through extreme physical self-torment holy, and this kind of extreme vocation represented by the saints is hardly to be celebrated. Even while Pope John Paul II was (according to some sources) privately whipping himself, he publicly preached the sacredness of the human body and the need to respect it.
The saint's hatred of the mortal body, after all, entails a recklessness bordering on the suicidal. One of Italy's patron saints, the fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena, regularly shoved branches down her throat to make herself vomit the meager food she ate (a process she called "retribution") and was ultimately killed by this holy anorexia, dying of malnutrition and thirst at the age of thirty-three.
The saints, one realizes, are to be revered but not imitated. They're there to show us how to be human by being what we could never be.
Simeon the Stylite chose his own mode of self-punishment in part because of its symbolic value: Standing on a column, he was elevated, above the world literally and figuratively, yearning for heaven and for God. It was because of this that other hermits followed his example, and why living atop a pole became a particularly popular form of asceticism for hundreds of years. It was a very visible metaphor, clearly announcing one's devotion to heaven.
At the same time, Simeon's gesture announced his rejection of the ground below, and for this reason many commentators since have been particularly derisive toward the stylites. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the nineteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon had nothing but scorn for Simeon and his asceticism: "This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility both of the mind and the body," he noted, going on to claim, "nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves are susceptible of any lively affection for the rest of mankind." For Gibbon, the crime of an ascetic like Simeon is the implied narcissism in such a renunciation of the world, an internal struggle at the expense of a life of charity.
Gibbon had a strong contempt for Christianity, blaming its spread for the decline of the empire that had once tried to eradicate it, so his distaste for Simeon is not surprising— but beyond his personal aversion to the desert saint, his comments came at a time when attitudes toward ascetics were turning from awe to contempt and pity. It was Gibbon's account of Simeon, along with that in William Hone's Every-Day Book, that inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to write a long, dramatic monologue from the saint's perspective in 1833. "The watcher on the column till the end," Simeon calls himself in Tennyson's poem, one "unfit for earth, unfit for heaven." The saints belong to both worlds, but in occupying that strange halfway position, they paradoxically belong to neither. Unlike angels, their home is not in heaven; unlike Jesus, they are not on loan. They are Earth's rejects; they have no real place here and so spend their time with their eyes watching God.
As he surveys his final hours, Tennyson's Simeon is plagued with doubt. Rather than speaking as a figure of certainty and piety, he's unsure whether he's earned sainthood, or even if anyone has witnessed his devotion.
O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?
Show me the man hath suffer'd more than I.
For did not all thy martyrs die one death?
For either they were stoned, or crucified,
Or burn'd in fire, or boil'd in oil, or sawn
In twain beneath the ribs; but I die here
To-day, and whole years long, a life of death.
Simeon became a saint not because of his good works or his martyrdom but because he outmartyred the martyrs. He didn't die; he turned his life into death. "A life of death": This is the true vocation of the saint— the walking dead, zombies in their faith.
Over a hundred years after Tennyson's poem, the Spanish director Luis Buñuel revisited the saint's legend with his film Simon of the Desert, in which a similarly named stylite and his trials embody all the failings Buñuel perceived in the Catholic Church. Buñuel's steadfast Simon is beset by peasants who plead for relief and offer no gratitude, or even surprise, in the face of Simon's miracles; he is surrounded by bickering monks whose banal concerns create an endless babble of noise beneath his pillar; and he is tormented by a low-rent Satan (played by Silvia Pinal), who seems to tempt Simon mostly out of boredom. Simon, the straight man to this absurdity, remains pious, if sometimes exasperated— yet it's clear that his refusal to engage with the world has itself become part of the problem.
For Buñuel, as for Tennyson, the saints are not just more than human; they are also less than human: cast off and exiled, mar ginal figures on the border of ridicule for their absurd failures to live among us. But even so, the hermit himself is not Buñuel's target. As the film critic Michael Wood notes, "what's worse than ridiculous, in Buñuel's view, is the religion that has taken this man's life away from him, the service of that God who never dies. Simon is neither the first nor the last to abandon the intricate human world for the sake of an extreme idea; and his crazy, admirable virtue is part of the problem because it is admirable as well as crazy."
Buñuel fought a lifelong struggle against the Catholic Church and what he perceived as its backward thinking and hypocrisy, but, as Wood notes, "God can't ultimately condemn serious atheists. They pay far more attention to him than halfhearted believers do, and they help to keep him in business." Buñuel is closer to Milton than he is to the average churchgoer because, despite his derision, he remains deadly serious. He knows the stakes, and he takes his adversary seriously. In films like Belle du Jour and Viridiana, Buñuel takes aim at those who are repressed by decorum and religion, unable to free their desires. He despises the saint's piety but not his excesses. Indeed, Buñuel's cynicism hides a desire for that excess, for a life lived at the margins.
Like Buñuel, I am less interested in the piety of the saints than in their excesses, their madness, their inability to live normal lives. I want to open up the meaning of the saint. I want to see what moves at the margins; I want to push at the boundaries of the human until something gives way.
We now live in a world far less tolerant of such extremes, which is why, perhaps, it has become so compelling to revisit the saints in a contemporary context. Buñuel's film ends in the city, as the fifth-century saint is miraculously transported via a jetliner to an unnamed metropolis and deposited in a nightclub, where young kids are dancing something called "Radioactive Flesh." It's the "final dance," Silvia Pinal's Satan tells Simon: "You'll have to stick it out. You'll have to stick it out until the end."
Gustave Flaubert, too, who spent his life trying to write a book based on the life of Saint Anthony, ended one draft in a city where Anthony walks through an urbanscape where "smoke escapes from the houses, tongues of fire twist upwards in the dense air. Iron bridges span rivers of filth; carriages, sealed as tightly as coffins, encumber the long, straight streets." The temptation to strand the saint in the modern city comes perhaps from the fact that saints no longer belong there. Though there are modern saints, the idea of a saint is always anachronistic— an occupation from another time that has no real corollary in