Looking at the history of the saints is a bit like looking at a cliff 's face: You can see an unbroken wall of rock, smooth and timeless, or you can read it as a geologist would, tracing the striations, the vestiges of geological epochs, an entire history of dynamic change that only slowly formed into the unmovable thing before you. So, too, with the saints; you can read them all as separate manifestations of the same unalterable divine moment, or you can read them as a long history of endlessly changing, constantly shifting expressions of faith. As I've collected stories of these strange saints over the years, what has repeatedly struck me is how far they seem to deviate from what most of us understand to be orthodoxy— these are saints who murder, saints who gouged out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. Put another way, the history of these saints helps enlarge our concept of faith. It was this realization that spurred the making of this book.
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; it terrifies ordinary humans. What Deckard learns as he hunts down these replicants is that the line between human and more-than-human is elusive and that it's impossible to know for sure on which side each of us falls.
The renegade replicants in Blade Runner become violent because they are rapidly reaching the end of their four-year life spans, and they're desperate to extend their lives in any way possible. The saints, however, desire the opposite. They don't want more life; they want more death. In a 2005 interview, the novelist Mary Gordon described her memories of the path to sainthood in the 1950s:
I remember, before we were being prepared for our first communion, we would be six or seven, we were told that we should pray for a martyr's death. So you would have these seven year olds saying, "Oh my God I better pray that . . . a Communist will say, 'Either say there is no God or we'll shoot you.' " . . . [So] when I was about nine or ten, I would put thorns in my shoes, to try to walk around, to experience the preliminaries of martyrdom, so I'd be toughened up for the real thing.
In a religion centered around a God who willingly allowed Himself to be crucified, the idea of a martyr's death has always been important. The chance to die, to be rid of one's body, all the while affirming one's faith, was nothing short of a gift. Christianity isn't unique in this, of course; Gordon's childhood memories echo those of the Japanese writer Kenzaburo O¯e, who was born in the years before World War II and underwent similar indoctrination. Called to the front of the classroom, like all Japanese schoolchildren, O¯e was asked, "What would you do if the emperor commanded you to die?" The young boy replied, knees shaking, "I would die, sir; I would cut open my belly and die."
Neither Gordon