The Medieval Monks Who Lived on Top of Giant Pillars

A history of the monastic high life

Aug 02, 2023

Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking along a dirt road in the seventh century Middle East. The sun is hot, the air is dry, your feet are tired. It’s been a long journey, by boat and foot, from your home in Constantinople to where you find yourself now: outside of the walls of the mountainous river city of Antioch. In the bright sunlight, you strain your eyes to catch a distant glimpse of the sight you’ve come all this way to see – and then suddenly, you do. A bright stone pillar, stretching as tall as a church dome with an unsteady-looking wooden platform; and atop it a tiny, bedraggled, flinty old man.

You’ve found him: the Pillar Saint.

Stylite, Constantinople, 11th century

To our modern eyes, this is a profoundly weird image – but it would have been a recognisable, even iconic, one if we were living in the early medieval Middle East. To explain how we got here – and how that guy got on that pillar - we need to step back and tell the origin story of one of the most recognisable characters in medieval life: the monk.

First, let’s wind the clock back all the way to the mid-third century. Rome is still the bustling, million-strong metropole of a continent-spanning empire. Legionaries are off fighting battles against the Goths along the Danube. Christianity is a curious minority sect clinging to life despite often-ferocious persecution from the emperor’s officials. And in the wealthy province of Egypt, a young man, barely 18, who we will come to know as Anthony makes an unusual decision. Mourning the recent death of his parents, he finds inspiration in Christ’s teaching that the perfect man will give everything he has to the poor. Once he’s set aside a little of his money to provide for his younger sister’s welfare and chucked her in a convent, he departs for the endless desolation of Egypt’s desert interior (We have no idea, by the way, what the sister made of all this business. I suspect she was less than impressed).

Eventually, Anthony pitches up in an old, abandoned tomb in the desert, to live a life of isolation and mortification (a religious concept, meaning to deny the desires of the flesh), eating and drinking only just enough to keep his body at bare minimum functionality. Did this make him a devoted servant of Christ who accessed a level of connection with his god unprecedented for a mortal man, or a total bore? Your mileage may vary.

Unfortunately for Anthony, his dream of a life of solitary contemplation didn’t work out as planned. He quickly became a local celebrity, with countless Egyptian Christians making proto-pilgrimages to visit the home of a man they came to believe had a unique connection to the Almighty. This only got worse when Emperor Constantine legalised Christianity in 313, and Anthony moved further into the desert to avoid his admirers.

Saint Anthony dispensing wisdom (no doubt reluctantly), Crimea, 1430

After (allegedly) almost a hundred years living the life of an ascetic, Anthony passed away sometime in the 350s. He left behind the following complete list of possessions:

Two tunics
One cloak
One shirt

And thus, the tradition of monasticism was born!*

*Well, maybe. So the Early Christian sources say, in any case. It’s important to remember that the narrative I’ve just described comes from the Life of Saint Anthony, a literal hagiography composed after his death by churchmen. There are definitely things in the account that make its reliability dubious – like the suggestion that a centenarian who’s basically been subsisting on sand for eighty years would be hale and hearty until the day before he died. And then there’s the near-certainty that Anthony wasn’t the only or first person in this period who made the decision to exile themselves from society and deny themselves the sins of the flesh. But even if Anthony isn’t THE granddaddy of all monks, he’s at least an example of an early evolution of monastic life, and he’s as good an example of them as we have. So we’re stuck with him; hang critiquing the sources.

At this point, I imagine readers (and my benevolent editor) are vibrating with the questions “What does this have to do with pillars” and “isn’t this meant to be Weird MEDIEVAL Guys? Please stop talking about Romans.” Hang with me, alright? We’re getting there.

So while Anthony is out scratching an existence in the Egyptian desert, these ideas of isolation and mortification are spreading across the Roman world. The popularisation of the lifestyle lead other famous hermits, like Pachomius, to gather up their disciples into their own communities. These exceptional characters have come to be known as the Desert Fathers.

A quirky bunch, those desert fathers

Or, in a few cases, the Desert Mothers. Women set up their own similar communities, or in a few cases, snuck in to join the men. Like a fourth-century woman named Marina, who cut her hair, put on a man’s tunic, and joined one of these communities until she was kicked out for being the (supposed) father of a local girl's bastard child. Instead of coming clean and explaining why that was anatomically impractical, Marina left voluntarily and happily raised the child. In fact, nobody figured out her secret until after she had died.

Brother Marinos is discovered in death to be a woman, Bruges, 15th century

So: asceticism, isolation and gender segregation. Sounds a lot like monasteries, right? Well, we’re not quite there yet. There were important differences between these early communities and the monastic lifestyle that will come to be so iconic of the medieval period. The most relevant for our purposes is that these were not understood to be permanent communities. Disciples lived alone in their own huts, only meeting for prayers, and the ultimate remained – in theory – to leave the community to take a life of isolation like Anthony’s. You can think of it as a sort of base camp for people before they scale the spiritual Everest of living alone in a hut for the rest of their lives – whether or not most of them ever intended to do so (they didn’t, by most accounts).

Outside of these communities, meanwhile, time was marching onwards. As the fourth century rolled into the fifth, the Roman empire’s possessions in Western Europe and North Africa began to crumble. The empire’s eastern half weathered the storm from its new capital of Constantinople – beginning the process of east-west division that would eventually lead to historians renaming it the Byzantine Empire. Newly-legalised Christianity spread further and deeper among Roman subjects. And with it, the monastic lifestyle spread to new territories, like Palestine and Syria.

Excavations of monastic sites in these regions suggest that with this spread, the role of monasteries changed to become increasingly recognisable as monasteries: they were more permanent, communal, and embedded in surrounding rural communities. But not every holy man gave up on the idea of withdrawal and mortification, and the transfer to new contexts and landscapes came with a new challenge for wannabe monks. When Antony and his Egyptian contemporaries became hermits, they were separating themselves from society spiritually, but also geographically. This is easy enough in the Egyptian landscape. The fertile Nile Valley surrounded by hundreds of miles of borderline-uninhabitable desert means that, as today, the population density of Egypt went from “lots” to “absolutely nobody” over a very short distance. Not so the rolling hills of Syria. The holy men of the Levant would have to innovate.

In the mid fifth century, a Syrian Christian man named Simeon had a brainwave: maybe the only way out was up. He’d been living in a hut for over a year, but he was constantly being bothered by pilgrims looking for advice/healing/assorted miracles. So he found an old pillar outside of town, built a platform on it, and lived there for thirty-seven years (with the exception of one occasion, where he moved to another, much taller, pillar). So, he came to be known as Simeon Stylites (Simon Pillars, as he’d be known today).

As you can imagine, the novelty of a guy living on top of a fifty-foot pillar 24/7 attracted a lot of attention; he was thronged with even more visitors than he had had before, including the Patriarch of Constantinople, the most senior Christian figure in the entire eastern Roman Empire. Emperor Theodosius II was reportedly also much impressed. With notoriety came imitators, and “stylites” became a common feature outside of many Middle Eastern cities. It was not unheard of, while you were entering a great Christian city, to pass by two cranky old men, each standing on their own giant stone pillar, bickering about theology.

Simeon Stylites and his visitors, France, 13th century

To state perhaps the obvious, this was not a lifestyle for the faint of heart. Most Stylites lived without roofs (there was no factor 50 in fifth-century Syria). All your food has to be delivered by locals or visiting admirers, either via ladder, or jerry-rigged rope and pulley systems, if you had a particularly luxurious pillar setup. There are even stories of stylites’ entire legs atrophying from lack of use.

Two Syrian icons depicting Simeon Stylites (left) (right)

But all the same, the stylite craze spread further afield, to Russia, and to the Caucasus Kingdom of Georgia. And so did their artefacts: the images of these saints were also revered. When they weren’t engaged in one of their occasional fits of iconoclasm, Eastern Romans (or, as scholars generally start calling them at this point, the Byzantines) were absolutely obsessed with icons: visual depictions of saints that were supposed to possess holy powers. They also occasionally were built to ooze holy oil, which, well, each to their own I suppose. Icons could supposedly heal you, bring you good luck, or even generate protective magical forcefields around cities if you carried them around enough. Simeon and other sainted stylites were among the most popular icons around, with personal icons bearing their signature pillars showing up across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Eventually, however, the world moved on again. Stylitism appears to have declined precipitously among the Byzantines from around the 11^th century, although the practice clung on in the Russian Empire until 1461. As far as we know, there is only one left: a Georgian named Maxime Qavtaradze, who revived the practice in the 1990s. He’s yet to start another trend, but watch this space.

It also never really caught on in Western Europe. Indeed, Westerners seem to have been mostly baffled and unimpressed with the whole thing. They were quite happy, though, to adopt the Desert Fathers’ ideas about living in monasteries and nunneries, and developed their own traditions of aseticism and hermitage (although that’s a story for another day). So while monasticism made the jump and spread across Europe from the fourth century onwards, forever colouring our image of medieval life, the stylites never did.

More, to be quite honest, is the pity.

Editor’s note: Hi everyone! Hope you enjoyed today’s article, which is also the first ever WMG Substack post to feature a guest author. Aran Prince-Tappé is a history graduate, Ottoman/Byzantine enthusiast, and my co-host on the Weird Medieval Guys podcast. A huge thanks to him for writing this great piece and I hope to see more from him soon!

-Olivia aka weird medieval guys

The Medieval Monks Who Lived on Top of Giant Pillars

A history of the monastic high life

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