The Stylite's Liturgy: Ritual and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity

The relationship between charismatic and institutional authority has been a favorite theme for scholars of Late Antiquity. This was, after all, an era of flamboyance. Striking figures dotted the landscape: Antony of Egypt in his desert, Simeon the Stylite on his pillar, and their like. With public adulation immediately intense, the ecclesiastical structure had to articulate and cement its own religious authority, while at the same time negotiating a means whereby the charismatic authority of the holy man or woman could be subsumed into the normative order of religious life as it was now being defined by men of institutional power.

Without doubt, the most influential and pervasive paradigm by which scholars have approached the problems of this situation has been that developed by Peter Brown. Peter Brown has attempted to account for the social and political impact of the great ascetics by examining the shifts in the locations wherein power (social, political, economic, cosmological) was exercised during this era of massive change. In a series of essays extending over the past twenty-five years, Brown has suggested several key images for charismatic authority: in 1971 (“Rise and Function”), the Holy Man as patron, an individual locus of power whose authority extended beyond the civic and into the cosmological realm at a time when traditional sociopolitical structures were in upheaval; in 1983 (“Saint as Exemplar”), the Holy Man as exemplar, the carrier of collective cultural memory whose authority derived from his capacity to express change in terms that hallowed tradition; and in 1995 (Authority and the Sacred), the Holy Man as negotiator, one player among many in the huge enterprise of negotiating religious and thus political change. Hence Brown has argued progressively for less emphasis on the holy man as individual, and more emphasis on the tradition and/or social matrix out of which the holy man acted. ¹

A different tack has been taken up in recent years, particularly with respect to Egypt, by scholars such as David Brakke and James Goehring. ² Here scholars have considered the various modes of religious authority in competition with one another, crystalized in the tension between episcopal and ascetic authority. These they have shown to be reconciled rhetorically in the ancient texts by a spatial demarcation: the authority of the bishop dominated in the location of the city, while that of the charismatic ascetic governed the desert in which the ascetic dwelled (and to which the ascetic was rhetorically confined) as a different location. In the Syrian Orient, however, the conflict was not played out through the polarized images of city and desert, but across the ambiguous space of countryside, the domain of the church’s extended authority as exercised through itinerant priests and scattered village parishes.

In this study, I want to suggest another route by which to approach the problem, namely, the role of religious ritual as both a process and a rhetoric of mutual inclusion for charismatic and institutional authority. I shall suggest that ritual allowed a demarcation of the holy man or woman that granted the charismatic a collective identity, at the same time that it defined the collective identity of the church as one summed up and culminating in the person of the charismatic. I shall use the case of Simeon the Stylite because he has been the figure most often cited in support of Peter Brown’s work, and, indeed, by Brown himself as emblematic of the entire situation: the holy man (“in his splendid isolation”) perched on his towering pillar atop a mountain, apart from the world yet within reach, midway between heaven and earth, rendered wholly “other” by his extreme ascetic practices and thereby wholly effective as the intersection between human and divine, between civic and imperial, between social and ecclesiastical spheres of activity, need, and response.

To this end, I return to the hagiographical presentations of Simeon the Stylite the Elder (d. 459) and his namesake Simeon the Stylite the Younger (d. 592). The vitae of the two Simeons present these stylite saints as involved in various levels of sacred ritual. Scholars...