Time passed. As childhood turned to puberty, and puberty to adulthood, and still the demons could not tempt Simeon down from his pillar, his reward was often to see “a great mass of cloud like a carpet of brilliant purple” rolled out before him.7 This was the dimension of the celestial; and sure enough, angels would often appear to the saint, sometimes flanking Christ Himself, sometimes holding a snow-white parchment on which they would write the names of all those mentioned in Simeon’s prayers in blazing letters of gold. As reports of these visions spread, crowds began to mass before his pillar. Many were the miracles performed by the saint, “more numerous than the grains of sand in the sea.”8 The dumb and the blind were healed, as too were a man afflicted by unfeasibly large testicles, “like a pair of clay jars,”9 and another who suffered from chronic constipation, the consequence of “a demon camped out in his colon.”10 Above all, though, Simeon offered blessings to those who could normally expect to receive none: lepers, whores and children, always children. By contrast, towards the mighty, he was unbendingly stern—as well he might have been, for the rich of Antioch, even by the standards of the time, were notorious for their arrogance and cruelty.
Far from resenting this, however, the local elite took great pride in Simeon. As his fame spread, so a day-trip up the side of the mountain to gawp at him silhouetted on the summit became the height of chic. Simeon, who had fled Antioch for the wilderness, discovered that Antioch had followed him. The opportunity to glimpse the authentic radiance of holiness in the stylite’s emaciated and ragged form was simply too precious to waste, even for the very grandest. And perhaps this was just as welclass="underline" for tourist attractions, after all, did not come cheap. Pilgrims, whether shuffling up the mountainside on leprous stumps or borne in gold-fringed palanquins, needed to be watered, fed, and housed. Inexorably, the longer that Simeon remained on his pillar, the more the rocks that had once surrounded it came to be replaced by impeccably well-dressed marble. The very rage with which the saint berated the rich served only to quicken the flow of gifts to his shrine. This might have appeared a paradox; but it was not. Nothing quite like power, after all, to make the nostrils of the mighty flare; and the power of the divine, the power that made of Simeon a veritable lightning rod of the supernatural, was like nothing else on earth.
Even in far-off Constantinople, where there had always been a tendency to dismiss Syrians as morbid and prone to hysteria, a bona fide stylite had fast become a must-have accessory. As early as 460, a mere year after the death of the original Simeon, one of his disciples had climbed a pillar just outside the capital. There he had remained for the next three decades, lecturing heretics on their duty to submit to the Council of Chalcedon and causing anyone who might jeer at him to explode. A succession of emperors had revelled in his austerities, journeying to the pillar to gawp at his sores “and perpetually boasting of the Saint, and showing him off to all.”11 Nothing but the best for Constantinople; just as Constantine had beautified his capital with the plundered statues of pagan gods, his heirs looked to endow the city with the potent mystique of the Syrian ascetics. Indeed, one emperor’s agents had gone so far as to pilfer a few portions of the elder Simeon’s corpse from Antioch, where the saint’s relics were jealously guarded as the city’s most precious treasure. Even those reminders of the stylite that could not be transported to Constantinople had been ostentatiously graced with the marks of an emperor’s favour: for the once lonely pillar on which he had stood, halfway to the sky, had ended up flanked by marble hallways and covered by a colossal dome. The precious wellsprings of holiness, even when they existed on the empire’s frontiers, right on the margins of the desert, were far too precious not to be stamped as imperial.
Nevertheless, there was, in the acknowledgement by Constantinople that certain locations might rank as hallowed ground, just the hint of defeat. The “New Rome,” as its title suggested, had been founded on the presumption that the sacred was readily transferable. Almighty God, who had created the heavens and the entire earth, was not to be pinned down for ever to a single spot. All very well for pagans to imagine that groves, or springs, or rocks might be sacred, and travel on pilgrimage to grovel before them; but Christians were supposed to know better. The charge of the supernatural properly attached itself, not to places but to relics. Of these, Constantinople could boast a quite astounding abundance: for the reach of the emperor was long and grasping, as the guardians of Simeon had discovered to their cost. The heads of prophets, the bodies of apostles, the limbs of martyrs: the capital had bagged them all. Indeed, Constantinople’s array of relics was so incomparable that it lent her precisely what her rulers had always most craved for their capitaclass="underline" the authentic aura of a holy city. Yet, as the crowds who continued to cluster around the elder Simeon’s empty pillar suggested, there were some things that could not be imported. The same pilgrim who travelled to Constantinople or Antioch to pray before the saint’s relics might nevertheless still wish to rub the stone that had once borne the stylite’s stinking feet. Foul-smelling though the ascetics of Syria notoriously were, yet in the air that had once been breathed by Simeon there hung, so many Christians believed, a lingering perfume-trace of paradise.
And there were places on the fallen earth that needed no stylites to sanctify them: places that had been touched not by saints but by the presence of God Himself. While human flesh, whether on the tops of pillars or in desert cells, might still become interfused with the Holy Spirit, it had once been possible, back in the mists of time, for men to talk directly with the Almighty. Abraham, of course, was the proof of that: a man graced with the promise that he would become a father of many nations. To his wife, Sarah, though barren and old at the time, God had granted a son; and that son, Isaac, fathered in turn a son named Jacob. One night, this same Jacob met a mysterious stranger by a ford and wrestled with him “until the breaking of the day.” When dawn came and the man asked to be released, Jacob demanded a blessing from him in return; and the stranger, with studied ambiguity, answered, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” And Jacob, who was now called Israel, found himself struck by a sudden realisation: “I have seen God face to face!”12 Certainly, whoever the stranger might truly have been, his blessing would prove a momentous one. Twelve sons Jacob would father in all—the Children of Israel. These then travelled from Canaan to Egypt, where they and their descendants, gathered into tribes, proved themselves astoundingly fecund, “so that the land was filled with them.”13 Ultimately, so prolifically did the twelve tribes of Israel breed that Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, grew alarmed; and so he ordered them enslaved, “and made their lives bitter with hard service.”14 God, however, had not forgotten His promise to Abraham. As the instrument of His Chosen People’s salvation, He selected a man named Moses, a descendant of Israel who had been brought up in high privilege as an Egyptian—the foster-son of Pharaoh’s daughter, no less. Then, one day, seeing one of his countrymen under the lash, Moses struck the overseer down dead, and fled into the desert. There, while working as a shepherd, he came across a bush that was on fire: “And he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”15 The voice of God was in the fire; and it told Moses to return to Egypt and to demand of Pharaoh that he let the Children of Israel go. For, as the Almighty explained, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”16