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Updated: June 14, 2025
This conspicuous perch, like the pillar of St. Simeon Stylites, was every now and then surmounted by the gaunt figure of some ambitious plunger who, after attitudinizing awhile in the pose of Napoleon on the column Vendôme, would join his hands above his head and take a tremendous "header" into the gulf below.
As the Baron said, he was indeed a strange owl; for the owl is a grave bird; a monk, who chants midnight mass in the great temple of Nature; an anchorite, a pillar saint, the very Simeon Stylites of his neighbourhood. Such, likewise, was the philosophical Professor.
We have, however, a Nicodemus and a Joseph of Arimathea, as well as a Dives and a Lazarus. Nothing points to a Simeon Stylites. Self-denial, though not asceticism proper, is a necessary part of the life of a wandering preacher, which also precluded the exhibition of domestic virtues.
In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.
Simeon Stylites who, perched on a lofty pillar, preserved an attitude of saint-like withdrawal from earthly things for days; and even Socrates, of whom it was said that he would stand for hours motionless and wordless all these are probable instances of autohypnotism."
If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life to your spirit. Come down from the pillar of observation. You might enact Simeon Stylites there for twenty years to come and be none the wiser or happier for the outlook. Refuse obstinately to take the big contract.
Simeon Stylites, who in his youth had often been saved from suicide, by ascending a column he had built, sixty feet in height, and only one foot square at the top, departed as far as he could from earthly affairs, and approached more closely to heaven.
His holy and fanciful genius hit upon a scheme that gave him his peculiar name. He took up his abode on the top of a column which was at first about twelve feet high, but was gradually elevated until it measured sixty-four feet. Hence, he is called Simeon Stylites, or Simeon the Pillar Saint. On this lofty column, betwixt earth and heaven, the hermit braved the heat and cold of thirty years.
The devotion of the Stylites and the hair-cloth saints, is in act, though not in motive, less noble, because this great chief proposed to go on in common life, where he had lived as a prince a beggar. The memoir by Corn Plant of his early days is beautiful.
Superstition performed its maddest freak in the Stylites, men "who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;" the original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty cubits high. The Agapae were abolished, and auricular confession was established, during this century.
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