Vulfolaic the Stylite: Orientalism and Performing Holiness in Gregory’s Histories

Abstract

“Syria,” Peter Brown observed in one of his many brilliant essays on late antique spirituality, was known in the West as “the great province for ascetic stars.”¹ Perhaps the most dazzling of those cynosures was Simeon Stylites (A.D. 390–459), whose reputation for flamboyant self-mortification mounted in step with his physical elevation: he stood atop a series of ever-taller pillars for the last thirty years of his life and died sixty feet above the ground, a cult figure in his own lifetime.² Simeon s example spawned generations of imitators. As Hippolyte Dela-haye wrote in his 1923 study of the stylite movement:

Pendant de longs siècles l’héroïque extravagance du grand Syméon exerça une véritable fascination sur l’esprit des ascètes orientaux; et malgré les difficultés matérielles qu’entraîne le séjour dans un ermitage élevé au-dessus de terre, le nombre de stylites qui sont nommés dans l’histoire ecclésiastique est véritablement étonnant. Il y a plus. Les textes ne manquent pas où les stylites sont cités comme formant une catégorie à part; le nom désigne une élite de moines relativement nombreuse et fort considérée.³

[For centuries, the heroic extravagance of the great Symeon captured the imagination of Eastern ascetics; and despite the material difficulties involved in occupying a hermitage raised off the ground, ecclesiastical history identifies a truly astonishing number of stylites. There is more. There is no lack of references to stylites as a category unto themselves; the name designated a monastic elite that was relatively numerous and highly regarded.]