Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

800 26. holy men
must turn. Let us conclude, therefore, by sketching, inevitably very briefly,
the role of the holy man as ‘arbiter of the holy’ – that is, as one significant
actor among many in the slow and hesitant process of the creation of a
Christian ‘thought world’.
The Christian holy man emerged at a crucial moment in the overall religious
history of post-imperial western Europe and the Byzantine middle
east. He was a figure of genuine spiritual power at a time when the holy
stretched far beyond the somewhat narrow confines of the triumphant
Christian church. It is no coincidence that a figure of the stature of Symeon
Stylites should have appeared in northern Syria at just the time when the
ecclesiastical structures of the region had been in place for some generations,
when the pagan temples had been officially closed for a quarter of a
century, but where a strong form of local religious leadership had not yet
arisen to negotiate an honourable surrender for the gods. Firmly placed on
a column which in itself may have linked his person to ancient memories
of holy stones, 38 administering banal and widely-recognized forms of
blessing (the hnana of the dust from the sacred enclosure beneath his
column), summoning local church congregations through their priests to
what amounted to gigantic revivalist meetings associated with Christian
penitential supplication, Symeon stood on the low slopes of the limestone
ridge as a highly personalized challenge to the ancient pilgrimage site on
top of Sheikh Barakat. Despite the splendid buildings that were lavished
on it after his death, it is not the relatively low-lying area of Telnesin, but
the conical shape of Sheikh Barakat that still catches the eye of the traveller
in the Jebel Sem’an as it towers with an immemorial sacrality above the
plain of Dana. In a similar manner, the column of Symeon’s later imitator,
Symeon the Younger, holds in view – but now at eye-level – the opposing
peak of the oracle of Zeus on Mount Kasios.
Symeon negotiated many surrenders of the gods. Bedouin tribesmen
burned their idols in his presence (Theodoret, HR xxvi.13). Whole villages
entered into a ‘covenant’ with him. A polytheist village in the mountains of
Lebanon was told that, if they followed his commands by placing stones
carved with the sign of the cross or blessed by portions of his holy dust on
the four corners of their fields, and if they destroyed their shrines and
household idols, they would enjoy protection from creatures of the wild –
from werewolves and ravenous field mice (V. Sym. Syr. 61 and 63, Doran
(1992) 141 and 143, with comments on 22–3). A century later, villages
touched by the ministrations of Symeon the Younger did not abruptly
convert from ‘paganism’ to ‘Christianity’. Rather, in a Christian empire that
had used many forms of cultural and physical violence against polytheists,
38 Frankfurter (1990).
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