Transcript

Life Atop a Pillar: Extreme Asceticism and the Destruction of Paganism in the Ancient

(00:00) life atop the pillar and so we'll talk about simeon stylity um we'll just call we're not going to bother with the elder but essentially uh even though this guy did this and he's the first guy to go and decide to live on a pillar for his whole life it became such a popular thing that many he had many imitators including another guy who was also named simeon and so they had to call that next guy simeon stylite the younger so so what is this all about so we're going to talk about also in a bigger context extreme asceticism and

(00:34) spiritual power in late antiquity so in this time period as the roman empire is spending all this decline and fall kind of time as we kind of frame it usually so just as a bit of terminology to kick us off this wonderful word asceticism as opposed to aesthetics which i always hear when i'm kind of saying it so this is uh one of our wonderful greek words and so it's from a greek word meaning exercise or training so as people are performing this thing but it generally has come to mean abstaining then from all kinds of worldly pleasures be it food or drink or sex or any kind of comfort

(01:20) um and you're trying to do that because matter is in antiquity especially thought of as being the absolute opposite of spirit and so if you're the flesh is the material world if you deny the flesh that helps you in a lot of ancient thinking focus on on the spiritual world um and so then there's the two two different kinds of um ways that people practice this traditionally or we break it down maybe into two different ways although they can do both um one is to be uh having what maybe is called natural asceticism so simplifying living so people want to do that maybe today in the 21st century

(01:59) where you you downsize from a big house to an apartment and you don't have all the junk in it you only have things that you use or you could simplify if you could do it that way not everybody does that have you done that [Laughter] so anyway we went through that discipline although we only got so disciplined when we moved from our house to an apartment here in toronto but i did have to um i did have to give up a thousand books so i was only able to keep what two thousand favorite books and i had to actually my two thousand

(02:31) favorite books i could keep a thousand books had to go so anyway very simplified i'm an aesthetic now so the other way though is unnatural or perhaps essentially where there's mortification so where you're literally trying to punish the body so um famously in like the middle ages people like flag who are flagellating the people who are whipping themselves in order to to really show that they detest the physical condition and flesh we'll also talk a little bit here about monasticism and so this is coming from the greek word for alone

(03:08) uh and so again this is used though to mean devoting one's life to spiritual practice uh and it is initially because of this aloneness the idea of it is as a as the aromatic tradition or hermit tradition but because um that always proved really really tough to all kinds of people so when you're just living completely alone in isolation a lot of times people found that um living the hermit life with a bunch of other hermits is actually easier to do or you know we were more able to get it all done and so um you

(03:40) know it's like let's all go be alone together you know and so that's the idea then of the kanabitic cannabidic tradition which is to say which is coming from the latin here for common life so where there is multiple initially it begins as multiple hermits that have little cells that are all around and then they have a common church or a common supply room and that kind of thing together but eventually it becomes the kind of monasticism where then they each have cells in the in the monastery and then dormitories and so in other words

(04:10) where they're living a true common life so those two different kinds of monasticism so obviously monasticism is not just in the western tradition so um uh we had talked about this before a little outside in the in the uh welcome room but essentially on the one hand yeah we're having the in the western tradition we have monks and nuns but we have monks and nuns also in south asian traditions for example these are buddhist monks and catholic mugs and so you might have seen we tend to see buddhas that are the big happy chubby buddha

(04:44) future buddha but anyway these are kind of the fun buddha whose stomach you rub this buddha is less gutless stomach so because also in this buddhist tradition and the sacred story of the buddhist exploration and life life and path to enlightenment one of the paths that he explores is extreme asceticism and so he goes through this whole period of just not eating and just like fasting and not doing anything and just being meditative and and until he's withered her way down to this kind of deathly skeleton

(05:21) until then he rejects that kind of extreme asceticism and as he's achieved when he achieves enlightenment and becomes the buddha he promotes instead a middle path right where we can where we don't have to go to that kind of an extreme uh in order to have a spiritual path um it's also um existing in other south asian religions so hinduism uh in other words this is a this is a thing that predated uh the buddha the buddha it's before buddhism he goes and joins other hindus who are ascetics and monks and also jainism which is an ancient religion that is pretty extreme but

(06:04) all by itself by not wanting to harm other beings and so there's all sorts of practices that jains uh go through in order to avoid you know not only just vegetarianism but to avoid um killing plants that uh as you're eating them and also to avoid stepping on other creatures and this sort of thing although this tradition so although asceticism isn't a core a core component of mainstream judaism there were different streams or sects or schools within judaism especially in antiquity so the second temple period that we've talked

(06:44) about in other lectures that do have aesthetic practices and so one of the most famous ones for us in the 20th 21st centuries since the discovery of the dead sea scrolls are talking about this sect that's identified with the essenes that um josephus talks about so this qumran sect where they functionally have a um where they're kind of living as a as a group monastery or communal monastery that includes different aesthetic practices and so that group for example is having those kind of practices even if mainstream judaism isn't doing that so much

(07:22) now we've also talked about how this is not alien to the greek in the greek philosophical tradition and so we've had a whole exploration before on the cynics and so diogenes here who is the exemplar of the cynics he's especially promoting that kind of aesthetic lifestyle that we're talking about that's natural which is to say the simplified life so he's not so much sitting around whipping himself but he's instead saying uh boy i was it was uh i was thought i would had really simplified my life because i only have you know this cloak and um

(08:00) you know the lamp or here or whatever the person and the and the cup until i saw a boy who was able to drink water just with his hands and then i realized what a fool i was to be bothering with this cup you know so now he was able to get rid of that and simplify his life one more whole step right and so there's a um a way then so this idea then is to reject all of these kind of social conventions that really um oppressively governed life in antiquity so in the ancient world you really oblige to family to civ city to all of the cults

(08:33) that you might be part of there's all kinds of rituals and everything else that you have to do as part of tradition and so one of the things that the cynics really were trying to do is cut through all of that and say no the way that you live a good pure life is to just not worry about all those things you don't have to spend all your time worrying about performing a funeral rights for your deceased relatives because they're gone i know what the lamp is about what are the dogs over there the what what i know what the lamp is for yeah yeah

(09:14) well so they're i mean they're called i mean that's that the emblematic i mean cynic i mean doesn't uh is coming from this is where i know latin but not greek but it's coming from the fact that they're called dogs right and so they're associated with vagrants and dogs and so um and so this is a this is actually not an ancient painting it's a it's a renaissance a romantic painting and so the idea of it is is to symbolically show the cynics here with the dogs right so in addition to the cynics of stoics

(09:44) they also were interested in aesthetic practices so spiritual or philosophical practices including things like meditation engaging in socratic dialogues with other people and great engaging in self-dialogue introspection always thinking about things like that death is in before you and then in general just training yourself to uh live in the moment and be aware of that kind of a thing and so all of those um in some ways are aesthetic practices that are also just alive and in the tradition prior to the emergence of christianity

(10:19) so this isn't coming out of uh when we're going to see the christians doing this it's not coming out of uh they've just thought it up or something like that right so yeah so that's a great great great question so the question here is that so since we're talking about greek philosophers does that mean that they're naturally antagonistic to traditional greek religion because we sometimes think of today in the modern world we as we have rewritten our vision and our framework of antiquity when we think of the modern

(11:13) era and we think of the middle ages we think of the ancient era and we think of the middle ages as being entirely religious and we think of ancient philosophers as somehow being precursors or secular people that are wandering around like our modern secular selves but that's not the case so in fact the ancient greek philosophers i would argue are actually all religious reformers um and the reason why um you know socrates is is killed is for being a um you know a person who is leading away the youth from traditional practices but it's not necessarily denying in almost all cases it's not necessarily even denying the

(11:50) existence of the traditional gods um in some in some of the rare cases some of the philosophers the most the ones that are accused of atheism which is rare uh the epicureans they are actually not even saying that they um don't believe in the existence of the gods but what they're saying is that the gods can't do anything for you or are of no purpose or no power and they are also subject to all of the same kind of issues that we are in life um but so what i would say instead is that that they that these philosophies are existing side by side with all sorts of traditional practices because ancient

(12:26) religions were largely not philosophical in nature they were largely more about practice and so if you were in ancient paganism you would have all sorts of rituals that you go through all sorts of things that you have to do all sorts of crossing your fingers when you go out through a treasure world and all kinds of different ways that you are propitiating the gods but that doesn't necessarily inform your like ethical behavior as you're wandering around and so uh people who believed in the traditional gods and who went and were part of a their local pagan shrine and did their devotions and

(13:03) things like that then they could also then be a stoic and they could actually have that be their their moral philosophy and so one of the things that's um that becomes new with the world religions in a way new is that uh christianity combines that together really and absorbs essentially all of the kind of pagan philosophies especially let's say neoplatonism and takes that and just eats it and includes that with the um the rest of it and so in that way christianity is an heir not just to ancient second temple israelite religion but

(13:42) it's also an heir to the ethical philosophy and and of the practical roman philosophies of the greeks greeks and the romans sure that's right yeah absolutely you're welcome okay so i just might just throw away uh-huh he wouldn't do that well so we've had so we're probably you know we've had um several lectures on the historical jesus and it's very complicated because uh the reality is that there's it's there's it's a different ways that we can approach it because we have the multiple pictures of jesus from the gospels and so we have the early christian traditions for how

(14:50) jesus was and then we have multiple different academic pictures of the historical jesus which are different ones are academically defensible and so but they're uh but they contradict each other and so we can it's very hard to for me to give you a simple answer on that one yeah yeah okay all i wanted to say though is that there are all kinds of significant precedents for asceticism and also monasticism that exist in the ancient world including the ancient world that where christianity emerges the first

(15:25) christians jesus and john the baptist for example and so jesus is a disciple initially of john the baptist according to almost all of our accounts that we have and john the baptist is generally always described as one of these kind of desert hermits right and so one of his description in the uh the gospels gospel matthew is that he's a guy who's wearing you know camel hair and skin skirt about his loins and that he would go around and he's kind of eating natural stuff so locusts and honey so he is not um a person who's like

(15:58) living in town and is not having a simplified life right so so this is an idea then at the beginnings of the movement um the guy that jesus goes to to begin jesus's ministry is already one of these kind of desert hermits and so we just have all that background and then i want to just bring that to our topic for tonight and then we'll get to kind of the connections here so for simeon stylite and which just means pillar dweller and let's have a little sketch of this guy and there's so many great pictures of him right so

(16:33) so all of the different icons where he's inside there although he always looks way better in pictures i think than he could have ever looked so if you look at the if you read the descriptions of you know the book and the life he does not have all these clothes there is no way his hair looks this good on any given day you know and he would have been more like that buddha that we saw that looked like a dead skeleton i think um at best and his column also wouldn't have been so nice but anyway so it's really nice in the it cleans up well in the in the in the icon

(17:03) so he's from the late fourth century where he's born uh he is from a roman province called cilicia that's the same province actually where paul the apostle paul is from and uh that's now turkey but if you think of how turkey stick it's like the bottom of turkey where it's right next to syria from childhood he's a zealous christian [Music] he does this thing where he renounces his property and gives his inheritance to the poor so there is a challenge uh in the gospels uh where uh that lots of these desert

(17:37) hermits uh saint anthony and others you know hear this where um jesus is talking to a rich young man uh the man says what do i need to do for salvation and he says well you know what to do you have this the commandments love god love your neighbor all this kind of thing he says well i'm doing all that and he's like well now what am i supposed to do now you know and he says well then you know sell all that you have to give to the give to the poor and come follow me and so then the guy's like i don't i

(18:03) don't think so you know that's i don't think so you know anyway so so that that's in the story but then lots of these guys um you know and men and women both who hear that story then they find that very compelling and they do it and so they sell all that they have and they go follow jesus into the desert so the story again that jesus is 40 days and 40 nights before his ministry before he goes about the rest of jesus's ministry he does it goes into the desert and is tempted by by satan by the demonic spirits so a lot of people took that as a model

(18:42) and uh simeon here is one of them so at 16 he enters a monastery but his austerity practices so this includes everything like fasting continually praying exposing himself to the elements shutting himself up in in tiny confined spaces it's so extreme that the other monks uh ask him to leave and in fact if you read the geography which is to say the um it's like a biography except for it's made really uh what for it's for a saint but it's it's it's an apologetic biography in other words where the person is writing really good things and very miraculous things

(19:20) and things like that you're not hearing all the bad stuff but what you do hear bad stuff in it is that all the other monks are continuously jealous of this guy you know so um and this had happened uh i forgetting the name of the other monk but essentially um there's a and again in the desert tradition they have these monasteries where all kinds of monks are living together and they're all doing these asture practices and things like that and so um and so a a a um a very renowned monk who secretly pretends that

(19:51) he's a brand new novice just an older guy who is joining the monastery he goes to the monastery and um and and so they're all doing their prayer they do a prayer all day long they fast all day long then this guy does the prayer and he fasts all week two weeks and so then they're all really put to shame and they're all really jealous and eventually they say to the to the uh to the abbot you've got to get rid of this guy he's making us look bad you know and so this is the same thing that is continuously happening to saint saint simeon where he is just constantly out showing everybody and so um

(20:26) the geographer is is telling us that he's not doing it out of pride guys he wasn't doing it for pride it's out of zeal but it's hard not to think of him as being a little proud you know that he's completely showing up all these other poor monks so anyway eventually eventually they're like okay you know you had to go be super holy some other place and so he moves on so at that point he's like okay and so he goes and shuts himself in a hut uh for a year and a half and while he's doing that um he has a uh they have you know again in this 40-day

(21:00) period of christian lent which is um replicating this time period of jesus fasting the desert uh he goes apparently the entire time he's shut in he goes apparently the entire time without food or drink for 40 days and so and then they open it up and and miraculously even the even the loaves that the the abbott had forced him to put in there they're all completely untouched and he didn't eat any of them uh so there was there when he could have been eating him or whatever and so that how do we know i mean it's hard to say how exactly but the guy is a very extreme practitioner of asceticism and

(21:36) the point of it is that this um was deemed by contemporaries as being quite a miracle so that anybody could go so long that you could mortify the flesh to this extreme extent and so clearly the um the desert fathers these desert monks and nuns are doing these kind of they're doing very extreme feats now whether they go an entire 40 days you know i don't know if it's medically possible to do that so however they're doing that that it they are having things they're they're making people very excited about it

(22:08) yeah so i'm not sure about it so maybe they're meaning that they at some point or other he's like in the story he's like eating the dirt a little bit or getting moisture out of it i'm not sure so i'm not sure what how it how it's exactly working because it seems like maybe they're allowed to have water but they're not drinking wine or something but anyway i'm so one of the other uh monks well i'm going to actually read a whole bunch of quotes from it one of the other monks wrote a whole life afterwards

(22:36) a disciple of his and so it lists off all of the different um stories and lore that had come down including all of the different miracles and visions that are attributed to the guy and so that's been translated into english and it's online um but i have a bunch of excerpts that we'll read tonight um so so having done that uh he then moved to a kind of confined space and he lived there but as after all this sort of extreme aestheticism so the word gets out that he's done this thing where he uh hasn't had any food or

(23:10) drink for all this time and so he finds himself continually disturbed by pilgrims and this is when he gets the idea that if he can't move away from them into the desert he's going to move up and so he moves to um uh like successively taller pillars and so he um has a little tiny platform which is really it's just described as being a little over a cubit uh and so he's on a little platform and that's initially on top of a a fairly small pillar but then it gets higher and higher until he's finally up on top of

(23:43) one that's 50 feet tall where he spends 30 years on the on the final pillar without coming down so pillar logistics how do you do that so he's got a 50 foot plus tall pillar and it's topped with a little platform that apparently had a railing but otherwise it's not a hut there's no um there's he's totally exposed to the elements apparently initially he's got also a a stake that's on top of there and so that he can be tied to it so that for the 40 days of lent he doesn't actually have to ever get down you know so he's just always standing during the whole thing

(24:25) but that's not the case later on he doesn't have that anymore um down at the bottom then there's a space around the pillar and then there's a double set of walls apparently to keep the all of the pilgrims and everybody from approaching so that he can pray and things like that so they're not immediately under the column constantly making noise and bugging him and things like that which is apparently a big problem so uh meanwhile like in this icon um the followers you know apparently they can either you know send them stuff up in a bucket or they can

(25:00) use ladders and they climb up the ladders as it's described in the story i looked and looked and looked obviously they don't mention it in the in the hagiography but just in the general awareness as we're traveling around um europe and we're seeing kind of medieval castles and things like that a couple of weeks ago the castles you know for you know it's not like they have a big sewer built into the castle or the cities and things like that essentially there's a wall and the the toilet seat is out over the you know side of the wall and it just goes right down on the side of the wall and i'm presuming that

(25:35) that's how the pillar worked so so there we are that's a question that a lot of people have been asking every time i mention this topic so i thought i'd at least try to do some research okay so here's this antoninus who's the monk who wrote this hey geography we'll just look at some quotes as it's describing and so this is not um immediate and so a lot of times the case with hey geography is we have to um you have to understand that the source is a very zealous follower who believes very strongly in the person's

(26:11) holiness and also their supernatural connections but that's just the bias of the of the work and the writer we have we'll see a little bit we have some other writers who are not christian and their response to all this stuff and it's not the same as what the what the devotees think right so here's what antoninus says he so simeon endured such suffering that neither among the ancients nor among the moderns and everybody's always modern right so in other words people who are living in in the 5th century could be found anyone i'm sorry any who had

(26:47) suffered as he did for what body is there or what limbs that could endure with fortitude in such a manner for he stood 40 years upon a pillar which was about a cubit in width and his feet were bound and fettered as though in stocks so that neither to right nor left was he able to shift one of them until even the bones and sinews of his feet were visible from suffering also his belly burst open from standing and so his disciples used to say that the suffering of his belly was more severe than the suffering of his feet three of the joints of his spine were dislocated from the constant

(27:22) supplication with which he was bowing and lifting himself up straight again so he's just continuously engaged in this kind of supplication practice and so that has also affected his spine so once so that's his physical condition he also is uh challenging the elements so he stood valiantly against the heat of the sun in summer and against the severity of the cold in winter therefore the sun was like a crucible and the saint like gold so he's being purified by the by the elements right the fire therefore lowered its temperature the furnace of the testing grew cool and the

(27:59) athlete of god came off victorious for the north wind came with its snow and the west with its ice and the east with a scale and the south with the sultriness all of them combined together accompanied also by heavy rain and joined war with the wise master builder who had put his house upon the rock but the wind grew calm the ice melted the rain was absorbed and the blessed one came off the victor who then is not astonished that he with his feet burst open and his belly too stood day and night so this is an impressive feat you know if people are seeing about all of these horrible conditions as you can imagine

(28:36) uh and who wouldn't be impressed by that as his follower asks uh so defeat of disease so not just the elements there's also disease so one of these days as he stood praying a severe disease smote him in his left foot who wouldn't who would guess it seems like if you're in this condition that would happen so while he was wishing for the evening to come it was filled with ulcers and when the next day dawned it burst and emitted foul odor and was alive with maggots matter and a disgusting smell came from the from the foot it should say from the foot and maggots fell out of it upon the

(29:15) ground so powerful and bad was the stench that not even halfway up the ladder could one ex ascend without distress so this guy is so smelly up there from the maggots and probably everything else if you get halfway up the column you're like as a disciple right some of his disciples who forced themselves to go up could not ascend until they put on their noses incense and fragrant white men he suffered this way nine months until nothing was left of him except breath only so he's just whitted away to nothing like that like that buddha statue right the report of his affliction so this

(29:51) particular time when he's wasting away to nothing and his foot is has these maggots and everything was heard everywhere even reaching kings bishops and periodoids which is say itinerant priests and many people came and tried to persuade him either to come down from the pillar until his disease was cured or to take off one section of the pillar so it'd be shorter pillar he'd been on a shorter pillar before can't we do that again then it'd be easier for a doctor to come up there and actually help you out and apply remedies

(30:19) but he would not yield to persuasion even the victorious king theodosius so the west roman emperor with his sisters sent bishops to him for the sake of this that they might persuade him to come down a little while but simeon dismissed the bishops skillfully by saying yeah you indeed pray for me and i have confidence in my lord jesus christ whom i serve will not let me need physicians and herbs and medicines so essentially he is famous enough that even the emperor is concerned now that it seems like he's going to die from all these diseases

(30:51) but he is able to successfully defy them all and say i'm i'm staying up here no matter what happens and i'm not coming down and and it's because of foot or high water so and and then he's ultimately cured of that so he continues to live on um just going on uh summarizing then what antoninus has to say about him is what tongue is there that dare attempt the narration concerning this man who while he was in the flesh exhibited among men the deeds and acts of the spirit for he stood like a strong man and was valiant like an athlete so we see he likes that metaphor

(31:29) athlete a spiritual athlete and endured with fortitude all sufferings held in contempt all diseases and lightly esteemed the evil one and defeated satan and scattered his house and put to naught his army and received the crown of victory for he publicly fast fastened his feet upon a pillar clothed mysteriously with heavenly power the fleshy body of his feet burst open from standing but his whole mind was kindled for his lord the joints of his vertebrae were dislocated by continued supplication but he strengthened his mind with the love of christ his helper

(32:04) so you can kind of see here you know on the one hand we're seeing the kind of the impressive display of just destroying your physical self but how what how people understood that in a spiritual sense his followers so this gave made him be a celebrity so he became a celebrity aesthetic as we mentioned um uh even kings and emperors so um denial of food drinks sleep property protection from elements all these kind of things he does this in a most extreme way possible and it's called an athlete and a warrior of god and so these feats are

(32:41) viewed by contemporary people with awe and they sort of see this as all signs of somebody exhibiting supernatural power and just being able to go and actually see a live miracle essentially is what the show comes and so as a result he's a huge celebrity in his own lifetime and he attracts all kinds of followers and pilgrims um this is a later imitator this is the the younger simian but essentially it's a kind of a pilgrim emblem as people would go kind of as pilgrims or ancient tourists so you go to go do the tourism for these guys um

(33:18) because of this then there's this perception of because of this kind of extreme spiritualism there's a real perception of supernatural power and so this is an uh early engraving of the guy again with the pillar but in this case there's a giant snake and all through the uh geography there are just continual visions of like a giant snake appearing and he does battle with the snake but then it'll essentially appear and disappear in a puff of smoke because it's not you know a physical snake it's essentially he is uh fighting with demons he's fighting

(33:54) with satan and and winning so essentially what he does he's got a book up there yeah so he had um yeah he wasn't totally bored up there so so he had uh he was praying all the time and everything like that but he also we have he was writing people letters for example so we have letters and so he's giving instructions at some point or other he might have books up there so they put things in the bucket and take it up to house so um no yeah these are these are pretty well attested who did extreme feats i mean they weren't known people were sort of known in this lesson

(34:53) yeah yeah i'll repeat the question so the question is do we have a good number of kind of eyewitnesses that we can can we can attest for sure that this isn't just the monk making this whole thing up so in other words his follower could have just written a good story but right because it seems crazy right but in fact um this kind of extreme aesthetic practices uh there happen a lot actually throughout history and um and continue to this day so people in south asia there are still people that doing incredible mortification you're going to

(35:30) mention once shaheen yeah yeah yeah so people will do these kind of things we have very good accounts for example um so for first nations people um there are there are various like what they have these descriptions of like the mandan's um initiation rituals where they essentially take hooks and they put it through the flesh and you're hung from a pole and and and all this kind of thing through the ribs and stuff and there are like lots of witnesses who have talked about this and and so in other words people have done uh very extreme aesthetic practices

(36:05) for a day or two no people can really do it for a whole long time and in fact it so not only was this one so so famous and there's lots of people who saw him um but in fact and we have his let letters that he wrote and this kind of thing so it's not just from this monk um but he had a bunch of um he so like i mentioned with this one right here this is you know simeon stylite the younger right so once he did this this was very impressive to people and there are lots of stylized monks after this so there were a lot of guys who uh later

(36:36) lived up on the pillar for also long long time uh in the imitation of the first um simeon and according now whether or not this is true there was in some some one of the one of the funnier chroniclers um says that they were so frequent that in some cases there would be um one of the style light monks uh in shouting distance of another one and so they would actually both be on pillars but they'd be close enough that they could shout each at each other and the one is like a monopole and the other one is a

(37:08) and they're just and they're screaming at each other about like you know christ has two natures christ is only one nature you know this kind of a thing that's from an audience yeah of course so there's lots of people not on the pillar but there's still a lot of people on the pillars so apparently anyway it became a pretty big thing for at least a century afterwards and so there and so it is something that you can do i don't recommend it um because you read the stuff about the maggots and the vertebrae i you know i think we can probably go ahead and not but it is possible to do

(37:45) so and he did now whether or not you know i mean how you want to interpret all of the the supernatural beasts that he's uh fighting um they generally are described as vanishing like in a puff of smoke and things like that so it's possible these are the kind of things that um when you were having these extreme aesthetic practices where you don't eat don't drink you don't sleep and you're constantly doing movements and things like that you may well i should think experience all sorts of visions of you know which would be could be metaphorically shown to be temptation

(38:20) right and so there's all of those are viewed as being like a serpent or any other kinds of any other kind of thing um but people in this time period routinely thought of this as being quite real so even though we're in a much more skeptical era in late antiquity people had a very growing fascination with the supernatural and this is not only true and it's not only what christians are doing it is a general thing in roman society and so philosophers for example now have kind of routinely now started to do things where they're

(39:02) practicing um thaumaturgy which is to say wonder working and so this is where you know we start to think of philosophers or we start to think of wizards and things like that right so they're supposed to have potions and other kinds of things and that's becoming you know way more what you're expected to do if you're a natural philosopher or scientist in the late antiquity um and so according to the geographer again here simeon is regularly engaged with fighting off these these demons that are in the form of serpents and other beasts and then he would do the same thing that he does with the elements which is to say he ignores them or it defies them

(39:39) and then they have no power over him and so then they you know they essentially flee before him or disappear in a puff of smoke so there is like i say then this perception that all the contemporaries have of real supernatural power that they are sensing that they are witnessing and so as a result pilgrims are going to travel to him all over the place and this is an example of all these kind of kind of people i always reminded of the one of my favorite movies the life of brian where brian if you've ever seen this as the monty python version of the

(40:11) life of jesus but essentially when brian is deemed to be the messiah by a whole throng of followers um you know they they all come to him with all their problems and the one guy kind of burns down he says lord i am afflicted with a bald patch you know and all this kind of thing but anyway in other words the people had very serious ailments beyond that and they would travel very long distances with the hope that some of this supernatural power will then be imbued on them that essentially um that there will be in the course of all this praying that he's doing that you could be included or your child

(40:47) that's suffering from some condition uh could be um interest he could do an intercession during this prayer that could be mentioned he's obviously closer to the spiritual realm than you are not only in physical place but also because he's so close to um you know like having renounced all of his physical self and so by having that um by being almost in a transitional spot between the physical world by having mortified the flesh so much he is right there and can communicate presumably with the divine and hopefully then there's a supernatural intervention that will uh result in a cure and so people

(41:25) throng to him and find that um uh the geographer just lists them off you know one after another person comes they're cured you know they're come they're cured so we have all the miracles that are listed as far as the geographer is concerned and so again we have to understand the bias of the source but there's all kinds of other things too so just in the whole list of the miracles i'm just pulling out just a handful here so farmers who are having a drought they come and ask him to intercede so that god will bring the rain there's a herders whose flocks are

(41:59) played upon by this mysterious man-eating lion that they'd never seen before and where did that come from and so they asked god to intervene and so he actually prays and and the lion is god sends the lion paralysis and so then they're able to kill the lion anyway so there's all kinds of um those kinds of uh supernatural petitions anyway that people come and the hagiographer as far as they're concerned all of these uh have very positive conclusions yes yeah so the question is on the one hand we have like person who is out in the

(42:57) desert that is really being a monk and so people are coming with those petitions but doesn't there are alternatives in the church so the church has also got a secular hierarchy a secular clergy that's what we call so the difference between a the the monastic clergy and the priests and so the secular clergy are the priests and the bishops and every one of the different um cities in the empire will have a um a bishop and the bishop will supervise priests and so like you say the priests also you know the people could also come to the priests and ask

(43:31) for a blessing and they could also come to the priest and ask for the priest's prayers for intercession and yet so you're i think anticipating and yet they're going off to these desert guys so so a lot of people are going off to these desert guys because they're thinking well what did the priest ever do the priest is just sitting there in the church being rich and isn't isn't being very holy as far as i'm concerned maybe or the bishop doesn't seem holy and that and the rain hasn't come so so exactly that and so you can imagine though when all the people

(44:01) in the bishop sees all the people going out to the desert to this guy that's sitting on the column not coming to the bishop anymore so the bishop may be also that may also be way in the bishop's mind so i think you're anticipating an issue here so one of the things that happens then that accrues because of this miraculous power perceived miraculous power is actual political power and so um he definitely as from what the the story we have in the hagiography and also in letters that we have there is a sense that he feels perfectly uh

(44:37) capable of giving advice to political leaders so for example uh and you know all through the whole geography there's list after list of envoys or actual provincial officials or different leaders including envoys from bishops foreign kings and even roman emperors so at a certain point the the persian shah sends uh sons representatives the one of the top zoroastrian magi come so in other words even the different um nearby foreign powers are recognizing this incredible spiritual power at least as far as the hagiography is concerned and so one of the things that happens uh at least again like i say in the

(45:18) stores which as far as the the from the standpoint of the monks is that he always stands up to these guys he always rebukes them including even um the emperor right and so as opposed to simply cow towing to them and saying oh you know great emperor in that way he's following in that same tradition that we had when we were talking about the aesthetics we were talking about diogenes at least according to the story where he you know when alexander comes because of diogenes incredible spiritual power or

(45:48) philosophical aesthetic power that he has and they ask and alexander asked to you know grant him anything that he wants and the ideology says well you know get out of my son because you're you're you're your shadow here is keeping me from being like getting my tan or whatever it is you know and so he doesn't want anything from alexander but then him to get out of the way so because he doesn't care about kings and that same thing is true now for uh in that same tradition simeon is saying that same thing anyway about the emperor himself christian

(46:17) emperor um okay so uh this is what the hagiography again says going back to the saints life letters of kings poured in and by the hand of messengers in writings petition and request with captains of their hosts they were sending to the to his righteousness to simeon here and they besought from his holiness that he would bless them and pray for their kingdom and the rulers who were under their power and that he would command and that he would command them all whatever he pleased so that same thing like alexander said whatever you want

(46:51) diogenes will do joyfully for joyfully without refusal they received his word and in the beginning of their letters in beginning their letters they write father and teacher who god has given to us they addressed him and they implored him that he freely would command them concerning everything so that's essentially taking that same tradition that we saw with the stoics and alexander but whatever and so whatever praised and glorified god's god and was for their souls welfare and of help for the poor and establishing their kingdom he counseled and advised them so he sends that back and he really only

(47:29) talks to them as if you know as a christian right and as telling and teaching them uh that same kind of extreme gospel purity that he's concerned with but those kings with the princes who were under the authority of their kingdom joyfully received the answer of the letters of the blessed one and quickly did all that he commanded as his pleasure so in other words there he's able to make these interventions and and uh they do what he says according to anyway his followers um these are in some cases like the guys saying are in favor of like having them be more christian or having them live a more let's say

(48:06) christian or ethical life and also to do justice for people who where where the poor have been oppressed or where that where um local corrupt officials are exacting too many taxes and he's telling them to stop doing that and so those are all listed off in the um in the hagiography but it's also not always for good stuff so the guy sitting on top of the pillar i mean whether that's good you can decide but anyway one of the guys sitting on the pillar also has a very extreme sense for example of um uh religious intolerance

(48:41) so and part one of the emerging things that's coming in uh this time period uh is as christianity now is the state religion uh the uh the state and the state church is having less and less tolerance for people who are not uh christian and for people who are um specifically especially people who are representing a heresy as far as the state church is concerned from the orthodox anyway version and so he's also very much writing to these uh leaders and telling them these heretics can't be um suffered to live so where they need to be put away and in one of the big examples that we have

(49:22) actually in the hagiography is a really bad one which is um there had been a uh kind of a popular um zealous christian people uprising in a uh roman city where they had destroyed the uh uh jewish quarter and they'd expelled all the jews and they'd taken all of the jews property and moved into the houses and the roman emperor theodosius ii had uh issued an edict that this was not incorrect his prefect had advised him to do this apparently and so they he ordered all of the christians to leave those houses and that they should be restored and rebuilt and given back to their actual owners

(50:07) and so simeon writes to theodosius and says that is absolutely wrong you know and you need to uh stop that and uh and stop supporting uh jews and uh and so then the guy reversed himself and he fired his uh prefect and so this is an example of simeon using his political power for intolerance so yeah was that already an established practice on the part of christian spokespeople to um to denigrate jews and judaism well so it's in the tradition all the way all the way back so it's um so since christianity emerged

(50:55) uh from second temple israelite religion and and because of the schism that occurs between the two um early religions in the first century there's a moment when uh all of these jews who believe that jesus is a messiah and won't stop talking about it in the synagogues and there's all the other people who are like stop talking about it at a certain point there's an edict that they can't go to the synagogue anymore and so when that happens in for example in the john community so the community that created the gospel of john they recall that event so it's their

(51:32) event even though it's put into jesus's words their writing of that gospel occurs after that edict so uh and so as a result of that they write a lot of things even though they themselves are jewish you know the writers of that gospel they no longer kind of are considering themselves to be jewish because of um this schism that's happened and so as a result of that in the gospel of john we have all kinds of very strange things where jesus is walking around talking about the jews which he would never the historical figure would never have said because if

(52:05) he was using the word judean which is what the greek there would be he was a judean as far as he was concerned you know this john idea so there's this idea it's written into the passion account and this is the the the poison seed of uh christian anti-semitism i think uh where the which clearly is a anyway a christian apologetic something that's non-historical uh where um at the time the christ is being killed the people in jerusalem the jewish people in jerusalem say our blood and the blood of our children be you know uh maybe you know be upon him for this crime but kind of our heads for this

(52:53) crime or something like that so um so that is written in unfortunately at the kind of a pivotal moment i think it's in the gospel of john oh uh so it's so the gospel of john is maybe written in 90s or 100 a.d so maybe something like 70 years after jesus's life and so it already is reflecting a a new religious tradition that has broken away from their co-religionists and unfortunately when that happens a lot of times the people who are immediate cousins especially hate each other and so anyway so that unfortunately is there

(53:40) and so what i would say about this with simeon the christian emperor obviously was saying that this isn't legal to be doing this all this is a popular thing which happened all the time and he actually had issued an edict to correct it but unfortunately so pop leaders like simeon were in favor of having this kind of thing happen and in fact this is um not only with jews but this is also for the pagans so for people who are practicing the traditional greek religion this is a very these guys and we'll talk about this uh like saint simeon are the real shock troops that are causing uh the

(54:18) conversions to happen or forcible conversions to happen as opposed to the imperial government so what will end up happening is these guys will go in and they do things like expel the jews from the corridor or they will go to the pagan temple and they'll just tear it all down and then and then the the problem for the people whose temple it was is that they don't have any recourse from the imperial government so the imperial government doesn't then fix the problem the imperial government doesn't actually send legions in and to tear the whole

(54:46) thing down or something like that but rather there are popular zealotry movements that um that no justice happens for the people that are dispossessed so shock troops that anticipated where we were going good anticipation so here's an example an icon of one of these um zealous eastern uh leaders going and taking the idols or the pagan statues um from the temples and smashing them from those poor pagans who can't do anything about it right so not just the elite so we talked about how all these kings and other leaders are sending their

(55:30) envoys to these spiritual guys this is also um very very popular and it's en engaging all kinds of the regular people all around to the east and so there's just all this incredible level of awe from these celebrities and so the monks then are really doing the work of spreading then christianity to the masses and one of the ways that they do that is that like i mentioned they go to a pagan shrine which could be a thousand years old or anything like that a shine let's say to aphrodite it's always been there

(56:02) they go and they go to into it they burst the doors open they go and get the cult statue they take it out and smash it and denigrate and they say things like oh aphrodite if you're such an important uh god then why am i not why am i able to smash your ancient temple here if if you have any power at all strike me down you know and this kind of a thing and so in being able to do that and then have that have no um let's say cosmic consequences but then also no legal recourse because the pagans aren't able

(56:32) to go and and complain to anybody because the officials turn a blind eye to this um that's one of the reasons why there's really no recourse and paganism um it actually has a fairly rapid demise as a result of not having a comparable counter organization so it's largely local shrines that are kind of run by volunteer civic priesthoods and so they don't have any kind of funded institutional support like monasteries or or churches that can actually uh or paid clergy or or anyway life um clergy that are professional that are gonna back that up except for

(57:09) uh except for in egypt so um one of the things then that this resulted in according to the geographer uh how many thousands in myriad myriads who were who were i'm sorry even i guess yeah of an unconscious yeah i don't know there's some typos i type these two things too fast in okay but anyway so so we're unconscious that there is a god so people are not even aware that there's the supreme god anyway uh though the saint came to know uh through the saint came to know god their creator and became worshippers and his adores so

(57:46) people are brought to um simeon's idea of god through his actions again how many unclean were sanctified how many licentious became chaste at the sight of him how many also who were not persuaded in the fear of our lord who came to hear him from distant places when they saw his beautiful person which i wouldn't see it describe it that way but they were thinking it's pretty amazing uh and his discipline and never-ending toil despised and left the transitory world with all that is in it and became disciples of the word of truth and many of them

(58:24) i'm sorry many of the in some of them were vessels of honor so anyway i have to there's some typos there i typed too fast oh thank you that's nice how many distant bedouins who did not even know what bread is that's i think a bias again of the author i think that bedouins know what bread is but whose subsistence was on the flesh of animals when they came and saw the blessed one when they came and saw simeon became disciples and were christians and renounced the images the idols of their fathers and served god how many barbarians and armenians

(59:04) and arshians i don't know who archaeans are i looked this up i couldn't find it presume somebody kind of in the eastern syria or something like that armenians and the arsenals and pagans of every tongue came continually and every single day crowd upon crowd received baptism and confessed the living god and there was no end to the arabs and their kings and chiefs who received baptism and believed on god and confessed the messiah and at the word of the blessed one also built churches among the tents so essentially um uh all of this thing

(59:35) uh the they're drawing the dots here um has led to you know mass popular conversions um through simeon's life and and in general this whole process of all the people that are like him and the desert um however we were mentioning okay so we we have to deal with you know the fact that we've been reading now mostly from a very pro-simeon source even though uh it doesn't always come off in the positive light by our own modern day perspective especially with the intolerance and stuff like that um but not everybody at the time found this extreme asceticism to be appealing so retilius nomantius who is uh i'm

(1:00:13) sorry no manchester unit no men ten tianas no nama tianas i should have been reading that ahead of time retillius novatianas prefect of the city of rome in the early 5th century so an important official who it's not clear but probably hadn't converted so there were a lot of holdouts actually in the city of rome itself among the old senatorial elite and so he wrote that he had been when he'd been traveling around he visited a filthy island filled by men who flee light monks they call themselves using the greek word

(1:00:48) because they want to live alone unseen by man fortunes gifts they fear dreading it's harm mad folly of a demented brain they cannot suffer good for fear of ill so in other words because they you know are so worried about having evil they also have despised everything that's good to do in life they're just living in this kind of filthy condition and he was not impressed by by them you anticipated that bishops also may not like all of this stuff so as bishops also became important imperial officials they were also very antagonistic to ascetics and monks as threats to the church's

(1:01:32) new hierarchical structure so we talked about different times how even in the first generation of christianity that one of the um the very earliest uh um types of christians uh that we saw were apostles and yet by the time we get to any time of the historical time frame apostles are completely gone and so the idea of it is apostles were itinerant preachers who would come and they would bring without bringing any property or anything like that they'd come to your congregation and they'd only be allowed to stay there for a day or two and meanwhile they're praying that god will

(1:02:08) give them this day their daily bread and this sort of thing and then otherwise they are preaching by the spirit and so they will be prophesying and they will be practicing these kind of aesthetic practices and things like that by the end of the first century there ceases to be these figures because most likely because these congregations don't like them very much at a certain point so these guys in addition to the ones that are seen as being true apostles they're also ones that are seen as being kind of like

(1:02:39) freeloader apostles and so over time they develop the early church develops rules and the bishops start to be in charge of these established congregations and a certain point we talked about how the bishops ceased to want these kind of guys to be coming to their congregations and instead said hey why don't you go off into the desert or why don't you go into one of these new monasteries and things like that and so that's still happening but even so as you we were kind of anticipating if uh instead of following the council or

(1:03:09) the you know acknowledging let's say the spiritual power of the bishop the person is running off to the desert to a guy that's on top of a pillar this also is potentially a threat to the hierarchical church and the and the and the monks felt the same way back so uh john cassian who's an ascetic he advised monk ought to flee women and bishops i don't want either of those and so these are already bishops as imperial clergy right built into the um built into the mosaics so just to kind of uh talk about this so

(1:03:48) why did all of this asceticism take hold when it did why did this become a central christian practice we talked about one of the things is that this is a way for people who are very interested spiritually to continue to exercise their piety outside of the congregation the more rigid congregation um but another thing that that is pretty clear is that while um that the replacement of this early christian ideal anyway of martyrdom as that can't happen anymore once christianity becomes the state religion in some ways going off and doing extreme asceticism

(1:04:27) it becomes a replacement for that martyrdom and so this is a an image of saint ignatius of antioch and just being fed to the lions in the coliseum whether or not there's a lot of this trope of christians being fed to the lions is actually a little bit more trope than we have very many examples of it um but uh because the the imperial idea about persecuting christians was not ever systematic it's or in general uh for the whole empire or anything like that it's not like the first three centuries of christianity um the christians were constantly being

(1:05:04) hunted down and fed to the lions by imperial officials rather what was happening is um if a christian really kind of went out of their way to get martyred by imperial officials um they would oblige the imperial officials would usually oblige them but it was like in general all you have to do is if you come up if you wanted to um if you wanted to not get martyred uh the the official would say would you just do a a prayer before the genius of the emperor and so if this is the statue of the genius of the emperor if

(1:05:34) you go like this you know then that's fine and so in other words that showing that you it's more or less for the roman empire that's showing that you pledge allegiance to the flag or something like that and if you refuse to do that because you're saying that's idolatry because the emperor's genius is a is pagan we're in canada yeah you know if you refuse to take the oath to the queen because you're saying i'm a republican person i i'm not a monarchist you know and then then uh then canada executes you right so

(1:06:06) there are people who refuse to take the oath of citizenship because they they won't pledge allegiance to the queen right well not that's how silly is that what's a little perjury among friends well that's what that's what several of the christians said uh you know so what's the difference uh however there were a bunch of them that were very firm that if you actually did that then you were a heretic and then if you were a bishop that did that um then that means that all of the different sacraments that you after were

(1:06:41) performed are not valid and so and so this is and so when that happens that means that everybody they get baptized by that bishop you know isn't actually baptized and if they became a priest and they you know i mean so in other words and so on and so on and so that ended up being um uh the position of the donatists but that the orthodox christians decided that's crazy that's chaos that's heresy stop saying that so anyway yes so the the question is um they're already in the tradition uh this uh this phrase and a saying of jesus which is render under caesar that which is caesar and render what unto god is god's and so

(1:07:41) that is already in our in the gospel texts and so that would have been um you know by the second century very commonly held by uh by christians but then there's always things that are subject to interpretation so what does that mean so what is god's so god's might be every everything that is god's might be everything that's spiritual and so if you were actually doing a prayer to the genius of the emperor that might be god's that's not caesar's so in other words those people can still argue well i pay my taxes but i don't do this because that's against my religion and so so that's the

(1:08:17) that's the thing and so that was a conflict and so anyway so some people like ignatius um did get uh martyred for that and so there are a lot of early christian martyrs um although we don't even know for example if ignatius actually got eaten by lions but he probably did get martyred in the coliseum um the lion story isn't contemporary so we're not sure um anyway after constantine converts and he issues the edict of milan and so ends all you know christian persecution legalizes christianity there is not going to be martyrdom anymore and so sopia severus writes

(1:08:54) to fast and to keep unceasing visual to lacerate the flesh this is also a martyrdom so we're not going to be able to be martyrs from the government anymore since we are the government but if you have this kind of ascetic practices you can experience a new kind of martyrdom right so so uh when we look at the the roman empire then this is in the fourth century the end of the 4th century this time period that we're talking about we have one of the very earliest of the desert monks anthony who goes out into the

(1:09:31) desert after after he gives all his possessions away and seeks this kind of spiritual life in the area around alexandria then picomias who is uh decides to help create a community around that so instead of just living as a solitary hermit taking like we said all of the hermits together and ultimately having colonies of thousands of of hermit monks and nuns that are living there and we've talked about the communists before a couple times because this area where that monastery those monastic colonies that's where we find the the nag hamadi library and so when we found

(1:10:06) all that gnostic library some of the komius's monks presumably or nuns were you know secretly reading gnostic books and at a certain point you know when there was a when gnosticism was um out of style they put them all together in a box and they buried them which like we said forever i always lament that everybody in egypt should have been doing that all the time if that we'd have all these books if they'd only all done it basil the great up in cappadocia up in what's now turkey becomes kind of the uh

(1:10:38) this uh the person who essentially writes the rules or makes the forms for eastern or greek monasticism for the westerners people like jerome while he's in palestine working on making a latin version of the bible and everything like that he's also living in as a monk and so he is also promoting as such an influential writer he's promoting the idea of monasticism and the one of the first early important monks in the west that's kind of bringing the tradition to the latin west is martin of tours who's running around doing miraculous things among the gauls and converting all of the galls from

(1:11:21) paganism to christianity then we have our simeon right so living on his pillar and then finally much later um in the west just as we're kind of aware of it so saint benedict so the benedictine order benedict regular rises instead of having um you know crazy guys on their own living on pillars doing who knows what and sending whatever advice to emperors and confounding them um you know now we have monks living on a very regular rule uh in kind of roman villas together where they're engaged in doing very particular tasks you know that are less uh politically unstable you know than what

(1:12:02) what simeon might be doing so kind of that expansion yeah he's very old was that 90 yeah yeah well well um so one of the things that you know some people always talk about how like life expectancy in the ancient world the medieval world is really especially early modern world is really really short but it's really because your life expectancy as a baby is very bad so you may well infant mortality you could really just die and that's true all through childhood you really have to have lots of kids in order to you can't just have like a modern uh queen of england having an error and a spare you

(1:12:48) gotta have more than one spare if you want to make sure your dynasty is going to actually last and so essentially people would die in childhood but essentially once you've got over the threshold into an adulthood for a man well and then depending on how much you were a night or something like that and fighting in war uh women of course had the additional issue of childbirth and dying in childbirth all the way up through middle age but then once you got kind of into the kind of middle age which is to say

(1:13:17) old age as far as um ancient medieval people kind of thought uh then you could pretty well live on uh there wasn't he wasn't anything stopping you from having um fairly long life so people did live long lives it's just your average life expectancy at birth was quite short i'm just talking about those boys yeah the monks these guys these leaders what those guys were living in yeah well they're not all terrible aesthetics like simeon so i mean at least some of them i mean benedict is like uh he's like saying how much wine you get to have i mean it's not as bad as

(1:13:58) all that once you start to regularize it right 105. i don't know that's yeah i find it hard to believe that's what i got off of the catholic encyclopedia or something like that [Laughter] okay uh so so there's this tension then we've kind of talked about this and so this is kind of one of the themes that we've kind of been talking about so we have this people who have this perceived spiritual power because of their aesthetic practice and so that that gives them a lot of uh credibility with people in general but also leaders

(1:14:39) and then that gives them a lot of potential to cause change provoke change that was for the good or also for the bad potentially chaotic and then what we have on the opposite side of that is the institutional pressure so the church its hierarchy the fact that it's become a state religion and so there's an institutional and inbuilt institutional desire obviously to promote order stability control and things like that and so there's going to be attention that always happens and so what we tend to have then in all these things is you'll have this kind of spiritual reformer

(1:15:12) that is seeking something like it could be uh some to live some kind of very true or fully dedicated or completely zealous life like simeon did and that'll challenge then the institutional church or the emperor or the bishops or all that kind of thing the institutional restaurant church's response frequently then is to co-opt these guys so wouldn't it be nice if you all lived in a monastery together instead of that in the monastery subject to inhabit who follows the directions of his bishop wouldn't that be how it should work oh okay that sounds good

(1:15:41) so then that's co-ops and regularizes it brings it under rule and then the result though is then that those guys that are brought into within a generation or so there's a loss of the kind of spiritual vitality within it and so um we'll see that again and again and again where um the benedictines uh they're they're they'll have these monasteries they start out having aesthetic life and they're doing all this manual labor and things like that over time their monastery everybody loves how spiritual it is they donate all of the requests to it they leave all

(1:16:12) their money and other things like that in order to have the monks pray for them then those monks become really rich and then it becomes you know less exciting to do all the work well maybe maybe our servants could do the work you know and that kind of a thing and so then it becomes less impressive over time and so then somebody else who has you know the same idea this new spiritual reformer then they challenge the institutional church you know and so then they'll that cycle will continue again and again and again so we have like i mentioned the benedictines uh they become not as extreme so then

(1:16:43) clooney has a whole bunch of reforms and we have clooney x the clooney acts quickly become super rich so then the cistercians want to come in and be really extreme again and aesthetic and and then of course they become rich the franciscans likewise you know so that kind of thing is happening the other thing though that happens the other way to have a challenge is the other response the church doesn't always do this the church has another potential response which is smash so in other words if we can't co-opt you

(1:17:13) you know then we can get rid of you and so we've seen that when we had our lecture on the cathars and also people like the waldensians the spiritual french the skins who are trying to take the franciscans back into their roots and things like that uh end up not being co-opted they end up getting branded heretics and ultimately even we can say that maybe going down to protestantism which begins as a reform but ultimately is not able to be smashed and instead leads to some permanentism in the church so stylism and asceticism today and so we're just going to have this as a leave

(1:17:49) this for thought and for discussion um there's different ways we can look at what simeon did so so one of the things that um people somehow people did crazy things in the roaring 20s and so one of them is they recreated this pull sitting fad where people would go and this guy would i guess sat on the pole for 51 days um in this case we do have the uh the the logistics of how they went to the bathroom because it's more in modern times we have more records what i don't think so i think i think they're in america in the united states i think aren't torontonians more more sensible than that i don't know

(1:18:34) so i don't know i don't remember anyways they essentially you know they're like okay everybody look away and apparently there's some kind of a a funnel with a tube that goes down not anyway exciting that's how you'd have to if you want to do that so i don't know that that's the only um legacy here another one that's also rare there is actually a 21st century georgian monk who has gone up and is living in a historic monastery that's on top of this natural pillar although the guy does come down so every once in a while so he hasn't only been up there i think he

(1:19:11) comes down every couple weeks but in the event he's generally living up there and it's so it's sort of not in quite the same way because he's got a house but anyway it's similar there's a pillar involved so so the question i guess is that we can have in discussion offline and then afterwards is um you know where do these aesthetic practices have appeal and value to us today in 21st century toronto are there different ways where um where we do things we talked about like people uh having a sense of simplifying

(1:19:42) their lives that's one thing that maybe people do in terms of the natural aesthetic practice but are there other kinds of things where people have decided that there's value to various extreme dietary practices or other things like that that still kind of evoked all of this or is this the kind of thing where we're in this kind of post-enchantment universe where it's harder to be worried about visions of serpents coming and challenging us and that kind of a thing because we we are too material maybe so we can talk about that after thank you much

(1:20:23) [Music] [Applause] [Music] you