To a modern eye, St. Simeon Stylites is likely to seem a kind of 5th-Century Shipwreck Kelly*a symbol of ascetic reductio ad absurdum. To that view, his 38-year residence atop a pillar was only a Syrian sideshow that attracted the curious. The vulgar error of a vulgar age, says Father Augustin C. Wand, S.J., in the current American Ecclesiastical Review. "Simeon the Stylite is not a character about whom we Catholics need to be apologetic."
St. Simeon faced the age-old dilemma of the religious ascetic: how to gain spiritual strength by withdrawing from mankind and at the same time to minister...
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