other · 423–459 · Telanissos
The pillar looks like the extreme case of running from the world and it is very nearly the opposite. Simeon had already tried the ordinary methods — a monastery that expelled him for austerity his brothers could not survive, a hut where he was walled up for the whole of Lent, a rock he chained himself to, a season buried to the neck — and every one of them drew a bigger crowd. The column solved the practical problem: it put him out of reach of hands while leaving him in earshot. From it he preached twice a day, settled disputes, answered letters, argued with the emperor Theodosius about a decree, and talked people out of and into decisions for thirty-six years. Bedouin came in from the desert, and pilgrims from Gaul and Britain. The column grew in stages to something over fifteen metres. He is the reason a genre exists: within a century there were stylites all over Syria and Asia Minor, and the practice ran on for eight hundred years. Theodoret put him in the Religious History while he was still standing on it, and says he went and looked.
How do you get away from people who will not leave you alone?
You cannot. He went up instead of away, and became the most visited man in Syria.