DANIEL THE STYLITE

The Church continues its wanderings along the paths leading to Christmas. To help believers, God sends those saints whose memory falls on these holy days. These are the Old Testament prophets, ancient martyrs and ascetics.

On the penultimate day of the civil year, when the Lord, Whose Hands write History, is about to complete this period of time, the Church celebrates the memory of the Prophet of God Daniel, and the Three Youths of Babylon. This also gives us reason to remember the great ancient saint, Daniel the Stylite (409-493), who, according to a special vow of his parents, was named in honor of the Prophet. Due to the special gravity and uniqueness of their feat, like holy fools, the stylites are a separate face of holiness.

Daniel was originally from the Syrian city of Samosata, otherwise called Antioch of Commagene. The ruins of this ancient city, in the south of modern Turkey, have been resting at the bottom of a reservoir since 1989, the dam of which was named after Ataturk.

Like Samuel and other biblical prophets, he was dedicated to God by his mother from childhood. Until he was five years old, he grew up without a name so that God Himself would give Him a name. One of the ascetics opened the Bible to the Book of Daniel. That’s why it was named after him.

Daniel the Stylite is a great monk, ascetic, wonderworker and seer, and, according to the biblical essence of his calling, a prophet. Like the prophets and seers of the Old Testament, and in much later times, the fools in Christ, in his behavior and the very course of action that revealed what was soon to happen to the People of God, Daniel, through his very biography, predicted what would soon happen in the Churches.

A little over 1,500 years ago, in 493, Daniel went to be with the Lord. By the destinies of God, he became a great grace of the Church in Antioch to the Church of Constantinople.

Stylites are a special rank, a face of holiness, a type of asceticism, born in Syrian Christianity, and, until the coming of Daniel, not practiced in the Proud Capital on the Bosporus. It consisted of a constant stay, day and night, all year round, on a pillar - a high tower, inaccessible to people, but exposed to the elements: heat and sun during the day, cold, at night and in winter.

The structure of the pillar itself harked back to ancient phallic symbols for pagan worship. Thus, like the martyrs of antiquity, the Christian stylites pillars mocked the demons. They turned what had previously been a refuge for them into the Place of the Presence of the Holy Spirit.

Daniel spent the last thirty years of his life on a pillar in the vicinity of Constantinople. On the pillar he was ordained a priest. Once he did not allow the Patriarch to come to his pillar, only once did he descend from it to personally expose the emperor Basiliscus (475–476) of the heresy of Monophysitism.

Daniel was a Syrian and spoke Syriac. But he completed his ascetical feat on the Bosporus. He brought this way of ascetism to New Rome, and became a true blessing, the heavenly protector of the City for many centuries. ‘Here is a miracle in my Kingdom!’, Emperor Leo I (401–474) said about him.

Named in honor of Daniel the Prophet, the stylite bequeathed to place his body upon death next to the relics of three biblical youths - Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael - friends of the Prophet Daniel, who are written about in the biblical book of the same name. So that respect had to be given only to them.

It seemed to contemporaries that Daniel absorbed all types of monastic holiness. However, the main, truly prophetic and, perhaps, the most difficult feat for the saint himself was the transition from his native Syria to Constantinople. He accomplished it, fulfilling the blessing given to him by Simeon the Stylite (389–459): “The grace of Jerusalem is now honored in Constantinople, by the command of God. For this is the New Jerusalem, go there!”.

Simeon was the greatest Syrian ascetic of his time. Daniel was inspired by his example. Initially he wanted to go to the Holy Land, but Simeon changed his ways. To understand the essence of this blessing, it is necessary to turn to church history.

Antioch was an apostolic see, founded by Peter, and had an Apostolic lineage that Constantinople did not have.

Founded by Constantine the Great in 330, Constantinople became a fully independent ecclesiastical see and Patriarchate only in 451. Then the Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon decreed this with its 28th canonical rule, which, however, was not recognized by Rome, which had primacy in the Church.

So, Antioch at that time was the Apostolic Capital. The Church of Antioch is the main and foremost one in the entire East. Not only Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Jerusalem, but also Cappadocia and all of Asia Minor depended on it. The Bishop of Antioch was the true Patriarch of the East.

In the West, Rome had primacy, and in Egypt it was Alexandria. So, the Church of Antioch took precedence in Syria, Asia Minor, Palestine, and the Middle East. But the fate of history has become a mysterious and, at the same time, very sad personification of the gospel words: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

These words, spoken by John the Baptist about Christ, came true in an incomprehensible, mysterious, and very tragic way at this ancient apostolic see, where, after the Resurrection of the Lord, the disciples of Christ “first began to be called Christians” (Acts 11:26). The stages of this belittlement were:

At the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431, the Church of Cyprus became independent. Possessing an apostolic origin, she did not want henceforth to have her bishops appointed with the participation of Antioch. Around the same time, the relics of the Apostle Barnabas were found in Cyprus, which undoubtedly became a sign from above in favor of the ‘removal’ of Cyprus from the jurisdiction of Antioch.

Exactly ‘twenty years later’, in 451, at the IV Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon, the Church of Jerusalem was proclaimed the Patriarchate. The dioceses of Palestine were resubordinated to the new Patriarch, and the jurisdiction of Antioch over this extremely important territory for all Christianity was abolished. Let us recall that the Church of Jerusalem was founded by the Apostles, but after the capture and destruction of the city by the Romans and the exodus of Christians from the city, it ceased to exist. The Romans renamed the Holy City Aelia Capitolina. At the First Ecumenical Council in 325, Jerusalem was restored as an ecclesiastical center and a Christian city. However, the Jerusalem See was subordinate to the Metropolitan of Caesarea in Palestine. Thus, Jerusalem, like Constantinople, historically has not an apostolic, but a Constantinian primacy in the Church.

At the same IV Ecumenical Council, the See of Constantinople was elevated to second place, after Rome, in the diptych, that is, the list of Patriarchates. Antioch became the fourth, which was very significant for the self-awareness of this ancient apostolic see.

About half of the Antiochian Church disagreed with Chalcedon’s decisions on Christology. Like most Egyptian believers, it sided with the so-called ‘Monophysites’. Consequently, from 519 there were two parallel Churches in Antioch and Syria, two Patriarchs and two hierarchies.

In 526, Antioch was destroyed by the largest earthquake in its history. Both sides, supporters and opponents of Chalcedon, saw this as a punishment for ‘deviating’, as it seemed to them, from the Orthodox Faith. In the hope of finding forgiveness from God, the city was renamed Theopolis, that is, the City of God. But it did not help. It was as if the words of the Church Father St. Augustine (354–430) from his work of the same name that “the City of God cannot take place on earth” had their prophetic effect.

Finally, in 634–640, Syria and Palestine were conquered by the Arabs. There was a gradual Islamization of the formerly Christian East.

So, over the centuries, the Church of Antioch gradually lost its importance. She had the same authority, but diminished, like John the Baptist in the Gospel, before the tragic end of his prophetic ministry.

The primacy in the Orthodox Church completely passed to Constantinople, so that by the time of the so-called “division of the Churches” in 1054, the Universal Church from the Pentarchy, that is, the communion of the Five Patriarchates, actually became binary: Rome and Constantinople in the second millennium of Christian history were destined to mutually divide into Orthodox and Catholics.

As a result, the Eastern Patriarchates either split up, like Antioch, or almost completely separated from the communion of the Universal Church, as happened with Alexandria. Let us recall that since 536 in Egypt two Churches, two Patriarchs and two hierarchies opposed each other. They considered each other heretics. On the side of the opponents of Chalcedon, that is, the “Monophysites,” stood six million believing Copts. On the side of ‘our’ Orthodox are three hundred thousand believers in the city of Alexandria, led by the Greek Patriarch. Just centuries later, both Syria and Egypt were conquered by the Arabs. In this context, the providential need to transfer primacy to Constantinople, centuries later, became obvious.

‘Every kingdom divided against itself is desolate; and every city or house divided against itself will not stand,” said Jesus in the Gospel (Matthew 12:25). As a result, in the middle of the 7th century, the divided Orthodox Churches and peoples in the East were unable to resist the advancing Islam; the Cradle of Biblical civilization was lost forever by the Orthodox Eastern Roman Empire. The colossal division of the Universal Church played a tragic role. However, a millennium later, Western Christianity, led by Rome, which was divided into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism during the Reformation, ultimately succumbed to secularization. But that’s a completely different story.

Contemporaries in Alexandria and Antioch saw the process of transfer of primacy to Constantinople as a usurpation of canonical powers. Others, and among them Daniel, and Simeon the Stylite who inspired him, are the undoubted paths of Providence. The biography of Daniel the Stylite became a kind of personification of the prophetic changes that were then taking place in the destinies of history.