(Note: “cult” means “a system of worship” in the academic sense, from Latin cultus, “worship”. It does not mean a manipulative religious group led by a charismatic controlling leader.)

The ancient Greeks and Romans honored and worshipped heroes, but they were clear that the soul rose to the lower heaves, but the body stayed in the earth and was disgusting. One Greek writer has Athena abandoning a favorite hero after he died, as proximity to death was inappropriate for the gods. (However, some held Romulus’ body had ascended, although others thought that was clearly nonsense.) Cemeteries were on the outside of the town, and dead bodies were strictly separated from the living.

The cult of the saints upended this system, to the consternation of the pagans. The soul of the saint, of course, went to be with God, but his presence was still among the living in the form of his body, miracles being a proof of this. Thus the saint was a major connection between Heaven and Earth. (The reason is presumably that the sacramental worldview of Christians held that God bridges time as well as space. For example, the celebration of Christmas brings us sacramentally into Christ’s birth, even though we are separated from it by time. Similarly, because the Church is Christ’s body, the dead believers are present among the living because we are all sacramentally one body.) Thus, the saint’s corpse was paraded through the city, and people kissed the saint’s bones, to the disgust of the pagans, because they wanted to participate with the saint’s presence, and the saint’s proximity to God.

We moderns have some mental furniture cluttering our mind that prevents us from understanding how the cult of the saints arose. Articulated most elegantly and in a way that makes it seem obviously true by Hume, this clutter is the belief that “popular religion” is inherently polytheistic, but unusually insightful individuals perceive that Creation points to a divine oneness; if an age has enough of these, their influence causes it to rise up to monotheism, while otherwise it sinks into idolatry. However, this is empirically incorrect. For one thing, it assumes that “popular religion” is essentially unchanging, but we have already seen that the pagan masses, disgusted by death, over time became Christian masses eager to associate with dead saints. Another piece of evidence is that, as we shall see, bishops in the West promoted the cult of the saints.

In the last decades of the 300s there was some apparent evidence for the “two-tiered” view of religion: Augustine and Jerome both decried pagan graveside feasting. However, in order for this to support the idea that Augustine was fighting populist paganism, it would require masses of pagans to have become Christians, yet there is no evidence for this. In fact, the church service continued reading the list of catechumens as before, a slow process that would be infeasible with mass conversions. A closer examination shows that Augustine and other bishops of this era were concerned with the Christian community being torn apart along class lines: rich members of the community (women, notably) were angling to get their families buried near the graves of the martyrs, and one lady even had a personal relic she kissed before communion. There was a risk that the holy spaces would be privatized. Ambrose found a solution at Milan. When the graves of two martyrs were discovered, within two days he had them moved under the altar, so that their presence was available to the entire congregration. Other bishops similarly worked to ensure public access. In effect the saint became the patronus of the community and the bishop mediated the relationship.

The bishops had other problems whose solutions led in similar directions. “[B]itter envy always fell on undistributed wealth in the ancient world... Yet [the bishops] lacked the normal outlets by which the layman could buy off envy by ostentatiously flirting with bankruptcy in bouts of public giving.” (40) In the Christian east, a Malthusian crisis meant that the bishops had to choose between feeding the poor and building, but in the west there simply were not enough poor people to use up the huge amounts of money the churches had acquired over a century. Spending on lavish non-tombs for the saints solved this problem.

Furthermore, the celebration of the feasts of the saints helped move the ties from blood kinship to the kinship of believers, and it helped move social ties from the city-unit to the body of believers. Testimonies of miracles, formerly private, became public record so that all could share in the miracle. It also incorporated women and poor people, who were not included in Roman civic society. Ambrose noted that saints were the only kinship ties that a woman could choose. And while men and women were segregated in the procession out of the city to the shrine at the cemetery, it was one time where women were able to be seen (and see) publicly. (It caused enough problems that one man was proud that he had remained chaste his whole life—in spite of attending many festivals of the saints while a youth!) Women could safely spend time out of the house at the garden-like shrines, and bishops encouraged wealthy women in their devotion to the saints and the shrine, a novel civic participation for a group that was prohibited from Roman civic participation because that was for men, and a way of being known more broadly (especially if coupled with a vow of virginity).

The cult of the saints also was a late-Roman solution to the Christian spiritual concerns in the decades around 400. The ancient view of the self was that the soul had different parts, each above the other, until you got to the daimōnes (not an evil spirit) which was protecting your soul and the daimōnes had as its protector a god. (Christians, and presumably Jews, saw themselves as having guardian angels in this position.) When you were born, which was sort of a tragedy of moving from the perfection of the heavens to this corrupt flesh, your astrological details determined the genius that was wedded to your soul. In senatorial circles, the feeling for one’s teacher-tutor was very strong, and also Roman society at by this time had a very explicit patron-client pattern with mutual responsibilities. The Christian innovation was that a martyr, by virtue of being human, could draw one closer to God than even the mediations of an angel, so the saint began to replace the daimōnes and guardian angels. Additionally, the spread of asceticism brought increased concern for one’s sin, so it was very helpful to have someone who could intercede on your behalf when you stood at Christ’s judgement seat when you died. So the saint began to take on characteristics not only of the guardian angel, but also that of the beloved teacher, and that of the patronus. Paulinus, a wealthy senator who renounced wealth to live as an ascetic, eventually becoming bishop of Nola, saw his baptism and his renunciation of the world as being reborn, separating him from his birth-genius and connecting him to St. Felix instead. (Also, due to the strong patronage networks, freedom of movement at this time required playing different groups off each other, or becoming an outsider, and Paulinus was clear that he belonged to Felix, that Felix was his patron not anyone else, and this enabled him to maintain outsider status despite his social status.) Augustine, not being high class, was not familiar with this system, so Confessions does not mention this aspect, but in The City of God he does observe how the martyrs can intercede for us.

Unlike, say, early-modern Puritans, one of whose graves describes death’s washed hand dripping God’s grace, the Christians of the 300s and 400s still retained the cultural horror of the shame of death, even someone like Gregory of Nyssa. This made the graves of “the very special dead” like a constellation of God’s stars resting earth. For the elect were well-known in those days (unlike after the Reformation)—whoever had persevered was elect, and the martyrs were the shining example of perseverance. While this connected Heaven and Earth, it threatened an unbridgeable separation between us and them, but it also gave an example of shameless death. The trees in the gardens of the shrine reminded believers of Paradise, where the saint was, while still present with them. The passio, while monotonous to read like their panegyric predecessors, show that the saint brought God’s mighty works from the Old Testament into the present, and reassured believers that God would work them in the future. (The ancient view of healing was that it frequently required replacing the basic systems of the body, so, particularly in the Coptic regions, the shrines with dis- and re-memberment where the most popular shrines for healing.) Healing frequently happened at the places of the saint’s greatest suffering, and the suffering of one was thus inverted into blessing for many. Through poetry on this topic Christians turned the shame of death into something beautiful.

At first the holy was located to a distinct place, and if you wanted to be in that presence, you needed to travel there. This led to the popularity of pilgrimage, which wasn’t so much to a place as to visit a person. This “therapy of distance” did not end once you arrived, because you could only glimpse the saint through small windows and make your request. In the case of St. Peter, you had to lower down a cloth onto his body, although having done so, the cloth was seen as having as much of Peter’s praesentia as the tomb. If this continued, the situation might have become like that of Muslim holy sites, which were located in a small area and poorly known outside that area.

However, Ortega y Gasset observed, “The virtues which count for most of us are those we do not possess.” (93) The late-antique desired the virtues of “concord and the unsullied exercise of power” (93), and the cult of the saints helped provide these. The bishops were connected through extensive letter-writing, as well as going on pilgrimages. And since patronage relationships relied on a gift exchange, this led to a proliferation of translated relics, as pieces of the saints were given out. Areas of the world with no notable saints, like Britain, acquired relics from Italy through Victricius, for instance. In southern France, Gaudentius installed relics given to him on pilgrimage to Cappadocia. Such relics were installed with a record of who had given them, which made clear the concord within the Christian community. (This desire for concord is probably why there a so many cities with dual patron saints at this time, while later times tended to focus on just one.)  The arrival of relics was treated like the adventus of an emperor’s arrival in a city. The emperor’s arrival was not intended to set him apart from the rest of the people, but rather, to involve the entire community. Thus the saint feasts became a way for everyone to participate in the community, even the outsider Frankish counts. Many of St. Martin’s miracles were integrative, like the blind eyes being healed so that the (presumed) sinful could particpate, or prisoner’s chains being broken during the feast as a sign of the saint’s amnesty.

Saints were also able to “cleanse” power. Almost as popular as the passio of healing by replacing bodily systems, was testimonies of the saint mediating a cleansing of power. At Carthage, a man named Florentius who was well-liked by the city, was accused of embezzling by the proconsul. As the torture was about to begin (Romans believed that truth could only be achieved through pain), he saw that one of the sour-faced officials at the bench had been replaced by St. Stephen, who motioned with his right hand to Florentius that things would be okay. The proconsul became less antagonistic and more like the fatherly figure proconsuls preferred to be (during the readings of the list of proconsuls, the people would acclaim or hiss the names). In Mallorca, the Christian area was assigned a Jewish leader, and although violence resulted, the bishop writing about it attributed to St. Stephen the resolution, whereby St. Stephen became the only patron of the city (and the Jewish leader became Christian).

Exorcism was an important feature of the cult of the saints. Although scholars decry such reports as “popular religion” and consider the subject unworthy, spirit possession is seen in societies around the world, anthropological study has made it understandable. Furthermore, “Davis ... has demonstrated how historians who are prepared to study such phenomena with alertness and a strong stomach, can find that they catch behind what first strikes them as a cacophony of random violence or exuberence, the strains of an alien music.” (108) Studies of ancient the world also show an consistent pattern.

Exorcism at a shrine of a saint was seen analagous to a Roman courtroom. The quaestio, the interrogation, by the judge required torture in order to compel truth, but the torture was not a goal, but simply a means of obtaining truth. So when the person became subhuman—acting like an animal, or screeming—or gyrating in the air or other such things, it was because the saint, as judge, was interrogating the demon. The saint was simply acting like a contemporary judge, except it was spiritual. Thus, the physical manifestations were proof that the saints praesentia was, indeed, real, as was the power (potentia) of his God. This power was “clean”, since it was in the invisible realm, and the understanding was that it was the demon using the person to express what the demon was undergoing, and not the person.

The difference between voluntary and involuntary possession was blurry, as it has been in all societies. One might come to the shrine in order to be possessed, since then you would get the saint’s justice instead of the State’s. At some shrines thieves could make restitution if they confessed while possessed during the saint’s feast day. The possessed became part of the life of the shrine: every day they were blessed, they cleaned the floor of the basilica, etc. In St. Martin’s lifetime the names of the demons that left people were the names of gods, but by the 600s they were specific sins that let the demonic power in.

Cure by the saint operated under the personal-power relationship of the patron-client relationship. Thus, once cured, either exorcised or healed physically, the person came under the patronage of the saint, regardless of who they had been owned by previously. This might entail working at the monastery near the shrine, for example. Personal-power healing was not the only kind of healing available, however. Marcellus of Bordeaux, for example, wrote a medical textbook that incorporated pagan and Celtic medical techniques with the goal that self-sufficient medicine. This would have been handy to large landowners who would not have access to urban medical care while traveling managing their estates, for instance, and it is a genre that continue even to the American Colonial period. The Church hierarchy (Gregory of Tours, especially) promoted the reverentia of the honoring the personal power of the saint through the rituals appropriate for Roman clients: vertical medicine, as it were. This required a fair amount of training, so it tended not to catch on in the countryside. (Also, this is another example of how the cult of the saints was not “popular religion”, since reverentia required relatively sophisticated relational understanding.) The other option was rusticias, ignoring personal power either deliberately or accidentally.

What tended to happen was that cities and towns were more reverentia, but when danger, like the plague, threatened, even they tended to revert to the rusticias of horizontal medicine of people like Marcellus. However, while the Church hierarchy failed to stamp out horizontal medicine, and it even created a two-tiered system where the countryside could not participate due to their lack of knowledge, over time this process did result in the pagan holy places losing the holiness of place. People still went to those places for healing, but now they went to get personal intervention from the saint rather than from the location itself. Thus, paganism truly died in what had been the Roman Empire.

The Cult of the Saints is a very interesting historical explanation of the saints in Christian life. Brown demonstrates how the cult of the saints developed from how the late Roman Empire related to power. It presented the spiritual world in something understandable, but it also critiqued the secular use of power because it expressed a vision of what power expressed rightly might look like. Brown makes the strange features of the saints (and even things like guardian angels) understandable; they are strange because they are vestiges of fifth century Rome, and do not fit how we think of power or concord today. A patron saint was actually a Roman patron, which is a relationship that the Anglosphere, at least, simply does not have, and thus we need it explained to us.

(Nonetheless, I still think that the Reformation was right on this; all Christians can relate directly to God. Mediating God through a patron is like mediating God through a pastor instead of interacting directly. And if it is not exactly idolatry, it sure seems like it has the same effect of moving your focus off of God to some extent.)

I was recommended this book in order to understand medieval culture. It is really late antique, not the middle ages, but I can see how it would be helpful to understand later developments. It certainly is helpful in understanding Catholic and Orthodox practices now. The book was originally a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, which were so captivating that at least one doctoral student having no interest in the cult of saints became so fascinated by it as to contemplate switch their focus. It is easy to see why, since Brown transforms the cult of saints from a bunch of crazy, uncomfortably close to idolatrous set of practices into concrete spiritual solutions to actual 5th-century social problems.