The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity

"To say that Peter Brown had a huge effect on me and my intellectual formation would merely repeat the testimony you’ll get from dozens and dozens of people more eloquent and intelligent than I am, who have also been hugely inspired by this man. It’s not really an exaggeration to say he invented a whole new historical period and place—the world of late antiquity—which historians have since been comfortably working away within and recognised that it’s here to stay. It’s being expanded upon, it’s being nuanced, but it’s still, recognisably, his world. One of Peter Brown’s first books was a biography of Augustine in 1967. He then wrote a book about late antiquity in the early 1970s [both books are recommended by Robin Lane Fox in his interview with Five Books here ]. He’s an example of someone who wears his learning very lightly. What he brings that’s new is interdisciplinarity—before we even knew what that word meant—between history and anthropology, and history and psychology, as well as an openness to breaking down some of the partitions between different types and areas of historical studies. For example, the Roman aristocracy are a subject here; the early church and the church fathers is a subject there; the late Roman state and socio-economic conditions of the late Roman world and the Mediterranean are another subject over here. There was very little attempt to synthesise these different areas of enquiry, and to understand how one might inform the other. This is something he’s done: he’s broken down those barriers that are, in some ways, an accident of our historiography. The things we often associate with saints are pilgrimage, veneration at a shrine and relics. All of that paraphernalia—the material environment of veneration and of piety attached to saints—is pretty much a product of the 4th century. There’s hints of it in the 2nd century with Polycarp, but nothing like it becoming a mainstream aspect of Christian faith until the 4th century. Two key thinkers defined the railway tracks of historiography on this: Hume and Gibbon. Neither have much positive to say about it. Gibbon’s big thesis about the late antique world is that it’s about strong Roman elite men going soft and dropping out of society. Instead of being military rulers keeping this empire running, they’re joining together in little groups and becoming monks. There’s this effeminising of a whole culture and that seeds the decline of the Roman Empire. Hume wrote his book, The Natural History of Religion, in the 18th century. That lays down one of the big fallacies that Brown really explodes, that of the ‘two-tier notion of religion’. He says that Hume argues that, in the Christian faith, we have these cycles, these two forces that pull in different directions. One of them is the elite monotheistic religion of the Church—which, in Hume’s write-up, is, implicitly, a noble, progressive thing. The other is this tendency towards polytheism, which is a vulgar playing out of religion by the masses that drags down the better aspects. The cult of saints is, in this analysis, a regressive cycle in the history of Christianity. In some ways, Hume is reflecting the prejudices of his own time, frankly, as all historians with greater or lesser self-awareness, do. He does away with that. He sees the materiality, the devotion, the emotional investment as a great lurching forward of a society. It’s not just the elites and the church structures but it’s also the people. It’s a transformation, a moment of radical change that all of Christian society is invested in. This book is looking at the context in which that change is taking place. The book has been criticised on a number of levels but it’s still revolutionary in the way that it offered us a functionalist account of what’s going on with the cult of saints. It’s about, among other things, the way that private customs of veneration of the dead were made public by bishops, how the very special dead were given central positions within civic space in the cathedral. It’s about how bishops acted as the impresarios of this rewiring of patronage networks of friendship, of support, spanning different sections of society in the Roman world. And, of course, heaven and saints as the pivotal figures in these relationships. He’s showing how what might be written off as populist, superficial forms of the cult of saints are actually immensely fundamental to the way that society is working its way through different problems at this time. Yes. As the Roman world and its secular authority and structures are disintegrating around them, Brown is evoking the one institutional survival of the western Roman empire—the episcopal office. It’s an office of the state, that has always been a secular and as well as a religious position. As you get shifts towards regionalism and the end of the apparatus of centralised government, the thing that is left is bishops. And they have huge resources. They have literacy and they are enlisting the support and the patronage of saints to help them focus and channel energy—imaginative energy, as it were. These are the patron-client relationships and sources of consolation and hope that small local communities have. It’s redirecting them. This has been criticised as being very broad brush but it reconfigured an area of study which had seemed quite moribund. Yes. It introduces an infrastructure that’s open, that’s a public space that people can occupy. But you can build things and people don’t necessarily come. You’ve got to give a lending hand and you’ve got to be perceptive about the needs of these communities. When I think of ‘popular,’ I think of ‘populist’. Some things are genuinely, authentically popular. They are bottom-up, ground-up initiatives that serve local needs. And some things are populist—condescending efforts to hijack those energies and channel them. There’s a mix of both here, of course, shorthand analytical polarities rarely survive in reality. But the tendencies are there."