The potentia
of the saint in his shrine assumed a ‘vertical’ model of dependence. The saint’s
power held the individual in a tight bond of personal obligation that might
begin, days of hard journey away, in a need to visit the saint’s praesentia (presence) in the one place
it could be found; it could make a patient pass through the drama of a
late-Roman court scene, and it might even end in a palpable and irreversible
act of social dependence, by which the recipient of healing became the serf of
the church in which his invisible dominus
(master) resided.
By contrast Marcellus* sums up a world for which a ‘horizontal’ model is still
dominant: the patient is tied directly by a web of Lilliputian threads to a
diffuse and seemingly bottomless traditions of his own environment. Such a
model tacitly but firmly excluded the intervention from the outside of a potentia that might dislodge the
individual from the environment in which he could still feel safely embedded.
Seen in this light, what we call the spread of Christianity in Gaul, as it
radiated from those great shrines where the praesentia
of the saints was dramatically revealed by acts of power, amounts to a
conflict of two models of healing, each heavy with assumptions on the position of
man in his society and his environment. It is to this conflict that we now must
turn.
For this is the conflict which holds the attention of Gregory of Tours. It is
summed up for him in two words: reverentia
and its antithesis, rusticitas. Reverentia implied a willingness to
focus belief on precise invisible persons, on Christ and his friends the saints
– the amici dominici – in such away
as to commit the believer to definite rhythms in his life ( such as the
observation of the holy days of the saints), to direct his attention to
specific sites and objects ( the shrines and the relics of the saints), to
react to illness and to danger by dependence on these invisible persons, and to
remain constantly aware, in the play of human action around him, that good and
bad fortune was directly related to good or bad relations with these invisible
persons. Reverentia, therefore,
assumed a high degree of social and cultural grooming. It was not a luxuriant
undergrowth of credulity or neo-paganism. It involved learning an etiquette
towards the supernatural, whose every gesture was carefully delineated. Hence
the importance for Gregory of its antithesis, rusticitas, which is best translated as ‘boorishness,’
‘slipshodness’ – the failure, or the positive refusal, to give life structure
in terms of ceremonious relationships with specific invisible persons.
Gregory’s use of the word rusticitas
throws light on the position of Christianity in parts of Gaul, and, by
implication, in western Europe as a whole, at the end of the late-antique
period. It is a situation which requires some delicacy of interpretation. For a
sharp dichotomy between ‘town’ and ‘country,’ ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ does not
do justice to its nuances. Rusticitas,
as Gregory observed its ravages, overlapped considerably with the habits of the
rural population; but it was by no means limited exclusively to these. Rusticitas could be committed by most
people on most days – and especially on Sundays, as when the inhabitants of
Arles irrespective of class and culture brought upon themselves the solemn warnings
of their bishop, Caesarius, by behaving like rustici in making love to their wives on the Lord’s Day. Still less
can it be identified with ‘rural paganism’. For what we have seen is that,
although therapeutic systems such as those assumed by Marcellus depended upon
knowledge inherited from the pagan past, they formed and intractable enclave of
rusticitas less because they were
closely connected with any precise forms of pagan worship, as because they
tacitly denied any rhythm of cure that involved explicit dependence on the potentia of an invisible human being:
the kin, the neighbors, especially the cunning men and women of the locality,
were thought to be able to o provide all that the sufferer needed. When members
of Gregory’s own entourage, traveling to Brioude to avoid the plague, resorted
to the use of amulets applied by local diviners to cue one of their fellows,
what angers him is not that they were behaving like pagans, but that they had
lost their sense of reverentia for the
saints. It provokes in him a characteristic outburst:
Let the patronage of the martyrs be what
the sufferer seeks . . . Let him pray for the help offered by the confessors,
who are truly called the friends of the Lord..
Thus, in any place where a Christian shrine lay close to hand, the diffuse
resources of the neighborhood, as these had been applied in the forms of
amulets and divination, were met by a precisely delineated image of ideal human
relations sketched out by bishops such
as Gregory with a certainty of touch that betrayed the long grooming of
late-Roman aristocratic society.
It is in a conflict of models of healing, therefore, that we can sense the
impact of the rise of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world, ’whether
it is in a little wooden chapel on an estate in the Limousin, as described by
Gregory, or in the vigorous ‘mopping up’ by Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus of the
sectarian villages in the hinterland of northern Syria, perched on their
mountain ridges, above the disciplined life of the plains in a countryside where,
as an eighteenth century traveler
observed, ‘we see despotism extending itself over all the flat country
and is progress stopped at the first rock, at the first defile, that is easy of
defense,’ the advance of Christianity beyond the towns was the advance of the praesentia of the saints. Throughout
this book, we have seen how such a praesentia,
in terms of a relic and its shrine, was heavy with a whole cluster of specific
associations, involving human interaction with an invisible, ideal human being,
wielding ideal potentia.
Only too frequently in late antiquity, the praesentia of the saint in the countryside
ratified disruptive processes that had been the work of centuries. For we are
dealing with a silent change, larger by far than the rise of the Christian
church. In Gaul and Spain, the spread of Latin at the expense of local Celic
dialects, and the consequent emergence of Roamce languages, betrays the final
death of cultures that had existed since prehistory. The Christian church
inherited the result of this change. By the sixth century, the only major
settled civilization that maintained a paganism reaching back without dislocation
to the pre-classical world west of India and east of Ireland was the Zorastrian
culture of Sasanian Iran: elsewhere, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Anatolia, and
in western Europe, the ancient pre-classical world had come to a definite end.
It was a silent subsidence more drastic than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,
and more irreversible than the passing of the urban gods of Greco-Roman
paganism. In the countryside and the towns of Gau and Spain the praesentia of the saints reaped the
fruits of a belated and largely unwitting triumph of Romanization. For the
spread of Christian reverential made the final processes by which the
indigenous cultures of the Western Mediterranean had been imperceptibly eroded
by a slow but sure pressure from on top exercised through the grid of
administration and patronage relationships that had reached ever outwards over
the centuries from the towns and from the country villas of the great. A
century after the end of the Western Empire, Gregory and his contemporaries
could now be certain that, if all roads no longer ran to Rome, in the Touraine,
at least, they would all run to Tours, ad
dominum Martinum: a speck of dust
from his shrine was worth more than all the immemorial cunning of the
village healers.
For, as we have seen throughout this book, the reverentia that Gregory expected derived its force from an
unremitting if discreet process of ‘socialization’ taking place in a world
whose expectations of the supernatural had been pieced together lovingly and
with a certain urgency, from the workings of power and protection among the
late Roman aristocracy in a largely urban environment. The language of the cult
of saints breathed this quite distinctive atmosphere; and the rhythms and
preoccupations that supported it were acted out most convincingly either at
urban shrines, under the patronage of aristocratic bishops, or, as at the
shrine of Saint Julian of Brioude, in a rural area dominated by aristocracy
with widespread urban connections. When this reverential reached out into areas
where such ‘socialization’ was less available, it was met by the tacit
resistance of life styles that were less amenable to urban and aristocratic
grooming. Throughout the late-antique and early-medieval period, the process of
Christianization was brought to a standstill by the silent determination of
human groups who would not alter the immemorial patterns of their working life
to pay reverence to the saints, or bend their habits to please another class of
domini. Zones of ‘raw rusticity’
hemmed in Gregory’s ceremonious world.
Occasionally, however, the new praesentia
of the saint might be used to condense and resolve the ambiguities of scattered
agrarian communities whose members felt enmeshed in conflicting networks of
obligations. Gregory’s hagiographic work is punctuated by incidents that allow
us to glimpse the malaise of a countryside faced by baffling or oppressive
forms of power. For the praesentia of
the saint often sparked off heady enthusiasm associated with the arrival of a
new, ‘clean’ power in areas where until then, the villagers had had no choice
but of forms of ‘unclean’ dependence. When the relics of Saint Julian passed
through the fields of Champagne at a time when these were crowded with hired
laborers drawn from the neighboring villages, their passage was marked by
scenes as dramatic and as ominous as any later pursuit of the millennium:
Look at the blessed Julian drawing near to us! Behold his power!
Behold his glory! Run, lads, leave your ploughs and oxen; let the whole crowd
of us follow him!
The transient praesentia of the
saint had brought to these tired men the touch of an ideal dependence that
could set them free, if only for a moment, from the harsh demands of
Gallo-Roman landowning in a labor-intensive cereal-growing area. Many of the
afflicted individuals who were emancipated from their lords or who abandoned their
families on finding healing at the shrines of the saints came from peripheral
areas. Faced by the ambiguities of the patronage system in which they were caught,
those who had no other defense, often the women, opted dramatically for
dependence on an ideal dominus at his
distant shrine, rather than dependence on the all too palpable wielder of power
in their locality.
Gregory registered this trickle of uprooted men and women with approval: for it
is the demons that speak in them, recognizing, in unexceptionable form, the
ever-widening range of the potentia
of the saints. What angers him deeply, however, is any attempt to sidestep the demands of
reverential by creating for themselves indigenous pockets of praesentia which escaped the control of
the bishop. Yet his libri historiarum
and other later sources are full of incidents that reveal the explosive
situation which the dominance of the urban saints of Gaul had created. Whenever
communities were faced with threats with which the conventional therapeutics
could not cope, as in the frequent recrudescences of the plague after 543, their
immediate response to the situation was a reassertion of the ‘horizontal’ model of healing, if now in a new, Christian
form. Soothsayers appeared, empowered by visions of the saints, to circulate
new forms of remedies and to enunciate new rituals of propitiation. Prophets
established penitential rituals, based on their ability as diviners to detect
thieves, to recover stolen goods, and to read thoughts. These movements betrayed
a poignant need to bring the praesentia of
the saints, often the most authoritative and unimaginably distant of these,
such as Peter and Paul, straight into the local community. And they claimed to
do this without the crushing demands of reverentia
mobilized around the urban shrines and its bishops. Even Gregory met his match
in such men:
[After
a bad year, in 587] there appeared in Tours a man named Desiderius, who
proclaimed himself one above the common, asserting his power to work many
miracles. He boasted, among other things, that messengers passed between himself
and the apostles Peter and Paul. As I was absent, the country people flocked to
him in multitudes, bringing with them the blind and the infirm, whom he sought to
deceive rather by false teaching of hellish arts than to heal by the power of
holiness.
What
worried Gregory was that this was not an isolated case. These incidents
stretched from the early 6th century deep into the middle ages. We can sense in
them the reaction of men and women who had been pushed tragically to one side
by the rise of the Christian church, and by the extension of its structures
into the countryside. Religion its fullness, and full participation in the
beneficence of the saints, happened elsewhere, in the towns.
For this was the paradox of late-antique Christianity as it came to e
crystalized in the cult of the saints. A universal and exclusive religion,
Christianity claimed to have spread to every region in the known world. In
fact, having spread, it lay around the shrines of the saints like pools of
water on a drying surface. For only in certain places, and in certain precisely
defined social milieu, could the language of the praesentia and the potentia
of the saints echo with satisfying congruence the deepest wishes of the Cristian
communities. Outside the areas where reverentia
could be limned in with a full palette of late-Roman associations, there lay
wide zones where Christianity could only be painted in so many washes of gray,
over a countryside where many of the
tints of indigenous paganism had, long previously, grown pale. It is a sad
prospect: Christian reverential created situation which the elites of the
Greco-Roman world would never have envisioned in a sharp a form, the population
was now divided between those who could if they wished be full participants in
the grooming of a universal religion, and large areas and classes condemned, by
physical distance and lack of ‘socialization,’ to a substandard version the same
religion. The death of paganism in western society, and the rise of the cult of
saints, with its explicitly aristocratic and urban forms, ensured that, from
late antiquity onwards, the upper-class culture of Europe would always measure
itself against the wildness of a rusticitas
which it had itself played no small part in creating.
We also look out on a natural world made passive by being shorn of the power of
the gods. It seems to me that the most marked feature of the rise of the
Christian church in western Europe was the imposition of human administrative
structures and and ideal of potentia
linked to invisible human beings and to their visible representatives, the
bishops of the towns, at the expense of traditions that had seemed to belong to
the landscape itself. Saint Martin attacked those points at which the natural
and the divine were held to meet: he cut down sacred trees, and he broke up
processions that followed the immemorial lines between the arable and the
non-arable. His successors fulminated against trees and fountains, and against
forms of divination that gained access to the future through close observation
of the vagaries of animal and vegetable life. They imposed rhythms of work and
leisure that ignored the slow turning of the sun, the moon, and the planets
through the heavens, and that reflected, indeed, a purely human time, linked to
the deaths of outstanding individuals. What is at stake behind the tired
repetitions of anti-pagan polemic and the admonitions of the councils in sixth-century Gaul and
Spain is nothing less than a conflict of views on the relation between man and
nature.
Alphonse Dupront has made this point clear when he speaks of the nature of the
Christian pilgrimage site:
The
place in the fullness of meaning is a cosmic reality, some physical accident
that in each case it consecrates. And the whole story of the Christian
pilgrimage aims to baptize the pagan - that is, to anthropomorphize the cosmic.
. . The human screen or 'hominization' are coherent acts without any Christian
consideration of the place of pilgrimage.
This was certainly the opinion of the fifth-century
bishop of Javols, as his activities were remembered by Gregory. When he spread
Christianity into the Auvergne, he found
the country folk celebrating a three-day festival with offerings on the edge of
a marsh formed in a volcanic crater within a mountain top. ‘Nullest religo in
stagno,’ he said.
There can be no religion in a swamp. But rather
acknowledge God and give veneration to his friends. Adore Saint Hilarius, the
bishop of God, whose relics are installed here. He can act as your intercessor
for the mercy of God.
What happens later may seem no great change. The pilgrimage to the mountain
top continued. But the religio has well
and truly gone out of the swamp. Instead, we have a human artifact –a stone building;
the praesentia of a human being – the
relic of Saint Hilarius; and Saint Hilarious’s power is suppose to operate through
the quintessentially human relationships of friendship and intercession. The
site itself is incorporated into the administrative structure dependent on the
authority of human beings resident in a town far removed from the signifying
folds of the once holy landscape; it has become a church in the diocese of the
bishops of Javols. Seen in this way, the rise of Christianity in Western Europe
is a chapter in the ‘hominization’ of the natural world.
This is a triumph which modern scholars need not witness with quite the same degree
of enthusiasm as Gregory of Tours. Faced with the majesty of mountain tops and
with the long, slow wisdom of pre-Christian Europe, Gregory’s reverentia seems brittle and not a
little abrasive: it reflects the comparatively rapid growth of an inward-looking
institution, gripped to the point of obsession with the need to understand
relations with the unseen in a language of human interaction hammered out
within the narrow confines of late-Roman urban and aristocratic society.
Wherever we look, in the early centuries of the cult of the Saints, we see the
victory of a language drawn from observed human relations over the less articulate
and less articulable certainties of an earlier age.
Yet we must do justice to the resolution of the four remarkable generations that
stretched from Paulinus’s decision to settle in Nolas, to the childhood memories
of Gregory of Tours. The old world had its limitations: as Sir James Frazer said
in his Golden Bough: ‘God my pardon
sin, but Nature cannot.’ God and his human friends had come to pardon sin. Among the three men
we have met in these chapters, to opt so obsessively for a patterning of expectations
of the supernatural that reflected current relationships of dependence always
meant more than to opt for a language top
heavy with associations of the exercise of power and patronage. In late-Roman conditions,
potentia had a more gentle reverse
side. Patronage and dependence, even the exigencies of aristocratic amicitia, might seem hard, binding
relations to us; but it was through these that late-Roman men hoped to gain that
freedom of action from which the miracle of justice, mercy, and a sense of solidarity
with their fellow humans might spring.
We, who live in a world where justice, mercy, and the acceptance of the
majority of our fellows is quite as rare and as fragile as a suspension of the observed
laws of society as was that blessed moment of amnesty associated with the praesentia of the saints in the late-Roman
community, should learn to look with greater sympathy and, hence, with greater scholarly
care, at the dogged concern of late-antique Christians to ensure that, in their
world, there should be a place where men could stand in the searching and
merciful presence of a fellow human being.
* Marcellus
Empiricus, (“Marcellus of Bordeaux”),
was a Latin medical writer from Gaul at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries.
His only extant work is the De medicamentis,
a compendium of pharmacological preparations drawing on the work of multiple
medical and scientific writers as well as on folk remedies and magic. It is a
significant if quirky text in the history of European medical writing, an
infrequent subject of monographs, but regularly mined as a source for magic
charms, Celtic herbology and lore, and the linguistic study of Gaulish and
Vulgar Latin.
