'Popular Religion' by Peter Brown

Wherever Christianity went in the early Middle Ages, it brought with it the ‘presence’ of the saints. Whether this was unimaginatively far to the north, in Scotland, where local craftsmen attempted to copy, in their ‘alter tombs’, the shape of the high-ridged sarcophagi of late-Roman Gaul;  or on the edge of the desert, where Rome, Persia, and the Arab world met at the shrine of Saint Sergius at Resafa  - a shrine in whose treasury even the pagan king of kings of Persia, Khusro II Aparwez, had placed a silver dish recounting his gratitude to the saint is a style which makes this ex voto the last address of a Near Eastern monarch to a supernatural figure (of which one of the first was carved by the Achaemenian  predecessor of Khusro, Cyrus, high on the rock face of Bisutun); or even further to the east, among the Nestorian Christians of Iraq, Iran, and central Asia, late-antique  Christianity, as it impinged on the outside world, was shrines and relics.

This is a fact of life which has suffered the fate of many facts of life. Its existence is admitted with a slight note of embarrassment; and even when admitted to, it is usual to treat it as ‘only too natural’,’ and not a subject to linger over for a prolonged and circumstantial investigation. I would like to end this chapter by suggesting why this should have been so, and to point out the disadvantages to the religious and social historian of late antiquity of so dismissive an approach to a form of religious life that was plainly central to the position of the Christian  church in late-antique society.


For it seems to me that our curiosity has been blunted by a particular model of the nature of religious sentiment and a consequent definition of the nature of ‘popular religion.’ We have inherited from our own learned tradition attitudes that are not sensitive enough to help us enter into the thought processes and the needs that led to the rise and expansion of the cult of the saints in late antiquity. That such models have entered our cultural bloodstream is shown by one fact: long after the issue of the rise of the cult of saints has been removed from its confessional setting in Post-Reformation polemics, scholars of every and no denomination still find themselves united in a common reticence and incomprehension with this phenomena. Plainly, some solid and seemingly unmovable cultural furniture has piled up somewhere in that capricious lumber room, the back of our mind. If we can identify and shift some of it, we may find ourselves able to approach the Christian cult of saints from a different direction.

The religious history of late antiquity and the early middle ages still owes more than we realize to attitudes summed up so persuasively, in the 1750s, by David Hume, in his essay The Natural History of Religion. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes this essay, somewhat loftily, as ‘an entertaining exercise in armchair anthropology from secondary sources.’ Yet, like weightier successors in that genre, it was precisely the ‘armchair’ quality of Hume’s essay that accounts for the continued subliminal presence of its leading ideas in all later scholarship. For Hume drew on evidence that lay to hand in classical authors, which all men of culture read and would read up to our own times. He placed this evidence together with such deftness and good sense that the Natural History of Religion seems to carry the irresistible weight of a clear and judicious statement of the obvious. It was difficult to doubt the soundness of Hume’s presentation of the working of the religious mind in general, and impossible to challenge, in particular, the accuracy of his portrayal of the nature and causes of superstition in the ancient world, drawn as it was from well-known classical authors.

Hume faced squarely the problem of the origins and variety of religious thought. Men, he insisted, against his orthodox contemporaries, were not natural monotheists, and never had been. They had not lost, through sin, the original simplicity of faith in the Supreme Being that had been granted to Adam and the patriarchs. Though  theism remained an ideal, it was at all times a precarious ideal. And this was not because of human sinfulness, but because of the intellectual limitations of the average human mind. The intellectual and, by implication, the cultural and social preconditions for theism were difficult to achieve. For theism, in Hume’s view, depended on attaining a coherent – and so, rational – view of the universe, such as might, in turn, enable the enlightened mind to deduce from the order of the visible world the existence of, and the forms of worship due to, a Supreme Being. Hence, Hume concludes, the extreme rarity of true monotheism, and its virtual impossibility in the distant, unrefined ages of the past.

Furthermore, the failure to think in theistic terms could be given a precise social locus -‘the vulgar’:

The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind a few excepted, being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens .  . .so far as to discern a supreme mind and original providence.

Hume was emphatic that this failure was not due solely to the intellectual limitations of ‘the vulgar.’ These limitations reflected an entire cultural and social environment, hostile to rationality. ‘The vulgar . . . being ignorant and uninstructed tended to fragment those experiences of abstract order on which any coherent view of the universe could be based. For the average man was both notoriously ill-equipped through lack of instruction to abstract general principle from his immediate environment and, in any case, in all but the most privileged ages, and among the most sheltered elites, the natural inability of the uninstructed intellect to think in abstract terms was heightened by fears and anxieties, which led men to personalize yet further the working causes beyond their control, and so to slip ever deeper into polytheistic ways of thought. As a result, the religious history of mankind, for Hume, is not  simple history of a decline from original monotheism; it is marked by a constant tension between theistic and polytheistic ways of thinking:

It is remarkable that the principles of religion have had a flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism to idolatry.

 

This characteristically sad and measured assessment of the limitations of average human thinking, and the manner in which these limitations were reflected in a constant ‘flux and reflux’ of religious thought, provided by Hume and his successors with a model for the cultural and social preconditions for religious change. For the ‘flux and reflux in the human mind’ had an historical dimension. Some ages had it in them to be, at least marginally, less polytheistic than others. They we more secure, their elites more cultivated, possibly more effective in controlling ‘the vulgar’ or, at least, less permeable to their irrational ideas. Other ages could do nothing but relapse into idolatry of some form or other. And so the respective rise and fall of rationality could be assessed in terms of the relative strength, in any given society, of the ’vulgar’ and of the potentially enlightened few, and in terms of the relative pressure which the views of one side could exert upon those of the other.

The greatest immediate legacy of the Natural History of Religion, however, was not a sense of change: it was a sober respect for the force of inertia behind the religious practices of ‘the vulgar.’ Hume had made polytheistic ways of thinking appear plausible, almost universal, and, seemingly, ineradicable. Gibbon seized at once on this aspect of the essay. It lies behind the magisterial coherence of the twenty-eighth chapter of Decline and Fall, which flows from a description of the nature and abolition of the pagan religion of the Roman Empire to the rise of the Christian cut of the saints without so much as an eddy marking the transition from one form of religion to the other.’Mr Hume . . .observes, like a philosopher, the natural flux and reflux of polytheism and theism.’ For Gibbon, Hume the philosopher had made the transition from polytheism to the cult of saints obvious:

The imagination, which had been raised by a painful effort to the contemplation and worship of the Universal Cause, eagerly embraced such inferior objects of adoration as were more proportioned to its gross conceptions and imperfect faculties. The sublime and simple theology of the primitive Christians was gradually corrupted; and the MONARCHY of heaven, already crowded by metaphysical subtleties, was degraded by the introduction of a popular mythology which tended to restore the reign of polytheism.

 

What is more surprising is that it was, if anything, the religious revival of the 19^th century that hardened the outlines of Hume’s model, and made a variant of it part of many modern interpretations of early medieval Christianity. We need only turn to Dean Milman’s History of Latin Christianity, to see how tis could happen. Milman presented the spread of the cult of saints in Europe during the Dark Ages in a manner touched with Romantic enthusiasm. Yet Hume’s model was very much a part of his mental furniture. For he identified the theism of the enlightened few with the elevated message of the Christian church; while tye barbarian settlers of Europe, although their mental processes might be escribed by Milman, the post-Romantic reader of Vico, as ‘poetic’ (and not, as Gibbon had said more bluntly of them, as ‘fierce and illiterate’) retained to the full the qualities of Hume’s ‘vulgar.’ They represented modes of thinking that fell far below those of the enlightened leaders of the Church. Milman merely added the whole span of the barbarian West to Gibbon’s canvas:

Now had commenced what may be called, neither unreasonably nor unwarrantably, the mythic age of Christianity. As Christianity worked downwards into the lower classes of society, as it received the crude and ignorant barbarians within its pale, the general effect could not but be that the age would drag down the religion to its level, rather than the religion elevate the age to its own lofty standards.

Indeed, the renewed loyalty of sensitive and learned minds to the religious traditions of the past, In Anglicanism and Catholicism alike, heightened the lack of sympathy for the thought processes of the average man. For those who wished to maintain the elevated truths of traditional Christianity had to draw with even greater harshness the boundaries between their own versions of ‘true religion’ and the habitual misconception of these by the ‘vulgar.’

In the next place what has power to stir holy and refined souls is potent also with the multitude; and the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and and abnormal; it will always be tinctured with fanaticism and superstition, while men are what they are.

Not Hume this time – but John Henry, Cardinal Newman. It is by such stage that a particular model of the nature and origin of the religious sentiment and, especially, of the forms that this sentiment takes among ‘the vulgar’ as ‘popular religion’ has come to permeate those great traditions of Protestant and Catholic scholarship on which we still spend for so much of our erudition on the religious and ecclesiastical history of late antiquity and the early middle ages.

In modern scholarship, these attitudes take the form of a two-tiered’ model. The views of the potentially enlightened few are thought of as being subject to continuous upward pressure from habitual ways of thinking current among ‘the vulgar.’ Hume was far more pessimistic than were those robust Victorian churchmen we have just described about the intellectual and religious resources of the few; but he had no doubts about who constituted ‘the vulgar.’ He was brutally plain about what he considered to be the intellectual and cultural limitations of the masses. Hume’s ‘vulgar’ have remained with us. To take only one example: the patient work of Hippolyte  Delehaye in recovering the historical kernel of the Acts of the Martyrs is marked by a pessimism similar to that of Hume. To pass from historical documents of the early church to their later legendary accretions was, for that sober Bollandist, to note the ease with which the truthful record of a ‘few enlightened minds’ became swallowed up in a crowd:

 

Indeed, the intelligence of the multitude manifests itself everywhere as extremely limited and it would be a mistake to believe that it undergoes, in general, the influence of the elite. . . . The best point of comparison to demonstrate level is the intelligence of the child.

When applied to the nature of religious change in late antiquity, the ‘two-tiered’; model encourages the historian to assume that a change in the piety of late-antique men, of the kind associated with the rise of the cult of saints, must have been the result of the capitulation by the enlightened elites of the Christian church to modes of thought previously current only among the ‘vulgar. The result has been the tendency to explain much of the cultural and religious history of late antiquity in  terms of drastic ’landslip’s  in the relation between the elites and the masses. Dramatic moments of ‘democratization of culture’ or of capitulations to popular needs are held to have brought about a series of ‘mutations’ of late antique and early medieval Christianity. The elites of the Roman world are supposed to have been eroded by the crisis of the third century, thus opening the way to a flood of superstitious fears and practices introduced the new governing classes of the Christian empire; ‘mass conversions’ to Christianity, which are assumed to have taken place as the result of the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion, are said to have forced the hands of the leaders of the church into accepting a wide variety of pagan practices, especially in relation to the cult of the saints; a further capitulation of the elites of the Byzantine world to ’the naive animistic ideas of the masses’ is supposed to have brought about the rise of the cult of icons in the later sixth century A.D.

Of each of these moments of ‘democratization’ it is now possible to say:

 

Oh, let us never, never doubt,

What nobody is sure about.

Applied in this manner, the ‘two-tiered’ model appears to have invented more dramatic turning points in the history of the early church than it has ever explained.

Let us see what can be gained by abandoning this model. I suggest that the greatest immediate advantage would be to make what has been called ‘popular religion’ in late antiquity and the early middle ages more available to historical interpretation, by treating it as more dynamic. For the basic weakness of the ‘two-tiered’ model is that it is rarely, if ever, concerned to explain religious change other than among the elite. The religion of ‘the vulgar’ is assumed to be uniform. It is timeless and faceless. It can cause change by imposing its mode of thought on the elite; but in itself it does not change.

Now it is hardly necessary to labor the point that even in relatively simple societies, shared beliefs can be experienced and put to use in widely different ways among differing sections of a society, and that it is quite possible for one section to regard the religious behavior of the others as defective or threatening. Christianity, in particular, found itself committed to complex beliefs, whose full understanding and accurate formulation had always assumed a level of culture which the majority of the members of the Christian congregations were know not to share with their leaders. Yet it is remarkable that men who were acutely aware of elaborating dogmas, such as the nature of the Trinity, whose contents were difficult of access to the ‘unlettered, felt themselves so little isolated for so much of the time from these same ‘unlettered’ when it came to the shared religious practices of their community and to the assumptions about the relation of man to supernatural beings which their practices condensed. In the area of life covered by religious practice – an area immeasurably wider and more and more immediately felt by ancient men tan tyeir modern counterparts-differences of class and education play no significant role. As Arnaldo Momigliano has put it, with characteristic wisdom and firmness:

Thus my inquest into popular beliefs in the late Roman historians ends my reporting that there were no such beliefs. In the fourth and fifth centuries there were of course plenty of beliefs which we historians of the twentieth century would gladly call popular, but the historians of the fourth and fifth centuries never treated any beliefs characteristic of the masses and consequently discredited among the elite. Lectures on popular beliefs and Late Roman historians should be severely discouraged.

 

The model of ‘popular religion’ that is usually presented by scholars of late antiquity has the disadvantage that it assumes that ‘popular religion’ can be understood only from the viewpoint of the elite. ’Popular religion’ is presented as in some way a diminution, a misconception or a contamination of ‘unpopular religion.’ Whether it is presented, bluntly, as ‘popular superstition’ or categorized as ‘lower forms of belief,’ it is assumed that ‘popular religion’ exhibits modes of thinking and worshiping that are best intelligible in terms of a failure to be something else. For failure to accept the guidance of the elite is invariably presented as having nothing to do with any particular appropriateness or meaningful quality in ’popular’ belief: it is always ascribed to the abiding limitations of ‘the vulgar’.’ Popular belief, therefore, can only show itself as  a monotonous continuity. It represents an untransformed, un-elevated residue of beliefs current among ‘the ignorant and uninstructed,’ that is, ‘all mankind, a few excepted.’

Gibbon saw this implication, and exploited it with summate literary skill, so as to introduce the still-explosive controversial issue as to whether or not the Catholic cult of saints has been a direct copy of pagan practice:

The same uniform original spirit of superstition might suggest, in the most distant ages, the same methods of deceiving the credulity and affecting the senses of mankind.

Up to the present, it is still normal to assume that the average homo religious of the Mediterranean, and more especially, the average woman, is, like Winnie the Pooh, ‘a bear of very little brain.’ His or her religious ideas are assumed to be unsophisticated and tenacious of age-old practices and misconceptions. We have at least added a few softening touches to the outright contempt of the Enlightenment for ‘the vulgar.’ We have developed a romantic nostalgia for what we fondly wish to regard as the immemorial habits of the Mediterranean countryman, by which every ‘popular’ religious practice is viewed as an avatar of classical paganism. We have become concerned to trace in paganism and Christianity alike a common response to the human condition. These modern concerns have added genuine human warmth, precision, and vast erudition to the study of the pagan background of ‘popular’ Christianity in the late-antique world. The concept of Antike und Christentum associated with the work of Franz Dolger has come to stay. Nowhere has this erudition been mobilized more abundantly than in the studies of the rise and articulation of the Christian cult of saints. Yet it is still assumed that, however novel the views of the leaders of the church might be, the study of ‘popular religion’ in late antiquity must be the study of continuity and not of change: for it is assumed to be a study of the un-moving subsoil from which Christianity sprang. As long as this is so, we have not moved far from the labor-saving formulas to which Gibbon once turned, with such studied detachment, to imply that there was, after all, nothing very surprising in the rise of the cult of saints.

It seems time to ask whether the late-antique historian can remain satisfied for much longer with so static and potentially undifferentiated a model. For it has left him in a quandary. He knows that the political, social, and economic tends of late-antiquity led to profound and irreversible changes in the relations between men and men in their daily secular life. In western Europe, an empire fell, and throughout the Mediterranean enduring new structures of social relations replaced those current in the classical period,. These changes manifested themselves differently indifferent regions; but they worked slowly and deeply into the lives of Mediterranean men of all classes and levels of culture, and not merely the elites. Yet the religious historian of late antiquity offers for the majority of the population of the late-antique world a vista of seemingly unbroken continuity; what goes around comes around still appears to be the guiding principle of a long and distinguished tradition of studies on late antique ‘popular religion.’

Yet we have seen in the beginning of this chapter that the rise of the cult of saints was sensed by contemporaries, in no uncertain manner, to have broken most of the imaginary boundaries which ancient men have placed between heaven and earth, the divine and human, the living and the dead, the town and its antithesis. I wonder whether it is any longer possible to treat the explicit breaking of barriers associated with the rise and the public articulation of the cult of the saints as no more than foam on the surface of a lazy ocean of ‘popular belief.’ For the cult of the saints involved deep imaginative changes that seem, at least congruent to changing patterns of human relations in late-Roman society at large. It designated dead human beings as the recipients of unalloyed reverence, and it linked these dead and invisible figures in no uncertain manner to precise visible places, and, in many areas, to precise living representatives. Such congruence hints at no small change. But in order to understand such change, in all its ramifications, we must set aside the ‘two-tiered’ model. Rater than present the rise of the cult of the saints in terms of a dialogue between two parties, the few and the many, let us attempt to see it as part of a greater whole –the lurching forward of an increasing proportion of late antique society towards radically new forms of reverence, shown to new objects in new places, orchestrated by new leaders, and deriving its momentum from the need to play out the common preoccupation of all, the few and the ‘vulgar’  alike, with new forms of the exercise of power, new bonds of human dependence, new, intimate, hopes for protection and justice in a changing world.