The Power of the Saints in Late- Roman Antiquity by Peter Brown

 

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.