Eastern
and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity
What we have to deal with is not merely what happened in the relations between
East and West, but why what happened
happened as it did. Once the ecclesiastical historian asks why, he will find
himself sooner or later forced to grapple with the whole quality of men’s lives
in the past – that is, with how they lived the full twenty-four hours of the
day, not only in their books, but in their churches, not only in their
churches, but in the most intimate and most monotonous rhythms of their life.
For one thing can be said with certainty. The parting of the ways between East
and West Christianity cannot be reduced to a few formulae. It can not be
explained in terms of a map of the division of the Roman Empire between its
Greek and Latin-speaking halves. Still less can the later alienation of the
churches be blamed on the delinquencies of interpreters and the surprising
inability of so many great Latin minds to reach ‘A’ level in Greek. Tempting
though this course may be, it cannot be compressed into brilliant juxtapositions
between representative early Christian authors. Merely to contrast Tertullian
and Clement of Alexandria, Augustine and Basil of Caesarea, as if by comparison
alone it were possible to trace the divergent trajectories of to great
Christian regions, may be a device of considerable didactic power, and
revealing when skillfully exploited, but it has little explanatory power.
For a sense of perspective, however, I would like to begin with a dictum
of Edward Gibbon: ‘The distinction of
North and South is real and intelligible .
. . But the difference between
East and West is arbitrary and shifts around the globe.’
In the present state of Late Antique studies,
Gibbon’s point needs to be stressed. Some of the most interesting work in late
Roman history in the past generations has been carried out in terms of the East-West
division of Greco-Roman civilization. The alienation of the East and West has
been accepted as one of the principal causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire in
the West. On the short time-scale, in the crisis that followed the death of
Theodosius in 395 and the first official division of the Empire between his
sons, the inability of the two parts of the Empire to collaborate against barbarian
invasion has been explained in terms of a deep-seated difference in aims and
outlooks. On a longer time-scale, the alienation of the two partes, the emergence in each of a
distinctive culture and social structure, has been fruitfully invoked to
account for the sinister ease with which western Roman society settled down to
a life without empire. Instances of misunderstanding and conflict in the
history of the Church and Empire tend, nowadays, to be seen as no more than
symptomatic of a deeper alienation: they are mere foam on a sea of ineluctable currents.
I would like to step out of this perspective, not necessarily to exclude it
altogether, but to seek a different vantage-point from which to take a new look
at our subject. I would like to suggest that the history of the Christian
Church in Late Antiquity and in the early Middle Ages is far more a part of the
history of the Mediterranean and its neighbors than it is a part of the history
of the Mediterranean itself between East and West. I would like therefore to
hark back to the perspective of Henri Pirenne, in his Mahomet et Charlemagne. Whatever the weaknesses of Pirenne’s thesis
from the point of view of the commercial and maritime history of the Mediterranean,
his intuition of the basic homogeneity of Mediterranean civilization deep into
the Middle Ages still holds good. The history of the Christian Church is a
history of Romania a la Pirenne. It
is the history of a religion which identified itself almost from its origins
with a Mediterranean-style of urban civilization; that penetrated the sprawling
countryside of western Europe along trade routes that linked it to the boom
towns of Asia Minor. It fed its imagination on Palestine and Syria; its
intellectual powerhouse in the Latin world was North Africa, and in this
Africa, Carthage, ‘Rome in Africa’, remained, like Rome, a great Mediterranean
town, moving to rhythms strangely similar to those of Alexandria, Antioch and
Constantinople.
It is important to stress this, the horizontal unity of the Mediterranean. Any
divergence along the East-West spectrum of the Mediterranean was always dwarfed
by the immensity of the gulf which separated the Mediterranean itself from the
alien societies which flanked it.
The most crucial parting of ways was not between East and West in the
Mediterranean, but between the Mediterranean itself and the exuberant hinterland
that stretched eastwards across the Fertile Crescent. If Christ had lived in
the Hellenistic rather than in the Roman period, or in the third century A.D.
rather than in the first, then we could imagine a very different Christianity –
a Christianity whose missionaries who would not have been drawn into the
unitary civilization of the Mediterranean at the time of its maximum
gravitational pull, but who would have wandered in a more random manner into
the great caravan cities and sprawling villages of eastern Syria and
Mesopotamia. The beautiful new book of Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, A Study in Early Syrian Tradition,
and the forth-coming study by Roberta Chesnut on the Monophysite Christologies
of three Syriac authors are reminders of a whole third world of Christian
experience, whose rich voice is too often drowned by the articulate and bustling
Mediterranean. Yet, as Gregory Dix wrote of early Syrian liturgies –these allow
us to penetrate ‘behind the divergence of Greek and Western Christianity
generally to that oriental world to which the Galilean apostles had belonged.
It is the same when we look to the north of Europe. Once again, the divergence
of East and West along the Mediterranean was dwarfed by the rise in
north-western Europe of Christian societies which were seen to differ toto caelo from the ancient Christianity
of the Mediterranean. In the early Middle Ages we have to deal with a
‘Mediterranean chauvinism’ whose force is too often underrated. As Maurice
Chevalier said: ‘Old age is not so bad if you consider the alternative.’
Nothing was better calculated to shrink the distance between Rome and
Constantinople than the contemplation of the alien alternative across the Alps.
Generalizations to the effect that the papacy served as a rallying point of western
consciousness against the East assumes that there was a West to be conscious.
As long as the Mediterranean remained the heart of Romania, the division that
was ‘real and intelligible’ to every early Medieval man was that between north
and south. Listen to the Roman on his northern co-religionists: ‘For the transalpine
voices . . . roaring deep with their thunderous throats
. .
. .cannot bring forth the proper sweetness of the melody, because the
savage barbarity of their drunken throats, while endeavoring to utter this
gentle strain, through its natural noisiness, proffers only unmodulated sounds,
like unto farm carts clumsily creeping up a rutted hill.’ Listen to the northerner on a representative
of Romania: ‘There was a certain deacon who followed the habits of the Italians
in that he was perpetually trying to resist nature. He used to take baths, he
had his head closely shaved, he polished his skin, he cleaned his nails, he had
his his hair cut short as if it had been turned on a lathe, and he wore linen
underclothes. . . .’
I would suggest that we abandon a model of the relations between East and West
based on the assumption of deep alienation. It is not enough, however, that we
should pile up detailed studies of those person, moments or milieus where the
shores of the Mediterranean appear to have drawn closer together. Such studies
have proved invaluable, ranging as they do from consideration of the Greek
culture of the early Christian
communities of Carthage, from the figures of Augustine, Pelagius, and
John Cassian, to the popes of the Middle Ages, from the missions of Constantine
and Methodius to that extraordinary galaxy of holy men at the court of Otto III
and the monastery of St. Alessio on the Aventine. But these studies might be misinterpreted if they
were seen as so many incidents of East-West relations, if by ‘relations’ we
mean the interchange between two separate free-standing worlds.
For this is precisely what may not have happened. Nothing has done more to
handicap our understanding of Mediterranean history in the medieval period than
the tendency of scholars to treat Byzantium as a world apart, standing aside
and above the destinies of an ‘underdeveloped’ western Europe. Once this view
is accepted, the East tends to be treated as a distinct and enclosed reservoir
of superior culture, from which an occasional stream is released, to pour
downhill – by some obscure law of cultural hydraulics – to water the lower
reaches of the West.. Relations between East and West, therefore, tend to be
treated as so many ‘releases’ of Byzantine ‘influence’ and the ‘eastern’
features of early medieval art and piety are ascribed to ‘borrowings’ from a superior Byzantine model. Nothing has
been more conducive to confusion in the study of art and religion in the Dark
Ages than such an assumption.
When seen in this way, also, undue attention is
given to those obvious ‘sluice-gates’ that would facilitate the downhill flow
from East to West. To take one example: I suspect that we will soon no longer
be as concerned as we have been with the question of whether or not Gregory the
Great spoke Greek. For a theory of cultural interchange that treats the
build-up of a culture – especially of a religious culture-in terms of so many
discrete acts of ‘reception’ tends to overlook the inarticulate familiarities
of a shared landscape. Throughout Late Antiquity vital areas of culture were
transmitted by a Mediterranean-wide process of osmosis. The ideology of the Byzantine
State is inconceivable without generations of Byzantines who could ‘think
Latin’ even when they could not read it. Life in Late Antiquity was wider and
more embracing than any knowledge of the right classical languages. The spread
of the feast of kalends of January in the late Roman period is an astonishing example
of this. A feast that had been limited to Rome in the high Empire suddenly
became a Mediterranean-wide phenomena in Late Antiquity [ https://en.subalternosblog.com/post/the-kalends-of-january-popular-culture-in-late-antiquity-1
]. Plainly, when the city-dwellers of Late Antiquity wanted to say something important
about the way life was lived, and find ceremonial expression for it, they said
the same thing all over the Mediterranean, in whatever language came to hand.
Christianity, which grew out of precisely that milieu, was exceptionally
sensitive to the same Mediterranean- wide rhythms. Furthermore, adoption by
osmosis came easily to a group in which oral methods of transmission has always
played a great part in its religious culture: the Christian faith was passed on by oral catechesis. Christian
spiritual direction was carried out in terms of a fund of monastic apophthegmata [pithy maxims or sayings of the Desert
Fathers].
In this situation I would like to introduce the concept of a Mediterranean koiné
( a ‘linga franca’). Let us take a few examples from the end of our period. The
history of monasticism in the fifth and sixth centuries is not a history of an
‘oriental’ monasticism penetrating into the West: in the simple phrase of P. Riche, we are
dealing with un monachisme mediterraneen. The new edition of a Latin
translation of the Apophthegmata by
Paschasius of Dumio shows this Christian Mediterranean koiné
at work. Paschasius is unlocalizable; and the apophthegmatic literature that he
handles has become thickly matted as a bed of reeds, bridging the Mediterranean
with a single monastic folklore. To take another example: often in the history
of early medieval piety, where the unwary might acclaim a direct ‘eastern’
influence, it is possible to sense ‘a breath of the warm south’. A Stylite
hermit established outside Cologne – Wulfilach, a Lombard, from a north Italy
heavy with the koiné of Romania. A miracle connected with an icon,
the only one in the Libri Miraculorum
of Gregory of Tours – a story by Venantius Fortunatus, straight from Ravenna.
There is therefore no shortcut to the problem of the parting of ways between
East and West. It would be a serious mistake to import into the history of the
Christian Church supposed contrasts whose outlines have been sketched grosso modo by previous generations of
late Roman historians of society and culture. The ecclesiastical historian
cannot ignore the intimate dependence of the Christian Church on its social and
and cultural environment. But it is vital that he should offer a differentiated
and up-to-date explanation of how such an environment was experienced in the
Church and precisely what the environment was. It is not enough to compound his
own generalizations by importing the generalizations of others.
Alas, such remarks are only a preface to
the main task. For now we come to the most delicate part of our
undertaking. We cannot subsume the explanation of the parting of the ways between
East and West beneath any overwhelming antithesis of two societies: the unity
of a Mediterranean civilization exerts a constant, discreet pressure to blur
such stark and convenient contrasts If there is a divergence between the
eastern and western Churches, we must look for it within the Churches
themselves; and if we do this we musty
begin at the beginning – we must have a clear ide of the implications of the
rise of Christianity in the Roman world.
W. H .C. Frend in his Martyrdom and
Persecution in the Early Church and R.A. Markus in Christianity in the Roman World have made clear that the parting of
ways between East and West springs from the way in which Christianity adapted
itself to the Roman environment. The parting of ways between East and West was
implied at the joining of ways of Christianity and classical culture. Christianity
took up a difference stance in East and West to the state, to society, to
classical culture. In the West, the Church maintained its ‘twice-born’ attitudes. It stood to one side
of the saeculum [ “the present age of
the world,” in contrast with an eternal, heavenly realm ]. West Roman society
and culture, first shunned as demonic, was firmly entzaubert (disenchanted) by
Augustine, no mystique but the most sinister was allowed to rest upon it. Later,
when this society was in the hands of barbarians, it sank to the status of a
passive and potentially refractory laity dominated by a clearly defined
clerical elite. The contrast with eastern Christianity, whose apologists had
early acclaimed a harmony between Christianity and Greek culture, and whose
emperors from Constantine onwards, had negotiated endlessly for the unanimity
of Church and State, stands out in pointed contrast to that situation. It is in
this tradition, rather than in the more pragmatic side of late Roman economic
and administrative history, that it is possible to catch the full significance
of the Late Antique revolution and to seize most clearly its implications for
the medievalist.
I would like to add to this perspective rather than challenge it. It is now
time for the strictly religious historian to take up his cue. I would like to
suggest that we trace some features of the divergence between the East and West
in terms of diverging attitudes to the idea of the holy in the two churches.
In Late Antiquity attitudes to culture and society were inextricably intertwined
with attitudes to the holy. The religious revolution in Late Antiquity did not
only see the rise of the Christian Church as a society within a society and a
culture within a culture. The rise itself was intimately connected with a
drastic redistribution and re-definition of those points at which the holy was
thought to impinge on human affairs.
Unlike paganism and much of Judaism, the Christian communities were prepared to
invest individual human beings with supernatural powers or with the ability to
exercise power on behalf of the supernatural. It was precisely as identifiable
bearers of the holy, and the heirs of an imagined genealogy of similar bearers
of the holy – apostles, martyrs, prophets – that the Christian leaders were
able to form the Christian communities. The groups that took up a stance to the
society and culture of their times were formed around known and revered loci of the holy- and these loci tended to be human beings. As the
rabbis told Justin Martyr: ‘but as for you, who have forsaken God and put your
trust in a man, what salvation can await you?’
The early Christians lived down to these strictures. Small details of their
behavior, revealed in passing in the acts of the martyrs, speak volumes:
‘Polycarp took off all his clothing, loosed his belt and even tried to take off
his sandals, although he had never had to do this before: for all the
Christians were always eager to be the first to touch his flesh.’ In this
respect, Christianity added a radical twist to a tide in Late Antique
sensibility. Pagan biographies of divine men, and later rabbinic literature
show a common search for heroes who would sum up in their persons the values of
the group. Ideals that had been allowed to float free, available to any member
of an educated or religious class but attached to no one in particular, come to
be given ‘an earthly habitation and a
name’, and so a power that is best caught in some of the masterpieces of the
third –and fourth-century portrait sculpture. Throughout the Mediterranean
world, face and halo tend to come together in Late Antiquity.
Pagans who might have taken more kindly to divine men than did their Jewish contemporaries
were appalled by what Christians did to their heroes when dead- they brought
the stench of death into the preserve of the holy. This was new. For all his
intimacy with the goddess Artemis, in dying Hippolytus was cut off by the
unbridgeable chasm which the fact of death itself opened between himself and
his goddess: It is not right for me to look upon the dead, And strain my
eyesight with the mists of dying men.’
In Eunapius of Sardis’ account of the Christianization of the great temples
of Egypt we can catch the carnal horror of the rise of Christianity: ‘For they
collected the bones and skulls of criminals who had been put to death for
numerous crimes . . . made them out to be gods, haunted their
sepulchers, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their
graves. ‘Martyrs’ the dead men were called, and ‘ministers’ of a sort and
‘ambassadors’ with the gods to carry men’s prayers.’ Yet much of medieval history
is inconceivable without the preliminary decision to allow the dead into a
central position in worship: ‘So you think, therefore, that the bishop of Rome
does wrong when, over the dead men Peter and Paul, venerable bones to us but to
you a heap of common dust, he offers up sacrifice to the Lord, and their graves
are called alters of Christ’ ( Jerome, Contra
Vigilantium).
Yet it is precisely around such idealized objects that Christianity
succeeded in crystallizing lasting pyramids of dependence. In the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries the old forms
of power and dependence were being transformed and re-articulated with abrasive
vigor: we need only think on the one hand of the elaboration of the imperial
ceremonial, and on the other on the tightening and the rendering more explicit
of the links of patronage in town and countryside. In this situation, the pyramids
of idealized dependence erected by the Christian Church around men and objects
thought of as ‘holy’ stand with uncanny congruence in a society constantly
experimenting with forms of power and social influence.
It is in this region that I would like to look for a parting of the ways
between East and West. Even if we cannot reach an explanation of the phenomena,
I would like to suggest that we are dealing with a phenomena to explain.
In the West the precise locus of the supernatural power associated with the
holy was fixed with increasing precision. Cyprian of Carthage, in his astute
handling of the confessores and in
his statements on the position of the bishop, has a baffling ‘medieval’ ring
about him: this may well be because no serious doubt as to the precise nature
and location of spiritual power and the means by which it was exercised in
ritual actions troubled his own mind or those of most of his successors. At the
same time, the eastern Church had entered onto what came to strike early
medieval western observers as a baffling ‘crisis of overproduction’ of the
holy. More men were accepted as bearers or agents of the supernatural on earth,
and in a far greater variety of situations, than came to be tolerated in a Western
Europe. As a result, the precise locus of spiritual power in Byzantium
remained, by western standards, tantalizingly ambiguous, and Byzantine
attitudes to sanctity, and hence to the world in general against which the holy
was placed, were shot through with paradox. By Late Antiquity, this contrast
was clear, and it was all the clearer from being seen not as an inevitable
contrast, but rather as the cumulative result of mutations within a single koiné – a koiné which, by the end of this period had already spilled far from
the shores of the Mediterranean, to the Nestorian hagiography of Sasania Iran and
the Celtic holy men of Northumbria.
I think it would be best to move from two clear examples, briefly sketched, to
the implication of these examples.
The rise and function of the holy man in the sixth-century eastern
Mediterranean as revealed in the work of John Ephesus stands in marked contrast
to the world of religious experience – mainly crystallized around relics –
revealed in the work of John’s contemporary, Gregory of Tours. The contrast is
all the greater for having become crystallized from a Mediterranean-wide koiné.
For Gregory can embrace Romania. His gazes pierces to Edessa.
Where a miraculous annual rainstorm washes clean the dunged-up souk after the great fair of St Thomas.
It even reaches as far as Sergiopolis (Resafa), where St Sergius is known as a
stern protector of ex-voto offerings
to his shrine: so stern, indeed, is he that chickens dedicated to him, if stolen
, emerge from the cooking pot even tougher than they went in! This was a fact
known also to the Shahanshah of Iran himself, none other than Khuso II Aparwez,
who, in a great silver ex-voto dish,
had proclaimed to St Sergius his gratitude for success and had reported on the
exceptional favors enjoyed by his Christian wife, the beautiful Shirin. ( the
inscription is the last great address of a Near Eastern ruler to his gods, of
which the first, by Khusro’s predecessor Darius, looks out from the cliffs of Bisutun,
to be read only by gods and rock-climbers). Nevertheless, with Gregory we can
trace the direction of a mutation that
would finally weaken the hold of the Mediterranean koiné on Gaul, and consequently on the
emergent societies of north-western Europe, in such away as to bring about a
final confrontation of East and West.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the holy man had been forced to the fore by those
exuberant and abrasive developments by which new classes came to compete for
control of the countryside. The position of the holy men in Syria is a paradigm
of the need of eastern Christians to consider as ‘holy’ ascetic figures on whom
they could place their hopes for a ‘holy’, that is for an idealized, patronage,
in a world overshadowed by an ‘unholy’, that is, by an only too real,
patronage. This aspect of East Roman social and spiritual life is well summed
up by Thomas Hobbes in chapter ten of his Levianthan”
‘Reputation of power is power: because it draweth with it the adherence of
those that need protection.’ The saints described by John of Ephesus had no
doubts on that score: ‘Neither yet think that this power of the saints before
whom these people come and groan is a void thing, lest it be roused against you
and your house perish.’
All this is striking and well-known, yet let us look for a moment at the
precise basis of this power. Here we must enter deeply into the materials from
which the East Romans framed their expectations of the holy, and how they
combined these in such a way not only to facilitate the exercise of ‘reputation
of power’ but, tacitly, to delimit this same exercise.
The Christian koiné was articulated in the eastern Mediterranean not to place
the holy man above human society, but outside it. He gained his powers from
retiring to the desert, that is, to the antithesis of human life, where Christ
had been served by angels,. And where the angels had invested John the Baptist
with the first monk’s cloak. The holy, therefore, was at its most holy when
least connected with that conflict of human interests which it was constantly
called upon to palliate.
The East Roman holy man, as we observe him in both the fourth and fifth
centuries, and in the age of Gregory and John, preserved his reputation,
therefore, by an exacting ritual of de-solidarization and even of social
inversion. He wielded his ‘idealized’ power in society by adopting stances that
were the exact inverse of those connected with the exercise of real power.
Where the patron was inaccessible, the holy man was open to all comers: of
Habib it was said: ‘he did not, as a man of high reputation, refuse to go, but,
in order to satisfy him, would go with him a once without delay.’ Where the
patron flaunted his status and his immunity, the holy man was ‘an afflicted
one,’ and often carried chains, associated in the Near East not with physical
discomfort so much as with the status of a political prisoner fallen from his
high estate. Thus, in few societies outside the sanyasi culture of Hindu India, has
‘reputation of power’ within a society been exercised on so strict a
tacit understanding that those who exercised it should be seem to stand outside
this society.
I feel that we touch here on something more revealing than merely the social
strategies of a charismatic ombudsman.
We are dealing with a society which accepts such strategies because they could
be associated with other basic ideas about the nature of the holy and its
impingement on human affairs. Here I would risk a suggestion. The holy escaped
social definition – or, rather, its absence of social definition became
intelligible – because it was thought of principally as a power that
‘manifested’ itself in a manner that was as vivid as it was discontinuous with
normal human expectations. If this is so, then we are in a very ancient world
indeed. It is the world of the epiphaneia,
of the sudden appearances of the gods. It is not enough that the divine should
exist, it must be seen to exist, in the occasional flash of clear vision. Such
moments of epiphaneia were
significantly widely-distributed throughout the whole range of East Roman
religious experience. They could suddenly highlight any moment of East Roman
religious life and can penetrate into any corner of East Roman Christian
society. Epiphaneia might occur in a
waking dream; liturgical expectations were articulated in terms of potential epiphaneia – trembling, in many sources, on the edge of breaking forth – with
the presence of an angel at the alter and the epidemia, the adventus,
of the divine Eucharist. Hagiography was read as so many unpredictable
manifestations in diverse times and places of men of every possible social
status. At a slightly later time, icons rose to prominence as so many visions
frozen in encaustic and mosaic.
Such an idea of the holy, so strictly defined as all that was non-human in any
situation and all that could be suddenly ‘manifested’ from beyond human
consciousness, tended to erode rather than to reinforced those institutional
structures in which it might have found of as nesting place. Sanctity, for East
Romans, always bordered on the paradoxical. For what we have are men with
‘reputation of power’; yet this power was thought to have been drawn from
outside any apparent niche in the power-structure of society. It was gained in the
desert, beyond human sight, and depended upon a freedom to speak to God, the
exact extent of which lay beyond human power to gauge. A woman dreamed that her
daughter would be cured at a certain monastery. The monks brought her the
abbot. No, said she, this is not the man I dreamed of. Bring me the red-faced
one, with warts on his knees. Byzantine monastic folk-lore toyed lovingly with
the possibility of this situation. For any one time, the man who enjoyed most
favor with God in Heaven might be, not St Antony, but a doctor in Alexander,
not St Macarius, but a farmer in a Egyptian village, and even, who knows, an imperial
inspector of brothels in Alexandria. There is nothing in the sixth and
seventh-century West to equal the Life of St Symeon the Holy Fool. In this
seventh-century masterpiece, the paradoxes of sanctity are explored with
exemplary thoroughness. Here the dogged role-inversion of those hard-worked
Syrian cursers has spilled over into a delightful study of a man who, because
he fulfils no overt social function, can enjoy to the full the position of the
‘outsider’ allotted to the bearer of the holy – ut novellus pazzus. In Emesa you could go to the tavern of the mad
monk and watch Symeon dancing the jig with the people of the town.
Paradox, after all, is a device of inclusion. The paradox of sanctity enabled
the holy to scatter itself widely throughout Byzantine society. At the top, the
touch of the hand of God gave an inexhaustible reservoir of initiative to the
Byzantine Emperors. At the bottom, it fell heavily on prostitutes as it never
fell on equally whore-laden towns in Italy. In between, it ratified the
anomalous position of the soldier, and did so to such an extent that, when, in
the eleventh century, the chaplain Hugh
of Avranches attempted to reassure the Norman knights with examples of warriors
pleasing to God, he could only find a catalogue dominated by Byzantine saints.
Let us now see what Gregory of Tours
does not share with this world. I have been struck by the following features:
First: there is the obvious feature
of a marked shortage of living holy men. A society which knew all about Symeon
Stylites somehow did not want one of their own: our Wulfilach was told in no
uncertain terms to get down off his column. The appearance of itinerate holy
men in Tours are recounted by Gregory in tones of ‘While the cat’s away, the
mice do play.’. Now this is easier said than understood. I would like to posit
a climate of opinion that actively withheld enthusiasm from all but the most
well-tried bearers of the holy. “Call no man holy until he be dead’ is the motto
of Gregory’s writings. While in Syria the hillsides on which the stylites
perched their columns would be ominously
ringed by brand new, empty martyria,
waiting to receive their guaranteed holy occupants, with the world of Gregory
even death marks only the beginning of long and acrimonious hagiographical
manoeuvers. Was Nicetius of Lyon, who died in 573, and whose tomb lay in the
basilica of the apostle of Lyon, a saint? This was decidedly not the opinion of
his successor, Priscus, nor of Pricus’s wife, Susanna, nor any of their friends
and dependents. One of Priscus’ deacons used the late bishop’s chasuble, among
other things, as a dressing gown – ‘A robe from whose very hems, if one was to
believe aright, healing would have come to the sick’ – and, when challenged, threatened
to make a pair of bedroom slippers out of it. Priscus and Nicetius rest
together in the same church. Maybe the inscription of Priscus contains a tacit
dig at his hated neighbor. But time heals even sixth-century feuds. In 1308
both tombs were examined and both occupants declared saints. Only readers of Gregory can guess from this
one clear example the febrile and insecure accumulation and dispersal of
reputation that went to make up what too often strikes the unwary as the
marmoreal façade of western episcopal sanctity.
A governing class carried the tensions of a governing class as well as
exercising its power. Here we are dealing with oligarchies of bishops powerful
enough to overshadow any other bearers of the holy, but who were
themselves locked in such bitter
competition to remain equal as to deny holiness to any but the most well-tried,
that is, the most safely-dead figure. The patriarchate of Constantinople in the
late sixth-century is the only milieu that can offer an analogy to Gregory.
Here we have the remarkable Life of
St Eutychius a ‘saint’ on whom John of Ephesus had his own opinion. But this is
nothing compared with the convergence of hagiography and propaganda that marked
the Adelsheilige [record of the noble saints]of the sub-Roman
West.
Second: the contact with the holy
itself, in the form of the relic, is fraught with an open-ended quality lacking
in the piety of the Eastern Empire. The locus
of the holy might be ambiguous in the East: but its epiphaneia was an un-ambivalently good event. In the work of
Gregory, by contrast, we come across an element which strikes me as quite
remarkable. Contact with the supernatural is fraught with all the open-ended
quality of an ordeal. It is a searing light, that can throw the merita of the recipient into high
relief. The theme runs through Gregory’s works. At Bazas, the relic in a cross
– a crystallized drop of divine mercy that had once fallen on the alter from
the vault (where, as at Ravenna, the Lamb of God may have stood among the stars
of heaven) –‘ when it is adored, will appear crystal clear to a man who is free
of sin; but if, as often happens, some evil is attached to the frail human
nature of the beholder, appears totally obscure.’
Therefore, a holy relic does not merely enhance the status of a church or a
locality, giving its favors indiscriminately to all connected to the site.
There is nothing in Gregory of the universal franchise on the favors granted by
St Thecla to all the citizens of Seleucia, nor the open-handfed, consular sparsio (scattering) of protection which
the inhabitants of Thessalonica saw in their St Demetrius. Nor is there any of
that informal access to the holy across the frontier that any man may pass when
he goes to sleep. The right to dream in the presence of the holy is denied.
There is no incubation in Gaul. Again when there is no incubation, the ‘holy’
is denied a chance to express itself at its most paradoxical. The shrine of St
Martin of Tours never witnessed the psychodrames
that were played out regularly in the iatrike
skene, ‘the playhouse of healing,’ of the great incubatory shrine of Sts
Cosmos and Damien in Constantinople. No paralytic was emboldened by the saint
to make make love to a dumb lady. No hulking butcher was told to shave a touchy
senator.
Rather, the contact with the holy is used to mark out unambiguously those
individual members of the community who enjoyed a permanent status different from the rest. We meet in
Gregory’s works a whole gallery of individuals clearly designated as those who
enjoyed greater intimacy with the supernatural because their merita were declared acceptable by the
‘ordeal of the holy.’ From a Christian koiné that linked sin and miracle,
Gregory has drawn sharper conclusions. The blessing of the relic falls most
heavily on those vested protectors and agents of the relics, and that, in
Gregory’s case, is almost invariably the bishop. The cult of the relic reaches its annual
climax in a ceremony modelled on the old-fashioned imperial adventus ceremony of the western
provinces; but it is a ceremony where the elements of heady enthusiasm and
ideal concord are acted out in such ay as to re-create and so re-embellish the
precarious concord of the Christian community around its bishop. Idealized consensus around Martin re-lives the
far-from-ideal consensus on which
every Gallic bishop depended for his own position. In that way the ceremony of
the martyrs differs toto caelo (‘by
the whole extent of heaven’) from the panygyreis
of East Rome. It is a ceremony of the bishop and his shrine: it is not the
ceremony of the town. At a time when the Byzantine town had sucked the churches
on its periphery into its traditional urban center, and the mosaics of the church
at Qasr el-Lebya contain reference to the Tyche (luck) of the city, the western
towns were already being pulled out of shape around their peripheral shrines.
Somehow, as in the case of Nicetius of Lyon, the holy shrine carried with it
the associations of the aristocratic family grave; it was a ‘fine and private
place.’
Third: much of this is intelligible
in terms of a streak in Gregory which defines the holy very strictly in terms
of individual salvation. The Christian koiné by which the miracle is meaningful
as a deliverance from sin bears a very heavy weight in Gregory: ‘O if only the
blessed confessor [Martin] would have deigned to make himself known in such an
act of power to me, in loosing the fetters of my sins in the same way he
smashed the vast weight of the chains that held that man.’
Holiness is possible only after death because only after death can salvation be
secure. Gregory’s hagiography is an illustration of the deep roots of the
Augustinian doctrine of predestination. A chill breath blows through Gregory’s
works when he contemplates the vast anonymity of cemeteries. The silence of the
Polyandrion – the place of the great majority – at Autun is broken only by a
few mysterious echoes of chanted psalms, betraying the presence, among so many
thousands, ‘of a few tombs of faithful souls worthy of God.’ Gregory was oppressed
by how infinitely small the number of such tombs must be. For these were the
tombs of the predestinate, they belonged to the ‘snow white number of the
elect.’
I must repeat that all this is easier said than explained. It would be facile to
reduce it to a contrast between the exuberant and basically optimistic world of
East Rome and the grim and depleted Gaul of Gregory. To do this would be to
ignore the koiné of basic attitudes which ran from one end of the Mediterranean
to the other: John and Gregory, for instance, both write history under the
shadow of the approaching end of the world. In some respects, admittedly, the
parting of the ways is a parting in styles of urban life. The holy tended, in
the West, to be increasingly confined to the rhythms of the great
basilica-shrine and the monastery, while in the Byzantine Empire it could spill
out unself-consciously to join the vast ceremoniousness of Byzantine urban
life. Styles of liturgy and preaching show how easily the street flowed into
the basilica; and the receding tide brought out much of the holy into the street.
When the straitlaced Carolingian divines attacked the Byzantine cult of icons, they thought they saw
in it a disastrous ‘over-production’ of the holy, strictly connected with a
blurring of the boundaries between basilica and street: ‘If then the vulgar
mob, partly maddened by excitement and partly swayed by the novelties of secular
pomp, partly eager to puff themselves up with an empty sense of
self-importance, partly urged on a weakness for adulation and partly prompted
by fear of punishment by authorities, should chose to honor the images of emperors
with vain and unhealthy praise, this is no affair of ours.’
Yet much more needs to be said, especially by an ecclesiastical historian. I
would like to return to the definition of the holy in East Rome as what is
outside human society. This is not a definition which Gregory accepts in the
way in which it was meant by a Byzantine. The holy, in the West, could be defined
as it was in the East, in terms of a stark discontinuity between the human and
the non-human: the drop of divine mercy at Bazas caused the jewels to fall out
of the frame into which it was first inserted – there was no consortium caelestibus cum terrenis (‘joining
between heavenly and earthly objects’). And yet this discontinuous holy is
deeply inserted into human society. In the most poker-faced and un-paradoxical
manner it makes clear who has received grace in its sight and who has not. This
declaration is held to have immediate social consequences: slaves healed by by
St Martin are automatically emancipated. Its blessing is clear and covers a
narrower range: it rests heavily on bishops of predictable merita. And this blessing is thought of as the intrusion into human
life of those dead man and women who had persevered in clear roles within the
human community than in the desert.
I would risk the suggestion that these phenomena reveal a mentality where the
holy plays a more permanent role in law and politics than it would ever play in
East Rome. Gregory’s world is one in which men worry much about perjury:
Claudius, riding to Tours to bring Eberulf, dead or alive, from the sanctuary
of St Martin, is one example among many in the pages of Gregory – ‘Upon his
way, after the custom of the barbarians, he began to take notice of the omens,
and to find them unfavorable. At the same time he enquired of many whether the
power of the holy martyr had of late made manifest against breakers of oaths . . .’ We are touching on a world where many of
the human relations basic to the working of society are made subject to sacred
law. The use of the holy in day to day affairs in this manner is paralleled, in
East Rome, only in villages in the forbidding hinterland of Asia Minor.
In Gregory’s works, the Mediterranean koiné – which had alays linked oaths with
the holy and treated thhe drama of exorcism as an informal court of law, in
which public judgment was passed on those sins that plainly disrupted society –
is hardened to take the strain of permanent government. In the Mediterranean
world of Late Antiquity this coalescence had never quite happened. A glance at
the Dialogues of Gregory’s namesake,
Gregory the Great, shows this. We are still in the world of le monarchisme mediterraneen which is a
world of mild paradoxes. There are tame bears and salad-gardens – warm memories
of a Mediterranean-wide monastic anecdotage.. Nor do we have the same phenomena
even among the stern heroes of John Ephesus. These knew how to exercise the ‘power
of the saints’ in society. Occasionally, among the loose-knit in habitants of
the mountains, the mirage of a theocracy founded around a holy man, where
excommunication from the company of believers replaced the blood feud, flickers
a good century before Islam: but the Djebel
Izala was no Mecca, and Simon the Mountaindweller left no Koran. For the power of the saints in
Syria was based upon a dizzy ritual of social inversion: it existed for occasional, dramatic application to a society
that was normally accustomed to looking after itself. The social use of the
holy was delimited to those moments when normal legal and social structure has
broken down. With Gregory, the holy is losing its function as an emergency
surrogate for justice. It is securely
vested in men who knew what it was to rule, and who lived in a society where
few men were prepared to rule as they were. The path towards the position of
the early medieval bishop, whose social and sacred functions interlock around
an invincible sense of das Tremendum [awe
inspiring mystery], may be slower than some exegetes of Gregory would have us
believe: the relation of the bishop to his town, for instance, still has an
untidiness that belongs to Late Antique Romania
– even in Tours, acclamation by the people can be as deadly a political weapon
as it was in Edessa or Constantinople, and Gregory could be threatened by it.
Nevertheless, Gregory’s works take us to the crest of a watershed: the manner
in which he assumes a linking of law and the holy makes him look north rather
than south, to the Middle Ages rather than to Late Antiquity, and therefore
away from the East. He is the first Auvergnat as Michelet describes them:
'It
looks like a southern race shivering in the north wind, and as if tight,
hardened under this foreign sky.'
A perceptive if unsympathetic western thinker put his finger on the contrast:
in his Philosophy of History Hegel
wrote- ‘The history of the highly civilized Eastern Empire – where we might
suppose, the Spirit of Christianity could betaken up in its truth and purity –
exhibits to us a millennial series of
uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses, baseness and want of principle . . .It
is evident here how Christianity may be abstract, and how as such it is powerless,
on account of its very purity and
intrinsic spirituality . . .Light shining in the darkness may perhaps
give color, but not a picture animated by Spirit. The Byzantine Empire is a
grand example of how the Christian
religion may maintain an abstract character among cultivated people, if the
whole organization of the State and of the Laws is not reconstructed in harmony
with its principle.’
This contrast of East and West does exist. But it need not be interpreted in so
harsh a manner. I hope that a historical examination of the Late Antique phase
of the parting of the ways of East and West may make plain part of the
Byzantine answer. Byzantine society could take the strain of life on its own,
frankly secular, terms. Ringed, in the early Middle Ages, on one side by Islam,
were religion and law fused, and on the other by a Western Europe, where
religion blew through gaping cracks in the structure of society, Byzantines
could keep the holy where they needed it – and in so doing, they preserved a
vital part of its meaning – it was an unexpected wellspring of delight in the
scorching summer of Mediterranean life.
