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 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 cure 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 Celtic dialects, and the consequent emergence of Romance 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 Sassanian 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 Gaul 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 recrudescence 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 be 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 Christian 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 onward, 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 articulate 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.

The Translation of Relics in Late Antiquity by Peter Brown

Let us consider for a moment [for example] the immediate profile and consequences of the beliefs that first encouraged the translation of relics in the late fourth century. If relics could travel, then the distance between the believer and the place where the holy could be found ceased to be a fixed, physical distance. It took on the shifting quality of late-Roman social relationships: distances between groups and persons were overcome by gestures of grace and favor, and the dangerously long miles of the imperial communications systems were overcome by a strenuously maintain ideology of unanimity and concord. Those who possessed the holy, in the form of portable relics, could show gratis by sharing these good things with others, and by bringing them from the places where they had once been exclusively available to communities scattered through out the Roman world. Behind every relic that was newly installed in its shrine throughout the Mediterranean, there had to lie some precise gesture of good will and solidarity. The inscriptions on an African shrine records merely the fact of distance overcome: ‘A piece of the wood of the Cross, from the Land of Promise where Christ was born.’ But Paulinus, writing inscriptions for his friend Sulpicius Severus, leaves us in no doubt of the reassuring touch of human friendship behind the ‘moment of high and terrible emotion’ on the arrival of such a fragment at Nola:

Brought as a gift to Nola by the  holy Melania, this, the highest of all goods, has come from the city of Jerusalem

As a result the transfer of relics, especially of the Holy Land to the Christian communities of the Western Mediterranean, can serve the historian as a faithful ‘trace element’ that enables him to take an X-ray photograph of the intricate systems of patronage, alliance and gift giving that linked the lay and the clerical elites of East and West in the  late Roman Empire. In recent years, the theme of notable pilgrimages and translation of relics has passed from the sober domain of hagiographical antiquarianism into a series of elegant studies of patronage and politics among the Christian governing classes of the late fourth and early fifth centuries – I refer particularly to the works of David Hunt in England and Ken Holum of the  University of Maryland.

I would like to point out some of the implications of this development. The yearning of Pilgrimage and the ‘therapy’ of distance,’ associated with the neutral fact that a particular landscape lay at an unchangeable distance from other centers, came to be detached from a purely geographical setting: the holy could be brought ever closer through gestures of concord and gift giving which the men of late antiquity and the early middle ages treasured as the cement of their social world. A network of ‘interpersonal acts,’ that carried the full overtones of late-Roman relationships of generosity, dependence, and solidarity came, in one generation, to link the Atlantic coast to the Holy Land; and in so doing, these ‘interpersonal acts’ both facilitated and further heightened the drive to transmute distance from the holy into the deep joy of proximity.

Without an intense and wide-ranging network of late-Roman relationships of amicitia and unanimitas among the fourth century impresarios of the cult of the saints, relics would not have traveled as far, as fast, or with as much undisputed authority as they did. If this had not happened, if the translation of relics had not gained a major place in Christian piety, the spiritual landscape of the Christian Mediterranean might have been very different. It might have resembled that of the later Islamic world: the holy might have been permanently localized in a few privileged areas, such as the Holy Land, and in the ‘cities of the saints,’ such as Rome. There might have been a Christian Mecca or a Christian Kerbela, but not the decisive spread of the cult of major saints, such as Peter and Paul, far beyond the ancient frontiers of the Roman world, as happened in Europe of the dark ages. Elsewhere, the holy might have been tied to the particularity of local graves that enjoyed little or no prestige outside their own region. By the early fifth century, the strictly geographical’ map of the availability of the holy which had tied the praesentia of the saints to the accidents of place and local history, had come to be irreversibly modified by a web of new cult sites, established by the translation of relics, which reflected the dependence of communities scattered all over Italy, Gaul, Spain and Africa on the enterprise and generosity of a remarkable generation of distant friends.

Recent studies of the social and political contexts of translation of relics have revealed with such delightful, and even damaging circumstantiality, the relations and the motives of the principal human participants, that we should not forget the prime mover of good things, who was thought by late-antique men to stand behind the busy story of discovery, the transfer, the accumulation- even, at times, the bare-faced robbery – of the holy. God gave the relic; in the first instance, by allowing it to be discovered, and then by allowing it to be transferred. Augustine said in a sermon on Saint Stephen: ‘His body lay hidden for so long a time. It came forth when God wished it. It has brought life to all lands. It has performed such miracles.’ Nowhere did the silver lining of God’s amnesty shine more clearly from behind the black cloud of the late-antique sense of sin than in accounts of the discovery and translations of relics. For the accounts are shot  through with a sense of the miracle of God’s mercy in allowing so precious a thing as the praesentia of the holy dead to become available to the Christian congregations in their own place and in their own times.

Behind the awkward Latin of the account by the priest Lucianus of the discovery of the body of Saint Stephen in a field outside the village of Capargamala, in 415, we can sense the hopes and fears of the Aramaic speakers of the region. Lucianus is warned to announce the good news to the bishop of Jerusalem:

 

For it is especially fitting that we should be revealed in the time of your priesthood . . .For the world is in danger, from the many sins into which it falls every day.

When the coffin of Saint Stephen finally made its appearance the touch of the divine mercy was overwhelming:

At that instant the earth trembled and a smell sweet perfume came from the place such as no man had ever known of, so much that we thought we were standing in the sweet garden of Paradise. And at that very hour, from the smell of that perfume, seventy-three persons were healed.

This mercy was further ratified by a downpour of rain which ended the cruel winter drought.

And the earth drank its fill, and all here glorified the Lord, because of Stephen his holy one, and because our Lord Jesus Christ had deigned to open to this imperiled world the heavenly treasure of his mercy and loving kindness.

The discovery of a relic, therefore, was far more than an act of pious archaeology, and its transfer far more than a strange new form of Christian connoisseurship: both actions made plain, at a particular time and place, the immensity of God’s mercy. They announced moments of amnesty. They brought a sense of deliverance and pardon into the present .They could condense moods of public confidence.i


Photos: Burial of the Body of Saint Stephen (Carlo Saraceni, 1579-1620)
             Reliquary of the hand of Saint Stephen

Cult of the Saints by Peter Brown; Chapter Five, pages 89-92

 

'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 this 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 the barbarian settlers of Europe, although their mental processes might be described 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 landslips  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 than their 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. Rather 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.