Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Number of quotes: 47
Book ID: 208 Page: 3/5
Section: 2A3
By the end of the sixth century, the graves of the saints, which lay in the cemetery areas outside the walls of most of the cities of the former Western Empire, had become centers of the ecclesiastical life of their region. {10} This was because the saint in Heaven was believed to be “present” at his tomb on earth. The soul of Saint Martin, for instance, might go “marching on”; but his body, at Tours, was very definitely not expected to “lie a-mouldering in the grave.” The local Jewish doctor might have his doubts: “Martin will do you no good, whom the earth now rests, turning him to earth....A dead man can give no healing to the living.”{11} They are not doubts shared by the inscription on the tomb:Here lies Martin the bishop, of holy memory,
whose soul is in the hand of God; but he is fully
here, present and made plain in miracles of
every kind.{12}
The rise of the Christian cult of saints took place in the great cemeteries that lay outside the cities of the Roman world: and, as for the handling of dead bodies, the Christian cult of saints rapidly came to involve the digging up, the moving, the dismemberment---quite apart from much avid touching and kissing----of the bones of the dead, and, frequently, the placing of these in areas from which the dead had once been excluded.
But the impact of the cult of saints on the topography of the Roman city was unambiguous: it gave greater prominence to areas that had been treated as antithetical to the public life of the living city;{15} by the end of the period, the immemorial boundary between the city of the living and the dead came to be preached by the entry of relics and their housing within the walls of many late-antique towns, and the clustering of ordinary graves around them.{16}
John’s note: Wow
Quote ID: 5061
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 208 Page: 6
Section: 2A3
Nothing could be more misleading than to assume that, by the middle of the fourth century, some insensible tide of religious sentiment had washed away the barriers by which Mediterranean pagans had sought for so long to mark off the human dead from the living. Far from it: on this point, the rise of Christianity in the pagan world was met by deep religious anger.
Quote ID: 5062
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 7
Section: 2A3
In attacking the cult of saints, Julian the Apostate mentions the cult as a novelty for which there was no warrant in the gospels.As an emperor, Julian could give voice to his own profound distaste by reiterating the traditional Roman legislation that kept the dead in their proper place. How could men tolerate such things as Christian processions with relics?
..........The carrying of the corpses of the dead through a great assembly of people, in the midst of dense crowds, staining the eyesight of all with ill-omened sights of the dead. What day so touched with death could be lucky? How, after being present at such ceremonies, could anyone approach the gods and their temples?
In an account of the end of paganism in Egypt, by Eunapius of Sardis, we catch the full charnel 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, 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.{31}
PJ NOte: I have "Philostratus and Eunapius" in Loeb
Quote ID: 5063
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 8
Section: 2A3
Beginning of the fifth century, in the same years Paulinus of Nola could congratulate himself on having built around the grave of Saint Felix, in a peripheral cemetery area still called Cimitile, “the cemetery,” a complex so impressive that the traveler might take it for another town.{33}In the proud words of Athanasius, writing of Saint Anthony and his monks, the monks had “founded a city in the desert,” that is, in a place where no city should be.{34} In the late fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian bishops brought the shift in the balance between the town and the non-town out of the desert and right up to the walls of the city: they now founded cities in the cemetery.{35}
Quote ID: 5064
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 9
Section: 2A3
In a characteristically rhetorical flourish, Jerome had challenged a critic of the cult relics:[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 sacrifices to the Lord, and their graves are held to be altars of Christ.{36}
The subsequent success of the papacy could only prove that the bishop of Rome had not done wrong.
To gain this advantage, further ancient barriers had to be broken. Tomb and altar were joined. The bishop and his clergy performed public worship in a proximity to the human dead that would have been profoundly disturbing to pagan and Jewish feeling.
The graves and relics of the saints stood out in high relief: they were “non-graves.”
John’s note: !!!!
Quote ID: 5065
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 11
Section: 2A3
As Gregory of Nyssa said, Those who behold them embrace, as it were, the living body in full flower: they bring eye, mouth, ear, all the senses into play, and then, shedding tears of reverence and passion, they address to the martyr their prayers of intercession as though he were present.{43}
Quote ID: 5066
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 12
Section: 2A3
Late-antique Christianity, as it impinged on the outside world, was shrines and relics.{50}John’s note !!!
Quote ID: 5067
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 208 Page: 12/13
Section: 2E5
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 of no denomination still find themselves united in a common reticence and incomprehension when faced with this phenomenon.
Quote ID: 5068
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 208 Page: 26
Section: 2A3
In the 380s, Ambrose at Milan, {9} and, in the 390s, Augustine in Hippo, attempted to restrict among their Christian congregations certain funerary customs, most notably the habit of feasting at the graves of the dead, either at the family tombs or in the memoriae of the martyrs. In Augustine’s explicit opinion, these practices were a contaminating legacy of pagan beliefs: When peace came to the church, a mass of pagans who wished to come to Christianity were held back because their feast days with their idols used to be spent in an abundance of eating and drinking.{10}These pagans had now entered the church, and had brought their evil habits with them.{11}
A decade later, Jerome found himself forced to write, from the Holy Land, a defense of the Christian cult of relics against Vigilantius, a priest from Calagurris, in the upper Ebro valley. Behind the studied outrage of “this unpleasant fly-sheet”{12} we can glimpse circles in southern Gaul and northern Spain who had been genuinely disturbed by the forms taken by the cult of relics and of the martyrs: “We see the ceremonial of pagan worship introduced into the churches under the pretext of religious observance.”{13}
Quote ID: 5069
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 27
Section: 2A3
For in this case it appears that articulate and cultivated leaders of the Christian church attempted to take a stand against “pre-Christian” practices among their congregations; that the weight of these practices had apparently increased with the conversion of the pagan masses to Christianity; and that the pressure of pagan ways of thinking and worshiping had made itself felt, also, in the ceremonial trappings and in the beliefs surrounding the new cult of martyrs.Nevertheless, popular opinion had forced on all but a discontented few the frank acceptance of pagan forms of ceremonial and of potentially “superstitious” views on the localization of the soul at the grave in the case of the cult of relics and of the tombs of the saints. Thus, a clearly documented victory of the “vulgar” can be thought to lie at the roots of the sudden prominence achieved, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the cult of the saints.
Quote ID: 5070
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 29
Section: 2A3
Yet what is not realized, in the first place, is that Augustine’s explicit reference to the increase in pagan practices within the Christian congregation as having been brought about by mass conversions, was apparently made on the spur of the moment. It was a plausible piece of clerical euhemerism. Yet it referred to practices which, whatever their long-term origin may have been, had been accepted as authentically Christian in all previous generations.{21} Those who practiced feasting at the graves need not have been semi-pagan converts. Furthermore, the seeming obviousness of the remark has led us to take its central assertion for granted. We should not do so: the evidence for “mass conversions” in the course of the fourth century and, indeed, in any time in late antiquity, is far less convincing than might be thought.{22} The archaeology of Hippo, in particular, seems, at present, to offer no support for Augustine’s picture of the expansion of the Christian congregations. The churches hitherto excavated do not give the impression that at any time in the fourth century the Christian congregations had been swelled by a “landslide” of recent converts.{23}
Quote ID: 5071
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 31
Section: 2A3,2E4
The careful noting of the anniversaries of the deaths of martyrs and bishops gave the Christian community a perpetual responsibility for maintaining the memory of its heroes and leaders.{32}
Quote ID: 5072
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 32
Section: 2A3
Even the manner in which Vigilantius attacked the cult of relics shows that he was facing a similar tension. He was spokesman for the views of men who were concerned at the way in which ostentatious and particularized loyalties to the holy dead disrupted the ideal community of the believers.{35} The practices localized the saints at tombs that could not be accessible to all, creating thereby a privileged religious topography of the Roman world from which peripheral Christian communities would feel excluded.{36}
Quote ID: 5074
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 32/33
Section: 4B
As we have seen, the evidence of the pressure from “mass conversions” has been exaggerated. Nor is there any evidence that the locus of superstitious practice lay among the “vulgar.” Indeed, it is the other way round: what is clearly documented is the tension caused by the way in which the demands of a new elite of well-to-do Christian laywomen and laymen were met by the determination of an equally new elite of bishops, who often came from the same class, that they and they alone should be the patroni of the publicly established Christian communities. Instead of a dialogue on “superstition” conducted between the disapproving “few” and the “common herd,” we must begin with a conflict more plausible to late-Roman men - a conflict between rival systems of patronage.
Quote ID: 5075
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 33
Section: 2A3
For it is far from certain that what we have been calling, for the sake of convenience, the “rise of the cult of saints” in the late fourth century was any more than the vigorous appropriation to this cult by the bishops and the ruling classes of the Roman Empire. The cult itself has far deeper roots.......they are part of an impressive continuum of beliefs.{40} What was far from certain, however, was who, within the Christian community, should have the monopoly of expressing and orchestrating such belief. At the beginning of the fourth century, this was unclear. For the influential patron had great advantages. He or she could obtain the body of the martyr with least resistance and could house it most fittingly. Hence in 295, the gentlewoman Pompeiana could appropriate the body of the young martyr Maximilianus: she obtained the body from the magistrate and, after placing it in her own chamber, later brought it to Carthage. There she buried it at the foot of a hill near the governor’s palace next to the body of the martyr Cyprian.
Quote ID: 5076
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 208 Page: 33/34
Section: 2A3
At Salona, the first known Christian memoria was created in 304 by a well-to-do lady, Asciepia, above the grave of a martyr, Anastasius, in a building that had been designed to house also her own tomb and those of her family.{42} Thus, for the influential layman, the grave, always “a fine and private place,” could reach out to appropriate the martyr, and so bring a holy grave, either directly or by implication, out of the Christian community as a whole into the orbit of a single family.{43}
Quote ID: 5077
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 34
Section: 2A3
The practice of depositio ad sanctos, for instance, threatened to make only too plain the play of family influence around the holy graves. It was a privilege which, as one inscription put it, “many desire and few obtain.”{46} Once obtained, it mapped out in a peculiarly blatant manner, in terms of proximity to the saint the balance of social power within the Christian community.
Quote ID: 5078
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 36/37
Section: 2A3
We are neither faced with grudging or political accommodation to a growing “popular” form of religiosity nor with measurers designed to absorbed leaderless pagan “masses” by a homeopathic dose of “superstition.” Rather, we are dealing with changes in the cult of saints that articulate clearly changes in the quality of leadership within the Christian community itself.The case of Ambrose, as it has recently been studied by Ernst Dassmann, makes this plain.{58} In Milan, the discovery of the relics of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, in 385, was an exciting event. But it was not the first time that relics had been discovered or received in Milan. The Christian cemetery areas were already dotted with quite sizeable martyr’s memoriae. What was new was the speed and the certainty of touch with which Ambrose appropriated the relics. He moved them after only two days from the shrine of Saints Felix and Nabor, where they had been unearthed, into the new basilica which he had built for himself; and he placed them under the altar, where his own sarcophagus was to have stood. By this move, Gervasius and Protasius were inseparably linked to the communal liturgy, in a church built by the bishop, in which the bishop would frequently preside. In that way, they would be available to the community as a whole.
Quote ID: 5079
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 37
Section: 2A3
Ambrose had not ‘introduced’ the cult of the martyrs into Milan, still less had he merely acquiesced passively to previous practices. His initiatives had been firm and in many ways unusual: he had been prepared both to move bodies and to link them decisively to the altar of a new church. Rather, he was like an electrician who rewires an antiquated wiring system.
Quote ID: 5080
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 38
Section: 2A3
In this process of “rewiring” the figure of the martyr himself changes. . . .It is a complex and poignant story; but the outcome was plain--the martyr took on a distinctive late-Roman face. He was the patronus, the invisible, heavenly concomitant of the patronage exercised palpably on earth by the bishop.
Quote ID: 5081
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 39
Section: 2A3
The habit continued. Gregory of Tours will devote twenty lines of rhapsodic prose to the miraculous bouquet of a wine passed around at one martyr’s vigil.{17} This is not because he and his congregation had become more lax. It is rather that the bishop has entered with greater certainty into his role as the visible patronus beneath the invisible patronus. Once the lines of patronage are clearly drawn to that one center, the feasting can begin again.
Quote ID: 5082
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 208 Page: 39/40
Section: 2A3
What might have caused this shift? In the first place, a different kind of bishop, from families more accustomed to play the role of the grand seigneur, was taking over the leadership of the Christian communities.{73} At an age when Augustine was fervently praying not to be thrashed by the small-town school-teacher, Ambrose was playing at being a bishop, welcoming even his mother by extending his hand to be kissed: here was a man who would know how to face the world satis episcopaliter.{74}. . . . His “style” for the discovery and incorporation of relics rapidly became a model for the Latin West.{76}But why should so many other bishops, of very different backgrounds and in many different areas, wish to follow Ambrose’s example? Here we should not forget one factor: the growing wealth of the church.{77} In a society where wealth slipped ponderously from hand to hand through inheritance more than through any other means, a century of undisturbed accumulation of endowments left the bishops of the Latin church with a wealth undreamed of in previous generations.{78} It was the mass of new wealth, not the mass of new converts, that rested most heavily on the bishops.
Quote ID: 5083
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 40
Section: 4B,2A3
Exempt from many forms of taxation,{81} and not subject to the periodic financial blood-lettings that accompanied a secular career, the leaders of the Christian community found themselves in a difficult position. They had all the means of social dominance, and none of the means of showing it in acceptable form. . . .the bishops of the West, by contrast, found that they had to invent new ways of spending money. Building and the increase of ceremonial in connection with new foci of worship was the only way out. And where better than at the graves of the martyrs?
Quote ID: 5084
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 208 Page: 40
Section: 4B
For bitter envy always fell on undistributed wealth in the ancient world, and the bishops could be made to feel this as much as any secular potentes. Yet they lacked the normal outlets by which the layman could buy off envy by ostentatiously flirting with bankruptcy in bouts of public giving.{82}
Quote ID: 5085
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 41
Section: 2E1
Furthermore, such wealth and ceremonial would be deployed in the invisible presence of a figure who had taken on all the features of a late-Roman patronus. The saint was the good patronus: he was the patronus whose intercessions were successful, whose wealth was at the disposal of all, whose potentia was excercised without violence and to whom loyalty could be shown without constraint. The bishop could stand for him. Lavish building, splendid ceremonial, and even feasting at such a shrine washed clean the hard facts of accumulated wealth and patronage, as they were now practiced in real life, even by bishops.
Quote ID: 5086
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 41
Section: 4B
It is not surprising that, in the late fourth century, the saints suddenly began to “stand out” in such high eminence. As Bishop Alexander stated in his inscription at Tebessa,Here where you see walls crowned with gleaming roofs,
here where the high ceilings glitter and the holy altars stand:
this place is not the work of any noblemen, but stands
forever to the glory of the bishop, Alexander.{90}
Quote ID: 5087
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 44
Section: 2E1
The saints, as Ambrose pointed out, were the only inlaws that a woman was free to choose.{115} Their shrines offered to half the inhabitants of every late-Roman town respite and protection which they lacked the freedom to find elsewhere.{116}
Quote ID: 5088
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 45
Section: 4B
Evelyn Patlagean has shown that one of the principal changes from a classical to a postclassical society was the replacement of a particularized political model of society, in which the unit was the city, its composition defined in terms of citizens and noncitizens, by a more all embracing economic model, in which all society was seen, in town and country alike, as divided between the rich and the poor, the rich having a duty to support the poor, which was expressed in strictly religious terms as almsgiving.{119}
Quote ID: 5089
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 208 Page: 50
Section: 2A3
The philosophers and the orators have fallen into oblivion; the masses do not even know the names of the emperors and their generals; but everyone knows the names of the martyrs, better than those of their most intimate friends.{1}It is in these terms that Theodoret bishop of Cyrrhus sought to convey the extent of the triumph of Christianity: by the mid-fifth century, the cult of the saints had ringed the populations of the Mediterranean with intimate invisible friends.
Quote ID: 5090
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 208 Page: 61
Section: 2A3
In the chain of mediation between God and man, of the fault that ran through the universe, separating the stars from the earth. Only the martyrs, heavy with the humility of human death, could bridge that fault. As Augustine put it in a sermon which he preached on Saint Stephen while writing these chapters of the City of God: when, in the Apocalypse, John the Divine saw the angel, he worshiped it; but the angel said: “Arise, adore the Lord: I am your fellow servant.”Per conservum beneficia sumamus.
(Let us take the benefits of God through him, out fellow servant){57}
Augustine’s solution summed up a drift in Christian sensibility: the need for intimacy with a protector with whom one could identify as a fellow human being.
Quote ID: 5091
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 86
Section: 2E1
In a characteristic moment of penetrating disapproval, Hegel wrote of the piety of the middle ages:The Holy as a mere thing has the character of
externality; thus it is capable of being taken
possession of by another to my exclusion; it
may come into an alien hand, since the process
of appropriating it is not one that takes
place in Spirit, but conditioned by its quality
as an external object. The highest of human
blessings is in the hands of others.{1}
Quote ID: 5092
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 208 Page: 87
Section: 2E1
At the shrine of Saint Peter, a whole ritual of access was played out:Whoever wishes to pray there (writes Gregory of Tours)
must unlock the gates which encircle the spot, pass to where
he is above the grave and, opening a little window, push his
head through and there make the supplication that he needs.{9}
Quote ID: 5093
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 208 Page: 88
Section: 2E1,2A3
A yearning for proximity kept so carefully in suspense occasionally exploded. The Carthaginian noblewoman Megetia, as we have seen, had committed herself to the “therapy of distance” by traveling away from her family to the shrine of Saint Stephen in nearby Uzalis.{13} But she could not rest at that: While she prayed at the place of the holy relic shrine, she beat against it, not only with the longings of her heart, but with her whole body so that the little grille in front of the relic opened at the impact; and she , taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, pushed her head inside and laid it on the holy relics resting there, drenching them with her tears.{14}
Quote ID: 5094
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 92
Section: 2A3
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.
Quote ID: 5095
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 208 Page: 94
Section: 4B
As Macrina used to remind her brother, "Your father enjoyed a considerable reputation in his time for his culture; but his fame reached no further than the law courts of his own region. Later, he became known as a teacher of rhetoric throughout all Pontus. But all he wished for was fame within the bounds of his own home country. You, however, are a name to conjure with in far cities, peoples and provinces."{37}.
Quote ID: 5096
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 94/95
Section: 2A3
Thus, the passing of relics from one community to another, or their discovery, heightened the special status of the members of the Christian elite by making them privileged agents, personally involved in administering the lovingkindness of God. As Ambrose said of his own role in the discovery of the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius,Although this is a gift from God, yet I cannot deny the grace
and favor which the Lord Jesus has bestowed on the time
of my priesthood; for because I have not gained the status
of a martyr, I have at least acquired these martyrs for you.{41}
Later, in the age of Sidonius Apollinaris and his colleagues{42} and of Gregory Tours, we see the bishops of Gaul, in frequent discoveries and translations of relics, discreetly backing into the limelight of the newly found praesentia of the saints. It was their merita, their personal high standing with God, that had gained the mercy of new protectors for their community.{43}
Quote ID: 5097
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 208 Page: 96
Section: 2A3
The late-Roman preoccupation with concord can be seen on every level of public life. The sermons of Gaudentius and Victricius allow us to sense its weight on an empire-wide scale. For the massed fragments of relics gathered together in one place both condensed the ideal unity of the Christian church, as it had first been fused together by the Holy Ghost at Pentecost.
Quote ID: 5098
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 208 Page: 119
Section: 2E1,2A3
Gregory of Tours For this is the conflict which holds the attention of Gregory of Tours--- Reverentia implied a willingness to focus belief on precise invisible persons, on Christ and his friends the saints----the amici dominici {68}---in such a way 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 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 neopaganism. It involved learning an etiquette toward 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.{69}
Quote ID: 5100
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 208 Page: 119
Section: 4B
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.
Quote ID: 5101
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 208 Page: 120
Section: 2A3,4B
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 friends of the Lord."{72}
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 form 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.
Pastor John’s note: = A more sophisticated superstition
Quote ID: 5102
Time Periods: 46
Book ID: 208 Page: 120
Section: 2E1
The advance of Christianity beyond the towns was the advance of the praesentia of the saints.{75}
Quote ID: 5103
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 208 Page: 121
Section: 2E1
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 reverentia made final the 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.{78} 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:(Greek words) a speck of dust from his shrine was worth more than all the immemorial cunning of the village healers.{79}
Quote ID: 5105
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 208 Page: 121/124
Section: 2A3,3G
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,{81} or to bend their habits to please yet another class of domini.{82} Zones of “raw rusticity” hemmed in Gregory’s ceremonious world.{83}. . . . 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 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 most 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!"{85}......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.{86}
**reverentia means awe, reverence.praesentia means “carriage, demeanor, aspect” (especially if impressive) is from 1570s; that of “divine, spiritual, or incorporeal being felt as present” is from 1660s. Presence of mind (1660s) is a loan-translation of French présence d’esprit, Latin praesentia animi.
Quote ID: 5106
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 208 Page: 123/124
Section: 2A3
What angers him deeply, however, is any attempt on the part of the population to sidestep the demands of reverentia by creating for themselves indigenous pockets of praesentia which escaped the control of the bishop.. . .In the frequent recrudescences of the plague after 543, their immediate response to the situation was a reassertion of the “horizontal” model of healing, if now in a new, Christian form.{91} Soothsayers appeared, empowered by visions of the saints, to circulate new forms of remedies and to enunciate new rituals of propitiation.{92} Prophets established penitential rituals, based on their ability as diviners to detect thieves, to recover stolen goods, and to read thoughts.{93} These movements betrayed a poignant need to bring the praesentia of the saints, often of 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 shrine and its bishop.{94} Even Gregory met his match in such men:[After a bad year, in 587] there appeared at 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 the false teaching of hellish arts, than to heal
by the power of holiness.{95}
Quote ID: 5107
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 208 Page: 124/125
Section: 1A,2A3
It is a sad prospect: Christian reverentia created a situation which the elites of the Greco-Roman world had never envisaged in so sharp a form, {101} 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 the lack of “socialization,” to a substandard version of the same religion.{102} The death of paganism in western society, and the rise of the cult of saints, with its explicitly aristocratic and urban forms, ensured that, from late antiquity onwards, the upper-class culture of Europe would always measure itself against the wilderness of a rusticitas which it had itself played no small part in creating. {103}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 of an ideal potentia linked to invisible human beings and to their visible human representatives, the bishops of the towns, at the expense of traditions that had seemed to belong to the structure of the landscape itself.{104} Saint Martin attacked those points at which the natural and the divine were held to meet:{105} he cut down the sacred trees,{106} and he broke up the processions that followed the immemorial lines between the arable and the nonarable.{107} His successors fulminated against trees and fountains, and against forms of divination that gained access to the future through the close observation of the vagaries of animal and vegetable life.{108} 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, instead, a purely human time, linked to the deaths of outstanding individuals.{109}
Quote ID: 5108
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 208 Page: 154
Section: 2E1
59. On the final draining of significance from the archangels in medieval Italian art, as these are replaced by human intercessors such as the Virgin.
Quote ID: 5109
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 208 Page: 154
Section: 2E1
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1968): 189-98. Angels carried with them associations of the absolute monarchy of God, surrounded by his servants and not open to manipulation by patronage: E. Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964): 25. Their continued importance in the Byzantine world is due, in part, to the fact that the surviving Eastern Empire was a society in which patronage, though current, never emerged as unambiguously as in the West as the only viable alternative to absolute government through a bureaucratic hierarchy of stable ranks.
Quote ID: 5110
Time Periods: 7
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