The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown

Church History, Dec, 2001 by Megan McLaughlin

The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown. Edited by James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x 298 pp. $74.00 cloth; $59.20 paper.

This book is a collection of responses to Peter Brown's famous article, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity" (Journal of Roman Studies 61 [1971]: 80-101), with nods to some of Brown's later writings on the cult of the saints. Three introductory essays devoted to Brown's life and work are followed by sections devoted to the cult of saints in Eastern Christendom, Western Christendom, Medieval Rus', and Early and Medieval Islam. The twelve authors included here react to Brown's work in ways too varied to be easily summarized, but perhaps the most common theme is a critique of Brown's functionalism--his focus on the social roles of holy men--coupled with a call for more attention to genre, intertextuality, and the cultural construction of sanctity.

All of the contributions to this volume are of interest, but several are particularly distinguished. Claudia Rapp ("`For Next to God, You are My Salvation': Reflections on the Rise of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity") criticizes Brown for using too narrow a range of sources. She suggests that reliance on the vitae of saints in his early studies led him to construct a model of sanctity centered almost entirely on miraculous patronage. In his later works, which made more use of philosophical and theological treatises, Brown looked at saints not just as purveyors of miracles, but also as role models and teachers. However, Rapp argues that consideration of epistolary sources reveals a further, "intercessory," model of sanctity at work in late antiquity, which intersects with Brown's models. She is able to trace the formation of what she calls "spiritual families," each centered on a charismatic figure (the "father" of the family) and held together by an exchange of prayers, facilitated either by personal encounters or by exchanges of letters. These letters provide the historian, with a "corrective to the literary creations of hagiographers," revealing the "direct and largely unadulterated voice of the holy men and their correspondents." Rapp makes a persuasive case for the centrality of prayer, rather than miracles, in the "day-to-day interactions between the holy man and his followers."

Probably the most ambitious essay in the collection is that of Paul Antony Hayward, "Demystifying the Role of Sanctity in Western Christendom." Hayward praises Brown for making us aware of the complex ways in which the cult of saints served to legitimate the power of elites, but criticizes him for treating his sources "as a general form of propaganda for a uniform religious ethos when they are more likely to represent much more narrowly based and contentious cultures of sanctity" (127). Hayward believes that "far from being the product of a highly ordered society, the hagiographical idea of cosmic order was the fantasy of an elite threatened by violence and competition" (130-31). He is also troubled by Brown's recourse to "irrational" (i.e., emotionally based) explanations of cults. He sees early hagiographers acting instead in rational and often self-serving ways, using reason and imagination to "answer difficult questions about the precise fates of persons of great importance to particular communities" (139). The problem with this interpretation, of course, is that it has no stronger evidentiary base than the one it seeks to replace. Brown and Hayward have read precisely the same hagiographical texts and in equally sophisticated ways. They have simply highlighted different aspects of them. Hayward's focus on instability, competition, and self-interest is presumably more palatable to postmodern scholarly audiences than is Brown's focus on stability, consensus, and emotional comfort. Yet can we really say that it is more convincing?

The impact of the "literary turn" is most apparent in the early sections of the book. The essays devoted to medieval Russia and Islam are less likely to focus on textual issues and more likely to accept Brown's functionalism--albeit with some modifications. In "Holy Men and the Transformation of Political Space in Medieval Rus'," for example, Paul Hollingsworth first considers "the prominent role played by churchmen in mediating and defusing secular conflict, especially inter-princely rivalry" during the period when Christianity took root in Russia (197). He then turns to the influential cult of Saints Boris and Gleb--two princes who were martyred for their peace-making efforts. Rejecting earlier interpretations of this cult, which employed a "two-tiered" model of sanctity very similar to that criticized by Brown in the 1978 Haskell Lectures (The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity [Chicago, 1981]), Hollingsworth asserts that "scholars should study the veneration of Boris and Gleb against the backdrop of how the mutual interaction between the princes and the churchmen led to the formation ... of a religious language for expressing the desire for political harmony and the social mechanisms for trying to attain it" (209). He attempts to show that the cult succeeded because it tapped into the desires of princes and churchmen for harmony.