THE GOD-PROTECTED EMPIRE? SCEPTICISM TOWARDS THE CULT OF SAINTS IN EARLY BYZANTIUM

Matthew Dal Santo

Some time around the year 590, Eustratius († after 602), a well-read priest in the entourage of the controversial Patriarch Eutychius of Contantinople (553–567, 577–582), penned a rebuttal of claims that the saints’ miracles were fakes.1 Apparently emboldened by Aristotle’s thesis of the soul’s inseparability from the body, critics of the saints’ cult (whom Eustratius called ‘philosophers’, not necessarily ironically) argued that the saints’ souls were not active in the next life. Owing to the dependence of all human souls upon their bodies for the ability to move, speak and act, the saints – like everyone else – lay dormant in a state of ‘soul sleep’ until the resurrection, unmoved by the prayers of the faithful.2 If some believed in perceiving visions or miracles at the saints’ shrines, so the sceptics’ argument ran, this was actually God or an angel assuming the saints’ form.3 Eustratius – our presbyter in the Great Church – was not impressed. Assembling a mass of proof texts from the Scriptures, Fathers and Lives of the saints, Eustratius’s On the State of Souls after Death refuted the philosophers’ opinions for what they really were: an outright assault on Christian piety and a grave misunderstanding of the nature of God’s engagement with humankind. Indeed, Eustratius contended that the saints’ cult was no ‘optional extra’ of Christian belief.4 On the reality of the saints’

1 Eustratius of , On the State of Souls after Death = Eustratii Pres- byteri Constantinopolitani: De statu animarum post mortem, ed. P. van Deun, CCSG 60 (Turnhout, 2006). 2 For the Aristotelian inspiration behind the sceptics’ claims, see N. Constas, ‘An apology for the cult of saints in late antiquity: Eustratius Presbyter of Constantino- ple, On the State of Souls after Death’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2002) 267–285 at 281. Cf. D. Krausmüller, ‘God or angels as impersonators of saints: a belief in its context in the Refutation of Eustratius of Constantinople and the writings of Anastasius of Sinai’, Golden Horn 2 (1998/99) = http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/ goudenhoorn/62dirk.html. 3 Eustratius of Constantinople, Stat. anim. = CCSG 60: 50–60. 4 For a useful introduction to contemporary piety, see D. Krueger, ‘Christian piety and practice in the sixth century’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, M. Maas (ed.) (Cambridge, 2005), 291–315. 130 matthew dal santo miracles hung not only a proper conception of the Incarnation, but also any hope of assisting the dead. For, far from dormant, not only the saints, but all human souls were active in the afterlife. For the saints, this meant the ability to perform miracles for their supplicants; for the rest of humanity, it signified the possibility of the soul’s ritual purification post mortem through the priest’s offering of the Eucha- rist on its behalf.5 Thus, in Eustratius’s relatively brief treatise there already appears an important intersection of vested interests in the saints’ cult: the anthropology on which it rested underlay the claims of the imperial Church to act as a mediator between God and human society, both in this life and the next through its priestly and sacra- mental structures. Eustratius’s treatise is important because it focuses attention on a remarkable degree of scepticism, even hostility, towards the saints’ cult in Constantinople at the end of the sixth century. This period has usually been noted for the intensified permeation by Christian- ity of the imaginative and symbolic landscape of East Roman society which it is alleged took place at this time.6 It is regularly remarked, for example, that from the reign of the great Justinian (527–565) the destiny of the empire generally, and the authority of the imperial office specifically, came to be identified directly with the legitimising inter- ests of Christian Providence.7 From this perspective, the empire was, as a number of contemporary writers claim, uniquely ‘God-guarded’

5 Eustratius of Constantinople, Stat. anim. = CCSG 60:2342–726. See also N. Con- stas, ‘ “To sleep, perchance to dream’’: the middle state of souls in patristic and Byz- antine literature’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001) 91–124. 6 See above all the seminal articles by Averil Cameron, ‘The early religious poli- cies of II’, in The Orthodox Churches and the West, D. Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History 13 (Oxford, 1976), 51–67, repr. in eadem, Continuity and Change in Sixth-Century Byzantium (Aldershot, 1981), X; eadem, ‘The Theotokos in sixth- century Constantinople: a city finds its symbol’,Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 29 (1978) 79–108, repr. in eadem, Continuity and Change, XVI; eadem, ‘Images of authority: elites and icons in late sixth-century Byzantium’, Past and Present 84 (1979) 3–35, repr. in eadem, Continuity and Change, XVIII. 7 J.A.S. Evans, The Age of Justinian: The circumstances of imperial power (London, 1996), 58–65 and 252: ‘[. . .] in Justinian’s reign, secular space grew narrower, the political and ecclesiastical sectors moved into closer union, and there was no safe space left for the outside.’ See also J. Moorhead, Justinian (London, 1994), 116–120. One also thinks of the political and eschatological claims implicit in Justinian’s eccle- siastical building programme, with Constantinople’s Hagia its chef d’œuvre. See P. Magdalino, ‘The history of the future and its uses: prophecy, policy and propa- ganda’, in The Making of Byzantine History: Studies dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, ed. R. Beaton and C. Roueché (London, 1993), 3–34 at 12–13.