Money and Faith in the Early Christian Church Series Cult of the Saints
A Sunday Adult Forum St. John’s Episcopal Church, Worthington, OH
Presented by Miriam Utter, Parishioner Sunday May 14, 2017
Good morning and Happy Mother’s Day. We are talking about saints, and I am sure that most folks view mothers as being in that category without any formal rituals. Women played an important part in the early church and the practices associated with the saints, so we will be honoring our foremothers in this discussion.
I’d like to first refresh everyone’s memory with some of the vital points that we have discussed in our trek through the landscape of the later Roman Empire. The mental and social constructs of the period and their ongoing evolution during the slow downward spiral of the Roman Empire shaped how Christianity in the West was formed and turned into the structure and practices associated with the Roman Catholic Church.
One point we made was about the importance of place -- pagan gods were strongly connected to a specific place -- Diana of Ephesus for example, or to a specific culture. The Greeks had Zeus, Romans Jupiter, same “father” god, but with varying characteristics and worship based on location. The goddess Diana might be worshipped elsewhere, but then she would be the Diana of Antioch. Trees, springs, rivers, stones, mountains could all have a spiritual entity dwelling in them that was a source of power. Another place to worship was the grave of a hero or an emperor, which could be an altar, a temple or an elaborate grave.
Another point is the importance of the city, with its walls and social hierarchy. The vast majority of people were poor, illiterate, enslaved, and living on the edge of destitution. People who lived in the cities – the urban poor -- received the benefits of citizen with a dole and the rights to attend games, bathe, and go to the temples and so on. Those non-citizens, the invisible poor had no rights and the early church expanded its ministry to include those poor outside the walls, so to speak, in efforts to lure the wealthy into spending their funds on the church instead of on civic improvements and games. This led to the idea that giving to the poor laid up treasure in heaven, and ultimately, giving to the church connected with those souls who had gone before and might need to be released from purgatory into paradise.
We also talked about personal relationships, of the patron, or patronus, who would protect his clientes or clients and offer them preferment or employment if they “remembered” him. He had power, or potentia, absolute authority - the power of life or death, of freedom or servitude. If you were a client seeking favors of a patron, you would need to be in his “praesentia” the root word for our word present, or presence. But this was not the passive state of just being in a place, but rather being in attendance, paying attention to a person who exuded power and authority, or as we say, she had a real presence a weight of personality. Another aspect of this attention was memory. To be remembered was a powerful act. I also mentioned that memory had a different meaning for them. Their understanding
Sunday Adult For u m 2 0 1 7 - 05- 14: Cult of the Saints ( Miriam Utter ) P a g e 1 | 5 of memory differed from ours. We see it as a passive storage unit, whereas memory in ancient times was an act of will. To remember was to assert a bond; to forget was aggressive; it was an act of social excision that severed links. To remember was to intercede or receive succor. To be present was to be attentive and receive attention, a two way relationship.
We also talked about burial practices. Cemeteries were outside the city walls, as the dead were considered unclean for sanitary reasons, and the graves were places where families would go, visit their dead, have a picnic, and ask for favors (to be remembered) by the souls who had gone into the Heavens, leaving behind the husk or the body. Pagans and Jews alike recoiled at the practices of Christians in revering martyred saints. (more about that later).
So, I hope with all the factors I have listed above, that you all might have an inkling of the origins of the cults of the saint might come. But as usual, we can observe the growth of this belief system with our slogan for all these talks “follow the money”.
As we have discussed before, Christianity moved from the shadows in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE into greater acceptance in the 3rd and 4th centuries. However, there were still persecutions and executions of Christians by emperors and local procurators who felt strongly that Christians were traitors because they would not worship the emperor, who was considered a god. Those martyrs who refused to renounce Christ were the heroes for the Christian communities, and it was thought that their souls, having left their tortured bodies, ascended straight to the presence of God and Christ, with no stops at purgatory. Lesser Christians, if you remember from last week, the so-so Christians, had to spend some time there on their way to heaven. Their time could be lessened by intercessory prayers and offerings to the church.
The bodies of the martyrs, instead of being “unclean” were viewed as conduits to the heavens. The martyrs had willingly allowed their fleshly bodies to be tortured and destroyed, so that their souls, or spiritual body could ascend immediately to be unified with Christ in Heaven. Their bodies and possessions were viewed as holy, alive with spiritual power, and could act as connectors, or in modern terms, as electrical conduits that tapped directly into the power of God and the saints. They could work miracles to those who came to visit them or touch their bones. Pagan observers were repelled by the Christian practices of digging up the bodies of the dead and carrying corpses through towns, kissing bones and filthy grave cloths.
The ancient barriers between the living and the dead were breached by these rituals. Another barrier symbolically torn down was the city wall. Cemeteries where saints were buried became enormous places of worship, with pilgrimage sites, basilicas, courtyards and triumphal arches. Western European bishops orchestrated a connection between their residence and main basilica with the cemeteries outside of town. The bishop of Rome held the Eucharist outside Rome’s walls on the Vatican Hill on the supposed tomb of St Peter. Other ancient social barriers were broken here, when tomb and altar were joined, and when the private grave of a saint became public property. No other Christian graves became accessible to all. They were private, for the family. But a desire to possess, to contain the miraculous powers of the saint in one’s own territory, to compete with the public and political life of the Roman city, led bishops to exalt the shrines in their territory with investments from the wealthy Christians. Art, literature, architecture and ceremony made the graves and relics more eminent; the powers of the bishop coalesce with the power of the shrine.
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Shrines dotted the landscape, with a grave or a fragmentary relic, and often were called “the place” loca sanctorum where the normal laws of the grave were suspended. The anonymity of human remains were thought to be still heavy with the fullness of the beloved person - the praesentia and thus also the potentia.
The desire to own the graves, bones or relics of the martyrs was driven by the acceptance of Christianity by the well-to-do, who entered into a “keeping up with the Joneses” situation, vying with others to purchase or discover martyrs’ tombs. Power struggles ensued among the various centers of authority. For example, the roman elite, when accepting the new religion, entered into a conflict with the bishops over who should be the patroni of the local community. For example, in 295 CE, a wealthy woman Pompeiana was able to obtain the body of the young martyr Maximilianus from the government instead of the the family and buried it near the tomb of St Cyprian, where her tomb was located so she could obtain the benefits of two saints. Another wealthy woman, Asclepia, built a memoria or tomb above the grave of the martyr Anastasius, for herself and her family, thus removing the tomb from the larger Christian community to her family alone, privatizing a resource that had belonged to the public. Wealthy patrons also paid bishops to be buried near the tombs of the saints.
Bishops thus had a stake in the ownership and adoration of saints and their relics as that produced an income stream from pilgrims, who needed housed and fed, and the wealthy, who would pay lavishly to adorn the basilicas, just as in the times before, they would have built civic structures like roads or amphitheaters.
There was also another problem – as the church became more accepted, money flowed into it and bishops became incredibly wealthy. But they had no place to put their cash – they had run out of the poor, the sick, the stranger- and undistributed wealth was a dangerous problem. What better place to put it than into the shrines of the saints and martyrs outside the walls of the cities? This would sum up the paradox of episcopal wealth – it was non- wealth as it belonged to God, so it was not private. It couldn’t be used for personal needs, so it would be deployed at a non-grave in the invisible presence of a figure that had taken on all the characteristics of a late-Roman patronus. The saint was a good patronus, his intercessions were successful, his wealth was at the disposal of all, his potentia was exercised without violence and to whom loyalty could be shown without constraint. The bishop would stand in his place, and carry out the ceremonials and feasts as a living patron would have done.
Another social problem solved by the location of the shrines outside the city walls was the unique structure of the Christian community in that it included women and the poor, which the classic city did not. Located outside the city walls, the barriers that kept classes separate disappeared outside, and people had the feeling of spontaneous fellowship, which often happens on pilgrimages. Faith banished distinctions of birth. Women were also set free by being outside the city walls. Often confined to their houses, heads covered, unable to go into the city unattended, they were constrained by social opprobrium. But when visiting a shrine, they could go alone or with other women, and enjoy the natural beauties of the fountains, trees and tranquil setting. Shrines offered respite, and the saint became a chosen friend.
The poor also gained with the fellowship at the shrine. Christians did not honor the old boundaries of the classes, where only the urban plebs or poor were fed and protected. The church also fed the poor rusticales outside the city, breaking down old divisions and enlarging the community by creating a new class of recipients of charity.
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In another unusual development, women became part of a new class of givers. In Roman society, giving was an act of politics, not of mercy, and women had no place. The Christian church encouraged women to take on a public role in their own right in relation to the poor. They gave alms in person, they visited the sick; they founded shrines and poorhouses in their own names and were expected to be visible in ceremonials at their shrines. Wealthy women also renounced their riches, vowed virginity, and founded convents, able to live independent lives. As I noted in examples given above, rich and powerful Roman matrons were not afraid to go toe to toe with a bishop in getting control of a shrine for maximum benefit for themselves or their families.
I hope that the preceding has helped you understand the social and economic forces that gave rise to the shrines and the development of theological support for these practices by the church fathers, especially St Augustine in his masterwork, the City of God. But the theological arguments belonged to the wealthy and well-educated elite, who were the bishops of the time. What did the average person seek when visiting a shrine or imploring a saint for a favor? What separates or connects this belief system with the former pagan system of spirits and nymphs in each tree and spring? Is it the old polytheism in a new form?
Several currents run in the development of the miraculous power of saints and their relics. The first is the crumpling of the philosophical worldview that happenings in the natural world were not caused by the gods but might be understood by careful observation and reasoning. The Christians felt that God was all powerful and directed everything so there was no need to observe and reason about possible causes. Another is the ancient belief, articulated by Plutarch, that there are multiplicities of selves that reach to God, the ultimate being the daimon, the genius or the guardian angel. This was an invisible being entrusted with the care of the individual from birth to death, and this invisible being or guardian angel was a constant and intimate companion. So when a person spoke of their relationship with a favorite saint, it was the transference to a dead human being of the feelings formerly attributed to the daimon or guardian angel. People felt the need for a protector who they could identify with as a human being, and the relations were similar to those of the patron/client that I described earlier.
We then have the relics, which anyone who has visited European Catholic Churches, or museums, has seen. Usually covered in gold and garnished with jewels, the reliquaries contain such treasures as St Clare’s little finger, or St Francis’ heart, or a piece of the True Cross. These objects can be the subject of adoration, of processions, of endless prostrations and prayers. They are similar in a way to the icon in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Protestants were scornful of these practices, calling them idolatrous or magical. However, as usual, there are reasons for the attention paid to these sacred objects. As mentioned earlier, the shrine was full of the praesentia of the saint; the physical presence of the holy. Even the tiniest fragment of the body, or an object that the saint had touched, had the same quality. Since not everyone could make it to a shrine, the saint’s relic could undergo the process of translatio, or travel to the worshippers, in an act of gratia or grace and gratitude that allowed others to experience the holiness of the saint. This was very similar to the visits of the Roman emperor as he made his way around the provinces, checking up on things. A vast system of patronage, alliance and gift-giving moved the relics from one location to another, as did plain theft and warfare. Priests, often from the upper classes, would find the bones of a saint in a field that had been revealed to them in a dream, creating a new source
Sunday Adult For u m 2 0 1 7 - 05- 14: Cult of the Saints ( Miriam Utter ) P a g e 4 | 5 of income and power in their domain. They were also found at times of social upheaval, drawing populations together in times of danger or rejoicing.
The miracles that were performed at the shrine of a saint were used as propaganda to entice more pilgrims to visit. In a period when sickness and disability were believed to be the results of sin (a concept that is alive and well in our society I might point out, where squabbles over health insurance and preexisting conditions reveal the same punitive mindset, or the vilification of the poor and ethnically different) a successful shrine with a long list of miraculous healings was a spiritual as well as an economic powerhouse, with loyal servants who protected the holy bones.
If we imagine ourselves living in this dangerous and difficult time, where 50% of the children were dead by age 5, where the average life span was 30 years, where constant warring gangs destroyed crops and animals, where illness could strike without warning and a person could die in a day, with no idea of causation aside from the devil or evil spirit or a witch, where the fear of hell was real and terrifying, the belief that a saint, with a direct connection to an all- powerful God, could intercede for you, listen to you, be a friend and intermediary in dangerous and deadly world, and guide your soul to paradise, seems almost rational. Pilgrimages, a feature of many religious traditions, became immensely popular, with crowds attending the ceremonies, pressing around the reliquaries, seeking healing but also a good time socializing with their fellow pilgrims.
The trade in relics and the desire for more was among the motives for the crusades, which led thousands to fruitless wars in the Middle East, with looting, pillaging and disease, all the attendant horrors of warfare. But the crusades also helped open the closed world of medieval Europe, with its focus on death and the afterlife, by bringing back treasures from the East, some of them manuscripts of the ancient philosophers. Their translation provided a different way of looking at the world. The fracturing of this worldview, beginning as early as 1100 CE, would give rise to the Protestant Reformation, as we will discuss next week in the Roots of the Reformation.
But, before we get too cocky about our modern rational lives, perhaps we should look at our similar beliefs and actions with relics – football jerseys, Marilyn Monroe’s skirt, Buckeye worship, the same credulity or magical beliefs about political theories or persons or the natural world in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the shrines we build- not to saints but to “health”. The enormous hospitals, medical complexes, research facilities that are all focused on life as an antidote to death, which is hidden and feared. It could be that our belief systems will seem as foreign to persons in the future as those of a medieval society seem to us.
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