Cult of the Saints
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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. Sunday Adult For u m 2 0 1 7 - 05- 14: Cult of the Saints ( Miriam Utter ) P a g e 2 | 5 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.