Later today, I am giving a talk at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, which will be about remembering the dead in the Middle Ages - a topic that will also provide an opportunity to describe the cosmology of Latin Christendom, in order to explain why it was so important to remember and commemorate the departed. As part of my presentation, I have included a picture of the Old Norwegian Homily Book, a collection of homiletic material compiled in Norway around the year 1200. The homily itself is much older, and was part of a religious heritage - or package deal - common to all the churches of Latin Christendom. Since the homily is for a feast dedicated to all the saints, the homily does not focus on any one particular saint's life, but instead provides an opportunity for compressing both biblical and post-biblical history into a short text. This homily in particular thereby provides a very valuable witness to the biblical knowledge available in Norway in the twelfth century.
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The feast of All Saints - which is on November 1 - is also a good reminder of a key aspect of the cult of saints, namely that not all saints are known to us. Consequently, new saints might appear, and old saints might become revealed to the faithful. Moreover, it is also a reminder that not all those who are venerated as saints are indeed holy. These issues are often lost in scholarship on the cult of saints, since the topic is often explored from the perspective of the political context of any given period, or with a view of the dynastic or institutional agendas of those historical actors who promoted a particular cult. However, for a phenomenon like the cult of saints to be wielded as a political tool - which indeed it was - and used to promote dynastic or institutional concerns, there has to be a genuine belief in the saints and their role in Christian cosmology. The veneration of a saint was a way of ensuring patronage from that saint, and the neglect of a saint could incur severe repercussions - there are numerous miracle stories about humans who are punished for not keeping their promise to the saint, or for not listening to the saint's instructions. Since not all saints were known, therefore, the discovery of bones that could potentially belong to a saint provided the living with a particular conundrum. If they ignored the bones, the saint might get offended. If they venerated the bones, they might end up like a community mentioned in the widely famous Life of Saint Martin by Sulpicius Severus, where the saint made a dead man speak from beyond the grave, admitting to his venerators that he was not a holy man but a criminal. It was because of this conundrum that signs were looked for, and bones were put to the test. Such mechanisms were not only a matter of ensuring elite control over a powerful religious phenomena, but also instituted to prevent misguided veneration. The feast of All Saints, therefore, is a kind of compromise, or a way to both recognise and circumvent the limits of possible knowledge. It speaks to a worldview where commemoration and recognition of holiness was important, but where recognition could be uncertain and where commemoration could be misplaced.
The feast of All Saints begins at Vesper this afternoon, roughly around six, and for those who celebrate a liturgical office, the mystical highpoint will be at Matins, sometime in the middle of the night. As a scholar, I for my part am fascinated and intrigued by the feast of All Saints precisely because it is a feast that is difficult to imbue with institutional and dynastic concerns, and instead provides an outlet for acknowledging that at the core of a phenomenon such as the cult of saints is a very real belief in the role of saints, and an understanding of the limits of human knowledge regarding the deeds of men and women in the past.
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