[The following is an attempt at a brief history of the development of the Christian cult of saints in the first 500 years. This period saw a rapid development of this phenomenon, yet the relative paucity of the sources means that it can sometimes be difficult to understand that despite the rapidity of the process, it was also piecemeal and slow, as well as both decentralised and not streamlined. What prompted me to write this text was a promise to help a colleague with providing an overview of the cult of saints, and I ended up putting together this text which is aimed at giving those unfamiliar with the topic some sense of the historical process, as well as some key terms and dates.]
Terminology and the first hundred years
The word ‘saint’ is the English translation of ‘sanctus’,
which in turn is the Latin translation of the Greek ‘hagios’, which means ‘holy’.
In the epistles of Paul, this term is used indiscriminately about all followers
of Christ, but it later came to signify an especially holy kind of Christian.
There was, in other words, a shift from the more general use of ‘hagios’ to a
kind of elite Christians. Here, the elite status is based on whether they died
for the faith, not their social standing or their position in the early church
hierarchy. The circumstances of this shift are nebulous to us, and it was
likely a gradual development that grew out of the early persecutions of
Christians. (Although it is likely that the persecutions under Nero were too
early to have an impact on this shift, and it is more likely that the persecutions
under Domitian and Trajan had the most immediate effect – especially those of
Domitian.) It is not clear how this change in terminology began, whether it was
initiated by the leaders of the early congregations, or whether it emerged from
common usage that eventually became the standard way of referring to those who
had shown their faith more clearly and publicly. These persecutions served to
solidify the sense of a shared identity among Christians, and therefore also
gave root to a stronger development of a Christian collective memory. This
memory was perpetuated in part through the celebration of the anniversaries of
those who had died for the faith. These celebrations were held at the graves of
the dead, and from this practice grew the elaborate liturgical celebrations
that came into place in the fourth and fifth centuries. The day of the saint’s
death became known as ‘dies natalis’, birthday, as it was the beginning of the
saint’s life in Heaven. Eventually, as Christianity became more widely common
and eventually legalised, the remnants of the especially holy dead Christians could
be moved into churches or other sacred spaces intended for the veneration of
these remnants. These remnants were relics, which were held to be sacred, and
to provide a tangible contact point through which the power of God could work
miracles for the glory of the saint (cf. ‘translation’ below).
We
do not know who were the first saints. Arguably, the apostles, John the Baptist
and perhaps also the Virgin Mary are likely to have been held in very high
regard from the earliest stages of the Christian religion. Because the early
church was both scattered and very heterogenous, however, it is doubtful that
we can surmise any coherent approach to the memorialisation of those who died
for the faith. In both the Latin and Greek traditions, one of the earliest saints
is said to have been Polycarp of Smyrna, whose death is conventionally dated to
155 CE. Early accounts of his death were written in both Latin and Greek, which
shows that there was a lot of exchange between those Christians who were Greek-speaking
inhabitants of the Roman Empire – not necessarily citizens, although some, like
Paul, were – and those whose main written language was Latin. Stories
travelled, and so did the terminology. In some cases, this exchange led to the
translation of Greek terms into Latin – ‘hagios’ to ‘sanctus’, for instance –
but in other cases the Greek terms became dominant also in the Latin language.
The best example of this retaining of Greek is seen in the word ‘martyr’, which
means witness, and came to mean someone who bore witness to their Christian
faith by accepting death rather than recanting their faith. Another of these
Greek terms is ‘apostolos’, which means envoy or messenger, and which became
slightly Latinized as ‘apostolus’.
The early literature: c.160-c.400
The account of Polycarp of Smyrna’s death –
commonly known as The Martyrdom of Polycarp – is believed to have been
written relatively shortly after his death, and is often dated to 160 CE. This
text is interesting because it shows that many of the typical features of later
literature about saints were already in place by the mid-second century CE. For
instance, there is an elaborate martyrdom, the remnants of Polycarp were
gathered by Christians and held in greater value than jewels – this is perhaps
the earliest reference to the veneration of the relics of saints – and the text
also exhibits very strong anti-Semitism. Throughout the second and third
centuries, several texts about the especially holy Christians appeared, perhaps
most famously the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, written in Carthage
around the year 200 CE. In this early period, however, there was no coherent
genre for writing about saints. The term ‘hagiography’, writing about the holy,
was first used by Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the Ketuvim, but at some
later point became adopted by Christians to refer to the accounts of saints and
their deaths and deeds. As far as I know, we cannot say for certain when this
terminology came into this Christian usage.
Following
the legalisation of Christianity during the reign of Emperor Constantine, the churches
became more stable centres of administration and memory-production. The various
church leaders were able to communicate more frequently with one another, and
this exchange led to a streamlining of both terms, practices and forms of memorialisation.
By Constantine’s death in in 337, the veneration of relics had become standard
practice among Christians, and rich Christians had begun collecting them and
turning their house complexes into memorial spaces. The memories of the recent persecutions
under Diocletian – particularly in the period c.300-305 – were transformed into
a collective memory that further solidified a Christian, but also a Roman
Christian, identity. One of the best examples of this memory-making is Pope
Damasus I (r.366-84). He himself was born around the time of the Diocletian
persecutions, and as bishop of Rome he began to collect the bones of those who
had died in the persecutions. These bones were placed in churches and the
places of their martyrdoms were memorialised through epigrams. This effort effectively
converted Rome into a Christian space, and several popular saints – such as Agnes
and Sebastian – became famous through the efforts of Damasus. These epigrams
were also part of the early literature about saints.
In
the second half of the fourth century, some of the most impactful texts about
saints were written, and these came to establish the form that hagiography
would retain throughout the medieval period and into the modern era. The
biographical accounts of Martin, bishop of Tours (d.397), written by Sulpicius Severus while Martin was still alive, and the account of Anthony, the Egyptian
hermit, by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d.373) came to provide a template
for later saint-biographers. The biography of a saint – often called ‘vita’,
life, or ‘passio’, passion, or even ‘acta’, acts – typically described the
saint’s childhood and background, their conversion or at least deeper
commitment to Christianity, their suffering, their good deeds, their deaths, and
eventually also the appearance of miracles. These two biographies also
established more clearly that even those who had not died for their faith –
which neither Martin not Anthony had done – could be considered holy, because
their way of life had proved their commitment to Christ. They were ‘confessores’,
confessors, of their faith, rather than martyrs.
The
emergence of a more formally coherent Christian literature also led to the more
coherent stylistic form of saint-biographies. Although a Christian was always
supposed to imitate the life of Christ, this was paramount in the case of the
saints. The early saints had imitated Christ by choosing death, and died like
Christ, even though the manner of dying was not necessarily on a cross. This
imitation of Christ, ‘imitatio Christi’, became more important to demonstrate
with the cessation of persecutions, and the relative scarcity of new martyrdoms
that followed the legalisation of Christianity. From the late fourth century onwards,
therefore, saint-biographers modelled their accounts even more explicitly on
episodes from the Gospels, and emphasised the parallels between the life of
Christ and the saints more strongly. This practice continued throughout the
medieval and modern periods.
As
part of the more formalised and streamlined cult of saints, collections of
miracles became more common. I do not know exactly when such accounts of
miraculous events first became committed to writing, but it is likely that an
expectations of signs and miraculous cures led to orally transmitted accounts
in the early period of the veneration of saints. Augustine’s City of God
includes an account of the miracles said to have appeared in the wake of the
finding of the body of Saint Stephen Protomartyr in 417, and the arrival of
some of the relics of Stephen in Carthage in 424. The popularity of Augustine’s
writings also had an impact on later miracle collections.
Saints in the Christian cosmology
We know little about how the earliest
venerators of Christian saints understood the place of the especially holy dead
in the greater scheme of things. There was an expectation of an afterlife, and most
likely the saints were believed to be in Heaven. It is unclear whether the
veneration of the early saints was done with the hope that those who were
venerated would provide help, but such an expectation came into place as the
cult of saints became more Romanised. The collection of verse biographies by
the poet Prudentius – Liber Peristephanon – shows that by the turn of
the fourth century, Christians in the Roman Empire, at least those who belonged
to the upper classes, understood the saints as ‘advocati’, intercessors or
ambassadors, in the Heavenly Senate. In other words, the system of Roman
society – where the rich were patrons who bestowed favours on the common people
in return for services, and where the Senate was the house of ultimate
authority – was transposed onto the greater cosmology. Saints were understood
as patrons, and in return for their aid – ‘beneficium’ – the living Christians
performed their duties or their labours, ‘officium’. This idea of saints as
interceding before God on behalf of the living has remained a key point in
Christian thinking. The ‘beneficium’ usually came in the form of cures or other
miraculous events by which God was believed to demonstrate the holiness of his
saints. The ‘officium’ usually signified the celebration of the anniversaries
of the saints, mainly their day of death or the day of the moving of the
relics, the so-called translation. The term ‘officium’ later came to denote the
performance of liturgical songs and readings in the course of a daily round in
a church or a monastery. Saints interceded on behalf of the living, but they
could also punish the living for wrongdoing, neglect of their patrons, or
heresy.
Continuity and discontinuity
There has been a lot of discussion about the
degree to which we can see a continuity from the pagan polytheism to the role
of the saints within Christian monotheism. The traditional argument has been
that the old gods were simply replaced with different figures, and that people
attributed to these figures a lot of the same properties and powers that they
did the old gods. Since Peter Brown’s monograph The Cult of Saints (1981),
however, the main consensus is that the situation is more complicated than
that. Naturally, there might well have been Christian converts who did not
discern much of a difference between the saints and the old gods, but to the
Christian theologians and, indeed, to the bishops and missionaries, there were
many important differences. First of all, a saint does not make any decisions
of their own, but with the approval of God. Miracles, moreover, are not brought
about by the saint. Instead, God performs the miracle as a favour to the saint
in return for the saint’s merit – ‘meritum’ – which is the quality of the saint’s
life on earth. Furthermore, while the Christians venerated the saints as
heroes, and although Paul’s epistles uses terms like soldier and athlete –
there was nothing physically violent about the way the saints met their demise.
They fight consisted of enduring violence – often described in gruesome detail
by Christian authors – and from the point of view of the pagan Romans, there
was little heroic about such passivity. In other words, and following the
arguments of Peter Brown, the heroes and gods of the pagan pantheon had little in
common with the heroes of the Christians.
The
differences between the worship of pagan gods and the veneration of Christian
hero, however, do not mean that there were not continuities. As the Christian
religion became legalised and increasingly infused with Roman impulses – one of
which was the transposition of the patron-client system onto the Christian
cosmological system – there were several aspects of the various polytheistic
religions that came to shape Christian religious practice. For instance, the
practice of incubation ritual, where someone sleeps at a shrine in order to
acquire a religious experience, was very common among various polytheistic
religions. This practice was adopted by Christians, and from miracle
collections from the Middle Ages we often read about cures and visions that
happened to those who slept or kept a vigil by the saint’s shrine.
Another
form of continuity can be seen in the deliberate re-use of pagan cult places by
Christians. Pagan shrines, temples or sacred trees were destroyed with the
purpose of replacing the pagan holy place with a Christian one. Among the
earliest surviving records of this idea is the Life of Saint Martin by
Sulpicius Severus, where Martin cuts down a sacred tree. In Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues – a collection of saint stories written during his papacy (590-604)
– we read that Saint Benedict of Nursia destroyed a shrine of Apollo and replaced
it with an altar of Saint Martin, which suggests a deliberate imitation of the holy
bishop. This incident is also a reminder that saints could imitate other
saints, not only Christ or biblical figures. In addition, however, it is
important to be cautious about whether this hagiographical topos was
indeed enacted in real life, or whether it was only a literary claim. It is
likely that the hagiographical topos did indeed inspire real-world events,
but it is also possible that in some cases we are dealing with a claim of
imitation only, not an actual event.
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Key terms
Apostolos: Greek for envoy or messenger; term used
for those of Christ’s early followers who were missionaries, but also used about
those saints credited with introducing Christianity to a new place or a new
people
Beneficium: the favours given by a saint to the
living
Confessor: those who testified to their faith
by their Christian living, but who did not die a violent death (cf. martyr)
Dies natalis: the Heavenly birthday of the
saint, meaning their day of death
Hagiography: writing about the holy; in the
Christian sense, any text that provides an account of the saint’s life, characteristics,
death, and/or associated miracles. What makes a text hagiographic is that it
has its focus on the saint, and many different types of texts therefore qualify
as hagiographic, not solely biographies of saints
Hagios: Greek for ‘holy’, Paul’s word for the
early followers of Christ
Imitation of Christ: every saint was expected
to imitate Christ to some degree; this imitation could be achieved in many
different ways, either by simply sacrificing their life for the faith, or by
imitating specific episodes from the Gospels. Saints could also imitate other
saints
Martyr: Greek for witness; a term used for
those who died for the faith and thereby testified to their conviction
Meritum: the quality of a saint’s life which
makes the saint earn the goodwill of God; the better a saint’s meritum, the more
efficient the saint is as an intercessor for the living
Miracle: in Christian terms, signs by which God
shows His will on Earth, and through which humans are expected to recognise the
holiness of a saint
Officium: the veneration given by the living in
order to deserve the favours given by the saint
Passio: Latin for ‘suffering’, a word commonly
used to describe accounts of the saint’s tortures and subsequent death (cf. The
Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas)
Relics: the remnants of the saints, usually their
bodies or bones; some relics were so-called contact relics, meaning relics that
had absorbed some of the holiness of the saints by contact with them – either while
the saint was living or after the saint’s death. Through this contact, items
such as clothes placed on the saint’s relics or the saint’s shrine could become
a new tangible relay point through which God’s power worked miracles. The
container in which these relics were placed is commonly referred to as a
reliquary, but also sometimes a shrine (cf. ‘shrine’)
Sanctus: Latin for ‘holy’; the root of the
English ‘saint’
Shrine: can be used to refer to the holy space
in which a saint is placed and venerated, but it could also mean the casket or
container in which the saint’s body or the saint’s bones, dust and ashes were
placed
Translatio: the moving (translation) of a saint’s
relics to a place of rest, sometimes to a new place of rest. The occasion could
be celebrated by an anniversary feast.
Vita: Latin for ‘life’, a very common term to denote
biographical account of a saint (cf. Life
of Saint Martin)
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Brief timeline (all years in CE)
c. 30: commonly accepted date of Christ’s death
c.35-64: the missionary activity of Paul the
apostle
54-68: reign of Nero; possibly the first, and
if so very limited, Christian persecutions
81-96: reign of Domitian; first major
persecutions of Christians
155: conventional date of Bishop Polycarp of
Smyrna
c.160: composition of The Martyrdom of
Polycarp
203: conventional date for the death of
Perpetua and Felicitas in Carthage, whose imprisonment was recorded in an
account that partly might be dictated by Perpetua herself
249-51: reign of Decius, which saw a major
persecution of Christians
257-58: the Valerian persecutions; Bishop Cyprian
of Carthage died in 258
c.300-305: the Diocletian persecutions
313: the Edict of Milan, which legalised
Christianity
366-84: papacy of Damasus I, one of the major
campaigns for Christianising the topography and urban space of Rome
373: death of Athanasius of Alexandria, author
of The Life of Anthony of Egypt
397: death of Martin of Tours
415: death of Prudentius, author of Liber
Peristephanon
417: the finding of the body of Stephen
Protomartyr
424: the arrival of some of the relics of
Stephen Protomartyr in Carthage
425: death of Sulpicius Severus, author of The Life of Martin
430: death of Augustine of Hippo
543: death of Benedict of Nursia
590-604: the papacy of Gregory the Great
