It is nowadays fashionable to say that one is "on the right side of history." Such a statement of one’s own sanctity wins arguments by demonstrating the speaker’s piety. What remains unclear is the character of the great force or being toward which the speaker is pious: What is history? What makes history a force? Is the force the individuals who live or is there a logic to history that transcends the individuals? And how can there be a right and a wrong side to it?
While he does not answer these questions directly, Peter Brown, in his classic The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, reissued with a new preface by the University of Chicago Press, sets out to provide a unique lens through which to view history. Brown contends that history is dynamic, not simple, and that we must be careful not to objectify the forces that drive historical progress. It has not always been so. In his first chapter, Brown argues that historical scholarship since the Enlightenment has followed Hume’s lead. The great Scot inaugurated a "two-tiered model" of history, which claimed that the chasm between "cultivated elites" and the unlearned, vulgar class is unbridgeable. In the field of early Christian studies, this means that historians have viewed the cult of the saints, wherein Christians came to venerate dead men and women, as a concession by the cultivated elites to the vulgar masses. The vulgar praised their folk heroes; the elites, sensing an opportunity to win them to the faith of Christianity, conceded this veneration on the grounds that it is a lesser evil than allowing the vulgar to submit to the faith of another religion.
Brown won’t have this. "It is remarkable," he says,
that men who were acutely aware of elaborating dogmas … felt themselves so little isolated for so much of the time from these same ‘unlettered’ when it came to the shared religious practices of their community and to the assumptions about the relation of man to supernatural beings which these practices condensed.
Indeed, Brown goes on to say that it is wrong to assume that "popular religion" is "best understood in terms of a failure to be something else." Brown thinks that the historian cannot see the rise of the cult of the saints in terms of a relation between learned and unlearned, cultivated and vulgar. Rather, he must see it as "the lurching forward of an increasing proportion of late-antique society toward radically new forms of reverence." The developments of history do not result from a struggle between two sides, but rather from a complex of variables.
Brown’s book goes on to elaborate this more complex view of late antique history by looking at why living human beings began to venerate dead ones. He treats this paradox adroitly by painting pictures of the shrines dedicated to saints that popped up all over Europe between A.D. 300 and 600. In doing so, Brown ventures beyond historical reporting to a poetic realm, painting portraits of men and women who came to the shrines of the saints to be healed of maladies, physical and spiritual. Brown therefore asks the reader to consider not simply what good lay at the shrine of the saints in late antiquity; his work, by making accessible the experiences of late antique people, makes us modern men and women in a certain sense live the enthusiasm of the rising cult of the saints. He masterfully brings home the question: What is the function of this cult? What does veneration of a saint do for me as a human being? The reader will find that the concerns about death, damnation, and illness that concerned late-antique men also concern him.
In his 19-page "Preface to the 2014 Edition," Brown addresses six topics on which he has had "second thoughts" since his book first appeared in 1981. In offering his reflections, Brown details the state of historical scholarship in the late 1970s and reveals ways that the field has since changed. Much of the new preface contains material of little interest to lay readers (such as this reviewer):
Worse still, I appeared to have sharpened that sense of agency by using the word impresario. Such a word grated on Gallic ears: oh! le villain mot. I can only answer by pointing out that the word impresario may carry with it, in a French environment, more of the manipulative and money-grubbing overtones of ‘show business’ than it does in England, where the figure of the impresario tends to have a softer meaning.
You don’t say.
It is worth pointing out that Brown does not treat sainthood in a theological context. The Cult of the Saints is solely historical. But it is also sympathetic: Brown attempts to understand the ceremonies, rituals, and beliefs of long-dead men and women with curiosity and intelligence throughout. "The saints were never, simply, powerful lords or advocates at a distant court," he writes in his new preface. "They got down in there. They were deeply immanent presences. Their touch caused human bodies to regain their original, natural integrity." Something similar might be said for The Cult of the Saints, which, with its earthiness and lack of condescension, is great history and often great fun as well.