Exorcist Three
Eric Christiansen
The Cult of the Saints Peter Brown (SCM Press Ltd pp. 187, £6.95) Peter Brown has been knocking about with the saints for some time, and his admirers may be excused for thinking that he has himself been gazetted to a short-service commission in the heavenly host, He writes like an angel, sometimes, and he writes about holy things, and he writes from such a great intellectual height 'and yet', as the auto-pilot blurb-printer would say, 'with such understanding'. And while this reviewer cannot take his wondrous prose quite seriously, he certainly cannot help enjoying it.
For example: 'If, in Nietsche's words, die Originalen sind zumeist auch die Namengeber gewesen, then Paulinus, precisely because of the seemingly unthinking certainty with which he found apposite names for the haunting presence in his life of Saint Felix, deserves a place alongside the mighty Augustine, as a founder of Latin Christian piety.'
No one passage can do justice to the Sound of Brown, which rises slowly to a crescendo in every chapter, but that one will serve. It has the custom-built quotation, selected and primed with the workmanship of a paper pellet moist from the mouth of Dennis the Menace. It has the qualification of the qualification of the abstract noun. It breathes a bit of life into a dead phrase (haunting presence), It brings the somewhat obscure (Paulinus of Nola) to the front of the class; and it implies that there is a place for everything, and that everything the author deals with will be put in that place. What more? Other passages will be marked by a slightly frenchified, slightly churchy syntax; by a gritty little dose of nonce-words (hominisation, reassuring scenario, interpersonal acts, role models) and by a use of adjectives so careless at one moment, and so cunning the next, that the reader is kept trembling in the expectation of a direct hit even through the densest foliage of a cliché. The impact of this style on a sensitive person like myself is difficult to describe, because pleasure, awe, and hysterical laughter are not usually experienced with equal intensity at the same time. It is like having your hair washed by one of those august barbers who used to work at Harrods; it was fun, but you had to keep a straight face under the foam.
To dwell on this aspect of the book may seem unfair, but it is not. So few historians known how to play with language that when one appears, a faintly sceptical growl goes round the profession.. Erudite bruisers, punchy after years of statistical analysis, mistrust the fluent and abhor the florid. Some who read The Cult of the Saints will mutter 'Come off it, Brown,' and refuse to be convinced by argument because they refuse to be seduced by words. That does seem unfair. For whatever you think of the style, the content is first-rate. Brown makes points about the history of religion which ought to be shouted from the house-tops. His subject is the strange craze for venerating and conversing with the Four Star defunct which developed in the Western Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. It can be called strange only because it was discredited and diminished after more than a thousand years of exuberant life. The saint, as a tangible relic through which he could act as friend, intercessor, protector, avenger, physician and exorcist was so important a figure for most of the Church's history, that it seems almost inconceivable that these cults could ever have been set aside, or distinguished from the central purpose and essence of Christianity. Yet so they have been, first by Protestant reformers and then by rational know-ails of all persuasions. By 1750, the noble army of martyrs was under constant harrassment by intellectuals for offences against the laws of physics and probability. It came to be agreed by all educated people that the whole paraphernalia of the saint business had been a mistake, or rather a concession to popular superstition and lingering paganism resulting from the overhasty and indiscriminate conversion of the Roman Empire.
This convenient theory rescued the 'mediaeval church from the total disapproval of Balliol men, and re-cast its history as an apostolic succession of first-class minds, compelled by circumstances to live in an underworld of penances, processions, miracles, and mumbo-jumbo for which they were not responsible. Meanwhile, out in the fields, the sons of toil, whether heroic or ignoble, carried on with their unchanging nature-worship under a 'thin veneer' of Christianity, and the city slums resounded with the occasional roar of plebeians in the grip of a religion that was really the well-known urban complaint called masshysteria, beneath another of those very durable thin veneers.
The trouble with the veneerial theory of religion is that it is nonsensical, boring, and prevalent. The virtue of Peter Brown is that he hits it for six. The men who he studies, the men and women who reached out their hands to the powerful dead in the LateRoman world were not boors or cryptopagans , but capable thinkers, plutocrats, governors and orthodox Catholics who testified in articulate voices that their reaching fingers had been met not by the squeaking anatomies of Hades, or by endless Night, but by the warm, overwhelming clasp of friends of God. These were the men who organised the procedures for worship, who got the show on the road; the peasants and proletarians joined in, not because this was ancient magic, but because it was new, not because they were cut off from educated thought, but because at these moments and places all ranks were in concord.
According to Brown, the facts of patronage in this world were reflected in the cult of the otherworldly patron. The saint was expected to duplicate in heaven the manipulation that the powerful went in for at the court of the Roman emperors; but the saint's power was 'dean', as the patron's was not The dispersal of relics and shrines throughout the West coincided with the shrinking of the centres of imperial protection, so that when the barbarian kings took over, the shrines were still there, all the more powerful for their closeness and their Romanity. They cured the sick, they cast out devils, they enlightened the doubtful, they humbled the proud, they rallied the district. They did more than government could do, and they brought together past, present, and future in scores of accessible places that could be strung together by pilgrimage.
'Localising the holy', is what Brown calls it, and since the unholy was visible everywhere in strength, this operation was the proudest and most deliberate achievement of the ancient church. Readers of The Cult of the Saints will not be surprised that this achievement lasted so long. They may well be astonished that in our times it has been so persistently vilified and misunderstood from within the modern church. However, the bird that fouls its own nest is now a protected species, both in the Church of Rome and in the Church of England, and of all the ways of facing death that mankind has devised, there is none exempt from the informed snigger or the impatient dismissal of the enlightened cleric. It is perhaps impossible to share wholeheartedly in the complex faith of Augustine or Gregory of Tours, but to understand why contact with the saints was so vital to both of them, and to the whole Catholic West, is no loss to anyone living in the shadow of that sombre past. In these lectures, Peter Brown has only asked his audience to face the facts of a supernatural revolution; we are all the wiser for his learning.
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