The Veneration of the Saints
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Christianity is a religion that resolutely affirms history. It not only believes in the creation of time itself by a benevolent God, but it regards the embodied actions of real historical persons as the stage on which the theater of salvation, both universal and individual, is played out. The Incarnation of Jesus is, of course, the ultimate, definitive historical event, the “intersection of the timeless with time,” as T. S. Eliot puts it. For medieval Christians, that act of divine intervention organizes and gives meaning to the rest of history. Because the Christian story was still unfolding in time, the past mattered: the virtuous deeds and lives of Christians of the past continued to be a cause of celebration and inspiration, and a resource in times of trouble. And, in a very real sense, the histories of the saints also become, collectively, the history of the Church itself.
It is within this context that the medieval veneration of saints comes into full focus. As early and medieval Christians believed—and as modern Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran Christians still believe—the saints were souls of deceased women and men who, because they had lived lives of extraordinary piety, faith, or service, were confidently counted among the blessed in the presence of God in heaven. They could be appealed to for aid in all manner of life’s difficulties. Most medieval people held that devotion to the saints could possibly result in miracles (of healing, of protection, of good fortune, of conversion, etc.), and that the relics of saints—the remnants of their historical bodies or items closely associated with them such as rings, clothing, and so on—could likewise effect miraculous interventions in one’s life. Moreover, the Apostles’ Creed affirmed the idea that the souls of the blessed are in communion with, and thus lovingly share the concerns of, living Christians. Since the living (the so-called "Church militant") and the blessed dead ("the Church triumphant") together constituted the universal Church, the dead could pray for the living, just as the living could pray for, and with, the dead. The cult of the saints sprang up early in the Christian period, perhaps as early as the second century. Indeed, fledgling Christian communities in cities all across the Roman Empire seem to have organized themselves around, and often settled around, the burial sites of martyrs, who had died in imitation of Christ in the name of their faith. Because of their belief in the resurrection of Christ and in the general resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment, early Christians felt that the bodies of those who died in the faith were sanctified. It was but a small step from there to believing that these holy bodies, because of the merits of the souls to whom they belonged, could confer blessings. Although popular practice could often veer away from orthodoxy, more thoughtful Christians distinguished their veneration of the saints and their relics (Aquinas and others use the term doulia) from the worship (latria) due to God alone. This distinction likewise governed understanding of the beneficent favors that the saints could confer: if prayer to the saints could cause miracles to occur, these were performed by God's holy power working through the saints and not, at the end of the day, by the saints themselves. Saints could be invoked in prayer at any time, and by anyone, though typically each saint was also considered to possess a particular domain of patronage—that is, to be concerned with or protective over some particular place, situation, or ailment. Many local saints were believed to be especially responsive to prayers from or about the people in her or his particular district. Others were considered what we might now think of as "national" or civic or regional patrons: St Bavo for Ghent, St Genevieve and St Denys for Paris, St Martin for all of France, St David for Wales, St Edmund the Confessor (and then later St George) for England, St Olaf for Norway, St Ambrose for Milan, St James for Galicia, St Januarius for Naples, St Ursula for Cologne, St Stephen for Hungary, St Mark for Venice, St Patrick for Ireland, St Adalbert for Prague, St Bruno for Calabria, St Thorlak for Iceland, St Leocadia for Toledo ... the list goes on. Many other saints were believed to evince special concern or power over other situations in life, topics often associated with that particular saint's biography. St Lucy, for instance, whose eyes were stabbed out during her martyrdom, was appealed to for eye ailments. By a similar logic, St Joseph, a carpenter, was the patron saint of carpenters, St Luke of physicians, St Fiacre of gardeners, and St Christopher and St George of travelers, especially pilgrims. Many medieval Christians also felt particularly dedicated to, and comforted by calling upon, whatever saint it was whose given name they bore, whom they sometimes looked upon as a personal patron. Each saint had his or her annual feast day (usually commemorating the date of the saint's death). Not all saints were honored at all times in all parts of Christendom: there were far too many to keep track of, and many (or most) were fairly unknown beyond specific areas. Usually each diocese, parish, or abbey kept its own "calendar" of saints' days that would be celebrated in that particular district. Devotions on these days typically involved a special mass, or reference to the saint in the normal liturgy or in the theme of the day's sermon. For the more popular saints the celebration might also involve a public processional or other festivities. Like the other holy days of the medieval Church, the feast days of saints usually meant a day's respite from normal labor. At a rough estimate, the typical district could probably anticipate two or three—sometimes more—saints' days in a month. The Feast of All Saints', generally observed on November 1, stood as an additional "catch-all" feast for saints otherwise omitted through the year, and it affirmed the Church's teaching of the unity of the living and the dead. One of the joys of studying the culture of Latin Christendom is recognizing that not all saints are alike and that, in many respects, they constitute a very motley crew. Some of the saints were quite famous, synonymous almost with Christianity itself, while some were obscure and barely known outside of their home parishes. Some were high-profile public figures—popes, bishops, queen and kings—and others were women and men of humble origin. Also counted among the saints, though strictly speaking not souls of departed humans, were the orders of holy angels, three of whom—Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel—were known by name from biblical sources. And revered above both the blessed dead and angels alike was the Virgin Mary, who, as the Mother of God himself, functioned as a sort of super-saint. Over the centuries, the catalog of saints proliferated, and by the end of the Middle Ages, many hundreds, possibly thousands, of different saints were venerated throughout Christendom. At the core of these were Jesus’ immediate followers and other New Testament persons: Peter and Paul, John and James, Andrew, Matthew, Philip, Thomas, and the other apostles, but also associated figures such as Joseph, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Timothy, Lydia, and the evangelists Luke and Mark. The authority of these and similar figures was revered in the early Church, and in many cases later Christians claimed to be living and worshiping in a tradition directly derived from some of these saints. These New Testament saints were not theologians or mighty heroes. Peter, Andrew, James, and John were fishermen, Mary Magdalene a reformed prostitute, Matthew a tax-collector, Paul a tent-maker, and Lydia a cloth-dyer. But some of them (Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, Stephen) did find a martyr’s death, witnesses to their faith in Christ. Joining this group of early figures were a host of other early martyrs of the Church, who had been executed, often in graphic and hideous ways, by Roman authorities in one or another of the sporadic persecutions of Christians that occurred between the first and early fourth centuries: Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Lawrence, Vincent, Vitalis, Alban, Perpetua, Felicitas, and many others. Among the early martyrs, the so-called “virgin martyrs" form a subset: young women—Agatha, Faith of Agen, Lucy of Syracuse, Catherine of Alexandria, Agnes, Anastasia, Cecilia, Petronilla, et al.—who defied Roman authorities in their refusal to marry a pagan husband. They too were, for the most part, brutally executed. If we look at the stories of these early martyr-saints, the common thread that runs through them is that faith in God and obedience to his precepts, especially in the face of pagan powers demanding a rather different center of obedience (to the Emperor, or to the laws of the civic state), is not only commendable but something to stake one's life on, even unto death. Later martyrs of the Church seem, in comparison, more haphazard, and sometimes almost accidental: kings (like the dismembered St Oswald of Northumbria) killed in battle against Vikings, Huns, or other armed enemies of the faith, as well as the unfortunate Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered before the altar in his own cathedral because of the rash words of his irascible king. After the adoption of Christianity as an official state religion in the fourth century (and the consequent cessation of persecution), a more diverse range of spiritual excellence became recognized through sainthood. One model here was the hermit Antony, who, disillusioned with the banality of what Christian life had become in the cities of Egypt, retreated to the Egyptian desert, devoting his life to solitary contemplation, prayer, and ascetic self-denial. The others his example inspired were manifold: the hermit-saints Arsenius, Pachomius, Macarius, John the Dwarf, and Syncletica; Simeon the Stylite (who sat upon a pillar for thirty-seven years in the desert outside Aleppo); Benedict (who founded the Benedictine monastic order); Scholastica (who adapted her twin brother Benedict’s order for women); Kevin (whose ascetic stillness allowed a bird to nest in his hand!); Calogerus (who fled persecution by Arian heretics to live as a hermit on a hill outside Agrigento, Sicily); and many others. The Christianization of the Roman Empire, and eventually of the rest of Europe, also enabled another new kind of saint: the statesman/bishop/scholar-saint. These were generally high-profile men, often of senatorial extraction, and known in varying degrees as both leaders of their communities and as possessing keen theological acumen: Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria and the chief architect of the Nicene Creed; Basil, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa; Gregory Nazianzus, archbishop of Constantinople; Ambrose, bishop of Milan; Augustine, bishop of Hippo; Hilary, bishop of Poitiers; John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople; Pope Leo the Great; Martin, bishop of Tours; Caesarius, bishop of Arles; Nicholas, bishop of Lyra; Isidore, bishop of Seville; and Gregory, the erstwhile Roman ambassador to the Byzantine court who in 590 CE became pope, and whom posterity would honor as “Gregory the Great” for his penetrating theological writings, his dispatching of missionaries, his consolidation of the Latin mass, and (spuriously) his establishment of the canons of "Gregorian" plainchant. In the company of these powerful public saints we might also include St Jerome (ca. 347-420), who walked in wealthy Roman circles but who retired to the desert outside Bethlehem where he studied Hebrew and translated what became known as the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. The fifth through eleventh centuries saw the age of what we might call missionary saints, men and women who were dedicated to either spreading or strengthening the Christian faith, either in their homeland or further afield. Remigius was the apostle to the Franks, Augustine and Theodore to the Anglo-Saxons, Patrick to the Irish, Aidan and Columba to the Scots, Willibrord to the Frisians, Boniface to the continental Saxons, Anskar to the Danes and Swedes, Olaf in Norway. During the centuries of transition from various Celtic and Germanic paganisms to Christianity, the work of these missionaries was supported by queens, kings, and other aristocrats who made sometimes dramatic conversions, who built churches and abbeys, who generally served as high-status examples of pious living for their subjects, and who were accordingly honored as saints: Clothilde and Radegund among the Franks, Edwin of Northumbria, Hilda of Whitby, Stephen of Hungary, Wenceslas of Bohemia, Edmund the Confessor of England, Margaret of Scotland. The later Middle Ages saw greater diversification in the ways that medieval Christians found spiritual expression. Renewals in monastic practices during the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced many ecclesiastics noted for their sanctity, service to the Church, and/or mystical experiences: Bruno of Cologne, Hugh of Cluny, Bernard of Clairvaux, Rosalia of Palermo, Elizabeth of Schönau, Christina Mirabilis, Franca of Piacenza, Hugh of Lincoln, Juliana of Cornillon, etc. In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the new mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans also inspired the kinds of sanctity that would get recognized as sainthood. The founders of these orders, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzmán, were quickly recognized as saints, as were many of their followers: Clare of Assisi, Elizabeth of Hungary, Anthony of Padua, Bridget of Sweden, Bernardino da Siena, Catherine of Siena. Due to the emergence of universities and the vivification of learning in general, the High and Late Middle Ages also saw a number of saints who were best known as famous scholar-theologians: Anselm of Canterbury, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. The groups of saints enumerated so far is necessarily only very partial, and the categories into which we have placed them necessarily artificial. Many saints occupy one or several of these categories. St Columba, for example, was a missionary and an abbot and an ascetic; St Bridget of Sweden was an influential aristocrat and a mystic and an ascetic and a Franciscan tertiary. Other saints are difficult to place into any category. What is one to make of St Monica, the mother of St Augustine, whose chief spiritual accomplishment seems to have been her decades of ultimately successful prayers for her son's conversion? Or of the sixth-century Irish saint Brendan the Navigator, who, out of dedication to God, embarked on several journeys aboard a coracle into the wide Atlantic Ocean, singing the glory of God and seeking the earthly paradise? Or of St Genevieve, whose prayers were thought to have prevented Attila the Hun from sacking Paris? Or of St Martin, less known for being the bishop of Tours than for having cut his cloak in half and shared it with a beggar? Or of King Louis IX of France—"Saint Louis"—admired for his kindness and pious lifestyle, but maybe especially for his military exploits in the Seventh and Eighth Crusades? Or of the unclassifiable Joan of Arc, "the Fair Maid of Orléans"—a peasant girl who, goaded by visions of St Michael, St Margaret, and St Catherine, was inspired to rally the belabored and crestfallen people of France to definitive victory over the English (thus ending the Hundred Years' War), only to be tried and burned for heresy? Stories of the saints and their deeds would be recounted on their feast days, or on any relevant occasions throughout the year. These might constitute the core of a formal sermon, or simply be passed along by word of mouth from parents to children or friend to friend. Meditation on the lives of the saints, especially in the later Middle Ages, could also be used as a form of contemplative prayer. Even the early Church produced accounts of its martyrs and their modes of death; early examples include The Martyrdom of Polycarp (late second century) and The Martyrdom of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas (early third century). Athanasius' Life of St Antony (fourth century) exemplifies a biography that does not focus on martyrdom but rather on the struggle to overcome sin and lead a holy life. These early accounts served as templates for the composition of countless later saints' lives (or hagiographies) throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. These hagiographies were sometimes collected into larger anthologies, which are known as legendaries; the Genoese bishop Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century collection of these, The Golden Legend, is undoubtedly the best known, though Eamon Duffy has argued that its selection criteria are notably conservative and it omits many well-known saints, especially those from the more recent religious orders. The medieval legendaries contain much material that is, well, legendary: much, that is, that has been invented, exaggerated, or fancifully elaborated by one hagiographer or another over the centuries. After all, if one miracle, pious practice, or charitable act has been reliably attributed to a saint, does that not make rumors of a second, or third, or fourth more credible? Over time, hagiographies were rewritten and re-rewritten to suit changing tastes and social circumstances. The eleventh-century Welsh monk Rhygyfarch, for instance, recast the life of St David (d. 601), presenting his countryman not only as a pious abbot but as Archbishop of Menevia. Rhygyfarch, himself bishop of Menevia, was doubtless creating an opportunity for a promotion while also making a statement about Welsh independence in the face of encroaching Anglo-Norman power. In another case, St George, a Roman soldier in Asia Minor who converted to Christianity and was perhaps martyred in the Diocletian persecution of the early fourth century, was transformed into a slayer of dragons and rescuer of princesses, a protector of Crusaders, and eventually the main patron saint of England, displacing St Edmund the Confessor. Saints also occasionally appear as characters in other sorts of texts: Geoffrey of Monmouth rehabilitates St Dubricius as a sort of "fighting bishop" in his History of the Kings of Britain; St Joseph of Arimathea, who had overseen the burial of Jesus, was adopted (probably much to his dismay had he known) into the cycle of Grail legends by the late twelfth century, and was even thought to have brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury; and the fifth-century St Patrick was integrated seamlessly into the twelfth-century Tales of the Elders of Ireland, where he serves as a major character. Other saints may have been more questionably fictitious. St Brigid of Kildare, though based in some ways on a historical Irish holy woman, has clearly incorporated aspects of the pagan Irish goddess Brid. While there may possibly have been a historical St Christopher as well, the famous tale of him carrying a child (later revealed to be the young Jesus) across a river, is certainly fictitious, and was doubtless inspired by his name, which means (in Greek) "bearer of Christ." The tradition, recorded in some Irish texts and elsewhere, that Christopher had the head of a dog, is also fictitious (or at least I believe it to be so). Other saints may have been completely fictitious, like Margaret of Antioch, a virgin supposedly martyred around 305 CE, but only after having been swallowed by a dragon and resurrected. A dubious fifth-century pope declared her apocryphal, but she nonetheless persisted as the subject of popular devotion a thousand years later! These few examples gesture toward how popular enthusiasm, folk tradition, and pious romance could all affect the ways in which medieval Christians thought about what a saint could or should be like. In the earliest Christian centuries, saints were more or less declared by popular consensus, and mostly around martyrs. As Latin Christendom grew and developed, the institutional Church felt obliged to oversee the process of canonization, the act of officially declaring a person a saint. Local bishops seem to have been the arbiters of this process during the earlier part of the Middle Ages, which explains why so many saints were barely recognized beyond their "home" diocese. But by the eleventh century, an increasingly powerful and assertive papacy established a more centralized process with stricter criteria. Although the process of canonization, then, became more evidence-based and standardized, it was far from apolitical. The canonization of Thomas Becket only took three years (despite his famously dissolute youth) , doubtless because he was a hero of ecclesiastical power against secular authorities. Conversely, the popular cult that sprang up after the able and pious bishop Robert Grosseteste's death in 1253 failed to amount to canonization, likely due to the deceased's many opponents within the papal court. The papacy, as the pinnacle of the institutionalized Church, was also rather biased against the many late medieval visionaries and mystics (independent-minded and less "institutional" folk, by and large, and often female)—and recognized most of them late, if ever. Many of the more well-known medieval visionaries—Mechtilde of Magdeburg, John of Ruysbroek, Hadewijch of Brabant, Meister Eckhardt, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle—were never sainted. Veneration of the saints was one of the most visible and characteristic aspects of medieval religious life. The saints' names were upon their lips of the faithful at prayer, who turned often to the saints for comfort and good hope. Remembrance of the saints both shaped the rhythms of the liturgical year and defined the ambitions and itineraries of pilgrims. By the sixteenth century, however, these practices proved troubling for many of the various Reformers, who saw veneration of the saints as, at best, a distraction from the core of the Christian faith (i.e. Jesus) and, at worst, idolatry. Countless images of the saints were removed, sometimes violently, throughout Europe during these years. Within the Roman Catholic Church, though, the Counter-Reformation movement that was ushered in by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) doubled down on certain traditional Catholic practices, encouraging the popular devotion to the saints and consolidating the canonization procedures. Within Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy today—and, to a lesser extent, among Anglicans and Lutherans—the veneration of the saints continues unabated and remains one of the principal ways in which the Christian past and the Christian present still inform each other. "He who for the love of God lives in holy temperance becomes a stranger on earth, but in leaving it becomes a citizen of heaven. And so after those who provide the brilliant foundations, and after the beacons of Peter and Paul, first in the faith, what a number of saints spread their light, dispersed in the world, how great the beauty and strength of these far-flung columns!" |
Further Reading
- Ælfric, Old English Lives of Saints, 3 vol., ed. Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2019)
- Athanasius, The Life of St Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, ed. Robert C. Gregg (Paulist Press, 1979)
- Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton University Press, 2013)
- Lisa Bitel, Landscape With Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
- Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints' Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Boydell & Brewer, 2008)
- Eamon Duffy, Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2018)
- Gregory of Tours, Lives and Miracles, trans. Giselle de Nie, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Guibert of Nogent, Monodies and On the Relics of the Saints, trans. Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubinstein (Penguin, 2011)
- Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger. Longmans, Green & Co., 1941.
- John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints, trans. Wendy Meier and Bronwen Neil (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2006)
- A Short Reader of Medieval Saints, ed. Mary-Anne Stouck (University of Toronto Press, 2008)
- The South English Legendary, ed. Charlotte d'Evelyn, Early English Texts Society (Oxford University Press, 1967)