UBC: Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints

[truepenny]

The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter R.L. Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



127 pages about Christianity in late antiquity (c.a. AD 300-600) and the increasing devotion to (specifically) martyred saints and their physical remains. Brown talks about shrines and pilgrimages and burials and exorcisms and relics, and it is all fascinating. 4 of 5 stars only because I've read The Body & Society: Men, Women & Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity--long long ago in an undergraduate history class--and that book sets the particular bar for Professor Brown kind of high. This is a lovely book, full of affection for the rather difficult men (Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Tours, Paulinus of Nola) who are our guides to the growing adoration of the saints in the transition from the Rome-centric culture of the Empire to a much more dispersed relationship of interdependent loci of Christian worship/life of the mind.

Brown is absolutely explicit and open about the fact that this book leaves out enormous chunks of Roman/early-medieval culture: he's talking about the upper class male intellectuals who created and transmitted the theological core of hagiophilia ("love of the saints"--I don't know if that was previously a word, but I need it to be right now). He discusses "women" and "the poor" (and we can talk about the infinite drop-down list of problems with the way he conceptualizes the two as monolithic and discrete categories some other time) only anecdotally--so if what you really want is social history, this is not the book for you. I found it both a pleasure to read and a useful introduction to the intellectual end of a fascinating phenomenon.

There's also a thing in here that, if I were still teaching undergraduate English, I would totally use for an upper-level course on pilgrimages and quests:

By localizing the holy in this manner [martyrs' shrines], late-antique Christianity could feed on the facts of distance and on the joys of proximity. This distance might be physical distance. For this, pilgrimage was the remedy. As Alphonse Dupront has put it, so succinctly, pilgrimage was "une thérapie par l'espace." The pilgrim committed himself or herself to the "therapy of distance" by recognizing that what he or she wished for was not to be had in the immediate environment. Distance could symbolize needs unsatisfied, so that, as Dupront continues, "le pèlerinage demeure essentiallement depart": pilgrimage remains essentially the fact of leaving. But distance is there to be overcome; the experience of pilgrimage activates a yearning for intimate closeness. For the pilgrims who arrived after the obvious "therapy of distance" involved in long travel found themselves subjected to the same therapy by the nature of the shrine itself. [...] For the art of the shrine in late antiquity is an art of closed surfaces. Behind these surfaces, the holy lay, either totally hidden or glimpsed through narrow apertures. The opacity of the surfaces heightened an awareness of the ultimate unattainability in this life of the person [i.e., the saint] they had traveled over such wide spaces to touch. (Brown 86-87)

There is so much in this passage if, as I am, you are predisposed to map the structure of the pilgrimage onto other texts. I'd really like discussions of how MacGuffins and P.R.O.s (Priceless Ritual Objects: Edward Gorey's term) do and don't map onto saints' relics; the way The Lord of the Rings is an anti-pilgrimage: Frodo has to get to Mount Doom (pilgrimage), but it's to rid himself of the unholy (I feel perfectly okay using that adjective for the Ring in this context) rather than to approach the holy; the difference between a quest and a pilgrimage and how those differences affect the structure of a work (Odysseus is on a pilgrimage to reach his home; Aeneas is on a quest to find somewhere to call home); why fantasy, as a genre, is so invested in the therapy of distance; the effect of the quest-structure used, for instance by the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, wherein the quester goes through perils and trials only to discover that what she's looking for was at home/on her feet the whole time; the definition of "home," for that matter, and what its value is as a place of pilgrimage and/or quest object. And the potential reading list: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, Growing Up Weightless (because we need to start teaching John M. Ford), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Supernatural, To the Lighthouse if I want to get pretentious high-brow literary into Bloomsbury, because I am not touching Joyce with a ten foot pole,* the Odyssey, the Aeneid, hey, the Satyricon just to embarrass the fuck out of my students, Heart of Darkness (post-colonial reading), Candide, Gulliver's Travels, Huckleberry Finn (and the picaresque in general, because it both is and isn't like quests and pilgrimages), Return to Nevèryön (which are meta-parody of the whole genre on top of everything else they're doing), The X-Files, Le Petit Prince, this list badly needs more women and people of color, because apparently you can take the girl out of the canon but you can't take the canon out of the girl, The Wizard of Oz (books and the 1939 movie, since the movie differs pretty dramatically from Baum's original in its valuations of Oz and Kansas), Lassie Come Home, Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Incredible Journey, The Beginning Place--there'd have to be a small assortment of core texts (and a smorgasbord of secondary reading because apparently what I actually want to teach is a graduate seminar) and then a wide variety of works that students could do individual research projects on (basically, anything they could make a case for--I know there must be manga that would be perfect, for instance, but I have no idea what), ending with presentations to the class. If enrollment was small enough, we could try to fake up a sort of mini-conference. ... ahem. Here endeth the digression.**

If you are interested in this odd little corner of history, this book is absolutely worth finding.

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*I really like Virginia Woolf (although more for her nonfiction than her fiction), but I have run out of patience with the artificial divide between "literary" and "popular" fiction that the soi-disant literati of the early twentieth century created in Anglophone literature. And I'm afraid she'd be a pain in the ass to teach. Ditto, come to think of it, for Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast would be awesome conceptually, but oh my god a nightmare about a plague in the classroom. Also, try though I do to overcome it, I really dislike him.

**If anyone wants to try and actually teach this course, you have 100% permission to steal my idea.



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