Peter Brown's Cult of Saints: Argument and Significance

Brown's Central Argument

The argument that Peter Brown makes in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity is that the "cult of saints" was essentially promoted by the cultural leaders of the time — the bishops and elites of society who had a hand in shaping the perceptions of others. Through them, the Church expressed the idea that Heaven and Earth could be joined through the intercession of the saints, whose bodies were vestiges of grace and holiness — conduits through which Heaven could bridge the gulf above the earth and reach out to Christians seeking to make it to the other side in holiness. As Brown notes, "the joining of Heaven and Earth was made plain even by the manner in which contemporaries designed and described the shrines of the saints."¹ The saints and their resting places represented the jointure — the point where the divine and the earthly merged — a point to be honored, revered, and utilized for holy purposes.

The Jews, Brown makes clear, believed in no such notion; for Christians, it was part and parcel of their belief in a God-Man Who had done what no other could do. The fact that the cult of the saints took its rise outside the realm of the Roman world — that is, "in the great cemeteries that lay outside the cities" — indicates that the cult was an alternative to what past and present Roman culture offered: it was something distinct, new, unique, and outside the mainstream.² This in its own right had a special allure, as journeying to the land of the dead was symbolic of the spiritual pilgrimage the Christian believed himself to be on. It also encapsulated the paradoxical mystery of the faith — that among the dead there could be found the grace of life.

This idea, this essence of the faith, was what Brown argues inspired the cult of the saints. He rejects the idea of modern historians that the cult came about as the result of a "democratization of culture," facilitated by the cultural elites of late antiquity who allowed the "vulgar" ideas of the masses to become commonplace.³ Rather, Brown argues that the "two-tiered model" fails to explain what really transpired because, in fact, there was no historical basis for the "vulgar" idea upon which the cult of the saints flourished: it was wholly unique among Mediterranean pagans and therefore not an outgrowth of any vulgar tradition. It was not something that the elites consented to in order to appease the lower-level intellectuals of the Christian crowd. On the contrary, it was an organic development within the Christian community, sanctioned by the community's own leaders.

Rejecting the Two-Tiered Model

Brown executes his argument, first, by showing what is gained when one rejects the "two-tiered model" that "invents" more than it explains.⁴ Specifically, Brown emphasizes the fact that "differences of class and education play no significant role"⁵ in the practice of the Christian religion: elites and common believers were, in this respect, one and the same. The breaking of the barrier between Heaven and Earth, the living and the dead, as Brown forcefully puts it, was no small thing. It was a tremendous movement and not one that could have spontaneously arisen out of "popular belief" for a number of reasons: first, the elites and the common faithful shared, generally, the same beliefs and practices, though disputes did arise when it came to the finer points of dogma and theology; second, there was no precedent for such belief — it was wholly its own thing, and it indicates a massive movement in which a large segment of late antiquity society embraced "new forms of reverence… orchestrated by new leaders… with new bonds of human dependence, new, intimate, hopes for protection and justice in a changing world."⁶

In other words, the only satisfactory explanation for the rise of the cult of the saints was that it was a truly religious movement: prompted by experience, sustained by a new faith, and supported by a new organization of leaders who likewise shared in that belief.