Introduction

Over twenty-five years have elapsed since the publication of Peter Brown’s first article on “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” in the Journal of Roman Studies. ¹ The effect of this article on scholars of the later Roman Empire and early Christianity was electrifying. On the one hand, it established its author, already known as one of the foremost scholars of Augustine, as a teacher in the “ancient and medieval” sense of the world, as a man who embodies and makes visible to others “what is exemplary in persons rather than in more general entities.” ² The article, on the other hand, effected a paradigm shift. It posited that the most significant shift in the Roman East of the fourth to fifth century occurred in the locus of civic and religious power from temples and institutions to the “holy man” himself as a “blessed object” mediating between the divine and the human. Later articles—“The Saint as Exemplar,” and “Arbiters of the Holy: The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity”—chronicle Brown’s own constant reassessment of this complex figure. Through them, we watch the “holy man” evolve from remote intermediary to the saint as carrier of paideia and hence cultural memory, and finally to one of several arbiters mediating religious and social change. ³

Peter Brown’s first article struck some like a lightning bolt out of the sky, yet it emerged, in fact, out of a rich matrix of historiographical traditions and theoretical approaches of which Peter Brown has continued to be aware in an extraordinary manner. Brown wrote primarily as a classical historian, but one trained in and influenced by the study of the Middle Ages, a course that sharpened his eye for an area rarely of interest to scholars of classical antiquity, namely, sainthood. Saints had predominantly been a subject of theologians and those engaged in the study of religion; they had their own established historiographical traditions. ⁴ In the sixties, however, French scholars like Evelyne Patlagean and Gilbert Dagron, influenced by the concerns of the École d’Annales, found in the Lives of late antique and Byzantine saints the means to explore those strata and elements of society rarely represented by other types of sources, namely, rural peasants and urban poor. ⁵ Into this mixture of traditional historical analysis and new socially oriented questions, Brown introduced the powerful explanatory models of functional anthropology. It was a bold methodological move, which allowed him to give the “holy man” a sharper profile by highlighting his central position in the day-to-day world of Syrian peasants. ⁶

Although fruitful in many respects and influential among scholars of more than late antiquity, the brave new “holy man” constructed by Peter Brown soon proved to be too two dimensional, “like a figure in a Chinese landscape, against a mist-laden and seemingly measureless background.” ⁷ Because of Brown’s emphasis on social function, the saint’s ties to the surrounding cultural matrix had received too short a shrift. In his subsequent article on the “Saint as Exemplar,” Brown, therefore, provided the methodological counterpoint by adopting a cultural anthropological model. ⁸ The “holy man” as saint now occupied the center, effective not primarily because of his “otherworldly” remoteness, but because he was the carrier of cultural memory, the Christian counterpart to the pagan wise man. In Authority and the Sacred, the interrelation between the holy man and his surroundings became even more densely woven through the inclusion of institutional structures. Influenced by his collaboration with M. Foucault, Brown now all but abandoned “straightforward” anthropological models and became increasingly concerned with notions of power and authority. As a result, his “holy man” gained yet another dimension: as the “arbiter of the holy,” who, “placed between Christian and pagan clients, aided the emergence of the new, religious commonsense.” ⁹

Firmly established on his pillar, Peter Brown’s “holy man” had proved a particularly flexible and mobile tool for the analysis of religion and society. ¹⁰ As we read through “The Rise and Function,” “The Saint as Exemplar,” and “Arbiters of the Holy...