Revisiting the Holy Man

Charisma and Society: The 25th Anniversary of Peter Brown's Analysis of the Late Antique Holy Man. Conference Held at the University of California at Berkeley, March 13-16, 1997. Edited by Susanna Elm and Naomi Janowitz. (Published in Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6 [1998], 343-539.)

The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown. Edited by James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 298. $74.00.)

To launch a thousand ships in academia you need a creative synthetic insight that is only about half-right. Whereas a perfect new perspective would be a dead end, those hypotheses that can be verified, falsified, and supplemented are what give rise to epic scholarly battles. Among the examples that might be invoked are Lynn White, Jr., on medieval technology, Marshall McLuhan on media, Philippe Ariès on childhood, and perhaps Peter Brown on the holy man. Brown, Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, is the most eminent historian of late antiquity. In his Augustine of Hippo (1967), he offered a literarily brilliant and insightful human image of Augustine which has not been displaced by several excellent later biographies. His World of Late Antiquity (1971), more than any other single book, gave life to what had been seen as a stodgy and decadent world. But the essay collections reviewed here were prompted neither by those masterpieces nor by Brown's other distinguished books but by a single twenty-one-page article which somehow, in the words of Susanna Elm, one of the editors of Charisma and Society, "effected a paradigm shift" (p. 343).

"The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity" [hereafter RFHM] was published in 1971 in The Journal of Roman Studies. ¹ At that time its subject matter appeared unpromising. Radical Christian ascetics, including such saints as Simeon Stylites (d. 459), who lived on a pillar for thirty-seven years, repelled many Christian scholars who preferred to marginalize them as misguided representatives of popular religiosity. They did receive attention, but no sympathy, from scholars hostile to the ancient Church such as Edward Gibbon, who deplored this "swarm of fanatics, incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity." ² The accomplishment of RFHM was to move to center stage the "holy man" (note the fashionable semantic shift from the ecclesiastical, legal term "saint" to the more phenomenological, anthropologically oriented "holy man") and to claim positive social functions for him. Brown saw him as an "icon" who brought the holy into the world, a hinge person mediating between God and man, between greater and lesser traditions, between greater and lesser patrons, and, indeed, between all sorts of combatants in a demon-ridden world that suffered crises of prosperity and freedom. To the "average late Roman" of the Greek East the divine would have been brought to earth not so much by relics, by bishops, or even by the emperor himself as by the holy man. Debates over this vision have shaped much subsequent research.

Now, more than a quarter-century later, two volumes of papers attempt to measure the impact of RFHM: from Berkeley, where Brown worked from 1978 to 1983 (officially to 1986) comes a group of conference papers, prefaced by an essay by Brown himself on "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997" (pp. 353-376); from Oxford, forsaken by Brown for those greener pastures, comes an allegedly independent retrospective. ³ But these are not Festschriften offering unalloyed homages to the master. Although the individual papers frequently acknowledge their debts to Peter Brown, almost all marginalize and sometimes even demolish his original methods and conclusions in RFHM.

Brown's attempt to situate actual holy men into real social contexts is attacked by scholars who argue that historians know hagiographical constructions, not saints. In the introduction to the Berkeley collection, Elm, having faulted Brown for...