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  • Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett
  • Leonard J. DeLorenzo
Robert Bartlett Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 808 pages. Hardbound. $39.95.

Robert Bartlett’s book treats the question of sanctity. In this treatment, sanctity is inextricably related to power, and this connection points to the derivative questions of the origin of power, its meaning, and the effect on and response by those for whom such power is or might be exercised. In other words, Bartlett is asking not just about the saints but also about those who turn to them. In fact, the latter group might be even more central to the study than the former. In the course of this study, Bartlett guides his readers on a journey that is more than a millennium-and-a-half long and comprises a rich tableau of religious and socio-historical themes pertaining to Christian saints and their respective cults. Along the way, Bartlett affords his readers the opportunity to learn much about the saints without necessarily drawing readers any closer to them.

“What makes a saint a saint?” For this text, that is broadly equivalent to asking “In what does the saint’s power consist?” When Augustine is cited as claiming that the witness of a saintly life—i.e., the holy character of the saint—is much more significant than the power attributed to him (339), the reader might detect a note of dissonance in regards to the historical argument already well in progress and which culminates in the book’s final chapter: that the heart of the cult of the saints concerns the invocation of powerful beings who abide in invisible form (608). Since the cult of the saints has to do with effects, the importance of saints has to do with efficacy. Though not a theological text, this text does spur a theological question since Bartlett’s historical treatment of the saints identifies them according to power and status rather than appealing to the socio-anthropological transformation that the traditional doctrine of sanctification (in the West) or deification (in the East) bespeaks. In Bartlett’s words, “sanctity is not an objectively identifiable feature but an attribute” (137), a claim which is concomitant with one of his main theses that “saints [End Page 90] were not people of a particular type, but people treated in a particular way” (150). The decisive emphasis placed upon how the saint was regarded follows from and redounds back upon what Bartlett calls “a central rule of a saintly cult: there is no relation between the historical reality of the saint and the importance of their cult” (33). The power and thus significance of saints pertains to what they can do more than to who they are and become.

This focus on power brings about an interesting response to the question that the title of the book poses (and both the question itself and a significant element of the response can be traced again to Augustine). In short, the dead can do great things because they are special. Actually, to be precise, it is the “the very special dead” (to borrow Peter Brown’s phrase) who can do great things; the ordinary dead are those in need of the power of others. The special ones are, from the beginning, the martyrs and those who share in their power as confessors and, later, the ecclesiastically canonized. To pray for them would be, at minimum, insulting; one prays to them. These are the ones with the power. Those in need of the power of the living belong to the ordinary masses, including one’s own beloved dead. These are the ones the living pray for. In relation to these ordinary ones, power belongs to the living; in relation to the special ones, power belongs to the dead (cf. 622).

Bartlett thematically examines the cult of the saints in an effort to learn about how the living go about attempting to share in the power of these “very special dead.” The variety of...

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