Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great by Matthew dal Santo (review)

In 593/594, the emperor Maurice began to suspect that the miraculous profusions of blood at the shrine of Saint Euphemia in Chalcedon were merely “men’s crafty devices.” Only after the tomb had been sealed, and the blood poured forth like never before, was his faith restored.

The thesis of this book is that there were many doubters such as Maurice in the early medieval world, and many different kinds of doubt toward the cult of saints. This claim contrasts with the commonly held view of the period in which the cult was (in Peter Brown’s phrase) “part of the religious common sense of the age.” Building on the work of Gilbert Dagron and others, Dal Santo bases his case on an analysis of a wide range of sources spanning several centuries and regions. The work is more ambitious than the rather narrow title suggests, and its implications are likely to reverberate accordingly.

Gregory the Great’s Dialogues are the focus of the first two chapters (21– 148). Dal Santo interprets them not as superstitious yarns but as a sophisticated defense of the cult of saints. The Second Dialogue in particular is shown to address quite precisely contemporary skeptics who denied the power of saints to intervene in human affairs post mortem—more or less the raison d’être of the institution. That these doubts were not restricted to Italy is shown by comparing the Dialogues to On the State of Souls after Death by Gregory’s contemporary and probable acquaintance Eustratius of Constantinople, a text that refutes doubters in the same way. Such refutations, the argument runs, only make sense because there was a significant section of society who made them necessary.

The third chapter (149–236) applies the same logic to hagiography and miracle collections from the sixth and seventh centuries. Here Dal Santo spreads his net impressively wide, showing refutations of doubt to be typical of such literature. Of the surviving thirty-two miracles catalogued in the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, for example, at least twenty contain some reference to a “crisis of confidence” that the saints gracefully cured along with physical diseases.

Doubts, Dal Santo shows, were not just common; they were extremely diverse in nature. Some doubts were high-minded and theological: Were human souls, including those of saints, active after death? Wasn’t it idolatry to pray to them? When saints appeared in dreams, how did one know they weren’t angels in disguise? Sometimes we catch a glimpse of earthier doubters: an Alexandrian noblewoman who asserted that there was no documentary evidence for the existence of Saints Cyrus and John; a doctor who objected that their shrine offered only conventional Hippocratic cures; more generally “those who believed that everything happened by chance.”

Although there is a post-Enlightenment flavor to some of these doubts, Dal Santo rightly avoids presenting the debate as a conflict between faith and reason. The cult of saints was often defended with the same “rationalist-empiricist hermeneutic” (90) with which it was sometimes contested. What visible proof was there that the soul survived? Reliable witnesses had seen the saints ascend, replied Gregory. How could one know that saints themselves were present in apparitions, especially since the disem-bodied soul was presumed to be formless? According to Anastasius of Sinai, by the same emblems (e.g. . by wearing armor or riding a horse) with which they were depicted in devotional images such as pilgrims’ tokens (eulogiai).

Taken together, the texts under discussion emerge as more than sporadic refutations of doubt from particular times and places. Rather, Dal Santo convincingly shows that as it was defended, the cult of saints gained an increasingly central theological status. Whereas Augustine had simply withheld judgment about whether God or the martyrs performed miracles, Gregory and Eustratius felt it necessary to argue with great theological precision that the saints’ post mortem activities...