1. This is an experiment in corpore nobilissimo. Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints is a splendid book, full of learning, imagination, and grace. Even the perplexities I am about to express will reveal my profound intellectual debt to this work.
At the end of chapter 5 (“Praesentia”) Brown illustrates the “ideal ‘clean’ power associated with the relics of the saints” with an episode which followed the arrival of the relics of St. Stephen in Minorca in 417. The peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians in the town of Mahon came brusquely to an end. Tensions emerged; the Jews gathered up stones and clubs and barricaded themselves in the synagogue. After a number of clashes, the Christians razed the synagogue to the ground. Then they urged the Jews to convert. Their efforts were largely successful, although Theodore, the defensor civitatis, who was the most prominent member of the Jewish community, for some time stubbornly opposed the joint pressure exerted on him by Christians and converted Jews. In a public debate on religious matters he almost prevailed over the bishop himself. Finally, Theodore gave up. Then the last Jewish resistance, which had included a number of women, collapsed. “Through becoming Christians,” Brown writes, “[the Jews] maintained their full social status within their own community, though now subject to the higher patrocinium of Saint Stephen, and seated beside the Christian bishop as Christian patroni. Thus, far from being eradicated, the ‘unclean’ power of the established Jewish families has been ‘washed clean’ by being integrated into the Christian community under Saint Stephen.”1
Brown does not deny that “violence and fear of yet greater violence played a decisive role” in these events. But his final comments emphasize the integration of Jews and Christians in a single community, not the human cost paid for it. He prepares for this conclusion by the use of negative analogies such as “it was something marginally more decent than a mere pogrom,” or “his [i.e., Stephen’s] arrival on the island was not seen as an occasion to purge the island of Jews.”2 Deliberate anachronisms such as pogrom and “purge” do not seem particularly illuminating in a case like this, which is among the earliest known occurrences of Jewish-Christian tensions. Even more perplexing is the opposition between “clean” and “unclean” power, which plays a crucial role in Brown’s presentation of the Minorcan events. “The reader must bear with me,” Brown says, “if, in describing a thoroughly dirty business . . . I limit myself to the perspective of Bishop Severus, our only source, and speak of the patrocinium of Saint Stephen as ‘clean’ power.” The problem of method raised here is obviously of great import. But this slightly ambiguous passage could be wrongly interpreted by some readers to mean that such categories as “clean” and “unclean” derive from the evidence itself. On the contrary, they are “etic,” not “emic” categories—to employ the terminology of the linguist K. L. Pike, and inspired implicitly by Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, and not by Severus’s long letter about the Minorcan events.3 This is a perfectly legitimate choice, of course, although somebody could object to the idea of lumping together pagans and Jews under the category of “unclean” power, in light of the much later hostile association between Jews and filth.4
These remarks on Brown’s historical approach to the Minorcan events are bound to remain inconclusive if they are not supplemented by an analysis of the primary evidence on which Brown relies: the letter written by Severus, bishop of Minorca, in 418. This statement is not as obvious as it should be. “History of historiography without historiography,” as Arnaldo Momigliano put it ironically, has become more and more fashionable in recent times.5 That there was a radical disjunction between historical narratives and the research on which it relies had already been suggested by Benedetto Croce as early as 1895.6 Roughly a century later, in a largely different intellectual climate, this approach to historiography has become popular for reasons I will not try to explain here.
Its limitations (not to mention dangers) are immediately obvious, as in the case with which I am dealing, based on a single piece of evidence.7 Doubts about the authenticity of Severus’s letter have been raised in the past, as Gabriel Seguí Vidal has shown in his critical edition of 1937.8 More recently, on several occasions, Bernhard Blumenkranz has authoritatively argued that the letter is a seventh-century forgery (even if the announced detailed demonstration has not as yet appeared).9 Brown mentions neither Seguí Vidal’s edition nor Blumenkranz’s criticism. He quotes the letter of Severus from one of the two nearly identical texts reproduced in Migne’s Patrologia Latina. Both are based, with a few minor corrections, on the editio princeps provided by Caesar Baronius in his Annales ecclesiastici (1588). To evaluate Brown’s approach to the Minorcan events, an examination of Severus’s letter seems unavoidable.10
I should say straight off that Brown was absolutely correct in his tacit acceptance of the letter’s authenticity. Recently discovered evidence has proved this beyond any reasonable doubt. But a quick recapitulation of the discussions concerning the authenticity of the document will I hope shed additional light on the events it purports to describe.
2. In his edition of Severus’s letter Seguí Vidal observed that the style of the document was perfectly compatible with an early fifth-century date.11 Nearly twenty years later, in an essay written with J. N. Hillgarth, Seguí Vidal introduced two additional arguments: (a) the identification of a pseudo-Augustinian treatise, Altercatio Ecclesiae contra Synagogam, with the commonitorium mentioned by Severus in his letter; (b) some archeological excavations suggesting the existence of a large paleo-Christian basilica in Minorca.12 The irrelevance of the second argument in a discussion concerning the date of Severus’s letter—which in any case is probably earlier than the basilica—has been rightly emphasized by José Vives (who, on the other hand, accepted the identification of the commonitorium with the Altercatio).13 The first argument was effectively rejected by Blumenkranz, who demonstrated that the Altercatio is a later (probably tenth-century) text.14 Moreover, he claimed that the letter ascribed to Severus (or Pseudo-Severus, as he says) reflects the preoccupations of a later period: the fact that Bishop Severus was nearly vanquished by Theodore, for instance, would suggest the risks involved in public religious confrontations with the Jews. Blumenkranz added to this a rather vague linguistic argument: the words “Theodorus in Christum credidit,” shouted by the Christians and misunderstood by the Jews as “Theodore crede in Christum,” seems to imply a homophony between the Spanish “cree” (imperative) and “cree” (indicative) which would be incompatible with an early fifth-century date.15
Fifth or seventh century? Lellia Cracco Ruggini rightly rejected Blumenkranz’s late date, but she gave a disproportionate importance to a more than doubtful argument—the archeological evidence mentioned by Seguí and Hillgarth.16 On the other hand, the unfounded skepticism of Díaz y Díaz about an early date contained some valuable suggestions.17 He noted that all the manuscripts (nine) used by Seguí Vidal for his critical edition include, besides the Severus letter, the so-called Liber de miraculis sancti Stephani protomartyris, which describes the miracles produced by the relics of St. Stephen in an African town, Uzalis.18 Both texts begin with the same biblical quotation (Tob. 2:7); the second cites the first, affirming (Patrologia Latina 41:83) that the saint’s relics were brought to Uzalis with a letter, written by Bishop Severus of Minorca, which was to be read aloud from the pulpit: it proclaimed the extraordinary feats already performed by these relics in converting the Jews of Minorca. Díaz y Díaz suggests two alternative possibilities: (a) that the allusion to the letter of Severus in the Liber de miraculis, which is the only external proof of the early date of the letter, is an interpolation; (b) that the letter itself is a fake constructed on the basis of the allusion in the Liber.19
These clever conjectures have been disproved by J. Divjak’s discovery of letters to and from Augustine. They include two written from the Balearic Islands by Consentius (known independently to be a correspondent of Augustine).20 In one of them (12*) Consentius mentions the letter of Severus on the conversion of the Jews, even claiming that he had some responsibility in its wording.21 It has been remarked, however, that the plain, straightforward style of Severus is very different from that of Consentius.22
3. So much for the date and authenticity of Severus’s letter. All remaining doubts concerning these two issues stem, in my opinion, from a hypercritical attitude.23 Other problems, however, are far from settled. Two recent essays insist on analyzing the letter as an autonomous document, related to a more or less isolated event.24 This approach is certainly not without merit, but I will try to suggest the possibilities offered by a different method, based on more extensive documentation, encompassing a longer time frame—an approach implying the construction (and reconstruction) of a different historical object.
The connections between the letter of Severus and the Liber de Miraculis Sancti Stephani have already been pointed out by Díaz y Díaz. Both texts are related to the same person: Paulus Orosius, the author of the Historiarum Adversus Paganos libri VII, the first universal history written from a Christian perspective. Elements in Orosius’s life explain his involvement with the two texts. Having left his birthplace, Braga, formerly a Spanish and then a Portuguese town, Orosius had come to Africa to meet Augustine and become his pupil. Augustine trusted him to the point that he sent him to Jerusalem (415) to challenge Pelagius and his ideas.25 Orosius took part in the Council of Diospolis, which turned out to be a success for Pelagius. During the synod the relics of St. Stephen, Gamaliel, and Nicodemus were found at Caphar-Gamala, near Jerusalem, by a priest named Lucianus, who had been led there by a series of nocturnal visions. He was asked by Avitus, a priest from Braga, to dictate to him the circumstances of his extraordinary discovery. Lucianus spoke Greek, a language with which Avitus was familiar. Having prepared a Latin translation of Lucianus’s report, known to us as De revelatione corporis sancti Stephani, Avitus entrusted it, with some relics of St. Stephen, to his fellow citizen Orosius, who was supposed to bring them to Palchonius, bishop of Braga.26 In 416 Orosius left Jerusalem with his precious objects and, after a halt in Africa, proceeded to Minorca, hoping to reach Spain. Events turned out differently. In his letter, written at the beginning of 418,27 Severus speaks of a priest coming from Jerusalem who, unable to get to Spain, altered course and returned to Africa, leaving behind in Minorca, “by divine inspiration,” fragments of St. Stephen’s body. For quite some time this anonymous priest has long been identified with Orosius. What convinced him to give up his original quest—whether winter storms, Vandal ships, or both—we do not know. In any case, I think we can trust the passage from the Liber de miraculis sancti Stephani mentioning Severus’s letter. The unnamed individual who brought it to Uzalis, along with additional fragments from that apparently inexhaustible treasure—the relics of St. Stephen—can be safely identified with Orosius. His Historiae adversus paganos, probably written in the same year (418), shows that, as did his teacher Augustine, Orosius rejected the apocalyptic view in which Severus, at the end of the letter, placed the conversion of Minorca’s Jews.28
4. Orosius could be regarded mistakenly as the protagonist in this story. In fact, he played only the role of intermediary, although admittedly an important one. The principal figure is Stephen. The arrival of his relics in Africa triggered a series of miracles, duly recorded some years later in the Liber de Miraculis Sancti Stephani Protomartyris, written under the impulse of Evodius, bishop of Uzalis. Since his youth Evodius had been one of Augustine’s closest followers.29 In the past Augustine had been openly skeptical toward miracles. The discovery in Milan in 386 of the relics of two unknown martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, which were immediately exploited by Ambrose as a symbolic weapon in his struggle with Arians, had left Augustine unmoved.30 In his treatise De vera religione (389–391), the latter explained that, after the spread of the Christian faith, miracles had become impossible: otherwise, people would have craved only for visible things.31 The title of book 22, chapter 8, of the City of God, written in 425, reads like a retraction of the aforementioned passage, as well as a turning point in the history of the cult of saints: “De miraculis, quae ut mundus in Christum crederet facta sunt et fieri mundo credente non desinunt” (“On miracles, which were done that the world might believe in Christ, and are still performed even though the world believes in Him”). The cult of the martyrs’ relics was widespread in Africa: the Council of Carthage (398) had tried to exert some control over it, ordering the destruction of all superstitious or illicit altars.32 But the change in Augustine’s attitude was specifically related, as Victor Saxer has shown, to the wave of miracles connected to the shrine of St. Stephen in Uzalis.33 Why was St. Stephen so important? He had been, of course, the protomartyr; his passion had reflected the passion of Christ. Other elements will become immediately evident as we focus on the momentous discovery of his relics. Let us now go back to 415.
5. The discovery of the relics of St. Stephen occurred at the right time and in the right place—a notion expressed by Victor Saxer, an eminent scholar whom nobody will suspect of militant anticlericalism.34 The event enhanced the prestige of a person who clearly had played a major role in it: John II, bishop of Jerusalem. In a recent essay Michael van Esbroeck has argued that some cults actively supported by John II—St. Stephen’s being the most prominent—implied a coherent religious policy, consciously addressed toward Jewish-Christian groups.35 This is a valuable suggestion: but the polemical, even aggressive implications of the event were disregarded by van Esbroeck. The discovery of the tombs of Gamaliel and Nicodemus, suggesting a continuity between Old and New Testaments, was more than counterbalanced by the discovery of the relics of St. Stephen, the protomartyr, the first man who “fought for the Lord against the Jews” (primum adversus Judaeos dominica bella bellavit).36 These words, included in both versions of the De revelatione corporis Sancti Stephani, are eloquent enough.37 Religious contiguity went hand in hand with religious competition. As Marcel Simon has shown in his important book, the Christians’ claim to being “the true Israel” had ambivalent, potentially tragic overtones.38
These tensions lurk behind the discovery of St. Stephen’s relics. Even scholars who have emphasized the perfect timing of this event have, as far as I know, disregarded the following matter: on 20 October 415 the emperor deprived Gamaliel II, patriarch of Jerusalem, of his traditional title of praefectus honorarius. Significantly, Jewish proselytism, in the form of the construction of new synagogues and the circumcision of Christians and Gentiles, was the reason mentioned for the suppression of this dignity.39 The patriarch was the highest spiritual and political authority for the Jews of Palestine and the Diaspora; Origen regarded him as a kind of monarch of the Jews.
The suppression of the praefectura honoraria led, a few years later, to the disappearance of the patriarchate.40 The weakened position of the Jews under Christian emperors was made evident, less than two months later, by another symbolic blow: the sudden reemergence of the relics of St. Stephen, announced by the visions of Lucianus at the beginning of December 415.
6. Retrospectively, it seems obvious that the relics were bound to reappear sooner or later. To explain this, we need to take another step backward—to the well-known sermons against Judaizing Christians delivered by St. John Chrysostom in Antioch in 385–386.41 Marcel Simon in a major essay has examined the underlying complex religious reality.42 Both Jews and Christians, for instance, fervently worshipped the relics of the seven Maccabees and their mother, which were thought to be preserved in a synagogue in Antioch. Around 380 this edifice was seized and transformed into a Christian church. This act, which was far from being exceptional,43 demonstrates the ambivalent implications of the formula verus Israel. The desire to emphasize the continuity between Old and New Testaments inspired the inclusion of the Maccabees in Antioch’s religious calendar, as well as the violent seizure of the holy place where their relics were preserved.44
The cult of the Maccabee brothers and their mother was not limited to Antioch. In 388, as we learn from a letter of St. Ambrose, at Callinicon, on the left bank of the Euphrates, heretics attacked some monks who, “following an ancient tradition,” were chanting psalms as they made their way to a sanctuary of the Maccabees. For some unknown reason, even in this case the local synagogue was destroyed by these monks, encouraged to do so by the bishop (auctore episcopo).45 Such a widespread cult, shared by Jews and Christians, undoubtedly had deep roots. The precedent of 2 Macc. 7 has been detected behind the description of Blandina, the Christian martyr put to death at Lyon in A.D. 177.46 It has been suggested that the very notion of martyrium ultimately derives from the story of the seven Jewish brothers and their mother, tortured and killed for their refusal to eat pork.47
We have already mentioned the attempts to Christianize the cult of these Jewish protomartyrs. The new balance of power, which had emerged between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries, led to the discovery of the relics of the Christian protomartyr, who according to the tradition had been killed by the Jews. The veneration of Stephen was thus raised up against the veneration of the Maccabees.48 In Minorca, as Severus stated in his letter, the tensions generated by the arrival of the relics of St. Stephen unleashed actual hostilities: “the Jews exhorted one another by recalling the examples of the age of the Maccabees, ready to die in order to defend the Law.”49
7. Up to this point I have dealt with a hagiographic stereotype, tied to a name: “Stephen.” It might be possible to go beyond this and try to disentangle, on the basis of Acts 6–8, the historical Stephen and his attitude toward Jewish tradition.50 Although I lack the competence to do this, the evidence I have collected shows, in my opinion, that a highly ambivalent attitude toward Jews played a crucial role in the emergence of the cult of the Christian saints. The religious violence occurring on Minorca is just one episode in a much longer story in which St. Stephen, or at least his relics, inevitably performed an anti-Jewish function.51
The role played by St. Stephen is so obvious that Peter Brown, in his work from which this discussion began, did not even mention it. This silence seems significant because it is connected to a larger tendency on his part to underplay tensions, divisions, opposition of all kinds—social, cultural, and religious. In an autobiographical fragment Brown remarked (with a touch of self-criticism) that British functionalist anthropology has had “a tendency to isolate the holy man . . . from the world of shared values in which he operated as an exemplar.”52 Brown preferred, instead, to focus on elements shared by an entire community. I agree totally with the objections, raised in the first chapter of The Cult of Saints, to the more or less openly paternalistic spirit with which the religious history of illiterate groups has been studied. Much more debatable is Brown’s tacit progression from this type of criticism to a rejection of what he defines as a “two-tier model”—in other words, any approach that presupposes the existence of cultural and religious dichotomies.
The Cult of the Saints is an indispensable book. But it is difficult to accept how it deals (or fails to deal) with the Jewish-Christian dichotomy.53