Date:
May 2, 2012 - 17:30 - 19:00
Event type:
Lecture
Event audience:
Open to the Public Public lecture of the OTKA Saints Colloquia Series
by
Marianne Sághy
CEU, Budapest
on
From Local Hero to Catholic Saint:
Interpreting the Globalization of the Holy Patron
in Late Antiquity
at 17:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 2, 2012
CEU- Faculty Tower 409
Budapest, V. Nádor u. 9
One of the salient features of the late antique cult of the saints is the promotion of local heroes to patron saints in the cities of the Roman Empire. Uncouth small town heroes, quite often total aliens, come to be venerated globally through Empire-wide PR campaigns, that is, through late antique hagiographical writing.
This talk attempts to explain the ’rise of the rustic’ in late antique hagiography. In the fourth century, martyrs acquired a double citizenship at their death. Apart from a passport to Paradise, they also received Roman citizenship. The new terrestrial country of the martyr for which s/he was responsible in Heaven was not necessarily identical with his or her birthplace. The clerical impresarios of the cult of the saints, such as Damasus of Rome, stressed with gusto the foreign extraction of the martyrs and praised them for their new-fangled patriotism: the legal aliens were naturalized by death.
To be an alien was an asset in the late Empire not only for long dead martyrs, but also for living holy men. Cities from Tours to Lorsch and to Naples prized unkempt and outlandish individuals when it was about to assign the local holy man. Local heroes, such as Martin of Tours and Severinus of Noricum, were not only successful patrons of their new hometowns, but became the patron saints of vast regions they have never visited.
How to explain the globalization of the local saint in the late Empire? Competition among the cities offers a useful tool, but is insufficient as an explanation. The multiple citizenship of the saints might have reflected new theological thinking as well as new social realities. Hagiography was a strikingly modern genre, sensitive to social issues. The cult of ’alien saints’ mirrored the social mobility of the late Empire and established new networks between Greece and Rome, Rome and Ravenna, Milan and Rouen, Noricum and Naples, Sabaria and Tours. Catholic, that is, international Christianity gave a new local cohesion within the Roman city as well as within the Roman Empire. In meeting the political needs of those not in the center, hagiography did not simply use the saints as a means of negotiating power, but sought to redefine Rome both as an idea and as a functioning state. The paper argues that the naturalization of Christian saints in the Roman city gave a welcome redefinition of what it meant to be Roman.
Marianne Sághy teaches political, social and religious history of late antique Rome and late medieval Europe at the Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies. She earned her PhD at Princeton University in 1998. Her most important publications are: Versek és vértanúk. A római mártírkultusz Damasus pápa korában, 366-384 [Poems and martyrs. The Roman cult of martyrs during the time of Pope Damascus, AD 366-384] (Budapest: Kairosz, 2003); "Scinditur in partes populus: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome” in Early Medieval Europe, 9 (2000): 273-287.
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