6

Knowledge and Belief

In a number of his sermons, Caesarius of Arles made a straightforward correlation: since anyone who believes in heaven and hell will behave, misbehaviour must therefore be a sign of unbelief. About Christians who neither avoided sin nor did good works he mused: ‘what remains but to suppose that they do not believe rewards will be repaid to the good and punishments meted out to the wicked by the just judgement of God?’1 If you claim to believe in God and yet continue to sin, he concluded in another sermon, ‘there is no faith at all in you’.2 If Caesarius’ reasoning were correct, our task would be relatively straightforward. Having explored what we can know about the behaviours of the laity in the previous chapter, we could extrapolate their beliefs from these. Evidence of lay people adopting ascetic models could then be taken as a sign of belief in God, while evidence of people offering vows to trees, or violating the Sabbath, could be taken as a sign of unbelief.

Clearly, belief and behaviour are connected. As Caesarius’ lament demonstrated, however, they did not always correlate as the church’s representatives thought they should. He did not treat these misbehaving Christians as atheists – his argument was precisely about bringing home to them the behavioural implications of their belief in God, and he used the assumption that they did in fact believe in heaven and hell as the motivating force. The result for us, however, is opacity. What did these lay people believe, and how can we access it if it bore no straightforward relation to how they behaved?

This difficulty has been one of the reasons why the beliefs of the laity, and even their knowledge of religion, have been seldom discussed.3 In some work, furthermore, there has been a sense that belief is an inappropriate subject for historical discussion, or that it has been given too much weight in past scholarship.4 A number of recent scholars have argued that it is both more appropriate and more feasible to study what ordinary Christians did rather than what they believed, and even that theology should be explicitly avoided.5 This recent desire to emphasize practice has dovetailed with a more established scholarly view that belief was anyway unimportant to the laity, that they knew relatively little about their own religion and that little information about theology was provided to them.6 However, this pessimistic attitude towards the importance of belief or possibility of theological knowledge among the laity has been contested by scholars who have insisted on its centrality both to the laity and to the clergy who communicated it to them.7

I share the optimistic view of the importance of belief and religious knowledge for late antique lay people. Some of the pessimism expressed by other scholars, indeed, appears to be based in a fundamental condescension towards the intellectual interests and capabilities of ‘ordinary people’.8 Yet the burden of proof lies upon those who would argue that the laity were not interested in knowing how their religion worked, what they had to believe to get to heaven, why bad things happened to good people, how a virgin could give birth, how a God could be both three and one, how to understand the scriptures and much more besides. These were issues which preachers addressed repeatedly in their sermons, and which they presented as being concerns of their congregations. These were issues that have been perennial matters of anxiety and concern through Christian history, throughout the social and educational spectrum.9 These questions were basic to religious thought and experience.10 Although the process of doctrinal explanation and canon formation over the early centuries had made the faith increasingly precise and dependent upon semantics, there is no evidence of lay alienation or disengagement from this process. The stakes for correct belief and understanding were extremely high. This explains the vehement emphasis on sermo humilis in preaching and the importance of using accessible language when addressing the laity. Caesarius made the reason for this perfectly clear. The pastor was obliged to save souls. He was obliged to give his congregation the information they needed to get to heaven, both in terms of behavioural instructions and in terms of elements of belief and knowledge of their religion. This obligation was the animating force behind all of the important collections of late antique sermons.

Preaching was therefore at the heart of the ‘democratization of culture’ in late antiquity. This is a phenomenon first identified by Santo Mazzarino, and which was the shaping force in both Peter Brown’s reinterpretation of the cult of the saints, and in Averil Cameron’s analysis of Christian discourse.11 The work of each of these scholars, and of many others, has served to break down previous distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of Christian culture, through their exploration of how, as Cameron puts it, ‘new lines of communication were opened up’ between different social and intellectual groups in this period.12 Carrié agrees in seeing a unification of late antique Christian culture around a common core, facilitated by the democratization of modes of cultural communication that permitted access for all.13 For him, as for many others, preaching was the prime example, and it will be a major focus of attention in this chapter.

There are important and obvious limitations to what we can say about lay religious knowledge and belief. However, there is much we can still know, or about which we can offer informed speculation. Most straightforwardly, we can trace what the clergy thought it was important for the laity to know. What did they teach them? What did they emphasize in sermons and in other genres directed at the laity? How did they present theology and other forms of religious knowledge to the laity? How did they imagine the laity would learn about their religion? What did the clergy think the laity believed about it? What were their expectations of lay belief? We can start with these questions, and they in themselves will tell us a great deal about the lay religious environment, in terms of what they were exposed to. However, we can and should also ask questions beyond this. Can we see through the sermons, to the cares, anxieties and questions to which they were responding? Can we trace the impact of beliefs about the afterlife in lay epitaphs? Can we, indeed, ever interpret lay behaviours in terms of the beliefs that might have lain behind them? These are more difficult questions to answer, but they are worth posing.14 We may not be able to see belief itself, but as Arnold contends, we can trace its passage.15 This chapter is an exercise in laying out what we can know.

Knowledge

Scholars have provided widely differing estimates of education levels among the ‘ordinary people’ of antiquity and into the middle ages.16 What education they did receive by the early middle ages, however, was primarily religious in character and meant that many lay Christians did at least have some basic knowledge of their faith.17 Children recited the Psalms aloud to remember them, and basic reading and writing was also taught through these same texts. Gregory of Tours wrote that Nicetius of Lyons, while still residing at home, ‘busied himself in the task of making sure that all the children born in his house … were instructed in reading and taught the psalms, so that when they entered the oratory for the divine office they so could join in the singing’.18 The Vita Geretrudis told of how she obtained books from Rome in order to teach divine song (carmina divina) to ignorant folk (ignaros).19 The Vita Hilarii depicted its hero encouraging congregants to accompany their meals with sacred readings.20 A wide range of Christians were thereby exposed to the Bible, to its language, to its way of constructing the world.21

Caesarius of Arles, meanwhile, is well known for not relying on his preaching to convey the elements of faith to his congregation – he wanted them to read the scriptures for themselves.22 Caesarius accepted no excuses for failing to do so: not illiteracy, not lack of time, not lack of memory.23 If you cannot read the scriptures yourself, listen while someone else reads them, even if you have to pay them, or exchange services.24 During long nights, you should have plenty of spare time for scriptural reading.25 If you are too busy, withdraw from worldly preoccupations to make time to read at home.26 Caesarius even went so far, in one sermon, as to assert that the scriptural readings in church were redundant, since congregants could perform these for themselves.27 Caesarius was unusual in his vehemence and in the apparently wide applicability of his instructions. Augustine had also encouraged private scripture reading circles, but was clearly envisaging a more elite endeavour.28 Nonetheless, Caesarius was simply taking to its logical conclusion a widely stated and accepted ideal of lay education in the elements of the faith.

All of these educational efforts represent idealized pictures. All make clear, however, that religious elites regarded the education of the laity as a fundamental part of their pastoral duties. ‘It is necessary, and very much so’, Caesarius of Arles insisted, ‘that not only the clergy but also the laity know the Catholic faith well’.29 Indeed, Caesarius placed responsibility for seeking this knowledge upon the laity. You should, he instructed them, be as hungry for the word of God as you are for food – if there is a delay in the supply, you should ‘demand what is rightly your due … the Christian people should continually appeal to their priests, as the udders of holy church, by devout questions. Thus they may acquire the good of salvation and provide for themselves the necessary nourishment of their souls.’30

In the Eusebius Gallicanus collection, congregational doubt even emerged as a force for good. The preacher of Eusebian sermon 22 used the story of doubting Thomas to paint a picture of ‘good ignorance’ (bona ignorantia). ‘This voice is inquiring, not denying … he wants to be taught, he desires to be confirmed.’31 In sermon 23, Thomas and the congregation, preacher included, were all linked together as sharing a common doubt and seeking a common reassurance. ‘We explore with him the wounds of the Lord, with the hand of our hearts.’32 Doubt was not here stigmatized as problematic or sinful, but embraced with apparent sympathy. The point the preacher made was not that the congregation should not doubt, but that there were right and wrong ways to respond to theological concerns. As the preacher of Eusebian sermon 76 put it: ‘You should not come against your faith, nor should you say: “How can this be?” ’33 You should respond to God with admiration (admiratio), not reason (ratio).34 Indeed, this sympathetic approach was especially marked in the Eusebius Gallicanus collection, whose preachers treated questions even about fundamental issues as natural and expected. Both the Eusebian preachers and Caesarius of Arles went to great effort to instil in their congregations knowledge of scripture and basic theological issues.35

Despite this apparent engagement with their audiences, and their interest in encouraging questioning and dialogue, both Caesarius and the Eusebius Gallicanus collection represent efforts at the standardization of preaching, so that prepared sermons could be read aloud, rather than relying upon original composition and prowess. This has been interpreted as the death-knell of preaching, as it became ‘more and more conventionalized’.36 It also, however, meant that preaching was far more accessible than ever before. The sermon collections of Caesarius and the Eusebius Gallicanus were distributed widely throughout Gaul.37 Congregations everywhere could hear preaching, so long as their bishop or priests could read. They no longer relied upon the lucky chance of having a trained rhetorician or scriptural exegete. As far as exposure to and knowledge of theology was concerned, the ‘death of originality’ in preaching was probably good news. The models of interpretation that the church advocated could now be rolled out on a large scale and to much more extensive audiences. The words of Caesarius and the Eusebius Gallicanus preachers therefore do not just represent to us the pastoral experience of a single congregation, but the potential exposure of communities across Gaul, through much of the period with which we are concerned.

Clerical efforts to inculcate belief

What did late antique clergy think that the laity should believe, and how did they try to ensure that they believed the right things? Can we gauge how successful they were? The clergy of late antique Gaul expended much energy on inculcating belief. The miracle stories of Gregory of Tours, for example, could be read as repeated demonstrations of the power of saints and relics, designed to combat disbelief. He even occasionally extended to inculcating belief in elements of Christian doctrine, as with the story of the fused gem, which was presented as proof of trinitarian theology.38 My central focus in this section, however, is once again on the genre of sermons. This is where we find explanations, directed to the laity, of the key elements of Christian doctrine: the creed, the trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, grace, the nature of the afterlife and much more besides. As I have noted elsewhere, in many respects, sermons are not ideal vehicles for explaining and thereby instilling belief because they were highly formalized.39 And yet, despite these restrictions, preachers clearly strove to explain. It mattered to them to persuade, not merely to utter the right phrases.40 Because they had to engage, preaching could never be a closed system – preachers had to acknowledge the minds they sought to reach and they had to adopt strategies and techniques for reaching, and perhaps changing, those minds. They wanted people not only to know, but to believe.

To do this, Caesarius and the Eusebius Gallicanus preachers used very similar strategies. Often, they would begin explanations by giving apparent voice to congregational doubt and anxiety over the issue. Perhaps there are some of ‘little learning’, the preacher of Eusebius Gallicanus sermon 16 commented, who worry when they hear that the son was generated ex deo and say in their hearts, ‘How did God generate a son?’41 Caesarius focused on congregational concern about Jesus’ body post-crucifixion.

Some men are wont to ask … how our Lord and Saviour could appear to His disciples when the doors were closed … For thus they argue: If there was a body, there was also flesh, and if flesh, bones too. If what hung on the cross arose from the grave, how could it enter through closed doors? If it was not possible, they say, it was not done, and if it could, how could it?42

By framing their explanations as answers to questions coming from the congregation themselves, the preachers gave themselves a number of advantages. They attempted to win over their audiences by appearing sympathetic rather than condemning doubt – the late antique equivalent of ‘I hear you’. This technique also, however, served to appropriate the voice of their congregants and enabled preachers to shape the ‘questions’ as they saw fit, in easily answerable terms. This was an ancient rhetorical technique – the adversarius who, as the creation of the author, ‘is made to ask the questions the author wants to answer, and can enunciate whatever alternative opinions the author wants to project on to him’.43 The preachers were, as Murray Edelman would have it, staging a drama of problem solving.44 They seemed to meet congregational needs for explanation and understanding, but made sure that the dialogue was tightly scripted and the conclusions foreordained.

The second strategy was to respond to the ‘question’ by using natural analogies that normalized the miraculous and presented it as part of the expected functioning of the universe. To explain how God could generate a son, a Eusebian preacher advanced the standard metaphor of a lamp that could light another, without suffering any diminution of its own force or requiring assistance from any other.45 Caesarius used a more general example of something which might appear inexplicable – a giant fig tree growing from a tiny seed.46 He presented his conclusion from within the circle of faith: ‘Nothing is impossible for God.’47

Both of these strategies were in evidence when the Eusebius Gallicanus preachers tried to inculcate belief in the trinity and particularly the proper interpretation of the nature of Christ. The very first sermon in the collection was an extended explanation and justification of trinitarian theology around the nature of Christ, adopting a number of rhetorical strategies to persuade and to inculcate belief. The preacher began by offering extended explanation of how Christ could be both human and divine at the same time, and what the implications would be if either element was prioritized over the other. ‘For if you were to say Christ is “only man”, you would deny the power by which you were created; if you were to say Christ is “only God”, you would deny the mercy by which you are blessed.’48 As the quote makes clear, this explanation was framed as an answer to the congregation, or a member thereof. Although the sermon had begun with the first person plural, in a statement of common identity: ‘We heard the prophet …’, it very soon after switched to the second person singular. This device was used in the sermon, and indeed through much of the collection, to voice the questions that the preacher could answer. ‘You may ask: “what was the reason why he had to take on a form with all the properties of our bodies?” ’ The answer is then presented in the unifying first person plural: ‘This is the reason: so that through him, who achieved victory over the enemy of the world in our flesh, he could glorify nature and strengthen our fragile condition …’49 This question is neither condemned nor presented as inappropriate, but it stood as an articulation of uncertainty that could be addressed, and the questioner thereby reintegrated with the religious community.

The Eusebian preacher also made extensive use of natural or familiar analogies to explain the nature of Christ and the structure of the trinity. Just as the forearm is inseparable from the shoulder, and cannot be moved without it, so the saviour is inseparable from the substance of the father and was able to descend to earth without relinquishing heaven.50 ‘For just as the words which you speak both go out of you and are with you … so also our Lord Jesus Christ … came forth to us from the father without leaving him, was present there and yet proceeded here.’51 The paradox of Christ’s nature was, the preacher clearly hoped, thereby rendered explicable, even normal.

Any alternative explanations that lay Christians might harbour were pre-emptively demonized as inappropriate and unacceptable. They were associated with heretics, people ‘deceived by a recent error and newly pierced by the teeth of the ancient serpent’.52 These heretics, the preacher made clear, were not us. They were twice described as ‘easterners’ (orientales), whose view that Christ could move through the virgin’s body without taking anything from it could be presented as ridiculous and unnatural. Their views were stated baldly, refuted even more bluntly: ‘But it is not so’ (sed non ita est).53 The questioning congregants were not these heretics. The congregants’ concerns were carefully distinguished, and the preacher ended on another moment of integration and uplift: ‘We flee anger, cruelty, dishonesty, we cleanse our hearts of malice, luxury and iniquity. We faithfully receive the lord Christ’, and we do all this because Christ has shown us that it is possible to do so in our bodies.54 The incarnation was recast as the source of hope, not of confusion.

In summary, this sermon represented a multi-pronged effort to inculcate belief, working at both the rational and the emotive levels. It concerned an aspect of Christian doctrine which many modern scholars would consider highly technical and which is not normally treated as an area of lay religious interest. Yet the preacher took great care to explain it to his congregation, and behaved as though it was a matter of great import that they believed and understood. Indeed, the trinity was a frequent subject of explanation and inculcation by the Eusebian preachers. There were different approaches to this effort even within the same collection. In sermon 9, on the creed, the sentence ‘I believe in God the Father omnipotent’ was the launchpad for an extended discussion of the trinity. Although both Arians and Jews can utter this phrase, the preacher emphasized, neither group believes in it correctly, because they do not properly understand the son.55 How could he be a father, the preacher queried, using natural analogy, unless he had a son.56 Even more emphatically, however, this sermon appealed to the mystery of it all and emphasized belief even over understanding. ‘Therefore whoever among you pries into the hidden depths not with faith but with curiosity, instead hold this in your heart: that however difficult you see the divine dispensations are, so much more reverently you should admire them.’57 Our job, the preacher emphasized, switching back to the first person plural, is to believe. It is not for us to wonder how these things are done, any more than we should wonder how life entered into the inviolate womb of a virgin or how he was resurrected on the third day. ‘One should not discuss divine things, but one should believe them.’58 This did not mean that the preacher did not explain. Indeed, this sermon contained an extensive passage explicating the different elements of the trinity and their relation to each other. However, belief was the primary goal, here approached in a slightly different fashion than in sermon 1. Elsewhere in the collection, preachers explicated the trinity through scriptural symbolism, demonization of alternative understandings and careful linguistic dissection.59 They took enormous care to communicate with their lay audiences in order to inculcate belief. The popularity of these sermons with later copyists and preachers indicates, moreover, that other clergy endorsed and repeated these strategies. They saw in them the key to success in instilling belief – our problem lies in assessing whether they did indeed succeed.

Doubt and irreligiosity

For the rest of this chapter, we move to a far more challenging question: can we know anything about what the laity did believe? Is there any way to track the success of these clerical efforts at explaining, persuading and inculcating belief? It is natural for historians, in thinking about this, to begin with the evidence for lay doubt or disbelief. Our own scepticism about the portraits of piety found in clerical and monastic texts leads us to look for signs of subversion and resistance to the propagated ideals. For example, Ian Wood quite rightly emphasizes the amount of inappropriate and irreverent behaviour catalogued in the works of Gregory of Tours, including failure to respond to saintly visions, treating saints as intercessors only of last resort, doubt about whether particular individuals had saintly powers, working on Sundays and feast days, perjury, breaking of sanctuary, and theft from churches. Wood reads these accounts as evidence for insufficient belief.60 As Wood admits, however, these portraits of lay unbelief demand as much scepticism from the historian as portraits of piety. Gregory needed to set up dramatic failures in belief, so that they could be punished and corrected. It is no coincidence, for example, that visions or warnings often come in threes, or that people are at death’s door before they turn to the saint and receive a last-minute cure. It was a part of Gregory’s humble self-construction that he presented his own failures of belief as object lessons to his readers. Doubt and error had to be articulated before they could be properly quashed.

Nonetheless, Gregory’s tales of rusticity and scepticism indicate what seemed to him to be plausible areas of lay unbelief. His stories can therefore be parsed as representing archetypal doubts that required clerical responses. In Gloria confessorum, for example, a layman expressed doubt that the anniversary of the death of a local holy man should be treated as a festival or indeed that he should be honoured as a saint. His disbelief, of course, was suitably punished, as his entire house burnt to the ground. The anecdote is perfectly shaped so that Gregory could then draw out the necessary lesson: ‘If someone thinks that this happened by chance, let him wonder that the fire harmed none of the surrounding neighbourhoods. What do you do now, o coarse rusticity? Because you always murmur against God and his friends, you receive catastrophe upon yourself.’61 Among his miracles of St Martin, Gregory told of how the bishop Baudinus prayed to Martin, when his ship seemed about to go down in a storm. One of the ‘unbelievers’ (unus ex … perfidis) rebuked him, stating that Martin would not help, but the other occupants of the boat joined the prayers, and the storm was calmed, replaced with the fragrance of incense. ‘Let no one doubt’, Gregory concluded, ‘that this storm was calmed by the arrival of the blessed man’.62 Gregory was clearly concerned that lay Christians sometimes doubted the power of the saints. His miracle stories were designed to address that doubt, again and again and again.

Indeed, although Gregory’s world was one of constant religious intervention and action, he portrayed as much impiety as he did piety: ‘the faith of Christ burns bright in many men, but it remains lukewarm in others; no sooner are the church-buildings endowed by the faithful than they are stripped bare again by those who have no faith’.63 He wrote as though to insist on the reality of divine action in the world, in the face of disregard or doubt. In his collection of miracles performed by Martin, for example, Gregory described his work as a refutation of ‘those disgusting men’ who had claimed that Sulpicius Severus’ Vita had been filled with lies. He himself, Gregory claimed, had heard a man express doubt that the miracles in that account really happened. ‘Therefore, by producing many stories as evidence I will demonstrate that this recently happened [again].’64 Although these anecdotes of lay scepticism were carefully shaped, their force and urgency appear to derive from genuine clerical anxiety about the belief of their lay congregations.

The same is true for expressions of apparent lay doubt in sermons, some of which I have already detailed. When faced with accounts of the virgin birth, for example, the preacher of Eusebian sermon 10 claimed congregants responded: ‘That is impossible, that cannot be done.’65 When facing the realities of injustice all around them, the author of Eusebian sermon 55 claimed that his congregants despaired of God’s interest in them: ‘It is certain that the Lord does not have regard for our affairs, that he neglects humans and does not care for the earth.’66 ‘Either he ignores sins if he does not damn them, or he promotes sins if he pretends to damn them.’67 The author of Eusebian sermon 23 attacked apparent scepticism among his congregants about the doctrine of bodily resurrection.68 These were rhetorical devices designed to frame questions which the preachers knew they could answer. They were not the recorded voices of lay disbelief.

Nonetheless, I argue that we can take these as indirect reflections of lay anxieties, and areas of lay theological concern. The preachers framed the questions, but they would not have bothered to do so unless they needed to respond to something. They were not uttering rote phrases. The sermons reek of effort, of anxiety, of persuasive intent. And these were plausible areas of lay concern. They were the doctrinal issues to which preachers, teachers and theologians had to respond repeatedly through Christian history.69 It seems perverse to assume, therefore, that the questions and difficulties which bedevilled Christian believers throughout the history of the faith did not occur to the lay people of late antique Gaul. These concerns were not the equivalent of late antique atheism. Clerics were more concerned about what Cannuyer calls irreligiosité – a practical scepticism which does not accept the prescriptions of the church, or at least not in every particular.70 Or, as Arnold puts it, ‘a sense in which, while God probably exists, he is clearly a long way off and little concerned in the practicalities of human affairs’.71 This scepticism appears as an important element of the lay religious experience. We cannot hear their voices, but here, with Arnold, we can feel our way around the edges of the lay-person-shaped hole.72

Reciprocity

Another important element was the principle of reciprocity that characterized many accounts of lay belief in this period. The clerical evidence for this is problematic, since it sometimes comes as part of a critique of inappropriate lay religiosity and therefore arouses a proper suspicion in historians. However, we also encounter reciprocal understandings in positive accounts of lay belief, which suggests it was more than just a symbol of impiety. Obviously there are limits to this method. The clergy could misperceive and misread even when they were not attempting to distort. Nonetheless, given the paucity of our evidence for lay belief, we need to make the most of what we have.

It should not be surprising to find the principle of reciprocity in lay belief; indeed, this is a fundamental element of many religious traditions.73 In a number of ancient religions, this principle was expressed through the making of offerings where ‘the offerer wishes to make contact and expects an answer to be given or a request to be met’.74 In the Roman context, this was particularly manifest in vows – the texts of those which survive are often ‘very specific and precise undertakings, made to named gods, laying down the conditions under which the vow will be fulfiled and the nature of the gift or ritual action with which the help of the god will be rewarded’.75 North emphasizes that these Roman vows were not strictly contractual, since the gods were not laid under obligation by the taking of the vow and Price describes the system as ‘a set of reciprocal relationships’.76 In the Jewish context, meanwhile, offerings and sacrifice could be a way of honouring God, correcting sin, effecting purification, communicating thanksgiving, fulfilling vows and eliciting blessings. Vows could be given in exchange for the deity’s fulfilment of a request, or could be given in exchange for nothing at all.77 Both Roman and Jewish vows, Price argues, however, had conditional elements – if the deity did not provide the desired benevolence, the giver was freed from their obligations in return.78

Christianity therefore emerged into a world in which reciprocity between God and believer was inherent to many religious interactions. However, the Christian approach consciously broke with these principles in three important respects. First, divine benevolence would usually come not in this world, but in the next. Second, after Augustine, the benevolence of grace was not held to be dependent on human action. Grace was a gift that could be neither earned nor deserved. Third, the proper Christian attitude to God was prayer and acceptance, not negotiation, and not conditionality. ‘Christians were expected to offer praise and thanks to God without obligation and without expecting anything in return.’79 We can see this principle at work in Gregory of Tours’ account of the woman with fingers bent into her palm who came to the festival of Martin but left without a cure. ‘I came with a pure heart to request the assistance of the blessed [Martin], but because my sins were an obstacle, I did not deserve to receive what I sought.’80 Since this was a miracle story, her pious attitude soon after got her the cure she needed, but the clerically approved posture was clear: pray, and hope, but do not bargain. Be passive, and accept what is given (or not). It should be sufficient, as Gregory emphasized, that the laity came to the saints and offered ‘nothing other than … prayers’.81

However, Gregory also told a number of stories about how lay people attempted to ‘buy’ cures, making clear that he regarded this as an inappropriately contractual approach to a relationship with a saint. In one, for example, a man named Maurus cursed St Lupus of Troyes and was driven mad as a consequence. ‘His wife’, Gregory reported, ‘presented many gifts to the church, but on the third day he ended his life in extreme pain. After his death, his wife took back what she had given.’82 Gregory’s point was that such an approach was impious, but the woman’s perspective is perfectly comprehensible within a reciprocal understanding of divine relationships. In another story, an abbot was depicted as intervening to prevent a gift-based reconciliation between sinner and saint. A man who had occupied some land given to the church and refused to part with it suffered an apoplectic stroke. Realizing that this was divine punishment, he repented and said: ‘Carry me to the church of the saint and throw on his tomb however much gold I have. For I have sinned by stealing his property.’ The abbot, seeing him coming, implored St Remigius, whose church it was: ‘I ask you, do not look at his gifts that you never used to accept.’ Sure enough, ‘although the [other] man presented gifts, upon returning home he lost his spirit and the church recovered its properties’.83

Gregory’s stance was complicated, however, by the fact that he could regard reciprocity as appropriate when handled properly, by the right person. In one story, he related another conflict over church property, this time between bishop Franco of Aix and Childeric, an important man at the court of King Sigibert. The bishop lost his case against Childeric in a royal court, and so instead attempted to force, or humiliate, the local saint into action: he threw briars on the saint’s tomb, closed the doors, and put more briars over the entrance, announcing: ‘Most glorious saint, no more lights will be lit here, no more melodies of psalms will be sung, until you first avenge your servants from their enemies and restore to the holy church the properties that have been violently taken from you.’84 As Patrick Geary has noted, such ‘humiliation’ of a saint was in fact an attempted act of coercion.85 Immediately, Childeric was struck ill. After a year of suffering, he decided to attempt his own negotiation with the saint, instructing his men to ‘go as quickly as possible and, after restoring the villa, place six hundred gold pieces on the tomb of the saint. For I hope that after the property has been returned he might grant a cure to a sick man.’86 This lay effort at reciprocity, however, was unsuccessful. Childeric died and the bishop obtained his revenge, thanks to the saint. In this case, the negotiation appeared to be legitimate in Gregory’s eyes, if undertaken by a cleric, and illegitimate if undertaken by a lay person. However, it was perfectly appropriate, Gregory made clear, for lay people to make vows to be tonsured, to serve at a tomb, or never again to work on a Sunday, if they received a cure.87 It was also acceptable to give objects – when a poor woman brought chickens to the church in fulfilment of a vow, Gregory presented this as an act of proper piety.88 As Gregory summarized in relation to one particular saint: ‘the martyr Sergius also worked many miracles for people by healing illnesses and curing the weaknesses of those who faithfully prayed to him. As a result it happened that thereafter people either made vows or brought gifts to his large church.’89 Sometimes the lay people in these stories refused to leave the church or tomb until they received that cure, or until the saint granted them a relic.90 This came close to an act of attempted coercion.

The picture provided by Gregory was thus not a consistent one and, indeed, the structure of many of his miracle stories was inherently reciprocal. The sick person must undertake correct action (prayer, prostration, vigil, fasting, candle-lighting, making contact with relic) and adopt a correct attitude (faith in God or saint) before receiving their cure. It was otherwise not a demonstration of divine power. The implication, although not spelt out, was that the cure was the reward. One story, for example, told of a man who was instructed in a vision to build an oratory over the tomb of the virgin Criscentia – once he did so, ‘immediately he was cured’.91 In other cases, however, the laity were depicted as withholding their promise until they received what they sought. In Gloria confessorum, for example, Gregory stated that King Childebert vowed that he would build a church for St Eusicius ‘if the Lord through his grace led him back from his expedition’. When he came back safely, ‘he fulfilled this vow’.92 Likewise, a woman whose husband had been imprisoned ‘vowed that if she received her husband back alive, she would cover the martyr’s [Julian’s] tomb with a stone’. He was freed, and ‘with lavish gifts she fulfilled the vow she had promised’.93 This was not only a strategy for the wealthy who could afford to construct religious buildings – Gregory described a man named Caelestis who was having trouble capturing a swarm of bees and prayed to Martin of Tours for help. ‘Most blessed confessor, if your power wishes to guide this swarm and restore it to my possession, then, with regard to what these bees produce in the future, I will take the honey for my use but I will send all the wax for the lights in your church.’94 In De virtutibus sancti Martini, a man placed consecrated bread and wine in a church before travelling, to ensure his safe passage.95 Sometimes, Gregory even deemed it appropriate to gift money, such as when a man sent a gold coin to a church and received a cure.96 Gregory did not depict this as ‘buying’ a cure, but the interaction is structurally indistinguishable. The only difference was the attitude of the cured man, projected by Gregory.

In his discussion of early medieval blessings, Rivard argued that they revealed a ‘fundamentally contractual’ understanding of a relationship with God, in defiance of theological teachings.97 Gregory’s miracle stories evoke a similar worldview.98 Even though Gregory himself presented a ‘contractual’ approach to God or the saints as evidence of an inappropriate attitude, many of his stories still depicted the Gallic laity behaving as though they believed in a reciprocal divine economy. Our evidence does not come from the laity themselves, but the picture of their belief systems is plausible.

Afterlife

The laity appear to speak of their religious beliefs more directly, however, through inscriptions. Epitaphs are identifiable as Christian, in late antiquity and the middle ages, precisely due to the statements or symbols of belief which they contain.99 We have, therefore, hundreds of lay belief statements from Gaul in the period with which we are concerned. As already indicated, these belief statements were not unmediated.100 It is impossible to judge whether these formulations reflected genuine beliefs and sentiments on the part of either the deceased or their commemorators, or whether these were simply the conventional statements that the community expected. However, we can at least accept that the statements of belief on lay tombstones must have been ones to which family members did not object. If people sincerely rejected the idea of the bodily resurrection, they were unlikely to agree to put ‘he will rise again with Christ’ on the tombstone of their loved one. If they did not accept the role of the saints, they would not have agreed to commend them ‘to the bosom of the saints’. There is evidence here, therefore, for the passive acceptance of certain Christian ideas, at the very minimum.

It may even be possible to extend our confidence beyond this. Christianity was a religion much focused on death and what happened after it. It is therefore unsurprising that we would find statements of religious belief in the documents that marked the death of the believers. This was the moment of reiteration and reminder – the deceased individual might be gone from this earthly realm, but they were not gone completely. It was also a moment when those left behind needed reassurance. Death was frightening and traumatic, even to those who believed that their loved ones would go to heaven.101 The ubiquitous statements that the deceased were resting peacefully in their graves, had travelled to God, or were enjoying eternal life among the elect, ‘must have been designed to provide comfort to the grieving’.102 Sometimes this was explicit. In a sixth-century inscription from Vienne, for example, the parents of a dead child were addressed directly: ‘Do not grieve father, cease your tears, mother: your child has the joy of eternal life.’103 These sentiments were commonplace.104 Nonetheless, for this comfort to be effective, those left behind must have believed that these formulations were plausible, must have wanted to think them true. The language of comfort around death had shifted to take place on Christian terms, not just at high levels of discourse, but in the most everyday representations of rhetoric around death which are still available to us.

The record of Christian inscriptions emphasizes powerfully a belief that the dead were resting in their graves, awaiting the resurrection. Many contain a version of a word connoting rest, such as requiescit, quiescit, iacet, dormit or recessit.105 Often the character of this rest was made explicit by the addition of ‘in peace’ (in pace). Geronius, for example, concluded his epitaph for his ‘very dear spouse’ with the phrase ‘rest in peace’ (quiesce in pace).106 Mauricius, a three-year-old boy described in his epitaph as a fidelis, was said to be resting ‘in Christ and in peace’.107 These formulations expressed belief in the salvation of the deceased, since it was commonly held that the sinful would be dragged to hell immediately upon their death.108 Some inscriptions also reflected the idea that the deceased might be already receiving their eternal reward in heaven. For example, an inscription from Trier stated that the deceased had travelled to the Lord; another described the deceased as ‘among the elect’ (inter electus); the epitaph of Eufemia assured readers that she loved the author of life, and was united to him in heaven; somewhat more poetically, the dead child in the inscription already cited above was described as being ‘among the stars’ (inter astra).109 These formulations might not have been doctrinally correct, but they reflected the comforting idea that the deceased was happy and comfortable, an extension of the peacefulness more commonly evoked.

Many phrases in epitaphs also evoked the idea that the earth was a place of transient residence, and that true comfort and belonging came in the hereafter. This was a theme of great importance in Christian preaching, and we can see it reflected back in a series of different ways. Deceased people were described as resting in the eternal seat, withdrawing from the world, passing over to the Lord, returning to God, leaving their earthly limbs on earth, and returning the soul to its author.110 An anonymous epitaph from Parnans praised its subject for almsgiving, fasting and penitence, and spoke of her migrating from this light (de haec luce megrauit).111 The same idea may lie behind phrases that gave the deceased’s age by reference to how long they had lived ‘in this world’.112 A mid-sixth century epitaph for Gundiisclus combined many elements of faith in his brief memorial: ‘Here rests in peace Gundiisclus of good memory, in hope of the resurrection and compassion of Christ, who lived in this world sixty-nine years.’113

Finally, as we see in this example, the inscriptions contained numerous evocations of belief in the coming resurrection, the idea that the death just experienced was not final, but that eternity awaited in another place. Epitaphs were full of confidence that the deceased would be resurrected in Christ, would rise again, would be resurrected in peace, would rise up on the heavenly day when the Author comes, or were waiting in hope of the resurrection of the mercy of Christ.114 An inscription from Vienne, probably early sixth century, expressed the confident hope that Lupicinus ‘will be resurrected with the saints’ (resurrecturus cum sanctis).115 One for the famulus Dei Vranius, meanwhile, stated that he would ‘rise in Christ’ (resurgit in Cristo).116 Handley emphasizes that we cannot be sure that everyone with such a formulation on their gravestone believed in the bodily resurrection.117 Nonetheless, the very ubiquity of these phrases demonstrates how ordinary the idea had become in this period, for the people of Gaul. This was exactly the element of Christian doctrine that people would want to evoke at a moment of loss – a reminder of the hopeful future moment of revival and reunion.

***

Despite the difficulty of accessing what the laity knew and believed about their religion, therefore, there is much that we can say. We can trace what the clergy thought the laity should know and establish some techniques for conveying that knowledge. Sermons provide evidence of how clergy went about inculcating belief in some of Christianity’s more esoteric teachings. It is more difficult to establish what the laity made of any of this or how much they absorbed. Evidence for lay irreligiosity, however, suggests the possibility of independent reasoning and expressions of doubt, while the reciprocal elements to lay behaviour in many miracle stories provide a picture of the implications of belief in practice. Epitaphs, meanwhile, show how ingrained and ubiquitous Christian beliefs in the afterlife had become within the epigraphic record and perhaps in the process of comforting the bereaved. The worlds of the late antique laity were not just shaped by what they did and where they did it, but also by what they knew and believed about their religion.

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!