The debate about whether Christianity was the cause of or the solution to the Fall of Rome has centered, above all else, on the cult of the saints. For Gibbon, there was perhaps no clearer index of the rising tide of superstition; for Peter Brown, no clearer example of the creativity of late Roman religious culture (Brown 1982; Hayward 1999). In the present context, we must ask whether this debate has been accurately founded, or whether our view of the cult of the saints in Late Antiquity has been skewed by our unwitting adoption of Carolingian perspectives and assumptions about sainthood.
Saints were central to the Carolingian project. The late eighth-century preface to the Salic Law grounds the Carolingian claim to empire in the blood of the Roman martyrs: the Franks were better placed to protect the shrines of Rome than were the Romans themselves (Nelson 1995: 424). This claim was not simply a statement of military fact: it was also an ideological pronouncement about the relation between sanctity and temporal power, and about the canon of sainthood. At the Synod of Frankfurt in ad 794, Charlemagne announced that there were to be no more new saints: his goal was to focus attention on the special relationship between his family and the Roman martyrs (Fouracre 1999). So enthusiastic were the Franks in appropriating relics of the martyrs, that the pope insisted, at the end of the eighth century, that there should be a moratorium on relic translations. It was to last a generation - before the floodgates opened again in the ad 820s, as memorably recorded by Einhard in his account of his acquisition of the relics of Marcellinus and Peter (Smith 2000c).
Relics needed narrative in order to acquire durable meaning (Geary 1978). If we turn from relics to the texts that storied them, we find one of the few contexts where manuscript evidence survives in enough density from before and after the AD 800 preservation watershed for us to be able to see clearly what the effect of the Carolingian intervention was. As far as we can tell, the earliest saints’ lives originate as pamphlet literature, whether in North Africa around the shrines of Stephen at Uzalis and Hippo, or in Rome at the behest of specific neighborhoods and aristocratic networks (Delehaye 1910; Cooper 1999). Very few examples of these libelli survive: the vast majority of saints’ lives are transmitted to us in large Carolingian lectionaries (Poulin 2006; Pilsworth, forthcoming). These collections, as has been shown with reference to Bavarian hagiography, are structured according to classic Carolingian principles of standardization (Diesenberger 2006). Jumbled local collections of Lives are replaced with an ordered sequence that follows the sequence of the liturgical year rather than idiosyncratic patterns of narrative affiliation.
To assess the transmission and use of saintly tradition across and beyond the Carolingian period, let us take the Passion of SS. John and Paul (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 3242). We have, unusually, a libellus copy of the text in a manuscript now preserved in St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg Q v I 5, to which was joined Par. Lat. 12634; see Poulin 2006: 107). The text, which is explicitly entitled the Passio Iohannis et Pauli, tells the story of two palace eunuchs martyred under the emperor Julian. This is clearly a foundation myth for the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (see Brandt, ch. 11), at the foot of the Caelian Hill in Rome, a ‘‘big and beautiful church’’ according to the description in a pilgrim’s guide dated to the early seventh century (but transmitted, inevitably, in a late eighth-century Carolingian copy; see Leyser 2000b and Diesenberger 2005). In its Roman context, the passio should be seen in the context of intra-urban burial in Rome (Costambeys 2001). In defiance of imperial prescription, the city filled up with the community of the dead, even as its living population was drastically and horrifically depleted across the fifth and sixth centuries (see Rebillard, ch. 15). The church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (as also of S. Bibiana) represents the efforts of urban dynasties, incorporating both laymen and clerics, to shore up urban property in the context of this depletion.
In the context, however, of its being copied around ad 600 and subsequently transmitted north of the Alps, the text moves from this late antique urban and ecclesial context out into the countryside and into a specifically monastic institutional context (Leyser 2007). The passio was copied most probably in Campania in circles familiar with the monastic teachings of Augustine and with the Rule of the Master tradition and possibly associated with Eugippius of Lucullanum; and from there it moved north to Corbie, where it joined another codex probably produced in the same Campanian milieu, displaying similar interest in Augustine and the Rule of the Master (Par. Lat. 12205; see Masai and Vanderhoven 1953). In these contexts, reaching from Campania to Corbie, the ‘‘House of John and Paul’’ became a symbol for the monastery. The story of the martyrdom becomes in spiritual terms a lesson for the monks in preparation for death. On this earth, meanwhile, the defying of the emperor by the martyrs may have served as a symbol of monastic immunity claimed by houses like Corbie. Dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul, Corbie claimed to be a new Rome.
Meanwhile, great interest was shown by Carolingian copyists in another, longer version of the story of John and Paul, in which the figure of the emperor appeared in a more flattering light (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 3636, 3638). In this account, which may in fact predate the Passion ofJohn and Paul found in the Corbie codex, the story of John and Paul is a coda to the Passion of Gallicanus, a Roman general serving under the emperor Constantine (or Constantius: the tradition is characteristically uncertain). In this version, prior to the accession of Julian the Apostate, there is a halcyon period when Gallicanus conquers the known world as the emperor’s general, before forswearing the hand of his daughter, Constantia (or Constantina). While the Passion of John and Paul presents an institutional face-off between the state and its citizens, the Passion of Gallicanusis a family drama, offering an insider’s view of how the state can function. The appeal of this version to the Carolingian world may readily be understood. By the same token, in the following century, and in the Roman Empire of the Ottonians, we find the Gallicanus story retold by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, who did not hesitate to draw parallels between Gerberga, the abbess of Gandersheim, and Constantia, the imperial princess sworn to continence (Wailes 2001).
From Campania to Corbie and on to Gandersheim: all these were monastic contexts, very different from the original urban setting of the martyr piety in which all these houses partook. But these monastic contexts were very different from each other. The ‘‘development of the western monastic tradition’’ is a story that may productively be retold under the heading ‘‘Late Antiquity in the medieval west.’’
In a very traditional perspective, the appeal of which is still strong, the ‘‘Benedictine’’ tradition is formed immediately in the sixth century. The Rule of St. Benedict, composed around ad 540, is brought to Rome by Benedict’s disciples after the sack of Monte-cassino. Pope Gregory writes the Life of Benedict in the Dialogues, and the combination of this text with the Rule, according to the classic account of Jean Leclercq, establishes the matrix of monastic life (Leclercq 1957). The Rule institutes a framework for the daily encounter with the word of God, the contemplative fruits of which are articulated in the Life, and in Gregory’s other writings. While this may work as a theology of the monastic life, it is not a historical account of the formation of the tradition.
The Rules of the Master and of Benedict, produced in Italy in the middle of the sixth century, were the works of authors who wished to present monasticism as an ancient craft, like medicine or law, involving mastery of a tradition and a set of techniques These Rules were in fact practical handbooks and as such were presented anonymously. When Gregory selected Benedict as the central figure of Italian holy men and women, he endowed with a personality and a history a figure whose own authorial strategy had been as unobtrusive as possible, and whose teachings were of a piece with this reticence (Leyser 2000a). The Rule recommended that monks remain for a while in a community, following a shared routine, before striking out on their own. The Benedict of the Dialogues is a young man who, disenchanted with his studies at Rome, heads straight for the wilderness as a hermit. He attracts followers, but also enemies: he abandons his first set of communities at Subiaco, to set up another at Montecassino. It is here, according to Gregory, that he finally acquires the stability recommended in the Rule. In other words, the Rule of St. Benedict and the account of Benedict in the Dialogues are at cross purposes, and their conjunction to form ‘‘the Benedictine tradition’’ was by no means a self-evident or self-explanatory process. At Rome, in particular, the fact that Gregory took an interest in Benedict seems to have retarded the development of the city’s monastic culture, given Gregory’s unpopularity with the Roman clergy (Llewellyn 1974).
Across eighth-century Europe, however, there were readers of the Rule and the Dialogues who saw ways to assimilate them. We might pick out three in particular. Firstly, the Anglo-Saxon Wynfrith - better known as Boniface, the name he assumed in honor of the Roman martyr (Lifshitz 2006) - made it his business to bring the
English enthusiasm for Gregory and for the Rule of St. Benedict to the continent. In the following generation, further out toward the missionary frontier in Bavaria and Austria, Arbeo of Freising expertly assimilated the Dialogues to the Rule in his Life of Corbinian (although it is now clear that both Boniface and Arbeo were further from the missionary frontier than has traditionally been thought: Wood 2001: 57-73, 150-60; for Arbeo’s connections in Italy, Reimitz 2000a). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have the Lombard writer Paul the Deacon, author of a biography of Gregory the Great and himself a monk at Montecassino, who awaits his historian as the maker of the Benedictine tradition. (It should be noted, however, that Paul is not the author of a commentary on the Rule: this attribution has long been exposed as a piece of tenth-century sleight of hand by the then abbot of Montecassino: Pohl 2001).
Nonetheless, an element of tension between the institutional Benedict of the Rule and the charismatic figure of Gregory’s making remained in play in the ninth century. On the one hand, we have the main architect of the Benedictine tradition, Benedict of Aniane. His two massive compendia, the Concordia Regularum, composed at some point in the ad 780 s, and the Codex Regularum, composed ad 816-17, were classics of Carolingian canon formation, which have conditioned the way we think about monasticism ever since (Semmler 1983). With these compilations, Benedict of Aniane remade the Rule of his namesake in a Carolingian image. The Rule presents itself as an introductory handbook to the monastic tradition, for beginners. The collections of Benedict drove this humility trope into reverse. The Rule of St. Benedict was the summation of all existing monastic tradition. Benedict had gathered into ‘‘a single sheaf the sheaves of his predecessors’’ (Benedict of Aniane, Concordia Regularum, praef., PL 103: 15), and this work of synthesis was what Benedict of Aniane hoped to achieve across the empire with the standardization of monastic observance.
Such a synthesis remained a dream, but the dream was enough in itself to universalize the criteria by which monastic life was assessed. Coupled with the imperial reach of Louis the Pious, Benedict of Aniane’s promotion of the Rule of St. Benedict served to constitute what was subsequently thought of as ‘‘western monastic culture.’’ Such a thing had not existed before. Later on, after the millennium, monasteries in France would start to claim Charlemagne as their legendary founder (Remensnyder 1994): the truth that these legends express is that it was the Carolingian idea of empire that gave to the various local traditions descended from late Roman monasticism a name and a shape.
That said, Benedict of Aniane did not have a monopoly on Benedict of Nursia. The monks of S. Benoit sur Loire at Fleury saw themselves as the guardians of the ‘‘Gregorian’’ Benedict of the Dialogues - the apocalyptic holy man, not the anonymous legislator. According to Paul the Deacon, the relics of Benedict and Scholastica had been taken from Montecassino to Fleury and Le Mans in the seventh century. Paul’s account is sketchy in the extreme, but it seems to have been enough to provide a foundation for an entire tradition (indeed, debate still rages as to the reliability of Paul’s testimony). Across the ninth century, as Fleury witnessed the translation north of the relics of Roman martyrs, one inmate of the community, Adrevald, decided the story of Benedict’s earlier translation needed to be properly told. In a triptych of related works, Adrevald described in detail how the body of Benedict had come from Montecassino north to Fleury, the vicissitudes it had undergone, and the unstoppable flow of miraculous power from its new location (Vidier 1965; Head 1990).
When, in the tenth century, Odo of Cluny, the ‘‘Benedictine’’ house sans pareil, came to reform Fleury, he met with strenuous resistance: the monks met him on the ramparts with weapons (John of Salerno, Vita Odonis 3. 8, PL 133: 80-1). In the tension here we can see the continuation of the ninth-century debate between Adrevald and Benedict of Aniane, between charisma and institution as forms of cultural memory. This conflict between the local and the multinational brand was to continue in the monastic tradition deep into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Henrietta Leyser 1984).
World History
