Bones of the Blessed: Cult of the Saints in the Church of the East

The Church of the East is worthy of serious consideration from all Christians. For a long while, the Church of the East was the numerically largest in the world (surpassing European Christendom for a time), ranging from east Syria to China, from the Turkic steppes down into India. It survived and thrived without a Constantine and was not wedded to a Christian empire (surviving under Zoroastrian Persians, Islam, and the Mongol khanate). The Syriac-speaking Church of the East offers an alternative paradigm, a lively history that expands beyond typical accounts of Church history which focus on the Roman empire and its descendants.

 Anyway, the following section is from Matthew Dal Santo's  Debating the Saints' Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Oxford University Press, 2015). While the book is mainly focused on Gregory the Great as a Byzantine theologian (against attempts to treat Italy as "the West" after 476 when western Roman empire collapses), it also treats the Church of the East's "cult" of saints and their relics. As you'll see, the Church of the East did not follow the same chain of thought that Roman Christians (Greek and Latin) did. Rather, there was an open-space for conflict, where Gregory (and his Byzantine allies further east) contended with skeptics. Not all agreed the saints operated as divinized patrons who, freed from the limits of the body, could aid their supplicants in the name of God. Drawing on Aristotelian philosophy about human beings and the natural world, skeptics (both pagan and perhaps Christian) rejected these claims and their subsequent justification for several rites of the church. However, these debates opened up interesting questions: what is the nature of the soul? how did the soul relate to the body? how could the soul do things without the body? These questions opened up further questions, such as what happened to the souls of the imperfect (thus presaging, for some, a belief in purgatory).

In the section of the chapter below, Dal Santo examines similar controversies in the Persian Church of the East. Unlike the Roman world, the paradigm that won out unhooked divinized patronage (something that was rejected in the main) from the cult of the saints (which was preserved). In other words, to honor saints with dedicated churches didn't imply a belief in the patronage of those saints over said site. Similarly, to recognize miracles from the bones of saints didn't imply it was the saint who did the miracle (rather it was strictly God through the physical object). Dal Santo shows how the Church of the East's paradigm did not depend upon Aristotle (or other Hellenic philosophers), but emerged from an older Syriac (dare I say biblical) tradition. Dal Santo's work shows that, despite any account of "Hellenizing" during the Second Temple period, Jewish distinctives remained and flowed naturally into Christianity:

Ishai then addressed the meaning of the cult that was paid to the martyrs, emphasizing that it was, as the Syriac term itself indicated, above all a ‘commemoration’ of the martyrs’ glorious deeds. Like Ephrem in this regard, Ishai appears to have conceived of the role of the saints’ cult in the church as primarily moral inasmuch as the remembrance of the saints’ deeds provided a model for imitation for the East Syrian faithful in the present. Ishai thus affirmed that:

The word ‘commemoration’ signifies ‘memory’. And, in fact, the memory of the sufferings of the blessed martyrs strengthens the hope of the truly faithful. It is thus in order to excite us to imitate the virtues of the confessors of the Christian faith, through the recollection of the memory of their victory, and in order to spur us to receive with them the same crown, through the painting of an image of their glories on the (p.282) canvas of our spirits, that the holy fathers have commanded us to celebrate their commemoration.161

As Ishai further put it, ‘[t]o commemorate the martyrs is thus to recall the memory of their glorious deeds.’162 To a very large extent, therefore, the East Syrian cult of the saints was justified on the grounds of the moral edification of the faithful in the present. In itself this would be an unremarkable explanation of an important aspect of the saints’ cult in all times and places. Unlike Eustratius’s apology for the saints at Constantinople at the end of the century and Gregory the Great’s at Rome, however, Ishai’s account of the cult of the saints was ambivalent about the active assistance from beyond the grave which the saints obtained from God on behalf of the living.163 Although, as we shall see, Ishai acknowledged the miracles and healings that occurred at the saints’ shrines (which were important as the divine favour which such miracles proclaimed that the saints enjoyed aided his argument that the honours which the church paid to the saints were not idolatrous), he seemed to deny that the saints were themselves the agents of these miracles.

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Despite initial appearances to the contrary, in fact, Ishai strongly upheld the completeness of the barrier which, as we have seen in earlier writers like Narsai, was commonly understood in East Syrian tradition to separate the living from the dead. Thus, Ishai asserted that:

whenever we celebrate the memory of the saints and their feasts, they [the saints] derive no more benefit from the honours we render them than they would be harmed from any neglect to honour them sufficiently on our part. But the veneration which we show them makes us worthy of esteem, is useful to us and will lend us assistance.165

Yet the assistance which Ishai supposed to be the fruit of the saints’ veneration by the faithful was overwhelmingly conceived of as consisting in moral instruction and a source of ethical inspiration: ‘By recalling the memory of their dazzling glory and their great patience in the struggle, we shall burn with the same love of Christ with which they themselves burned, and as if at the sound of the trumpet, we shall gather to celebrate the solemnity of the triumphs.’166 We have already seen that, for both Eustratius and Gregory, a view of the role of the saints in the church that remained limited to the moral edification to be derived from the recollection of their righteous deeds, would insufficiently account for the sacramental role which their miracles were perceived to have played as an ongoing consequence of the transformation of matter through the Incarnation, one that was comparable in some way to the priest’s consecration of the host in the Eucharist. But Ishai’s presentation of the saints’ cult as a kind of ethical mimesis can perhaps be compared to the fundamentally different view of the sacraments and their role in the sanctification of the church that was part of the East Syrian inheritance from the ‘Antiochene’ (p.284) tradition conveyed in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the primary theological authority in the Church of the East, where he was known as ‘the Exegete’.167

In the fourth chapter of his treatise, Ishai reached the liturgical Feast of the Martyrs that was celebrated in the Church of the East on Easter Friday. Ishai naturally pointed out that this feast fell precisely one week after the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday, and explained its presence in the calendar of the church at this point as reflecting the fact that, like Jesus, the martyrs had been executed for having preached the true faith of righteousness. Moreover, the truth of the Lord’s subsequent resurrection was proved by the willingness of the martyrs to go to their deaths in the hope of their own resurrection. For both of these reasons, Ishai affirmed, ‘[t]he holy fathers […] established this feast and regulated that it be celebrated immediately after the glorious resurrection of our Redeemer, Christ, so that their [the martyrs’] memory would proclaim their sufferings and make known that they remained attached to their Master even unto death.’168 Although different accounts of the origins of this feast later circulated in the Church of the East, Ishai directed his audience to a further reason why the feast of the martyrs and confessors should be celebrated so near to that of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, one that reflected the current abode of the saints.169 Thus, the holy fathers decreed that the Feast of the Martyrs should occur when it did ‘so that’, Ishai affirmed, ‘the proximity of the commemoration of the saints’ sufferings should help us to understand that, just as the solemnity of their commemoration is close to the glorious resurrection of our Saviour, so they themselves are also close to Christ (p.285) and participate in his benefits: “My desire”, it is written, “is to leave this world and be with Christ” (Phil. 1.23)’.170

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As we have seen earlier in the treatise, Ishai presented the martyrs’ willing self-sacrifice as evidence of the reality of the life beyond the grave which Christ himself preached, not least through his own Resurrection. We have also observed that, from the perspective of an existing tradition of soul sleep as expressed in the writings of Ephrem and Narsai, Ishai laid remarkable stress on the ongoing activity, before the Resurrection, of the disembodied souls of the saints in Paradise. With his demonstration above of the abundant miracles which the relics of the saints performed at their shrines, Ishai would seem here to confirm his view that, pace the fathers of the early Syriac tradition, the souls of the saints did in fact retain a significant degree of activity beyond the grave. Yet even as he defended the veneration which the church paid to the wonder-working bones of the martyrs, Ishai denied that their cult was idolatrous. In the process, he substantially reduced the scope of the saints’ posthumous activity and their engagement with the world here below. ‘So, we honour the bones of the martyrs’, he explained:

but heaven forbid that we mean by that the adoration that belongs only to God. It would be sacreligious to worship in an idolatrous way [lit. adore with a cult of latreia] the relics of these illustrious men. For, these bones of the blessed are not themselves aware of the miracles that flow from them.193

(p.293) Ishai’s distinction between the legitimate veneration, or honours, that the church paid to the saints and the worship, or latreia, that was reserved for God alone, foreshadowed the distinction that the defenders of images would make in eighth-century Byzantium.194 But in marked contrast to the Greek and Latin writers of the same period as Ishai, the East Syrian doctor appeared to deny that the disembodied souls of the saints, despite their triumphant entry into Paradise, retained any knowledge of the world here below or were directly involved in its affairs.195 How their relics performed miracles, if not through the sentient oversight of the saints’ souls from heaven, Ishai did not specify.196 It may be that he imagined that it was God himself who performed the miracles that took place through the saints’ relics, or through the in-dwelling Holy Spirit that remained with them.197

What is clear is that with this doctrine of the saints’ posthumous ‘unconsciousness’ (at least of worldly events) Ishai steered the East Syrian cult of the saints down a path that led it far from the somewhat unsettling representations of the saints’ activity post mortem and their vigorous, and as we have seen contested, intervention in the world of the living, whether at Constantinople, Thessalonica, Alexandria, or (p.294) Rome.198 It also explains why nowhere in his On the Martyrs, before his final exhortation of the end of the elta, did Ishai advert to the direct supplication of the saints as advocates of the living before God, or, significantly, refer to the importance of their intercessions, as contemporary Byzantine writers did so zealously.199

By thus limiting the saints’ awareness of the miracles which their bodies (or God through their bodies) performed, Ishai doubtless sought to maintain the strength of that barrier between the living and the dead which, in his eyes at least, seems to have played a significant part in protecting the saints’ cult from the danger of transmogrifying into an odious form of idolatry. Despite appearing earlier on in his treatise to depart some distance from Ephrem and Narsai in the degree of activity he was willing to ascribe to the saints’ disembodied souls before the Resurrection (at no point, for instance, did he describe them as ‘asleep’), Ishai remained within the traditional current of East Syrian teaching on the afterlife by emphasizing the effective inactivity of the souls of the saints after death, at least in the world here below. This is true even if he was not willing to impose complete inactivity upon the saints’ souls in Paradise. Rather than perceiving the souls of the saints as powerful agents in the historical present from their vital abode in heaven, Ishai, like other East Syrian writers, appears to have preferred to view the saints safely from the perspective of the historical past. Thus, when he came in a final flourish to justify once more before his audience the propriety of the veneration paid to the martyrs, Ishai again resorted to the ethical function of the recollection of their past deeds for the imitation by the living. With the considerably reduced ambit for independent activity which the East Syrian understanding of the afterlife left for the souls of the saints relative to contemporary Greek and Latin representations of their miracles, the cult of the saints in Persian Christianity appears largely to have lacked, or consciously avoided, the direct (p.295) supplication of deceased saints in the manner we have seen in the East Roman world, west of the Euphrates. Such supplication of the saints did not even appear in Ishai’s parting description, in this chapter, of the contours of the East Syrian saints’ cult as seen from the school room at Seleucia:

Not only do we render unto the saints the veneration that is due to them by recounting the story [of their deeds], but we furthermore erect shrines and build churches in their honour, where we offer our love in tribute by occasionally gathering at the altar for their commemoration. In this way, we show that we belong to the same family as them [the martyrs] and we also exhort many persons to persevere genuinely in imitating these victorious saints […]. The honour which we pay to the holy confessors is thus just and reasonable.200

At the end of the eighth century, Catholicos Timothy would invest a vision of the saints’ cult very similar to that which Ishai articulated in his On the Martyrs with the canonical authority of an ecclesiastical synod and the support of his own letters.

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This picture of the benefits of the church’s liturgy of the dead deferred until the Resurrection justifies a solution offered earlier in this chapter to a further ostensible aporia in the East Syrian cult of the saints. Ephrem, as we have seen, minimized the activity of the disembodied human soul, but nevertheless expressed, at a number of points in his Hymns on Paradise, his hope in the prayers and intercessions of the saints beyond the grave. This hope, it was suggested, should properly be understood as a desire to benefit from the prayers of the saints, not so much in the ‘here and now’ of Ephrem’s life here below, but on the day of judgement that followed the Resurrection, when uniquely the saints’ reunited souls and bodies would be able to offer them. Of course, this deferral until the Resurrection of the saints’ role as patrons of the living contrasts sharply with the perception of (p.318) the saints’ present immanence found so widely in representations of the saints’ miracles in early Byzantium. Yet it would seem to be justified not only in the light of Timothy’s teaching on the nature of the East Syrian office of the dead, but also, implicitly, in the almost total absence of reference to the saints’ role as present intercessors before God on behalf of the living in Ishai’s On the Martyrs. Only at the end of this treatise, it was observed, did the doctor of Seleucia express any hope in the prayers of the saints. Crucially, it, too, was in the context of the final judgement that followed upon the Resurrection. We may conclude, therefore, that it was not that the Church of the East did not conceive of a patronal role for the saints on behalf of the faithul, but that, consistent with the wider geography of the East Syrian afterlife and especially the elevated significance it accorded to a view of man as an organic union of body and soul, the church of the East largely deferred that role to an eschatological future.274

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(161) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 24: ‘Le mot commémoraison signifie souvenir. Et de fait le souvenir des souffrances des bienheureux martyrs affermit l’espérance des vrais fidèles; et c’est justement pour nous exciter à imiter les vertus des confesseurs de la foi chrétienne en nous faisant rappeler le souvenir de leur victoire et pour nous pousser à recevoir avec eux la même couronne en peignant l’image de leurs gloires sur le tableau de notre esprit, que les saints Pères nous ont commandé de célébrer leur commémoraison.’

(162) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 24: ‘Faire la commémoraison des martyrs, c’est donc rappeler le souvenir de leurs gloires’.

(163) This may be compared to Ephrem’s Hymns to St Saba above, 253–4.

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(165) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 25: ‘toutes les fois que nous célébrerons la mémoire des saints et que nous célébrerons leur fête, ils ne retireront, eux, aucun profit du respect que nous leur rendrons, pas plus que notre manque d’honneur ne leur fera tort, tandis que le respect que nous leur rendrons, nous rendra dignes de considértation, nous sera utile et nous prêtera secours.’

(166) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 25: ‘En nous rappelant le souvenir de leur gloire éclatante et de leur grande patience dans les combats, nous brûlerons de l’amour du Christ, dont ils brûlaient eux-mêmes, et comme au son de la trompette, nous nous réunirons pour célébrer la solennité de leur triomphe.’

(167) On Theodore’s view of the sacraments, see now McLeod (2002). For the ‘general Antiochene ethical focus on freewill and the imitation of Christ in order to restore the prelapsarian man, as opposed to the Alexandrian emphasis on Eucharistic communion’, see Becker (2008) 91; and Wallace-Hadrill (1982) 117–50. See Williams (1999) on the relationship between these different views of the Eucharist in the cult of the saints.

(168) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 28–9: ‘Les saints Pères […] ont établi cette fête, ordonnant qu’elle fût célébrée immédiatement après la glorieuse résurrection de notre rédempteur le Christ, afin que leur souvenir proclamât leurs souffrances et (fit connaître) qu’ils sont toujours restés attachés jusqu’à la mort à leur Maître’.

(169) All found in texts later than Ishai’s, these explanations often focused on an apparently legendary order of Persian King Shapur II (309–79) in AD 344 for the execution of all the Christians in his empire. When he saw how many thousands confessed the faith, he rescinded his command. See Scher (ed.), Traités, 29 n. 2.

(170) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 29: ‘afin que ce voisinage de la commémoration des souffrances des saints nous fît comprendre que, de même que la solennité de leur commémoraison est à proximité de la résurrection glorieuse de notre Sauveur, de même eux aussi sont près du Christ et participent à ses bienfaits: “Mon désir”, est-il dit, “est de partir de ce monde pour être avec le Christ.”’

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(193) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 41: ‘Nous honorons donc les ossements des martyrs. Mais à Dieu ne plaise que nous entendions par là l’adoration, qui appartient qu’à Dieu. Ce serait un sacrilège d’adorer d’un culte de latrie les ossements de ces hommes illustres; car ces os des bienheureux ne sentent pas les miracles qui en découlent.’

(194) See Déroche (1994) 94–5. On the apparently aniconic nature of East Syrian Christianity in the Sasanian period, see Hauser (2007) 114–15. Ishai twice refers to ‘images’: Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 24, 41. For the first, see above p. 281. The second reference was to the ‘statues and images’ commonly set up to honour those who died in battle on behalf of the Persian king of kings, to which he compared the shrines which Persian Christians erected in honour of the saints. See also Barhadbeshabba, Life of Narsai in Becker (2008) 47–9, which speaks perhaps more conventionally of the written Lives of the saints as an ‘image’. On similar metaphors in Greek and Latin authors, see further Cameron (1991a) 226–8; and esp. Frank (2000), 171–81.

(195) See esp. Chapter Two of this book above, 126–9. But note also Gregory the Great’s affirmation in his Moralia above 21–2.

(196) On tomb and relic miracles in Persian martyrs’ acts, see Bruns (2006) 202–9. Compare also the tomb miracles performed by the relics of St Febronia in Brock and Ashbrook Harvey (1987) 175–6, where the author presented the deceased martyr as actively resisting the attempt to translate her body to an alternative shrine. Despite being set in the early fourth century, the text may have been composed during the sixth, when Febronia’s cult became popular. Febronia was commemorated in the East Syrian church, but the earliest manuscripts are West Syrian in provenance.

(197) See, for example, the West Syrian Philoxenus of Mabbug, On the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit, ed. Tanghe, Le Museon 73 (1960), 53. I thank an anonymous reader for this reference.

(198) Cf. Constas (2001) 94: ‘[t]he continuity of the [a saint’s] earthly and eschatological body was matched by the continuity of memory and consciousness, producing a powerful living presence that was made available to the Byzantine faithful from within the transcendent time and sacred space of the liturgy.’

(199) In this sense, the previously observed ‘anomaly’ between Narsai’s even stronger insistence on the soul’s pre-resurrection inactivity (as in On the Nature of the Soul and On the Rich Man and Lazarus) and his optimistic expectation of assistance through the post-mortem intercession of the saints (as in his On the Martyrs) remained unresolved.

(200) Ishai of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, On the Martyrs, in Scher (ed.), Traités, 42: ‘Non seulement nous leur rendons le respect qui leur est dû, en racontant leur histoire, mais nous érigeons encore et nous bâtissons en leur honneur des temples, où nous offrons en tribut notre amour en nous réunissant quelquefois à la table de leur commémoraison. Ainsi, par ces choses nous montrons que nous appartenons à la même famille qu’eux et nous exhortons bien des personnes à s’encourager réellement à imiter ces saints victorieux […]. L’honneur que nous rendons aux saints confesseurs est donc juste et raisonnable.’

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274) Of course, this still leaves unexplained the reference in Narsai’s memra On the Martyrs to the prayers of the saints as a superior form of urban defence than the city walls themselves, for surely that was one of the saints’ posthumous benefactions that could not be deferred until the final judgement.