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Ventriloquism and the Miraculous: Conversion, Preaching, and the Martyr Exemplum in Late Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Kate Cooper
Kate Cooper*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Disciples of Christ do not consider how things will proceed in the sight of judges. For thus he forewarned us, saying, ‘But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 22 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 Matt, 10, 19, cited in Passio Sebastiani 45. The Passio Sebastiani (BHL 7543) appears in the second volume for January of the ActaSS, II Ian., 265–78, here, 272. I cite throughout from this version in the footnotes, giving the Latin where relevant, while in the text I have drawn (with some alterations) on the English translation prepared under my supervision by Daniel S. Richter, to be published in a forthcoming collection of Roman passiones sponsored by the Roman Martyrs Project of the University of Manchester Centre for Late Antiquity.

2 Cooper, Kate, ‘The Voice of the Victim: Gender, Representation, and Early Christian Martyrdom’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 80 (1998), 147–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the date and context of the rise of the gesta martyum, see Kate Cooper, ‘The Martyr, the Matrona and the Bishop: Networks of Allegiance in Early Sixth-Century Rome’, Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999), 297–317.

4 Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), 13–15 Google Scholar.

5 Quotation from Gibbon, ibid., 15, n. 55.

6 Ibid., 29–30.

7 Ibid., 31.

8 Hume elaborated his view of the miraculous in Section X, ‘Of Miracles’, of the Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding: an Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, and an Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1894).

9 Discussed by Mark Sainsbury in his review (TLS 15.10.04, 4–5) of Robert J. Fogelin’s A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton, NJ, 2004).

10 Hume, Enquiry, X.I.91, ed. Selby-Bigge, 115–16.

11 One might compare, for example, the third-century pagan Lucian of Samosata’s Life of Alexander of Abonuteichos with the roughly contemporary figure of Simon Magus in the Christian Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, to gain a sense of the ecumenically agreed profile of this kind of individual.

12 Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: the Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford, 1933), 7. Danny Praet, ‘Explaining the Christianization of the Roman Empire: Older Theories and Recent Developments’, Sacris Erudiri 33 (1992–3), 5–119, 8–9, situates Nock’s views alongside those of his continental contemporaries.

13 In his Gifford Lectures of 1901–02, printed as The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (London, 1902). Indeed, Nock wrote the introduction to the 1960 reprint of James’s volume (Glasgow, 1960); the relationship between the two is discussed by Fausto Parente, ‘L’idea di conversione da Nock ad oggi’, Augustinianum 27 (1987), 7–25, 7–8.

14 Ramsay MacMullen, ‘Two Types of Conversion to Early Christianity’, Vigiliae Christianae 37 (1983), 174–92, 187. See also his Christianity and Paganism in the 4th to 8th Century (New Haven, CT, 1997).

15 MacMullen, ‘Two Types of Conversion’, 188.

16 MacMullen, ‘Two Types of Conversion’, 184.

17 Ramsay MacMullen, ‘Christianity Shaped through its Mission’, in Alan Kreider, ed., The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh, 2001), 97–117, 98–9.

18 The numbers (six million and thirty million respectively, against an estimated population of sixty million in ‘the Mediterranean world’, are MacMullen’s (‘Christianity Shaped through its Mission’, 10). Their shape aligns fairly well with those cited by Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: a Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 5–11, although Stark believes the fifty per cent mark was reached earlier, by around 350, and, as we will see below, has a very different idea of how the numbers were achieved.

19 Stark, Rise of Christianity, 5–11, drawing on Rodney Stark, ‘The Rise of a New World Faith’, Review of Religious Research 26 (1984), 18–27 Google Scholar.

20 Stark, Rise of Christianity, 19, drawing on John Lofland and Rodney Stark, ‘Becoming a World-Saver: a Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective’, American Sociological Review 30 (1965), 862–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Stark, Rise of Christianity, 17–18, with discussion of the ‘control theory of deviant behavior’ underlying the analysis.

22 Ibid., 18; see also Stark, Rodney and Bainbridge, William Sims, ‘Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects’, American Journal of Sociology 85 (1980), 1376–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 MacMullen himself has called attention to this fact, in e.g. ‘Christianity Shaped through its Mission’, 106–9.

24 Kreider, Alan, ‘Changing Patterns of Conversion in the West’, in idem, ed., The Origins of Christendom, 3–46 (here, 34), citing Sermons 88.12–13 and 14.4 respectively, in the translation of Edmund Hill (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

25 De catechizandis rudibus, 5.9, trans, and cit. Kreider, ‘Changing Patterns’, 32.

26 Kreider, ‘Changing Patterns’, 32, based on De catechizandis rudibus, 13.18 and 16.25–25.49.

27 Kreider, ‘Changing Patterns’, 41.

28 On the gesta as a response to earlier Christian literature, see Cooper, Kate, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 116–19 Google Scholar.

29 Passio Sebastiani 23 (ActaSS, II Ian., 268): ‘per unam fere horam splendore nimio de caelo veniente illuminatus est, & sub ipso splendore, candidissimo pallio amictus est ab angelis septem clarissimis, & iuvenis apparuit iuxta eum dans ei pacem, & dicens: Tu semper mecum eris’.

30 Passio Sebastiani 24 (ibid.): ‘Tunc B. Sebastianus dixit: Si ego verus Christi servus sum, & si vera sunt omnia, quae ex ore meo haec mulier audivit & credidit, iubeat Dominus meus Iesus Christus, ut redeat ad earn officium linguae, & aperiat os eius qui aperuit os Zachariae Prophetae sui; & fecit crucem in os eius. Atque ad hanc vocem S. Sebastiani, exclamavit mulier voce magna, dicens: Beatus es tu, & benedictus sermo oris tui…’.

31 Passio Sebastiani 24 (ibid.).

32 Passio Sebastiani 26 (ibid., 269).

33 Passio Sebastiani 51 (ibid., 273).

34 This point will be understood more clearly if and when a scholarly consensus emerges regarding the audience for the gesta: on this problem see now Clare Pilsworth, ‘Reading the Roman Martyrs: Rome, Campania and the Case of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 12634 + St. Petersburg Q VI 5’, in Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner, eds, Dynasty, Patronage, and Lay Authority in a Christian City: Rome, c.350–850(forthcoming).

35 For comparanda, see Stanley Tambiah, The Magical Power of Words’, Man 3 (1968), 177–206; P. L. Ravenhill, ‘Religious Utterances and the Theory of Speech Acts’, in W.J. Samarin, ed., Languages in Religious Practice (Rowley, MA, 1976), 26–39; Patricia Cox Miller, In Praise of Nonsense’, in A. Hilary Armstrong, ed., World Spirituality, Vol. 15: Classical Mediterranean Spirituality (New York, 1986), 481–505.

36 In a forthcoming essay on twelfth-century English miracle narratives, Simon Yarrow reminds us that ‘the miracle is performed each time it is retold’: The Negotiation of Community in Twelfth-Century English Miracle Narratives’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds, Elite and Popular Religion, Studies in Church History 42 (Woodbridge, 2006), citing M. Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East (London, 1982, repr. 2000), 75.

37 The phrase is from De catechizandis rudibus, 10, 15, as cited in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London, 1967), 161.

38 This Augustinian binary, taken up by Gregory the Great, is discussed in Conrad Leyser, Asceticism and Authority from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000), 177–81.

39 Liber ad Gregoriam, 4, ed. G. Morin, in Etudes, texts, découvertes (Paris, 1913), 383–439, 389, repr. in PL Supplement 3, 221–56.

40 Leyser, Asceticism and Authority, 59–61, with a summary of secondary literature since Eric Auerbach’s Literary Language and its Public in Late Antiquity, trans. R. Mannheim (London, 1965).

41 On the relation between this text and the Gesta martyrum, see Kate Cooper, ‘The Widow as Impresario: the Widow Barbaria in Eugippius’ Vita Severini’, in Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger, eds, Eugippius und Severinus: Der Autor, der Text, und der Heilige (Vienna, 2000), 53–64.

42 For discussion of the date and authorship of the Regula Magistri, see Leyser, Asceticism and Authority, 103, 108–17.

43 This is seen in the opening of the Rule, ‘O homo, primo tibi qui legis, deinde et tibi qui me auscultas dicentem, dimitte alia modo quae cogitas, et me tibi loquentem et per os meum Deum te convenientem cognosce’ (Prologus, 1), and again ‘Et intellige tu, homo, cuius admonemus intuitum, quia te per hanc scribturam admonet Deus…’ (Prologus, 16), La Règle du maître (vol. I, Prologue, Ch. io), ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 105 (Paris, 1964), 288 and 290.

44 Douglas, Mary, Introduction’, Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ASA Monographs 9 (London, 1970), xxv Google Scholar.