There were two basic textual tropes for the death of a saint, excluding the martyrs of early
Christianity. The most common trope occurred if the saint was known to be a saint, or at least a very holy person, prior to their death. In these cases the end was seen coming, the saint often saw it, named its hour, and the death scene became the eye of a holy storm, such as that of Nikon O
Metanoeite, a preacher in the Peloponnese who died at the turn of the second millennium (Smith
2008:592). In the case of Nikon, crowds of the laity gathered close to the holy man to rip his clothes to shreds as he lay dying in order to gain some relic of the event (life of St Nikon, cited in Kazhdan et
al 1991). An additional example of this form of death is the fifth century death of the Anatolian saint
Daniel the Stylite (Daniel the Stylite: 95-102).
The second common hagiographical trope for recording the death of a holy man was that the death (and life) was written in retrospect because the person was found to be a saint after death. This was the case for the tenth century pious housewife, and later saint, Mary the Younger. It is in these descriptions of death and mortuary practices that the ready-to-hand fabric of mourning was made explicit, only later taken over by exceptional happenings. Mary died, and was interred. When the grave was re-opened her body was found to be uncorrupted at which point her saintliness was established and miracles were reported. Her relics were later moved and the miracles proliferated. This is the reflexive cycle of the transition of a pious person to a culted saint (The life, career, and
partial narration of the miracles of the blessed and renowned Mary the Younger: 11-29)This is the
Not all holy men and women became saints, and not all saints were acknowledged as holy within their lifetime. The ambiguity of the gap between these two things suggests that people were monitoring for saintly activity. Post-mortem behaviour which suggests someone might be a saint took the form of exuding sweet smelling odours (e.g. St. John the Almsgiver: 46), failure to
decompose (Mary the Younger: 12), signs, portents, miracles and visitations which occurred around the dead body of the potential saint; the deceased saintly body became a hotspot of holy activity. This is discussed more completely in section 4.2.
This does not work if the theology ascribed to comes from a tradition of thetnopsychism, and is materialist; a position which holds that there is no connection between living and dead and the dead and the souls of saints do not remember the other world. The cult of the saints was widespread, particularly in popular literature, reliquaries, pilgrim tokens, chapels dedicated to saints, and icons prolific in the Medieval Byzantine period. This suggests that the majority of the population ascribed to a more psychologically active conception of body and soul in which the one was incomplete without the other, and conscious of its loss.
The veneration of saints was practiced from the earliest Christian period with veneration of martyrs. The singular ‘cult’ is perhaps inappropriate here, as there was never a single cult in the same manner as there has never been a single orthodoxy. By the seventh century the cults of the saints were well established.
Cults of the saints
The veneration of saints, their relics and their icons lead to miraculous healings or other instances of divine power channelled through saintly physicality. The nature of the veneration of saints changed significantly with the iconoclastic controversy which began in the eighth century, and then again with the eventual triumph of Orthodoxy (the end of Iconoclasm) in 843. The iconoclastic controversy focused around the iconoclasts objecting to perceived worship of icons rather than God while the iconophiles held that there was a distinction between the icon and the prototype and that icons were used to channel prayer through the icons of the saints (Mansi XIII cited in Brubaker 1989: 33). This controversy redefined what it meant for a human to be sacred and what formed allowable expressions of power. Although iconoclasm never challenged the power of the saints directly, it was tied up in anxieties surrounding the worship of the one God, and the power that was his and his alone. This goes some way to explaining why the incidence of miracles lessened in a post- iconoclastic world (Smith 2008:588).
The saints in both Early and Medieval Christianity were exceptional examples of humanity, but they were still human. The relationship between the saintly body and soul was an idealised model for human body-soul relationships. What this means is that in the exceptional reactions to saintly bodies (the present-at-hand moments) which were more fully recorded than everyday ready-to-hand bodies, we see echoes of the ready-to-hand ideas of a normal human’s body-soul relationship. Primarily, the fact, and general acceptance of intercession encourages me to believe that the majority of the population ascribed to a theology where the body and soul remained connected even after death. As outlined above, in the psychologically active eschatological model the soul retains a sort of imprint of the physical body and appears in that form in visions of the afterlife even if at the moment of death homunculi appear as swaddled infants (Walter 1976:119). The soul as an infant appears an apt depiction if we take into account the close ties between birth, baptism, death and transformation and the frequency of infant baptism during the Medieval Byzantine period. The connection between the saintly body and soul, and the conscious state of the soul after death are implicit in the nature and practice of intercession. This makes it clear that a significant group of people (those who practiced intercessionary prayer) expected to be conscious after death. The Medieval Byzantine concept of intercession relies on an understanding of heaven as a
metaphorical court (or rather on the imperial court as a model of the heavenly one). Saints then fall into the Medieval Byzantine role of patrons, who push their subjects’ interests and argue on their behalf to higher powers. Intercession was achieved by prayers to the deceased saint, who heard them in heaven and acted on behalf of the person who prayed, sometimes appearing to them. The efficacy of these prayers was greatly increased if the prayers are channelled through a conduit to the saint, this was the post-iconoclastic function of icons, with the eyes acting as a window to the saintly soul. Relics, which were generally body parts, exuviae or materials which had close physical
proximity to the saints, acted in the same manner as the icons, enabling the prayer to reach the saint more easily – arguably because of the closelink between body and soul. This is one of the ways in which the practices surrounding saints give us insight into how members of cults of saints viewed both saintly and their own bodies.
In summary, the ready-to-hand things which the death of saints can tell us about the way Byzantines thought about death are as follows:
1. The souls of the dead remained conscious, remembering the physical world, even as they inhabited a spiritual one where the very special dead had privileged access to the divine. 2. The bodies of the dead were important, retaining links with the souls of the dead.
There are further implications here; the deliberate disturbance of the saintly dead suggests that for them at least, remaining intact was not important. Similarly the graves in churches, which contain many more than a single individual suggest that there too, bodily wholeness was not an issue for resurrection. Some of the more rural cemeteries however, where there is generally more space, seem to be strictly one occupant per grave, and even where there are two, the individuals were interred together and the bones not disturbed after the primary burial event. This distinction is explored in section 4.2. This suggests a separation between the way particularly holy and ordinary people were buried, and perhaps also a distinction in their personhood. Perhaps saints, being more holy and in some ways already partially ascended in their access to the divine in their role as intercessors, were higher up in the hierarchy and could take the chance that God will remember their physical body at the Day of Judgement.