Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and Linda G. Jones
[Dato Achen, chief of Sulu] rampaged over the islands of Pintados and he caused significant damage. He captured Father Juan Domingo Vilancio of our Society of Jesus in Caliban, a native of Luca, a holy man, and known as such by the Indians and Spanish, and even by the Moors, who venerated him as such […] They buried Father Vilancio in the island of Joló, and even though we asked for his body, they do not want to return it, saying that they wanted to have it because he is a saint (for even the Moors and infidels esteem sanctity, and virtue) and add other issues as proof of his sanctity, which I do not refer to because they are not well established, and the Lord will want them to be clarified so that He may be glorified.1
Forgetting is the deadly enemy of saints, no matter how transgressive, inconvenient, embarrassing, infuriating, and uncontrollable they are.2 A common objective of the veneration of saints in all three monotheistic religions is the recovery and perpetuation of the collective memory of the saint.3 Sainthood depends on preserving the memory of those moral heroes whose thaumaturgical powers, extraordinary feats, charismatic gifts, and prodigies defy the laws of nature “quod substantiam.” Why do these saintly figures appear in so many different cultures? According to anthropologist Carles Salazar, the instruments religion uses to make itself credible come from ordinary life: “religious belief is, therefore, an ‘ordinary’ belief in a supernatural world or beings.”4 It follows that sainthood derives from the ordinary experiences of human communities. Because saints and sanctity are always for other people, we analyze the social contexts of the human communities that produce and venerate them, as well as the social and symbolic functions they fulfill within those societies.5
Perhaps the most basic of these functions, common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is to serve as heroic and ethical models. Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that the heroic deeds of saints are worthy of imitation. However, as some scholars argue, hagiographies – or “narratives about saints and the miraculous,” as Taylor has recently qualified it – are more complex than simply holding up paragons of virtue.6 In all three traditions there are many instances of saintly behavior that ought not to be imitated, but rather admired (the imitanda/admiranda distinction).7 Saints are key figures of collective memory who help to model patterns of social behavior.8 Their special relation to the divine, whether conceived of in terms of holiness or proximity to God, makes them an “object of veneration”9 and a channel through which the desires and needs of the community are potentially fulfilled. For this reason they have to be remembered as the heroes who defend the community from harm and whose recollection through collective rituals helps to constitute and reinforce community identity.10 Comparisons between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam exhibit important differences and similarities in their respective conceptions of sanctity; in the literary and cultural productions associated with the cult of saints and pious heroes; and in the social, historical, and political contexts in which sainthood operates. What mechanisms exist for making saints? Is the dynamic between local or unofficial saints and institutionally canonized saints unique to Christianity?11 Which models and saintly behaviors are common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in what ways do they differ? What functions do the saints fulfill in society? How does gender inform constructions of sainthood and patterns of saint veneration? How does the collective commemoration of the saint contribute to the formation of community identity? The purpose of this collection of essays is to answer these questions and fine-tune those answers by asking them of the three religions at different times and in different places.
Recent publications on sainthood, such as Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon’s Saints and Sanctity (Studies in Church History) (2011) and Robert Bartlett’s Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? (2013), are splendid surveys that have tackled some of these questions, although both focus exclusively on Christianity.12 Other scholars have undertaken binary comparisons between two of the three Abrahamic traditions. For instance, the volume coordinated by James Howard-Johnston and Paul A. Hayward, The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2002), paid homage to Peter Brown’s seminal research on the holy man in Syria and Egypt in late antiquity by not only broadening the scope of inquiry to include medieval Rus, Constantinople, and the Carolingian world but also by considering the differences between the concepts of sanctity in Christendom and the Muslim Mediterranean.
Thomas Sizgorich’s Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity (2009) examines ideological violence in the Christian and Muslim communities of late antiquity, arguing that it contributed to the development of parallels between Christian and Muslim ascetic martyrs. Straddling between Mediterranean and Islamic studies, Sizgorich analyzed the acceptability of violence and other forms of coercion as practical methods for the spread of the Christian and Muslim faith between the fourth and ninth centuries.13 By contrast, in The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (2002) Josef W. Meri utilized a comparative approach to the phenomenon of saint veneration to highlight “the relatively harmonious relations that existed between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Near East.”14
The editors of this volume believe that such questions and topics can only be addressed through comparative religious and anthropological approaches. Other scholarly books, such as Daniel T. Reff’s Plagues, Priests, and Demons, have also drawn on anthropology, religious studies, and history to understand why indigenous communities of northern colonial Mexico accepted Jesuit missionaries. Reff’s central thesis is that pagans in late antiquity and early medieval Europe (150–800) and the indigenous peoples in the Spanish New World (1520–1720) were attracted to Christianity through the Christian missionaries who offered spiritual and physical benefits (e.g., healings) to deal with new epidemic diseases, thereby facilitating the accommodation of indigenous religions to the cult of saints.15 Similarly, we seek to traverse a number of scholarly boundaries and break down the divisions between the medieval and the modern, and continuing down to the present.
Following the path of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine (London, 1990) and Josef Meri’s Cult of Saints, the editors’ comparative agenda seeks to explain how notions of sainthood have always, to an extent, been fluid.16 For most of their common history, the lives and traditions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been intertwined.17 As a result, sufficient points of contact exist among the three religious traditions to warrant a comparative exploration of a range of models of sanctity and their respective cultural expressions, and sufficient differences exist to make such a comparison interesting, viable, and necessary.18 Indeed, in some cases it is possible to speak not merely of “points of contact,” but rather of veritable cross-pollinations between religious cultures; for instance, we see the veneration of the same saint by diverse religious communities, or cultural borrowings in the forms and practices of veneration.
Sanctity is socially configured in a multiplicity of ways in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures. This diversity appears, for example, in the paucity of hagiographic texts in Jewish literature in comparison with Christian and Islamic cultures, in which hagiographic works proliferate, inhabit many genres, and share common, though not identical, propagandistic functions.19 This situation led to a scholarly debate over the existence of saints in Judaism. Thus, Robert L. Cohn locates sainthood on the periphery of biblical and rabbinic Judaism.20 The founding myths that Israel as a whole is a holy nation (cf. Ex. 19:6) and that Jews sanctify the world by scrupulously applying the law to their daily lives, together with Judaism’s radical aniconism and adverse stance toward venerating the dead, militated against the elevation of certain individuals above others as objects of devotion. Nevertheless, some individuals did become sanctified in Jewish collective memory and, in fact, as Cuffel and Meri argue, the veneration of these saints and the sacred places associated with them was not a peripheral, but rather a normative part of Jewish practice.21 For instance, the tombs of the matriarchs and patriarchs have been sites of pilgrimage and devotion since the Hellenistic period despite the censure of many rabbis. Miraculous powers, most notably the ability to bring rain, were ascribed to a number of the ancient rabbis.22 Hellenistic Jewish narratives of suffering, such as the Maccabean martyrs who died resisting Roman persecution, or Daniel’s death at the hands of Haman, the wicked prime minister of Ahasuerus (Targum Sheini on Esther, 4, 11), became venerated models. The virtuous deaths of these and later Jewish martyrs were memorialized in tales and incorporated into the liturgy; invoking their saintly “merits” could bring divine blessings to the entire community.23 At the same time, the veneration of mystics and messianic figures as saints became a feature of the religiosity of Jews residing in Muslim lands.24
The martyrdom of Jesus provided the essential paradigm of sanctity in early Christianity. Martyrs bore witness to their faith, thereby becoming model saints who imitated Christ’s death – imitatio Christi – and passion with exceptional suffering and devotion.25 While the sanctity of the martyr is acknowledged in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the holiness and piety focused upon the martyr’s blood are not exclusive Christian phenomena. Shi‘a devotional practices are very concerned with the blood of Husayn, rivaling, if not surpassing, anything in the Christian world.26
To understand how martyrs’ blood and saints perform socially cohesive functions, the contributors will focus on ritual practices and on material culture, bringing to the fore the veneration of Catholic and Islamic relics.27 Early Christian attempts to gather and preserve the remains of holy men and women were not an isolated phenomenon. If God’s presence on earth is manifested through the exemplary life – exemplum – of saints, their tertiary relics (rosaries, miraculous prints, saint’s personal objects, such as rings or handkerchiefs touched to saint’s corporeal fragments or objects) or brandeum (textile relics put into a box, or pyxide, which were placed near the body of the saint) extended their power years after their death, transforming everyday life and mundane places into sacred spaces. The power emanating from those material remains was the result of a tradition in Latin Christianity obsessed with an economy of the miraculous.28 Imperial legislation upheld the integrity of corporeal relics. However, it was not enforced and mortal remains of saints, or part of them (bones, robes, crosses), were soon disseminated in all directions.29 These coveted sacred objects elevated the prestige of Christian communities and functioned as totems around which community identity and memory were fashioned.30 This trust in miracles reinforced the attitude of Western rulers toward the possession and use of relics, fostering the production and distribution of them as consumer goods.31
As stated from the outset, this book focuses on the three monotheistic religions. The editors are fully aware that other monotheistic ethnic groups venerate relics as well.32 For instance, the Fang, a Bantu-language people originating from the savannahs of southern Sudan, also practiced a sort of monotheism – believing in the existence of an almighty god called Mebe’s. They preserve the skulls and bones of their ancestors in reliquaries known as Nsok, Nsok Malan, or Ngon.33 The Eyema byeri we...
