Divine Fury (10 page)

S
O
P
OLYCARP, THE BISHOP
of Smyrna and a direct disciple of the apostle John, sealed his fate before the Roman proconsul in the year 155 CE. Promptly burned at the stake and run through with a sword, Polycarp triumphed as a martyr, earning the celestial glory of a saint by refusing to acknowledge the
genius
of the pagans.
¹

Polycarp’s encounter is a wonderfully concise illustration of the place of
genius
in the confrontation between pagans and Christians. It was hardly an isolated occurrence. Roman administrators used the oath as a test of allegiance during their periodic persecutions, and Christians gloried in their refusal to take it—with predictable results. “We certainly do not swear by the genius of the emperor,” the prominent theologian Origen declared in the early third century. “The so-called genius of the emperor is a demon . . . and we ought rather to die than to swear by a
wicked and faithless demon that commits sin with the man to whom it has been assigned.” Christians ought to render unto Caesar his due, but, as Origen’s contemporary, Tertullian, insisted, Caesar’s evil
genius
did not figure in the allowance. Still, in denying the
genius
’s authority, both men affirmed its existence and acknowledged its power, even as they called it by another name.
²

That ambivalence—belying at once affirmation and denial—would characterize Christian attitudes toward the pagan inheritance for centuries to come, sustaining a tension that continued well into the Renaissance. And so, even as they put forth powerful new models of the God-man Jesus Christ and those extraordinary individuals, the martyrs and the saints, who aspired to his perfection, they continued to countenance the
divinum quiddam
of the ancients. Reinventing divine possession and divinely planted power as gifts of the one true God, Christians searched for signs that set the Lord’s anointed apart. Prophets were possessed by the Holy Spirit. Saints and apostles kept the company of angels. And a beautiful mind that flowered in the light of God’s grace was seeded in a beautiful soul.

Christians thus conceived of their paragons in familiar terms. But they worried, too, about the dangers of a mind possessed. For to seek to be perfect as God was perfect was to expose oneself to the temptations of Satan; to court the divine fury that could lift one ecstatically to God risked calling forth the furies of the demons. The contrast was clear between a sorcerer and a saint, an angel fallen and an angel ascendant. But the line of separation was thin. The holy men of late antiquity who did battle with the demons understood that truth, as did the mystics and doctors of the medieval church, and the early modern magi, who strove, like Faust, to know God’s secrets and to speak with his angels in their cryptic tongue. The divine poets and artists of the Renaissance, finally, who moved in spaces that the saints had sanctified, recalled the
genius
and
ingenium
of the ancients. And in the persons of men like Michelangelo, they joined them together, bearing the pains of inspiration and the humors of their souls as they struggled to raise themselves to God by imitating his creation. Heirs to the
daimonic
powers of the ancient world and ancestors of the modern genius: they became men who would be more than men, for better and for worse.

In the fourth-century basilica of a Roman citizen and saint, we may still catch a glimpse of this nascent Christian model of transcendence that would develop into the Renaissance, a model of inspiration and grace, of the souls of human beings spectacularly endowed, possessing or possessed.

I
T CAME TO HIM IN A VISION,
he told his sister in a letter: the place where the bones of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius lay. Their remains had been lost since the second century at the time of their glorious deaths. They must be found now and moved to a fitting place of rest. And so the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, sent his servants to find the spot and clear away the ground, revealing, as in the dream, “two men of marvelous stature, such as those of ancient days.” The heads of the martyrs were separated from the bodies, but all the bones were perfect, and there was much blood. The witnesses assembled could feel the sacred presence, and as they stared in wonder, the “power of the holy martyrs” came upon them: one man was “seized and thrown prostrate”; others shuddered, shook, and cried out in reverence before this awesome sight.
³

There was a great new basilica being built in the city, and a tomb beneath the altar lay empty, intended for the bishop himself. The martyrs must have his place, the bishop announced. And so, born aloft in solemn procession, the relics were carried to their new home in what Catholics describe as a “translation.” Demons fled screaming from their hosts. A blind man, the butcher Servius, recovered his sight. The scripture was sound: “Whereas I was blind, now I see.” Others, too, would have their eyes opened by the power of these holy martyrs, these men who were more than men, saints touched and suffused by the Holy Ghost.

Unearthed on June 17, 386, the relics of Saints Gervasius and Protasius were deposed in the newly built Basilica Ambrosiana two days later. They lie there still. Ambrose’s friend Saint Augustine was on hand to observe the proceedings, and he attested to the healing of the blind man, adding that “several persons who were tormented by evil spirits were cured, for even the demons acknowledged the holy relics.”
⁴

Although little is known of the mortal lives of Gervasius and Protasius, their subsequent fortunes are well documented. For what is most extraordinary about their discovery and deposition is how they were later put to use. Twin overseers of the basilica, the men were embraced as its guardians—“protectors” and “defenders,” as Ambrose describes them—heroic “champions,” “soldiers of Christ.” They also served as intermediaries, conduits to the divine, who opened the eyes of those who beheld them to “the numberless hosts of angels” and the majesty of God. Their “patronage is powerful,” Ambrose affirmed. As he later declared in a sermon delivered on the third anniversary of their discovery, they were like two “good serpents” (
boni serpentes
) guarding the boundaries of their space.
⁵

The description of the martyrs as serpents is striking given the fact that the image generally recalls for Christians the snake in the Garden of Eden, who slides in the grass of human sin. But Ambrose’s reference in this case is literary, not scriptural. It is taken directly from a line in Virgil and evokes a classical connotation: that of the
genius loci
, whose venerable Roman symbol was the snake. The two good serpents, Gervasius and Protasius, Ambrose asserts, are good
genii
, guardians of the Basilica Ambrosiana, fathers attendant at its birth.

Ambrose was the first figure in Latin Christianity to use the term “patron” (
patronus
) in connection with Christian martyrs. Romans had employed the word to describe their own guardian protectors, whether men of power and influence, looking after their retainers, or
genii
, presiding over corporations and towns. Following Ambrose’s example, Christians extended the word’s sway to the martyrs, whose glorious deaths had singled them out as among God’s chosen. As they did so, they joined the description to another, employing a term that Saint Paul had used in the New Testament in reference to the righteous:
agios
in Greek,
sanctus
in Latin, words that literally meant “holy.” But as the word
sanctus
was applied in sermons and hagiographies extolling the lives and deaths of the Christian heroes, it began to take on the associations that it now has of “saint.” The martyrs were the first such
sancti
, “holy ones” endowed with special powers that set them apart from ordinary human beings. They could ward off demons, in death as in life, because their relics retained their sacred force. And they could intercede before God, petitioning on our behalf, because they stood close to his throne. Over time, other men and women remarkable for their holiness were added to the lists of the special dead. They, too, were remembered and invoked as saints, and the sites of their remains were venerated as loci of sacred power. Patrons and protectors, intercessors to the divine, the saints followed Gervasius and Protasius in assuming the role of the Roman
genius
of old.

That process of co-optation is well attested. With their conversion to Christianity, Roman emperors in the wake of Constantine proscribed the cult of
genius
, rendering the act of sacrificing wine to the god of birth an offense punishable by death. The old ways lingered, of course; Christian missionaries in Europe complained for centuries of their stubborn persistence, singling out such practices as throwing bread and wine into springs, placing shrines at crossroads, or otherwise honoring the
genius loci
of some local place. But gradually, in late antiquity, men and women transferred much of the language and longing previously reserved for the
genius, daimon
, and other invisible companions to the saint. The saint was the
genius
’s heir, watching over people and places
alike and protecting their human charges from birth until death. Saints bore messages and prayers, interceding for the people before God. And like the classical
comes
, saints were friends, consoling the afflicted and comforting the sick. Gradually, if steadily, the saints assumed prominence over their classical predecessors, and the signs of their triumph were abundant: in art and iconography, where the patron saint replaced the votive renderings of the
genius
; in the ubiquitous “lives of the saints,” which lovingly recounted the miraculous deeds of patron protectors; in the practice of assigning saints’ names to children at birth and ensuring that all, at baptism, acquired an individual patron; and finally, in the celebration of saints’ days—literally the anniversary of the saint’s death, but called, revealingly, their
dies natalis
, the day of their “birth” into heaven. The feast of one’s patron saint replaced the birthday, the
festum geniale
, as the principal day of celebration in individual and corporate lives. It was on this day that Christians sought to propitiate those who watched over them and who interceded before God on their behalf. By the Middle Ages, every soul in Christendom had a patron, and nearly every corporation, too—guilds, clubs, confraternities, cities, countries, platoons—each with its own little shrine or sanctuary, a private altar, image, or fragment of bone. Whereas Servius had once said of the Roman Empire, “nullus loci sine genio,” there is no place without a
genius
, now it could be said of Christendom, “nullus loci sine sancto,” there is no place without a saint.
⁶

But the patron saint was much more than simply a classical
comes
in disguise. Most obviously, the saint was a
human
mediator—indeed, very often a woman—of flesh and blood. All saints were dead, it is true, and so, strictly speaking, they were spirits of sorts, souls in the heavenly spheres until they would be reunited with their bodies at the time of the resurrection. But unlike the
genii
or
daimones
, the saints left their mortal remains behind, and those relics—venerated with tremendous passion throughout the Middle Ages—were a continual reminder that the saint had lived in flesh and bone, providing in death an image of the higher self that few could emulate but all might ponder or strive to attain. In this respect, the Christian saints resembled less the invisible companions of the ancients than a range of human exemplars common to different peoples at different times. Like legendary heroes, they underwent trials, tribulations, and tests, suffering bravely in self-sacrifice in the face of adversity. Like Hebrew prophets and bearers of the law, they were filled by the voice of God and aspired to follow his ways, striving like Abraham to lead lives of righteousness, or to keep God’s commands on the model of Moses, “the greatest and most perfect man that ever lived.” And like holy men
of many kinds—whether Hindu
sadhus
or Buddhist
bodhisattvas
—the saints embodied the ideals of their contemporaries while going beyond and even contradicting them in the service of a higher calling. Very often they conducted their quests in isolation, for the saints, like virtually all human paragons, were deemed to be persons apart.
⁷

In these and other ways, the Christian saint stood on a continuum of related types that encompassed the hero and the prophet and that one day would include the modern genius. And yet the saint was charged with another, and quite specific, demand. “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect,” Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew (5:48). The example of his life drove home the point. God had become man, appearing in flesh and blood as the embodiment of divine perfection and human striving, the conquering hero par excellence. He was a living reminder of what an individual charged with divine power could be. And so to take up his cross in imitation of his life was to strive to be godlike. There were precedents for that aspiration, to be sure. All Jews knew that God had formed man after his own image and in his own likeness, suggesting a certain approximation. And the ideal of the “divine man” was well known in the ancient world, where the gods were regularly portrayed in human form and where the highest human beings, such as Alexander or Caesar, claimed to be gods incarnate. Yet the Christian injunction was more explicit, more sweeping, and more direct. Strive to be perfect as God is perfect, to participate in God’s mystical body, to become a divine man like Christ. To aim for perfection in the
imitatio Christi
was to attempt to become God himself.
⁸