Indeed, to Augustine, the teaching of Pelagius that Christians might live without sin was not merely fantasy, but a pernicious heresy. It risked damnation for all who believed it. Men and women could not possibly, in a fallen world, attain perfection. The doctrine formulated centuries earlier by Jesus Ben Sirah, that Eve’s disobedience in Eden had doomed all her descendants to share in her original sin, had largely been forgotten by Jewish scholars; but not by Augustine. Every day was a day that demanded penance: not just prayers for forgiveness, but the giving of alms. Here, for everyone who could afford it, from the poorest widow to the wealthiest senator, was the surest way to expiate the fatal taint of original sin. Position and wealth, so long as those entrusted with them put them to good purposes, were not inherent evils. The wild demands of the more radical among the Pelagians, that all possessions be held in common, could be dismissed as a folly and a delusion. ‘Get rid of pride, and riches will do no harm.’35 Augustine’s message, in the centuries that followed the collapse of Roman rule in the West, was one that found many listeners. Amid the rubble of the toppled imperial order, it offered both to local aristocrats and to barbarian warlords a glimpse of how their authority might be set upon novel and secure foundations. If the old days of marble-clad villas were gone for ever, then there was now another index of greatness that might more readily win God’s blessing: the ability to defend dependants, and to grant them not just alms, but armed protection. Power, if employed to defend the powerless, might secure the favour of heaven.
The surest evidence of all for this, perhaps, was to be found at Tours. There, a century and more after Martin’s death, it was no longer his cell at Marmoutier that provided the focus of pilgrims’ devotions, but his tomb. All the reservations about his memory had long since been swept away. A succession of ambitious bishops had adorned the site of his burial with a great complex of churches, courtyards and towers. Over the tomb itself there glittered a gilded dome.* Here, dominating the approaches to Tours itself, was a monument that proclaimed an awesome degree of authority. Martin, who in life had shunned the trappings of worldly power, in death had become the very model of a mighty lord. As he had ever done, he continued to care for the sick, and the suffering, and the poor with manifold acts of charity; chroniclers of his miracles lovingly recorded how he had healed children, and provided for impoverished widows. Martin, though, like any lord in the troubled years that had followed the collapse of Roman order, knew how to look after his own. Even the most grasping kings, in dread of his potency, made sure to treat Tours with a certain grudging respect. Clovis, the Frankish warlord who in the last years of the fifth century had succeeded in establishing his rule over much of Gaul, ostentatiously prayed to Martin for his backing in battle – and then, after receiving it, sent him appropriately splendid gifts. Clovis’ heirs, the rulers of a kingdom that would come to be called Francia, tended to avoid Tours altogether – as well they might have done. Sensitive to the parvenu quality of their own dynasty, they knew better than to compete with the blaze of its patron’s charisma. When, in due course, one of them obtained the capella, the very cloak that Martin had divided for the beggar at Amiens, it fast came to serve as the badge of Frankish greatness. Guarded by a special class of priest, the capellani or ‘chaplains’, and carried in the royal train in times of war, it bore intimidating witness to the degree to which holiness had become a source of power. Martin’s death, far from diminishing his authority, had only enhanced it. No longer, as they had been back in Paul’s day, were ‘Saints’ held to be the living faithful. Now the title was applied to those who, like Martin, had died and gone to join their Saviour. More than any Caesar had been, they were loved, petitioned, feared. Amid the shadows of a violent and an impoverished age, their glory offered succour both to the king and to the slave, to the ambitious and to the humble, to the warrior and to the leper.
There was no reach of the fallen world so dark, it seemed, that it could not be illumined by the light of heaven.
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* A letter from Julian to Basil would subsequently be forged, in which the emperor expressed his admiration for the recipient.
* The reliability of this particular story, which was written two centuries after the events it describes, is hard to gauge. For what it is worth, a contemporaneous account makes no mention of the contest between the men of Poitiers and Tours.
* Assuming, that is, that the dome which in the tenth century was reported to have ‘glittered in the sun like a mountain of gold’ had already been gilded by the sixth century.
VI
HEAVEN
492: M
OUNT
G
ARGANO
The story brought from the mountain seemed scarcely believable. That a bull, wandering from its herd, had discovered the mouth of a cave. That its owner, indignant that the animal had gone rogue, had shot it with a poisoned arrow. That the arrow, its trajectory reversed by the blast of a sudden wind, had ‘struck the one who loosed it’. All this, reported by the peasants who had witnessed the miraculous event, left the local bishop intrigued. Anxious to make sense of what had happened, he embarked on a fast. After three days, a figure of radiant beauty armoured in light appeared to him. ‘Know that what happened,’ the figure told the bishop, ‘was a sign. I am the guardian of this place. I stand watch over it.’1
Gargano, a rocky promontory jutting out from south-eastern Italy into the Adriatic Sea, had long been a haunted spot. In ancient times, pilgrims to the mountain would climb its summit, and there make sacrifice of a black ram, before sleeping overnight in its hide. Glimpses of the future were granted in dreams. A soothsayer lay buried near by who, according to Homer, had interpreted the will of Apollo to the Greeks, and instructed them, at a time when the archer god had been felling them with his plague-tipped arrows, how to appease his anger. Times, though, had changed. In 391, sacrifices had been banned on the orders of a Christian Caesar. Apollo’s golden presence had been scoured from Italy. Paulinus, in his poetry, had repeatedly celebrated the god’s banishment. Apollo’s temples had been closed, his statues smashed, his altars destroyed. By 492, he no longer visited the dreams of those who slept on the slopes of Gargano.
His fading, though, reached back long before the conversion of Constantine. The same convulsions that, over the course of the third century, had inspired various emperors to attempt the eradication of Christianity had proven devastating to the cults of the ancient gods. Amid war and financial chaos, temples had begun literally to crumble. Some had collapsed altogether; others been converted into barracks or military storehouses. The decay witnessed by Julian at Pessinus had owed less to any crisis of faith than to the erosion of traditional patterns of civic patronage. Naturally, though, given the opportunity, some bishops had not hesitated to press for the coup de grâce. The hunger of the gods for sacrifice, for the perfume of blood on blackened altars, had never ceased to horrify Christians. Before their righteous and militant indignation, even the most venerable of cults had proven powerless. In 391, the endemic aptitude of the Alexandrian mob for rioting had turned on the Serapeum, and levelled it; four decades later, the worship of Athena had been prohibited in the Parthenon. Time would see it converted to a church. Nevertheless, despite loud Christian crowing, these celebrated monuments were the exceptions that proved the rule. No matter how much the biographers of saints might claim for their heroes the triumphant annihilation of a great swathe of temples, or their conversion to the worship of Christ, the reality was very different. Most shrines, deprived of the sponsorship on which they had always depended for their upkeep and rituals, had simply been abandoned. Blocks of masonry were not readily toppled, after all. Easier by far to leave them to weeds, and wild animals, and bird-droppings.*