In the preface to Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, Kyle Smith confesses that the impetus to write this book came, in part, from a conversation with an antiquarian book dealer who was in possession of an early 20th-century English translation of an old Italian volume that illustrated “every conceivable way that early Christian martyrs might have had their flesh torn, butchered, or burned” (xvi). The author of the original had been a Catholic priest; its translator, by contrast, was a noted publisher of “late Victorian porn.” The opening anecdote winks at the modern reader’s suspicion that there is something prurient, even sadistic, about the reverence that Christians of bygone centuries showed for the sufferings of their saints. If Christian martyrs, their torturous deaths, and the relics they left behind remain objects of fascination in the 21st century, they are also the source of some embarrassment. The great accomplishment of Smith’s book is that it manages to both revel in the macabre appeal of the martyrs, and, at the same time, take the Christian cult of the dead sympathetically and seriously.
Over the course of eight chapters, Smith guides his readers through nearly two thousand years of Christian thinking about the special dead. He begins with Jesus and his closest companions, the apostles, all but one of whom were remembered as having died for the faith (19). Smith argues that it is in Jesus’ crucifixion, as narrated by the Gospel of Luke, that the roots of the Christian martyrdom are to be found. Here Jesus is presented as a second Socrates, “an innocent and impassive martyr in the mold of that most self-assured of the ancient Greek philosophers” (2). In Luke, Jesus’ death is not a tragedy, but a template for others to follow—which, beginning with Stephen, whose stoning is depicted in the Luke’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, they surely do (31).
The desire to remember the names and manner of death of those killed for Christ’s sake, and to fix their memory in the life and rhythms of the Church, was the driving force behind early Christian historiography. The annual recitation of the martyrs’ places and dates of death, their “hagiographic coordinates,” constituted “a form of communal storytelling” (45). Citing Clifford Geertz’s famed definition of culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” Smith contends that “the culture of ancient and medieval Christianity grew out of the twinned storytelling tradition about the martyrs” as both icons of individual perseverance and the collective triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire (51). Telling these stories inspired new Christian ways of defining time, space, and health through the celebration of martyrs’ feasts, the establishment of pilgrimage routes, and the attestation of miraculous healing attributed to the martyr’s relics.
Smith knows that the practices of medieval Christian piety sound strange, even discomfiting, to modern ears. In one particularly arresting passage, he narrates the enclosure liturgy used in 12th century England to ritually confine anchoress nuns to their anchorholds—tiny cells attached to the walls of churches, monasteries, or even city walls—where they would then spend the rest of their earthly lives in a form of “living entombment” (139). While never discounting the physical and psychological strain inherent in enclosure, he also illumines the power that such an extreme form of asceticism conferred upon the enclosed (145). Similarly, while acknowledging that the veneration of relics has been an object of derision since the Protestant Reformation, he counters by drawing a comparison with modern sports fans who enthusiastically acquire game-used gear, and even the dirt of decommissioned baseball stadiums, in order to gain some material artifact of the bodily presence of their heroes. In light of this, Smith asks, “Is the cult of saint’s relics really that hard to understand?” He reminds his readers that medieval Christians took seriously the doctrine of the incarnation, “that uncomfortable paradox at the heart of Christian theology, [that] insists that the divine became flesh and that Jesus too once spit and sweated.” If the dirt that soaks up the spit and sweat of professional athletes is valuable, why not that of the saints, those ancient heroes of the faith?
Cult of the Dead is not aimed at an academic audience, nor does it claim to present new research. Still, Kyle Smith’s deep knowledge of the relevant primary sources and secondary literature shines through on every page. Even seasoned scholars of Christian martyrology and hagiography are likely to learn something from the “magpie’s collection of stories and scholarship” that Smith has gathered (273). It is therefore somewhat disappointing that the book does not include endnotes or footnotes to document its sources, offering instead one to two pages of “notes for further reading” for each chapter at the end of the book. Although an understandable choice given its intended general audience, the lack of documentation of sources poses a problem for assigning it in an introductory-level undergraduate course, for which it would otherwise be well-suited. This is a book that deserves to be read, and one hopes that it will find its intended popular audience in spite of its release by a university press.
Jennifer Otto is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Jennifer Otto
Date Of Review:
December 23, 2023
