Everlasting Bliss Later
Kyle Smith, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity
University of California Press, 384pp, £30.00, ISBN 9780520345164
reviewed by Josh Mcloughlin
Jesus told his disciples: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16:24–25). The opening gambit of Christianity is a death pact. Believers in return for giving up their earthly life for Jesus — and for the first Christians, that often meant a grisly death — were promised eternal life in the next. Suffer now, everlasting bliss later.
As Kyle Smiths shows in this illuminating and thoroughly readable new book, ‘Christianity is a cult of the dead’. After Emperor Constantine’s conversion, Christians were ‘emboldened to tell the history of the Roman Empire anew’, says Smith. In revising that past, writers fused history, horror, and folk myths to create martyrology, a mode that heavily influenced European literature and historiography as well as devotional culture. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History (early fourth century) was the ‘first to systematically gather and transmit’ the stories of early martyrs into a collection, thus ‘helping to establish a recognizable genre of Christian death literature’. Cult of the Dead reminds us that ‘the word saint is the Christian tradition most likely refers to a martyr — not a smiling Mother Teresa or garden gnome Francis with a bird on his shoulder’. Smith frames Christian history is one long morbid fascination: an obsession with the agonies and afterlives of the dead.
The book’s structure is thematic rather than chronological, to ‘offer readers an entertaining guide instead of a comprehensive survey’. Complemented by 16 sumptuous plates in full colour, as well as 29 black and white figures, Smith presents a compelling literary and visual history of martyrdom, from the oldest dated book in the world (written by a scribe at Edessa in 411, held at the British Library, and ending in a list of martyrs’ names) to contemporary artist Silouan Justiniano’s dazzling icons in gold and tempera.
We begin with the origin story of Christian martyrdom. The model, of course, was Jesus. But as Smith shows, the story of ‘Jesus the Martyr’ rests mainly on the Gospel of Luke. Whereas ‘Mark presents a fearful Jesus who goes to his death agitated and unwilling’ and, like Matthew, reports Jesus crying on the cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46), Luke’s Jesus meets death serenely, comforting the thief crucified alongside him that ‘today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43).
As an educated Greek, Luke may have been influenced by the noble deaths of Hellenic philosophers, for whom ‘dying was a public performance, part of a practical and embodied philosophy of life and death,’ says Smith. Socrates, who could have escaped execution, chose instead to spend his remaining time not fleeing but thinking, ‘philosophizing until the end’, just as Jesus died supplicating forgiveness for his tormentors (Luke 23:34).
Of Jesus’s earliest followers, only John was lucky enough to die of old age. The others are recorded (variously and sometimes contradictorily) as meeting grisly ends, including being crucified (Peter, Andrew, Philip, Jude) dragged through the streets by chariot (Mark), beheaded (James the Great, Paul), stoned to death (Stephen), stabbed (Mark, Thomas), skinned alive (Bartholomew), sawn in half (Simon the Zealot) burned (Matthias), or thrown from the Pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and clubbed for good measure to finish the job (James the Less). Saint Lawrence, being burned to death during the Valerianic persecution in 258, told his executioners: ‘Flip me over! I’m done on this side!’
In narrating these grisly histories, Eusebius upended the Roman historiographical focus on triumph in battle. The heroes of Christianity were not — as in Rome or Israel — military commanders but frail old men, steadfast women, innocent children. There was a democratising undercurrent to early martyrologies: a brutally murdered female slave could be just as holy, just as sanctified — perhaps even more so — than a bishop.
‘The Remains of the Dead’ shows how relics became central to devotion. Along with the Mass (a dramatic commemoration of Jesus’s last meal and execution) and Purgatory (the waiting room for the dead), venerating the dead was a central pillar of the medieval industry of intercession. After Helena, mother of Constantine, dug up the cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326–8, the relic and pilgrimage trade was transformed. Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem was its head of sales, encouraging pilgrimages and ensuring fragments of the true cross started appearing across the Roman world. Stories of miracles spread. The pious — or those that could afford it — started wearing holy remains about their persons. In 1238, King Louis of France paid 135,000 livres to his cousin Baldwin II (the last Latin emperor of Constantinople) for the crown of thorns — three times the cost of the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle built to house the relic.
Inevitably, the ‘big business’ of pilgrimage encouraged a bootleg industry as ‘martyrs’ relics were illegally sold, counterfeited, smuggled and stolen’. As Patrick Geary shows in his book Furta Sacra (1978, rev. 1991), thefts often preceded translations, bishops turning a blind eye to transgressions of the seventh commandment in exchange for a shiny new (old) relic for their cathedral. ‘The world’s first tourist guidebook’, says Smith, was probably Peregrinatio Compostellana, a ‘medieval Lonely Planet that advised travellers on local food and customs, safe river crossings, alternative routes and ancient relics’ along the Camino de Santiago.
In ‘The War for the Dead’, we learn how ‘Counter-Reformation Catholics began systematically excavating, studying, and even exporting Rome’s immense underground warehouse of relics’, drawn from the storehouse of remains in the city’s ancient crypts and catacombs. As Smith says, ‘the bones of those presumed to be early Christian martyrs were now unwitting conscripts in a religious war’. It was papal fundraising for a new cathedral in honour of Rome’s favourite saint and martyr that stoked Martin Luther’s fury against indulgences: those ‘get-out-of-jail-free cards’ Smith calls them, that absolved the sins of those living or smoothed the path of dead relatives through purgatory.
A combination of increasingly sophisticated historical research and bitter partisanship reinvigorated the field of martyrology. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs (first published in 1563, with three further editions in Foxe’s lifetime in 1570, 1576, and 1583 and many others afterwards) became one of the ‘pillars of the English Reformation’. In Italy, Antonio Gallonio, working under the great Cardinal Baronio (who had recently revised the Roman Martyrology in 1583) produced Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio (Treatise on the Instruments of Martyrdom, 1591), organised not chronologically or alphabetically, but by the brutal methods of killing meted out to the martyrs.
In the 17th century, Smith says, ‘the study of saints [. . .] changed’. Texts like Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), a 13th-century collection of hagiographies that rivalled the Bible in popularity, ‘eventually fell out of favour’ due to its crude ‘brew of fact, fiction, and fable’. In the Low Countries, a group of scholars led by Jean Bolland began to use the latest historical methods to rewrite the lives of the saints. Their travels resembled less impassioned pilgrimages than research trips today: ‘quests not for bones but for texts’, supplemented by ‘a voluminous correspondence with the librarians of Europe’, says Smith. In 1643, the Bollandists published Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints), an enormous collection of critical hagiographies still edited today. We have the obsession with the saints to thank for paving the way for such monumental achievements of collaborative scholarship as the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Smith's work will be of interest to both popular and academic audiences, although specialist readers may be disappointed at the lack of scholarly apparatus. As the ‘Notes for Further Reading’ state, the aim is ‘to gather a magpie’s collection of stories and scholarship and then distil some of it into an entertaining narrative for the general reader’. It’s a worthy aim. But it’s hard to see the use of a notes section that credits some of the scholarship Smith has used without citing specific pages (or publishers or years of publication). This criticism might best be aimed the publisher. Perhaps their worry was that foot or endnotes might scare off non-academic readers. But their absence prevents scholars from getting the most out of a work that could easily have appealed to both audiences.
Christianity's obsession with saints and martyrs understandably leaves Smith little room for comparative religion. But Cult of the Dead misses a chance to discuss attitudes to martyrdom in other faiths, especially in Islam. The Arabic shahīd and the Greek martyrios both mean ‘witness’, as well as ‘martyr’. The Qurʿān explicitly reaffirms the pact between believers and their God (with the same dichotomy between earthly death and heavenly life) that Jesus offered his followers. ‘Truly God has purchased from the believers their souls and their wealth in exchange for the Garden being theirs’, the ninth sūrah reads. ‘They fight in the way of God, slaying and being slain. [It is] a promise binding upon Him in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qurʿān. And who is truer to His pact than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made. That indeed is the great triumph’ (9:111).
The Shīʿah developed a sophisticated culture of mourning and commemoration following the martyrdoms of the first Imām of the Shīʿah and the fourth Caliph ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (reigned 656–661CE) and his son Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680CE). Like Christianity, Islam has a wealth of martyr narratives in poetry and literature, especially the Sufi ʾawliyāʾ ('the ones nearmost to God'), those mystics ruthlessly and suppressed, from within Islam as well as without. Whilst martyrdom arguably waned for Christianity after the Enlightenment, it enjoyed renewed importance in modern Islam in light of nationalist struggles across the Muslim world (continuing today in occupied Palestine) as well as the controversial link between shahīd and jihād (struggle) in militant interpretations of the faith. Even a quick nod to the wider influence of death cult logic might have offered a broader perspective and placed Christianity in the context of its neighbour religions.
Cult of the Dead promises to tell the story of Christianity’s fetish for death from antiquity to the present. It does a wonderful job — but it is light on developments after the 17th century. It would have been valuable to discuss the modern dimensions of sainthood and controversies surrounding decanonisation, such as Little Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255), whose ‘martyrdom’ was declared a fiction by the Anglican Church in 1955; and Simon of Trent (d. 1475), who was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1965 by Pope Paul VI — both were at the centre of antisemitic blood libels. What of the 400-odd Martyrs of Japan, 42 of which were canonised after being executed, mostly during the Tokugawa shogunate? Or the controversies surrounding Saint Teresa, who was criticised by Christopher Hitchens (no friend to the Church it must be said) in 2003 for believing that ‘suffering was a gift from God’, instead of using some of the millions donated to her clinics to ease pain and provide palliative care? What about the continuing persecution of Christians such as the genocide of Assyrian Christians in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Libya by the Islamic State from 2016 onwards?
But these gripes do not detract from what is, overall, a fantastic book. Smith has succeeded in retelling a familiar history in a fresh and exciting way with wit, sympathy, and a fine balance of erudition and entertainment.
As Kyle Smiths shows in this illuminating and thoroughly readable new book, ‘Christianity is a cult of the dead’. After Emperor Constantine’s conversion, Christians were ‘emboldened to tell the history of the Roman Empire anew’, says Smith. In revising that past, writers fused history, horror, and folk myths to create martyrology, a mode that heavily influenced European literature and historiography as well as devotional culture. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History (early fourth century) was the ‘first to systematically gather and transmit’ the stories of early martyrs into a collection, thus ‘helping to establish a recognizable genre of Christian death literature’. Cult of the Dead reminds us that ‘the word saint is the Christian tradition most likely refers to a martyr — not a smiling Mother Teresa or garden gnome Francis with a bird on his shoulder’. Smith frames Christian history is one long morbid fascination: an obsession with the agonies and afterlives of the dead.
The book’s structure is thematic rather than chronological, to ‘offer readers an entertaining guide instead of a comprehensive survey’. Complemented by 16 sumptuous plates in full colour, as well as 29 black and white figures, Smith presents a compelling literary and visual history of martyrdom, from the oldest dated book in the world (written by a scribe at Edessa in 411, held at the British Library, and ending in a list of martyrs’ names) to contemporary artist Silouan Justiniano’s dazzling icons in gold and tempera.
We begin with the origin story of Christian martyrdom. The model, of course, was Jesus. But as Smith shows, the story of ‘Jesus the Martyr’ rests mainly on the Gospel of Luke. Whereas ‘Mark presents a fearful Jesus who goes to his death agitated and unwilling’ and, like Matthew, reports Jesus crying on the cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46), Luke’s Jesus meets death serenely, comforting the thief crucified alongside him that ‘today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43).
As an educated Greek, Luke may have been influenced by the noble deaths of Hellenic philosophers, for whom ‘dying was a public performance, part of a practical and embodied philosophy of life and death,’ says Smith. Socrates, who could have escaped execution, chose instead to spend his remaining time not fleeing but thinking, ‘philosophizing until the end’, just as Jesus died supplicating forgiveness for his tormentors (Luke 23:34).
Of Jesus’s earliest followers, only John was lucky enough to die of old age. The others are recorded (variously and sometimes contradictorily) as meeting grisly ends, including being crucified (Peter, Andrew, Philip, Jude) dragged through the streets by chariot (Mark), beheaded (James the Great, Paul), stoned to death (Stephen), stabbed (Mark, Thomas), skinned alive (Bartholomew), sawn in half (Simon the Zealot) burned (Matthias), or thrown from the Pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and clubbed for good measure to finish the job (James the Less). Saint Lawrence, being burned to death during the Valerianic persecution in 258, told his executioners: ‘Flip me over! I’m done on this side!’
In narrating these grisly histories, Eusebius upended the Roman historiographical focus on triumph in battle. The heroes of Christianity were not — as in Rome or Israel — military commanders but frail old men, steadfast women, innocent children. There was a democratising undercurrent to early martyrologies: a brutally murdered female slave could be just as holy, just as sanctified — perhaps even more so — than a bishop.
‘The Remains of the Dead’ shows how relics became central to devotion. Along with the Mass (a dramatic commemoration of Jesus’s last meal and execution) and Purgatory (the waiting room for the dead), venerating the dead was a central pillar of the medieval industry of intercession. After Helena, mother of Constantine, dug up the cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326–8, the relic and pilgrimage trade was transformed. Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem was its head of sales, encouraging pilgrimages and ensuring fragments of the true cross started appearing across the Roman world. Stories of miracles spread. The pious — or those that could afford it — started wearing holy remains about their persons. In 1238, King Louis of France paid 135,000 livres to his cousin Baldwin II (the last Latin emperor of Constantinople) for the crown of thorns — three times the cost of the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle built to house the relic.
Inevitably, the ‘big business’ of pilgrimage encouraged a bootleg industry as ‘martyrs’ relics were illegally sold, counterfeited, smuggled and stolen’. As Patrick Geary shows in his book Furta Sacra (1978, rev. 1991), thefts often preceded translations, bishops turning a blind eye to transgressions of the seventh commandment in exchange for a shiny new (old) relic for their cathedral. ‘The world’s first tourist guidebook’, says Smith, was probably Peregrinatio Compostellana, a ‘medieval Lonely Planet that advised travellers on local food and customs, safe river crossings, alternative routes and ancient relics’ along the Camino de Santiago.
In ‘The War for the Dead’, we learn how ‘Counter-Reformation Catholics began systematically excavating, studying, and even exporting Rome’s immense underground warehouse of relics’, drawn from the storehouse of remains in the city’s ancient crypts and catacombs. As Smith says, ‘the bones of those presumed to be early Christian martyrs were now unwitting conscripts in a religious war’. It was papal fundraising for a new cathedral in honour of Rome’s favourite saint and martyr that stoked Martin Luther’s fury against indulgences: those ‘get-out-of-jail-free cards’ Smith calls them, that absolved the sins of those living or smoothed the path of dead relatives through purgatory.
A combination of increasingly sophisticated historical research and bitter partisanship reinvigorated the field of martyrology. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs (first published in 1563, with three further editions in Foxe’s lifetime in 1570, 1576, and 1583 and many others afterwards) became one of the ‘pillars of the English Reformation’. In Italy, Antonio Gallonio, working under the great Cardinal Baronio (who had recently revised the Roman Martyrology in 1583) produced Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio (Treatise on the Instruments of Martyrdom, 1591), organised not chronologically or alphabetically, but by the brutal methods of killing meted out to the martyrs.
In the 17th century, Smith says, ‘the study of saints [. . .] changed’. Texts like Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), a 13th-century collection of hagiographies that rivalled the Bible in popularity, ‘eventually fell out of favour’ due to its crude ‘brew of fact, fiction, and fable’. In the Low Countries, a group of scholars led by Jean Bolland began to use the latest historical methods to rewrite the lives of the saints. Their travels resembled less impassioned pilgrimages than research trips today: ‘quests not for bones but for texts’, supplemented by ‘a voluminous correspondence with the librarians of Europe’, says Smith. In 1643, the Bollandists published Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints), an enormous collection of critical hagiographies still edited today. We have the obsession with the saints to thank for paving the way for such monumental achievements of collaborative scholarship as the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Smith's work will be of interest to both popular and academic audiences, although specialist readers may be disappointed at the lack of scholarly apparatus. As the ‘Notes for Further Reading’ state, the aim is ‘to gather a magpie’s collection of stories and scholarship and then distil some of it into an entertaining narrative for the general reader’. It’s a worthy aim. But it’s hard to see the use of a notes section that credits some of the scholarship Smith has used without citing specific pages (or publishers or years of publication). This criticism might best be aimed the publisher. Perhaps their worry was that foot or endnotes might scare off non-academic readers. But their absence prevents scholars from getting the most out of a work that could easily have appealed to both audiences.
Christianity's obsession with saints and martyrs understandably leaves Smith little room for comparative religion. But Cult of the Dead misses a chance to discuss attitudes to martyrdom in other faiths, especially in Islam. The Arabic shahīd and the Greek martyrios both mean ‘witness’, as well as ‘martyr’. The Qurʿān explicitly reaffirms the pact between believers and their God (with the same dichotomy between earthly death and heavenly life) that Jesus offered his followers. ‘Truly God has purchased from the believers their souls and their wealth in exchange for the Garden being theirs’, the ninth sūrah reads. ‘They fight in the way of God, slaying and being slain. [It is] a promise binding upon Him in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qurʿān. And who is truer to His pact than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made. That indeed is the great triumph’ (9:111).
The Shīʿah developed a sophisticated culture of mourning and commemoration following the martyrdoms of the first Imām of the Shīʿah and the fourth Caliph ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (reigned 656–661CE) and his son Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680CE). Like Christianity, Islam has a wealth of martyr narratives in poetry and literature, especially the Sufi ʾawliyāʾ ('the ones nearmost to God'), those mystics ruthlessly and suppressed, from within Islam as well as without. Whilst martyrdom arguably waned for Christianity after the Enlightenment, it enjoyed renewed importance in modern Islam in light of nationalist struggles across the Muslim world (continuing today in occupied Palestine) as well as the controversial link between shahīd and jihād (struggle) in militant interpretations of the faith. Even a quick nod to the wider influence of death cult logic might have offered a broader perspective and placed Christianity in the context of its neighbour religions.
Cult of the Dead promises to tell the story of Christianity’s fetish for death from antiquity to the present. It does a wonderful job — but it is light on developments after the 17th century. It would have been valuable to discuss the modern dimensions of sainthood and controversies surrounding decanonisation, such as Little Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255), whose ‘martyrdom’ was declared a fiction by the Anglican Church in 1955; and Simon of Trent (d. 1475), who was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1965 by Pope Paul VI — both were at the centre of antisemitic blood libels. What of the 400-odd Martyrs of Japan, 42 of which were canonised after being executed, mostly during the Tokugawa shogunate? Or the controversies surrounding Saint Teresa, who was criticised by Christopher Hitchens (no friend to the Church it must be said) in 2003 for believing that ‘suffering was a gift from God’, instead of using some of the millions donated to her clinics to ease pain and provide palliative care? What about the continuing persecution of Christians such as the genocide of Assyrian Christians in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Libya by the Islamic State from 2016 onwards?
But these gripes do not detract from what is, overall, a fantastic book. Smith has succeeded in retelling a familiar history in a fresh and exciting way with wit, sympathy, and a fine balance of erudition and entertainment.