Debating the Saints' Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great. By MATTHEW DAL SANTO.

Abstract

Near the end of the sixth century, a priest in Constantinople called Eustratius, the author of an encomiastic Life of Eutychius, the recently deceased patriarch, and later of a Greek version of the Life of the female Persian martyr Golindouch, composed a treatise on the state of souls after death. In it he defended the belief in the continued activity of souls after death against the idea that souls fell into a kind of sleep or, more radically, the theory that they ceased to exist altogether. In the 590s Gregory the Great also argued for the activity of souls after death in his fourth Dialogue on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers, a work arguing more broadly for the efficacy of saints in producing miracles. Gregory had been papal representative in Constantinople between 579 and 585–6, and retained his connections with individuals and issues in the eastern capital. He had also argued with the patriarch Eutychius about the state of the resurrection body. The debate about the continued existence of souls went to the heart of the cult of saints and belief in their miracles, in an age when collections of stories of such miracles attached to specific shrines or specific holy men were being produced in places as far apart as Constantinople, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. If it could be argued, for instance, that such miracles were really performed by God or by angels who merely impersonated the saints, the veneration of saints was in urgent need of justification.