Peter Brown's The Cult Of The Saints

TITLE In the book The Cult of the Saints, Peter Brown explore the rise and function of the cult of the saints, and the religious practices and cultural life of people in the early church. Peter Brown opposes the popular “two-tiered model” and offers an alternative model. The “two-tiered model” is the theory that the cult of the saints was a “popular religion” and started by the “vulgar” bringing in their superstitious practices and the elite just have to succumb to it. However, Brown comes up with an alternative model, that the elite were actually the ones who were responsible for the rise of the cult of the saints. The elite, especially the bishops, were the original leaders of the cult of the saints. In order to more thoroughly explain Peter Brown’s alternative model, I will use three juxtapositions that best explain his thesis, and they are: the elite and the “vulgar,” heaven and earth, and proximity and distance. In the “two-tiered model” the belief is that the lower class, the “vulgar,” led to the rise of the cult of the saints, and that it was just the lower class misinterpreting, and twisting it. Brown cites Dean Milman who states that “As Christianity worked downwards into the lower classes of society, as it received the crude and ignorant barbarians within …show more content…
The saints were human, and they sinned, but that is why they grew so popular, because they are like us. And they served as a link between heaven and earth, between God and humans. And being in proximity with them, one is in the presence of the holy and the holy has a great deal of power. The “two-tiered model” and the belief that the rise of the cult of the saints was because of the lower class is wrong. It was actually just the opposite. It was the elite looking to gain power through the use of the saints and holy