The Cult and the Miracles

Within a few years of the finding of 415, fragments of Stephen’s relics had spread across the Mediterranean, and shrines (memoriae) sprang up to house them — in Jerusalem, in Constantinople, and across North Africa at Uzalis and Hippo. Augustine, who established a shrine in his own basilica at Hippo, devotes a long passage of City of God 22.8 to cataloguing the miracles reported at these relics, recording cures and even raisings as what he and his community attest. This file sets out the spread of the cult and the miracle-record, pinned to its sources, and the Orthodox theology of relics.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Protomartyr)

The Rapid Spread

The diffusion of Stephen’s relics after 415 was extraordinarily swift, carried by the well-developed late-antique traffic in the bodies of the saints. The principal relics remained at Jerusalem, in the church of Holy Zion and, by the mid-fifth century, in the great basilica north of the city built for the protomartyr by the empress Eudocia, who was a devoted patron of his cult and was herself buried near him (Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1982, 221–248). Portions traveled west with Orosius and others, reaching the Balearic island of Minorca (where the arrival of a relic in 418 is the occasion of the Epistola Severi), Constantinople (where relics were enshrined and the cult flourished under imperial patronage), Rome, and above all North Africa, where Augustine’s own diocese and the neighboring see of Uzalis became major centers of the protomartyr’s veneration (Clark, “Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen,” 1982; Hunt, 1982). The speed and reach of this spread make Stephen one of the first saints of the Christian East and West to be venerated, by his relics, across the whole Mediterranean within a single generation.

The Shrines of Africa: Uzalis and Hippo

Two African centers stand out in the record. At Uzalis, near Carthage, bishop Evodius — Augustine’s friend — received relics of Stephen and built a memoria for them, and a collection of the miracles worked there, the De miraculis sancti Stephani, was compiled in the 420s and circulated as a record of the wonders (the Miracula; cf. Augustine’s references). At Hippo, Augustine himself established a shrine of Stephen in his basilica, and from it he both preached his series of sermons on the protomartyr (Sermons 314–319, 382) and gathered the testimonies of cures that he would set into City of God. The African enthusiasm for the protomartyr’s relics is the immediate background of Augustine’s famous catalogue of miracles, and it shows the cult of Stephen at the moment of its first flowering in the Latin Church (Augustine, Sermons 314–319; City of God 22.8; WSA III/9–10).

Augustine’s Catalogue of Miracles

The fullest patristic record of the wonders at Stephen’s relics is Augustine’s, in City of God 22.8 — a chapter written precisely to answer the objection that the age of miracles had ceased, by adducing the miracles then occurring at the shrines of the protomartyr in his own diocese. Augustine names cures of the blind, of fistula and gout and demon-possession, and recounts at length two raisings of the dead reported at Stephen’s memoriae: a child crushed by a cart-wheel at Audurus, and another at Hippo; and, most circumstantially, the cure of the brother and sister of Caesarea in Cappadocia, Paulus and Palladia, afflicted with a trembling palsy, who were healed at the shrine of Stephen at Hippo during the Easter days while Augustine and his congregation looked on — an event Augustine had publicly attested before the people and recorded in a libellus (Augustine, City of God 22.8; trans. Dods, NPNF I/2). Augustine insists that these are recent, witnessed, and locally verifiable events, and that he reports only a fraction of what was attested.

These miracles are set down here as what Augustine and his community report and attest — the testimony of the City of God and the African shrine-records — and not as independently established historical facts, in keeping with METHODOLOGY §3.5. The historical datum is the existence and contents of the report; Augustine’s own care to name witnesses and circumstances is part of that datum, and is itself notable as an early instance of a bishop documenting miracle-claims. The Orthodox tradition receives such accounts as the witness of the saints’ continuing intercession through their relics, while the discipline of this guide is to pin them to the source that records them rather than to certify them.

The August 2 Translation

The Eastern Church keeps two principal commemorations of the protomartyr: his feast on December 27, within the Nativity octave, and the uncovering (translation) of his relics on August 2 (the Slavonic obretenie, “finding”) — together with a further commemoration of the translation of his relics from Jerusalem to Constantinople on or about September 15 in some calendars (the placements vary by tradition; see The Feast and the Nativity Octave). The August 2 feast directly commemorates the inventio of 415 and the honoring of the relics it uncovered — the liturgical memory of the day the protomartyr’s bones were given back to the Church (the church calendar and its feasts are set out in The Church Calendar).

The Orthodox Theology of Relics

The cult of Stephen’s relics is an early and richly attested instance of the veneration the Orthodox Church accords to the bodies of the saints — a veneration grounded in the Incarnation and in the sanctification of the body by the indwelling Spirit. The relics of the saints are honored, not worshipped: the worship (latreia) due to God alone is distinguished from the honor (timē, proskynēsis) given to the saints and their relics, exactly as the Martyrdom of Polycarp had already distinguished worship of Christ from love of the martyrs (Mart. Pol. 17; see St. Polycarp of Smyrna). The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) would dogmatize this distinction for icons and relics alike, and the keeping of relics in the altar at the consecration of every Orthodox church carries the principle forward to the present (on which see Icons and Iconoclasm). The protomartyr, whose relics were among the first to be venerated across the whole Church, stands near the head of this tradition as he stands at the head of the martyrs themselves.

See Also

References

  • Augustine of Hippo. City of God 22.8. Trans. Marcus Dods, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 2. (The miracles at the relics of Stephen; Paulus and Palladia; the raisings.)
  • Augustine of Hippo. Sermons 314–319, 382. Trans. in The Works of Saint Augustine III/9–10. Hyde Park: New City Press, 1994–95. (Preached at the shrine of Stephen at Hippo.)
  • De miraculis sancti Stephani protomartyris (the Uzalis miracle-collection), 5th c. (The wonders at Uzalis.)
  • Hunt, E. D. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. (The spread of the cult; Eudocia’s basilica.)
  • Clark, Elizabeth A. “Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen: The Partisans of Melania and Eudocia.” Church History 51 (1982): 141–156.