Prayer to Saints: Greek Cultural Influence on Early Christianity

The origin of identifying ‘saints’ apart from other believers and of praying to them originates from Greek culture (we might says 'Graeco-Roman' culture).  This is an example of how a culture might, and often does, influence Christian practices and faith.  The Reformation rightly rejected such accretions to Biblical Christianity.  The pressure to honour, even fear, dead ancestors is something Christians face in Africa and Asia today, and so the topic remains relevant culturally if not in Protestant rejection of the Roman Catholic practice.  This brief essay will examine the cultural practice in Greece as found in Plato's Laws.  Prayer to heroes was well-established in the culture before the early Church arose in the 1st century AD.

Plato, in laying down good practices for worship, says,

Next after these gods the wise man will offer worship to the daemons, and after the daemons to the heroes.  After these will come private shrines legally dedicated to ancestral deities; and next, honors paid to living parents (Laws 4.717b).

At this point in the dialogue, the Athenian spokesperson is saying that people must show honour where honour is due: first to the Olympian gods, then those of the Underworld, then to spiritual beings (daemons), then to heroes, and, he continues, (a families’) private, ancestral deities, then to living parents.   Elsewhere, the Athenian spokesperson in Plato’s Laws speaks of a ‘divine ancestor’ (1.630e).  Also, he says that property—statues, altars, temples, sacred glebes—should be set aside for a god, daemon, or hero (5.738d).

One can see that this is how the heroes of the past came to be associated with the gods.  The translator chose ‘worship’ in the quote given above for the word ‘orgiazein’, meaning to celebrate or pay ritual service to a deity.  The description is or actual worship for the gods and the dead heroes.  Notice the spiritual beings are worshipped along with the gods—something Paul explicitly rejects in Colossians 2.18 (taking the Genitive as objective).  The dead heroes are listed next, and then the ancestral gods: the heroes are given a divine status, listed between the daemons and ancestral gods.

The status of the dead heroes in Greek and Roman understanding was comparable to the ‘sons of gods’ (cf. Laws 9.853c, e.g.).  On the one hand, Graeco-Roman gods sometimes cohabited with humans, producing ‘sons of gods’.  Hercules’ father, for instance, was said to be Zeus, while his mother was a mortal named Alcmene.  Hercules famously was given challenges to attain a full status of divinity.  Purely human heroes, on the other hand, could be elevated to divine status.  The Roman senate would vote to make a deceased emperor a god, as in the case of Julius Caesar.  (This is why Augustus, whom the deceased and deified Caesar had adopted, was called ‘son of god’ while still living.  This imperial cult stood directly opposed to Jesus Christ, the true Son of God.)

Later in Plato’s Laws, the Athenian spokesman says,

Next to these, it will be most proper to sing hymns and praise to the gods, coupled with prayers; and after the gods will come prayers combined with praise to daemons and heroes, as is befitting to each (Laws 7.801).  

Such worship practices of the culture apparently and unfortunately influenced the early Church.

How did the Church correct these culturally inherited practices?  The Church was under pressure to conform.  First, Christians also needed to show honour, and they could do so to living persons in the Christian community (cf. Romans 12.10).  Yet not to honour the culture’s gods was considered ‘atheistic’, and not to honour the gods and the heroes of the past was a rejection of social norms and unpatriotic.  In the case of Roman emperors who were deified, not to sacrifice was also an act of political opposition.  This led to frequent persecution of the Church until the Roman Empire came under Christian control in the 4^th century. 

Already before that, certain Christians elevated their own dead heroes to the status not of divinity but of honour that distinguished them from other Christians.  These were called ‘saints’, and many of these saints had proven themselves in the ‘battle’ of martyrdom.  The martyrs were considered to be sinless through the second baptism of blood when they were slaughtered.  They were the Church’s heroes.  Others were not martyrs but also given a special status of sainthood.  The mother of Jesus was given a particularly special honour, and prayers were often said to her. She fulfilled a role missing in Judaism: a female goddess who, like Hera, Zeus’s wife, could represent women.  All this, I would argue, stemmed from the cultural context.  It certainly was not a feature of Old Testament or Jewish practice.

Second, the Church corrected the culture by not worshipping its gods or heroes but by praying to them.  The theology of praying to saints is more complex than this, having to do with a theology of works and merit as well as the notion of ‘purgation’ of dead Christians—purgatory==which also stemmed from Graeco-Roman views about the afterlife.  Yet the practice of praying to saints stood on its own apart from these other early Christian theological embellishments beyond Scriptural teaching.