Marcellus Empiricus - Religious Background

Religious Background

Marcellus is usually regarded as a Christian, but he also embraces magico-medical practices that draw on the traditional religions of antiquity. Historian of botanical pharmacology Jerry Stannard believed that evidence in the De medicamentis could neither prove nor disprove Marcellus’s religious identity, noting that the few references to Christianity are “commonplace” and that, conversely, charms with references to Hellenistic magic occur widely in medieval Christian texts. In his classic study The Cult of the Saints, Peter Brown describes and sets out to explain what he sees as “the exclusively pagan tone of a book whose author was possibly a Christian writing for a largely Christianized upper class.” Historians of ancient medicine Carmélia Opsomer and Robert Halleux note that in his preface, Marcellus infuses Christian concerns into the ancient tradition of “doctoring without doctors.” That Marcellus was at least a nominal Christian is suggested by his appointment to high office by Theodosius I, who exerted his will to Christianize the empire by ordering the Roman senate to convert en masse.

The internal evidence of religion in the text is meager. The phrase divina misericordia in the preface appears also in St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, where the reference to divine mercy follows immediately after a passage on barbarian incursions. Marcellus and Augustine are contemporaries, and the use of the phrase is less a question of influence than of the currency of a shared Christian concept. Elsewhere, passages sometimes cited as evidence of Christianity on closer inspection only display the syncretism of the Hellenistic magico-religious tradition, as Stannard noted. Christ, for instance, is invoked in an herb-gathering incantation, but the ritual makes use of magico-medical practices of pre-Christian antiquity. A Judaeo-Christian reference — nomine domini Iacob, in nomine domini Sabaoth — appears as part of a magic charm that the practitioner is instructed to inscribe on a lamella, or metal leaf. Such “magic words” often include nonsense syllables and more-or-less corrupt phrases from “exotic” languages such as Celtic, Aramaic, Coptic, and Hebrew, and are not indications of formal adherence to a religion.

The first reference to any religious figure in the text is Asclepius, the premier god of healing among the Greeks. Marcellus alludes to a Roman version of the myth in which Asclepius restores the dismembered Virbius to wholeness; as a writer, Marcellus says, he follows a similar course of gathering the disiecta … membra ("scattered body parts") of his sources into one corpus (whole body). In addition to gods from the Greco-Roman pantheon, one charm deciphered as a Gaulish passage has been translated to invoke the Celtic god Aisus, or Esus as it is more commonly spelled, for his aid in dispelling throat trouble.