Download PDF | Koen De Temmerman, Julie Van Pelt, Klazina Staat (eds) - Constructing Saints in Greek and Latin Hagiography_ Heroes and Heroines in Late Antique and Medieval Narrative-Brepols, 2023.
186 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book originates from a conference entitled ‘Holy Hero(in)es. Literary Constructions of Heroism in Late Antique and Early Medieval Hagiography, which was organized by the editors at Ghent University in 2016. It was part of the research project ‘Novel Saints. Studies in Ancient Fiction and Hagiography’, which was dedicated to the study of late antique and medieval hagiography as narrative. We thank all colleagues who submitted abstracts and look back with gratitude at the inspiring presentations and conversations with those present at the conference. We are equally grateful to Johan Leemans, Vinciane Pirenne, and Marc Van Uytfanghe, who kindly agreed to be on the academic advisory board of the conference. Our thanks also go to the Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, whose venue in Ghent was the setting for the conference.
We wish to extend our warmest thanks to the contributors of this book for their inspiring chapters, hard work, and pleasant collaboration. We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewer at Brepols for valuable comments on and wise suggestions for improving the original manuscript. We are also grateful to Lotte Van Olmen for her help in preparing the bibliography of this book, to Mathijs Clement, Merel Van Nieuwerburgh and Marthe Nemegeer for editorial support and to Anke Timmermann for proofreading and language-editing. Finally, we wholeheartedly thank Guy Carney, publishing manager at Brepols, for his interest in our work and his support.
Both this book and the conference from which it originates have received generous financial support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013; Starting Grant Agreement no. 337344, and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Consolidator Grant Agreement no. 819459). The book also benefitted from the Junior Postdoctoral Fellowships awarded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) to Klazina Staat (grant agreement no. 1232820N) and Julie Van Pelt (grant agreement no. 1206221N).
Note on Editorial Choices and Abbreviations
In order to distinguish the two current meanings of the word ‘life’ (both ‘the period from birth to death’ and ‘biography’ ), we capitalize it (‘Life’, plural ‘Lives’) when it is a synonym of ‘biography’ or ‘description of one’s life. We similarly disambiguate ‘martyrdom’ /‘passion’ (the event or concept) and ‘Martyrdom’/‘Passion’ (the account). For reasons of internal consistency across the book, English spelling is used for names of places, persons, and literary works where common. If there is no common English spelling, Latinized spelling or Greek transcriptions are used depending on the context of the literary tradition in question (e.g. Athanasios of Alexandria, Sulpicius Severus). References to titles of specific works (or parts thereof) are not only capitalized but also italicized (e.g. Passion of Babylas).
The abbreviations of Greek/Byzantine Christian texts are derived from Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon (PGL). Other Greek and Latin texts and authors are cited using the conventions of the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD) or otherwise the Greek-English Lexicon edited by Liddell, Scott, Jones, and McKenzie (LSJ, for Greek), and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (for Latin). Books of the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, and apocrypha) are abbreviated according to the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style, 2nd edition (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014). In the bibliography, abbreviations of periodicals used are those of L’Année Philologique. Other abbreviations will be explained in the context. In addition, this book uses the following abbreviations.
Saints, Narratives, and Hero(in)es
Scholarship, Definitions, and Concepts
Narratives
In the broadest terms, this book examines late antique and medieval hagiography — a modern umbrella term to which I return below — as narrative.’ Historically speaking, this approach has only been established relatively recently in the field. For a long time after its emergence in the CounterReformation, scholarship on hagiography was driven both by a distinct interest in questions of authorship and authenticity, and by a tendency to mine texts for factually reliable data about persecutions, cults of saints, and liturgical practices.” This intellectual bias towards authenticity and historicity had profound consequences for the study of hagiography well into the twentieth century. The study of martyr accounts is a case in point. On the one hand, a disproportionate amount of attention has traditionally been paid to the earliest accounts,> which were written close to the time of the persecutions that they (purport to) describe (i.e. dating from the second, third, and early fourth centuries) and were therefore thought to provide fairly reliable historical documentation for them. On the other hand, later accounts (i.e. those written long after the persecutions) have typically received much less attention. Both their remoteness in time and the fact that they are more imaginative as well as more complex and elaborate in their narrative were reason enough for scholars to look at them with suspicion.* The state of scholarship on martyr acts, in other words, has been impacted significantly by scholars’ traditional concern with ‘separating the historical wheat from the fictional chaff’, as two scholars put it eloquently in a recent study on hagiography.®
Nowhere is the systematic neglect of accounts that were felt to be too imaginative to be historically reliable more visible than in editorial practice: the Bollandists published no fewer than sixty-eight volumes of editions of late antique and medieval hagiographical texts in their ‘Acta Sanctorum’ between 1634 and 1940. (They also published a number of supporting series, such as ‘Analecta Bollandiana’ and ‘Subsidia hagiographica’) The subsequent identification of an ever-increasing number of these texts as ‘not authentic’ or ‘spurious’, however, prevented their inclusion in later editions.° Even when an influential Bollandist like Hippolyte Delehaye criticized the decision to include only historically reliable Lives in the ‘Acta Sanctorum and suggested that literary interests (‘T’intérét littéraire’)” would be better served by a more inclusive approach,’ the editors were slow to act.
Since the mid-twentieth century, although the quest for factual accuracy and authenticity no longer monopolizes scholarship, the historical interest has remained largely dominant in the field, and ample attention has been paid to hagiographical writings as sources for social history, theology, church history, and the history of gender and sexuality.’ Less attention has been paid to narrative qualities of hagiography in their own right.’° James Corke-Webster and Christa Gray sensibly look for an explanation for this tendency in the hagiographical texts themselves,” which generally are not only full of theological overtones, but also reveal their edifying purposes via a strongly moral and didactic agenda, all of which may be difficult to square with modern literary concerns. At the same time, another part of the explanation may lie in the traditional classifications of modern-day academia. Classicists and ancient historians, for example, have been studying the narrative qualities of texts fora long time, but until the 1970s those venturing into Late Antiquity mainly paid attention to pagan authors while leaving Christian literature from the same period largely to church historians and theologians.” Even though this situation has changed dramatically, especially since the publication of Peter Brown's 1971 work The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, and even though Late Antiquity has long been studied in more integrated ways through pagan, Christian, and Jewish documents alike, this change has not always impacted research on hagiography, where some traditions continue to receive more attention than others, as I have observed above.
In this book we approach hagiographical accounts as narrative constructions meriting scholarly attention in their own right, thereby inscribing ourselves in, and contributing to, a growing body of relatively recent scholarship. Over time more scholars have realized that reading hagiographical accounts simply as repositories of historical facts may not be the most productive way forward, and have rightly suggested that historical accuracy may, in fact, not even have been the authors’ primary concern.* Such insights have contributed to the development of a scholarly rationale which increasingly values imaginative and fictional aspects of hagiography, for example for answering broader questions about narrative creativity and ideology.’
Furthermore, scholars of Late Antiquity have emphasized that an investigation of textual and rhetorical qualities of discourse can enhance our understanding of texts and their contexts — an insight introduced into early Christian studies by Averil Cameron’ and picked up in this book, specifically in Part 11, where individual chapters examine how hagiographical accounts mobilize and capitalize on both literary and rhetorical traditions. Even thirty years ago Cameron stated that the kind of post-structuralist analysis that had been common in the study of the gospels for some time (and in New Testament studies more generally) ‘crie[d] out to be carried over into other early Christian literature:"® This insight has impacted the study of early Christian prose narrative of the second and third centuries, such as the apocryphal acts of the apostles, the Ps.-Clementines, and (some) early martyr acts to some degree.’” Since both the gospels and the acts of the apostles (both canonical and apocryphal) provided models and motifs for later hagiography, it is not surprising that these texts and their scholarship have, in turn, proved inspirational for the study of hagiography.’®
Even so, the apparatus of narratological analysis is only beginning to be introduced into the latter field.’? Admittedly, there has been no shortage in recent decades of journal articles and book chapters that, in one way or another, examine the narrative qualities of individual hagiographical accounts for specific purposes.”° There are even a few (edited) books dedicated to this broad approach, but none of these has our specific thematic focus, to which I return below. In one fine example, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy map several textual and narrative qualities of hagiography in relation to historiography specifically and explore what the overlaps between the two genres can tell us about how authors reconstructed the past.” A recent volume edited by Christoph Brunhorn, Peter Gemeinhardt, and Maria Munkholt Christensen is comparable to the previous in that it also examines hagiographical accounts as literary rather than historical texts (‘als literarische Texte; italics original) and asks which intertextual and narrative strategies are used to tell stories about saints.” It is significant that the contributions to the latter book are presented metaphorically as ‘exploratory drills for oil’ (‘Probebohrungen’),”3 a metaphor aptly capturing the notion of hagiography as a vast reservoir of material waiting to be unearthed and explored in detail. The common focus of both the work of Papaconstantinou, Debié, and Kennedy and that of Brunhorn, Gemeinhardt, and Munkholt Christensen, namely the questions of how stories are told and how story-worlds are (re)constructed,”* is shared by this present volume, but unlike the volumes mentioned, this book explores these questions specifically to address the narrative (re)construction of characters.
Another rich, solid, and recent book-length treatment of narrativity, textuality, and discursivity in late antique hagiography is the collection of articles edited by Christa Gray and James Corke-Webster.”5 Like Brunhorn, Gemeinhardt, and Munkholt Christensen (and like the present book), they explore ‘the decisions that authors of successive hagiographical works made about writing, selecting, arranging, and presenting their material’ and analyse ‘the forms and structures chosen to shape and reshape the material presented’ Whereas Corke-Webster and Gray aim to trace a ‘process of evolution’ underlying hagiographical discourses and thus see their book as ‘a study of development’ that largely encompasses not just saints, but also authors and audiences,” we focus more strictly on narrative constructions of saints within individual texts.
Hagiography
Before clarifying the thematic approach of this volume, it is necessary to introduce the corpus of texts that we address, particularly the notoriously vague concept of hagiography. Whereas scholars agree that it is important to understand saints in the study of Late Antiquity,”* opinions differ on what exactly hagiography is. The Greek term hagios (like the Latin sanctus) has been widespread since the fourth century,”® but our modern English compound (with its literal meaning of either ‘holy writing’ or ‘writing (about) holiness/ holy people’) dates to the seventeenth century*° and has since been used to denote a wide variety of textual material. While Delehaye, for example, defines hagiography as a corpus of texts inspired by or aimed at the propagation of a cult, others have noted, correctly, that much of the extant material does not fit this definition. Today, most scholars use a fairly loose, inclusive definition of hagiography. Brunhorn, Gemeinhardt, and Munkholt Christensen, for example, read the term in the widest sense according to its etymology as describing phenomena that thematize holiness (‘das [Be-]Schreiben von Phaénomenen [... ] in denen “Heiligkeit” thematisiert wird’) and explain that, in this sense, holiness is not so much an external quality (‘etwas an und fiir sich Bestehendes’) as a predicate attributed to a person by the texts themselves (‘als Resultat einer Zuschreibung’)*
One recent authoritative dictionary of Late Antiquity is more specific and defines hagiography as ‘a broad designation encompassing a variety of literary forms in both prose and verse that take the life and/or the actions of a holy person as their subject’ This definition takes ‘hagiography’ as an umbrella term that covers a vast number of types of texts. Scholars commonly divide these into subgenres such as saints’ Lives, miracle collections, collections of sayings, edifying tales, acts of apostles, and martyr acts.3+ But such a classification gives an impression of the material that is much tidier than the material itself, with its staggering variety in terms of length, style, form, and narrative layout.’5 Even within individual ‘subgenres’ there is no general formal unity.* It is not surprising, then, that it has been a matter of debate in the study of hagiography for some time now how one should conceptualize late antique accounts of saints and their lives in connection with other types of narrative. The most straightforward conceptualization of hagiography as a genre alongside other genres dates back as far as Theodoret of Cyrrhus who, towards the middle of the fifth century, saw a place for Lives of saints among the classic genres of the epic, history, tragedy, and comedy.*” Naturally, given hagiography’s focus on the lives, actions, and words of saints, scholars have long noted (and built upon) its similarities with ancient biography, and indeed, have conceptualized saints’ Lives as a genre originating in the fourth century with Athanasios of Alexandria's Life of Antony.3*
But since ancient biography, like hagiography, does not seem to exhibit any formal characteristics that lend themselves to a straightforward definition,°? this association has not necessarily resulted in greater conceptual clarity. In fact, in order to come to terms with the uncertainties surrounding the concepts of both biography and hagiography, scholars have been devising creative metaphors. Tomas Hagg, for example, rightly warns against drawing borders between different types of ancient and late antique Life-writing ‘where the authors themselves so obviously moved over mapless terrain’*° Danny Praet agrees with this and suggests replacing the metaphor of space with one of music, ‘where certain themes are repeated but with new material and variations on old themes, played with different instruments, sampled and remastered, and so on." James Corke-Webster and Christa Gray allow for similar flexibility when they conceive of hagiography as a system of family resemblances: ‘works about “saints” — subjects considered holy in some sense by their authors — need have no one shared feature, but rather are all part of a family that each share some features with each other’#* Some scholars have gone even further and suggested that the very notion of genre is not ideal for capturing the complexities of hagiographical narrative.*? Most famously perhaps, Marc Van Uytfanghe sees hagiography not as a genre but rather as a type of discourse (‘discours hagiographique’) that pervades several genres, such as biography, novels, and panegyric.
Clearly, given the variety of the extant material, it is difficult to make general claims about hagiographical narrative. Instead, it is one of the aims of this book to offer a detailed analysis of specific texts, to allow for differentiated scholarly appreciation.*> More specifically, this volume pays attention primarily to Lives and martyr acts (and, to a lesser extent, edifying tales) because these subgenres (if we can call them that) offer the most relevant material in terms of narrative analysis in general and our thematic approach, to which I turn below, in particular. As for their time of composition, most of them date from between the fourth and eighth centuries, although we have also included later texts, and a small number of earlier ones, where thematically appropriate. In order to achieve some balance between breadth and depth, the book offers chapters that aim to trace patterns across entire corpora or subcorpora (e.g. Chapters 2, 3, and 6) as well as chapters that focus on one or two individual texts (e.g. Chapter 5) or groups of texts dealing with the same saints (e.g. Chapters 7 and 8).
Hero(in)es
As the title of this book suggests, our thematic focus is on heroes and heroines. This focus addresses an essential aspect of the narrative construction of hagiographical accounts, as illustrated by Van Uytfanghe’s notion of the ‘discours hagiographique. Drawing inspiration from Michel de Certeau,*® Van Uytfanghe identifies one essential quality of hagiographic discourse as the presence of a hero or heroine who has specific exemplary Christian values and norms, and on whom the story is based. This book, in other words, is not a contribution to the work of the so-called ‘religionsgeschichtliche Schule’, which asks whether and how we can conceptualize Christian saints as successors of pagan heroes.*” Rather, its title is a play on two other important meanings of the word ‘hero(ine). First, given our interest in hagiography as narrative, we adopt the term ‘hero(ine)’ as a concept referring quite simply to the main character ina story.** Indeed, STEPHANOS EFTHYMIADIS (Chapter 2) explores the dynamics between protagonists and minor characters in a wide variety of Byzantine hagiography and examines how Lives appropriate earlier accounts to construct these dynamics. He demonstrates not only that in this interplay the characterization of protagonists often intersects with doxological issues, but also that minor characters are sometimes semantically invested to the extent that they become so-called ‘secondary heroes’ in hagiographical narratives otherwise centred around a single hero.
The second definition of the English term ‘hero(ine)’ is also relevant to our purposes, namely an extraordinary character exhibiting both exemplary behaviour and a set of specific qualities that distinguish them from others.* As it happens, from a modern, religious point of view, this notion of heroism is intimately linked with that of sainthood. The Corpus iuris canonici, for example, which dates from the first half of the eighteenth century, explicitly states that one of the crucial questions to be addressed in canonization procedures is whether a person possessed both the theological and the cardinal Christian virtues ‘to a heroic degree’ (‘in gradu heroico’).S° Moreover, the close connection between sainthood and the essential aspects of what we refer to as heroism today is also borne out by the late antique and medieval texts with which we are concerned in this book. Indeed, what characterizes many hagiographical stories is their portrayal of saints as individuals who distinguish themselves from others specifically through their devotion to God and their embodiment of essential Christian values, and who exhibit these values in extraordinary ways (for example by performing miracles," inspiring followers, undergoing physical torture, or embracing asceticism) in order to defend and propagate the faith.’ At the same time, hagiographical accounts clearly construct saints as examples of Christians who inspire imitation and devotion in others, be it characters within the text or audiences who read or hear it.54
When we conceive of saints as heroic figures in this sense, as scholars often do, we can identify a number of markers — prominent to different degrees in different traditions and subcorpora — that single them out as extraordinary characters, for example a noble death, or the exhibition of moral virtues,*” including the rejection of marriage and cultivation of chastity and virginity (especially for female saints).5* Hagiographical accounts also typically mobilize paradigms from the Old Testament,’? the New Testament, or non-biblical traditions to invest their characters with meaning.” They also typically characterize saints by using a fixed set of metaphors, for instance describing believers and martyrs as ‘slaves of Christ, and ascetics as martyrs.
In this book we take these general observations into two directions. First, we ask how exactly — that is, with which narrative techniques — saints are depicted as heroes.°* Unlike fictional heroes, saints and martyrs also exist in various cultural registers outside the texts that depict them; they have existed, or are believed to have existed, as historical persons and are often commemorated in religious culture and liturgy. Therefore, it can be proposed that hagiographers do not construct their heroes purely from their imagination (as authors of fiction do) but reconstruct them from legendary or historical material.°> Four chapters of this book survey some of the narrative complexities behind these processes by exploring how such reconstructions draw upon various traditions.
Chapters 3 and 4 analyse how hagiographers marshal different literary and rhetorical traditions in the constructions of their heroes. In a study of African Lives and Passions ranging from the second to the fourth centuries, SABINE FIALON (Chapter 3) demonstrates that the narrative texture underlying depictions of the saints as models of sanctity is intimately connected with specific rhetorical concepts, especially those originating in epideictic rhetoric.© At the same time, the construction of these saints is shown to be more polyphonic in that they are also defined by models of heroism drawn from other traditions, such as the Stoic sage and the epic hero. ANNE Atwtis (Chapter 4) also essentially builds on the importance of rhetoric for the characterization of saints. She examines how two female martyrs, Ia and Tatiana, were rewritten as orators in Byzantium (in the middle and late Byzantine periods respectively), how these acts of rewriting have resulted in the paring down of more traditional aspects of their characterization, such as their physical beauty, and how they became an inextricable part of Byzantium’s literate, performative, and argumentative society.
As Stephanos Efthymiadis (Chapter 2) reminds us, a well-established technique from the hagiographical toolbox is for hagiographers to associate themselves with subjects, for example by presenting their stories as eyewitness accounts or by claiming other types of affinity.®* In Chapter 5, PlET GERBRANDY focuses on a text from the ninth or early tenth century in which that general principle has been developed creatively along metanarrative lines. He explores how the authors of the Life of St Gallus associated their own writing process with the adventures of their protagonist, and how this affects both the depiction of their hero and the presentation of their own activities as biographers. Finally, MarkETA KULHANKOVA (Chapter 6) examines how the construction of characters is defined and moulded by generic considerations and formats. She turns to edifying tales in three distinct corpora and demonstrates that, even if these are typically organized around character types, an investigation of specific characterization techniques can reveal a differentiated picture that takes into account the protagonists’ spiritual transformation.
All these chapters encourage us to be open to the idea that (many) hagiographers were perhaps more skilful than is often acknowledged. Mark Humphries rightly notes that hagiography has long been regarded as ‘little more than a whimsical devotional literature that served to instruct the docile faithful in tales of the heroic age of the church’®? Even if hagiographical texts have been subjected to a more critical approach since the scholarship of Delehaye and Brown, it is fair to add, as I have clarified above and as Humphries also notes, that to date much of this critical rehabilitation has addressed primarily historical questions. Our book, then, aims to contribute to this debate with a focus on narrative.
In addition, this book takes narrative (re) constructions of saints into another direction. We aim to add complexity to one of the most prominent statements in scholarship about the characterization of saints in hagiography, the statement that hagiographical accounts are virtually always about the simple glorification of saints who cannot be described further beyond their stereotypical moral perfection. Indeed, this idea is rooted so deeply in our culture that the term ‘hagiography’ itselfhas become a figure of speech to denote it.”° Certainly, much hagiography does invite such appreciations.” Chapters 7 and 8 of this book, by contrast, suggest that this may not be the full picture. This insight resonates once more with recent scholarship which has argued, for example, that none other than Jerome was interested in exploring morally complex characterization in his depiction of Malchus, including aspects of failure and transgressive behaviour.
Less known authors or redactors also probed into more ambivalent aspects of saints: the author of the Latin Passio of Agnes, for example, characterizes the saint as cunning and manipulative;”’ the Latin Passio of Caecilia revolves more around complex characterization than it does around typification;” and in the Greek Life of Mary of Egypt the central character Zosimas becomes complacent and proud. As Corke-Webster and Gray remark more generally, ‘[i]n the extant hagiographical corpus the cleancut saint of popular imagination rubs shoulders with cavorting, incompetent, petulant, and even murderous saints.”°
Occasionally some chapters in our book point in the same direction,”” but the final two chapters have a more dedicated interest in depictions of variously complex saints in common. For example, some hagiographers raise ethical issues about saints rather than simply and straightforwardly proclaiming and celebrating their moral perfection. Whereas Sabine Fialon (Chapter 3) explores how the hagiographer’s art essentially revolves around the notion of praise, CHRISTIAN H@GEL (Chapter 7) thematizes moral complexity in his reading of Byzantine Lives of so-called doctor saints. While hagiography often eschews material concerns and is explicitly not interested in material advantages, the depictions of doctor saints, Hagel argues, are quite different in that they raise ethical questions about the spending of money, which in turn relates to contemporary debates about poverty and power. He also proposes that the Lives of doctor saints are ambiguous and paradoxical in the sense that those who deal with the so-called anargyroi (the moneyless) focus on these issues the most.
Whereas Hogel addresses Christian re-evaluations of wealth and poverty, VIRGINIA Burrus (Chapter 8) takes the idea of less-than-ideal character to another level in her analysis of Lives of the fourth-century saint Constantina, whose rhetorical abilities and educational background are reminiscent of the virgin martyrs discussed by Anne Alwis (Chapter 4.). Not only may this saint present behaviour that is not to be directly imitated, and thereby challenge the generic protocols so often said to be at work in hagiography, but the textual tradition itself also raises fundamental questions about who the saint really is in the first place: since there is no single, stable Life, there is no single, stable heroine, but rather ‘a kaleidoscopic array of shifting portraits’ — an observation that fundamentally challenges any assumption that hagiography typically deals with saintly saints.
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