In a thirteenth-century manuscript of uncertain provenance, a historiated initial for Psalm 26 shows a crowned King David within the letter “D.” He lifts a lighted candle up before the altar, and God’s outstretched hand blesses it from on high. The letter “D,” David’s own initial, combines with other letters to spell “Dominus inluminatio mea” (The Lord [is] my light). The image narrates God’s enlightenment of the psalmist, while David’s upheld candle also serves, literally and figuratively, to illumine the holy words on the page for the reader.
A candle’s light is flickering and short-lived. During the time of its shining, however, even a brief candle no bigger than a wick can enable the king’s discovery of a lost gold coin or a misplaced pearl in a dark house, as the rabbis have reminded those who would despise the minor genres of parable, narrative example, and saintly tale. Ancient Jewish commentary therefore intersperses such homiletic material into its grammatical, moral, and mystical elucidations of the biblical text and of the Talmud. Easily understood, plainly told, “the Aggadot …give delight to [the study of] Scripture,” and “by [their] light, a man may fathom words of Torah.”
Like Jewish Aggadot, Christian hagiography functioned in the time of its flourishing (from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries) in the overlapping forms of exempla and vita chiefly as an illumination of the Gospel, as a narrative form of commentary upon the Bible. The Book of Armagh (Codex Ardmachanus, ninth century), venerated as a relic by Irish Christians during the Middle Ages, contains the Latin texts of the Gospels and epistles, alongside Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Saint Martin of Tours and memoranda for a Life of Saint Patrick. Such Lives highlighted Scripture’s allegorical (that is, Christological and ecclesial) and tropological (that is, moral and ethical) senses for the faithful, rendering them literal in the kinetic stories of saints who responded with their lives to Christ’s imperative, “Come follow me” (Mtt 4:19). Indeed, classic stories within the hagiographic tradition begin with the saint’s response to a biblical word as a personal address. The young Antony of Egypt hears Matthew 19:21 read aloud in church and finds in it an answer to his question about living evangelical poverty. Augustine, recalling this very episode in Athanasius’s Life of Antony, reads the passage from St. Paul (Rm 13:13–14) that precipitates his own conversion: “Take and read.” Francis of Assisi understands, commits to memory, and joyfully acts upon the Lord’s command to the twelve disciples in Matthew 10:9–10, a passage Francis has heard proclaimed in the Gospel at Mass.
As a literally realized tropology, the saint’s life was, at the same time, a figurative allegory of Christ, who calls the saint and whose words and actions can be glimpsed, mutatis mutandi, through the veil of the saint’s. The end of the saint’s Life, moreover, whether witnessed in martyrdom or described as ecstasy, conveyed to its readers an anagogical anticipation of the after-life. Composed by monks, clerics, and ascetic laypersons who practiced lectio divina, the early and most influential saints’ Lives echo the biblical texts from which they draw their inspiration; like the Scriptures, moreover, they were meant to be read at multiple levels of signification; indeed, the “literal sense” itself of saints’ lives accommodated sometimes abrupt shifts in those levels, historia yielding to literalized (or re-literalized) allegoria. In this way, the hagiographies could be seamlessly incorporated into the prayer life of the church, with episodes from the Lives used as readings in the Divine Office, retold as exempla in sermons, and visualized in art. The same readers who heard the God of Israel and the devil compared (in bono and in malo, respectively) to a devouring lion (Cf. Hos 13:8; 1 Pet 5:8) and who read about Jonah in the whale’s belly (Jonah 1:17–2:10) could easily imagine and understand in allegorical and moral terms (e.g., as reliteralized tropology) the dramatic tale of the dragon swallowing (the ultimately victorious) Saint Margaret in the darkness of her prison cell.
In his Homilies on Ezekiel, Gregory the Great confidently asserts, “In the life of the holy Fathers we recognize what we ought to understand in the book of Sacred Scripture.” Writing in the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) admonishes any student of the Bible who has become obsessed with interpreting difficult and occult passages to remember the plain sense, biblical teaching of virtue and to “make it a habit of going … to the lives of the holy fathers and the triumphs of the martyrs and other such writings dictated in a simple style.” Linking the biblical saints with more recent ones, Hugh explicitly directs students of the Bible to read the hagiographies composed by Gregory the Great: “Among the deeds and sayings of the saints, those marvelously written down by the blessed Gregory should, I think, be taken to heart.” Parallel to the Hagiography (Wisdom literature) of the Old Testament in its tripartite division (Law, Prophets, Hagiography), Hugh places the writings of the Fathers, including the saints’ Lives by Athanasius, Jerome, and Gregory, as a hagiographic, third part of the New Testament, alongside the four canonical Gospels and the “Apostles” (Acts, epistles, Revelation), which correspond in Hugh’s schema to the Law and the Prophets, respectively.
(excerpted from introduction)
