Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible—God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor. In The Saint’s Life and the Senses of Scripture: Hagiography as Exegesis, Astell convincingly shows how this radical shift in hagiography’s status serves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.
The saint’s Life as a broadly defined literary genre (inclusive of hagiography and biography) has never entirely lost its early function of illumining the Gospels, much as a reflective foil magnifies a light. It suffered an eclipse, nonetheless, in the early modern period that strangely foreshadows what Hans Frei (1922–1988) has called “the eclipse of biblical narrative” in modernity, when the organically inter-connected levels of premodern Scriptural signification—literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical—became increasingly separated from each other. Focusing on biblical scholarship, Frei finds “the seeds of disintegration” present already in the seventeenth century, when a shift and reversal of perspective begins to occur. Increasingly, the truth of the Bible, grounded in its historical sense, is no longer the standard for the world’s realities, calling them into judgment, but rather the world’s realities—known to the world through scientific and historical research, political exercise, and jurisprudence—test the Bible’s. The question becomes: “Do the stories and whatever concepts may be drawn from them describe what we apprehend as the real world?”
In Frei’s analysis, “Realistic, literal reading of the biblical narratives found its closest successor in the historical-critical reconstruction of specific events and texts of the Bible,” the guiding question for the moderns being “how reliable are the texts?” Concerned with “specific texts and specific historical circumstances,” such scholars have discerned no literal basis, however, for reading the Bible as a divinely inspired unity or for using scripture across the canon to interpret scripture.
The “figural reading” of patristic and medieval exegesis, which bore witness to the unity of the Old and New Testaments, has “found its closest successor,” according to Frei, “in an enterprise called biblical theology,” which argues for the Bible’s unity either through tracing common theological themes and concepts throughout the Scriptures or by highlighting successive episodes “within a single, gradually developing and cumulative history,” the metanarrative of salvation history.
The tropological (moral and ethical) sense of premodern exegesis extended the Bible’s historical narratives, typology, and teaching into each one’s life. In Frei’s view, this scriptural sense has been greatly undermined for modern readers by the disassociation of literal and figurative meanings, but it remains somewhat in force, due to the inescapable realism and “history-like” quality of biblical narrative. This “history-like” sensus litteralis is acknowledged, Frei marvels, even by those Biblicists who question, in positivist terms, the historical accuracy of the biblical stories.
The same three-fold pattern of disassociation (literal / historical, figural, moral / ethical) that Frei discerns in modern Biblical scholarship is clearly evident in modern hagiographical scholarship. Exactly in the seventeenth century—the same period in which Frei perceives the first “seeds of disintegration” in biblical interpretation—the critical study of the Lives of the saints began. The combined efforts of the Jesuit researchers known today as the Bollandists—Heribert Rosweyde, S.J. (1569–1629), John van Bolland, S.J. (1596–1665), Godfrey Henschen, S.J. (1601–1681), and Daniel von Papenbroeck, S.J. (1628–1714), and others—eventually resulted in the monumental Acta Sanctorum, published in 53 folio volumes between 1643 and 1794.
The quest of the Bollandists, which continues to this day, and which gave rise to Hippolyte Delehaye’s 1905 Legends of the Saints, is to test the historical accuracy and reliability of the extant Lives against one another and against various external sources of documentation, to provide a critical apparatus helpful in resolving apparent contradictions, and thus to protect the cult of the saints from the discredit that arises from error. Thomas Heffernan affirms: “[Delehaye’s] motivation was to provide a solid historical foundation for those saints whom the church worshipped [sic].” Partly because of the vituperative charges leveled by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), who found “a total disregard of truth and probability” in many early martyrdom accounts, Delehaye and his fellow Bollandists were “concerned to authenticate a canon of texts that had some claim to historical authenticity.”
In this effort the natural allies of the Bollandists were and are historians who, for their own reasons, seek to know, understand, and describe the medieval cult of the saints as a fact with cultural, sociological, economic, and political consequences. To this task historians in growing numbers have dedicated themselves, ever since the innovative, Marxist, Czech historian Frantisek Graus (Volk, Herrscher, und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studeien zur Hagiographie der Merowingenzeit, 1965) demonstrated the usefulness of hagiographic sources for social history. The work of three scholars in the 1980s has proven pivotal: Peter Brown (The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 1981), Caroline Walker Bynum (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987), and André Vauchez (Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 1981). Since then, there has been a flood of important hagiographic studies by historians.
This combined hagiographical enterprise by Bollandists and social historians plainly parallels the modern impulse in biblical criticism to test, verify, and interpret the Bible’s “letter” not principally by the Church’s rule of faith (regula fidei), but historically in time and place as a human work, a cultural product. Much knowledge has been gained by this. By its procedural bracketing, however, of the theological questions of divine inspiration, authorship, and intervention, biblical “higher criticism” casts them into doubt (a process signaled by the “demythologizing” of Rudolf Bultman), even as its “lower criticism” of the text undermines traditional exegesis based (according to the findings of modern scholarship) on errors in transmission, faulty translation, or the verbal concordance of biblical words and phrases stemming from diverse authors, chronological periods, and cultural idioms.
Not surprisingly, therefore, modern historians who narrate the life of a medieval saint resemble biblical scholars in search of the Historical Jesus. Augustine Thompson’s recent Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, for example, uses the earliest sources to construct a minimalist, demythologized account of the founder of the Franciscans. As Thompson says of his own work, “The similarity to Historical Jesus studies is obvious.” The “Historical Francis” that emerges from Thompson’s biography is not, however, the “real Francis.” “My ‘Historical Francis’ . . . is ‘historical,’” writes Thompson, “in that the picture I have painted is the result of historical method, not theological reflection or pious edification.”
(excerpted from chapter 10)