HAGIOGRAPHY

HAGIOGRAPHY. According to the Greek roots, hagiography literally means the “writings on the holy ones,” i.e., saints (q.v.), and includes writings on the lives and legends of the saints, generally without any modern critical claim to veracity or verification. The lives of the saints have constituted the popular reading of Byzantine, Russian, and other Orthodox believers down to the modern era. As all popular literature hagiography was, and is, highly stylized and employs a number of standard types and tropes.

Early hagiography before the 4th c. is generally limited to short entries on the time, place, and type of martyrdom of a particular saint(s), with a few notable exceptions such as the court record regarding the execution of Justin Martyr and his friends, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (qq.v.) on the way to his death, etc. In the 4th c. Eusebius of Caesarea began to write much more than the single paragraph on martyrs (q.v.), and Athanasius of Alexandria wrote the famous Vita Antonii, the Life of Antony (qq.v.). Athanasius’s artistic and purposeful life of Antony became the 4th c. equivalent to a modern best-seller, and with Eusebius’s contributions, henceforth changed the form of hagiography for all time. Certain famous “Lives” served as paradigms for subsequent saints. Thus the Martyrdom of Polycarp (ca. 160) served as the model for martyrs, the Life of Antony (ca. 358) for monastic saints, Eusebius’s Life of Constantine for devout rulers, etc. Particular lives, in addition to the ones just mentioned, also demonstrated outstanding qualities, for example the Life of St. Symeon the New Theologian by Nicetas Stethatos, or Epiphanius the Wise’s Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh.

For all the stereotyping, the Byzantine and later “Lives” convey a great wealth of both theological and historical material. They grant the historian a privileged glimpse into the daily lives and attitudes of the more ordinary folk customarily overlooked by court chroniclers. For believers, the saints’ “Lives” provide a confirmation of faith in the transforming power of the Spirit, a person with whom one might identify.

Both in original composition and in translation, a great deal of ancient Slavic literature was devoted to hagiography. For example, the lives of Palestinian saints and the Syrian Historia Religiosa of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (q.v.) were two models of ascetic life for Kievan Christianity, and certainly must have been some of the earliest material translated from Greek. Within 100 years of the death of Boris and Gleb, sons of Prince Vladimir, in the early 11th c. three different hagiographies were written about them. Nestor the Chronicler (q.v.) wrote a “Life” of Theodosius of the Kievan Caves Monastery within twenty years of his death-even before he was canonized-as well as other lives he included in the Chronicle. The later style of Russian hagiography was established in the 15th c. by Epiphanius the Wise and Pachomius the Serb. From the 18th c. to the present the standard Russian collection of “Lives” consists of twelve thick volumes, one for each month, compiled by Dmitri of Rostov (d. 1709) during the last twenty years of his life.

Each local Orthodox Church compiles its Synaxarion, or collection of saints’ lives. These normally run into several volumes. The Great Synaxarion of the Church of Greece, for example, includes fourteen volumes, and the more recent Zhitie Svyatix by the Serbian monk, Justin Popovich, twelve. Shorter compilations are also available, as the abbreviated Synaxarion in four volumes by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (q.v.) or the volume of abbreviated saints’ lives in Bulgakov’s Nastolnaya Kniga. None, however, are as yet available in English.

A note of caution is in order for the contemporary reader who might approach ancient hagiography with a modern literary viewpoint and thereby be disappointed. As literature (q.v.), hagiography served many different functions throughout history, from the mountaintops of spiritual edification on to the exalted heights of biographies of holiness (q.v.), and back to the familiar plateaus of entertaining legend and pious fiction. In this regard Webster’s definition of hagiography as “biography of saints: saints’ lives” is so brief as to be misleading, as seen in the short historical development outlined above. Not all hagiography is of the same quality and purpose.

Some Orthodox theologians, while respecting the Bollandists, look askance at modern efforts to critique ancient hagiography with hypercritical agendas they judge as inappropriate-e.g., proving or disproving the existence of someone/something, discrediting the miraculous, etc.-ultimately not allowing the genre to fulfill its original literary function. This is identified as the same modern critical tendency that led scholars of the last century to misidentify the Gospels as biographies of Jesus.