The Invention of Saintliness

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134498642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume discusses, from an historical and literary angle, the ways in which sanctification and the inscription of saintliness take place. Going beyond the traditional categories of canonization, cult, liturgical veneration and hagiographical lives, the work raises fundamental issues concerning definitions of saints and saintliness in a period before the concept was crystallized in canon law. As well as discussing sources and methodology, contributions cover contextual issues, including relics and veneration, life and the afterlife, and examinations of specific sources and texts. Subjects raised include the idea of hagiography as intimate biography, perceptions of holiness in writings by and about female mystics, and bodily aspects of the Franciscan search for evangelical perfection.

Part I
Introduction

1 The invention of saintliness

Texts and contexts

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

Canon 2104: In causis confessorum discuti debet dubium: an constet de virtutibus theologalibus Fide, Spe, Caritate tum in Deum tum in proximum, necnon de cardinalibus [virtutibus] Prudentia, Iustitia, Temperantia, Fortitudine, earumque adnexis in gradu heroico in casu et ad effectum de quo agitur;

in causis vero martyrum: an constet de martyrio eiusque causa et de signis seu miraculis in casu et ad effectum de quo agitur.

Canon 2116: Praeter virtutum heroicitatem aut martyrium, ad beatificationem Servi Dei requiruntur miracula eius intercessione patrata.¹

Canon 2104: In [canonization] procedures of confessors the question to be discussed is whether the Servant of God possessed, to a heroic degree, the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God and neighbor, as well as the cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, and related virtues, and whether this is certain enough to permit proceedings towards beatification.

However, in the case of the canonization of a martyr, the question is whether his martyrdom is absolutely certain and whether it is known for sure that signs or miracles occurred, and whether all this is certain enough to permit proceedings towards beatification.

Canon 2116: In addition to a heroic degree of virtue or martyrdom, another requirement for the beatification of a Servant of God is that miracles have been performed through his intercession.

This, then, is the official definition: a saint is a deceased person who once excelled in virtue. A saint is one who possessed faith, hope, and love, demonstrated wisdom and justice, exercised moderation and perseverance. A person who occasionally manifested these virtues can make no claim to sainthood, but only he who persevered through his entire life, to a heroic degree, in gradu heroico, under difficult circumstances, and with a cheerful heart. Only he who took true delight in the practice of virtue can be considered for canonization, provided that a few miracles after death revealed the man’s saintly ability to intercede with God – the man’s ability, yes, for only seldom are women admitted to this select group.

After exemplary exercise of virtue and a holy life, the existence of a cult, public veneration after the person’s death, is the ultimate indication of sainthood. Sanctity, in other words, is a quality ascribed posthumously. Saints live in the hereafter, in the company surrounding the throne of God. Here on earth believers have to be satisfied with the material remains of their earthly existence, their relics or their graves; and, of course, with the stories of their exemplary lives or the legends about their miraculous deeds.

This, in summary, is the ‘list of requirements’ found scattered throughout the present-day Corpus Iuris Canonici and used in canonization procedures in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a program that goes back to Cardinal Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, who in 1734–8 set down the conceptions prevalent at the time in his De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione.² He codified the ideas that had gradually crystallized out of the papal canonization procedures since the late Middle Ages. Sanctity as defined by canon law is therefore – certainly from a medieval perspective – a relatively modern concept.

Scholars of today who study saints are caught in a kind of double bind. Consciously or unconsciously they tend to take over the Church’s teaching summarized above as the point of departure for their research. The concept of sanctity in canon law generally determines the selection of the material and provides a framework for their findings. The same historians are bound by the scholarly traditions of their discipline, which also point to a certain selection of sources and prescribe an accompanying method of research. This makes their work doubly difficult. In order to heighten awareness of the pitfalls surrounding hagiographic research, this introduction will focus on three of the questions researchers will encounter. First, what should we understand by saints and saintliness in the medieval context – in the period, that is, before the concept was crystallized in canon law? Second, who decided in that period, and on the grounds of which criteria, who could be considered a saint. In other words, who constituted the social agency? The third question is one of the sources and methods to be used in research. The following paragraphs are intended as an introduction to this last issue.

Clearing the scene

Notwithstanding the many recent “studies brilliantly critical of the ‘fathers’ of medieval studies” published in the United States,³ as well as the debates on ‘La Nouvelle Histoire’ or ‘New Perspectives’ in medieval studies in Europe,⁴ medievalists of today have still not wrestled themselves free from their predecessors’ scholarship. Academic disciplines such as historical writing and literary studies were developed in the nineteenth century, at a time, that is, when the growth of the nation state, of constitutions and a civil service – in short, the public domain – was an all-pervasive concern. These nineteenth-century preoccupations led to the setting of standards for the relevant disciplines. Scholars working in these disciplines today, medieval historians in particular, resemble dwarfs standing on the shoulders of the one-eyed giants of the nineteenth century.⁵ Positing a dichotomy between public and private, these forefathers had eyes only for the public sphere – offices and institutions, rules and procedures, and the written documentation produced by institutions.⁶ Although no such dichotomy existed in the Middle Ages, historians still have a tendency to accept only public laws and institutions as the structuring element and solid base of medieval society. To justify this, consciously or not, they fall back on another dualism, one that did exist in the Middle Ages, namely that of literate versus illiterate, clergy versus laity, the world of learning as opposed to the world of popular culture.⁷ As a result, they still view documentary sources, charters and archival evidence in particular, along with the canon of literary texts, as the most trustworthy sources for the study of the medieval past.⁸ Hagiographic sources, despised as they were in the nineteenth century, are still the victims of that ill repute. This is due not only to their ambiguous character – shared, it should be noted, by literary sources that now figure so prominently in the work of ‘New Medievalism’ adepts – but also because they are seen as lacking literary form and thus as altogether unworthy of scholarly interest.⁹ It is indeed remarkable that none of the collections representing the recent vogue in ‘New Medievalism,’ ‘New Historicism,’ or ‘The Past and Future of Medieval Studies’ includes work on the ‘New Hagiography.’

The message seems to be that ‘true’ medievalists do not concern themselves with hagiographic sources, or if they do, it is only because they wish to study the earliest texts in the vernacular or are interested in folk beliefs and popular mentality. Little or no thought is given to the place of hagiography within medieval studies.¹⁰

The problem goes even deeper. Not only do medievalists base their work on documentary sources and literary works, a small segment of the sources available, they seem to lack the theories and methods to analyze that segment adequately.¹¹ Certainly in the last decades there has been a great deal of discussion on the interpretation of written sources, especially by literary critics reflecting on medieval texts. The contemporary ‘postmodern’ debate is in fact completely focused on the interpretation of language and texts, including documentary texts. What the debates leave unexplored, however, are questions – most intriguing for historians and philologists – of the context in which these medieval texts came about, and of how this can be adequately researched.¹² They concentrate exclusively on what we can (now) do with those texts, on the meaning we can give them.¹³ As Gabrielle Spiegel has cogently pointed out, there is a “common reliance upon a language-model epistemology, one that views language not as a window on the world it transparently reflects, but as constructing that world.”¹⁴ The genesis of this language and textual references to the social agency behind the texts are consequently left out of consideration. She notes regretfully:

What gets lost in the concentration on meaning in place of experience is the sense of social agency, of men and women struggling with the contingencies and complexities of their lives in terms of the fates that history deals out to them and transforming the worlds they inherit and pass to future generations.¹⁵

This is precisely what historians and philologists consider their sphere of activity.¹⁶ For them the sources reveal, or at least point to, a world behind the coded narrative. This explains why the modern debate generally has little appeal for philologists and why historians continue to rely on familiar tools such as language skills or diplomatics and auxiliary sciences.¹⁷ German studies in particular, as well as Dutch research modeled on them, have this as their focus. Even when these historians reflect on Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften,¹⁸ the questions raised by the ‘New Historicism’ and the ‘New Rhetoric’ often remain outside their field of vision. In this way they ignore the fact that they, too, need an adequate methodology in order to understand “documentary writing as a scripture, as an inscription of order, “rather than as “transparent texts which can assert objective truth independent of the subjective act that intended the document and of the operations of language within it.”¹⁹

We might stop to ask whether it is worth the effort to go in search of a suitable methodology. Would it not be better to simply leave the few hagiographical sources which are studied to (church) historians and philologists with their old-fashioned, ‘positivistic’ approach? Why bother? Those who are interested can join the literary debate in progress and limit themselves to the sources, especially those of a literary and historiographic nature, for which good research methods have been developed. Would that not be sufficient? The answer here is simply, no. In a discipline where the religious and devotional texts, including hagiographic texts, constitute the bulk of the scarce remnants of source material, we cannot afford to leave a large part of them out of consideration.²⁰ Those who wish to take medieval studies seriously have to open up those sources in a responsible way and study them with reliable methods.

My third question in this introduction can therefore be phrased as follows: which texts should we use for ‘modern’ hagiographic research? And how should we organize our study of those sources if we commit ourselves to the idea that it must be grounded in an intimate knowledge of the medieval past and reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation?

These three sets of questions – concerning conceptions of sanctity, the matter of social agencies involved in their making, and the problem of sources and methodologies – are of pivotal importance. I shall begin with the conceptions.

The contexts

The concept in canon law

Scholarly studies of saints show that the concept of sanctity found in canon law often constitutes the frame of reference not only for canonization procedures in the Roman Catholic Church but also for research conducted by (church) historians. In some cases this comes about consciously, in others unconsciously. The Dutch church historian R. R. Post, for instance, in his authoritative Church History of the Netherlands in the Middle Ages, candidly held that “he is a saint who best imitates Christ in this life, by an exemplary practice of Christian virtues and by participating in his suffering,” thus adhering to the modern definition of a saint in canon law.²¹ Post admitted that “ideals of sainthood had not always been the same for the common faithful,” but this did not prevent him from applying modern ideals to the medieval past. Differing ‘beliefs’ he labeled as ‘deviant,’ ‘superstitious,’ or even as ‘heretical,’ and at best as clerical ‘concessions’ to the illiterate populace. From an ecclesiastical point of view Post may be right, but from an historical perspective I would argue that he is not. Historians ought to make use of historically adequate criteria.

When studies of saints and sainthood gai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword by Han J. W. Drijvers
• PART I. Introduction
• PART II. Contexts: The cult of saints and the invention of saintliness
• PART III. Texts: The Lives of saints and the invention of saintliness
• Index