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Hagiography and Autobiography in the Late Antique West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Peter Brown’s classic essay of 1971, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, is celebrated for applying the tools of sociology and anthropology to the study of late antique sanctity. It strove to remove holy men from the distorting literary texts through which we know them, and to place them instead in a rich context of everyday concerns. My starting point here, however, is not the essay itself but a no less interesting critique of it subsequently made by the author himself. In 1998, Brown offered a number of pieces of advice he would now give to a younger self embarking on the same topic. In 1971, he claimed, he had unwittingly colluded with the hagiographical texts by presenting holy men in dramatic, epic terms. Focusing on what holy men did for society, he had observed the phenomenon from a purely third-person perspective, and had neglected their own personal quest for sanctity. Although he had located the holy man’s activity in the everyday, he had effectively conceded that the ultimate locus of the holy man’s holiness — his superior understanding — was unknowable.
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References
1 Brown, Peter, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, JRS 61 (1971), 80–101.Google Scholar
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11 Porphyry, De vita Plotini 1 (Plotinus I, ed. and trans. Armstrong, 3).
12 There has been extensive debate about the historicity of Eugippius’s hagiography and, in particular, of the function of this device. For an introduction, see W. Pohl, ‘Einleitung: Commemoratium — Vergegenwärtigungen des heiligen Severin’, in W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger, eds, Eugippius und Severin (Vienna, 2001), 9–23.
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20 Hodgkin, T., Italy and her Invaders, 8 vols (London, 1880-9), 2Google Scholar: 248, speaks of ‘the harmless comedy of the nolo episcopari, which was so commonly played in those days’. In a similar vein, Mathisen calls Hilarius’s flight after Honoratus’s death ‘de rigueur’, suggesting that he was ‘hoping, perhaps, to be able to fulfil the topos of being raptus ad episcopatum’: Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 88.
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23 Augustine, Confessiones 8.6.15.
24 Ibid. 8.6.14: ‘There was the strongest attestation for them [i.e. God’s work through Antony]; they had occurred within living memory, and almost, indeed, within our own lifetimes.’
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27 Augustine, Confessiones 2.3.7.