Paideia Today: Saints' Lives, Season Two, Episode One
In our first episode of Season 2 of Paideia Today, we look at the now-neglected genre of hagiography, and debunk the popular misconception that medieval hagiography was the product of weak artistry or even a form of propaganda, a type of embellished historical document recording superhuman individuals. We tend to read it as if hagiography were a Christian variation on the nineteenth-century accounts of the lives of great men, as Thomas Carlyle made famous.
On the contrary, we explain that authors of hagiographic accounts had no interest in the Romantic obsession with originality as an indicator of artistic merit, or with making their subjects superhuman. On the contrary, they are thoroughly generic in their portrait of virtue and seek to hew very closely to the pattern of imitatio Christi. We mention the lives of St. Paul the Hermit, St. Martin, and St. Anthony as variations of lives patterned upon the well-known deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in Scripture.
The greater the saint, the less exemplary he will be, and the more Christ will be seen in the pattern of his life.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free