saint julio
I’ve thought that “hagiography” might be the best name for this writing you’ve been reading—this attempt to write a saint’s life.
We scholars tend to be wary of hagiography. It’s a “risk,” a “temptation,” a “betrayal.” Hagiography tends to be the name we give to scholarly writing that has veered off the sober road to knowledge because its writer has gotten drunk on his subject, has taken it into his veins, or under his skin. I’m not going to rehearse this viewpoint, nor do I want to defend my own writing, this hagiography here, against its accusers. No.
There’s nothing for me to do but confess: I’ve taken a whole lot of Cortázar and I’m beginning to feel the effects. And so I’ve begun to assemble this hagiography. Though I think it is also worth affirming that hagiography is more than just adulatory writing. It is that and so, unashamedly, is my writing in this book.
But hagiography does more than adore its subject and therein we can begin to grasp its force. Hagiography seeks to produce effects, or more accurately to transmit effects on a different wavelength or bandwidth and it will subordinate the elements of which it is composed to this task.
Hagiography sets itself up as a vector for the transmission, the communication of holiness. This holiness is what is important, not the particular, historical individual – if he or she even existed – who is treated in the hagiography [Ù23, 27, 31, 37, 47, 79]. The saint is touched, an individual that has been broken up by God.
So Athanasius writes of St. Antony: “Working with Antony was the Lord, who bore flesh for us, and gave to the body victory over the devil, so that each of those who truly struggle can say, It is not I, but the grace of God which is in me.”1 Thus he or she matters only as the crystallization of this transpersonal force that has washed through him or her.
Saint might be seen as the name for an event springing up in the relation between the human and the divine. That’s how Peter Brown sees it: “The joining of Heaven and Earth was made plain even by the manner in which contemporaries designed and described the shrines of their saints.”2 The written life of a saint, viewed this way, is like a spark across the gap.
This way of seeing sainthood explains why hagiographers are notoriously unconcerned with historical accuracy. It also explains why saints’ lives proliferate like rabbits—because the saint’s significance isn’t biographical, but generative.
The anonymous author of the earliest life of Gregory the Great: “We know too that all saints have everything in common through the love of Christ of whose body they are members. Hence if anything we have written did not concern this man. . . yet in his case we have little doubt on the whole that they were true of him, too.”3
The saint doesn’t have a life, from the point of view of the hagiographer. The saint, to the degree that he or she is a saint, gives up his or her particular life in order to accept and participate in a transpersonal movement that is, after all, the movement of a life that could be called eternal.
Peter Brown again: “The men of the second and third centuries had an acute sense of the multiplicity of the self.”4 And Duncan Robertson, speaking of readers in the later middle ages, tells us that they “serenely subordinated the saint’s individuality to his trans-personal identity as a saint.”5
In that case, and given the relay function of hagiography, there ought to be as many versions upon a saint’s life as there are occasions, or contexts, into which holiness ought to be injected. In this way, hagiography exalts its subject, paradoxically, by dissolving it as self and then reassembling it as a particle in a divine dust storm.It is this event called saintliness that we are to venerate, and it is the saint’s selfless availability to the sweep of holiness that we are to imitate.
We readers are, after all, the other crucial term for the hagiographer. If hagiography sets the saint up as a relation or event joining heaven and earth, it sets itself up as another event relating the saint – and the force by which he or she has been touched – and ourselves as readers.
The avowed aims of hagiography with respect to its audience – edification, veneration, imitation – all point to its unavoidably relational and occasional nature as a form of writing. Hagiography is only to the degree that it does. And it can do only to the degree that it orients itself, and subordinates its elements (like rhetoric), to the needs and desires of its audience.
I wonder if Julio didn’t have this in mind when he titled his book on Keats Imagen de John Keats [Image of John Keats]. Morelli, who may also be Julio, expresses his preference for the indexical efficacy of the medieval “image.”
Many hagiographies include as a – or the – crucial moment in the saint’s life, an instance of active or participatory reading by the saint; a moment in which the saint is lifted, summoned, by and into a grand text. This moment then works for us too, and part of what we imitate is this active engagement with the saint’s life, the hagiography.
“Sainthood,” as Robertson succinctly puts it, “is active reading.”6 And so Athanasius relates the following episode in the life of St. Antony: “He went into the church pondering these things, and just then it happened that the Gospel was being read, and he heard the Lord saying to the rich man, If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. It was as if by God’s design he held the saints in his recollection, and as if the passage were read on his account. Immediately, Antony went out from the Lord’s house and gave to the townspeople the possessions he had from his forebears.”7
These are the moments, when sainthood begins to happen, that we’re supposed to really want. This desire, provoked by the narrative structure and rhetorical devices of the hagiography, and its satisfaction not only sweetens the pill of doctrine the hagiography supplies, but also helps fuels our desire to imitate the saint in our own lives.
We don’t just want this moment for the saint, we want it, or perhaps some more modest version of it, for ourselves. Hagiography, like rhetoric or sophism, subordinates the referential or mimetic facets of language to its pragmatic facets in order to do this. Hagiography, contrary to appearances, isn’t meant to represent anything. It’s meant to do something: to transmit effects [Ù8, 67].
All this has left hagiography open to accusations, especially in a Western world whose dominant voices tend toward the view that truth is measured by the fidelity of a copy to an original. Even within the Catholic church, which you’d suppose would be happy for the P.R., priests and theologians run the hagiographers out of the temple for their verbal luxuriance, popularizing approach to doctrine, and historiographical lack of rigor. From their point of view, hagiography erodes the values of austerity, orthodoxy, and truth upon which the faith must stand.
Now today we may think we know better than to put our faith in austerity, orthodoxy, or truth (or at least in those as defined by the priests and theologians). And we may think that this is probably a good thing (though for my own part, I think maybe in the long run I’d rather have been on the side, at least, of austerity and truth). But maybe I can also put that “knowing better” in a slightly different light.
We usually call the moment when we learned to know better than to believe in religious orthodoxy “the Enlightenment” or “modernity.” It begins with us saying that reason, instead of faith, leads to the truth. Consequently, we ought to apply reason to our social and political institutions. It is in this sense, for modernity, that the truth sets us free.
Before long, the Enlightenment, which had first emerged to destroy the myths of religion, created its own myths of the omnipotence of reason in the form of science and technology.8 More recently, some thinkers feel that many of us no longer believe in reason and its promise to lead us to truth and free us in our social worlds. This is called “the postmodern condition”: now, at last, we might say, we are free of all myths.9 We can see clearly now. We’ve disenchanted the world and disenchanted ourselves.
That very critical distance in whose name the heresy of hagiography is routed among literary experts today might, if unquestioned, then turn out to be an expression of this more general disenchantment, an expression of our cynicism or hyper-maturity. Like eight year-olds armed with the knowledge that there is no Santa Claus, we ruthlessly stomp out every miracle machine – every myth – we can find in our own and other cultures [Ù90].
And the current, usually offhand, disdain for hagiography may just be another minor raid in this lackluster war against myth. For hagiography is one of the greatest myth machines to have developed in the Western between the age of the Greeks and the age of television; great precisely on account of its unapologetic deployment of rhetorical tools in the service of a popular struggle for happiness, a struggle carried out in the face of the grimly punishing, disenchanting priests of austerity, orthodoxy, truth, and critical distance.
So hagiography is indeed more than adulatory writing. It is a way of adoring someone, not because of how special he or she was as a person, but because of the special way in which he or she was traversed by ten thousand intensities, from the massive to the microscopic.
It’s a way of writing that understands itself not as primarily telling or showing, but doing—so that its standards are those of efficacy.
And, finally, it is a kind of writing that taps the powers of myth and the renegade desires of the unwashed, the saints, madmen, ghosts, demons, and children against which Western knowledge and politics have waged a tireless war since the time of Plato.
It’s a window through which mystery and wonder sneaks back into the world. This is what makes hagiography such a suitable mode for me, today, transmitting Cortázar’s miraculous 20th century inventions into the 21st.
For one way of grasping Julio’s invention is to see it as a crowbar for springing from captivity a world of miraculous powers, individuated in a teeming pack of saints, madmen, ghosts, demons, and children, swarming forth to reenchant their worlds and ours [Ù3, 7, 8, 86, 93].
1 Athanasius, Life of Antony (New York: Orbis, 1980), p. 34.
2 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 4.
3 The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968), p. 133.
4 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 51.
5 Duncan Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), p. 25.
6 Duncan Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), p. 80.
7 Athanasius, Life of Antony (New York: Orbis, 1980), p. 31
8 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1987), esp. Ch.1.
9 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Trans. Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).viduated in a teeming pack of saints, madmen, ghosts, demons, and children, swarming forth to reenchant their worlds and ours [Ù3, 7, 8, 86, 93].