The Saint’s Life and the Senses of Scripture:
Hagiography as Exegesisy
by ann w. astell macculloch
notre dame, 400 pages, $70
Out in some wild place, there stands a prophet. He is alone with the elements and his God. He has retreated from the crowds, yet again and again they follow him and demand a sign. And who can blame them? Miracles abound in his presence: The sick are healed, storms are stilled. The dead are raised.
Who am I describing? You would be forgiven for thinking of Christ. But the man I had in mind was St. Columba, as described in Adomnán of Iona’s Life of St. Columba. To be honest, though, I might have been describing any number of saints. For anyone familiar with the Bible, a curious sense of déjà vu attends the reading of ancient and medieval hagiography, in which conspicuous and seemingly needless concrete parallels to the life of Christ abound.
For many, such parallels prove that hagiographies are so much stuff and nonsense: shameless spin-offs, sequels repackaging the premise of an earlier hit. Even Christians, and particularly Protestants, who have no problem accepting the miraculous nature of the New Testament—and even the ongoing reality of post–New Testament miracles, to whatever extent—refuse the tropes of the hagiographical tradition, not least because they are tropes. That tradition is seen as at best a collection of noble lies meant to encourage the faithful, and at worst an exploitation of the credulous.
I suspect this kind of skepticism remains the basic attitude of most people, but the weird and wonderful world of the Christian saints is experiencing a renaissance. Figures such as Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw have found an eager audience by writing about holy wells, “wild Christianity,” and “the mossy face of Christ.” Their success fits into the bigger picture. Polling suggests that Gen Z, surprisingly, is far more spiritual (or, at least, more spiritually open) than its forebears. Recent books such as Justin Brierley’s Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God and Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder offer a sense of the “vibe shift” toward re-enchantment.
Ann Astell’s The Saint’s Life and the Senses of Scripture: Hagiography as Exegesis is a worthy entry into this discourse. It must be noted that Astell does not frame her book within the popular discussion just mentioned, nor does she make any reference to major academic theorists of disenchantment and re-enchantment, such as Max Weber and Charles Taylor. Her book is an attempt to understand hagiography’s modern decline and its future direction, and so it fits snugly within the now well-established body of religious disenchantment literature.
The book is not, however, an attempt to establish whether accounts of pre-Enlightenment saintly miracles are plausible—for that, consult They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Carlos Eire’s remarkable study of the extensive eyewitness accounts of holy levitation and bilocation in the late medieval and early modern periods. Nor is it a hand-waving attempt to advocate for the broad “spiritual” or “mythical” meaning of hagiographies, without regard for their verisimilitude. Rather, Astell seeks to frame hagiography as a form of biblical exegesis, shifting debate about the genre into new territory. In this reviewer’s estimation, the shift will be enriching for both hagiography’s detractors and its defenders, even if questions remain over Astell’s proposals for a revival of hagiography.
Debates about hermeneutics often involve the question, “Are we allowed to read Scripture in the way the Apostles did?” Astell’s book prompts us instead to ask, “Are we allowed to read history in the way the Apostles did?” The hagiographical tradition and its tropes, Astell contends, arose not simply because believers in centuries past were superstitious miracle-mongers. Rather, until the rise of scholasticism, the Church believed that, in both God’s providential ordering of events and the hagiographers’ interpretation of those events, the Scriptures were effectively still being lived and written. To steal an idiom from the Bible Belt, everyone believed we were still in “Bible times.” Just as God unfolded Old Testament history and narrative to point toward Christ, so, too, did he now in the lives of saints—not merely in their daily taking up of their cross, but in providential events and miracles that directly echoed Christ’s life as told in the Gospels.
Astell argues that this view entailed no contempt for history. Citing theologians such as Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), she demonstrates that, for the hagiographers, history was a kind of “rough foundation,” the gravel and rubble laid down in a trench. This foundation was then smoothed over and held together by the cement of allegory. Combined, history and allegory resulted in tropology, echoes of the tropes of Christ’s life. In this process, the hagiographers saw themselves as essentially writing Scripture—or rather, crucially, they saw God as writing Scripture in both themselves and the saints’ lives. What resulted was a diminished view of both their own agency and the saints’, corresponding to a greater view of God’s agency:
Just as God is the author of the two books of Creation and the Bible—each necessary to the other’s proper understanding—so too is God through God’s grace the privileged author of the saint, whose sanctity bears witness to God’s own: “Be holy as I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16). Composing a saint’s Life in biblical language conveys the theological doctrine that God himself is the author of a saint’s holiness, the Word who has impressed the divine image and established God’s likeness in the saint. The saint (to the extent that he or she is a saint) is the “author” of his own life only secondarily, in collaboration with the divine author and dependent on God’s grace, even as the human writers of the scriptures are authors in a secondary sense, their work inspired by God’s spirit.
This belief in hagiography as Scripture was explicit. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, designated hagiography the third part of the New Testament, after the Gospels and Epistles, paralleling the tripartite structure of the Old Testament in the Law, Prophets, and Writings.
Once we are aware of this approach, hagiographical narratives make a little more sense. They might seem like a disjointed and episodic collection of miracles, but Astell makes clear that immense theological and literary sophistication is at work. Chapter 2, for instance, examines St. Aelred of Rievaulx’s Life of Ninian, tracing its elaborate numerical riffing on the six days of creation (the sort of thing the Bible itself does constantly), as well as influences from Augustine, medieval cosmology, and Old English literature.
Framing the hagiographical tradition as a form of biblical exegesis seems, to this reviewer, a fruitful avenue for both its defenders and its detractors. Rather than endlessly debating “Did these things happen?” we may ask, “Is this a licit extension of New Testament hermeneutics?” The conversation becomes intrahermeneutical, rather than a standoff between the biblical and the extrabiblical. Indeed, one could consider hagiography, as presented by Astell, as a kind of biblicism—a dirty word most often associated with untheological low-church Protestant hermeneutics. And even when detractors of hagiography conclude against its hermeneutic, the hagiographical mind will at least have been rendered more intelligible. It can be seen as a form of exegesis rather than mere superstition, even if questions of truthfulness can’t be sidelined entirely (a point to which we will return).
Astell’s account of hagiography’s decline is worthy of attention, too. If hagiography and biblical exegesis are of a kind, shifts in the latter will necessarily affect the former, and such is Astell’s contention. In her introduction, she fingers the disenchanting Reformation as sounding the death knell for hagiography—ushering in its replacement, biography. This account, drawn from Weber and Taylor, has become a staple for Roman Catholic intellectuals in recent years (see, for instance, Brad Gregory’s Unintended Reformation or Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel). Suffice it to say, non-Catholic intellectuals have been steadily showing up this narrative’s shortcomings. Jason Josephson-Storm’s 2017 book The Myth of Disenchantment, for instance, questions whether disenchantment ever happened at all, given the high levels of spiritualism and occultism among many of its alleged architects. Others, such as my colleague Joseph Minich in his Bulwarks of Unbelief, concede the reality of disenchantment but convincingly place most of the blame on the material conditions of post-industrial technoculture, rather than on the theology of Martin Luther.
It is a shame, then, to see Astell falling back on such a dubious narrative, though to her credit she places the beginnings of hagiography’s decline even further back. It is the medieval scholastics who are to blame—not, for once, nominalists such as Ockham, but realists such as Aquinas. The development of the medieval quadriga (that is, the “fourfold sense,” which interpreted Scripture literally, allegorically, morally, and eschatologically) led to a new interest in the literal sense of Scripture, along with its human authors and events. This triggered “a hagiographic turn from earlier, meditative, monastic forms celebrating God’s wondrous work in human lives to emerging scholastic models focused on the saints themselves as heroic respondents to God’s call.” These exegetical developments precipitated a shift in perceptions of sainthood, including a greater emphasis on saintly character over against miracles. Astell seems to regard this emphasis as a kind of semi-Pelagianism, pulling focus from God to the saint as the “author” of his own life. Erasmus comes under fire in Chapter 8 as the godfather of biography and a scoffer at miraculous tales. The Reformation, in Astell’s account, simply delivered the coup de grace. In the interests of transparency, this reviewer would begin the narrative with the Enlightenment as a decisive break with all forms of Christianity, rather than a natural progression of Protestantism, but Astell’s account is nevertheless coherent and well argued.
So, quo vadis hagiography? This question occupies the book’s last two chapters, which are spiritually enriching but ultimately unconvincing. Astell admits that the question of relighting the “brief candle” of the saint’s lifeas a form of biblical illumination remains “inconclusive,” but it is hard not to be underwhelmed when her alternative is essentially “the novel.” The spiritual merits of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette are surveyed, the latter two being adaptations of true stories. Earlier in the book, Astell delivers worthy explorations of the differences between history and legend, but she would have done well to deal in a similar manner with the idea of “fiction” in the book’s final section. Modern readers are open (perhaps overly so) to the spiritual power of fiction, but one feels that, when the two are grouped together, hagiography is brought down to the level of the novel rather than the novel’s being raised to the level of hagiography. Not to mention the fact that Roman Catholic works such Bottum’s Decline of the Novel present the novel as a Protestant art form, which emerged as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to compensate for Protestantism’s own malign influence. Astell would have done well to address this concern of her coreligionists before gesturing toward the novel as a site of great Christian spiritual renewal.
As I finished Astell’s book, I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s conclusion to his great posthumous work, The Discarded Image. After holding forth at length on the “splendour, sobriety, and coherence” of the medieval cosmological model, Lewis notes “that it had a serious defect; it was not true.” And yet this did not stop Lewis from imbuing the Narnia Chronicles or the Cosmic Trilogy with the same spiritual realities conveyed by the images and ideas of the medieval cosmos. Lewis recognized two things. First, the spiritual realities remained true, even if the scientific “facts” through which they were once most readily apprehended had been debunked. Second, modern interest in “the actual facts” is here to stay. His responses to this situation have been wildly successful, both popularly and in terms of Christian devotion. But he achieved this success through fiction that acknowledged itself as such. If we do see a revival of saintly stories in the years ahead, that will be well and good—one could imagine the films of Robert Eggers delivering on this score. But these stories will surely be understood as pure fiction and as a break from, rather a continuation of, hagiography. Lewis elsewhere says that fairy stories enable us to “steal past those watchful dragons” in our hearts and minds that obscure the “real potency” of Christianity. He has been stealing past them for more than seventy years.
