Saints' Lives ♥

"Of all the genres that survive from the Middle Ages, only the lives of the saints, arguably the richest in terms of extant records, are still treated by literary historians as documents for source studies (Quellenkritik) and little else. The genre has until recently fallen through the net of scholarly research, avoided by the historians because it lacks 'documentary' evidential status and by the literary historians because saints' lives are rarely works of art.

We live, moreover, in a pluralist age ruled by a post-Marxian secular materialism, in an age when fear of the avenging angel of the Lord has been replaced by fear of microorganisms. We have replaced the awe-full reverence for the Almighty with a minute examination of the specific. Microbes have replaced devils. Our literary language has followed this transference of belief. The leading theorists of the last twenty years, in both literary criticism and historiography, share two important methodological premises inherited from the logical-positivists: a skepticism of metaphysical inquiry and a disbelief in the ontological status of language. From this methodological vantage point, they argue that narrative is unable to reflect any reality other than its own. Their major premise which decisively veers from the mainstream of Western philosophical argument is that language—which they define as a rule-based system of mutually intelligible signs—cannot represent reality, for reality is itself a random series of unrelated discontinuities (i.e., is not rule-based). Language is a closed encoding system, and if it reveals anything about a 'reality' outside itself, that 'reality' is a fictive one. It is some considerable distance from this position to that wherein language is a vehicle for representing not only the 'things' of the material world but also the numinous presence (e.g., the scriptural λόγος). Augustine, Gregory, Bokenham or—even the proverbial medieval man on the street—all would affirm the ability of language and narrative to represent not only this world but the divine as well."

—Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography (1988)