HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHY: FOUNDATION TO MATURITY 121indeed ‘put on’ the Christ? The Church provided the answer throughits promotion of hagiography. The narrative of the holy life providedthe documentary evidence of sanctity.The gospel narratives present a soteriology of the holy that isindebted to this imitation of the incarnate divine. Christians redefinedthe holy and virtuous life as someone in whom the teachings ofChrist were manifest. Athanasius of Alexandria attributes this commentto Anthony of Egypt: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Virtue,therefore, has need only of our will, since it is within us and springsfrom us”. 18 The individual who sought virtue through a responsiblecivic life in the late Roman Empire, who revered the ancestral godsand the genius of the emperor, was now outside the pale. Men andwomen who would be saints had to represent the imitatio Christi, evenif it cost them their lives. There are no saints’ lives or Christianbiographies that do not make mimesis central to the narrative. Itwas the constitutive rhetorical principle of the genre.Mimesis functions in the saints’ lives through recursive structuresintended to excite memory. Recursive structures, or tropes, mightappear as anecdotes, metaphors, events, or even exact language fromScripture or new canonical Christian biographies. These structureswere built into the narrative to remind the listener that this biographywas part of the idealizing tradition of Christian biography anddrew its legitimacy from the gospels. Recursive structures facilitatepatterns of correspondence as multiple layers of recognition (anagnorisis)emerge from the shuttling back and forth between the oldand the new biographies. 19 Such rhetorical tropes fuse mimesis andideology and move us from ignorance to knowledge, “ÄAnag≈risiwd°, Àsper kai toÎnoma shma¤nei, °j ãgno¤aw efiw gn«sin metabolÆ”. 20The biographer—whether he is extolling the prophetic wisdom ofSt. Polycarp, the heroism of Perpetua of Carthage, or Adomnán’scelebration of Columba—employs such recursive tropes to remindhis audience of the presence of the divine in his subject. This recursiveprinciple of Christian sacred biography is crucial and has itslocus classicus in Christ’s dying lament.18St. Athanasius: The Life of St. Anthony, trans. R. T. Meyer, Ancient ChristianWriters 10 (New York, 1978), 37.19Dörrie (1938), 274.20Freese (1975), 1452a, 36.