HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHY: FOUNDATION TO MATURITY 147power. He [Benedict] knelt in prayer and asked that he might performit”. 76 This comment and Peter’s ensuing agreement underlinethat the power of healing is shared between the holy man and thefaithful father, who both receive the gift by God’s grace.Gregory shifts the emphasis from an ideology of the sacred—whichdepicted the holy man as a powerful, charismatic, spirit filled, miracle-workerwhose mighty spirit performs miracles—to one that placessaintly power within the grasp of the peasant father, the elderly nun,or perhaps even an elderly pope working to maintain his piety beneathan avalanche of secular concerns. Furthermore, Gregory extends thislocation of God’s salvific power even beyond the personal. For example,Gregory’s interest in representing Benedict’s primary interest ascaregiver for the monastery broadens the emphasis in the life fromthe figure of Benedict as saint and miracle worker to include themonastery as a center for God’s grace. The worshiping community,the ecclesiastical structure, and the Church Triumphant all becomethe locus of God’s mercy and power. Gregory’s intent to feature theChurch as a principle locus of the divine is indicative of the Church’smaturity and his own heart-felt need to illustrate the possibility ofrealizing the divine in the profane. His life of Benedict is not, however,a repudiation of the saint as charismatic holy man (in figureslike that of Anthony, Martin, or in some of Gregory of Tour’s bishops)but a domestication of the model. Gregory intended his depictionof Benedict—and by analogy his own life—to serve as a rebuttalto the traditions of an increasingly bureaucratic papacy that graceand the miraculous can thrive in the tumult of a worldly life. 77Far Away Across the SeaHis face showed a holy gladness because his heart was full of the joyof the Holy Spirit. (Adomnán, Life of St. Columba)The Island of Iona in the late sixth century was the edge of theknown world. Europeans who knew of it believed it to be the endof the earth, perched on the edge of the primeval abyss of Genesis(Gen. 1.9), surrounded by a hostile sea inhabited by monsters and76Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 101.77O’Loughlin (1997), 13.