4

A QUESTION OF PROOF

Augustine and the Reading of Hagiography

In 1230, Hugolino, who was then bishop of Ostia and would later become Pope Gregory IX, confessed to James of Vitry that he suffered from the temptation of blasphemy. According to Thomas of Cantimpré, James first attempted to aid him by proclaiming “things that seemed to be apt and suitable for temptations of this kind,” but his “reasoning” (rationem) remained ineffective, as did James’s wise pastoral strategy of “mingling his sighs” with Hugolino’s.1 Finally, James gave him the Life of Marie of Oignies, confident that this saint who so often cured others of the spirit of blasphemy would soon cure the bishop.2

The book, James told Hugolino, contained “many examples” of Marie’s “special grace” of expelling blasphemous spirits, a gift, James insisted, that she retained in death. Hugolino then asked James whether he could also borrow the relic of Marie’s finger that James wore always around his neck and which, as Thomas later describes, helped to save James’s life during a shipwreck.3 Hugolino took the book and the relic and “devoted himself” to reading Marie’s Life (lectioni vigilanter incubuit). He found “wondrous hope and peace” in the vita, and from the relic, he derived a “great mental confidence.” The transformation wrought in Hugolino by James’s gifts culminated in a secret vision in which, “with the palate of his heart he tasted how sweet is the Lord” (gustansque palato cordis quam suavis est Dominus) and attained a lasting security (securitas), free from his old temptations.4

This instance, narrated by Thomas in the Supplement to the Life of Marie of Oignies (1230), vividly displays how important examples were for a man when traditional sources of persuasion—particularly the scriptures—were no longer effective in the face of demonic rhetoric. Thomas writes that James of Vitry realized from long experience that a mind overwhelmed by the temptation of blasphemy does not easily grasp (capiat) an argument (rationem) from scripture “unless it is buttressed with the most telling examples” (nisi exemplis evidentissimis confirmetur).5 James’s encounter with Hugolino figures examples as a kind of proof, for they provide the evidence that is able to render an elusive argument visible even as they also establish its veracity, thereby making it compelling for an audience.

Thomas portrays James’s use of the example and the relic as being remarkably efficacious, having an effect that is almost instantaneous and irresistible. However, by the time he wrote the Life of Lutgard of Aywières thirty-two years after the Supplement (1262), Thomas’s confidence in the power of hagiographical example to persuade, increase understanding, and thereby transform readers was attenuated. The prologue to Lutgard’s Life foregrounds his concern that the vita would not be believed and thus would not be adopted by readers as an exemplary text, concerns that are elaborated as part of an extended humility topos. In the prologue to Lutgard’s Life, Hugolino’s idiosyncratic, blasphemous doubt becomes the doubt of all readers in the truth of Thomas’s tale. In contrast to Hugolino’s experience with Marie’s vita, the Life of Lutgard is not represented as irresistible, nor does the text portray itself as conferring an immediacy of saintly presence on the reader. Instead, the prologue emphasizes the rhetorical situation of writer and resistant reader—the reader who considers the merits of an argument, weighing the legitimacy of offered proofs—and posits the necessity that the reader’s reason participate in the work of belief and interpretation. The reader must, in Thomas’s language, “take up” (suscipiant) the tale and the saint, without which the exemplarity of the saintly figure remains ineffective. The exemplar is adopted as such only after a process of deliberation. The contrast between the Supplement and the Life of Lutgard in their attitudes toward hagiographical example can be seen in Thomas’s recapitulation of the tropes of finger and text in the later vita: Thomas wrote the Life of Lutgard in exchange for Lutgard’s finger. While Thomas needed to earn a finger by writing a Life that was a performance, incitement, and proof of his love and belief, Hugolino graciously received Marie’s finger and was thus given the capacity to believe.

Exemplary proof and the ways in which it solicits readers’ belief in thirteenth-century hagiography are important, for it was a time when Catholic and Cathar alike proffered novel and contemporary forms of sanctity as models for pious practice and as evidence for the truth of theological claims. Hagiographies like Thomas’s, Dyan Elliott argues, were key documents for “proving” the sanctity of women whose piety was sculpted in order to refute Cathar claims.6 Such vitae were the initial stage in a juridical process that culminated in a papal inquisitio to determine the validity or spuriousness of a claim to sanctity. Elliott thus identifies a double dynamic of proof: holy women were proven saintly by hagiographical evidence, and these women, in turn, became proofs of orthodoxy, living instances of the truth of Catholic dogma. According to Elliott, both Thomas’s and James of Vitry’s vitae are exemplary illustrations of this kind of hagiographical writing.7 The saints of these Lives, she argues, with their elaborate somatic and Eucharistic piety and their submission to clerical authority and its sacramental and penitential program, could act as a kind of argument refuting the claims of heretics (including denials of the goodness of the body, the materiality of the sacraments, the humanity of Christ, and the validity and efficacy of the Catholic priesthood). They could also act as consummate performers of those saintly behaviors that were idealized by both Catholics and Cathars, thus affirming the presence of apostolic values such as poverty and charity within the context of a Catholicism that was derided as corrupt and greedy by many dissenters.8 The hagiographical representation of contemporary holy women thus affirms Catholic sacramentalism, their examples functioning as compelling rhetorical devices that render the saints vivid, comprehensible instances of abstract doctrine so effectively that they become forms of living proof of those doctrines.

The probative function of these Lives as noted by Elliott is indeed well established. The vitae are pervaded by the vocabulary of proving and witnessing that accords with the context of inquisition and trial to which both potential saints and heretics were subject. The verb probare, exceedingly common in ecclesiastical Latin as well as in Thomas’s vitae, translates variously as “to test, to judge, to inspect,” which refers to acts of adjudication, and also “to make credible, to represent, to prove, or to demonstrate,” which refers to forensic acts of defense and representation within a legal context.9 However, Thomas’s understanding of the nature of hagiographical proof and the ways in which credibility, representation, and saintly example work within his vitae is more complex than the juridical model discussed by Elliott, and it changes over the course of his career. Questions thus remain regarding how the saintly female example works as a persuasive device to solicit readers’ belief and how the texts themselves understand the rhetorical power of example. In this chapter, I will address these questions by examining Thomas’s understanding of how saintly example functions to convince readers of the theological probity of his hagiographical texts and of the sanctity of their protagonists in the Supplement to the Life of Marie of Oignies and the Life of Lutgard of Aywières, texts that are separated by more than thirty years.

According to Aristotle, rhetorical arguments persuade hearers by producing belief (pistis) after the hearer has deliberated and subsequently chosen between alternative arguments.10 Examples serve these arguments as “a kind of epilogue,” providing “evidence” of the truth.11 However, for Thomas—working within an Augustinian lineage—the reader of scripture has the complication of being subject to the fall, to temptations that interrupt the capacity of truth to work on the mind, and, once persuaded, for that reader to act on that which has been decided. The deliberation and choice that, for Aristotle, mark the rhetorical situation are, for those working within an Augustinian tradition, fundamentally undermined by sin. Augustine effected a revolution in rhetorical theory with his doctrine of the fallen will: What is it to convince human beings who do not do the good they know or, even more fundamentally, cannot understand or believe the truth because of demonic influence? The interdependence of intellect, will, and body—in other words, of knowledge, desire, and action—led Augustine to yoke the affective and intellective elements of rhetoric in unprecedented ways. For, if persuasion is to be truly effective, it must engage the whole person, allowing the listener or reader not only to understand the good but to do it despite the fallen will. Eloquence, for Augustine, arises from a combination of logos and pathos. More than being made certain of the truth of an argument, the audience must desire to act upon what they have heard.12 Augustine perhaps best represents the holism of this view of persuasion in book 8 of Confessions, which depicts transformational reading as a physical act of “putting on” or being clothed in the body of the text. The converted reader not only understands intellectually but incorporates the Pauline command to live chastely.13

In Thomas’s story about Hugolino, we see this Augustinian understanding in play. Temptation—the demon of blasphemy—negatively affected the capacity of Hugolino’s mind to “grasp” (capiat) an argument. The “grasping” of understanding that Hugolino sought involved more than ratiocination leading to a choice. It was connected with the will, the faculty that, in being tempted, arrests understanding and, once healed, enables a transformation of not only the intellect now acceding to belief but the affect and the body such that Hugolino’s newfound understanding is figured as “tasting within the heart.” The story intimately links belief with understanding, the will, the intellect, and the flesh. Examples are the means of their union and thus are essential to successful persuasion.

The pairing of text and relic, of hagiographical example and saintly body, leads to a fundamental opacity in Hugolino’s story concerning what, precisely, was the agent in his transformation. Was it the bishop’s engagement with the text or Marie’s finger? What is the relationship between them? Although Hugolino assiduously read the vita, his final transformative vision occurred when, following a time of reading, he was again tempted by a particularly violent demon of blasphemy, and, leaving the vita aside, grasped Marie’s relic, invoked her, and was instantaneously relieved of his burden. Although it could seem that the relic ultimately purged him of his doubt, the story carefully couples the relic and the text, given, as they were, to Hugolino in the same moment. While the relic is a fragment of a literal body, the vita is a narrative that carefully and in great detail depicts the bodily form and exemplary deeds of the saint, and this depiction is, furthermore, not read but “incubated” (incubuit), as a hen broods over her eggs or as the bride reclines in the inner chamber. Hugolino’s engagement with both gave rise to an understanding—described with the gastronomic participle gustans—in a heart that was made into a mouth, able to taste the “sweetness” of God, much as Augustine was able to enfold his body in the garment of Christ. Both the hagiographical example and the relic bore saintly virtus, and both enabled Hugolino to “invoke that saint just as if she were present” (praesentem).14 In Thomas’s full account of hagiographical example in the Supplement, then, example not only buttresses an argument by means of figuring abstract ideas or dogma according to the lineaments of a particular person or life, making them vivid and comprehensible. Rather, the ekphrasis of textual example is a form of living bodily presence that, like a relic, exercises an irresistible force on another body and its desires. This presence is assimilated to the understanding by means of a reading that is described in highly somatic terms. Thomas’s tale of the power of saintly example thus no longer conveys an understanding of rhetoric simply conceived nor one of proof as a function of rational evidentiary corroboration of an argument.

Lutgard’s Life continues the Augustinian holism of Marie’s Supplement with a notable difference. By depicting Hugolino’s broken will and mind as healed by a hagiographical narrative that exercised an inevitable transformation, Thomas obscures the deliberative function of rhetoric in which the reader considers presented arguments and chooses between them. He thus downplays the role of a reader’s skepticism. Marie’s exemplarity, rather than being delivered through the mediations of interpretive exercise, is represented as irresistible—we could say coercive—and immediate, with Hugolino becoming primarily a site for the working of divine power. In contrast, the Life of Lutgard does not present the same optimism about the efficacy of example, and it wrestles with the problem of the reader’s doubt, “baring,” as Stephen Justice writes, “the devices of faith” from the outset of the text.15

In Lutgard’s Life, Thomas’s concern about his text’s credibility leads him to explicitly theorize the act of reading the vita of a wondrous saint, providing a methodology for his readers’ lectio and their deliberative engagement with the text. Thomas directly appeals to and recontextualizes the Augustinian rhetorical and exegetical theory of De doctrina christiana, making the hagiography a self-conscious work of persuasion in the tradition of Christian reading and preaching. Through Augustine, Thomas develops a theological hermeneutic to deal with the dilemma of belief that he outlines in the vita’s prologue. This hermeneutic transforms both the figure of the witness-reader and the location of auctoritas, which rests less in the text as an independent object and more in the practice and will of the reader who engages with it and is thereby transformed.

Deliberation as represented in Lutgard’s Life makes space for doubt and the reader. However, this emphasis on the reader’s engagement does not mean that Thomas theorizes that a correct hagiographical reading is one in which the reader controls the text. As in Hugolino’s story, engagement with hagiographical example involves more than assent that is conceived in purely intellective terms; deliberation requires affective engagement with the text and has implications for the reader’s body insofar as the exemplary life of the saint makes claims on a devotee’s actions. Belief is a matter of practice. In his last vita, Thomas represents ideal reading in some ways as an act of vulnerability to a text, recapitulating Hugolino’s readerly posture, but in Lutgard’s Life, this incorporation is depicted explicitly as giving rise to understanding and as emerging from love rather than fear. As the vita has it, the reader of hagiography is drawn into an intimate relationship with the saintly exemplar that ideally transforms him or her into its likeness as the body of the communicant assimilates and is assimilated to the Eucharistic host. This assimilation moves through doubt and deliberation by means of love and faith in order to arrive at understanding.

The Augustinian language of love, faith, and incorporation does not erase juridical discourse from the vita. Thomas draws on two discourses and two hermeneutics to construct his theory of hagiographical reading and rhetoric in Lutgard’s Life. First is the juridical or probative discourse in which he conceives his task as a writer as one of convincing readers of the truth of his text by offering proofs—visible and verified examples that solicit a reader’s intellectual assent—of saintly character that satisfy the doubts and curiosity of readers. In the second discourse, one of reading and rhetoric that Thomas develops through Augustine, belief in the saint is a function of the reader’s love; the reader believes in order to understand, and belief and understanding entail the adoption of the saint as an exemplum for the reader’s own life. Thomas thus joins the juridical hermeneutic of proving and convincing with a hermeneutic that emphasizes moving the heart and changing practice to accord with belief.16 As a result of this connection, the semantic and conceptual field of “proof” in the Life of Lutgard is much richer than that of evidence given in a courtroom by a writer conceived of as a lawyer, a saint conceived of as defendant, and readers conceived of as jurors.17 In arguing for the need to expand the category of proof, I am directing our attention to a more robust notion of the ways in which Thomas understands exemplarity to function within his texts and the ways in which exemplarity is bound up with rhetoric.

In addition to his use of De doctrina christiana, Thomas theorizes the ideal reader’s lectio within the vita by means of the narrative presence of different sorts of readers, whose reactions and interpretive work variously enact Augustine’s rhetorical theory. These readers anticipate the incredulity and credulity of the vita’s readers, enabling the tale to explicitly become a space of deliberation as well as a reflection on the nature of that deliberation. Most notably, Thomas himself is represented as a resistant reader who undergoes a moral purgation of incredulity, moving from doubt to belief and love, a love that ultimately issues in the writing of his tale. The vita also portrays Lutgard’s fellow nuns as good and bad readers. Finally, Lutgard is made a figure of the ideal reader of scripture, a subject that I will examine in detail in the next chapter.

RECEPTION AND PROOF

Thomas’s employs two discourses of proof in the Life of Lutgard. This strategy was driven in part by considerations of reception, which would have been different from such considerations in the case of the Supplement. First, as a supplement to the Life of Marie of Oignies, the vita garnered authority from the primary text, which was written by an important preacher who became a cardinal with powerful papal connections. Furthermore, Marie’s reputation was already well established. The Vita Lutgardis, in contrast, was written in part to establish Lutgard’s reputation. It entailed multiple audiences, although it was commissioned by Lutgard’s community and was addressed to them as well as the nuns of Brabant. The nuns of Aywières had likely sought both a memorial of their sister and an exemplary text for private use. They would, moreover, likely have been seeking to develop a cult around Lutgard in order to garner prestige and, perhaps, financial reward from pilgrims and devotees. The hagiography would then potentially become an integral part of a dossier in Lutgard’s bid for sanctity, which is, in part, why Thomas attends to the power of her relics in the final chapters of the vita, as this would be essential material for any inquisitio.18

For Thomas, the issue of Lutgard’s fellow nuns as an audience is not only whether or not she is believable in and of herself but whether the life that she represents is possible for those who read her vita. In other words, the question posed by Lutgard’s Life is whether readers can believe that Lutgard can be a model for their own lives. Can the virtues she represents be taken up as exemplary and thus be performed by the reader?19

Another audience implied in the prologue’s concern for doubting readers—inevitable should the vita have been part of a canonization dossier—were clerics, men of the ecclesiastical hierarchy who, it was noted in the introduction, often read vitae of mulieres religiosae with skepticism and disgust.

A final potential audience was the laity. Although the vita was written in Latin, thus radically circumscribing its readability, all of Thomas’s vitae are filled with materia praedicabiles to be used by preachers.20 As Robert Sweetman has shown, by the time he composed the Bonum universale de apibus (1256–1263), Thomas wrote with no trace of pastoral dualism; the devotional life of the laity was elaborated according to the ideals of regular life, and the regular life was described in terms of the secular life. Secular people, like those who were cloistered, were taught to live according to the order of grace rather than nature.21 This rapprochement between secular and regular life can be seen as early as the Life of Christina the Astonishing (1232) and the Life of Margaret of Ypres (1240–1243), in which laywomen lived exemplary lives contra naturam. Lutgard’s vita circulated with Christina’s as early as the second half of the thirteenth century, along with the lives of other female saints, such as Mary Magdalene, Margaret the Lame, and Elizabeth of Hungary. Further demonstrating the rapprochement between lay and religious spheres in the clerical imagination, Lutgard’s Life recapitulates a number of the events of Margaret’s vita using the same language. For example, like Lutgard, Margaret “never relaxed the vigilance of her mind to commit any mortal sin”; like Lutgard, her “affectus” for a man is translated into love for a new spouse, Jesus, resulting in a divine gift to never feel temptation again; and like Lutgard, she is called a “simple dove.”22 Given his commitment to pastoral duties to the laity and the ease with which he moves between secular and religious life in his writing, it seems highly possible that Thomas intended the Vita Lutgardis to be used in sermons for the laity.

Juridical rhetoric and hermeneutics would have been necessary to address those clerics who would adjudicate Lutgard’s sanctity as well as those skeptics who pursued proof of the sanctity of a woman whose form of life was in many ways novel and thus deemed potentially dangerous or unacceptable. Lay listeners with heretical views would likewise require such proofs. However, the nuns to whom the text was addressed would have sought to use the vita as a devotional text, looking to Lutgard for inspiration and motivation in their spiritual lives and attempting to have those unconverted aspects of their souls transformed. Furthermore, as the laity was held to the same ideals as those in regular life, such a transformation of the soul and body by means of the exemplary figure of Lutgard would have been held out as an ideal for all those who came into contact with her Life.23

THE CRISIS OF CREDULITY IN THE PROLOGUE TO THE LIFE OF LUTGARD OF AYWIÈRES

The prologue of the Life of Lutgard of Aywières introduces the question of belief as a dilemma that necessarily faces the writer of a wondrously virtuous life. Lutgard’s vita, although it is about a woman with a very different vocation from Christina’s, thus continues a problematic that we have seen in Christina’s Life. The prologue lays bare a set of anxieties that invite the reader to reflect on the nature of the text as well as his or her relation to it. Thomas fears that his story will not be believed:

Not for many years, I believe (credo), has there been written (descriptam) the life of any person so filled with remarkable virtues (virtutum insignia) and so privileged by marvels and miracles (mirabilium ac miraculorum praerogativas). If you ask how I am to convince readers (fidem faciam) of the truth of all these things, I briefly say (and may Christ himself be my witness and judge) that I received many of them from Lutgard’s own mouth as one of her closest friends (sicut familiarissimus). In these matters no one, I believe, would be so bold as to contradict her testimonies (testimoniis). I acknowledge that I collected the rest from people of a kind who would never stray from the path of truth. There were many things—splendid ones in fact—which I have not consented to write, either because they would not make sense to (non intelligibilia) the uncultivated (rudibus) or because I did not find suitable witnesses.24

Thomas thus opens the vita with a literary problem: the Life he has written (descriptam) is threatened from the outset by an irony necessarily arising from its subject. The same remarkable nature and miraculous deeds that compelled its writing strain the credibility of the narrative, undermining the reader’s capacity to believe the text, its author, or its subject. Thomas must write of the incredible mirabilia ac miracula that are witnessed to in Lutgard’s Life even as he attempts to create a rhetorically persuasive narrative, one that is able to convince his audience (fidem faciam) of its truth, thereby fulfilling the hagiographical task of preserving Lutgard’s memory as a saint. The wondrousness described in the text compromises its persuasiveness even as it is the condition of its existence. The power of the example to render an argument both vivid and convincing by stirring the affections and giving rise to understanding is challenged by the miraculousness that both justifies the example’s use and gives it vibrancy.

These wonders and miracles not only compromise the vita’s credibility but render Lutgard, by virtue of her special grace and ability to represent the seemingly impossible (and therefore wondrous) ideal of divine life, singular (or, as Thomas puts it, “set apart” [sequestrata]), but singular in an exemplary tale, meaning that the story offers Lutgard’s singularity to others for their adoption. While the gap between the real and ideal—what is and what ought to be—between the saint who is set apart and the saint who is imitated, is always an issue when the reader takes up the saint’s Life, the prologue to Lutgard’s Life explicitly addresses this gap, asking what happens to those who must dwell in this space and how they might successfully navigate it.

Lutgard’s wondrous deeds and supremely virtuous character are problematic both because they defy belief in their own right and because they are the site and source of Lutgard’s novelty. Thomas’s statement that a saint such as she has not appeared “for many years” suggests that Lutgard is not absolutely without precedent, and, later in the vita, he calls her “another Agnes” and claims for her a merit equal to the virgin martyr by virtue of a hemorrhage in her chest. However, he asserts in the prologue that no saint of recent memory, and definitely no “living saint,” has manifested holiness quite as she did.25 Thomas’s hagiographical efforts are, therefore, he writes, similarly unprecedented, and despite his efforts to ground Lutgard’s claim to sanctity within the authority of tradition, it is her novelty that he desires to underscore, even as it creates the rhetorical difficulties here outlined. As much, then, as Thomas attempts to frame the holy women of whom he writes in terms of the traditions of desert fathers and mothers, virgin martyrs, and other saintly precedents, this vita cannot be read as simply a recapitulation of older hagiographical conventions. In particular, the Vita Lutgardis diverges fundamentally from earlier hagiographical models in its introduction of what Simone Roisin terms a “mystical element”—narratives detailing encounters with Christ, union with God, ecstatic states of prayer, and visionary experiences—alongside depictions of intense asceticism. According to Roisin, such portrayals of mystical union were “riskier” than detailing physical feats. Thus she ascribes Goswin of Bossut’s elaborate humility topos in the Life of Ida of Nivelles—absent from his Lives of Arnulf, a conversus who practiced extreme bodily mortification, and Abundus, a monk of Villers—to the presence in Ida’s vita of “mystical facts” that occurred in Ida’s interior life, “facts” that are absent from the two male Lives.26 The novel wonders and miracles of Lutgard’s vita are likewise found in its detailed depictions of Lutgard’s visionary encounters and her union with God.27

Thomas’s literary problem, outlined in the prologue, is a result of the clash between his desire to witness to the unprecedented nature of the saint and the unintelligibility and skepticism that this novelty yields.28 His constant references to the wondrousness of Lutgard’s piety and to the fact that he is about to “speak marvels” (mira dicturus sum) contextualize Lutgard’s Life within Thomas’s broader project, which aimed to show that an unusual outpouring of divine grace was occurring in Liège, an outpouring that was visible particularly, though not exclusively, among women.29 As with Christina mirabilis, not only the fact of Lutgard’s piety but its unusual nature was important to him and the rhetorical construction of her vita. He notes in the prologue and throughout the tale that what he tells are “still greater wonders follow[ing] upon … wonders” (mirandis plus miranda succedunt),30 wonders that she experienced and that others witnessed working in her.31 These wonders are offered as proof of Lutgard’s sanctity even as they give rise to the skepticism that seeks such proof.

The doubleness of the marvel is apparent throughout the first book, where, Thomas relates, Lutgard’s devout way of life was unable to be imitated by her fellow nuns (quam poterant non imitari), who slandered her in their jealousy. Their disbelief led to a series of publically manifested divine proofs, including Lutgard’s suspension in the air before the whole community;32 her illumination by the sun in the night;33 her mouth being made to taste like honey long after she had a vision in which she sucked “much sweetness” from Christ’s side wound—a savor that others tasted in her saliva, making them able to certify (probaverunt) that the vision and its effects were true;34 the mystical placement of a golden crown on her head;35 and her singing voice, which “marvelously stirred” those who heard it “to devotion” (corda audientium ad devotionem interim mirabiliter movebantur).36 These external manifestations of Lutgard’s divine favor eventually convinced the nuns of Saint Catharine’s of Lutgard’s special status. They had not recognized, as Thomas puts it, the way in which she was “set apart” from them (sequestrata) or “singularly honored” (eam prae aliis singulariter honorare).37 As Thomas tells it, these proofs ultimately led to her recognition and her election as prioress.38

Eliciting belief in the veracity of the wonders recounted in the vita was essential to Thomas’s reputation as an effective author and to Lutgard’s attainment of a reputation of sanctity. This belief was also necessary if the vita’s primary audience, the nuns of Aywières and Brabant, were to be able to adopt it as an exemplary instance of the virtuous life, one that could be used by them to further their own spiritual path. Thomas hopes, he writes,

Not only you [Hadewijch, the abbess of Aywières], but the virgins of all the monasteries of Brabant should receive (suscipiant) this life of the gracious Lutgard so that she, whose reputation for virtue (fama virtutis) was known to all, should become even more widely known (innotescat) by the publication of this little book (libelli). May it increase virtue and merit in its readers, to whom it will provide a lesson (praescriptum) and example (exemplum) of virtue.39

The verb suscipere is the implicit synonym and supplement of credere. Suscipere means to take up, accept, and defend. However, as the origin of the English “suspicion,” it refers to the Roman practice of the father “taking up” a new child from the ground after overcoming his suspicion that the infant may not be his own. The taking up thus occurs after a process of doubt and distrust. Thomas hopes the nuns will overcome their suspicion of the vita’s excesses and “take it up.” The verb implies that this taking up is not only a matter of overcoming doubt but of an affective identification with, recognition of, and caring for as if it were one’s own that which was regarded with suspicion. To believe is, then, to acknowledge the text as authoritative such that the claims it makes on the reader are acknowledged as requiring a response, a “taking up” that is the necessary precondition for “increas[ing] virtue and merit” in the reader. Yet how is Thomas to persuade his readers to do this? The dilemma stands; the excessive wonders that are the content, justification, and often proof of the text undermine narrative’s credibility.40

The prologue first responds to the problem of disbelief with a turn to the terms of juridical discourse. Thomas emphasizes his dependence on reliable witnesses, those who knew Lutgard personally, including Thomas himself. He claims further that he left things out because he did not wish to court disbelief or the confusion of those too “rude” to understand the mysteries of his subject. He writes that the vita contains examples of her virtues as well as miracles and marvels. The promise of providing signs of Lutgard’s virtue accords with what André Vauchez has shown to be papal attempts in the thirteenth century to prioritize a saint’s virtus morum over the more popular virtus signorum, or marvelous manifestations of divine favor, in canonization policies.41 In his promise to also reveal many miracles and marvels, Thomas, in effect, plays to both audiences, the papal and the “popular.”

In the prologue’s salutation, Thomas appeals to the authority of his office, an authority that he says transcends the interests and corruptions of his “personal name”: “Instead of a proper name, I have put the author’s office (officium) and his order in this salutation, so that the office and the order might commend (commendetur) the authority (autoritas) of the work, rather than making it worthless by the intrusion (insinuatione) of my personal name.”42 This is an argument from the authority of the office of the Order of Preachers, an authority that is held here to be free from the sullying influence of the individual interests of the personal. The autoritas of the Dominican order as a whole stands as a buttress for the truth claims made by the text. It is a mode of proof belonging to the juridical sphere.

However, Thomas immediately undermines this claim to the authority of the impersonal, writing that he personally was incited to write this text not only out of love for the monasteries of Brabant but for that singular person, Lutgard: “Since it was not only your charity (caritas) which incited (incitavit) me, but also that of many monasteries, as well as the most burning love (amor flagrantissimus) I had for this most special personage (specialissimum personam) I have described in writing the life of the gracious (pia) Lutgard.”43 The source for the vita was not the office and order of the author but Thomas’s “most burning love” (amor flagrantissimus) for the particular person, Lutgard. Thus, immediately following his appeal to the authority of the order and office, invoking the humility topos by means of the marked absence of the author’s name, the text calls on the authority of Thomas’s personal claims. He has already implied that these claims do not assist with the narrative’s credibility, and yet they appear forcefully, with the use of the superlative, to describe his love and the marking of this love not as the generalized Christian caritas but as the more personally charged amor.44

Thomas’s second strategy for answering the doubts of his readers is an appeal to the common hagiographical topos of the eyewitness. He writes that he has conveyed only those stories that he heard from Lutgard herself and those who are trusted friends. He claims that he left out things that, though wonderful and presumably painful to lose, were not adequately accounted for by witnesses. Furthermore, these human witnesses—Lutgard’s friends, Thomas himself—are watched over by the looming authority of Christ, the witness who will judge what is written there, test its honesty, and hold the author and his sources accountable.

These two strategies of proof do not satisfy Thomas. In a drastic shift of tone and discourse, he moves from those proofs that would be proper to a trial to an invocation of the rhetorical theology of Augustine. Quoting from De doctrina christiana 4.11, he writes: “For as the most glorious Augustine says, ‘it is a mark (insignis) of good and distinguished minds to love (amare) the truth in words and not the words themselves. For gold is no less precious for having been taken from the earth; nor is wine less sweet for being extracted from worthless wood.’ ”45 The distinction between the truth in words and the words themselves relies on Augustine’s categories of signum and res, signs (the words themselves) and things (those entities signified by the word), which he outlines in book 1 of De doctrina christiana.

Thomas’s invocation of this Augustinian distinction is, first of all, a creative use of the humility topos—a rather showy way of denigrating his writing while rescuing his subject. However, Thomas’s appeal to Augustine’s treatise is more than a rhetorical flourish. Instead, the exegetical and rhetorical theory of De doctrina christiana, founded on the fundamental distinction between things and signs and the proper relation between them, underlies Thomas’s understanding of what it is to successfully read the signs of his hagiography, particularly the living sign of the saint.

Thomas’s turn to Augustine is necessary because, no matter what kinds of evidence are provided, the prologue indicates that the tension between intellectual certainty and the saint who is manifest by means of both miracles and practices as yet unheard of is, in fact, irresolvable. The excesses of the miraculous cannot be domesticated, either by offices or eyewitnesses, and a reader who seeks to adopt the saint’s Life as exemplary must exist in the gap between the credible and the incredible. This gap cannot be traversed simply by recourse to the use of a compelling example that would somehow give the reader intellectual certainty, for the example of Lutgard’s Life, with its miracles and marvels, necessarily exceeds comprehension and the dynamics of juridical proof (even as they are Thomas’s proof of Lutgard’s holiness). However, while the prologue registers this impasse as an anxiety, the hagiography exploits this tension throughout its telling by refiguring it in terms of a particular—what I have identified as Augustinian—mode of reading and writing the saint’s Life. In short, it is a way of reading defined by taking up a relation to the wondrous in belief enabled by and defined as love.

AUGUSTINE’S DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA

Written for all those “with the will and wit to learn,” not merely preachers, De doctrina christiana was intended to be a systematic exposition of the principles of biblical interpretation that were required for understanding a complex and foreign canon.46 Augustine paints himself as a teacher of the alphabet who provides the skills to his students that enable them to read, interpret, and teach this canon.47 The need for interpretation exists for the majority of the faithful who are not, as Abba Antony, divinely inspired or, as Paul, caught up into the third heaven to there hear “words that cannot be expressed.”48 Furthermore, even those interpreters who are divinely inspired rely on the conventional human language they learned as children. Thus, people who are inspired by God nevertheless require human teachers and the mediation of human language to apprehend the divine message. To argue otherwise and disavow the need for rules governing exegesis, Augustine argues, is to give in to pride and can lead to the view that one lacks any need for the mediation of the Church or for human love in which, when learning from one another, “souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other.”49 The human condition, Augustine writes, “would be wretched indeed if God appeared unwilling to minister his word to human beings through human agency.”50

The participation of human agency in the creation of scripture necessitates human rules for its interpretation, for although—along with the entirety of the “temporal dispensation”—it was “set up by divine providence for our salvation” and ultimately authored by God,51 scripture is subject to human distortion, including complications that come with translation and divergences among manuscripts.52 The contingency of scripture means that ongoing interpretive effort is required in order to find, in and through its human media, the divine will. Rita Copeland argues that the emphasis on the necessity and centrality of the interpreter in Augustine’s theological rhetoric means that the role of the interpreter acquires a status that is unheard of in classical rhetoric, as “textual power” resides not in the author’s intention but in the reader. Augustine moves “responsibility for making meaning from the writer to the reader.”53 Divine authorship is indeed ultimately responsible for scripture’s meaning—and entails the boundaries of that meaning—but as it is expressed in ambiguous ways and is subject to the limits of human language and historical vicissitudes, the reader must judge and determine what that meaning is with the assistance of doctrinal guidelines and exegetical rules.

The text immediately states that there are two things “on which all interpretation of scripture depends.”54 First, the discovery of what must be learned (modus inveniendi) (books 1–3) and, second, the presentation of what has been found (modus proferendi) (book 4). The majority of the treatise, up to the end of book 3, was written in the mid-390s, perhaps before Augustine’s election as the bishop of Hippo, though after he had much experience as a preacher.55 The remainder of book 3 and all of book 4 were not taken up again for thirty years. Despite the significant temporal gap between the inception and completion of the treatise, however, R. P. H. Green observes that had Augustine himself not noted the break, it would have been undetectable,56 and David Tracy contends that the work constitutes an “authentic whole.”57 Moreover, the structure of the work is comparable to contemporary rhetorical compendia and treatises, treating style and presentation in a much more condensed fashion than invention, which comprises the greater part of most such works.58 While Thomas only quotes from book 4, and the passage might have been read in a florilegium, it is not unlikely that he had access to the entirety of the fourth book (if not the whole treatise), which was a central text for those learning and teaching the art of preaching and was often circulated separately from the rest of De doctrina for use as an ars praedicandi.59 Most important for our purpose here, the theorization of eloquentia in book 4, to which Thomas refers in his prologue, depends on and is consonant with the distinction between res and signum that is examined in the first three books of Augustine’s treatise and was widely disseminated beyond De doctrina itself. I will thus briefly outline the background of the first three books of the treatise insofar as it elucidates Thomas’s invocation of book 4 in his prologue.

Book 1 of De doctrina opens by naming the distinction between res and signum, thing and sign (a distinction that became central throughout the Middle Ages).60 Knowledge of both things and signs is necessary, Augustine argues, to understand scripture, for “all teaching is teaching of either things or signs.”61 A thing, “in a strict sense,” is that which is never a sign of anything else. A sign, in contrast, is a thing that refers to something else, a “thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind (in cogitationem) besides the impression it makes to the senses” (praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus).62 Thus, the substance “wood” is a thing, while the wood that Moses cast into the water to make it sweet is both a sign and a thing insofar as it signifies something other than itself.63 While all signs are things, for all that exists is a thing, not every thing is a sign. Things, Augustine writes, “are learnt through signs,”64 and in relation to these signs, the rei are the content or subject matter to which the signs refer.

Augustine’s discussion of things immediately departs from a treatment of the res strictly in relation to scriptural interpretation to a consideration of the human relationship with all things. Book 1 primarily concerns the practice of ordering love such that all created things become signs that refer the soul to its divine, immaterial, eternal “homeland.” Augustine introduces the distinction between enjoyment (frui) and use (uti) to describe two possible modes of relating to things. “Enjoyment” refers to the type of relation a person should have to that which is the final end of the human soul, “eternal and unchangeable things.”65 “Use” refers to proper action performed with regard to things that are not ends in themselves but “are to be used so that we may attain the full enjoyment of those things.”66 Enjoyment entails “hold[ing] fast to [something] in love for its own sake.”67 Augustine then specifies that the only things that are to be enjoyed are the Father, Son, and Spirit—the Trinity—“a kind of single supreme thing” (una quaedam summa res),68 while all other things are to be used in order to refer the individual to the supreme divine thing, who is source and aim of the Christian life. In this referential capacity, things are made signs. If disordered desire leads the soul to enjoy that which should be used, it is, in effect, turning sign into thing, interrupting its capacity to transport the traveler from the estranged land of materiality to the immaterial homeland, disabling the capacity of things to reveal “the invisible attributes of God, which are understood through what has been made or, in other words, to ascertain what is eternal and spiritual from corporeal and temporal things.”69 For the person who loves in an ordered fashion, created things act as “conveyances” rather than final resting places. Augustine describes this capacity of things “we use” to act as vehicles by virtue of their being “related” to the “aim of enjoying God’s goodness” as the treatment of things in a “transferred” rather than a “literal” sense: “For when the object of love is present, it inevitably brings with it pleasure.… If you go beyond this pleasure and relate it to your permanent goal, you are using it, and are said to enjoy it not in the literal sense (proprie) but in a transferred (abusive) sense.”70 The “use” rather than enjoyment of earthly things allows them to become catachrestic, revealing that which is not “proper” to them, by “relating” the created to the creator and thus allowing those created things to become forces of transferal that convey the soul to its heavenly dwelling.

Augustine elaborates his discussion of signa in books 2 and 3. He distinguishes between “natural” (naturalia) signs,71 which signify without intention—for example, the footprint of an animal signifies its passing—and “given” (data) signs, which are, in contrast, those signs governed by human convention, which “living things” produce in order to “express and transmit to another’s mind what is in the mind of the person who gives the sign.”72 These include verbal and nonverbal signs, such as gestures or facial expressions that are “visible words.”73 Augustine distinguishes between two uses of given signs, “fitting” or “literal” (propria) signs—the use of a sign to signify the thing for which it was invented, as when the word “ox” (bovem) is used to signify the animal—and “transferred signs” (translata)—the figural use of signs whereby the signifying chain is extended in order that a sign may signify not only its literal referent, but some other thing, as when “we say bovem and not only interpret these two syllables to mean the animal normally referred to by that name but also understand, by that animal, ‘worker in the gospel.’ ” Book 2 addresses “unknown signs,” both fitting and transferred, while book 3 addresses ambiguous signs, both fitting and transferred, and provides interpretive strategies for exegeting these difficult signs.74

Like Thomas’s prologue to Lutgard’s Life, De doctrina opens by addressing the problem of recognition. While Thomas faces the problem of the nonrecognition of Lutgard’s sanctity, Augustine grapples with his diagnosis of the human condition as one beset by the problem of having an eye that, in the wake of the fall, is “weak and impure,” unable to perceive the creator through the creation. Christ’s Incarnation and scripture were two solutions to this problem, each a form of divine speech. In the Incarnation, the divine res became signum, the end became the means, as immaterial divinity appeared to the “carnal eye” to compensate for the weakness of the “inner eye,” for, as Augustine quotes Paul, “the world was incapable of recognizing God through wisdom.”75 Scripture, too, is a privileged means of healing the impure eye, a different kind of divine flesh. Although the divine res is ineffable, making scripture into a “conflict between words,” for it speaks the “unspeakable” God,76 the divine referent is nevertheless made available to the reader in its pages, which authoritatively witness to the revelation of God. Correct interpretation of scripture is purgative, an encounter with soteriologically placed signs that reforms and orders desire by “conform[ing it] to the truth.”77 For this encounter to be salutary, a reader requires the skills for approaching and correctly interpreting the various types of signs that a reader finds in scripture, for it contains many obstacles, including the question of whether to interpret transferred and ambiguous signs in a literal or figurative manner. In order to be efficacious, the body of the sign must be read in such a way that the reader sees “the truth in words” and “not the words themselves.”

Difficulties with signs occur not only at the level of interpretive dilemmas concerning obscure or ambiguous passages but in relation to the eloquence of scripture. Book 4 of De doctrina addresses both the eloquence of the scriptures and the role of eloquence in the work of persuasion undertaken by the preacher who must instruct, delight, and move (persuade to act on ones belief) an audience. Augustine asserts that he can conceive of nothing more eloquent or wise than scriptural writings. However, this eloquence is unique, for the authors of scripture “used our [pagan] eloquence side by side with a rather different eloquence of their own.”78 The singular quality of scriptural language arises from the fact that God has presented the mysteries of faith in simple language. Thus, unlike other literature, “the humbler (humilior) [scripture] seems the more thoroughly it transcends (transcendit) [the eloquence] of others.”79 This is that form of eloquence that Eric Auerbach argues gave rise to the “Christian sublime,” a style in which, he argues, the great is revealed in the humblest of language,80 while the sublime becomes that which is most lowly and the most lowly becomes the most sublime.81

For Augustine, to recognize scriptural eloquence as such requires that one first “understand these authors.”82 “Indeed,” Augustine writes, “I venture to say that all who correctly understand what these writers are saying realize at the same time that it would not have been right for them to express it in any other way.”83 However, when a reader lacks understanding, “their eloquence is less clear.”84 The simplicity of the language of scripture, then, can have the effect of obscuring its message, for its humble form does not accord with the grandeur of its claims.

Augustine’s acknowledgement that the recognition of scriptural eloquence occurs in the wake of understanding begs the question of how a reader might be convinced of and understand wisdom that does not seek to persuade by means of classically eloquent speech. Similarly, the question that arises from the first three books of De doctrina is how a reader is to use the signs of the scripture in order to know and enjoy God, the true res, if that reader has no knowledge of God, no understanding that would make the signs intelligible, and in a postlapsarian state, confuses signs and things, enjoying, as if they were final ends (rei), what should be used as a means to that end (signa). For the converted reader, the renovation of the soul and its desires is necessary for reading scripture in such a way that its signs are understood to refer to God and thus to function as vehicles for the return journey to the divine source. Even as the Christian ethos is one that uses and does not enjoy the finite things, so is the interpreter’s transformed ethos required in order that he or she might recognize that the referent of scripture is the rightly ordered love of God for God’s own sake and of the neighbor for God’s sake.85 The “truth behind the signs” that is the subject of Thomas’s quotation is this love, and the interpreter who properly distinguishes between signs and things is able to see “the truth in words and not the words themselves,” to see love and not pay attention to the putatively awkward—ineloquent—surface of the text, or to be caught forever within a net of ambiguity. As David Tracy notes, the initial distinction between the res and the signum liberates Augustine from his prior disdain for the “vulgarity” and “obscurity” of the scriptures in contrast to the clarity and sophistication of the pagan classics. It allows Augustine to recognize the biblical writings as having their own kind of eloquence in service to their own topic, the love of God and neighbor.86

Thomas cites that portion of De doctrina christiana that argues that the eloquence of a teacher must be simple. Augustine writes,

In a word, the function of eloquence in teaching is not to make people like what was once offensive, or to make them do what they were loth to do, but to make clear what was hidden from them. If this is done in a disagreeable way, the benefits reach only a few enthusiasts, who are eager to know the things they need to learn no matter how dull and unattractive the teaching may be. Once they have attained it, they feed on the truth itself with great delight; it is the nature of good minds to love the truth in the form of words, not the words themselves (in verbis verum amare, non verba). What use is golden key, if it cannot unlock what we want to be unlocked, and what is wrong with a wooden one, if it can, since our sole aim is to open closed doors?87

The eloquence of the good teacher is subordinate to the teacher’s wisdom, as words are subordinate to the reality (res) they represent. Delighting and moving an audience are secondary to the requirement to teach clearly. Eloquence should not be utterly dispensed with, lest the teaching lack all appeal, but unlike schoolmasters who regard eloquent figures as “something great … bought at a great price, and sold with great showmanship,”88 Christian teachers should use a prose that divests itself of such ornament in order to teach the most serious of subjects. Rhetoric does not exist for its own sake; as an instrument, it is to be used for the return of the soul to its source rather than enjoyed.

When Thomas invokes this passage, however, he does not do so to draw attention to the clarity of his writing. Rather, the passage is part of an extended humility topos. This rhetorical gesture does two things. First, Thomas draws a parallel between the vita and scripture, which has a similarly humble style.89 Second, this parallel suggests a mode of reading the vita: as Augustine instructs readers of scripture, so Thomas asks readers to look not at his ostensibly poor prose but at the truth behind it. He asks them to take up the vita as an exercise practiced on a text that can be read as “obscure” insofar as its subject resists understanding because of its incredible and novel claims. Thomas wants readers to look past the “wood” of his words to see the “truth” that is Lutgard (and according to the logic of signs here, Lutgard as Christ) and not those mediating vehicles that compose the text.

Such a reading of his work would be a proper “use” of the text. Thus, Thomas refigures Philippians 4:8, which he renders “believe such things are holy as are useful (utilia).” The Pauline verse commands the community at Philippi to “think about such things as are true, noble, right, pure, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy.” While Lutgard is represented as being all these things, Thomas tells readers to believe it insofar as it is “useful,” in other words, insofar as it allows them to look past the text and toward the figure of Lutgard, who refers the reader to God. The reader of the Life of Lutgard is like the interpreter of scripture in Augustine’s De doctrina. Thus, through the use of the humility topos, Thomas makes enormous claims for the vita.

However, the obscurity that Thomas addresses remains a source of anxiety. The obscurity of his narrative arises, we have seen, from the novelty and unintelligibility of Lutgard’s sanctity. The call to read “beyond” language does not satisfy his concern. Why should a reader undertake such an exercise on an unintelligible and nonauthoritative text or nun? The vita is not, after all, the Bible (though it stands in complex relations of imitation to it). Thomas’s task is to make Lutgard legible and thus acceptable and exemplary for a community of readers. At the same time, however, he must foreground the power of her wondrousness and novelty, for this strangeness energizes and justifies his text even as it threatens it. Without such legibility, the reader would remain unsure whether the life represented in the text is, in fact, a “possible” one, to use the happy phrase of Allison Frazier.90 By possible, I mean not only for Lutgard herself, or believable on the part of the reader, but desirable. How can such strangeness be placed in the space where a reader could “take it up”? What is required for a reading to be taken up such that it is efficacious, able to “increase merit and virtue” in its readers? How might reading itself be transformative?

Thomas’s recognition that his hagiographical document is one that must persuade disbelieving readers—those who approach his subject not with faith and love but a skepticism born of what he asserts is his poor prose and the incredible nature of its claims—mirrors Augustine’s problem of recognition in De doctrina. To recognize the eloquence of scripture behind its humble style requires that the reader have an understanding of the message of the text. Yet how is a reader to gain this understanding if the text seems inelegant, offensive, or simply unintelligible, its obscurities an opaque veil rather than a site for productive interpretive exercise? How might Thomas convince readers of—render them faithful to (fidem faciam)—the truth of his text?

The solution offered by De doctrina to the dilemma of understanding is that God must graciously give the capacity to discover him.91 Augustine’s declared reliance on grace for inner transformation and understanding does not, however, end in quietism; rhetorical persuasion and teaching remain central tasks in Christian life. Truth requires, he asserts, persuasion to turn the soul toward its proper end and clever language to defend it. Yet the dilemma remains acute in the treatise as it is in Thomas’s vita and for its readers, for in the realm of the fallen will, the unconverted soul suffers a fractured relation between sign and thing, and the good that would repair this relation is no longer irresistible. Real eloquence, for him, is that which stirs listeners to “lend their assent to matters which they admit to be true” and to “act decisively on the knowledge that they have.”92 In other words, persuasion must engage the will and the body. Although a person may know and desire to do the good, the divided will that resulted from the fall renders knowledge powerless.93 The function of proof and belief in contexts of persuasion, then, aims for more than intellectual assent to a proposition. It seeks an enlistment and agreement of desire. Thus, love and belief are deeply entwined for Augustine: “For if someone lapses in faith, that one inevitably lapses in love as well, since that one cannot love what he or she does not believe to be true.”94

If love enables belief, and belief, in turn, is required for love, the issue is less one of certainty than of the assent of the will in love. The will healed by an infusion of charity is able to act upon its desires, a radical change from the broken will’s alienation from potestas. In the prologue to the Life of Lutgard, this action of the united will is conceived as the “taking up” of Thomas’s tales “as are useful.” This use is how the nuns were to incorporate Lutgard’s vita into their reading practice and thus into their cultivation of a spiritual disposition modeled on Lutgard’s Life.

In book 1 of De doctrina, Augustine provides some clues as to the pragmatics of how reading and interpretation might transform and persuade the unconverted or disbelieving. Addressing the moment when an interpreter encounters a passage that clashes with his or her old thoughts, he acknowledges that the reader’s first impulse is to disagree with the text. This initial gesture is dangerous, and “if he or she encourages this evil to spread it will be his or her downfall.” This is so because, in negating the demand of the text and thus disavowing the gap between the mind and scripture, the reader no longer reads with faith. He writes,

For “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), and faith will falter if the authority of holy scripture is shaken; and if faith falters, love itself decays. For if someone lapses in faith, he or she inevitably lapses in love as well, since he cannot love what he does not believe to be true. If on the other hand he both believes and loves, then by good conduct and by following the rules of good behavior he gives himself reason to hope that he will attain what he loves. So there are these three things which all knowledge and prophecy serve: faith, hope, and love (1 Cor. 13:13). But faith will be replaced by the sight of visible reality, and hope by the real happiness which we shall attain, whereas love will actually increase when these things pass away. If, through faith, we love what we cannot yet see, how much greater will our love be when we have begun to see! And if through hope, we love something that we have not yet attained, how much greater will our love be when we have attained it!95

Faith consists, in part, in the submission of the intellect to the authority of scripture (or to God, as some advanced souls do without recourse to the mediations of scripture).96 This submission is not an act of the intellect based on things seen. It is, rather, love of that which is not yet attained or seen, a love that seeks in hope and enables a person to behave in such a way that it is possible that he or she “will attain what he or she loves,” eventually arriving at the consummation of that faith, hope, and love in the beatific vision after death.

Yet how does such a submission of the intellect occur except through a faith and a love (an act of the will) that the text itself engenders (or the prior illumination of God)? In other words, if the will resists the demands of faith, then faith and love are impossible from the outset.

In book 8 of Confessions, Augustine offers a powerful example of this problematic. Having already been transformed by “the books of the Platonists,” which converted him to a belief in the immateriality of God, Augustine continued to struggle with the submission of his will. His mind was certain (certum) of the truth of what he needed do, but his will was broken and weighed down by chains of habit that the certainty of his mind could not shatter. Augustine describes himself in a state of extreme agitation, disgusted with his own recalcitrance and yet unable to give himself over to that part of his will that desired chastity. Fleeing to a garden at his Milanese house, he read Romans 13:13–14, “not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and lust, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Rather put on (induite) the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.” What it meant for him to be “convinced” or persuaded of this text was to acquire the capacity to act upon that to which his intellect had assented, to submit to the authority of a text that did not comport with his prior habits or disposition. In order to acquire this new capacity, he assumed—clothed himself in—the person of Jesus. The struggle for conversion, for submission to the code of scripture, is depicted here as the result of grace, but a grace that works in and through the text.

Commenting on the scene of conversion in the garden, Brian Stock notes that Augustine did not simply align himself with the directives of the text but first experienced a horrifying distance between his own state and that of the ideal stated in the text.97 This experience of the gap enabled his repentance (precisely what was missing for Augustine in the Platonic writings) and, through this, a submission of his will (and thus his body) to the divine command of chastity. The scripture was not only a sign of the invisible, absent res but a mark of the distance between reader and the text. While reading in agitation because of this gap, he writes, “A light of freedom infused my heart, dispelling all shadows of doubt” (luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt). While Stock renders securitatis as “certainty,” the word carries connotations less of intellectual confidence and more of a sense of freedom from anxiety, safety, and composure—an emotional state that stands in contrast to the agitation that introduces the scene. This securitatis contrasts with the “certainty” of book 7, a certainty arising from intellectual assent that was able to bring him only so far on his road to conversion. This security was what ultimately dispelled doubt, demonstrating that the persuaded reader is one whose will has been reconfigured and whose body has been transformed, not only convinced of a series of propositions.

If we return to the series of Pauline quotations that appear in Thomas’s prologue immediately before the invocation of Augustine, we see that these passages together constitute a view of reading designed to address the vita’s implausibility in a deeply Augustinian way. Thomas writes, “Since ‘charity believes all things, bears with all things’ (1 Cor. 13:7) I plead with those into whom ‘God has poured (infudit) the spirit of his charity’ that, in these matters, they believe ‘such things as are holy, such things as are useful’ (utilia),98 such things as are consonant with the truth, and at the same time patiently bear with such things as I might have put down in a less rhetorically pleasing or discerning (indiscrete) style.”99 One must read in love, for this love believes “all things.” Love also enables the reader to “bear with” (sustinet) the allegedly bad grammar and poor style of Thomas’s writing. Thomas thus gives a strangely grand theological pressure to the humility topos; the reader’s capacity to accept the humble style of the text is evidence of an operation of grace working in them.

Romans 5:5, to which Thomas appeals, is an essential text for Augustine in his debates with the Pelagians, appearing in both On the Spirit and the Letter and On Grace and Free Will.100 In both treatises, it acts as a proof-text for the necessity of prevenient grace, that love that is first “shed abroad” in human hearts, transforming the will so that it is able to love the law rather than obey it in fear and to act upon this transformed ontology.101 By invoking Romans 5:5, Thomas circumscribes his addressees as those “into whom God has poured the spirit of his charity.”

Thomas appeals to his readers’ status as those who have been infused with the love of God, demarcating the audience, which is the key rhetorical strategy Thomas uses in attempting to solicit his readers’ belief. Thomas appeals to readers’ status as already converted. Successful readers of the vita are those, he writes, who have received the divine illumination that is necessary to recognize that the true topic of his hagiography is the caritas manifested in Lutgard. The corollary of this appeal is that the conversion of those who do not accept his text is called into question. Accepting Thomas’s text becomes proof that a reader has been infused with grace. He borrows, for his own text, his reader’s presumed prior acceptance of and submission to the authority of scripture.

Thomas thus uses the authoritative work of Augustine, which was initially elaborated for the interpretation of the scriptural canon, in the service of a new hagiographical, extracanonical text. He attempts to convert already-converted Christians to a new type of text and example. His elaborate humility topos implicitly places his work, if not on an equal footing with scripture, then on a level of comparable revelatory status, claiming for it the same necessity of grace on the part of the interpreter and the same true topic, namely the love of God and neighbor as it is manifested in Lutgard.

DESIRE, INTERPRETATION, AND PROOF

To read in love is, first, to submit to the authority of the text in an act of faith that Thomas argues is coterminous with his readers’ faith because it draws upon their prior infusion of gracious love. Such a reader “bears with” or “endures” the implausibility and simplicity of the tale’s narration as well as Lutgard’s strangeness. The reader’s passion is a key means to his or her identification with Lutgard, for it enables her “virtue and merit” to become models “taken up” by the reader, effectively increasing his or her own virtue and merit. Suspicion is overcome by a belief that is a work of love in faith.

However, the reader’s identification with Lutgard, which could be understood to be—much like Augustine’s taking up of Romans in the Confessions—submission to the authority of the textual exemplar, whether Lutgard or, in Augustine’s case, Christ, is not, I would argue, one that Thomas understands to be the end of readerly desire and interpretive practice but its incitement. Martyrdom to the text does not entail the cessation of the reader’s interpretive work. Despite the alignment of his text with scripture, Thomas is not setting himself up as an authority delimiting the interpretive scope of the reader. Rather, by assimilating the mechanics and topic of the vita to Augustine’s understanding of scripture, Lutgard becomes the res, that referent that can be captured only by means of language that inevitably falls short of the capacities of the text’s signa.

The type of reading that Thomas’s text suggests and that Augustine’s theory of signification allows is similar to that which Roland Barthes terms the “writerly text” (le scriptable). It contrasts with the juridical notion of the saint-as-proof, which Dyan Elliott argues is fundamental to Thomas’s hagiographical corpus. According to Barthes, the writerly text is one in which the reader is “no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.”102 The reader as producer is, he argues, the goal of “literary work.” In contrast to the writerly text, the “readerly” text (le lisible) is one in which the reader is made idle:

Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and reader. The reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum.103

The aim of literary work, according to Barthes, is to turn the reader into a “writer,” one who has an active engagement with the text, in contrast to those intimidated or lazy readers who simply “accept or reject” the text in a reading that is a “referendum.” The referendum is not unlike the juridical notion of persuasion in which the aim is to lead listeners to give a verdict of true or false, guilty or not guilty. The referendum attempts to determine the nature and status of the referent, that to which the signs refer, in an absolute and single moment that enables the reader to stop working.

The way that Thomas has framed his tale, such that Lutgard is the res, complicates the nature of reading hagiography in relation to the question of belief and doubt. The res to which the signs refer stands always in excess of the text’s signifiers. The referential work of signs is never resolved, and neither, then, is reading completed. Thus, interpretation must be more than assent to or dissent from the claims of the text. Thomas himself provides the best example of this notion of reading as writing. He appears in the vita not only as a superlative lover of Lutgard but as an instance of the doubting reader whom he addresses in the prologue.

The last chapters of the vita elaborate the surprising nature of the agreement between Thomas and the Abbess Hadewijch that Thomas says gave rise to the writing of the Life. Though Thomas claims that it was his love for the abbess, the nuns of the Brabant, and Lutgard herself that impelled his writing, at the end of the vita, he describes how he wrote the tale in order that he might obtain her relic. Thomas arranged to receive Lutgard’s entire hand upon her death. Hearing this, however, Lutgard told Thomas that he would receive the little finger of her right hand. Thomas, disbelieving her prophecy, protested that he intended to get the entire hand. When Lutgard died and Thomas approached Hadewijch for the agreed-upon relic, she refused to give it to him unless he first wrote her Life. He agreed to write it and, in due course, received the very finger Lutgard had indicated he would. Thomas believed, he writes, that this trial was according to the “dispensation of God’s counsel, for the Almighty had arranged a test (ordinabat probare) so that I might obtain Lutgard’s finger according to her promise—the finger that my ignorant simplicity had once refused (nescia simplicitas denegarat). Once again I came to Aywières and, promising to write Lutgard’s life, I received with immense and heartfelt joy the gift I desired more than gold or silver.”104

Thomas had doubted Lutgard’s words, insisting on his claim to her entire hand. He had to undergo a purgation of his incredulity and misplaced desire—by means of the test that is his writing and bearing with the disappointment of his hope for her hand—in order to obtain that which Lutgard herself had allowed. Thomas’s testing had the further virtue of “proving” Lutgard to be a prophet (si vere Prophetes pia Lutgardis esse probabitur) according to her earlier prediction that only the little finger of her right hand would be amputated.

Thomas’s account of how he came to write the vita also demonstrates the way in which a juridical discourse of proof and doubt is paired with an Augustinian one that is articulated in terms of love and the transformation of the subject who believes. Both Thomas’s belief and Lutgard’s prophetic powers are tested and proven (probare). The hagiography is, furthermore, meant to be proof of Lutgard’s sanctity, containing tales like this one in which her prophecy is carefully attested to by worthy witnesses. However, the writing of hagiography does not only prove Lutgard. It is also Thomas’s test in which he proves his love, devotion, and belief. His writing was born of desire, most immediately for her finger and more generally for the sake of his amor flagrantissmus and caritas for Lutgard and the women in her orbit. Thomas, the reader of Lutgard, becomes a writer. The text that proves him is a work of desire, a space in which he is placed as a character and undergoes purgation and transformation.

Thomas justifies his desire for the finger of an as-yet-uncanonized woman (nondum adhuc canonizatæ) with reference to the story of Hugolino accepting the finger and vita of Marie of Oignies from James.105 In these doubled stories of doubt—Hugolino’s blasphemous doubt and Thomas’s doubting of Lutgard’s prophecy—relic and text act as proofs of orthodoxy and saintly power. Marie’s relic and vita are presented in the Supplement as efficacious because of Hugolino’s great desire for them to work. Hugolino was, despite his blasphemous doubt, an already-converted soul, for he desired his own cure and was able to act upon that desire in reading—“incubating” (incubuit)—with the devotion of the bride of the Song of Songs and clinging to Marie’s relic with confidence.

Behind Hugolino, however, lies the true addressee of the Supplement, Thomas’s mentor, James of Vitry. In the Supplement’s prologue—addressed to Giles, a founder and prior of Saint Nicholas at Oignies—Thomas claims that he wrote the vita for Marie’s admirers, who knew that James left many things out from his account for the sake of brevity and credibility, but the vita was, in fact, an occasion for Thomas to write James’s Life through his encounters with Marie. The text culminates in a querela in which Thomas berates James for quitting the apostolic life and his community in Liège for the glamor of Rome.106 Marie’s Supplement is, in effect, James’s antihagiography. If Lutgard’s Life was written for the sake of Thomas’s love of his spiritual mother, the Supplement was written for the sake of his disappointed love in his spiritual father, James. The account of James’s abandonment of Liège provides a second narrative of proof and disbelief within the Supplement. In it, however, James models the failure of love and belief, issuing ultimately in his falling away from what Thomas perceived to be his sanctity.

James’s transfer to Rome was, Thomas argues, against the wishes of Marie, who made her desires clear to James. Though he was her most devout follower, he discounted them. Hugolino’s conversion from doubt to belief is thus a foil for and inversion of James’s conversion from belief to disbelief. James becomes a figure for the failure not only of hagiographical but visionary rhetoric, as even Marie’s persuasive efforts were unsuccessful in his case. James thus enacted the Augustinian problematic of the fallen will in the work of persuasion in a way that was much more pronounced than in the tale of Hugolino. For Augustine, as we have seen, the rhetorical encounter does not only involve deliberation and choosing among various truth claims. Successful rhetoric is a mode of speaking that unifies the fissured subjectivity of the fallen person. The preacher’s task, according to Augustine, is to “reach people who know what they should do but do not do it.”107 According to Thomas, James knew what he should do—return to Liège—but his will was recalcitrant, and he refused—or was unable—to act on his knowledge.

Thomas relates a tale of Marie’s intercession on James’s behalf that reveals James’s knowledge of what was required of him. Once, when he was bishop of Acre and sailing to Rome, a terrible storm threatened the ship. Terrified of drowning, James clung to her relics hanging from his neck, pleading for her help, calling upon her merits and reminding her of the “special love” (amore præcipuo dilexisti) she bore him while on earth and promising to change his way of life.108 Marie dutifully appeared to James, telling him that he would be saved. She then predicted that he would consecrate five altars at Oignies, the last to the Trinity, and that there, “if you wish (si ipse volueris), Christ will give you the peace that you [have] sought.” However, she ominously told him “you are a man with a will of you own (Sed tu, homo voluntatis tuæ) and you have never wanted to accede to my counsels and the counsels of those who loved you spiritually.”109

Thomas writes that James “wished to test” (probare volens) this vision. He thus asked the pope to release him from his episcopate and returned to Oignies, where the vision was confirmed. Two years later, however, James was again invited to Rome. When Prior Giles importuned Marie to keep James in Liège, as it was likely he would become “entangl[ed] in some dignity” in Rome, she told him that because she was opposed to the journey, she would not accompany James. When Giles told James of his vision, he laughingly replied that not only had Marie told him the same but that he “was not moved” and said, “I don’t believe it: indeed I certainly presume that … the pope will not detain me with him if I am unwilling” (Præterea non credo, imo certus præsumo quod me).110 James thus became an unbeliever. His certainty was pitted against the word of the saint, as the dignity of Rome was pitted against the apostolic ideals of the small community at Oignies. Thomas paints James as a man whose will, which could have given him the “peace he sought” in Oignies if he had acted on that desire, was delivered instead by the alternative desire for the satisfactions of the cardinalate to unbelief. “Unmoved” by Marie’s appearance, the querela of chapters 24–27, which are addressed to James and written in the grand style—which according to Augustine is the style necessary for addressing an audience that cannot do the good it knows—and full of unmitigated pathos, allusion, repetition, the hortatory subjunctive, and the central stark image of two “beautiful dead birds” that represent James’s ministry, are Thomas’s desperate attempt to convince James to return to Lotharingia. Addressing James, he writes,

So now I must turn to you, bishop of Tusculum and cardinal of the Roman curia. Anyone can see that the handmaid of God spoke most truly when she said you are a man with your own will. You were so obstinate in the face of the clear revelation of the handmaid of Christ that there was no way you could be turned from your own will. Brothers, let the bishop of Tusculum look and see if he has gained through his own will, if he has incurred damage from this, if he has omitted things which could have promoted the honour of Christ and the salvation of abandoned souls.… O most honourable bishop … you testified that you saw in a divine revelation that blessed Gregory [IX] gave you two very beautiful, but dead, birds. Bishop Lambert, the martyr and bishop of Liège gave you one, but much prettier and alive. This is also what the most blessed woman Mary of Oignies, a prophetess without deceit, once foretold to you when she was alive: the blessed Lambert himself put a mitre on your head.… The holy martyr Lambert … through the holy prayers of saintly men and women, does not cease offering you each day this bird of spiritual administration, stretched forth on the wings of contemplation, bright with the feathers of virtues, live with holy action.… O man especially chosen by the Lord from among mortals, and yet remiss in such things, we are confident that you still burn inside with the divine fire.… O beautiful and dead birds! The birds, I repeat, are dead.… If they are dead, why are they favoured in place of the living one? Take care holy father, take care most reverend bishop, lest the dead birds provide you with stench rather than honour. The nature of things is known to be such that however pretty the birds are dead, when they are dead, they cannot last without decaying.111

Thomas’s rhetoric, however, could not persuade James’s recalcitrant will. The good, in this instance, was highly resistible. James thus became the embodiment of the bad reader, one whose love for Marie and the community at Oignies did not persist. He stands in opposition to Hugolino, who began in a state of doubt and was cured by means of his devoted reading and relic.

Thomas wants readers to believe that the truly incredible wonder of the Supplement is not the material about Marie that James had left out of his vita “lest … by including too much of the incomparable magnitude of revelations and miracles which is the fragrance of life in the hearts of believers but the odour of death [in the hearts of the unbelieving].”112 Rather, he declares it an “unprecedented wonder” (incognitum monstrum) that a bishop “of his own free will” renounced his episcopate, performing a true imitation of Christ, a wonder that was recapitulated in deformed shape when James remained unmoved by Marie’s desire that he remain in Lotharingia.113 Thus, Thomas tells the reader to “be stunned” and “gaze on a miracle (Obstupesce, Lector, intuere miraculum),” namely James’s unmoved will in the face of his saintly mentor’s advice.114

Thomas’s narrative of Hugolino’s conversion by means of the vita and relic (ca. 1230) demonstrates a great confidence not only in the power of these objects to effect a cure but in the will of a converted soul to act upon that which it desires. In writing the Life of Lutgard of Aywières in 1246, Thomas reveals a greater insecurity about the capacity of a vita and its examples to convince and thus transform its readers. Thomas’s strategy for dealing with his sense of the resistibility of the vita and the recalcitrant nature of the broken will is to explicitly theorize the act of reading a wondrous saint’s Life, providing a methodology for his readers based on his claim that their faith in the hagiography is an extension of their faith in scripture and thus should be subject to the same readerly strategies. Thomas’s understanding of what it is to properly read a Life does not change: Hugolino was an ideal reader in the terms of both the Supplement and the Vita Lutgardis. He approached the vita with love and faith, meditating on the text “vigilantly” until he was able to “taste and see the sweetness of the Lord.” Testing and proving became a tasting that transformed. However, I would suggest that Thomas’s disappointment with James (who never did return despite Thomas’s efforts to persuade him) and subsequent awareness of the limited capacity of hagiographical example to effect a change of the will, stand behind the self-conscious concern of the inherent (in)capacity of Lutgard’s Life to inspire belief or, more properly, of the sufficiency of the proof of the example to render a reader faithful to a text.

Thomas’s solution to this problem is to invoke the authority of Augustine in order to provide a theory of how to read the text. In the Augustinian understanding, the very obscurity of the vita and of Lutgard—her novelty and marvelousness—may become, Thomas implies, sites at which the reader can “exercise” his or her faith and, in this exercise, “take up” the saint as an exemplar. Furthermore, by asking readers to treat the vita as scripture, Thomas in effect argues that belief in and understanding of the Life requires the grace and love that readers already possess by virtue of their faith. Only through such belief can the proofs offered by the text become truly convincing.

Therefore, while juridical proof occupies an important place in the Vita Lutgardis, the prologue prioritizes the notion of reading articulated by Augustine as the education and engagement of love through grace, as it is the only sufficient solution to the problem of the text’s credibility. Deliberation—engaging with and interpreting the vita while weighing its claims—in the rhetorical space of what Thomas conceives as a hagiographical psychology, then, leads to more than intellectual assent to an argument; the knowledge that arises from being convinced of the text’s truth is dependent on and productive of love that issues in both the understanding and behavior of the reader. To be convinced is to be rendered faithful, not certain.