He placed himself in the order of signs.
—Maurice de la Taille
This book has argued that Thomas of Cantimpré’s hagiographical works fall within the domain of “imaginative theology”—theology that does its work by way of figures (typically female) who emerge out of an inventive, if unstable, alliance between story and image. I have further made the case that these texts educate readerly affect and receptivity and thereby add to imaginative theology its devotional aspect. Theological writing of this sort is driven not only by the desire to insert readers into particular orthodox postures but also by the investigation of the nature, purpose, and possible uses of the saintly signs that are its material. I understand Thomas, above all, as a semiotician.
Hagiographical signs signify the saintly rei to which they point. Their power, however, is potentially much greater than that of indication or portrayal; they may become, in addition to their evidentiary capacity, sacramental. Hagiographical signs become sacrament, Thomas suggests, when read in the particular ways that are prescribed by those same hagiographies, making the saint palpably present in the soul and body of the reader; reading may thus become a form of communion. The transformative capacity of the hagiographical sign is founded on the assumption of what de la Taille describes as the divine placement within the order of signs. Such placement, Thomas implies in some of his work, elevates hagiographical composition as a represencing, like scripture, of that divine reality, its signs exemplars of the Exemplar made available through the Incarnation. The life of the saint makes present the divine Word, and her representation does so again in text; this writing creates the possibility of communion for the reader who is able to read, interpret, and thus “take up” the signs of the vita.
I have shown that such claims raise a host of questions and problems. These questions and problems are, however, often the site of Thomas’s greatest theological creativity and generativity, particularly if he is read as one who is consciously interrogating his own use of signs and of things as signs, pressing them on their possibilities as well as their limitations, sometimes to the point that their persuasive power collapses or, quite differently in the vitae of Lutgard and Christina, with the effect of unsaying the saintly sign in an act of hagiographical apophasis.
Such limitations are revealed in Thomas’s work when, for all the incarnational power and probative force of the exemplum—a force for which Thomas, as a Dominican, has great appreciation—saintly figuration does not persuade. In the case of Christina, we have seen, the very figuration of the saint courts disbelief; Thomas sets out to teach the truth (and terrifying prospect) of purgatorial fire, thereby convincing readers of the urgent need for penance, but his portrayal of Christina’s fearsome sanctity exceeds the boundaries of the arguments it seeks to make, rendering her body (the res that is the basis of her sanctity) unassimilable to any ideological regime. Christiana’s is a monstrous body, inspiring both wonder and horror, assent to and flight from her as a demonic figure. Her excessive body becomes a mode of negative theology insofar as the saint who unites with Christ becomes monstrous and thus inimitable, her sanctity pointing to the divine life as that which cannot be captured within a system of signs.
In a similar way, Thomas’s exemplum of Agnes and the convert Sarah-Gertrude demonstrates the way in which exemplary teaching through appeal to vivid bodies does not successfully persuade when it comes to the doctrine of Mary’s virginity. Like the rest of the De apibus, the story attempts to render church doctrine vivid and persuasive, shoring up Christian society against doubt and heresy by demonstrating the way that external signs secure the immaterial claims of faith. But the exemplary body of the pregnant-yet-virginal Mary (like Agnes’s scars) frustrates such efforts. The difficult arts of interpretation and discernment on the part of readers or listeners, Thomas finally suggests, are crucial, as is a faith that makes up for what sensory apprehension lacks. What is striking about the exemplum of Agnes and Sarah-Gertrude is how, rather than attempt to gloss over the failure of the example to prove the argument, Thomas crafts a narrative propelled by that very challenge. Thomas’s experimental exemplum dwells on the signs it deploys and the need for readers to supplement what the writer provides with their own acts of faith.
Occurring as it does within the “Jewish dossier” of the De apibus, however, the exemplum also importantly reveals that the articulation of the structure of interiority and exteriority in reference to signs—of signs functioning as external, material proofs for inner, spiritual truths—has a long history in Christianity. This history is tied to the laborious construction of its ambivalent difference from Judaism. External signs, understood as the carnal marks of the “law” and therefore of Judaism in Christian theological tradition, are to be transcended with the coming of Christ, who spiritualizes the letter, thereby bringing into question the value of the literal. The exemplum of Sarah-Gertrude operates within this tradition in its argument for an understanding of the exemplary sign as an external, material marker capable of spiritualization, able to transcend its carnal particularity, a convertibility represented by the Jewess, Sarah.
Thomas thus performs here another iteration (more subtle than is typical for him) of his anti-Jewish project insofar as male Jewishness stands for the intractable carnality of external proofs, obstinately unwilling to be transformed through an infusion of the spiritual content of the material. He also seeks to protect himself from what could be read in this system as the carnality of a project predicated on the use of external signs for proof of faith and as objects of devotion.
The failure of signs to convey truth stems not only from the improbable demands of faith, it is an idea that Thomas actively courts in Lutgard’s vita, which is, for Simone Roisin, the prime example of Thomas’s mystical hagiography. This text suggests readerly practices to facilitate assimilation to the saintly figure through several layers of imitation: first, through imitation of the bride uniting to the bridegroom in the Song of Songs, then through imitation of the Cistercian monk reading the Song, then the saint reading the Song in a Cistercian mode, then Thomas himself reading Lutgard. In the latter case, however, Thomas enacts the intentional failure of hagiographical representation. Inability here becomes an act of imitation, for it reflects Lutgard’s own inability to convey the hidden content of her vision. In the case of both Thomas and Lutgard, the failure of language marks an ecstasy that is enabled and revealed by the incapacity of signs. The saint, then, is both painstakingly figured as a recapitulation of a scriptural prototype and as painstakingly unsaid.
Gregory of Tours believed that the Lives of the saints should in fact be understood as “the Life of the saint,” for “all partake of the singular illuminative power of Christ.”1 Although Gregory’s notion of a singular “Life” undergirds the sacramental claims that Thomas makes for his texts, he nevertheless exploits differences between the Lives as well as tensions and inconsistencies within a single Life to think about the problem that arises when one uses words in an attempt to speak the Word, or names to say the Name, or when bodies form the Body of Christendom.
Saintly signs are always in double exposure; the hagiography seeks to portray in living color the particular life of the saint, yet this life is no longer, strictly speaking, the saint’s own, but Christ’s. The tension that inheres in this displacement of the subject can, as happens in the case of Christina, threaten to displace Christ himself, even as the corpus more generally calls on readers to displace themselves through acts of imitation. Thomas, however, does not attempt to collapse or conceal but rather exploits the difficulties of this double exposure; it provides an opportunity to think about the difficulties and possibilities of signifying the perfect union of sanctity with the particularity of each saint’s manifestation of holiness. Thomas’s hagiographical representations insist, moreover, not only on the tensions within particular Lives but also on the differences among his saintly figures. The body of work he composed as a Dominican seeking the unified corpus of Christianitas is neither as seamless nor singular as one might expect.
At the heart of sanctity is refraction, not reflection, and textual representation is crucial to this process. The saint refracts the light of Christ in her body, which is again refracted in the text. The multiplications of the saint’s significations do not dissipate or distance divine reality, Thomas suggests, but add shading and contour. Hagiographical texts, Thomas holds, sanctify a faithful imagination; this makes them generative but, by the same token, unruly, as they are interpreted by the reader who, in turn, is to embody the textual-yet-living example.
Like the history, which Augustine argues is authored by God and rendered linguistic in the scripture that reflects it, and like the Word made flesh, the saint’s body is a res with its own scripture—the vita. As the biblical text ventures signs of the infinite and therefore impossible translatability of sacred res into signa, of that which perpetually resists signification—the flesh and blood of the Word—so does the vita of the saint venture signs of the saint’s body, her always imperfectly (if seductively) rendered res.