Hagiographical Theology—Making Holy Bodies from the Word
Sometime in 1250 or 1251, two Dominican friars, twenty-five years apart in age, sat together in a classroom at the new Dominican studium generale in Cologne under the tutelage of Albert the Great.1 One, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), became the representative of medieval theology in the popular imagination. The other, Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–1270), disappeared into comparable obscurity. Thomas Aquinas was a young man, just beginning his career. Thomas of Cantimpré was already passing middle age and was returning for further education after what had already been a long and busy life, which included a first profession as an Augustinian canon and a subsequent transition to the Dominican order in 1232. Thomas Aquinas emerged from these studies with an academic vocation that involved preaching and traveling but remained closely tied to the university, and he created his famous introductory textbook for budding theologians, the Summa Theologiae, which is composed of systematic treatises even as he was a writer of devotional hymns. Thomas of Cantimpré, after completing this course of study, returned to his homeland in the Southern Low Countries, and from the priory in Louvain, he traveled as the preacher general for Teutonia, moving primarily among aristocrats and town dwellers, visiting monasteries, acting as confessor and exorcist to the laity, and collecting stories of the holy and the possessed as well as relics—vials of undecomposed blood or a saintly finger—that provided proof of the divine presence he saw being poured out on the region in eschatological abundance.2 These stories, collected and treasured, like marvelous particulars gathered and displayed in cabinets of curiosities, were placed within an encyclopedia, an exempla collection, and five saints’ Lives.
Both Thomases attempted to discover and articulate the relationship between divinity and humanity in order to understand the ways in which embodied human subjects receive and should interpret divine revelation through a careful negotiation between faith and reason. Both, in other words, undertook a theological project. Both were likewise university trained in the most cutting-edge Aristotelian philosophy of their day.
Their modes of discovery, ways of proceeding, and sources were, however, different. Thomas Aquinas’s work is primarily—though not entirely—systematic and scholastic. He approached revelation using the categories of Aristotelian philosophy in order to formulate and answer questions of scripture and church authorities, using the protocols of validity to move through arguments in a linear progression. “Sacred teaching” (sacra doctrina), Thomas Aquinas determines in the first question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, is scientia.3 As such, it is an organized body of knowledge that is teachable precisely because of its order. Its organizational structure is possible because of the internal consistency of the teaching, in which knowledge (scientia) is generated through syllogistic demonstration based on valid first principles:4 as the “most effective way to teach (docere) is to present doctrine as conclusions from first principles, sacra doctrina presents theological doctrine as true and certain, derived from articles of faith as first principles.”5 Scientia, then, is that knowledge in which conclusions flow necessarily from premises. Unlike opinion, scientia generates a knowledge of which one can be certain because it is founded on first principles; unlike faith, scientia is that to which reason assents following understanding.6
As a pedagogical text teaching scientia, the Summa is a finely articulated body composed of distinctions that seek coherence, that aim to leave no element extraneously hanging. It does not meander or digress but, as John O’Malley argues, “churns along,” impelled by the inexhaustible force of its quest for truth.7 Thomas Aquinas’s authoritative sources were scripture, the theological giants of the Christian past, and Aristotle.
Thomas of Cantimpré’s work, in contrast, is hagiographical and documentary. It proceeds through the narration of contemporary lives. Thomas was a pastor who saw the people with whom he worked as primary theological sources.8 His authorities were not only scripture and the important figures of Christian theology or pagan philosophy but also the saintly people he encountered in his travels; revelation was found in these saintly lives, which, he believed, embodied and communicated Christ through their perfection. Thomas of Cantimpré begins, then, in the concrete particularity of certain persons who are brought to life by narrative. The universal claims he makes are tied back to these bodies and the stories that produce them. Whereas Scholastic discourse aims at an objectivity in which the speaker disappears “behind the subject,”9 Thomas’s hagiographical discourse foregrounds speakers and the bonds of love and desire, trust and doubt, that form their lives and, in turn, inform the ways in which others convey these to Thomas. What we see in him, then, is an academically trained Dominican who nevertheless foregoes systematicity in order to address some of the pressing theological issues of his day, crafting a devotional theology that addresses questions of faith and reason, the imitation of Christ, and theological representation through the figuration of beloved individuals who are offered to readers so that they might form relationships with them.
Thomas’s work is profoundly formed by and embedded in the varieties of women’s spiritual expression, which flourished in his context. He was a defender, documentarian, shaper, confessor, and devotee of many holy women. Of the five saints’ Lives he wrote, four depicted women who lived their religious vocations in different modes (Marie d’Oignies as a Beguine,10 Margaret of Ypres as a Dominican tertiary,11 Lutgard of Aywières as a Cistercian nun,12 and Christina “the Astonishing,” who was not affiliated with any institutional formation),13 and a fifth was based on a man (an Augustinian canon, Abbot John of Cantimpré).14 Thomas also wrote the Bonum universale de apibus (The common good as taught by bees),15 a lengthy exempla collection of short, extremely dramatic narratives depicting virtue and vice, which he gathered in the course of his travels throughout the Low Countries, and an encyclopedia, De natura rerum, which derives moral lessons from the natural world.16
The primary assertion of this book is that Thomas of Cantimpré’s hagiographical writings are sophisticated theological and literary documents. They represent a mode of medieval theology that is typically overlooked as such by theologians and medievalists. This is, then, in some ways, the story of a road not taken. As Barbara Newman notes, if you were to ask someone on the street today what they think of when they hear “medieval theology,” the immediate response would probably be a caricature of Scholasticism: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”17 The complexity and texture of medieval theological discourse, which contains distinct but overlapping forms, including monastic, mystical, Scholastic, pastoral, imaginative, and vernacular theologies, has been eclipsed in the contemporary imagination by a dominant model of systematicity and disembodied academic speculation in which complex arguments are made to answer seemingly inane questions about angelology. As Pierre Hadot and, more recently, Jean-Yves Lacoste argue, however, throughout antiquity and much of the Middle Ages, both philosophy and theology were as much ways of life as they were modes of knowledge and discursive formations.18 These “ways of life” were, in turn, bound to particular organizational structures that formed and made possible different modes of living and thinking.19 There is, in other words, no speculative project in this context that can be absolutely detached from the embodied lives of the persons who practiced it, a fact that hagiography makes clear both in its very form, as the stories of particular persons, and in its pursuit of its readers’ devotional responses. These hagiographies both represent and seek to reproduce ways of life and modes of thought.20
If the theological import of hagiography is considered, it is typically placed under the rubric of pastoral theology, understood as that which attempts to teach the most basic principles of Christian life to a broad audience; in other words, it is seen as a subsidiary application of theology to practical circumstances. Such an understanding of hagiography owes much to Gregory of Tours’s (ca. 538–593) famous assertion regarding the purpose of saints’ Lives in the preface to his Liber vitae Patrum. There he argues that despite differences of merit and virtue, the Lives of the saints should properly be understood as the “Life of the saint,” for they all partake of the singular illuminative power of Christ. Vitae are meant to “build up the church” (aedificare), stirring listeners to emulate (profectum) the lives that are there represented.21 A saint’s life is an exemplary manifestation of the singular light of Christ among humans, and this manifestation is represented textually in order to edify readers—citizens of the church—and offer up the figures of the saints for imitation. Gregory’s definition was repeated by the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye, who, in a work that became highly influential for modern studies of saints’ Lives, defined hagiography as works that seek to “edify” through “exemplarity.”22
Although Delehaye’s definition can be usefully applied to many vitae, thereby suitably situating them in a pastoral context, it is not as simple a proposition as it might seem to edify or offer a figure for imitation.23 Thomas’s hagiographical corpus reveals notions of edification and imitation being tested and made strange within the works of a single author. Furthermore, Thomas’s corpus elevates varied, often-incompatible forms of exemplary life. It is thus not possible to reduce hagiography and its theological content to the singular aim of presenting exemplary figures for imitation without attending to the tensions, difficulties, and sheer variety that are found within particular vitae and between them. Nor is it possible to ignore the ways in which, in particular Lives, we sometimes find that the text undermines its own solicitation of a reader’s devotion to a figure in order to edify or inspire imitation. These works thus show that edification and imitation are as much the work of the reader, who is required to interpret the meaning and discern the status of a Life. Thomas understood exemplarity to be a function of devotion—of right relation to the saint—and that relationship occurs through the complex mediations of the text, the Life that makes present the life of the holy person, and if read correctly, that life will become present again in the reader’s own.
Delehaye notes the imbrication of narrative and theology in the interpretation of saints’ Lives when he contends that because of their writers’ attempts to conform the saint to the Christic archetype, hagiographies tend to be repetitive, reproducing paradigmatic actions and lifting whole passages from one Life into another, thereby enacting Gregory’s theological claim that vitae should be understood not in the plural but in the singular. The textual form of saints’ Lives, according to Delehaye, relies upon the repetition of types in an attempt to manifest a transcendent reality that seeks to escape from the particularities of history. In this view, vitae are not regarded as documents of discovery or invention (indeed, discovery or invention would undermine their very import as hagiography according to this view) and thus are not sites that require arduous interpretation, for they do not produce new knowledge. Such a lack of theological and literary creativity renders hagiography, in Delehaye’s assessment, “monochromatic.”24
This book argues, in contrast, that Thomas of Cantimpré’s hagiographies are not monochromatic but rather sites of theological work that are filled with debate and experimentation. It considers how they seek to edify and offer figures for emulation; it argues that these works are theological documents that perform their theologizing in a rhetorically specific way, namely through the narration of contemporary—and, most often, female—lives. Moreover, they explicitly represent themselves as works of interpretation and call for the interpretive engagement of the reader. To paraphrase Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who argues that in medieval texts of various genres, the body is a site of “unraveling and invention,”25 this book argues that Thomas’s hagiographical texts think with and through the bodies and deeds of particular figures, which are placed within their historical contexts and written for historically contextualized audiences. The narrative of the holy person’s life becomes, in these works, a site of theological invention and unraveling. The form of this theological discourse, in other words, is inseparable from its content.
SAINT AS IMAGE AND SIGN
Barbara Newman compellingly argues for the category of “imaginative theology,” the “hallmark” of which is that it “thinks with images” rather than abstract “propositions or scriptural texts or rarefied inner experience—although none of these need be excluded.”26 In its appeal through narrative to the embodied life and action of the saint as the medium of theological discourse, Thomas’s work can be read as an instance of “imaginative theology.” Cynthia Hahn notes the “inherent visuality” of saints’ Lives. Like the literary practice of ekphrasis, she argues, the exemplification of a saint’s Life “insists upon visual perception as part of textual imagination.”27 A vita seeks to create works that persuade readers of their probity and truth, and the vivid narrative imaging of the saint is a crucial rhetorical strategy in such an attempt. As rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians have long noted, the appeal to the concrete reality of the example has exceptional persuasive power due to its ability to engage the imagination and thereby forge a more robust affective response. Peter, the interlocutor in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (d. 604), asserts that narrative examples of the saints are sometimes more able to incite love of God than discourse alone: “Some there are that be sooner moved to the love of God by virtuous examples than by godly sermons; and oftentimes by the lives of the holy fathers the heart reaps a double commodity.”28 Again in the Cura pastoralis, Gregory writes, “For the most part reasoned arguments convert the learned; examples sometimes better suit the ignorant.”29 Humbert of Romans (d. 1200), minister general of the Dominican order in Thomas’s lifetime, elaborates on Gregory’s view in his treatise, Liber dono timoris, writing, “According to Gregory, exempla move (movent) [listeners] more than mere words (verba) do and are more easily grasped (capiuntur) by the understanding and more deeply fixed (infiguntur) in the memory.”30
I have referred to the exemplary figures of Thomas’s vitae, however, as “excessive” in the book’s title, for in these Lives, the very images of sanctity, which are crafted in order to shore up particular beliefs or to prove the saintliness of the figure authorizing and modeling such belief, are repeatedly represented in such a way as to be in excess of the arguments and demonstrations that they are meant to support and embody—not least the argument that the person figured in the text is holy and is to be venerated. In other words, these images both invent and unravel Thomas’s theological project.
Attention to the excessiveness of Thomas’s representation of sanctity builds on work done in the 1940s by Simone Roisin, the inaugurator of modern scholarly interest in Thomas and his oeuvre. She contends that his Life of Lutgard in an exemplary way and the Life of Christina in a less straightforward way belong to a genre emergent in the thirteenth century that she terms “mystical biography,” which was notable for its attempt to conform hagiography to the rhetorical strategies and generic forms of mystical theology.31 Most crucially, the saint who unites with a God who is beyond the limitations of language and representation must herself become ineffable, thereby confounding the hagiographer’s representational efforts. Hagiography in this account has the capacity to be a form of apophatic theology.
Roisin’s formulation suggests what this book will consider in detail, namely that the hagiographical saint is a signum that gains significance and shape in its relation to the God, the divine res whom the saint makes manifest. Thus, the project of narrativizing the life of a holy figure is a necessarily theological endeavor, for it includes the question of how visible, finite, yet saintly lives have the capacity to make invisible divine truth present. This is, then, a question that hinges upon and extends a theology of the incarnation, of the divine exemplar “entering the order of signs,” in the words of Maurice de la Taille,32 and thereby becoming available to be made signs in the lives and Lives of the saints. Thomas’s most interesting theological work—work that will be addressed in the chapters to follow—is found in his consideration of the nature, purpose, and limitations of the saintly signs he crafts, including his reflection on the fraught relationship between the materializing externality of sign and the unseen interior reality that it represents. Relatedly, Thomas asks what it means for a person to embody and represent a truth that transcends the limitations and figuration of the sign. Finally, Thomas’s corpus is concerned with the question of how signs command belief and love or repel them. In other words, what is the extent of their probative force?
The question of how to read and thus become devoted to these signs is a corollary to the question of the signs’ capacity to be truthful, persuasive, and transformative, for Thomas argues that saintly signa ultimately acquire their power not through their objective status but through the discerning interpretation and love of the reader. Thomas’s imaginative theology is, then, a devotional one, one that emerges not only from Thomas’s formation as a Dominican but from his immersion in a milieu in which men and women of many different vocations are engaged in significant relationships of admiration, mutual influence, and debate. This is not to say, as once-dominant constructions of devotional literature did, that these texts are “merely” devotional, attesting to affective connection with the divine or with the saint while making no innovative claims. Rather, the theological arguments and rhetorical strategies found within Thomas’s texts cannot be understood apart from the devotional work performed by the vitae, for the vitae attempt to embody the holy persons through their figuration, becoming mediums of encounter with living beings. Crucially, the divine with whom the saint becomes one is not only the ineffable Father considered by Roisin, but Christ, whose presence in the flesh of the saint is a recapitulation of the incarnation that is yet again made present in the hagiographical text to be consumed by readers. The saintly sign is, then, sacramental, and Thomas examines the potential for vitae, too, to become sacraments for the readers who read in the right way, allowing their affect to be schooled through their encounters with the saints of the texts. If the psalmist says “taste and see,” Thomas’s formulation of strategies for reading and interpreting hagiographies such that they transform readers, teaching them the arts of devotion, is a program of seeing to taste: if one sees the saint by reading rightly, interpreting the signs, one may unite with the saint and so taste divinity.
However, as Steven Justice notes and as Thomas’s works affirm, this labor of right interpretation, as Thomas would have it, is neither inevitable nor easy. Justice argues that contemporary scholarship regards belief to be a “black box,” inaccessible to modern scholars, thus “enforc[ing] an idea of the immediacy to faith” on the part of medieval people.33 Such a move repeats the exoticization of the Middle Ages that scholarship has attempted to overcome.34 He argues that two dominant accounts emerge from the bracketing of belief, which are used to interpret hagiographic and miracle tales: the didactic and the perceptual. The didactic account explains miracle stories as exemplary tales told solely for the purpose of edification, pursuing a moral that can be learned without belief in the facticity of the narrative. The literal story, in this case, is simply the incidental structure upon which the moral allegory hangs its lesson.35 The second account, the perceptual, claims that medieval people, lacking a scientific worldview capable of distinguishing between the natural and the supernatural, easily and unconsciously explained natural events supernaturally.36 Miracles, in this view, were experienced unreflectively as real and pervasive. Justice contends that the didactic and perceptual accounts, unable to cope with the problem of belief as raised by hagiographical texts themselves, impoverish our capacity to understand the complex ways they were created and received. Instead, he argues that medieval texts “bare the devices of faith” and display a robust engagement with the problem of belief and the struggle to inspire belief in what seems “the scarcely credible.”37
Thomas’s texts demonstrate just such a struggle in their concern to formulate a program of reading. The vitae repeatedly raise the problem of their credibility, drawing attention to the signs as signs, narratives as narratives, self-consciously soliciting the reader’s faith, offering strategies of reading that will facilitate belief in the scarcely credible. Such belief is essential yet difficult because, for Thomas, to believe in the hagiographical portrayal is not only to accept the proposition that the saint is saintly or that a doctrine preached by a saint is true, but it is, for Thomas, to have trust in the saints, to “take them up” as he puts it in Lutgard’s Life. Access to the saint’s exemplary power occurs only through faith. There is, then, an inescapable imbrication in Thomas’s theology of a reflection on the meaning and function of hagiographical signs and the devotional theology he seeks not only to teach readers about but to inculcate.
Like Thomas Aquinas, then, Thomas of Cantimpré is concerned with the relationship between faith and reason, and the vitae explore the possibilities and limits of certainty with regard to the claims he makes concerning the holy figures he presents for readers’ devotion. However, for Thomas of Cantimpré, implicit syllogistic demonstrations made by the vitae often break down, and a reader must risk devotion to a figure in order to arrive at knowledge of her. For example, if one were to syllogize a logical demonstration of holiness in hagiographical form, it would appear something like this: “To perform miracles is holy. This person performs miracles. Therefore, she is holy.” However, Thomas’s defense of a person’s sanctity often uses a logic that looks something like this: “To do X is unbelievable. This person does X. However, she must be believed.” Or, “To do X is not holy. She does X. She is holy.” As much as Thomas’s hagiographies seek to prove the holiness of their figures or to deploy their figures as demonstrations of orthodoxy,38 then, his narratives do not function as a scientia proceeding through demonstration. Rather, they present themselves as offering evidence that confounds their stated purpose of proving the sanctity of a figure. The result of such a procedure is that his narratives foreground the risk of faith in seeking to believe in, to know, and to understand the saint.
HAGIOGRAPHY: A “TECHNOLOGY OF THE VISIBLE” FOR THE CREATION OF CHRISTENDOM
Thomas’s theological project, both imaginative and devotional, is framed by a problem that, if Michel de Certeau is right, is central to Christian theology—the “founding disappearance” of Jesus’s body. Thomas’s narratives can be read as another form of substitution for the lost body of Jesus, a means of resolving this disappearance. This absence at the origin of the faith, de Certeau writes, gave rise to a “quest for annunciations,” events in which words take flesh.39 In the space left by the absent body, he argues, a variety of substitutions arose, including ecclesiastical bodies, doctrinal bodies, sacramental bodies, and, as this book will explore, hagiographical bodies. The saintly body is another body in a litany of bodies, and hagiography is another attempt at annunciation, another attempt to make a body from a word.
In rendering holy bodies word, Thomas does not compose the stately Gothic cathedrals of systematic Scholastic discourse in which doctrine and argument cohere, forming texts that are perfect in proportion, detail, and lucidity, but creates a hagiographical corpus composed of the bodies of saints and demoniacs, figures whose vocations are radically different from one another’s and whose imitations of Christ are not only different but perhaps incompatible with others that are represented in Thomas’s body of work.
The plethora of vocational types and what is sometimes the narrative unruliness of Thomas’s corpus reflect the increasing complexity of the social order during his lifetime, which spanned much of the thirteenth century. At the same time as the social body diversified, Michel de Certeau notes, “imitations of Jesus” proliferated, claiming multiple versions of Christian perfection. Such diversification, de Certeau argues, rendered the church “opaque,” as it was unclear what exactly constituted the community or the church or how the various members of this corpus related to one another. Lateran III (1179) sought to reform the church at the clerical level, increasing the organization and reach of the papacy and continuing the trend of centralizing papal power. Lateran IV (1215) extended this reformist reach to the laity, developing what de Certeau calls a “sacramental pastoral” that attempted to overcome the growing disjunction between newly consolidated ecclesiastical power and the Christianities burgeoning among the laity, instituting policies including annual confession and communion for all (Canon 21), and requiring Jews and “Saracens” to be distinguished by their dress, within but not of the Christian community (Canon 68).40
As the attention to clothing suggests, of essential importance to this reconquering of the laity were techniques of making visible a clerical image of the ideal, unified church. Representations of the church sought to rescue it from its opacity, delineate its contours, and impose form on the multiple unruly sites that appeared, to the hierarchy, to threaten disorder. The exemplary bodies of individuals were a key means of representing the ideal communal body. These included the Lives of priests who, having undergone reformation, were offered as “epiphanies of meaning” in the public square; the use of exempla in sermones ad status (vivid stories inserted into sermons addressed specifically to those of different walks of life in order that, by means of such demonstration through example, they might believe the lesson being delivered) became the hallmark of thirteenth-century preaching. The attention given to writing Lives of the saints furthered this project, for in them, as in confession, “inner lives are unveiled and private lives are made … decipherable.”41
All these technologies of visibility were important strategies in Thomas’s ministry. His hagiographical corpus was composed during the long course of the thirteenth century and in the wake of the directives of Lateran IV. All his works bear the hallmarks of the sacramental pastoral that de Certeau outlines: he preached to the laity and to clerics, emphasizing Eucharistic piety and the importance of confession, and his key strategy for teaching was the vividly rendered image, both in the exempla he composed for use by other Dominican preachers in his final text, the massive Bonum universale de apibus, and in the five saints’ Lives that render the inner worlds of their subjects through the externalizing strategies of hagiography with their public performances of piety and repentance. In many ways, these Lives are, like the Eucharist, an “ostension,” a lifting up and holding of the saint before the eye of the believer as a visible sign—or proof, Thomas would say—of invisible truths, including doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatorial punishment, the virgin birth, and the concomitant “fact” of clerical authority. Even as Thomas Aquinas offered proofs for the existence of God, Thomas of Cantimpré sought to prove the tenets of the Catholic faith through the sanctity of his figures. Thomas was an avid enemy of the Cathars, and his saints, with their Eucharistic piety and vividly rendered embodied piety, act not only as an apologetic for Catholic Christianity and proof of the efficacy of its sacraments to attain connection with God, but as sermons against dissenting groups. Finally, by depicting such a variety of pieties, one can read Thomas’s vitae as a quintessentially Lateran IV strategy of assimilating rogue imitations of Christ to Mother Church, absorbing and deploying the energy of these religious expressions for his own purposes and, in the process, containing and unifying what would otherwise break away under the sign of the one faith. The saintly body becomes, in Thomas’s pastoral project, another sacrament of institution and regulation, creating visible signs of the ideal church, signs and proof of the truth of doctrine.
Thomas’s project, then, is situated within this post–Lateran IV context and with the Mendicant drive to reform the laity in concert with ecclesiastical hierarchies. However, his works tell a story that is not quite as simple as the one outlined by de Certeau. First, if Thomas is indeed attempting to contain the proliferation of imitations of Christ by depicting them through a clerical lens in line with clerical aims, he ends up creating a hagiographical corpus made of diverse members that do not sit seamlessly alongside one another or clearly demarcate a unified body. The way that Thomas tells stories and deploys saintly signs complicates de Certeau’s argument that visibility and its capacity to provide clarity for ecclesiastical authorities is the primary purpose of late-medieval saints’ Lives. If we look closely at Thomas’s Lives, we see a tension between an Augustinian discourse of faith and understanding that approaches signs contemplatively and a Scholastic discourse that treats signs as forms of demonstration and proof. Second, gestures of showing, techniques of visibility, give way to the unsaying of saintly images in many of Thomas’s texts. In other words, although Thomas deploys the saint as a proof-sign of invisible truths, the vitae also interrogate the use of the sign in this way and its corollary, the notion of belief suggested by such a use of the sign.
HENRI DE LUBAC AND THE SHIFTING APPROACH TOWARD THE SIGN IN MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY
In his now-classic study of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, Corpus Mysticum (which de Certeau considered his essay “A New Science” in The Mystic Fable vol. 1 to be the sequel to), Henri de Lubac lays out a narrative of the shifting approach toward signs and the understanding of what constitutes faith. He argues that by the thirteenth century, Scholasticism had advanced an epistemology that was fundamentally different from that which dominated theology before the eleventh century. He tracks the dissolution of the “incurably ambiguous” Augustinian notion of the relationship between faith and understanding and the way that changing theories of the sign reflected this dissolution.
In the Augustinian model, de Lubac notes, revealed truths of faith are mysteries, but their mysterious nature incites a twofold response. On the one hand, revealed signs are marked by an obscurity that confounds the understanding of knowledge attained through the senses. On the other hand, this obscurity is a lure that prompts questions and arouses the desire of the intellect to understand, to seek beneath and beyond the obscurity of the sign.42 Thus, the more mysterious a sign, the more reason is elicited and engaged. There is an interplay of seen and unseen, opacity and clarity.
De Lubac argues that at the end of the eleventh century, this Augustinian view broke down. For de Lubac, Anselm was the pivot, for he was inspired by an Augustinian impulse, viewing reason as led by divine light.43 However, de Lubac argues, Anselm advanced new “emphases” in theology, and these emphases ultimately led to a new notion of understanding, for with Anselm, it “takes the form of a demonstration”; providing objective proofs of and for mysteries becomes necessary to theological knowledge. The “mystical” and intellectual interplay of Augustine’s illuminationism here begins to polarize, resulting, on the one hand, in a notion of understanding based on rational demonstration and, on the other hand, a faith that stands in contradistinction to reason, a “simple” faith that does not attempt to probe obscure mysteries or undertake suspect speculation.44 The anagogic tension of contemplative understanding, in which faith moves into comprehension by virtue of its engagement with “mystery” that eludes it and draws it after itself, is eventually replaced with a belief in propositional content. Such understanding through demonstration was placed in the service of apologetics, and “the end being pursued was no longer dogmatic or contemplative, but purely apologetic.… The giving of reasons had taken the place of the discerning with the mind.”45
De Lubac’s distinction between the contemplative and demonstrative approaches to signs is helpful for teasing out tensions within Thomas’s work. However, attention to Thomas’s hagiographical corpus also troubles de Lubac’s historical narrative, for it shows that the antipodes of what de Lubac describes as an epistemic polarity could coexist, as it does in Thomas in the later thirteenth century. Thomas’s hagiographical theologizing should be situated at a moment of increasing rationalization in which the urge to demonstrate and prove the claims of faith was ascendant. He wrote his stories during the course of his profound formation in Scholastic modes of thought and argument, the natural science of his day, and his engagement with the ecclesiastical, social, and theological questions of his time. His mode of demonstration was the bodily proof of saintly signs. However, at the same time that Thomas appeals to the vivid display of the body and deeds of his figures, he offers a profoundly Augustinian model of reading, interpretation, and signification as an alternative. His work is perched between contemplative and demonstrative approaches to theological questions.46 The hagiographical mode of Thomas’s theology thus enables him to wrestle with the profound and, in his time, unresolved theological issue of the status of signs and the correct mode of reading them.
DEMONSTRATION, THE UNIVERSITY, AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
Thus, despite the shift in theological discourse toward demonstration and apologetics and away from earlier contemplative models, as de Lubac describes, it is important to note that medieval theology remained complex, and it is this complexity that someone like Thomas of Cantimpré demonstrates well. The contemplative and literary form of monastic theology, whose approach to the page was the meditative and allusive reading of lectio divina, continued; vernacular theology among women and men, laity and clerics, flourished in the thirteenth century; and Scholastic theology, even as it continued to develop from its Anselmian roots into a discourse marked by highly technical Aristotelian vocabulary and the combative techniques of dialectic and disputation, cannot be caricatured as the sport of bloodless syllogists. Mark Jordan argues that in the tertia pars of the Summa, Thomas Aquinas retells Christ’s life as exemplary—the highest hagiography. The moral teaching of the Summa is completed as Christ’s life is manifest in the sacraments. Each Eucharistic celebration becomes a “scene of moral instruction” that the Summa’s teaching reflects. The Summa, like Thomas of Cantimpré’s vitae, is a pedagogy of the incarnation, leading readers ultimately to the Eucharistic table, not only to the realms of metaphysical abstraction.47 Like Anselm, Thomas Aquinas wrote devotional poetry and understood the life of prayer to be intimately bound up with his work of uniting reason and revelation. In other words, the classroom was not as distant from the pulpit or the cloister, and Scholastic, pastoral, and devotional theology were not as separate, nor were they understood to be antagonists, as has been sometimes argued. As Bernard McGinn notes, “All forms of medieval theology tried to be true to two goals—deepening the understanding of faith (intellectus fidei) and enkindling charity (experientia caritatis).”48
However, Scholastic theology, written in the privileged language of Latin, which was reserved for clerical men who acquired a technical vocabulary through extensive university training, was set apart, and theology became increasingly professionalized. The ultimate result of this trajectory was the defining of theology in profoundly limited terms, a definition that was retrospectively applied to medieval sources by later figures. By the early modern period, the sense that theology had been taken over by specialized language and techniques can be seen in polemics against Scholasticism by Erasmus and Martin Luther. For Luther, Aristotelian assumptions were incompatible with Christian doctrine.49 For Erasmus, they were were affectively powerless, caught up in a world of jargon and debates that were disconnected from real, everyday life and the concerns that human beings have about how to live.50 For both Luther and Erasmus, Aristotelianism was a colonizing force in theological discourse, requiring readers to approach scripture inappropriately, disputing and covering over holy writ with philosophical categories rather than listening to and meditating upon its words.51
De Certeau notes that theologians had long considered the multiplicity of theological modes according to a hierarchical gradation that, although it predicated distinction and rank, saw the modes as fundamentally united in a continuum. Theological discourses in this view are “diverse modal forms” that “remain accidental and quasi-‘adjectival’ in relation to the One Principle that innerves them, correlates them, and manifests itself in them.”52 However, with the specialization of society in the late Middle Ages, knowledge, too, was transformed. The “distinct spaces” of society lead to a conception of the distinct regions of knowledge, and “knowledge … henceforth consist[s] of regions whose differences are insurmountable and whose methods are specific to each region.”53 No longer a hierarchized continuum with overlapping elements, the new geography of knowledge is that of discrete islands.54
THOMAS OF CANTIMPRÉ’S HAGIOGRAPHICAL THEOLOGY
In arguing that Thomas’s hagiographies are a mode of medieval theology, I am not advancing a claim that would be at all surprising to medieval persons. However, hagiography as a theological genre was obscured because of the identification of medieval theological discourse with Scholasticism, first in the early modern period and then in the nineteenth century when Pope Leo declared Thomistic “philosophy,” and Scholasticism more generally, the best remedy for rescuing Christian thought from secular influence in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). The argument of this book, then, is part of the emerging convergence of conversations that attempt to complicate what we mean when we use the word theology in terms of its methods, aims, addressees, and content.
When hagiography is treated theologically, as I have noted, it is usually located within the framework of pastoral theology.55 However, when we ask how someone like Thomas teaches—when we consider the unique features of theologizing in a hagiographical mode—the notion of pastoral theology becomes too thin a construct. We need to either expand our notion of the pastoral beyond the teaching of basic doctrine and practice or supplement it with other theological forms. There are epistemological and methodological questions that arise when teaching occurs by means of narrating the stories of particular lives that need to be addressed. Thomas’s hagiographical corpus is a powerful witness to the ways in which theological modes overlap and require each other. Unpacking the implications of theologizing through the vivid depiction of contemporary, often-female bodies and deeds, particularly the implications such an approach has for the reader who seeks to “take up” the saint as a model for life or as a source of doctrinal claims, is the work of the chapters.56
The primary attention in these chapters is given to those vitae that are marked by what Roisin termed “mystical” features—the Lives of Lutgard and Christina—but there is extensive comparison with the Lives of Marie, Margaret, and John in the body of the text. The reason for this focus is that in the Lives of Lutgard and Christina, the tension and relationship between the devotional and the demonstrative use of signs is most finely knit. The important exception to this treatment of the hagiographical corpus is chapter 6, which is a study of what Henri Platelle terms Thomas’s “Jewish dossier,” a section from his final work, the exempla collection Bonum universale de apibus. This departure is important, however, for it demonstrates the way in which the theology of the sign developed by Thomas is not only gendered but is also a development in a long-standing anti-Jewish discourse by Christian theologians.57
After contextualizing Thomas’s life and works within the political and social forces of his day, chapter 2 will turn to the second of Thomas’s Lives, the Life of Christina the Astonishing, which demonstrates the imbrication of Thomas’s interrogation of the limits and possibilities of saintly signs and devotional theology. A key problem Thomas faces when soliciting the reader’s belief and love is the astonishing and, in Christina’s case, horrifying nature of the saint. Christina’s Life exemplifies the vicissitudes of appealing to the vivid figure as the undeniable foundation of belief. Thomas portrays the saint performing such incredible feats of bodily mortification that, in her imitation of Christ, she becomes indistinguishable from a demoniac to those around her. On the one hand, the terrifying aspect of the saintly figure is meant to convince readers of the terrors of purgatory, which Christina’s deeds embody. However, by attempting to inspire horror (or a horrified devotion) in readers by writing a Life that deforms hagiographical conventions, Thomas risks the rejection of his saintly exemplar, flight from her and her message rather than assent to it. In addition to the possible failure to teach lessons about purgatory, the representation of the saint as the imitator of Christ is also called into question. Christina is represented as inimitable, her sanctity pointing to divinity in its ineffable aspect. The vita thus portrays a break in the mimetic chain of Christian sanctity, raising the question of what it is to imitate the singular witness of Christ’s incarnate example, of how the saint is saved by, participates in, and repeats the divine witness. Inimitability probes the possibilities and limits of exemplary repetition; this is, then, one way that Thomas renders a vita apophatic.
Chapter 3 compares the representation of saintly exemplarity in Thomas’s earliest vitae, those of Christina and John of Cantimpré. These representations are profoundly gendered. In the case of John, exemplarity is figured as a type of successful repetition, for the exemplar disappears within his vita, absorbed into figures who displace him despite being inspired by him. This effacement is the mark of his successful imitation of Christ’s humility and contrasts with Christina’s imitation, which is represented as singular and monstrous. Exemplary imitability and inimitability is thus shown to be a gendered difference, for the inimitability of the female saint functions as a fence to limit the reach of her transgressive life. Moreover, the divergent representations of the two saints carry different implications for the devotional lives of readers.
Chapter 4 continues the question raised in chapter 3, asking how Thomas, in Stephen Justice’s words, “bares the devices of faith,” but here it is considered in relation to the Life of Lutgard of Aywières and the Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies. It demonstrates the ways in which Thomas draws on multiple discourses—including the contemplative, juridical, scriptural, and autobiographical—to persuade readers to believe his stories. The chapter argues that the most telling distinction between and within these two Lives is that of a corrosive hermeneutic—in which the reader seeks proof in a juridical sense, weighing evidence and placing the text on trial, so to speak—and an Augustinian hermeneutic in which the reader contemplates the text, treating it as an object of devotion through which the reader is affectively transformed. These hermeneutics and the epistemologies on which they rest are both suggested by Thomas as possible, though potentially incompatible, approaches within single works.
Chapter 5 considers more deeply the devotional theology of Lutgard’s Life. It shows how Thomas thematizes the interchangeability of the saint’s beloved body and vita in the Life. Thomas explains that he wrote Lutgard’s Life in exchange for possession of her finger after her death. The text—a careful depiction of her body, deeds, ecstasies, visions, and words—and the relic become figures for each other; both are remains of the saintly body, sites and sources of love, and an encounter with the saint as well as a locus for her holy power. The reader, in turn, believes the story there narrated and is morally transformed, not solely through an act of cognition, but by “putting on” the saint’s body through practices of devotional reading. Thomas offers a complex treatment of Lutgard’s reading of scripture as one that conforms her to the bride from the Song of Songs, making Lutgard an exemplar of how to read hagiography devotionally. Belief and understanding are possible, in this model, only through assimilation to the text. As the saint imitates scriptural models, so the reader of hagiography is to imitate the saint.
Chapter 6 examines the ways in which it is not only the reading but the writing of hagiography that is, for Thomas, a devotional act. Hagiographical writing here does not merely describe an object or articulate a theological position but is a means of undertaking a spiritual practice that incites and consummates Thomas’s desire for a holy person and thereby performs his theology of sanctity and sanctification. This chapter shows how Thomas’s devotional practice as a writer proceeds not only by way of the vivid figuration of a particular beloved but through its apophatic effacement. Following Roisin, I show that Thomas deploys rhetorical strategies drawn from mystical theology in order to describe those person whose primary vocation is the attainment of union with a God who defies the delimitations of language, thereby becoming unnameable herself. The writing of such a saint’s vita must defeat the descriptive and taxonomic capacity of the hagiographer’s language. This failure in Lutgard’s Life does not, however, only mark the weakness of language; rather, it is a purposeful failure that implicates Thomas, the writer, in the text, becoming a central strategy for his own act of imitation of and relation to Lutgard. It is, in other words, a feature of the devotional performativity of Thomas’s rhetoric, for Thomas’s linguistic humiliation enables his own experience of ecstatic rapture by observing and composing Lutgard’s ecstasy in his writing. Lutgard has a vision of God while the hagiographer has a vision of Lutgard. This devotional context is, then, inescapably gendered.
Chapter 7 looks beyond Thomas’s vitae proper to his use of exempla in his final work, the Bonum universale de apibus. The chapter examines the theorization of the inventional power of the exemplary sign to find and persuade theological themes and so inspire devout faith, even as it demonstrates the limits of such a strategy in some key exempla. The semiotics of exemplary proof in the De apibus is, for the most part, simple: the outer, material reality signifies and manifests the abstract, inner, or immaterial reality, proving, through corporealization, the existence of an immaterial reality, and the belief that follows in the wake of such proof unites the devout with God.
However, there is a fundamental problematization of persuasion by means of external proofs, and therefore a question arises of the power of such bodily proof to inspire devotion when Thomas addresses Mary’s virginity, in which the pregnant body speaks of one thing but signifies another. Thomas addresses the question of Mary’s virginity in that part of the text that has been called his “Jewish dossier,” thereby linking the problematics of proof and doubt, the inner and the outer, the visible sign and the invisible divine truth, with his notorious representation of the Jews and Jewish unbelief. It becomes clear here that the understanding of signs as external, corporeal evidence for internal, spiritual claims is one that has been crucial to the articulation of Christian difference from Judaism since its inception and remains operative in Thomas’s understanding of saintly signs. The chapter argues that Thomas understands the externality of exemplary signs to be licit and useful if these signs are capable of spiritualization, able to transcend their carnal particularity. This convertability is represented by his portrayal of a Jewess, Sarah, in one exemplum, while her husband represents the danger of visible signs to remain recalcitrantly carnal and unconverted.
Thomas’s hagiographical signs function as evidence for propositions of faith (not least the proposition that the person depicted is, in fact, holy) and serve an apologetic purpose. However, this probative use is in no way exhaustive of the purpose, meaning, or effect of such signs, nor are the beliefs that are taught in Thomas’s vitae solely “simple” ones, assented to under pressure of clerical fiat. Rather, they are represented as contemplative engagements with others whose motive force is devotion.
The theological foundation of such devotion is the assumption underlying all Thomas’s vitae that the persons he represents are founded on Christ’s incarnate example, which was rendered as word in scripture. The vitae and exempla are, in turn, textualizations of saintly figures. These hagiographies are, then, an imitation of the scriptural text and so require a hermeneutics proper to reading them. The saintly body of hagiography becomes, Thomas hopes, through writing and a certain kind of contemplative reading, a sacrament enabling the reader to participate in the divine life.