Some Foundational Considerations on Taxonomy: A Case for Hagiography
Abstract
:The complex web of behaviors, practices, beliefs, and productions (literary, visual, acoustic, etc.) in and by which a given community constructs the memory of individuals who are recognized as the embodied perfection of the religious ideal promoted by the community’s tradition and socio-cultural context.
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
- Aigrain, René. 1953. L’Hagiographie: Ses Sources, ses Méthodes, son Histoire. Paris: Bloud & Gay. [Google Scholar]
- Bhabha, Homi Jehangir. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]
- Boesch Gajano, Sofia. 1999. La Santità. Bari: Laterza. [Google Scholar]
- Brown, Peter. 1981. The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bynum, Caroline. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Cassinari, Flavio. 2011. Dynamics of Legitimation: History, Myth and the Construction of Identity. English translated by Giacomo Donis and Anna Morselli. Aurora: The Davies Group. [Google Scholar]
- Dalarun, Jacques. 1996. La Malavventura di Francesco d’Assisi. Milan: Edizioni Biblioteca Francescana. [Google Scholar]
- Damrosch, David. 2003. What is the World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Delooz, Pierre. 1962. Pour une Étude Sociologique de la Sainteté Canonisée dans l’Eglise Catolique. Archives de Sociologie des Religions 13: 17–43. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Delooze, Pierre. 1969. Sociologie et Canonisations. Liège: Faculté de Droit de l’Université de Liège. [Google Scholar]
- Dubois, Jacques, and Jean-Loup Lemaitre. 1993. Sources et Méthodes de l’Hagiographie Médiévale. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. [Google Scholar]
- Freiberger, Oliver. 2018. Elements of a Comparative Methodology in the Study of Religion. Religions 9: 38. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Freiberger, Oliver. 2019. Considering Comparison. A Method for Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Freidenreich, David M. 2004. Comparison in the History of Religions: Reflections and Critiques. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 16: 80–101. [Google Scholar]
- French, Todd E. 2016. Many Truths, One Story: John of Ephesus’s “Lives of the Eastern Saints”. In Hagiography and Religious Studies: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. Edited by Rico Monge, Kerry P. C. San Chirico and Rachel J. Smith. New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 151–67. [Google Scholar]
- Frugoni, Chiara. 1993. Francesco e l’Invenzione delle Stigmate: Una Storia per Parole e Immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto. Turin: Einaudi. [Google Scholar]
- Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. [Google Scholar]
- Geertz, Armin, ed. 2000. Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Leiden: Brill. [Google Scholar]
- Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Graus, Frantisek. 1965. Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studeien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit. Prague: Nakladatelství Československé Akademie Věd. [Google Scholar]
- Grégoire, Réginald. 1996. Manuale di Agiologia: Introduzione alla Letteratura Agiografica. Seconda Edizione. Fabriano: Monastero San Silvestro Abate. [Google Scholar]
- Gyatso, Janet. 1998. Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hawley, John Stratton, ed. 1987. Saints and Virtues. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Head, Thomas. 1990. Hagiography and the Cult of Saints. The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Heffernan, Thomas. 1988. Sacred Biography. Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hollander, Aaron Thomas. 2018. The Multimediation of Holiness: Hagiography as Resistance in Greek Orthodox Theological Culture. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, Divinity School, Chicago, IL, USA. [Google Scholar]
- Hughes, Aaron. 2017. Comparison: A Critical Primer. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. [Google Scholar]
- Jorgensen, John. 2005. Inventing Hui-Neng, the Sixth Patriarch: Hagiography and Biography in Early Ch’an. Leiden: Brill. [Google Scholar]
- Keune, Jon. 2019. Comparative vs. Hagiology. Two Variant Approaches to the Field. Submitted to Religions. [Google Scholar]
- Kieckhefer, Richard, and George Bond, eds. 1988. Sainthood: Its Manifestation in World Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Leonardi, Claudio. 2011. Agiografia e Autoagiografia di Agostino. In Agiografie Medievali. Edited by Antonella Degl’Innocenti and Francesco Santi. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, pp. 265–72. First published 2000. [Google Scholar]
- Lifshitz, Felice. 1994. Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical Narrative. Viator 25: 95–114. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Manselli, Raul. 1974. Paul Sabatier e la “Questione Francescana”. La “Questione francescana” dal Sabatier ad Oggi, Atti del I Convegno Internazionale della Società Internazionale di Studi Francescani 18: 271–336. [Google Scholar]
- Manselli, Raul. 1980. Nos qui cum eo fuimus: Contributo alla Questione Francescana. Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini. [Google Scholar]
- Manselli, Raul. 2002. San Francesco d’Assisi, Editio Maior. Milan: San Paolo. [Google Scholar]
- Martinez, Chloe. 2018. The Autobiographical Pose: Life Narrative and Religious Transformation in the Mirabai Tradition. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41: 418–34. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- McCutcheon, Russell, ed. 1999. Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: Controversies in the Study of Religion. New York: Cassell. [Google Scholar]
- McCutcheon, Russell. 2003. The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]
- McCutcheon, Russell. 2014. Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion. Bristol: Equinox. [Google Scholar]
- Minocchi, Salvatore. 1902. La Questione Francescana. Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 39: 293–326. [Google Scholar]
- Monge, Rico G. 2016. Saints, Truth and the "Use and Abuse" of Hagiography. In Hagiography and Religious Studies: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. Edited by Rico Monge, Kerry P. C. San Chirico and Rachel J. Smith. New York: Bloomsbury. [Google Scholar]
- Monge, Rico, Kerry P. C. San Chirico, and Rachel J. Smith, eds. 2016. Hagiography and Religious Studies: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 7–22. [Google Scholar]
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2010. The Anti-Christ. In The Anti-Christ; Ecce Homo; Twilight of the Idols; and Other Writings. Edited by Aaron Ridley. English translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2014. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. English translated by Reginald Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Pellegrini, Luigi. 2004. Frate Francesco e i suoi Agiografi. Assisi: Porziuncola. [Google Scholar]
- Philippart, Guy. 1994. Hagiographes et Hagiographie, Hagiologes et Hagiologie: Des Mots et des Concepts. Hagiographica 1: 1–16. [Google Scholar]
- Philippart, Guy. 2006. L’Hagiographie, Historie Sainte des “Amis de Dieu”. In Hagiographies: Histoire Internationale de la Littérature Hagiographique Latine et Vernaculaire en Occident des Origines à 1550. Edited by Guy Philippart. Turnhout: Editions Brepols, vol. 4, pp. 13–40. [Google Scholar]
- Philippart, Guy. 2020. L’Hagiographie entre Croyance et Dérision. In Understanding Hagiography and its Textual Tradition. The Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period (6th–11th Century). Edited by Paolo Chiesa, Monique Goullet and Paulo Farmhouse Alberto. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, forthcoming. [Google Scholar]
- Quintman, Andrew. 2014. The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Ramey, Steven W., ed. 2015. Writing Religion: The Case for the Critical Study of Religion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. [Google Scholar]
- Ray, Reginald. 1993. Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rondolino, Massimo A. 2017. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Hagiographical Strategies: A Comparative Study of the Standard Lives of St. Francis and Milarepa. Milton: Taylor and Francis. [Google Scholar]
- Rondolino, Massimo A. 2020. The Repa and the Chan Devotee: Hagiography, Polemic and the Taxonomies of Philosophical Literature. In Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature. Edited by Rafal Stepien. Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming. [Google Scholar]
- Sabatier, Paul. 1894. Vie de S. François d’Assise. Paris: Fischbacher. [Google Scholar]
- Schilbrack, Kevin. 2005. Religion, Models of and Reality: Are We Through with Geertz? Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73: 429–52. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Schober, Juliana, ed. 1997. Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions in South and Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982a. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982b. Map Is Not Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Jonathan Z. 1990. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Smith, Jonathan Z. 2000. The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification. In A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Edited by Kimberly C. Patton. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 237–41. [Google Scholar]
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Stepien, Rafal, ed. 2020. Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature. Albany: SUNY, forthcoming. [Google Scholar]
- Turner Camp, Cynthia. 2015. Anglo-Saxon Saints Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. [Google Scholar]
- van Orman Quine, Willard. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- van Orman Quine, Willard. 1992. Pursuit of Truth, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Vauchez, André. 1981. La Sainteté en Occident aux Derniers Siècles du Moyen Âge d’après les Procès de Canonisation et les Documents Hagiographiques. Rome: École française de Rome. [Google Scholar]
- Vauchez, André. 2009. François d’Assise. Paris: Fayard. [Google Scholar]
- Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1977. Philosophical Investigations, 5th ed. Oxford: Phaidon. [Google Scholar]
1 | Mindful of its historical and theological Christian connotations, the term saint and its cognates are here adopted more broadly as a heuristic device to readily and intuitively refer to individuals that a particular tradition, group, or individual recognizes as perfected in light of a given theory of truth and an eventual related soteriology (see, for example, Hawley 1987; Kieckhefer and Bond 1988; Ray 1993). |
2 | |
3 | |
4 | Gyatso’s work also raises stimulating questions about the relationship between author and subject when the person who is being narrated as perfected is also the one who is narrating, a dynamic that Claudio Leonardi, reflecting on Augustine’s Confessions, aptly categorized “auto hagiography” (Leonardi [2000] 2011). On the relationship between author and subject in the context of religious autobiographical writings, see also (Martinez 2018). |
5 | On the academic study of “religions”, particularly as a secular project, see, among others, (McCutcheon 1999; Geertz 2000; McCutcheon 2003, 2014; Ramey 2015). See also the activity of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (https://naasr.com/) and its publications: Brill’s Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (https://brill.com/view/journals/mtsr/mtsr-overview.xml) and Equinox Publishing’s series “Concepts in the Study of Religion” (https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/concepts-in-the-study-of-religion/). |
6 | Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of the historiographical fallacy (Nietzsche 2010, 2014), Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that all seeing is always a seeing as (Wittgenstein 1977) and Willard Van Orman Quine’s argument that truth is fundamentally relative to theory (van Orman Quine 1969, 1992), I contend that this is what scientific historiography also does and so do we, scholars of religions, when studying and writing about our subjects. If, ultimately, we are bound by our mental formations and categorical lenses for the apprehension of phenomena, then our reflections and writings necessarily communicate more about our historically, culturally, and socially contingent theoretical frameworks (but also, anxieties, aspirations, fears, and hopes), than the objective “truth” of the objects we are studying. In this perspective, I see the social–scientific self-awareness advocated, among others, by Jonathan Z. Smith and Oliver Freiberger (Smith 2000; Freiberger 2019) as a critical method to empower us toward engaging, with increasing sophistication, with the one object of inquiry over which we ought to have the greatest degree of control: our own, often implicit, formal models and theoretical biases. On this, see also Sara Ritchey’s essay in this special issue. |
7 | The categorical tension between “history” and “fiction” was famously addressed in (Lifshitz 1994) (see also, more recently, Monge et al. 2016). Recently, as part of a critical analysis of Buddhist literature as philosophy and Buddhist philosophy as literature, led by Rafal Stepien (Stepien 2020), I offer a critical discussion of the cross-cultural validity and applicability of antithetical categorizations, such as “philosophy vs. literature vs. hagiography” (Rondolino 2020). On hagiography as a fluid category, see also Todd French’s notion of “hagiography’s polyphonic structure” (French 2016) and Guy Philippart’s discussion of “historia vs. fabula” and of hagiography as “transgenre” (Philippart 2020). |
8 | For a broad discussion of hagiography in the context of its European Christian development, see (Aigrain 1953; Dubois and Lemaitre 1993; Grégoire 1996). For a concise, yet exhaustive, genealogy of the term, see (Philippart 1994). For a further problematization of the term and a proposal for its redefinition, see also (Philippart 2006). |
9 | See, for example, (Smith 2000; Freiberger 2019). |
10 | For a concise, yet historically grounded, theoretical assessment of “literature” as an analytical category, see (Williams 1977). For critical theorizations of the category in global, postcolonial perspectives, see (Bhabha 1994; Gikandi 1996; Damrosch 2003; Spivak 2003). |
11 | For a critique of similar comparative projects, see, most famously, (Smith 1982a, 1982b, 1990). See also, more recently, (Hughes 2017). |
12 | On the “use and abuse” of hagiography, see (Monge 2016). |
13 | Also, I contend that, in our globalized world, ever more gripped by nationalistic polarizing tensions, we ought to. |
14 | See also the alternative, commensurable approach advocated by Aaron Hollander and his theorization of hagiography as “multi-mediation of holiness” (Hollander 2018, particularly pp. 24–26 and pp. 31–38). |
15 | For a discussion of criticisms of Geertz’s definition of religions in terms of both a “model for” and “model of” reality, see (Schilbrack 2005). |
© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
Rondolino, M.A. Some Foundational Considerations on Taxonomy: A Case for Hagiography. Religions 2019, 10, 538. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10100538
Rondolino MA. Some Foundational Considerations on Taxonomy: A Case for Hagiography. Religions. 2019; 10(10):538. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10100538
Chicago/Turabian StyleRondolino, Massimo A. 2019. "Some Foundational Considerations on Taxonomy: A Case for Hagiography" Religions 10, no. 10: 538. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10100538