greater influence; and accordingly, while perhaps none of the vitae is without pious colouring, as a class they range from fairly trustworthy biographies to vehicles of edifying myth.[1]
Miracles are never lacking. The vita commonly was drawn less from personal knowledge than from report or tradition. Report grows passing from mouth to mouth, and is enlarged with illustrative incidents. Since no disbelief blocked the acceptance of miracles, their growth outstripped that of the other elements of the story, because they interested the most people. Yet there was little originality, and the vitae constantly reproduced like incidents. Especially, Biblical prototypes were followed, as one sees in the Dialogi of Gregory the Great, telling of the career of St. Benedict of Nursia. The Pope finds that the great founder of western monasticism performed many of the miracles ascribed to Scriptural characters.[2] Herein we see the working of suggestion and imitation upon a "legend"; but Gregory found rather an additional wonder-striking feature, that God not only had wrought miracles through Benedict, but in His ineffable wisdom had chosen to conform the saint's deeds to the pattern of Scriptural prototypes. And so, in the Vitae sanctorum, the joinder of suggestion and the will to believe literally worked marvels.
Usually the Fathers of the Church were as interested in miracles as the uneducated laity. Ambrose, the great Archbishop of Milan, writes a long letter to his sister
- ↑ An excellent statement of the nature and classes of the mediaeval Vitae sanctorum is "Les Légendes hagiographiques," by Hipp. Delehaye, S.J., in Revue des questions historiques, t. 74 (1903), pp. 56-122. An English translation of this article has appeared as an independent volume.
- ↑ At Gregory's statement of the marvellous deeds of Benedict, his interlocutor, the Deacon Peter, answers and exclaims: "Wonderful and astonishing is what you relate. For in the water brought forth from the rock (i.e. by Benedict) I see Moses, in the iron which returned from the bottom of the lake I see Elisha (2 Kings vi. 6), in the running upon the water I see Peter, in the obedience of the raven I see Elijah (I Kings xvii. 6), and in his grief for his dead enemy I see David (2 Sam. i. 11). That man, as I consider him, was full of the spirit of all the just" (Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi, ii. 8. Quoted and expanded by Odo of Cluny, Migne, Pat. Lat. 133, col. 724). The rest of the second book contains other miracles like those told in the Bible. The Life of a later saint may also follow earlier monastic types. Francis kisses the wounds of lepers, as Martin of Tours had done. See Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini. But often the writer of a vita deliberately inserts miracles to make his story edifying, or enhance the fame of his hero, perhaps in order to benefit the church where he is interred.
