Saints Alive: Word, Image, and Enactment in the Lives of the Saints 9780773590991

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SAINTS ALIVE

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SaINTS aLIVe

Word, Image, and Enactment in the Lives of the Saints

D av i d W i l l i a m s

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston ∙ London ∙ Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010 ISBN 978-0-7735-3708-8 Legal deposit third quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Williams, David, 1939– Saints alive : word, image, and enactment in the lives of the saints / David Williams. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-3708-8 1. Anne (Mother of the Virgin Mary), Saint – In motion pictures.  2. Thomas, à Becket, Saint, 1118?–1170–In literature.  3. Kolbe, Maximilian, Saint, 1894–1941 –In literature.  4. Christian saints in literature.  5. Christian saints in art.  6. Saints in motion pictures.  7. Saints in opera.  8. Christian hagiography – History and criticism.  I. Title.

pN 49.w552 2010   809’.8921282   c 2010-902504-0 Set in 12/15 Bembo Pro with Sophia Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

For Anna, Élisabeth, and David-Antoine Thy children like olive plants round about thy table. Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD. Psalm 128

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CONTENTS

Preface ix Introduction 3 Chapter One WOrD, ImAGE, ENACTmENt 17 Chapter Two SAINT aNNe 47 Chapter Three SAINT THOMAS BECKET 112

Chapter Four SAINT mAXImILIAN kOLBe 165 Conclusion 197 Notes 201 Works Cited 213 Index 221

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PREFACe

The idea for this study came to me while teaching a course on saints’ Lives as literature at McGill University. The course asked students to find out as much as they could about the saint they chose to study (often their name saint). Some students based their work on the written Life or, as it was called originally in Latin, Vita, examining the biography in such written texts as the Acta Sanctorum, the Golden Legend,1 and any other Lives they could find. Other students opted to investigate the saint’s religious images, known as iconography, where that was found to be sufficiently ample; still others concentrated on the records of the cult of the saint in question, examining prayers, liturgies, and other forms of veneration. The impressive results of the students’ various investigations suggested the thesis of the present study – that, for the genre of the saint’s Life, the integration of all three elements was the essence of the text: the written narrative (word), the visual account (image), and the cultic practices (enactment or gesture). Such an approach forms a holistic result, what Richard Wagner called a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” in which word, image, and enactment form the total text. Unlike my investigation in Language Redeemed: Chaucer’s Mature Poetry, where I concentrated on readings of particular poetic works by a single author, the present undertaking involves analyses of num-

erous texts of different genres – verbal, visual, and gestural – with the object of describing their interrelations. Similarly, unlike my Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature, which sought to describe the intellectual sources of the genre of the grotesque, here I am interested in interrogating the nature of text itself. By “text” I intend not only the written word but also the texts of images and of enactments. While this project involves the use of visual images and historical material as well as religious devotional materials, it constitutes, due to the limitations of my discipline and methodology, a literary study. In each of the chapters dealing with a specific saint, the written record of the life of the saint is discussed, and the question arises as to whether these records are “historical” or “hagiographical.” However, this distinction is not one that I attempt to clarify because it is not essential to my thesis. I am interested in how written records, regardless of their historicity, present the saint in question, and although there is a tendency among historians to regard biographies of saints or descriptions of other religious phenomena as “hagiography” (by which they mean “unhistorical”), such a perspective makes no difference to my discussion. I have, however, tried to be careful not to use the term “historical” loosely. Similarly in my discussion of images of the individual saints, I am not concerned with many of the questions that would engage the art historian. The development of a particular saint’s iconographical program, for instance, does not affect my thesis, nor do such otherwise essential questions as the image’s provenance or even its date. My questioning of image concerns what the visual says that the verbal does not and how, then, the image expands the text. The discussion of the cult of the saint in each case is intended to indicate how enactment contributes to the creation of the holistic text. No exhaustive account of any particular veneration is needed to demonstrate the necessity of taking into consideration the way in which the devotees of the saint enact their experiences of the writ-

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ten and visual accounts of the life of the saint and how gestures of veneration complete the holistic text. I wish to thank Ave Maria University and the English Department of McGill University for their generous financial support of this project. I thank especially my editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Susan Pelland and Joan McGilvray, who may now cry out with Pubilius Syrus, “Patience is the remedy for every sorrow” (Maxim 170).



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SAINTS ALIVE

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INTRODUCTION

texo, texere, texui, textus: to weave, to twine together, to compose.

The etymology of the word “text,” like all etymology, reveals buried connotations that haunt the contemporary meaning beneath the level of active memory. For most of us, “text” means the written document, and even in the more nuanced semiological concept, texts are “sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic” (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms), the plural “systems” suggesting the disintegration of the unified concept of “text” into texts of different kinds: verbal, visual, aural, gestural, and so on. The etymology of the word, however, seems to resist divisions, indicating integration and unification: the participle of the verb, textus, from which we get our word “text,” signifies a woven fabric and a web, a sense that was alive in past historic communities. In Greek legend, Philomela, deprived of voice, literally weaves a text, a tapestry containing a narrative that unites her with her sister Procne in communication and in vengeance for the violation of kinship, her community’s most sacred bond. Similarly, Penelope weaves and unweaves a shroud in order to be united again with the absent Ulysses and thus preserve the sacred bond of marriage. Hers

is a wordless, political text, a strategy to deceive and hold at bay those who would usurp her husband’s bed and kingdom. Plato uses the image of weaving throughout his writing. In Cratylus he compares language to weaving and the work of the weaver’s shuttle to the function of the name in language.1 In this image, the shuttle separates the warp from the woof before it knits them together into a single fabric in the same way as words distinguish one thing from another and then are integrated into syntax. Just as weaving produces a seamless fabric from separate strands, so do words woven into narrative produce text. A more extended analysis of the metaphor of weaving, and particularly of the dynamics of separating and combining, is found in Plato’s Statesman where the metaphor expresses, not the nature of language, but the nature of community and its governance, thereby creating an analogy between text and community.2 The analogy is appropriate in several ways: in a fundamental sense, texts belong to those joined within community, for it is members of the community who create, communicate, and interpret texts. The holistic, or complete, “text” that I wish to discuss is a whole of many strands, woven of words, images, and enactments. It is the sense of “text” that Wagner described as Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work, for him, an integration of music, theatre, and dance. Penelope’s shroud is a silent image that makes visible and present the predicament of the heroine simultaneously depicted verbally in the narrative of her story. Philomela’s embroidery is at once a visual image (indeed, a work of art) and a verbal narrative that, combined, lead to the enactment of vengeance that affects the community and completes the “text.” Anglo-Saxon poetry came about through performance – the enactment by the Anglo-Saxon poet, the scop, who possessed no written document, but who reached into his memory for the words of the text. The Anglo-Saxons referred to the makers of their poetic texts as word weavers because they combined and interlaced words into poetic texts that represented the

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religious, historical, and artistic constituents of their society – that is, the entirety of the culture. Etymology reveals another aspect of kinship in that words have ancestors and descendants – their original or ancient meanings and their present meanings in new contexts. In a different way, images, too, have the equivalent of etymologies in their histories since a particular depiction of a given event, the Nativity for instance, relates to all other depictions of that event not only in the artist’s conceptual and creative process, but also in the viewer’s interpretive process, since both artist and viewer are familiar with other images of the same event. In a similar way, enactment has its lineage. Like the scop who repeats the performance of the scop who taught him the poem, the devotee who venerates Saint Blaise repeats a liturgical practice handed down from mediaeval times when he places two tallow candles on his throat on the saint’s day. In this example, gesture, or enactment, enlivens and makes present the whole Vita (as the biography is called in Latin) of the saint and thus the saint himself; like all mimetic gestures, enactment has its own etymology, or etymomimesis, that stretches back to meanings found in the original verbal account of the Life of Saint Blaise, his iconography, and his veneration. Unlike drama, which also unites word, image, and enactment but in which the audience remain spectators of the action, liturgy overcomes separation of author/performer and audience; the reader, viewer, and actor become one. The religious narrative recited throughout the liturgical rite is visualized through the church paintings, statues, and stained glass windows that surround the locus of the event, as well as through the symbolism of the priest’s vestments, which are coordinated with the meaning of the particular celebration. The prayers of the priest and the responses of the congregation – their movements and gestures – constitute the enactment of the event. All three, taken together, produce the living text.



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The contemporary necessity for a science to understand “signsystems, linguistic and non-linguistic” indicates the disappearance of a former intimacy with the full sense of text, a philosophical rejection of ideas of pre-existing unity, and the loss of an easy integration, or interweaving, of modes of meaning, an integration that, nevertheless, survives in systems of signification inherited from earlier periods. In addition to the formal religious liturgy, another kind of text, existing on the margins of contemporary culture, is the saint’s Life or hagiographical biography.3 The Life intertwines fundamental narratives of different kinds and different systems of signification into a text fabric that transcends the separation of word and image, author and audience, intention and interpretation, and that gives life to the whole text. Hagiography gives us a holistic text through the integration of three basic sign systems: the written word, the visual image, and the ritual enactment. The Acta Sanctorum, the Golden Legend, and the many other written narratives of a saint’s birth, acts, and death provide the written word. Visual images are found in the iconography that recounts the life of the saint in the images in manuscripts, in stained glass windows, in statuary, and all other visual expressions. The acts of veneration performed by pilgrims and other devotees of the saint – offerings, prayers and chants, ritual movements such as prostration and ambulation, and the undertaking of various kinds of penance – constitute the gesture, or enactment. Although one of these may, in a given text, be fuller than another, in general all three operate together to create the holistic text of the saint’s Life. This unity is made possible, not through any hierarchical arrangement of parts, but by the originating Word from which not only words but all signs flow, deriving their power of expression through their equal participation in the overarching Logos that makes all signification possible. Typically, the verbal account of the saint’s Life has no known author or is a composite of biographical accounts written by vari-

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ous authors. The weak presence of the author in this kind of text favours the perspective of the audience, or what contemporary literary theory calls the reader, and tends to make this audience primary in the finding of meaning in the text. The sense of “reader,” as I use the word here, is more general, since the written form of the text is only one of its elements, and in the Middle Ages, the era of the beginning and greatest popularity of this genre, the great majority of readers would not have read the text at all, but heard it, seen it, performed it. Illiteracy was more the norm than the exception during the Middle Ages. Many among the nobility did not know how to read and didn’t need to because they had literate servants to read to them. The common people were mostly illiterate as well, at least in the early Middle Ages, and their access to written texts came through the pulpit. The clergy was the only literate class as such (although not all were literate), but even among them only a minority could read Latin, which with some exceptions was the language in which mediaeval saints’ Lives were written. The visual narrative is equally anonymous. Although scholarship has identified many details concerning the stained glass narratives, for instance, it might never have occurred to a mediaeval viewer, as he gazed upon a scene in a cathedral window, to wonder about its author or its author’s intention. Similarly, the ritual behaviour of the pilgrim arriving at the shrine of his patron saint or another holy person was dictated by the community and tradition, not by any individual authority. The devotee of Saint Christopher, for example, did not read that the saint was particularly pleased (and perhaps swayed) by the offering of an apple at certain times of the year or by a white cock at others. These were things that the community knew, a knowledge passed down from generation to generation, the meaning of which arose from the communal interpretation of the whole text of the culturally transmitted Life.4 It is in this sense that the faith community is both author and audience of the saint’s Life. As Margaret Miles, speaking of sacred



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images, has observed, “The individual viewer confronted the image as a member of an interpreting community, and the image itself was also part of the architectural and liturgical presentation of an ordered cosmos of being, reality, and value.”5 My description of the saint’s Life is likely to bring to mind the reader-response theory of Stanley Fish. His view that there is no freestanding, autonomous text as such and no meaning of text independent of the reader’s interpretation of it helps to explain the dynamic of the saint’s Life. Fish claims that the meaning of any text arises out of a community of readers sharing interpretative strategies. This is true also for the saint’s Life, but in an even stronger way than in the usual application of reader response theory to more conventional texts. Explaining his opposition to the idea that there is meaning embedded in the text and that it is the role of the reader to find it, Fish states: “In the procedures I would urge, the reader’s activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning, but as having meaning.”6 If we consider the “reader” of a saint’s Life as part of a community to which the text is addressed, it is clear enough that the meaning of the text inheres in his listening to the words of the narrative, integrating them with his contemplation of the visual images related to the Life, and “performing” his interpretation of the text through his acts of veneration of the saint in question. From this perspective, one might say, the “reader” of the saint’s Life “writes” the text. In this way also, Fish’s theory of the reader’s activities having meaning is helpful for an understanding of the way a Vita works. The “problem” of the author and the dominance of his “intention” in the work are obviously diminished in a text like the saint’s Life in which the author is unknown or is one of many. However, in Fish’s theory, intended mainly to explain modern writing, there is no “text,” but there is meaning: the reader writes the meaning, not the text. The obvious problem is that texts have many readers, and from an overemphasis on the readers’ creation of meaning the possi-

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bility arises of a limitless number of interpretations and thus invalidation of the text. This problem has led to accusations that reader response theory is a form of relativism in which one interpretation is as good as another and that every reader is authorized to come up with his or her individual interpretation. Fish has defended his theory against charges of relativism principally through the argument that readers form communities, and within those communities common “strategies” of interpretation produce stable meanings of a text. Shared interpretation, corresponding to the protocols of the community of readers, produces authentic meaning. Although in this way Fish restricts subjective interpretations, he still allows for the existence of many interpretive communities and thus multiple interpretations: “Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading, (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”7 For Fish, the various and different interpretations of the same text are equally “true,” their “truth” being grounded in the fact that they arise from a community. The meaning of the text, then, is confined by the number of communities of readers that produce limited numbers of interpretations; while all such interpretations are valid, none excludes the other. Although Fish argues persuasively that his system does not produce limitless private interpretations, we are, nevertheless, still left with the feeling that what we have is a form of moderate relativism. Furthermore, these solutions also produce their own difficulties, not because a given text may not have more than one meaning, but rather because of the synthetic nature of what are called communities. Fish’s community is really no community at all and might better be described as a cadre. Unlike the usual idea of a community, the assembly envisioned here is a miniscule group consisting



INTRODUCTION

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of persons with no relationship other than shared ideology. Fish’s “community” is unnaturally homogeneous, made up principally of academics, not even inclusive of the entire academic community, but limited to the still smaller group of the literati. Within the literati, the number is further reduced to those sharing “interpretive strategies.” (One envisions a “community” of feminist interpreters, another of Marxist interpreters, queer interpreters, and so on.) These are, moreover, ideological groupings, and ideology is never fully all-embracing because it is inevitably polemical. These are groups that lack both diversity and common ground, without sufficient variety of points of view to be able to produce interpretation that is valid for the entire culture or to address the real world in any meaningful way. The minimum requirement of a genuine community is its power to unify people from all levels of society and of divergent ways of living through an inclusive set of values and beliefs. This is the character of the faith community of the readers of the saint’s Life, but it is not the character of Fish’s assembly of intellectual elites. Instead of “community,” I have used the word “cadre” to describe Fish’s interpretive groups, and I justify it by Fish’s linking of “community” to “strategies.” A cadre is “the permanent establishment forming the framework of a regiment” (Shorter Oxford Dictionary), and the military sense of the word is significant. A group of persons held together by strategies is an army or political party, not a community, and the need of strategies is proper to it because its purpose is aggression. Thus Fish’s vocabulary suggests a kind of hostility toward the text: the text itself appears to be the enemy, and the strategy is to annihilate it through rewriting. The “interpretive community” resembles a colonizing force invading the written text so as to set up a hegemony of its own ideological interpretation. The elitism of these interpretive communities is brought out quite candidly by Fish himself who, trying to refine the sense of what constitutes membership in such a community, describes it as signified by a kind of secret handshake and confirmed by what amounts to the

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wink and nod of those in the know: “The only ‘proof’ of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know.’”8 While resembling Fish’s communities in some respects, the interpretive community of the saint’s Life does not entail such problems. Made up of a wide spectrum of social agents, from kings to peasants, from theologians to the illiterate, the audience of this text embodies community in a way that gives its interpretation authority. It does not need to struggle against the author of the text it interprets so as to wrest meaning from him because the saint’s Life is already open to audience participation in the way described by Umberto Eco: “An ‘open’ text cannot be described as a communicative strategy if the role of the addressee (the reader in the case of verbal texts) has not been envisaged at the moment of its generation qua text. An open text is a paramount instance of a syntactic-semanticopragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is a part of its generative process.”9 In engaging with the text, the faith community replaces strategies of interpretation with a becoming-one-with the text. The “reader” and the meaning of the text are one in the sense that the text’s principal function is the redemption of the reader through his and her engagement with and mimetic enactment of its contents. Just as the individual saint has imitated the life of Christ so as to become Christ-like and has thus entered into and become part of the narrative of redemption, so the reader of the biography of that saint merges with and becomes the saint he reads. Through reading or hearing the account of the saint’s life, by gazing at the visual images of that life, and by enacting the meaning of the life through ritual, readers bring the text to life. At the same time, they are themselves brought into a new spiritual existence by the text. However, the imitations and interpretations of the saint’s Life are diverse. The reading of the leper seeking a cure at the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket is different from that of a king seeking



INTRODUCTION

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forgiveness for murder, but the containment that is necessary to prevent the superabundance of meaning that occurs through limitless and indiscriminate interpretation is found in the life of Christ himself. Jesus becomes the centre of the text that holds together the countless interpretations emanating from it. Every Christian aspires to sainthood, which is nothing more nor less than being in the presence of God forever. To achieve this state, the Christian attempts to live his life in imitation of Christ, the “Word of God,” the template for which is found in the New Testament. The Gospels are not, however, merely a written account or formula for behaviour; they provide a way of being. Although the concept of the divine in the Gospels is expressed in written words, the concept of “word” itself is more than sign and is expressed as living, human flesh. The foundation for this concept is found in John’s Gospel where he describes the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:1). There is a striking sameness in the candidates for sainthood as they are described in their Lives. Students of hagiography regularly remark the stylized nature of the genre in which the eponymous character’s individuality is often barely detectable. This uniformity of character comes about because all saints’ lives are the life of Christ, written small, and the individual differences from one to another are in the minor register. Similarly, the individual interpretations of these texts by various members of the living audience – from king to peasant – are also in the minor register because the text, both in its creation and in its interpretation, is governed by the metatext which is Christ himself. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce delineates three categories of relationship between an artist and his work. In the third, the dramatic form, the personality of the artist “finally refines itself out of existence.”10 In an extensive study of the theory of text, D.C. Greetham selects this category as a vehicle for his discussion of the “gap” (apechie) that opens up between author and

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his creation and the consequent problem of “alienation and loss of authority.”11 Both in the dramatic presentations of an author’s original work and in the (re)interpretations by individual “readers” of other kinds of texts, differences and expansions occur, changing the text and increasing the “gap” between what the author intended and how the audience perceives the work. The issue, as Greetham says, is how far the gap can expand between the author’s original text and its progressive reinterpretation and re-presentation before the work disintegrates altogether.12 The problem has an interesting expression in the text of the saint’s Life where, as has been said, the author is already absent, either because unknown or because the text has, from the moment of reception, multiple authors (so, multiple intentions). Here it is not that some mysterious process has refined the author out of existence, but rather that the author’s intention is transtextual and is meant to be understood through the all-encompassing genre of hagiography. Whereas, according to Greetham, the continuous reinterpretation of the literary text distances its meaning from the original author’s intention, thus creating the “gap,” in saints’ Lives the repetition and copying of the text from one copier to another, its continuous illustration in iconography, and its constant enactment by the saints’ devotees, do not widen the “gap” but, in fact, progressively close it. Again, this occurs because the concept of the life of Christ functions as the foundational text that produces an imitative repetition of itself in the various texts that constitute the genre of hagiography. Based in the theology of sanctity, an individual Vita, then, is the record of such imitation, and all Vitae taken together differ only in their variations on this controlling narrative. The biography of the life of Christ that we receive from Holy Scripture is understood in Christian culture to have been written by the Holy Ghost employing the agency of the evangelists, and thus this biography is simultaneously an autobiography – a narrative of the earthly life of God as man, dictated by God as Holy Ghost to his chosen amanuenses. So, just as Jesus is the author of his own life, he also “stands



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behind” and authorizes the various imitations of it. In the repetitions that are the individual saints’ Lives, the gap between the original and the copy is thus constantly filled. The present discussion of the saint’s Life adopts the semiotic concept of “text” as a composition of any system of signs that conveys meaning. The Vita Sacra is a unique semiotic event in that, as text, it is constructed of several systems of sign that, although each may be complete within itself, cannot be separated without damage to the integrity of the whole. A saint’s Life is not, in other words, merely the written biographical account of the subject’s earthly existence, as one finds in secular biographies. Nor is it a collection of pictures consisting of a series of narrative images that illustrate a biography, as one may find in a family album. Moreover, the liturgical text is not only a ritual practice involving a series of actions performed on a certain date, in a certain way as, for example, a visit to the grave on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. It is all of these, integrated in such a way as to produce a living, holistic text. Maurizio del Ninno has perfectly captured the mutually reinforcing nature of the verbal, the visual, and the gestural in the celebration of a saint’s life in his description of the festivities known as the corsa dei Ceri (the race of the candles) in Gubbio in honour of the city’s patron saints: “My hypothesis is that the celebration of the Candles is constructed as a text, that is, as an entirety of same and/or complimentary messages articulated through several codes (food, space, sound, etc.).”13 Del Ninno demonstrates his theory by showing that the very way the race is organized is a form of veneration mirrored in the rhetorical organization of the written text and reflected further in the order of the ringing of the church bells during the race: “In the ritual the use of space obeys at one and the same time the narrative logic of the whole, within which it occupies its own functional area, but, at the same time, as an autonomous semantic system, it translates to its interior the narrative that it helps to develop.”14 It is precisely the semantic integration that del Ninno finds in the Gubbio celebration that I believe characterizes all hagi-

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ography to one degree or another, where word, image, and gesture work together to coordinate the full narrative. In the following chapters I attempt to show, by including a twentieth-century saint in the discussion in the last chapter, that the holistic text is not one locked in the past. Ultimately the kind of “text” studied here is made possible by the existence of the faith community for which it is created and which creates it, and although there are many differences of experience and sensibility between mediaeval people and us, for Christian culture these differences are considerably transcended in shared spirituality. Outside of the faith community, the study of saints’ Lives may spill over into purely secular interests, as it clearly does in the encounter of religious paintings in museums, in themes about saints’ lives in theatre and film, and in literature that thematically employs aspects of the lives of saints. In the present discussion, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral; Anouilh’s Becket; Ionesco’s operatic libretto, Maximilien Kolbe; and a recent Canadian film, La Neuvaine, are examples of such interpenetration of the religious and the secular that contribute to the creation of “text.” While these uses of the hagiographic still function to some degree within their original context, the relation between “text” and the contemporary audience is problematic, an example of what Eliot famously called the dissociation of sensibility, wherein literature seeks refuge in obscurity and is content to speak only to its elite. As text, the Vita Sacra can, to an extent, overcome that dissociation through the common bond and shared understanding of religious culture, which inevitably persists even in contemporary secular society. To illustrate the nature and function of the living “text,” I have chosen three saints’ Lives. Saint Anne, who because there is no mention of her in scripture, nor in any other historical document, has been called a “constructed” saint, lived in the era immediately before Christ and was directly responsible for his coming. Mother of the mother of God, she appears early in Christian literature, but



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the height of her cult and iconography is reached in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The second saint to be discussed is a thoroughly documented figure who played an important part in English history, profoundly influencing Western art and spiritual practice. The cult of Saint Thomas Becket, originating in the histories written by his devotees, provides an effective example of how image and ritual extend word into the full holistic text. Finally, I have chosen Maximilian Kolbe because he provides a contemporary example of a saint’s Life and thereby allows the ideas concerning a holistic text to be tested in a context other than the mediaeval. The brevity of this chapter suggests that the text of a contemporary figure is elaborated, to begin with, primarily by words; time is the agent that favours the development of image and enactment, both eventually enriching the word. Indeed, the length of treatment here of each of the saints may appear slightly lopsided, Saint Anne’s being the longest, Saint Thomas’s somewhat shorter, and Saint Maximilian’s shorter still. That image and enactment usually develop later than the written text does not, however, mean that these are illustrations and imitations of the verbal. While Kolbe’s biographical history is already fully known as part of a well-documented modern history, his iconography and veneration are still in the developmental stage. In the case of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the historical facts of his life are easy to access; his birth, family, his youth and adulthood, as well as his dramatic death, are all a matter of record. What is not a part of the biography, although there are hints there, is the man’s spirit, his deepest emotional experience, and, most importantly, his meaning – the significance he holds for the faith community he left behind and yet to which he still belongs. Because of the particular context of Kolbe’s martyrdom, his Life speaks as eloquently beyond the particular faith community as within it. These elements of his Life find nascent expression in his iconography and cult, however preliminary their present development.

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Chapter One

WORDS, IMAGES, AND ENACTMENTS

WORDS In verbis verum amare, non verba. (In words it is the truth we love, not the words.) Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana IV.11.26.

The great power of words consists in their ability to represent thought as language, enabling the speaker to communicate complicated intellectual processes and extensive discursive descriptions. No other sign system achieves this. The image, although more effective than the word in presenting in a solitary, contained way what it represents, cannot comment on its object or analyze its own method of representation as language can. Similarly, gesture, or enactment, while performing what it represents and, in this sense, closer to its object, cannot reflect upon itself or the nature of its own operation. Words can talk about words; images and gestures cannot analyze themselves. If we accept that the world outside us has its own existence and reality, we can also accept without solipsism that our experience of that world is conditioned by the basically linguistic nature

of our knowing. Words as names, then, give reality, not to what they name, which already has its own reality, but to the relationship between the named and the namer. That is to say, more than any other means of representation, the name reveals how we know intellectually what it is that we know. As well as naming and thus creating a relationship between knower and known, words as discourse enable us to explore the nature of the known, to query the status of the knower, and to reflect upon the very phenomenon of knowledge. Verbal reasoning also, however, separates us from the known by pointing to the gap between namer and named, knower and known, while at the same time making us aware of the connection between self and other. The knowledge the suckling babe has of his mother is intimate and profound, we think, exactly because it is prelinguistic, nonmental. Indeed, here the knower does not even distinguish himself from the known. The acquisition of language is concomitant with and helps construct the psychological formation of senses of the self and the other, of similarity and difference. In this sense, however, names and words also stand between us and what we know, this gap appearing clearly in the structure of the sentence in which subject, verb, object require a particular sequence and are thus linearly distanced yet intellectually connected. Nevertheless, the drawbacks of language seem also to be its strengths. Although one must not suggest that being human is dependent on being intellectual, human development does presuppose intellectuality. Travis Curtright summarizes Pope John-Paul’s description of the tripartite process of human development in which the second step is “intellectual growth, from first childhood impressions to the capacity for reflection and analysis.”1 Such analysis and reflection are accomplished through language and emphasize the fact that human consciousness depends directly on the acquisition of language. Furthermore, the very possibility of having a sense of the self depends on the ability to conceive of the other, a conscious

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process that implies the gradual growing beyond the early intimate knowledge of the infant. Words in the form of narrative also reveal the sense of time, for narrative is, we might say, time’s perfect image. Saint Augustine was among the first to perceive this, and it was this perception that enabled him to formulate his famous existential explanation of the nature of time as something existing always in the present: the past is the present remembered, the future is the present anticipated, and the present is the point de repère through which the experienced moment passes into memory and the anticipated moment becomes actual.2 It is not that the past exists only as a subjective recollection; the past has an objective reality and possesses truth. Rather, Augustine asserts, we experience the past in the present. In a work fundamental to understanding language, Paul Ricoeur analyzes this passage from Augustine and develops the saint’s perception into an entire hermeneutic of narrative. For Ricoeur, the very nature of the world is revealed, or “configured,” in narrative; literature in the form of the novel, poetry, biography, historical narrative, infuses the discordant human experience of time with a comprehensibility made possible through plot.3 Whereas the image exists always in the present of the moment of the gaze, and the ritual transcends time altogether, lifting the devotee into a realm of the eternal, words as narrative bring us to an experience and understanding of the nature of time and its passage. The discourse of the saint’s Life rests somewhere between the chronicle and the narrative, its historicity drawing it toward chronicle, its metaphoricity drawing it toward narrative. In the chronicle type, the teller is often an eye witness to what he recounts, as in the case of the biography of Saint Thomas Becket, and his account consists of a listing of incidents. The presenter of a narrative, often removed from the moment of the occurrence of the incidents, structures characters and events in such a way that all details extraneous to the plot are removed from the story. This description of narrative



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fits Saint Anne’s story in which much of what we would want to know in a full-fledged chronicle of her life is missing because such information does not advance the plot. The various Lives of Becket and of Anne, like most saints’ Lives, contain elements of both the chronicle and the narrative, the balance between these elements depending on proximity to the historical moment of the events. In both cases, however, what is evident is that verbal accounts require some kind of logical form, either predominantly chronological (“this happened, then this, then this, then …”) or predominantly narrative. It is also primarily in language that the intellectually allimportant phenomenon of metaphor is made possible. There is an enormous leap in intellection between simple denotative language and the rich connotative language made possible by verbal metaphor. As a kind of analogy, metaphor was considered by Aristotle as the fullest revelation of the nature of things, accessible only through inspiration: “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted to another: it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphor implies an eye for resemblances.”4 Ricoeur parts company with Aristotle in the latter’s view that use of metaphor requires genius, seeing metaphor, instead, as the very core of all language: “If to ‘metaphorize well’ is to possess mastery of resemblances, then without this power we would be unable to grasp any hitherto unknown relations between things. Therefore, far from being a divergence from the ordinary operation of language, it is ‘the omnipresent principle of all its free actions’ (Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 90). It does not represent some additional power, but the constituent form of language.”5 Christianity provides a guide to encountering the divine that is fundamentally linguistic, or, as Gene Edward Veith Jr puts it, Christianity insists on the role of language.6 This insistence does not, however, exclude other systems of signification and representation, as the monumental Christian tradition of visual religious art and religious ritual attests. And yet, the story of the development

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of human expression has nothing to do with drawing pictures or performing acts. God told Adam to name the animals he had created, and Adam not only named them, he named them “correctly,” a strong suggestion of the bond between being and word. Nevertheless, it seems there has always been a deep suspicion about the dangers of language and an association of the mastery of words with arrogance and pride. This is the meaning of the story of the Tower of Babel. Here the descendents of Adam use language, not to verbalize God’s creation, but to challenge him as the origin and source of all names (“let us make us a name,” Gen. 11:4). The paradox of maintaining a foundational cultural monument that is both revered and suspect characterizes the history of the Western attitude to language. It is seen, for instance, in the vow of silence taken in various religious orders because silence, not words, facilitates spiritual communication. It is seen in the virtually universal condemnation of verbosity – of the chatterbox, the gossip. The scepticism about language finds its most intellectually elaborated expression in the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite who repeatedly warns Christians that they must not trust words, which are of human origin, to lead to a true understanding of the incomprehensible One. Words, he warns, reflect our own human experience of the phenomenal world and therefore can never objectively represent God as he is in and of himself. Although Pseudo-Dionysius recommends the negation of every affirmation we can make and then the negation of the negation, in order to leave the inquirer with a kind of distilled sense of the meaning of words, it is noteworthy that he also asserts the fundamental importance of words; in his theology, it is only after expressing in words everything that can possibly be said about the subject that the superior process of negating those words can begin. Thus, even in a system that strives to transcend words, language is basic. Dionysius seems to be in disagreement with Aristotle about the highest form of language for, unlike the philosopher, who considered the perception of similitude to constitute profound intellectual insight, the



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Areopagite promoted the understanding of dissimilitude and difference as the deepest spiritual insight. Despite the limitations and our mistrust of verbal language, its undeniable prestige in Western culture raises the question of the relationship of language to other forms of signification, particularly whether there is an implied hierarchy in their relationship. Does word command image, as its handmaiden, to fill a role of illustration? Does word relegate ritual to a function of miming the words of the written text?

Images Seeing has its own history. (Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History)

The particular power of the visual image is found in its ability to bypass the process of reasoning with words and to bring to awareness a direct experience of the represented. Its intellection is achieved by showing rather than telling, by (de)monstrating (monstrare, to show, point to) rather than (de)scribing. In this sense, the visual is a step closer to its subject than are words. The image, unlike the word, does not stand for its subject; it is a form of it. Words are about what they signify, whereas the visual image is a presentation of its subject and participates in its being. The gap that we have seen in verbal language between knower and known, the difference between the “I” who knows and the “it” that is known, is much reduced in the relation between beholder and beheld. The separation between the viewer and the viewed is diminished through the process by which the image “makes present” what it (re)presents, somewhat in the same way, perhaps, as a photograph of someone is more immediate than reading the name of that person.

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In his work on the nature of language and epistemology, Hans Georg Gadamer has distinguished three constituents of language: the sign, the symbol, and the image. Although Gadamer strives to describe all language as “image,” the difference he finds between sign, symbol, and image is telling: “The essence of the picture stands, as it were, midway between two extremes: these extremes of representation are pure indication (the essence of the sign) and pure representation (the essence of the symbol).”7 In an informative study of the transcendence of the sign in Gadamer and Derrida, Zoran Jankovic refers to Gadamer’s definition of the sign as pur renvoi, which because its essence is a function possesses no ontological dimension. “The difference between a picture and a sign has an ontological basis. The picture does not disappear behind its pointing function but, in its own being, shares in what it represents.”8 On the other hand, the symbol is pure suppléance in that it “takes the place of” its subject, as opposed to referring to something other than itself. In this sense, the symbol makes present its subject in the guise of itself. Gadamer gives pride of place, however, to the visual image which, like the sign, functions partially to refer but, also like the symbol, makes present that of which it is an image. But it goes further: the concept of representation through image is not, in Gadamer, a question of copying. Jankovic summarizes Gadamer: “Mimesis, or more precisely ‘the original mimetic relation,’ (mimische Urverhältnis) consists in two moments: first, it signifies the presence of the represented … Second, it possesses a ‘cognitive sense:’ not only is the represented present, but it becomes even more authentic due to its presentation. It has thus ‘gained in truth’ … imitation and representation are not only a repetition that copies, but a comprehension of essence.”9 The biography that is the written account of the saint’s Life is a text constituted primarily by signs, a narrative that strives to present a series of events as they may have happened in the past and to structure them so as to reveal the meaning inherent in them. Its



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distance from what it represents is measured by the temporal hiatus between the events and their recounting but also by the nature of the sign itself, whose raison d’être is the absence of what it signifies and, in the case of biography, the representation in the present of what is past and no longer present. However, in the case of hagiography, verbal account is augmented by image and enactment to produce a text that transcends the limits of the written word. For Gadamer, the symbol, in its capacity as substitute for the symbolized, makes the original immediately present but paradoxically reveals its absence for the place of the original must be vacated before the symbol can “take its place.” As Jankovic points out, “It is in this sense that the symbol remains separate from that which it symbolizes, and for which it must pay the price … This is why the symbol, although it makes what it represents present ‘in person,’ nevertheless maintains a rapport with the represented that is external and is determined by its arbitrary (conventional) character, something it shares with the sign. In this sense, the symbol can tell us nothing about the original.”10 In Gadamer’s view, only the image exists in complete unity with the original it represents. Indeed, the aesthetic image not only possesses its own ontological status, derived from the original; it also invests the original with increased being, causing it to have what Jankovic describes as an “ontological surcharge.”11 In Gadamer’s hermeneutic, only the image can claim to be free of conventional meaning and uncompromised by the arbitrary. The image demonstrates the “natural” bond between signifier and signified that Cratylus mistakenly searched for in words. In the holistic text of the saint’s Life, it is the iconography of the saint in question that provides this dimension. Utilizing both sign and symbol, the visual representation of the person and the events of his or her life – the iconographic image in painting, stained glass, statuary, and other plastic, visual form – comes to possess a vital character through the ontological dynamic of the relation of image to thing. Indeed, in the images of the sacred and the saints, we find

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the pristine example of this dynamic, as Gadamer explains: “Only the religious picture shows the full ontological power of the picture. For it is really true of the appearance of the divine that it acquires its pictorial quality only through the word and the picture. Thus the meaning of the religious picture is an exemplary one. In it we can see without any doubt that a picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is in ontological communion with what is copied.”12 Although Gadamer eventually attributes the status of image (eikon) to language as a whole, the metaphysics of image per se that he develops is helpful in re-establishing the proper equilibrium between word and image in the concept of text, an equilibrium that seems to have existed in mediaeval culture. Although the seeds for disintegration were sown early in the Middle Ages, the iconoclasm of the Reformation is the first clear sign of the disintegration of the holistic text through the denigration of the image and the hegemony of words, this denigration being completed in modern times by the onset of the so-called “linguistic turn.” Religious iconography makes real the life of the saint or holy figure for the observer through a psychological effect that involves the metaphysical. Previously informed by verbal comprehension of the signified, the beholder of the image augments this understanding through the visual. As Margaret Miles puts it, “Images encourage the identification of the worshipper with past and future sacred events by revealing a visually present universe. The mediaeval worshiper became, through concentrated vision, present at the nativity, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the Last Judgment.”13 Here it is the temporal demarcation of the image that is its strength for what is happening in the contemplation of the image is that the past is made present, and in being made present it is quickened. The being of the beholder can now engage the being of the person or event he beholds and can project it into his personal future by the intention to imitate its significance. In his essay on ritual gazing, Thomas Lentes describes the dynamic between the beholder and the image beheld as a com-



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munication with the past and with the other world: “By means of eye and sight, it became possible for the pious to come into contact with the people from the hereafter in pictures, a contact that we can hardly imagine realistically.”14 In the Middle Ages, the visual was highly theorized in theology, philosophy, aesthetics, and science. In the science of optics, for instance, there were two theories of vision: in the ancient theory of extromission,15 the eye sends out rays that touch the object viewed and return to the eye bearing images of the object. In intromission, the theory championed by Roger Bacon, among others, it is the object that emits images of itself that strike the eye of the beholder, travel down the optic nerve, and come to rest in the memory. In both cases, the image is the exact likeness of the object; it is the object-as-image. Now the identification of image with object is complete since what the viewer receives is not something that stands for what is viewed but a simulacrum of the thing itself. Furthermore, the relation of the viewer and the viewed is one of intimacy in which the thing seen penetrates the viewer and comes to reside within him.16 In his study of the fifteenth-century painted “close-up,” Sixten Ringbom attributes the reasoning and justification for the cult image to Saint John of Damascus, who stated that, “The honor shown to the image is transferred to the prototype, and whoever honors an image honors the person represented by it.”17 It is remarkable that here John of Damascus provides a theory about not only the ontology of the image, but the psychology of the viewer, enabling us to perceive the intimate relation of beholder to beheld. Ringbom also refers to the important mediaeval metaphor of the soul as a house on the walls of which mental images are painted and Gregory the Great’s trope of vision as an intake of external things, which are then “painted in the heart.”18 Saint Augustine, too, regularly refers to the heart as the locus of memory where images are stored. Augustine developed an entire psychology of vision that was tripartite and consisted of corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual percep-

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tion. In the instance of corporeal perception, it is the eyes that are the functioning organ, and their working, according to Augustine, was a matter of extromission, by which the perceived image melded with the soul.19 It is likely this idea that was behind the mediaeval belief that a pregnant woman who viewed or gazed long at certain creatures or objects could imprint upon her unborn child an image of what she perceived. Thus Gerald of Wales describes a certain queen who lingered too long over the “painting of a negro in her bedroom” and subsequently gave birth to a black child.20 The same phenomenon is at work in the habit of devotees staring fixedly at the image of the saint whom they venerate so as to become one with the saint, a practice well described by Virginia Nixon: “Contemporary descriptions tell us that people prayed in front of images, knelt before them, held them in their hands, at times spoke to them, presented them with gifts.”21 The relation between word and image in mediaeval culture seems to have been one in which the relative position of one element or the other shifted and was often determined by material developments and mentalities. Catherine Karkov points to analysis that shows that in certain examples from the early Middle Ages, “miniatures function as a visual gloss or exegesis of the text,” a phenomenon that points to the interpretive power of the image.22 Michael Camille offers a compelling historical explanation of the “marginalization” of the visual image, describing the twelfth-century transition from text as “cue for speech” to text as “written document.” The former, he shows, was an integration of words and Word, and page layout mattered little since what was on it was there in order to trigger enactment; the words were to be memorized, spoken, performed. As to the textual status of visual images: “In the early Middle Ages, then, images existed not at the edges, but within the sacred Word itself.”23 In the late twelfth century, with the growth of literacy, an important change occurs: “Now it was the physical materiality of writing as a system of visual signs that was stressed. The shift, from speaking words to seeing words, is fundamental to the development



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of marginal imagery, because once the letter had to be recognizable as part of a scanned system of visual units, possibilities for its deformation and play became limited.”24 Camille explains this momentous shift in mentality as due partially to technological developments in the scriptorium. Whereas in the early Middle Ages the copier of the text was often the same as the illuminator, by the thirteenth century a division of labour had occurred, and the work of the illuminator began only when that of the scribe had been completed: “The illuminator usually followed the scribe, a procedure that framed his labour as secondary to, but also gave him a chance of undermining, the always already written Word.”25 This division of labour has at least two consequences. One is that the text produced in the scriptorium is further made anonymous by being the product of multiple “authors” – the author himself, the scribe, and the illuminator. The text now has no single origin. The second consequence is the creation of a hierarchy of functions in which the written word was uppermost. The degree to which the written word came to dominate the very concept of text is shown in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries’ theories of mediaeval manuscript illuminations. Here it was accepted as a given that the visual representations found in the margins and bas de page of mediaeval manuscripts, especially the more fanciful and grotesque, were mere decoration, had no relation whatsoever to the content of the text, and contributed nothing to its meaning. This, it was claimed, was self-evident, since one had merely to read the words and then look at the depictions to see that no correspondence existed, an idea based on the assumption that the only meaningful function of images is to illustrate what the words say. Camille quotes Sir E. Maunde Thompson, the late nineteenth-century Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, as typical: “The ornamentation of a manuscript must have been regarded as a work having no connection whatsoever with the character of the book

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itself. Its details amused or aroused the admiration of the beholder, who in his admiration took no thought whether the text was sacred or profane.”26 The marginalization of the pictorial and centralization of the written narrative encourages the idea that image functions merely to illustrate the text – that the picture says the same as has already been said in words, that the image brings nothing of its own to the meaning and may even be dispensed with (as it often was), and finally that the visual is inherently secondary to the verbal. This process of marginalization is also a process of fragmentation since the written narrative can, and increasingly does, exist independently of the visual narrative, and each can go its own way, so to speak.27 Many contemporary art historians resist the view of images as mere illustration. In a study that has greatly influenced the discussion of the place of image in relation to word in mediaeval culture, Hans Belting claims that the theologians of the Middle Ages were dedicated to the suppression of visual representation and favoured the linguistic. Although his view is generally considered overstated,28 Belting has nevertheless contributed to re-establishing the integrity of visual representation. The collection of essays that appears in The Mind’s Eye elaborates in a detailed manner what might be called the ontology of the image.29 It follows that enactment, in the case of religious texts, is also separated off. Now the text can be read for itself alone, privately, without community, for any and all purposes. In the case of the saint’s Life, such fragmentation destroys its intention and diminishes all its parts. Although the written narrative, independent of its iconography and liturgy, may appear complete, it risks being reduced to mere object of scholarly interest and analysis, lacking engagement of the reader’s whole self, just as the pictorial narrative can be studied independently or simply enjoyed as colourful decoration. The enactment of ritual, deprived of its historical text



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and lacking the aid of the visual, may become mindless repetition, conducted with no reference to the spiritual truths that the larger narrative makes clear. The process of hegemony of the verbal that Camille describes as beginning as early as the twelfth century required, like all cultural innovations, considerable time to become generalized. The gradual emergence of a truly verbo-centric culture occurs during the next three centuries until, with the Protestant Reformation, it finally prevails, at least within the Protestant countries of Europe and eventually North America. Margaret Miles describes the success of Protestant iconoclasm: “The ultimate success of the Protestant reform, then, came with the emergence of a language-oriented religion and culture. As people were gradually educated to attend more to the word than to visual images, as they became habituated to worship in churches in which no images presented spiritual hierarchy, the success of the Protestant reform in the creation of a new linguistic culture was assured.”30 Miles continues by pointing out the importance of such events as the Protestant efforts to create mass literacy, the printing press, and the pedagogical use of written pamphlets for religious education until “the reading eye became the ancillary of the hearing ear,” and the mediaeval use of the visual to stimulate understanding and feeling gave way to words, both written and spoken. The modern illusion of a linguistically constructed self was born. Edward Muir describes the reasons for the malaise that ritual inspired among Protestant reformers: “Rituals employ sight in order to give access to emotional, psychological, or spiritual states that often resist expression in language, which is precisely the power of ritual and which is one of the reasons why the masters of logo-centrism, the humanists and Protestant reformers, so distrusted ritual, a term they invented during the sixteenth century to describe a vain, meaningless activity.”31 Protestant iconoclasm was often extreme and violent in some areas, whereas among Lutherans and Anglicans the attitude toward

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images was more theologically nuanced. It was not people’s delight in images that Luther deplored but rather the belief that images could effect anything on their own. As David Freedberg puts it in his discussion of Hans Belting’s work, “Luther’s view that the validity of images had nothing to do with the image itself, but was rather a matter of what the viewer made of it, was the defining one. After Luther, roughly, images could no longer be justified as holy images, only as art.”32 But other Protestant sects’ iconoclasm went much further. Miles refers to the work of a committee, chaired by Zwingli, that inspected every church in Zurich, searching out any and all visual representations so as to destroy them. She quotes Charles Garside’s description of the event: “Every standing altar was removed from its niche or base and, together with the base, taken out of the church. It was then either broken up by the masons, if made of stone or plaster, or burned, if made of wood. Every painting was taken down from the altars and burned outside, and all crucifixes were removed. Even the carved choir stalls were taken up and burned. Then the walls were whitewashed so that no traces whatever of the old decorations and appointments might be seen … By Sunday, July 3, 1524, scarcely a statue, a painting, a crucifix, a votive lamp, a reliquary, a shrine, or image or decoration of any sort was to be seen anywhere in the Zurich churches.”33 Not surprisingly, ritual aspects of Christianity often suffered the same fate as the sacred images. The cult of the saints was particularly abhorred by the reformers. Pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints were fervently condemned, as were prayers for the intervention of the saints and the veneration of relics. The condemnation of such religious practices had behind it a complex religious theory, as well as a mentality, in which the verbal sign was at war with the visual image and the ritual gesture. In his recent study of early modern ritual, Edward Muir describes the Catholic doctrine of presence in ritual by which, as seen especially in the sacrament of the Eucharist, ritual brings about the presence of someone or something and enacts in such a way as to bring being into existence. This contrasts



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and conflicts, says Muir, with the Protestant reform doctrine of representation in which all religious signification, image, and ritual is reduced to the linguistic: “The opposite extreme from the doctrine of presence in the Reformation debate was the theory of representation. According to the humanists and Protestant reformers who espoused some form of this theory, rituals should not be understood as a kind of behavior that created presences and enacted states of being but as an aspect of language that communicated meaning. The Eucharist reminded believers of Christ’s sacrifice rather than offering up his actual physical body.”34 This doctrine of representation reveals the thorough commitment to the view of all meaning as linguistically framed and the subsequent and inevitable view, more clearly articulated in structuralism and poststructuralism, of language as pur renvoi, a nonreferential system of signs. Up to the fourteenth century, however, the experience of a Christian entering a church was initially visual, and his spiritual experience was induced visually. This phenomenon is seen in its fullest in the elevation of the consecrated Host during the sacrifice of the Mass.35 A practice introduced in the Middle Ages, this gesture called for the devotee’s intense gaze upon the simple round, white disk, a visual experience capable of transporting the viewer out of time and place. Thomas Lentes calls attention to the similarity of the religious experience of the image and the enactment: “If the sacramental performance was based upon the interplay of three factors – the material (bread and wine), the verba et signa (or words and gestures) and the intention – image devotion was based upon these same elements. The material picture was not only venerated through word, gaze, and gesture, but also was actually sanctified and could, accordingly, be used for different purposes. Succinctly put: images were the very sacrament of the pious – and gaze and picture worship were their liturgy.”36 The heart of the Catholic religion is the Mass, and the heart of the Mass is the consecration of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Although transubstantiation is brought about

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essentially but partially through the words of Jesus repeated by the priest, the epitome of spiritual experience for the Catholic begins with the contemplation of the Host as it is raised before his eyes, and that experience is first of all visual and then tactile. It is not verbal. The idea of the gaze reveals much about the function of the image in the dynamic of the saint’s Life and in the religious life of the mediaeval Christian. As Margaret Miles describes it, “This strong visual experience was formulated negatively as the fear of contamination by a dangerous or ‘unsightly’ visual object or positively as belief in the miraculous power of an icon when assiduously gazed upon, to heal one’s disease.”37 The question of the gaze unites all the elements of the holistic text. A saint’s devotee is always aware, at least in part, of the biography of the saint brought about through words; in the case of Saint Anne, the devotee knows that she is the mother of Mary, wife of Joachim, and probably knows that she is the patroness of sterile women. The devotee brings these facts as a kind of tacit knowledge to the image before which she kneels, upon which she gazes, and to which she prays. David Freedberg reminds us of a fact that was highly significant in the devotee’s experience of the image: images were anointed with holy oil before being placed in churches and shrines. They were, indeed, “sacred.”38 The difference between word, image, and gesture blurs, and a kind of melding into a whole occurs. This experience of the devotee is the holistic text. Generally speaking, modern hagiographical scholarship has, along with the rest of modernity, adopted a verbo-centric perspective that has undermined the holistic nature of the saint’s Life by assigning the visual a position secondary and inferior to the verbal or by simply ignoring it. Ritual has usually been excluded altogether from hagiographical study and relegated to the social sciences. More recent scholarship, however, has tried to correct the imbalance. In one of the most powerful studies to argue the centrality of the visual, Margaret Miles distinguishes between the cul-



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tures of what she calls “language users” and “non-language users.” Although, of course, everyone in every human culture uses language, Miles identifies “language users” in the sense that Wittgenstein intended when he said, “the master of the language is the master of us all,” and non-language users as “those whose use of language is unselfconscious.”39 It is these latter, Miles demonstrates, who are more adept at the use of visual images, especially those from what she calls “historic communities,” the principal one in Miles’ study being the mediaeval Christian community. Miles offers an entirely convincing analysis of the hegemony of the verbal in which its final triumph occurs with the rise of the modern philosophical concept of the self and the human community as constituted linguistically.40 This tendency to subordinate the visual to the verbal also finds exception in the work of art historian Madeline H. Caviness, whose writings on stained glass wisely caution against presuming a hierarchical relation between word and picture and suggest instead the integration of visual, verbal, and performative: “Stained glass is often heavily inscribed, fusing text and image so that they must be deciphered together. Like most Christian pictures, it is also related in some way to a text, such as a biblical or hagiographical narrative, and possibly also to biblical exegesis. These relations are far more complex than once thought, and it is inadvisable to insist on the text as the source or normative rendering, and the pictorial cycle as an illustration or deviation; even explanatory inscriptions composed with the glass may complement, rather than repeat, the pictorial encoding.”41 What is more, the conventionally expected direction of influence is sometimes reversed. Sarah McNamer, in a study of the dating of the Meditationes Vitae Christi once attributed to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, points out that there is an unmistakable similarity of subject and style between this text and the paintings of artists such as Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, Simone Martini, and others of the dolce stil nuovo. Attention to detail, the rendering of human feeling, and

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other innovations of this style are evident in both text and image. Thus it has always been assumed that the painters were inspired by the written Meditationes and set out to illustrate that text. No less a scholar than Emile Mâle, McNamer tells us, initiated this interpretation with the sweeping statement that, “Few books have had on art an influence more profound.”42 However, in a careful examination of the authorship and dates of the Meditationes, McNamer shows that it was composed not in the thirteenth or very early fourteenth centuries, as scholarship had previously maintained, but sometime from 1336–60. Giotto’s Arena Chapel (also known as the Scrovegni Chapel) cycle, which supposedly “illustrates” the text, is known to have been executed in 1305 or 1306. With the new date of the composition of the Meditationes, it is clear that Giotto could not have known the text when he painted the cycle. McNamer’s conclusion is radical: Thus it would appear that inspiration went in precisely the opposite direction from what has long been held to be the case: the painted image preceded and motivated the written word. Since it is known that the MVC (Meditationes Vitae Christi) was written by a Franciscan living in Tuscany, it is natural to conclude that the author was familiar with the Assisi frescoes and was inspired by the dolce stil nuovo and the new development of the human, the domestic, and the earthly that he found there. This is not to say that the relation between word and image was never dynamic. The illustrations in illuminated manuscripts of the MVC – miniatures that were manifestly inspired by the details of the text itself – had a demonstrable influence on other miniatures as well as on later frescoes and tableaux … But when the author of the MVC sat down to write, it is clear that he was inspired by the imaginative efforts of the artists who preceded him.43



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Of course Giotto knew the Gospels that, in a general way, inspired some of the scenes in the Chapel, but many of the scenes are totally extrabiblical, such as the meeting of Anna and Joachim at the Golden Gate, and even the scenes with a biblical basis show considerable innovation. Is it not also possible that various aspects of veneration and liturgy form part of the inspiration of both the author of the Meditationes and Giotto? This seems to be the opinion of many art historians, including Giuseppe Basile, who, also speaking of Giotto’s Arena Chapel cycle, emphatically states that, “As for the relationship with the sacred theatre of the time, it is certainly not to be questioned: Not only because it was possible to register signs or traces of exceptional interest on the occasion of the restoration suggesting the fortuitous presence of luminous phenomena, but because the arrangement of the personages (often actual tableaux vivants), the angle of the scenes, the “perspective wings” are all theatrical – and it certainly is not happenstance that the narrative and theological epilogue of the entire representation, the two angels rolling up the sky, is presented as final curtain.”44 Giotto himself was a Christian and would have participated not only in the liturgy of the Mass, but likely also in various forms of veneration of the saints, the very saints that he depicts on the walls of the Chapel. Both the authors of the Meditationes and the Arena Chapel Cycle had already, as participants in the culture, integrated far more than a verbal knowledge of the salvation narrative: they both saw and enacted its meaning. David Acres points out that the bulk of the Renaissance tradition of Christ’s infancy, absent from the Gospel accounts, was invented by the painters.45 Margaret Miles, too, while admitting that, in practice, image follows written text more often than not, nevertheless sees the relationship as intra-informative: “Occasionally it is possible to document the appearance of a particular motif in paintings before it appears in extant texts. More frequently, as is the case with many of Jacobus’ legends [in the Golden Legend] a text can be shown to precede painted depictions. No consistently one-

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way influence can be demonstrated, but on-going mutual inspiration and influence are evident.”46 Such mutuality is particularly characteristic of the genre of the Vita Sacra, and it is a mutuality that is tripartite, integrating not only the verbal and the visual, but the gestural as well. Nevertheless, much imagery of the saints’ Lives functions as illustration of the written account, reflecting its endorsement by Pope Gregory the Great, who conceived of the image as the substitute for words for those who could not read.47 In such a view, it is possible to dismiss the visual altogether in a culture in which everyone can read, and to a great extent this is what happened from the late Middle Ages onward. However, narrative imagery often displays considerable innovation and creativity. This is not to suggest that in order for the saint’s Life to be holistic the visual must be independent of and separate from the written narrative, constituting a narrative entirely of its own. Such independence would exacerbate the separation of parts rather than reinforcing the whole. Instead, word and image work together to weave a seamless fabric that exhibits the full meaning of its subject. The third thread in this fabric is enactment.

Enactments Veneration of the saints can be seen as related to the dramatic mode in art, particularly to the forms of ancient dramas. The verbal and the visual are both present in drama, as they are in veneration, but the gestural is fundamental to the genre and, at certain moments, becomes the primary means of expression. Lear’s tearing at his clothes on the cliffs of Dover, for instance, “says” more than the accompanying text at the same point in the play. At their centres, both ritual and drama have performance, the phenomenon that distinguishes them from the written word and the visual image. Drama derives from religious ritual. The essential difference



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between the ritual and the drama has to do with the audience or, as Fiona Bowie defines it, the effect on the audience: “If the purpose of a performance is to be efficacious, then the performance is a ritual. If the purpose is to entertain, then it is theatre, although no performance is merely one or the other.”48 The development of drama out of religious ritual and into theatre is marked by the progressive distinguishing and separating of the audience from the enacted event. In theatre, the audience is spectator; in religious ritual, audience is actor. The effective element of ritual introduces the concept of sacrament. Like the ritual, the sacrament utilizes words, images, and gestures for the purpose of making something happen, that is, to be efficacious. Unlike the sign or the symbol, the end of sacrament is not to represent, not to “stand for,” but to cause to become; when a sacrament is performed, the world is changed in some way. Thus in the sacrament of marriage, for instance, a man and woman change their status as separate individuals to become a couple; they are changed, and the community to which they belong is simultaneously transformed as this new unity is added to it. The ritual veneration of the saint, although not a sacrament, is nevertheless efficacious, and what it effects is a communion between the devotee and the saint, both in the sense of “communication,” as when one speaks to the saint, as well as in the sense of “community,” as the devotee joins himself or herself to the saint through emulation. In this dynamic, there is both objective encounter with the emulated saint and subjective encounter with the self as actor – a discovery of a new self within the model. As public enactment, ritual also brings into being a community of those performing the ritual and a union with the community of saints in paradise. The Christian participant in liturgy was, at various moments in the Middle Ages, more or less active in the central liturgical event, the Mass, but always the principal actor in the veneration of the saints. The various gestures performed at the tomb of the saint, or in a chapel dedicated to the saint, or before a relic of the saint

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required an understanding on the part of the devotee of the particular powers of intercession of that saint and the symbolic gestures required to invoke them. The description of the saint’s powers of intercession was to be found in the written Vita, or in tradition, or both, and a general understanding of the narrative of the historic life of the saint was needed as a ground for the ritual gestures. Nevertheless, the ritual did not consist of gestural imitations of what was written; rather, the written account was a description of the ways in which the devotee venerated the saint. One of the most common ritual gestures is procession. The Greek word for procession, ή πομπή, (a sending) bespeaks moving from one place to another and establishes the fundamental idea of ritual movement. Such movement is distinguished from ordinary movement by its reiteration and circularity. Often the ritual procession involves walking three times around the outside of the chapel or three times within the nave of the church. These processions, unlike mundane movement from one place to another, have no utility in that they lack a new physical destination; their goal is always to return to the point of departure. This point of departure is, however, transformed through the repetitive processing to the point of return, and the reality of locus as both point of departure and point of return paradoxically transforms this locus as both and neither, a specific point and all possible points, thus extraspatial, extratemporal. The destination/point of departure is symbolically ontological in that the devotee, by processing, arrives at a place of encounter between himself and his patron saint, a “place” that is lifted outside of both space and time. The ritual procession further distinguishes itself from the mundane through its solemnity and magnificence, a distinction clearly seen in the ancient Greek religious processions and the name for them: “The English word ‘pomp,’ an almost exact derivation of πομπή, retains with its meaning the magnificence of processions.”49 Christians follow this practice by preparing themselves for the sacred event. Bathing, dressing in fine clothes, holding candles and



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other ritual objects all contribute to creating the needed difference between procession and ordinary movement. The procession is also the event that most closely allies image and enactment, since its movement through space is quite intentionally created as public spectacle. Edward Muir has pointed out that the viewing of the ritual procession is an act done not only by the public assembling to watch the proceedings, but by those in the procession, as well: “The spectators of a procession were simultaneously being viewed by those who marched in the procession so that the seeing subject and seen object were, in fact, interchangeable.”50 As Muir states, this mutual spectating tends to dissolve the barrier between beholder and beheld and to render the apparently passive viewer an actual participant in the ritual procession. Muir goes on to discover, in Bacon’s optical theory of the emanation of species, an explanation of the visual dynamics of procession by which the procession projects its image to the viewers in a beneficent way: “Contemporary optical theory suggested that the viewers of rituals were brought under the influence of what they saw through a profusion of material or spiritual emanators, or, to put it in their terms, through the radiation of species.”51 In this view, the procession is like an icon transmitting its power to the beholder through the eye. Another fundamental element of veneration is found in the ritual function of relics. In semiotic terms, a relic is a wholly different kind of sign in the sense that it is not a renvoie to what it stands for, nor a supplément of its original; it is an organic part of what it (re)presents. A relic is typically a part of the body of the revered saint, a vestment that has touched that body or a piece of a holy object, such as a splinter of the wood of the cross. In rhetorical terms, the relic is the synecdoche incarnate in which part not only “stands for” whole, but also brings the whole to life in the present. The intimacy of the relic and of the whole of which it is a part is suggested by the early names for relics; they were called membra (limbs, members), exuviae (skin, covering removed), as well as signa (signs).52 The Church defines relics as things that have been in actual contact with

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the bodies of Christ or the saints and which call them back to us again, “not in the same way as holy images do, by simple representation, nor as a sacred object, by a cultural function, but rather by an objective relation to the body of Jesus in his human life, by being the belongings, more or less intimate, in the past lives of the saints or blessed who are now in heaven. Moreover, no convention can make a thing into a relic; it either is or it is not a part of that which it signifies.”53 In modern, secular culture, a familiar form of the relic is found in the practice of carrying a strand of a loved one’s hair, often a child’s, in a locket. If we compare contemplating a photograph of a loved one to wearing a locket with a part of that person in it, we get a sense of the difference between image and relic.54 This difference between touch and sight suggests the sense of intimacy that the relic can inspire in the devotee. Unlike the lock of hair, however, the genuine relic of a saint is thought to possess the same power of the sacred that the saint himself or herself achieved through living a holy life on earth; now in paradise, the saint in question remains on earth, both physically and spiritually, dispersing blessings to the devoted through the relic. Christians eventually used the term reliquiae (remains, remnant) to refer not only to the physical remains of the human body, as the Romans used the term, but even to objects touched by or placed in the vicinity of the departed. This use indicates an ontological concept of the extension of being into thing, making the part not only a sign of the whole, but an incarnation of the whole. The relic shares the élan vital of the departed; it is the continued life on earth of the deceased, now sanctified in paradise. The relation of relics to words was specifically addressed in mediaeval theories of signification, and it is clear that, as signs, words and relics were thought of as entirely different in their signifying processes. Relics are what Augustine called “natural signs,” like the tracks of an animal signifying its passage or smoke signifying fire, but they are more since they are components of what they signify.



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Words, however, are conventional and ephemeral, too abstract to make fully present their signified. Thus writings by or about the saints, however sacred, are not considered relics unless written by the saint’s own hand. (And here we see that what is efficacious is, not the words or what they say, but the physical touch of the saint, transferred through the pen to the parchment.) A remarkable architectural metaphor for the semiosis of the relic is found in the way the early Christian churches went about creating representative relics. In a church that possessed the intact body of its patron saint, the saint for whom the church was named, a crypt was built directly beneath the altar, and the body sealed within. Between the crypt and the floor where the altar stood was constructed a tubular passage, a well that formed an airway between the crypt and the floor above. Beside this well was another parallel shaft that, halfway down to the crypt, was joined horizontally to the well. Into this shaft were placed fabrics and other objects destined to become representative relics. Once a year, a burning censer was lowered down the well into the crypt beside the body of the saint. This censer not only blessed and honoured the sacred remains, but created as well, through the smoke that mingled with the body and the objects in the shaft, a physical contiguity that made those objects “part” of the saint’s body. The well that connected the saint’s body to the world above was called the umbilicus, a term that radically corporealizes the entire structure and figuratively suggests a mother-child relation between the body of the saint and the objects which, through the effluvium passing from the body’s chamber, are, we might say, nourished and animated into the figurative offspring of the matrix. This metaphoric consanguinity between a saint and his or her signs communicates not only the unique representational process of the relic, but also the centrality of the relic’s physical, material reality.55 Participation in ritual enactment leads the devotee to a form of self-constitution and at the same time to a form of self-abnegation. This duality echoes an aspect of the ontological structure articu-

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lated by Michael Polanyi, particularly his concepts of “indwelling” and “breaking out.” Indwelling is the learning and adoption of systems of articulation, what might be called “discourses,” and involves consciousness of the nature of the discourse. “Astronomic observations are made,” Polanyi tells us, “by dwelling in astronomic theory, and it is this internal enjoyment of astronomy which makes the astronomer interested in the stars.” The construction of such a framework within which to understand is, at one and the same time, an intellectual enablement and a limitation. For this reason, Polanyi posits the second element of the dynamic, “breaking out,” in which the continual process of understanding experience “must occasionally operate by demolishing a hitherto accepted structure, or parts of it, in order to establish an even more rigorous and comprehensive one in its place.”56 The dynamic that Polanyi describes is one that involves the intellectual, logical, and analytic understanding of the world and our experience of it. This understanding, once perfected, must be transcended so as to achieve a “being with” the object of attention. Polanyi cites the example of contemplating the stars and being swept away by their beauty and mystery, as opposed to analyzing them scientifically. The moment we begin to reflect on astronomical propositions, our awareness of the stars themselves is lost and is replaced by an awareness of ideas about the stars. According to Polanyi, the greatest act of breaking out of fixed conceptual structures is ecstatic vision achieved through contemplation. He describes this experience much as Gadamer describes the experience of the image in art: “The conceptual framework by which we observe and manipulate things being present as a screen between ourselves and these things, their sights and sounds, and the smell and touch of them transpire but tenuously through this screen, which keeps us aloof from them. Contemplation dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them … As we lose ourselves in contemplation, we



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take on an impersonal life in the objects of our contemplation; while these objects themselves are suffused by a visionary gleam which lends them a new vivid yet dreamlike quality.”57 What supports contemplation, Polanyi tells us, is ritual. In a highly perceptive study of the relation of Polanyi’s thought to ritual, Robert E. Innis explains Polanyi’s idea of Christian ritual as instilling modes of feelings concerning the experience of the supernatural: “The purpose of ritual, in the Polanyan position, is to provide a field of actions, gestures, words, images, or places that elicit these modes of feeling. But this field itself is purposefully generated and formalized by a passionate quest to break out of the normal conceptual framework within which we interpret and experience the world. Indeed, the religious ritual displays a permanent tension between dwelling in and breaking out, which also grounds the sense of the numinous.”58 The historical accounts of the lives of saints provide the reader with the necessary intellectual input to understand the subject. The breaking out of this conceptual framework is achieved, for the reader of the saint’s Life, through the meditation that takes place as one gazes at the sacred image and as one carries out the ritual acts of liturgy. Again, Polanyi, like Gadamer, finds the strongest example of his concept in religion: “The religious mystic achieves contemplative communion as a result of an elaborate effort of thought, supported by ritual. By concentrating on the presence of God, who is beyond all physical appearances, the mystic seeks to relax the intellectual control which his powers of perception instinctively exercise over the scene confronting them. His fixed gaze no longer scans each object in its turn, and his mind ceases to identify their particulars. The whole framework of intelligent understanding, by which he normally appraises his impressions, sinks into abeyance and uncovers a world experienced uncomprehendingly as a divine miracle.”59 The sense of the numinous, achieved through entering the world of divine miracle, is also revealed in the profound symbolism of

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the major epithets of Jesus. His incarnation of verbal language is expressed in his title, Word of God. The language one uses reveals in an especially complete way the essence of the speaker since, as rational beings, our words stand for our understanding of and relation to external reality. We seal our statements of truth with the strongest expression of sincerity we know: “I give you my word.” Thus we warrant the truth of words through an engagement of the integrity of the self; to say, “I give you my word” is as much as to say, “I give you myself.” The incarnation is the salvific event in which God says, “I give you my Word,” speaking himself into the world and giving himself to the world. From the moment of his teaching in the Temple throughout his preaching activity, Jesus speaks forth God’s words, which the chosen people scripturally possessed but now encounter in incarnated form. The Sermon on the Mount begins significantly, “And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying.” Jesus also bears the epithet Image of God, a further expression of his identity with the Father for, just as the image is the reflected presence of the original, so Jesus is the apparition of God: “Who has seen me has seen the father” (John 14:9). Gadamer’s view, that the image both derives being from the original while simultaneously re-infusing the original with being, suggests something of the mystery of the hypostasis, in which God is Being and his image, Jesus, is equally Being. The understanding of Jesus as Imago Dei functions to complement our understanding of his status as Verbum Dei. This divine image is not, however, an “illustration” of the meaning of the divine word, but an added dimension in the revelation of the nature of the Godhead. Jesus is also, and supremely, a divine “enactment.” As his purpose is the salvation of humanity, his life can be seen as “God doing,” a carrying out of redemptive acts that culminate in the Crucifixion and Resurrection. The ritualistic dimension of these acts is clear in the typology of the New Testament, where the narrative is continually marked by references to previous events of the Old Testa-



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ment: “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued” (Matt. 27:9); “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them” (Matt. 27:35); “Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst” (John 19:28). Thus the present event refers to a past event that is, in a sense, its original – or better, its origin – but as we know from the way typology works, the past event remains unfulfilled until the present event occurs, thus the ontology of the enactment: the past event which “originates” the present event is given meaning and is brought to life by the occurrence of the present event that, in a paradoxical reversal, is seen to originate what preceded it. This is the mystery of typology described by Saint Augustine: “In the Old Testament the New is hidden; in the New Testament, the Old is revealed.”60 This intra-informative dynamic is reflected in the relation of word, image, and ritual in the text of the saint’s Life. In this way, Jesus’ entire life may be seen as ritual enactment, from his conception in the womb of a virgin, an event already recounted by the prophet Isaiah (7:14), to his rising from the dead (John 20:9). Jesus is the consummate text, and he provides the model for all other texts. As God’s Word, he speaks the sacred narrative of salvation. As God’s Image, he makes present that of which he is an image; he is epiphany. As the fulfillment of original promise and the enacting of the already foreseen, Jesus completes the text of salvation through ritual gesture. The life of a saint is the imitation of the life of Christ, and thus the text of that life is structured in relation to the text of the Vita Christi, a text the perfection of which is constituted by word, image, and enactment. In the Lives of the saints, this structure is imitated and reflected in the biographical narrative, the iconographic narrative, and the ritual narrative of veneration.

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Chapter Two

SAINT aNNe

For a figure with no historical basis, to whom there is no reference in scripture, whose very existence depends on logical deduction, Saint Anne has had a remarkable career. Although her life cannot be verified by any historical source, we are sure she existed, if only because Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to have had a mother herself. Her Hebrew name, Hannah, is probably derived from identification with the prophetess Hannah, and the foundation for the rest of her rich and complex history is found in the Protevangelium of James, a second-century apocryphal Greek document. A Latin text of the sixth century, known as the Pseudo-Matthew Gospel, is more or less a translation of the Greek narrative.1 The enormity of the cult of Saint Anne, or Anna as she is called on the European continent, is described and analyzed in Virginia Nixon’s Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe, the most comprehensive recent scholarly study of Saint Anne, particularly in the mediaeval German tradition. Describing developments in the veneration of Saint Anne in the late fifteenth century, Nixon states: “Within a few years, churches and convents throughout Germanic-speaking regions were following the model set by the Rhineland cult of Saint Anne. Lives were rewritten, translated, and

republished, confraternities were founded, and fine new altarpieces were commissioned. By the late 1400’s, Saint Anne’s popularity had spread throughout Germany, Switzerland, Flanders, and Holland, making substantial inroads as well into Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavia. Anne’s name, we are told, was on everyone’s lips.”2

Words The highlights of Saint Anne’s Life, as found in written sources, are as follows: Joachim, a rich man, attempts to make an offering in the Temple and is rejected by the high priest because he has failed to sire a child for Israel. Ashamed and saddened, Joachim thinks ruefully of Abraham, who had been granted a son in his old age; he leaves the Temple dejected and goes into the wilderness. In the Latin source (Pseudo-Matthew), it is said that Joachim was a shepherd who owned his own sheep and, a rich man at twenty years old, took a wife named Anna of the tribe of Judah, the family of David. After twenty years of marriage, Anna had produced neither son nor daughter. It is also in this source that we are told that it was with his shepherds amongst his sheep that Joachim exiled himself for five months after his rejection at the Temple. Both sources recount the beautiful lament that Anna expresses when her husband does not return from the Temple. Going into her garden dressed in her bridal gown, Anna sits beneath a laurel tree and prays. The specification of the type of tree is significant since laurel was a widespread symbol not only of victory, but also of fertility. Especially, perhaps, because it is “evergreen,” it was further associated with fruitfulness in old age.3 As Joachim has compared himself to Abraham, so Anna associates herself with Sarah, calling on God to bestow the same blessing upon her, and through the establishment of this typology is activated an important biblical theme – that of the barren woman made fruitful. Through her allusion to the first of these women, Anna informs her own life story with a

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series of intertextual echoes. Other versions of her Vita develop the relation of Anna to the barren women who become mothers of heroes. In the ninth-century adaptation of the Pseudo-Matthew, called Gospel of the Birth of Mary, the symbolic lineage is specified when the angel reminds Anna that Sarah, first mother of the nation, bore Isaac at eighty. Rachel, he continues, was sterile until she bore Joseph. The Hebrew heroes Samson and Samuel were both born of previously barren women.4 Perhaps even more important than situating Anna in this line is the Christian fulfillment of the theme in the rendering fruitful, not a barren woman, but a virgin. Just as Mary will be the completion of the topos, the son she produces will be the apotheosis of the hero. Seeing a nest of sparrows in the laurel, Anna sings: Woe is me, who gave me life What womb brought me forth? For I was born a curse before them all and before the children of Israel, And I was reproached, and they mocked me and thrust me out of the Temple of the Lord.5 Woe is me, to what am I likened? I am not likened to the birds of the heaven; For even the birds of heaven are fruitful before you, O Lord. Woe is me, to what am I likened? I am not likened to these waters; For even these waters are fruitful before you, O Lord. Woe is me, to what am I likened? Woe is me, to what am I likened? I am not likened to this earth; For even this earth brings forth its fruit in its season and praises you, O Lord.6 In the next scene, strongly reminiscent of the Annunciation, an angel appears declaring, “Be not afraid,” and reveals to Anna that



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she will conceive.7 According to the Latin version, the angel also appears to Joachim at the very same time and asks him why he does not return to his wife. Joachim now recounts the whole story of his malaise, and the angel announces that Anna “has conceived a daughter from your seed.”8 Here the alert reader recalls that, according to the same text, Joachim has been away from his wife for five months, and if she had been made pregnant by her husband before his departure, she would now be heavy with child and certainly aware of her condition, which clearly she is not. Joachim returns to Anna and they meet, as the angel has instructed, at the Golden Gate where in both versions Anna throws her arms around her husband, exclaiming, in the older version: “Behold the widow is no longer a widow, and I, who was childless, shall conceive.”9 (Emphasis added.) In the Pseudo-Matthew, however, she declares, “I was a widow, and behold now I am not so: I was barren, and behold I have now conceived.”10 (Emphasis added.) This detail – that Anna is already pregnant when Joachim returns – is introduced earlier in the narrative when the angel tells Joachim that Anna has already conceived, but it is complicated by his adding, “from your seed.” Given that the Pseudo-Matthew is largely a translation of the Protevangelium, the change of tense of the verb “to conceive” from future to past appears to represent a deliberate and thus meaningful change. The issue was, in fact, to play an important role in the mediaeval study of Mary’s Life. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception began to form as early as the fourth century in the East through philosophical speculation on the nature of Christ’s humanity. Simply put, if Jesus was free of original sin, which he surely was, then it must have been that his sole human parent was also free of it. Theologians of the Middle Ages and to this day are unanimous that the conception and birth of Mary were perfectly natural; that is, she was sired by Joachim and borne by Anne. Nevertheless, according to the dogma, Mary was miraculously free of original sin from the very instant of her conception. Popular thinking from the

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Middle Ages on has associated the idea of immaculate conception with sexless conception, an expression, perhaps, of the fascination that parthenogenesis has seemingly always held for humans. Numerous expressions of the theme offer various explanations for conception taking place without male involvement. In the case of the Virgin Mary, the solution for some was that Anna had conceived Mary miraculously through the words of the angel while Joachim was far away with his flocks. Another legend has it that Mary was conceived through the kiss exchanged by her parents at the Golden Gate, an orthodox echo perhaps of the Gnostic adoption of the concept seen, for example, in the Gospel of Philip: “For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth.”11 Throughout the Middle Ages, the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception was controversial, finally being declared dogma only in 1854. The alternate solution, one supported by such luminaries as Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and Saint Bonaventure, was called “maculate” conception: in short, Mary was miraculously freed from original sin after her natural conception but before her birth. The narrative continues with an account of Mary’s birth and the keeping of Anne’s promise to dedicate her to the Temple at the age of three. Whereas at this point the Protevangelium and the Pseudo-Matthew fall silent about Anne and continue with the story of Mary’s youth, Anne’s Vita is extended in later mediaeval sources. Inspired, we may assume, by a desire to delineate the saviour’s genealogical tree, Haimo of Auxerre in the ninth century is the first to claim that Anne married again after the death of Joachim and still again when widowed a second time.12 This narrative feature, known in the Saint Anne tradition as the trinubium, served to historicize Anne’s life and provide a genealogy of her many descendants; it was especially helpful in clarifying Jesus’ relationship to certain of his apostles, called “brothers’ in the New Testament, a designation that suggested the possibility that Mary did not remain a virgin after Jesus’ birth.



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According to this tradition, Anne’s second husband was a man named Cleophas, with whom she produced a child whom she named Mary, known in scripture as Mary Cleophas. Anne’s third husband was called Salome, and with him she had a third daughter whom she also named Mary, a figure also recorded in scripture as Mary Salome. Anne’s peculiar penchant for the name “Mary” was a way of linking together not only the three Marys of the Bible, but perhaps more importantly, their progeny as well. Mary Salome married Zebedee and became the mother of the apostles James the Greater and John the Evangelist; Mary Cleophas wed one Alpheus and gave birth to James the Lesser, Joses (Joseph the Just), Judah, and Simon.13 In the gospels (Matt. 13:55, Mark 6:3), James, Joses, Judah, and Simon are identified as Jesus’ “brethren,” who are, of course, the same men identified in the Life of Saint Anne as Mary’s nephews and thus Jesus’ cousins.14 The explanation seems to be that because they are related to him through a common ancestor, his grandmother Anne, and because Hebrew had no specific word for cousin, the Hebrew word for brother (ahh) was used generally to mean cousin as well, and that the Greek of the Gospels simply preserved this Hebrew usage, calling his cousins Jesus’ “brothers.”15 Thomas of Hales, in the late thirteenth century, confirms this view with somewhat different reasoning. Jesus’ cousins were called brothers because they were descended from both the maternal side – Mary Cleophas, Mary Salome – as well as the paternal side – Zebedee and Alpheus – and thus closer than cousins. Saint Anne also had a mother and a sister. John of Eck, in a sixteenth-century sermon, reveals that Anne’s mother was Esmerentia (elsewhere called Esmerentiana) and her father, Stollanus. Significantly, both had been childless for twenty years before Anne was conceived. Esmeria or Hismeria, Anne’s younger sister, became the mother of Elizabeth, who married Zaccharias and became the mother of John the Baptist.16 Making Esmeria Anne’s older sister was done, we assume, so as to make Elizabeth older than Mary and

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so accord with John the Baptist’s seniority to Jesus. This aspect of Saint Anne’s Life provides the basis for the identification of Elizabeth as Mary’s cousin in Luke’s Gospel (1:36) and, more importantly, creates Jesus’ family bond with John.17 This elaborate genealogical construct, known as the “Holy Kinship,” was widely represented in Saint Anne’s iconography, as we will see. The narratives depicting Anne’s parentage tend to transfer the circumstances of the Virgin Mary’s conception, birth, and childhood to her mother. A modern Life, written in French Canada in the early twentieth century, both preserves older, traditional aspects of the story and introduces certain innovations: when the angel appears to the barren Esmerantia, her husband Sollanus is away tending to his sheep. The angel who appears to him tells him that he will have proof of Esmerentia’s new found fertility in four golden letters inscribed on their bedstead. The letters turn out to spell ANNA . Like her own daughter, Anna is presented at the Temple.18 There was a virtual explosion of written Lives concerning the mother of the mother of God during the late Middle Ages, all of which greatly elaborate the original Greek and Latin versions. As well as a plethora of Vitae, some written as late as the twentieth century, there exist hundreds of poems, prayers, hymns, and offices dedicated to Saint Anne. The most important of all, if only because the most widespread and popular, was Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century Golden Legend, one of the most popular books ever written. It is a relatively brief compilation of earlier Vitae, adding little to the narrative. The angel who appears to Joachim enters into great detail concerning the line of barren women made fruitful, tracing the entire group from the Old Testament to the conception and birth of Mary. This version also makes clear that Mary was conceived after Joachim’s return.19 In the fifteenth-century Legenda sanctae Annae, published in Louvain, Anne is designated as the beginning of the divine redemptive process, and the Augsburg Life clearly makes her a psychopomp.20 In



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England, Osbern Bokenham recorded the life of Saint Anne in his fourteenth-century Legend of Holy Women21 that begins by addressing Anne as a tree, the genealogical root and stem from which Mary and Jesus are brought forth.22 In this narrative, an angel appears to Joachim as a handsome young man and asks him why he hides away from his wife. “I lack the proof of manhood,” Joachim laments. He has sown his seed for twenty years, he declares, and it “has been lost”: “For he who sows his field annually with great diligence, and waters his apple tree daily, and nothing grows, he is like one who drinks salt water to staunch his thirst.”23 The angel’s retort again firmly links Anne to the series of women whose late-life conceptions establish this important biblical topos – the sterile made fruitful. As in the Gospel of the Birth of Mary and several other sources, Anne’s predecessors in the topos are delineated by the angel as he links her to Sarah, Rachel, and the mothers of Samson and Samuel, adding, “Your wife is similar now, for she bears a daughter. For a daughter she hath, sothlye.”24 It is clear from this English version of the Life that the author wishes to inform his audience that Mary was conceived in a unique way. This is interesting in light of the view that the promotion of the doctrine of the immaculate conception in the West began in England, apparently as early as the twelfth century, although its most important proponent in the late Middle Ages is the German Johann von Trittenheim (Trithemius).25 Further insistence on the theme is found when Joachim meets Anne at the Golden Gate after his long absence, and she exclaims, “I was a widow and now I am none. I was barren and blameworthy, but now barrenness has left me, and God’s eternal providence has enabled me to conceive.”26 Bokenham includes the biographical detail that Anne had three daughters named Mary but adds the curious rider, “whether by one husband or three, I will not specify.”27 In the Middle English Stanzaic Version of the Life of Saint Anne, Anne’s other marriages and their progeny are recounted with the same detail as the tradition provides, but to her family is added a

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sister, Ismary who, like Esmeria, is identified as the mother of Elizabeth. The author also suggests a new interpretation of the theme of barrenness: that it functions to remind us that God, not man, is in charge of fertility.28 As in Bokenham, the angel relates Anne to all the barren women of the Old Testament, but here he includes Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, anticipating in a charmingly anachronistic way the continuation of the theme of barrenness fructified into the New Testament. Also, conforming to the Bokenham view, Anne is already pregnant before Joachim returns to her (“thy wyff is with child)”29 but again that view is complicated by the fact that the angel adds that Anne will give birth in a few days! This would mean that Anne had to have been four months pregnant before Joachim went into exile for five months, making it possible that Mary’s conception was perfectly natural. However, further confusion is introduced by the fact that in this version the angel visits Anne only after informing Joachim that she will give birth in a few days, and Anne is clearly not aware at the moment of the angel’s visit that she is pregnant! Deepening the bafflement, the author concludes that Mary was born when Anne’s “tyme kame.” Not all English versions of the Vita support this idea of Mary’s conception. In the dramatic version of Anne’s biography in the Ludus Coventrie, we find Joachim praying with three shepherds, again invoking a scene from the later nativity narrative, and the angel who appears repeats exactly the lines found in Bokenham, with one extremely important change: “Anne þi blyssed wyff / Sche xal bere a childe – xal hygth mary.30 (Anne thy blessed wife / she shall bear a child – shall name her Mary. [Emphasis added.]) Thus here, it is suggested, Anne has not conceived before being reunited with Joachim, and the use of the future tense throughout the dialogue with the angel is stressed. The many versions that suggest both that Mary was “immaculately” conceived without the participation of Joachim, and that she was conceived when Joachim and Anne “lay together” after meeting at the Golden Gate may reflect the authors’ orthodox under-



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standing of the tradition. Narrative contradiction is not uncommon in the Middle Ages, and authorial intention in these texts was always, in the first instance, to inspire devotion to the mother of the Virgin Mary, only secondarily to create a historical record of the saint’s life. This then is the outline of the contents of the mediaeval Vita Sacra of Saint Anne. Her story continues to be elaborated into the modern period, especially in Quebec where, as we will see, the devotion to Anne has been extremely vigorous, and where to this day she continues to have influence.

Images The question now arises as to how the iconography of the saint expands the text of her Vita. The number of visual representations of Saint Anne is vast, and no attempt to survey the whole will be made here.31 As examples of the way in which her iconography creates its own narrative of her life at the same time that it expands the written narrative, four of the most frequently encountered themes will be discussed. The first of these, the meeting at the Golden Gate, is regularly included in the written accounts, but the visual representation of the incident, as we shall see, goes further in its statement about the encounter. The widespread theme of Holy Kinship is treated in the iconography in a way that greatly extends its meaning, as well as re-informing the historical record. Third, the composition known as Anna Selbdritt, or the Anne Trinity, that pictures Anne, Mary, and Jesus together, also makes statements about its subject not articulated in the written narratives. Finally, both in the cult of the saint and in her iconography, Anne’s role as Mary’s teacher is ubiquitous despite the fact that there is no mention of it in the early Vitae. In addition to these four widely represented themes, there is a unique and unusual depiction of an incident in Anne’s life not found in the early Lives – Esmerentia’s betrothal of her daughter

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to Joachim, an incident that provides a peculiar example of iconographic extension of verbal theme by visual image. The question of the autonomy of the visual is particularly interesting in the iconography of Saint Anne. Not only does the pictorial tradition concerning her marriage, pregnancy, and mothering of Mary show considerable innovation in relation to the written accounts that describe the same incidents, but also, as Alexandre Masseron points out, mediaeval and renaissance hagiographers by and large drop Anne and Joachim from their histories at the point at which Mary is presented at the Temple: “Only an Armenian version of the Protevangelium tells us that they [Anne and Joachim] both died the same year as the Presentation and that Mary was in mourning thirty days. Furthermore, most sacred writers assert that Anne and Joachim were dead before the Incarnation and never knew the divine child of Bethlehem.”32 As Masseron goes on to show, the visual authors completely rejected this history and produced a whole discourse of Anne’s later life through numerous scenes of Anne betrothing Mary, educating Mary, and being present with Mary and the baby Jesus. There is at least one visual representation of Saint Anne’s death, in which an adolescent Jesus blesses his grandmother on her deathbed (Fig. 2.1). The reunion of Anna and Joachim at the Golden Gate after they have been visited by the angel is a favorite subject of the iconographers. Usually some sort of architectural form represents the Golden Gate, while husband and wife are almost always pictured in an embrace and sometimes exchanging a kiss. The most extensive and certainly most beautiful visual depiction of the life of Saint Anne is found in the Arena Chapel in Padua in frescoes painted by Giotto.33 In his rendition of the meeting at the Golden Gate (Fig. 2.2.), Anne and Joachim’s lips touch, suggesting the possibility of the third explanation for Mary’s conception – that Anne conceived through this kiss. While the meeting at the gate is featured in most of Anne’s Vitae and very widely represented visually, Giotto meaningfully expands



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Fig. 2.1  La mort de sainte Anne, 16th C. altar piece by Quinten Masys (1466– 1530), Musée de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, photo and permission: Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique.

the scene. At the extreme left of the composition is seen one of the shepherds with whom Joachim, we are told, had taken refuge. Although not stated in the early written accounts, the shepherd has apparently accompanied his master on his return to Anne, and he is clearly delighted to witness their embrace.34 In the background

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Fig. 2.2  Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1305 Arena Chapel fresco by Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336), Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy, photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

to the reunited couple but in the centre of the composition are five women – four dressed in bright robes, the fifth garbed in a dark purple robe with which she veils half her face. Unlike the shepherd, the women do not contemplate Anne and Joachim, but rather the four women grouped together contemplate the woman in purple, the one in green gesturing toward her. The identity and significance of the mysterious woman in purple (Fig. 2.2a) have been the subject of much speculation.35 She has often been interpreted as an allegorical figure of Synagoga, while



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Fig. 2.2a  Detail of Meeting at the Golden Gate.

the white-clad woman beside her has been interpreted as Ecclesia, a widespread allegory in the Middle Ages. So they have been interpreted by Virginia Bush; however: “Interpreting the two women at the centre of Giotto’s scene as Ecclesia and Synagoga, or anticipations thereof, does not rule out other levels of meaning. They could, for example, also represent the curse of barrenness and the blessing of fertility, or the different aspects of love: profane love or concupiscence and sacred love or innocence.”36 In fact, the identification of the two women as Synagoga and Ecclesia, although they appear as such at the Golden Gate in the fifteenth-century retable of Burgos, leaves unexplained the identity of the other three women behind the this pair. The three who stand one behind the other, facing the “dark-veiled” woman, are dressed in white, red, and green, the same colours in which Dante dressed

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the three maidens on the right side of the chariot drawn by the gryphon in Purgatorio XXIX . In Dante’s case, the symbolism is clear: the chariot is the Church; the gryphon, Christ; the three maidens represent the three theological virtues – faith, hope, and charity. On the left side of the chariot, Dante places four women dressed in purple who represent the four cardinal virtues. Giotto is reported to have been a friend and admirer of Dante. He even pictures him in one of his renditions of the Last Judgement, and Dante describes Giotto as the foremost painter of their age (Purgatorio XI , 95–6), so it is not impossible that Giotto here is borrowing from Dante’s symbolism, in which case we have in Giotto’s rendition the three theological virtues gazing at the representative of the purple-clad, cardinal virtues and a sophisticated and elegant tip of the hat to Dante. This, of course, still leaves uninterpreted the fourth woman, whose costume is barely visible but seems to be of light blue and gold. Whatever the case may be, Giotto has gone far beyond the written narrative account of the meeting at the Golden Gate. His interpretation is personal but one drawn from traditional iconography. Here the visual expands the verbal to include theological reference to the movement from Synagoga to Ecclesia through the typological reference to Mary, whose conception is taking place in the foreground of the composition, as the future bearer of the Messiah. In Giotto’s composition, the visual teases out the typological meaning of the verbal account of the meeting at the Golden Gate. Other visual accounts contribute in quite different ways to the text of the Life of Saint Anne. Some seem to enter into the debate on the Immaculate Conception, as may be the case with the depiction (Fig. 2.3) of the meeting at the Golden Gate in the Petit Livret faict à l’honneur de Madame Sainte Anne (1518–19) in which Joachim is first seen in the field with his shepherds, being addressed by the angel, and then arriving at the Golden Gate where he embraces Anne with his left arm while touching her between the legs with his right. This gesture was not uncommon in mediaeval visual illustration and served rather obviously, if crudely, to signify sexuality. In the



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Fig. 2.3  Life of Saint Anne, miniature on paper from the Petit Livret faict à l’honneur de Madame Sainte Anne, anon., Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, MS . 4009, fol. C 1, 1518–19, photo: Arsenal, reprinted by permission of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

fourteenth-century Taymouth Hours (Fig. 2.4), for instance, a cowled male figure in black strokes the genital area of a woman in white. To insist on the sexuality of the scene, the artist has added a shed with a hole above the door into which an obviously phallic broom handle has been inserted. A more classical example is found in a mediaeval illustration of the story of Pygmalion and Galatea in which the sculptor sexually touches his female statue before she is transformed into his paramour by Aphrodite.37 The intention seems to be to depict illicit

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Fig. 2.4  Taymouth Hours, 14th C. manuscript illumination, anon., British Library, London, England, MS Yates-Thompson 13, fol. 177, photo: by permission of the British Library.

sexuality so as either to show disapproval of it or, as seems more likely, to make a joke of it. In either case, what the artist is depicting is something transgressive. The sexuality in the depiction of the Life of Anne in the Petit Livret is that between husband and wife, neither illicit nor bawdy. Similarly, in the depiction of the meeting at the Gate in the Hours of Catherine of Clèves, Joachim seems to reach toward Anne’s breast; both bear halos and are clearly meant to express the sanctity of chaste sexuality.38 But why note it at all? Although the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is clearly formulated today, it was not in the Middle Ages. Even though it was never confused with the virgin birth of Jesus, exactly how Mary’s Immaculate Conception occurred was not a subject of consensus. It is possible that iconography here is making its own statement concerning the dispute over the theory



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of the Immaculate Conception. If so, the iconography seems to be correcting the popular misunderstanding that the Immaculate Conception meant that Mary’s conception was asexual.39 There is another issue that iconography may also be addressing  – the theme known as Holy Kinship. The iconographic representation of the theme, popular throughout the late Middle Ages, featured Mary and her sisters – Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome – with their many children – James the Lesser, Joseph the Just, Simon, Jude, and James the Greater. Less often represented were the husbands Joseph, Alpheus, and Zebedee. Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist were more rarely added. The Holy Kinship tradition had theological implications as well as iconographic popularity. It delineated the members of Jesus’ extended family descended from Saint Anne, who had six grandsons, five of whom were among Christ’s apostles, called “brothers.”40 The effort to find genealogical solutions to problems of descent and relationships that ended in attributing to Anne the bearing of three daughters – the three scriptural Marys by three different husbands – caused uneasiness among some mediaeval Christians. Whereas sexuality was viewed as a life-affirming good, it was also marked by animal lust, a momentary descent into irrational sensuality. Saint Paul’s view on the matter formed the mediaeval attitude: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them to abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry” (I Cor. 7:8–9). The image of unbridled female appetite, as is most famously found in the insatiable widow in Chaucer’s oft-married Wife of Bath, is a figure of exceptional irrationality.41 Was Anne her predecessor in sexual excess? This problem is brought out in the story of Saint Colette, who refused to venerate the mother of Mary on the grounds that her several marriages compromised her morally.42 Saint Anne appeared to Colette (Fig. 2.5) and explained that her many sexual couplings were honourable, that indeed she had coupled more often than any other saint yet was more honoured in heaven than all other women

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Fig. 2.5  Vision de sainte Collette and Dévotion de sainte Colette à descendance de sainte Anne, 15th C. altar painting by the Bruxelles Master, Annenaltar, Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main, photo and permission: Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

except her daughter. In her vision, Saint Colette sees Anne accompanied by Mary, holding Jesus, and followed by the whole extended family of Holy Kinship – Mary’s sisters, their husbands, and their many children. In another panel, we see a converted Colette praying before an altar, the retable of which depicts the Holy Kinship. Her praying indicates a devotion that visually signifies an admission of the propriety of human sexual fertility. The character of the Holy Kinship iconography is one of reproductive abundance, in which women and babies fill the visual space almost to overflowing. The basis for the concept of the Holy Kinship lies in the need to delineate the genealogy of the Messiah, and the key to that geneal-



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Fig. 2.6  The Holy Family, woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany, photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

ogy is Anne. The written narratives work this out in a direct way, as we have seen, populating Jesus’ ancestry with his mother, three aunts, and several cousins, all of whom appear in scripture. The relationships are not dramatized or elaborated upon beyond their genealogical importance. The iconographic representation of this family, however, animates it in a way that extends the range of relationships between the members and adds imaginative details of its own to the story. In Cranach’s 1509 depiction of Holy Kinship (Fig. 2.6), the emotional relationship between the many members comes alive. One mother plays with her baby, a father teaches two of his children, three husbands converse with each other, while central to the scene, seated together, are Mary, Jesus, and Anne. Never without her

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Figure 2.7  Ortenberg Altar, ca.1420, detail of central panel by the Master of the Ortenberg Altar, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany, photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

book, Anne seems to be trying to show the book to the infant Jesus, whom Mary is either placing on or taking off his grandmother’s lap. As Nixon points out, it is in the sixteenth century that the men in this kin begin to receive some prominence, and this is an iconographic initiative.43 In the early period, Mary and Anne are surrounded only by Mary’s women relatives, and Holy Kinship is represented exclusively through the female line, as we see in the illustration of the Holy Kinship in the Ortenberg Altar (1420–30) (Fig. 2. 7) where there appears, amidst ten women of the kin, a lone bearded face practically hidden between Anne and Mary. In the triptych of the Saint Anne altarpiece by Daniel Mauch (Fig. 2.8), created a year earlier than Cranach’s woodcut and ninety years after the Ortenberg Altar, the central panel shows the baby Jesus with Mary and Anne while Joseph and Joachim stand behind the group, as mere observers but at least present. On the side panels,



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Fig. 2.8  Saint Anne Altarpiece, 1510, Daniel Mauch (1477–1540), Chapel of St Francis Xavier, Bieselbach, Germany, reprinted from Daniel Mauch, Bildhauer im Zeitalter der Reformation, Ulm: Uhmer Museum (2009).

however, we see on the left Mary Cleophas and on the right Mary Salome with their husbands, who are actively assisting with their children. Iconography has drawn these figures out of scripture and the written narratives, where they are practically spectres, into a vibrant existence as husbands and fathers. In all of these themes in the life of Saint Anne, a common thread is literacy. It appears throughout the Holy Kinship representations, in which the daughters of Saint Anne, like their mother, are literate and read books. In the Book of Hours of Anne de Bretagne, for instance, discussed below, although the subject is the education of Mary, her two sisters appear in the background, both holding

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Fig. 2.9  Saint Anne with Virgin and Child (Anna Selbdritt), 1513 carving by Hans Leinberger (1480–1530), St Johann Gnadenthal, Ingolstadt, Germany, photo: Foto Marburg/ Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

books. Speaking generally of the autonomy of visual representation, Virginia Nixon makes several points important to this discussion: “Works of art have their own patterns, rhythms, and lines of descent. Habit, convention, even misunderstanding on the part of the artists and patrons, help shape iconography, and artists draw on traditions of past images as well as present discourses … While images and texts are closely related they do not speak in parallel voices. Sometimes they seem to contest one another; for example, at the same time that the painted and sculpted Anna Selbdritts and Holy Kinships embody images of female power, lives of Anne urge docility and restraint in women’s behavior.”44 The suggestion here – that the visual collaborates with the verbal in hagiography so as to expand the text – is strongly supported by the phenomenon of the so-called Anna Selbdritt. In none of the



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Fig. 2.10  The Holy Family with saints and angels, woodcut by Albrecht Duerer (1471–1528), photo: Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

written Lives is it stated that Saint Anne formed a kind of trinitarian relationship with her daughter and grandson, nor would it have been theologically tolerable to have articulated such an idea (although the French version of the Selbdritt is referred to as Sainte Anne Trinitaire). But the triadic arrangement is expressed in the visual text, especially in the iconography coming from mediaeval Germany. In some of these compositions, there is a kind of naturalism created by the depiction of Anne as elderly, Mary in her prime, and Jesus as a baby or toddler, as in the Leinberger Anna Selbdritt (Fig. 2.9) in Ingolstadt (1513). There the Christ child is balanced directly between his youthful, uncoiffed mother and his wimpled, somewhat elderly looking grandmother.

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Fig. 2.11  Saint Anne with Virgin and Child (Anna Selbdritt), ca.1490–1495, sandstone by Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531), Mainfrankisches Museum, Wuerzburg, Germany, photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY, reprinted with permission by Art Resource, NY.

In the Duerer woodcut Holy Kinship with Lute-Playing Angels (1511) (Fig. 2.10), Mary suckles the infant Jesus while his aged grandmother busies herself with her habitual activity – reading. Here again the background is populated with male relatives of the Holy Kinship, not unusual in the sixteenth century, but the trinitarian composition remains mother, son, grandmother. Just as often, however, naturalism gives way to metaphor. In the fifteenth-century Anna Selbdritt by Tilman Riemenschneider (1490–95) (Fig. 2.11), for instance, both Mary and Jesus sit on Anne’s lap; Anne is large and encompassing, while Mary is no bigger than the infant son. This device of miniaturizing Mary, seen frequently in the Selbdritt representations, serves to augment the importance of Saint Anne in the viewer’s experience: “The frequent miniaturization of Mary and Jesus and their depiction as children emphasize their physical



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Fig. 2.12 (left)  Lamentation with the Anna Selbdritt, ca.1500, statue, anon., Church of St Michael, Schwalmtal-Waldniel, Germany, reprinted from Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press (2004). Fig. 2.13 (right)  Sainte Anne Trinitairian, 16th C. woodcut from Heures à l’usage d’Angers, printed by Simon Vostre, Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, photo and permission: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

dependence on and subordination to Anne. By showing Mary as a child, the artist disrupts the natural grandmother-mothergrandchild generational connection in favour of an emphasis on the maternal role of Anne vis-à-vis both Mary and Jesus; thus, in these works, even while Mary is Jesus’ mother she remains Anne’s child.”45 This is not always the case, however, as we see in the Pietá of the Church of Saint Michael in the Lower Rhine, where Mary holds her crucified son while on her right her mother, of equal size and similar appearance, reads (Fig. 2.12). Such a scene defies naturalistic interpretation. Anne’s act of reading while seated beside the corpse

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of her grandson is a visual utterance with symbolic intention and was certainly read as such by the Christian viewer; it is tempting to speculate that what Anna is reading is the Old Testament prophesy of the Crucifixion, while at her left the New Testament fulfillment of that prophesy is displayed. This ability of the visual to speak in a different voice and to communicate ideas beyond the verbal discourse is dramatically illustrated in the further stylization and abstraction of the Selbdritt theme in the Heures à l’usage d’Angers (Fig. 2.13), where Mary and Jesus are not only miniaturized but also physically incorporated into Anne’s body. This elaborate sixteenth-century image reflects the more widespread illustrations of Mary’s windowed womb, showing the baby Jesus as fetus. In so doing, it establishes a similarity between Mary’s conception of Jesus and Anne’s conception of Mary, reinforcing visually the theological position that favoured the idea of the Immaculate Conception. The theme is further extended, along with a powerful assertion of the matrilineal descent of the Messiah, in the composition that Virginia Nixon has labeled “Anna Selbviert” or “Esmerentia Selbviert.”46 A striking example is seen in the fifteenth-century statue of Esmerentia (Fig. 2.14) standing behind the seated Anne and the Virgin, who holds Jesus. Both Esmerentia and Anne hold books. Numerous iconographic aspects of the presentation of Saint Anne seem to be modeled on the tradition of Marian iconography, such as the angel’s visit to Anne to announce her being with child, a scene that parallels almost perfectly the Annunciation to Mary. The Angers employment of the “windowed womb” motif, however, is more than iconographic paralleling; the visual preponderance of Anne over the diminutive Mary and the still smaller Jesus provides a strong statement of the idea that Saint Anne is the root and origin of the sacred line. The graduation of size in the composition states clearly, albeit visually, that from Anne comes Mary, from Mary comes Christ. Genetically she is simply a link in a continuum, but iconographically and exegetically Anne’s conception of Mary initi-



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Fig. 2.14  Virgin, Child, St Anne and Emerentia, 1515–1530, statue in wood, anon., Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY, photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

ates the line, just as in another tradition Jesse of Bethlehem is the beginning of the Messiah’s genealogy through his son, David (Isa. 11:1). Again, the identification of Anne with her daughter is suggested by the numerous banderoles that surround Anne, all of them bearing the various praises of the Virgin Mary found in her litany, the whole being crowned by a banderole passing behind Anne’s haloed head and proclaiming Tota pulchra es amica mea, et maculata non est in te (Thou art fair my love, there is no spot in thee). This verse from the Song of Songs (4:7) was often pointed to by those who promoted the theory of the Immaculate Conception. Iconography also plays the principal role in establishing Saint Anne as teacher. There is no mention whatsoever in the early Vitae that Anne taught Mary at home. On the contrary, it is uni-

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formly stated that at three years of age Mary entered the Temple, where her education began. The visual tradition of Anne as Mary’s teacher, as Louis Réau asserts, is a direct contradiction of the written tradition.47 Later Lives include the theme of Anne as teacher, but they follow the lead of the visual narrative that originates it. The Education of the Virgin, as the theme has come to be called, is created late in the devotion to Saint Anne, but her role as teacher quickly becomes Anne’s dominant attribute in her iconography and cult. Lafontaine-Dosogne tells us that in one of the windows at Chartres Anne is depicted as seated, holding a flowering stalk, while Mary holds a book. The book was later transferred to Anne in visual representation. This, she goes on to say, is the beginning of the tradition of Anne as Mary’s teacher. It gets under way in fourteenth-century English art and is seen, for example, in the frescos at Croughton: “Thus this theme was integrated into certain narrative cycles independent of all textual traditions and regardless of the obvious contradiction between the postulate of Mary in the Temple and her education by her mother.”48 The iconographic symbolism of the book generally signifies the word of God. Being held by Mary, the book signifies the word of God brought to man through scripture, just as the Word of God was brought to man by Mary herself. In the iconography of Saint Anthony of Padua, for instance, the saint is regularly shown holding a book, on which stands the baby Jesus. The allegorical message is clear: Anthony, “Hammer of Heretics,” was famous for his powerful preaching, and the visual presence of the book reveals that what he preached was to be found in scripture; the addition of the figure of the Christ child further identifies the words of God in scripture with the Word of God, Jesus.49 Saint Anne’s principal iconographic attribute is the book even when Mary is not present in the composition. In this way, Saint Anne seems to symbolize typology itself, acting as the exegetical bridge between the Old Testament and the New. In many of the scenes that picture Christ and Mary and also have Anne with a



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Fig. 2.15  Saint Anne Teaching, Les Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, 1508, manuscript illumination by Jean Bourdichon (1457–1521), Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, reprinted by permission of Bibliothèque Nationale De France.

book, the sense seems to be that Anne reads the ancient prophesy that the viewer sees fulfilled in the representation. This function would be in harmony with the fact that the New Testament begins in time with the Annunciation, making Mary a figure principally of the New Testament. Anne, however, while clearly identified as a figure of Old Testament time, is also intimately connected to the time of the New. Her position as the link between the Old and New Testaments is visually expressed by the book, in which, we may assume, she reads of past promise while attending to its fulfillment. However, it is the book in conjunction with her daughter that makes of Saint Anne the pedagogical saint, and so she has been regarded in her cult. In the Heures d’Anne de Bretagne (Fig. 2.15) the pedagogy is highly formalized: Saint Anne is seated in the elevated magisterial chair, holding open a book in her lap. Her advanced age

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is suggested by her wrinkled face and heavy wimpling. Her expression is serious, even severe, and in every detail it contrasts with the young and luminous face of her daughter. Although the words in the book cannot be made out, it is usually thought that what Anne is teaching Mary is how to read and that the text she uses is Holy Scripture. Yet in this example Mary is clearly a young woman who would certainly know already how to read. Both Mary’s apparent adolescent state and her pious pose with hands clasped may suggest that she is learning not only to read, but to pray and even to interpret scripture. In any case, this image, like all others showing Anne and Mary with a book, augments the text of the Life by inventing one of its most extensive and influential themes. In addition to introducing the issue of Mary’s education and establishing Anne as a teacher figure, this type of representation of Saint Anne makes strong statements about female literacy, an important topic in the Middle Ages. We notice in the background of the illustration two other haloed, female figures, both holding books; one of them holds her book open, the other closed. These are Anne’s other daughters – Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome – and their portrayal further emphasizes the mother’s role as instructrix. The composition as a whole presents a clear statement concerning the educational and cultural development of women and doubtless served to encourage in female devotees of Saint Anne the value of women’s intellectual development. The fact that this illustration is found in a book created specifically for a woman adds to the point.50 In another woman’s Book of Hours, that of Catherine of Clèves (Fig. 2.16), Joachim holds a book as Anne is impregnated by divine rays from the hand of God above. In the absence of Mary, we may assume the book signifies Anne’s personal literacy, and a hint as to what is contained in Anne’s book is found on the scroll held by Joachim, a prophesy of the birth of the Saviour, based on Anne’s bringing Mary into the world. Part of the importance of this illustration is that it seems to reveal what it is that Anne reads. If we take the function of the scroll held by Joachim as showing what cannot



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Fig. 2.16  Joachim and Anne: the Immaculate Conception, Book of Hours of Catherine of Clèves, ca.1440, by Master of Catherine of Clèves (fl. 1400–1450), The Netherlands (Utrecht), MS M .917, p.145, The Pierpont Morgan Library, NY, photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

be seen in the book, then we discover that here (and probably elsewhere) the saint reads scriptural prophesy. A manipulation of the theme that unites it to the Selbdritt motif is found in Joos van Cleve’s (1484–1540) painting entitled The Holy Family (Fig. 2.17), where the family is composed of Mary, breast feeding the baby Jesus, and a very wizened Saint Anne. The picture is filled with iconographic detail. The infant Jesus holds an

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Fig. 2.17  The Holy Family, ca.1512–13, oil on wood by Joos van Cleve (1485–1540), The Friedsam Collection, bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (32.100.57), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, photo: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission.

apple, symbol of the Fall, in his hand as he suckles. Before Mary is a table laid with a bowl of fruit containing the symbolic grapes often found in representations of Jesus as an infant, their symbolism drawn out here by the presence of a beaker of wine. A knife lies beside a half walnut. The most remarkable detail is the pair of eye glasses in Anne’s right hand. Glasses, or spectacles, were introduced in the mid-thirteenth century and first appeared in painting in a fresco by Tommaso da Modena in 1352.51 By the time of Van Cleve’s use of them, eye glasses had taken on symbolic value and represented perspicuity and wisdom. In her left hand, Anne holds not a book but a scroll. Her gaze is turned to her daughter and grandson, not to the scroll, and the dynamics of the composition suggest that she has just taken off her glasses after reading the scroll and, perhaps



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having read something there concerning the fate of her daughter and grandson, has turned her eyes to them. If so, Anne must have been reading the prophesies of the Old Testament. Although the tradition that makes Saint Anne Mary’s teacher appears to contradict the historical account that Mary entered the Temple at the age of three, iconography seems to have, not sensed the contradiction, but paralleled the two concepts in its development of the visual text. There are numerous pictorial examples of the theme of Mary entering the Temple, most of them featuring the aspect of the story that at the tender age of three she was able to mount the many stairs leading to the entrance of the Temple. Mary is often shown on one of the first steps while the high priest awaits her at the top. Duerer’s depiction of the presentation (Fig. 2.18) shows Mary hurrying up the first few steps of the Temple and movingly adds expression of Anne’s sorrow at the loss of her daughter. This would seem to indicate that iconography is undisturbed by the same logical anomalies that would be intolerable in historical accounts. That the iconographic tradition of Saint Anne could simultaneously show the saint educating her daughter at home and Mary entering the Temple to be schooled suggests that different kinds of logic are at work in the visual narrative and in the verbal. The oddity of this may have to do with the difference in the relation between the reader and the verbal narrative read, and the contemplator and the image contemplated. The written text establishes an intellectual distance between itself and the reader and thereby guarantees a certain objective judgment of what is read. Because the reader of the written text is called upon to evaluate the rationality of its content, logical contradiction automatically cancels the authority of the text. The relation between the image and its viewers, however, is not intellectually distanced and does not require deduction or any other analysis; instead, it creates an emotional and existential relation. With sacred images, the very difference between beholder and beheld gradually dissolves as the devotee gazes upon the image. Virginia Nixon describes the relationship of

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Fig. 2.18  Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, from the Marienleben (Life of Mary), 1511 woodcut by Albrecht Duerer (1471–1528), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany, photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

image and beholder in this way: “The interaction was an intense one, for notwithstanding the fact that people knew perfectly well that the sculptures and paintings in their churches had been made in workshops by artists and had been paid for with substantial sums of money, they often experienced them as though they embodied the



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people they represented. Saint Anne, as well as being in heaven, was also perceived as in some way being present in her images.”52 Gadamer’s view of the close bond between image and its referent is echoed in Nixon’s description of the intimacy, common to all Christians throughout the Middle Ages and after, between image and saint in the devotion to Saint Anne in Germany: “Medieval texts provide abundant evidence of the tendency among late medieval German Christians to conflate image and referent, to respond to works of art as though they were their referents. ‘The dear saints’ (die liebe Heilige) were not the distant inhabitants of heaven; they were the dear, familiar figures who inhabited the churches.”53 In this extralogical experience, just as Anne could be both absent and present, so too she could be both Mary’s teacher and not her teacher. In contradistinction to Stanley Fish’s view that there is no “text” until the reader authors it, in hagiography and Christian aesthetics generally, the text (or artifact) has a reality of its own independent of any interpretation of it. However, a reader’s or viewer’s encounter with it enlivens a text for that interpreter. No better example of a devotee enlivening a hagiographical text could be cited than the story of Margery Kempe who, while contemplating an image, has a vision of the birth of the Virgin Mary. Margery pleads with the image of Saint Anne to be allowed to be the child’s servant and, petition granted, thereafter cares for Mary, dressing her in white until the day of her marriage.54 This practice of meditating on the image brings out the way in which the visual makes possible the interpretive act of the beholder and makes it analogous to an act of authorship. As grace quickens the devotee and the devotee quickens the image in his mind through meditation, the gap between copy and model disappears, and the saint who has died and gone to heaven returns to the company of the devotee. As the devotee stares at the image, the image stares back; they converse and even embrace and kiss. The choice of whether to depict visually one or the other of the scenes of Mary’s education seems to have depended more on didac-

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tic intentions than on a desire to illustrate historical incidents. A modern example makes this clear. Planning the decoration of Quebec’s Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in 1939, the Redemptorist fathers hired two artists – Auguste Labouret and Jean Godin – to create the mosaics. These artists used the Protevangelium as the source for the scenes they were to depict. Although the intention of both the artists and their patrons was to illustrate the written text, the result was otherwise for it is clear that the artists selected what they would and would not represent. Significantly, the incident of Mary entering the Temple was suppressed, and the representation of Anne teaching Mary replaced it. It is probable that this was done at the insistence of the Redemptorist fathers who wished to promote Anne’s role as educatrix to serve as a model for French Canadian mothers. What they invented and added to the “story” are scenes of Anne sewing, washing, and doing other domestic chores, all with angel-held banderoles on which are written “Patience,” “Humilité” – virtues highly regarded in Catholic Quebec.55 What might be called a subtheme running throughout the hagiographical tradition of Saint Anne is her connection with the topos of the barren woman made fruitful. It is the narrative centre of the written Vitae where, as we have seen, it is articulated by the angel’s announcing Anne’s newfound fertility. To my knowledge there is no visual depiction of Anne with Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, or the mother of Samson, but there is a curious representation of the engagement of Anna to Joachim that links her to the Book of Tobit and particularly to the incident in which Tobias, Tobit’s son, seeks a wife. The fact that Tobit’s wife’s name was Anna and Tobias’ wife was called Sara may have initiated the link with Saint Anne, but the development of it takes on mythical characteristics. In an altarpiece (Fig. 2.19) in the Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main, we see Esmerantia, mother of Anne, in an outdoor scene in a courtyard, presiding at the engagement of her daughter to Joachim. Outside the courtyard is a scene with no apparent rapport with the subject of the main image: six young men – some dying,



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Fig. 2.19  Betrothal of Anne to Joachim, 16th C. altarpiece, anon., Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, photo and permission: Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main.

some dead, one still alive – are being hauled away by demons. Guy de Tervarent tells us that the scene is derived from a written text, the Legenda sanctissimae matronae Anna (Cracow, 1532).56 De Tervarent rejects Beda Kleinschmidt’s earlier interpretation that the men harried by devils are the rejected suitors of Esmerantia herself, who finally accepted Stollanus, the seventh of her pretenders.57 This links her in the minds of the mediaevals with Sara, the oft betrothed cousin of Tobias, whose seven husbands “died the night they came in unto her” (Tobit 7:11). This story of Tobias and Sara is one of the best known expressions of the strange tradition of the vagina dentata, according to which certain women inflict a venomous wound on the phallus of men by

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Fig. 2.20  Scivias (Know the ways of the Lord), 1151/52, Romanesque, 12th C. MS illumination by the German nun and mystic Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), from a facsimile (The book, Codex Rupertsberg disappeared during WW II ), photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

means of teeth in their vaginas or, more metaphorically, by Asmodeus, demon of lust, in the form of a serpent resident there. Aristotle warns Alexander the Great of such women,58 and Hildegarde of Bingen illustrates the vagina dentata in painting (Fig. 2.20). The presence of this theme in the tradition of Saint Anne is mysterious. It may be the result of a vague association of Anne with Sarah, wife of Abraham, and by extension with Sara of Media, wife of Tobias; it may be the result of the recurring number seven in the cases of the seven husbands of both Emerantia and Sara of Media. An interesting modern version of the Life of Saint Anne refers frequently to the story of Tobias, linking his betrothal to Sara dir-



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ectly to Joachim’s betrothal to Anne. A cobbling together of ancient, mediaeval, and modern sources, Reverend Paul Wittebolle’s La Vie de Sainte Anne is a remarkable example of early twentieth-century, pious rhetoric. In the chapter devoted to Saint Anne’s marriage, the author is at pains to express the purity of the couple’s sexual union. He accomplishes this by comparing them to Tobias and Sara: “We may well imagine that Joachim was even better prepared for marriage than the just Tobias to whom the Archangel Raphael took care to say: ‘Those who enter marriage with the intention of distancing their spirit from all thought of God and delivering themselves over to sensuality like beasts deprived of reason, such kind fall under the power of the demon.’”59 Not surprisingly, Anne is found to have virtue equal to that of her fiancé: “We may well imagine that Anne’s intentions were even purer than those of Sara who took God as witness to the righteousness of her heart.”60 Wittebolle is one of the rare few who ventures to reveal what it is that Anne reads. According to him, her preferred reading is the Book of Tobit, used here to explain still another aspect of the Saint Anne tradition – Joachim’s and Anne’s division of their wealth into three parts: “One day Anne read in the Book of Tobit the counsels given by that holy patriarch to his son: ‘Give alms of thy substance: and when thou givest alms, let not thine eye be envious.’” Wittebolle goes on to cite all six verses from Tobit IV, 7–12. This reading of the Book of Tobit, the author explains, provides Anne and Joachim the inspiration to divide their considerable wealth into three parts – one for God, a second for the poor, and the third for themselves.61 Although there is no inherent similarity between Sara, daughter of Raguel, and Anne, the force of analogy works it so that because Joachim is likened to Tobias, Anne shall be likened to Sara; just as Tobias is a very rich man (Tobit IV: 21), so too, Joachim; Tobit is led to his wife by an angel, Raphael, just as Joachim is led back to his wife by an angel. But what of Sara and Anne? Sara’s sole distinction is that she is possessed by the demon Asmodeus, who is lodged

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in her genitals and who kills her husbands in the reproductive act. How are we to associate this with Saint Anne? One of the associations has to do with the number seven. Sara had seven husbands, who all perished; Anne had but one suitor, as far as we know, but three husbands. Her mother, Esmerentiana, however, had seven suitors, the last one Stollanus, whom she chose as her husband. There seem to be a variety of symbolic exchanges between Esmerentiana and her daughter Anne, just as there are between Anne and her daughter Mary. De Tervarent dismisses earlier interpretations of the scene as relating to Esmerentiana’s suitors on the grounds that no written text supports such interpretations. Rather, he thinks, the demon scene, in which “Asmodeus carries off the men to whom Sara had been united before marrying Tobias,” alludes to Sara and Tobias’ marriage as an example of chaste marriage, an example extended to both Esmerentiana and Stollanus and further to Anne and Joachim. The written accounts make exactly this comparison, and de Tervarent credits these texts with inspiring the artist who created the image in question. In other words, the images of the Frankfurt altar are illustrations of the written text.62 The texts in question are all of the fourth quarter of the fourteenth century and virtually contemporary with the composition on the altarpiece in Frankfurt, so close in time as to make direct influence appear unlikely. Furthermore, the allusions to the Book of Tobit in the verbal texts do not refer to the death of Sara’s seven husbands, but only to the piety of the couple on their wedding night. Whatever the rapport between the written texts and the image, the verbal account does not seem to have inspired the reference to Sara’s seven unfortunate husbands. It is possible that the artist of the Frankfurt altar, in placing beside Anna and Joachim the dead and dying husbands of Sara, is tapping into the symbolism of fertility and infertility. What Anna has in common with Sara is childlessness. In that each of her seven husbands perished before impregnating her, Sara remains a married



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woman without child. As Anna remained childless for twenty years, she reflects – in a very different way, to be sure – the predicament of Sara. In any case, we see here a rich and complex typology and intertextuality created by iconographic imagery above and beyond what the written accounts contain. De Tervarent is correct in identifying the young men seized by demons as Sara’s husbands, but he misidentifies the rapport between the Esmerentiana, Anna and Joachim, and those young men by falling back on the idea that the image must be illustrating some written text. In fact, the Frankfurt altarpiece explores themes and meanings quite outside the written accounts of the Vita of Saint Anne. The term iconography is found frequently today in cinema studies – and appropriately so – since cinema is, in its very essence, the employment of images to tell a story, and iconography is the communication of meaning through visual symbols. The semiotics of each is the same. In this sense, the most recent example of the iconography of Saint Anne is Bernard Émond’s 2005 prizewinning film, La Neuvaine (The Novena).63 The film presents two main characters, Jeanne – a Montreal physician who has suffered a violent emotional trauma – and François – a simple, rural young man who is also experiencing the greatest loss of his life. Two other powerful presences dominate the film – Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River and Saint Anne. Like many mediaeval iconographic arrangements, the film’s structure consists of two parallel narratives that are intertwined through a dynamic of similitude and dissimiltude. One narrative depicts Jeanne’s mental and spiritual decline after she witnesses the brutal slaying of a mother (Lise) and her child by the child’s father, who also kills himself in front of her. Jeanne has befriended Lise and has attempted to protect her from what Jeanne strongly suspects is Lise’s fate. Dialogue in the film suggests to the viewer that Jeanne’s kindness to the young mother was a late attempt to find meaning in a life deprived of hope or purpose since the death of her own sick child years before. After that loss, Jeanne avoided depression by

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working obsessively so as not to remember, but after witnessing the carnage wreaked by the crazed husband, Jeanne quickly descends into a deep depression that causes her to abandon her profession, her friends, and her home. Further depressed by the solicitude of her loved ones, Jeanne flees north of Montreal in an escape that ends, for no apparent reason, in the town of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. In nearby Petite-Riviere-St-François a second narrative, initiated by the camera’s evening shot of the Saint Lawrence River, introduces François, who has discovered his elderly grandmother collapsed outside her bedroom. A medical examination reveals that she is dying of heart failure, and she tells her grandson this, adding that death will bring her happiness in Paradise. The camera moves from the bewildered face of the frightened boy to the river again, seen far in the background through a window, then in a close-up. Throughout the film there is an increasing cinemagraphic and iconographic association of the river and death. Convinced but unconsoled by his grandmother’s faith, François begins a daily trip to the Basilica of Saint Anne de Beaupré to say a novena to save the life of the dying woman who has raised him since the death of his parents. The film proceeds through the interspersing of scenes that advance the plot of the narrative concerning François and his grandmother and scenes depicting the narrative of Jeanne’s despair, her narrative developing from flashbacks to the attempts to protect Lise and the eventual murders. This narrative is often accompanied by an interior dialogue with an unidentified male voice. In an early remembered exchange, Jeanne states: “What I can’t bear is the idea of useless suffering. It would be better had we never existed.” “Don’t say that,” the voice cautions, “we don’t know. We can never know.” The dialogue continues. “You wanted to tell me something?” “It’s a long story,” she says. “I have all the time in the world,” answers the interlocutor. “I wanted to kill myself,” she continues. “That’s terrible,” he replies, and Jeanne seems to agree: “Evil for evil,” she answers, then asks, “Do you think evil exists?” “Yes,” he replies, “it exists.”



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Fig. 2.21  Image from the film La Neuvaine, written and directed by Bernard Émond, Kfilms Amérique (2005), printed with the permission of Pierre Dury.

The two narratives eventually merge when the lives and sorrows of Jeanne and François intersect. Jeanne’s intention to commit suicide is confirmed as she drives to the motel in Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré, all the while with the Saint Lawrence River in the background. “Have you ever wanted to die,” she asks her interlocutor. “No,” he replies. “Can you understand that one would want to kill oneself?” “I can understand, but I can never accept it.” “It’s hard, you know,” she says, “It’s harder than one might think.” Jeanne then walks to the edge of the Saint Lawrence. Earlier, François is seen entering the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré and beginning the novena for his grandmother: “Good Saint Anne, on this the first day of my novena I promise to pray to you with fervor. I ask you to pray for my intention, that my grandmother get well and live for a long time still.” A written petition is inserted into the base of the statue of the saint (Fig. 2.21). Leaving the basilica, François parks his truck on the banks of the Saint Lawrence to eat the lunch he has brought with him; he notices a woman at the fast flowing river’s edge. The camera does a close up of Jeanne’s face, ravaged by sorrow; her body inclines toward the water. As the truck pulls in, she backs away from the bank and

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sits shivering on a cement barrier at the water’s edge. The camera moves from François to the river, from the river to Jeanne, from a wider shot of both of them, and back again to the river. The sense of an interrupted suicide by drowning is palpable, and there is a long scene in which the camera lingers over the flow of the Saint Lawrence. The young François intuits that something is wrong. As the bells of Saint Anne ring in the background and day becomes dusk, François gives the mysterious, shivering woman his jacket; he drives her to her motel, brings her food, and the following morning leaves a warm coat at her door. Little by little, Jeanne’s emotional paralysis is penetrated by the simplicity and generosity of the youth, but in her despair she is resistant to any form of affection. François’ religious faith further distances her. Jeanne: “You think a novena can help?” François: “Yes. Do you believe in God?” Jeanne: “No.” This interchange so disturbs François that when he returns home that evening he asks his grandmother whether people who do not believe in God can be saved. “I think so,” she says; “if they have lived a good life and have loved others, God will not abandon them. But it is harder for those who do not believe to lead a good life.” François: “Why?” “Because they are without hope.” In the museum of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Jeanne reads the written petitions of Saint Anne’s devotees, and the camera scans various icons of the saint. The vulgarity and sentimentality of the basilica’s panorama of Jerusalem (the biggest panorama in the world, François boasts) repulses Jeanne, but the viewer begins to wonder whether it is not exactly the simplicity of spirit that François exhibits that Jeanne badly needs. Through the character of François and through the basilica itself, the film subtly suggests that truth and dignity can lie within the common and vulgar. An example of this is when François tells Jeanne that she should go to see the geese at nearby Cap Tourmente. “Why?” Jeanne asks. “Because when you look at the geese at Cap Tourmente, you can think of nothing else.” François is full of tourist slogans, bits of folk wisdom, and even clichés, all of which ironically turn out to have real wisdom in them.



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François returns home to find his grandmother receiving the Last Rites. For her part, Jeanne goes to see the geese, and the viewer realizes, as hundreds of white birds swarm, that for that moment at least she is relieved of her depression. (She can, indeed, “think of nothing else.”) Jeanne is next seen at the Basilica of Saint Anne, where she passes by and gazes, intrigued, at the religious iconography that surrounds the outside of the church. François sits at his grandmother’s bedside as she says, “You know, François, death is not a terrible thing. It’s just a passage.” Thus the two oncoming deaths are juxtaposed: the suicide Jeanne plans is flight from despair; the death that the grandmother awaits is a flight toward eternal bliss. François discovers that Jeanne is a physician when he sees her assist a heart attack victim on the steps of the basilica and instantly believes he has discovered another way of saving his grandmother’s life. Jeanne at first refuses his request to attend to his grandmother, but her resistance is overcome when François cites Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” In this context, the phrase is ironic and dark since what Jeanne would have done to her, what she wants, is death. Or does she? The progress of the narrative has brought her from the experience of abysmal nihilism to a confrontation with faith in all its simplicity, even its banality, causing a kind of peripeteia in which Jeanne begins to turn away from death toward life. A long moonlit shot of the Saint Lawrence precedes Jeanne’s medical examination of the grandmother. “Your grandmother is going to die, François. There is nothing I can do, nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do.” But François still clings to the idea that somehow his grandmother can live on. When, however, Jeanne describes the technology with which the hospital could keep her alive for awhile, he rejects that possibility and begins to accept the fact that his grandmother will die. Jeanne consoles him: “She will die in her bed, without suffering, in her own home with you at her side. It is a beautiful death.”

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A beautiful death? With these words, François fully accepts the reality of death, and at the same time Jeanne, who has understood death only as violent, destructive annihilation, now perceives the rightness of death and its beauty though her own words of consolation. The film now begins its dénouement. Despite his acceptance of the finality of death, François completes his novena to Saint Anne: “Saint Anne, I have prayed to you, I do pray to you, and I will always pray to you. Do not forget me or those whom I love. On this the last day of my novena, I pray to you with confidence for the members of my family, living and dead. Blessed be you, Saint Anne, so powerful, so good, and blessed be your daughter, the sweet Virgin Mary, and blessed be forever your grandson, Jesus, my God and my Saviour.” Another moonlit shot of the Saint Lawrence initiates the scene of the grandmother’s death throes, and we watch François grieving at her bedside. Jeanne is seen on the bus back to Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré, and her interior dialogue begins with the now familiar male voice asking: “You wanted to ask me something? I am here for that, I am listening.” “I am not a believer,” Jeanne declares. “It doesn’t matter,” the voice responds, and through this exchange the viewer realizes that whoever the voice belongs to, he is a character whom we have not yet encountered in the film. “Can you pray for the dead? Can you bless someone who is not actually present?” Jeanne asks. “It’s for someone who has saved my life!” The last scene has Jeanne watching a priest at Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré Basilica as he blesses a petitioner, and the viewer realizes that it is he, the priest, who has been the invisible male interlocutor who, from the beginning, has been in communication with Jeanne. This is confirmed when, back in the mental dialogue, he asks how Jeanne’s life was saved, and she replies that it is a “long story.” “I have all the time in the world,” the voice replies, a direct echo of their first dialogue. The film ends with a long gaze between the priest and Jeanne.



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The pertinence of a film like La Neuvaine to this discussion of the holistic text is reflected in Margaret Miles’ remarks about the dynamic of the universal and particular in the visual image: “The image’s universality rests not on its potential for abstraction … but on the capacity of the viewer to grasp in the concrete particularity of the image a universal affectivity. The image defines a particular constellation of affective energy that is not foreign to the viewer but that has not, until her encounter with this image, been formulated in quite this way.”64 Like hagiography, film combines word and image into a text more complete than either the written text or the visual text alone, and like hagiography cinemagraphic word and image communicate, not through parallel voices, but in a single, unified mode. The filmic iconography of Saint Anne in La Neuvaine adapts the ancient aspect of her cult as both rescuer of the drowning and as psychopomp. As Jeanne seeks annihilation through death in the waters of the Saint Lawrence, François’ grandmother seeks life everlasting through the death of the just. Like God, Saint Anne works in mysterious ways for within the frame of the first and ninth days of François’ novena to Saint Anne, Jeanne is saved from drowning, and the grandmother dies a peaceful and holy death – both hagiographic functions of the saint who has been invoked. Margaret Miles claims that modern viewers think of themselves as “disengaged voyeurs,” in the sense that we believe that images have no impact upon us – that we are “objective observers.”65 She is speaking of the “dissociation of sensibilities” found in the modern museum, where the contemporary secular viewer looks upon a religious icon without the slightest emotional engagement, intellectually aware of details of composition, perhaps, but failing, as Polanyi might say, to “break out” of such structural restrictions and contemplate the image before him. What is missing in the museum is what, again, Polanyi identifies as “ritual,” an element pre-eminent in a film such as La Neuvaine and a subject to which we now turn.

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Enactments Just as the visual artists create a narrative of their own that addresses not only the biography, but also the meaning of Anne’s life, so her devotees expand the text of the Life of Saint Anne through the various prayers, processions, gifts left at her shrines, and other gestures. She is said to protect her supplicants against sterility, poverty, and death by drowning; she is the patroness of numerous professions and places, including parishes, cities, and whole countries. Anne has also been enlisted by those hoping for a happy death, suggesting that, like several other saints, she has played the role of psychopomp. She has been, as well and above all, invoked by women wishing to become pregnant. Gail McMurray Gibson has perceptively remarked that: “There is a paradox in a second truth about medieval saints, and that is that their cults were not just about the lives of the saints, but also about the lives of their supplicants.”66 It is through injecting their own existential dramas into the life narrative of the saint that the devotees write themselves, as it were, into the Vita, and thus in a way become co-authors of the text and also one of its subjects. John Lubbock sees, in the very difficulty of comprehending images, their power to make authors of audiences: “The very inscrutability of images, however, puts the spectator in the position of attempting to tell the story to himself from the evidence supplied by the artist … Just as we have to supply the logic so also, in pictorial narrative it is the spectator who is the narrator.”67 That is, the spectator, in coming to understand the artist’s text, retells it to himself. The Life of a given saint becomes a text about the devotee, not through the reading of the text in which, to be sure, there is a certain “identification” of the reader with the hero of the story, but more fully through the veneration of the saint. At this stage in their relationship, the devotee enacts the meaning of the life of the saint through certain symbolic gestures and, in thus playing the part of



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the saint, becomes metaphorically, like an actor in a play, the saint herself. Francesca Sautman, who has studied the folkloric aspects of the Saint Anne tradition, believes that Anne’s cult provides an example of the apprehension of the highly abstract concept of time through symbolic process, a devotional practice that integrates the abstraction into the existential experience of the devotee: “It is through the cult of Saint Anne that the ever-waning quality of human life and the harsh reality of the irreversible passing and disappearing of things are made more familiar and less threatening and, on the symbolic plane, are eventually conquered. Anne’s late childbearing through divine intervention is the most powerful element in that portrayal.”68 In the case of Saint Anne, we are not surprised to find that she has had a wide following among women, but less obvious is the reason for her extensive and long lasting cult among sailors. One explanation is found in the fact that her mediaeval cult has been particularly strong in the maritime regions of Normandy and Brittany, but this seems to beg the question as to why her cult was strong in such places. Sautman suggests that, because of the similarity of names, there may be a connection between the cult of the trois Maries, particularly popular among Gypsies, and the cult of the Virgin Mary’s mother, and this has had the effect of associating Anne with the sea.69 Be that as it may, what we witness in this phenomenon is the complete independence of the cult from the written narrative: liturgy takes over the “writing” of the Vita and directs it toward its own symbolic expression. The case is even more pronounced in Anne’s patronage of woodworkers, joiners, and carpenters. It finds no rationale in her written lives, but instead has its origin in a legend that she grew up living in a tree in the forest.70 Again, according to Sautman, the association of Anne with trees and thus wood is a projection of the iconographic representation of Anne as the genealogical “tree” from whose “branches” spring Mary and Jesus. Anne is also referred to as

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a “vine” bringing forth the “grape” of Christ. Her statue, Sautman tells us, was ritually decorated with bunches of grapes and these “grapes of Christ” were distributed to the sick: “The litanies of the Church at Apt … call her root of Jesus, fertile tree, vine loaded with fruit.”71 Here, as in many other instances of cult veneration, we witness the integration of the metaphoric and the literal; that is to say, the metaphoric or symbolic yields a literal representation – genealogical “tree” gives us a literal tree. Paul-Victor Charland, a French Canadian historian of the cult of Saint Anne, offers another intriguing interpretation of Saint Anne’s patronage of woodworkers: “Given that the Tabernacle is the noblest of all things woodworkers [menuisiers] ever make, it is meet that the profession venerate by a special cult the one who made the first and most beautiful tabernacle, and that is Saint Anne because she was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary was the tabernacle of the Son of God.”72 The symbolic mentality that perceived the link between wooden tabernacles made by joiners and the tabernacle of Saint Anne’s womb carries that perception over to goldsmiths. Just as the tabernacle was the highest achievement of the woodworker’s art, so the chalice containing Christ’s blood and the ciborium on which his body rests, both crafted in gold, were seen as the epitome of the goldsmith’s work. For this reason it was deemed appropriate that Saint Anne also serve as patron saint of goldsmiths.73 The perspective afforded by this example is a good illustration of the method of composition that veneration employs, in that the assignment of patronage of woodworkers and goldsmiths to Saint Anne is a way of extending the story of her life at the symbolic level. To the faith community in which she resides, Anne is not simply an actor in time and space, ancestor of the Messiah, as the written narrative would have it, but also metaphorically a tabernacle containing the flesh of the Mother of God, herself in turn metaphorized as a tabernacle, a chalice, a ciborium. It should be noted that this symbolic transfer also has the effect of vivifying the wooden structure



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of the tabernacle, now seen – through symbolic eyes – as a holy woman. As the mother of the Virgin Mary and, in many accounts, two other daughters, Saint Anne is associated with fertility and motherhood. The basis for her veneration by women wishing to conceive is found within the written narratives of the Vita, but the rituals of the cult extend the idea into a text in and of itself. For instance, Virginia Nixon tells us that in 1667 the parish of Düren, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, acquired a girdle having belonged to Saint Anne, and that this relic was lent out to be worn by women wishing to become pregnant. In addition, such women were advised to wear on their persons a prayer written out to the saint.74 Through such mimetic enactments, these women became “Anne-like,” that is to say, eventually fruitful like her. Saint Anne also protected the children she made possible through the fertility she brought to their mothers. One of the most common forms of veneration among the mediaeval rich was the presentation at a saint’s shrine of a candle or a silver thread the same length as the height of the person the saint had cured or assisted. Charland reports that Yoland of Flanders went further and promised the saint a statue in silver of the same weight as her son, whom Anne had cured.75 Among the less materially fortunate, however, a candle or a small amount of money was the usual offering. Just as the silver statue incarnated the petitioner by being of the same weight and size, so too, the candle: to create a votive candle, a wick was measured along the length of the body of the petitioner and then coated with wax. This personalization of the candle had the effect of putting the devotee in the company of his patron saint when his candle was set up beside the saint’s statue or image. When the candle was lit, his prayer rose, like the flickering flame, to the ears of his intercessor in heaven. Saint Anne is also the patron saint of seamstresses and all sewing and embroidery. According to Sautman, this connection has its origin in the symbolic force of the vestment as a simulacrum of the

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body, a symbolic force not unlike that which we have seen in the case of Anne’s patronage of woodworkers. Sautman nicely brings out the symbolic logic of the phenomenon: “The origin of this patronage can be traced to at least a late medieval poem in praise of the Virgin, which says that she was the ‘robe inconsutile’ (or robe ‘devoid of seams’) that enveloped the Logos made flesh, and that Anne and Joachim pulled the white silk threads used to make this seamless dress … The mystical tone of the poem cannot obscure the fact that thread and sewing were powerful sexual images.”76 Ritual acts performed by Anne’s devotees reveal the intraformative nature of the relation between written narrative, iconography, and cult: “Not infrequently, three genuflections, three prayers, or three candles are mentioned in the lives, whereas for other saints it would be only one. Tuesday – tercia feria, the day Anne was born, gave birth to Mary, and died – was especially recommended for devotional activities.”77 The symbolic employment of the triadic is a contribution of Saint Anne’s cult to her Lives in that it is a dramatic expression of the iconographic tradition of Selbdritt that presents her in a threefold composition consisting of Jesus, Mary, and Anne. As we have seen, this concept is extended symbolically in both the narrative and the iconography by the assertion that Anne had three husbands and, further still, by her giving birth to three daughters. In the written Vita, the use of the triad functions as a logical explanation of the divine genealogy; in the iconography, it assumes metaphoric dimensions and begins to connote symbolic associations. In the enactments of veneration in the cult of Saint Anne, the triad has loosened itself from the historical and become purely symbolic: “In honour of Saint Anne one should pray three Pater Nosters and three Ave Marias in front of her image every Tuesday. One should also burn thus three lights, one in honour of Jesus Christ, another in honour of our dear Lady, the third in honour of Saint Anne.”78 A Breton poem, cited by Nixon, describes the ritual gestures of gratitude promised to Saint Anne for answering a supplicant’s pray-



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ers. He promises her “a cord of wax” that will go three times round the walls of her chapel, three times round her church, three times round the cemetery, and three times round her lands. Beyond the literary hyperbole, one notes not only the repetition of the number three but its multiplication by four (around chapel, church, cemetery, lands). This signals the prominence of number symbolism in the ritual enactments described. In mediaeval numerology, the number twelve, as multiple of three and four, signifies the penetration of matter by spirit (three = divinity and spirit, four = earth and matter) and thus further suggests the joining of the soul to the bodily matter at the moment of the conception of the child. Twelve also signifies completion (twelve lunar cycles = a year, etc.) and thus, in this context, may be associated with the completion of the term of a pregnancy. In this way, number symbolism reinforces Anne’s connection to fertility.79 As we have seen in the discussion of Anne’s iconography, one of the most widespread depictions of the mother of the mother of God was in the Selbdritt, a triadic relation with her daughter and grandson that emphasized the female lineage. However, in her cult the repetition of the number three signifies not only the triad of Jesus, Mary, and Anne, but also, more generally, the family: the numerological symbol of one as male, or father; two as female, or mother; and thus three, their product, as child. The same symbolism was used to express the relation of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. The ritual enactment of procession also sometimes employed the significance of three. Those engaging in a procession within the church dedicated to the saint would process three times around the nave. This circular movement constituted a symbolic pilgrimage, whereas the actual pilgrimage was, of course, not repeated thrice but was an itinerancy from a point of departure to a point of arrival and back again. The procession as pilgrimage represented the pilgrimage of life, conceived as our departure from the One, our peregrination through the world, and our return to the One. In the case of Saint Anne, one example of this among many is found

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in the enactment of her feast day, 26 July, in the parish of SainteAnne-de-Varenne, near Montreal, where, after an evening Mass in her honour, the parishioners process from the basilica to a small, riverside chapel, carrying the miraculous portrait of the saint said to have saved a group of sailors in the seventeenth century from drowning in the Saint Lawrence. On 25 July 1624, Saint Anne appeared to Yvon Nicolazic, a Breton peasant, and soon after, in commemoration of the event, was built Ste-Anne-d’Auray, the church that was to become the most important site of devotion to the saint in France.80 The cult of Saint Anne had been introduced into France in 1204 by Emperor Baudoin (d.1261), who after the sack of Constantinople sent a relic of the saint, her skull, to Chartres Cathedral.81 The phase of the cult begun by Yvon Nicolazic in the seventeenth century was its most vigorous, and it grew beyond measure. Concerned that the devotion to the mother of the mother of God had surpassed the limits of veneration, the Church attempted to diminish the cult several times, most notably at the Council of Trent (1545), but always without success. In mediaeval Brittany, the most widespread occupations were farming and maritime activities. Fishermen and sailors adapted to their own lives and the hopes and preoccupations that filled them, the devotion to Saint Anne that had swept France. Although there is no mention at all in the early Vitae of incidents associating Anne with the sea, this did not prevent the Bretons from invoking her for safe passage and for rescue from shipwreck and drowning. From seventeenth-century Brittany, Anne was brought across the ocean to the site from which her devotion would spread throughout the New World and the modern age. Quebec was peopled almost exclusively by settlers and clergy from Normandy and Brittany, and their enterprise was protected and promoted by “la Bonne Saincte Anne.” In Quebec her early cult was concentrated on Saint Anne’s patronage of sailors and those in danger at sea. Ships passing by



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her shrine on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River fired salvos in her honour. This seventeenth-century shrine was the origin of the now famous Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, thirty miles from Quebec City. The first of the five buildings devoted to Madame Saincte Anne on the banks of the Saint Lawrence was built in 1656 at Le Petit Cap, near Beaupré. Increasingly larger structures were built to accommodate the swelling crowds coming from all over Canada and the United States to venerate the mother of the mother of God, until in 1923 the present basilica was completed.82 Her Breton association with rescue from shipwreck and drowning was continued and strengthened in Quebec from the earliest times. In 1629 a French priest, Père Vieuxpont, was shipwrecked as his vessel approached Quebec City. He was saved along with a large painting of Saint Anne that, it is supposed, he was bringing to the chapel of Saint Anne at Fort St Anne in Cape Breton. Sometime before 1658, according to a legend reported by Nicole Cloutier, a ship full of Breton sailors was assailed by a fierce storm in the Saint Lawrence, but they were saved by the patron saint of Brittany, Saint Anne. In thanksgiving, they built a sanctuary on the banks on which they were washed up, the very site of the present basilica of Saint Anne de Beaupré.83 In 1662 three men, M. de la Martinière, Pierre le Gascon, and M. Leguille, were shipwrecked and, as they were drowning, prayed to Saint Anne and made vows to her and were saved. The next morning, they were washed ashore and went immediately to her sanctuary at Beaupré to offer thanks and fulfill their promises.84 One of the most important ritual enactments in the cult of a saint is the offering of an ex voto at the shrine. Ex voto may be of different kinds: the “gratulatory” ex voto is presented as a way of giving thanks for a favour received; the “propitiatory” ex voto is a way of giving thanks in advance of receiving what has been asked for; the “commemorative” kind recalls a past favour, and the “supererogatory” ex voto is given as a simple act of devotion. These signs are semiotically intriguing in that they hint at a kind of metempsycho-

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sis or sympathetic magic. The devotee, having enlisted the intercession of a particular saint to pray to God for a cure of some disease or the resolution of some difficulty, creates a visual image of his dilemma and offers it to the saint in thanksgiving. The ex voto can be any object that is connected symbolically to the subject. Thus some saved from shipwreck brought to the shrine of Saint Anne a model ship. Far more common, however, judging from the numbers still extant, was the gift of a painting that represented the incident as accurately and in as much detail as possible. Painted ex voto always included the figure of the beneficent saint, often in the act of praying for the intention of the devotee.85 Thus the scene “reenacted” the miraculous event. The most popular form of ex voto is the object associated with the disease or handicap, now cured and left behind at the shrine. Thus we find in most saints’ shrines even today crutches, braces, eyeglasses, and other objects abandoned by pilgrims after they have been cured of the disease that required the prosthesis. The psychic dynamic here is the same as that of the ancient Hebrews who rid themselves of their sins by symbolically placing them on the scapegoat and driving the animal off into the wilderness (Lev. 16:8–10), a practice that survives in the Catholic sacrament of penance, a cleansing ritual. Michael Carroll, describing the Irish practice of leaving one’s ailments or sins at a sacred well, states: “That devotees felt they were ‘detaching’ themselves from their physical or spiritual ailments probably explains the particular nature of the objects they left behind at the holy wells. Since they had been in ‘close association’ with the ailments they were leaving behind, it was only fitting that they represent this materially by leaving behind concrete objects with which they had been in ‘close association’ (e.g. strips torn from their clothing, strands of their hair, threads from their shawls, etc.).”86 Such a practice parallels the action of the relic: just as the relic was revered because it was part of the holy person and therefore emitted the power or virtue of the whole saint, in this practice at



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Fig. 2.22 (left)  Ex voto of Pierre Lemoyne d’Iberville, 1696, oil on canvas, anon., Musée de Sainte Anne, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, Québec, Canada, photo: Robert Derome, reprinted by permission of Madeleine Landry. Fig. 2.23 (right)  Ex voto of Monsieur Juing, 1826, oil on canvas by Antoine Plamondon (1804–95), Chapelle commémorative, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, Québec, Canada, photo: Robert Derome, reprinted by permission of Madeleine Landry.

the holy wells and in the leaving of ex voto at the saint’s shrine, the devotee leaves a part of himself that is neither power nor virtue, but their opposite – a deficiency or vice. The dynamic between saint and devotee becomes one of exchange. Numerous ex voto and paintings based on ex voto offerings narrate the many sea battles, shipwrecks, and near drownings in the Saint Lawrence in the seventeenth century.87 The earliest maritime ex voto in French Canada is one created in 1696 by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (Fig. 2.22). It is a painting of refined technique, showing Le Moyne d’Iberville kneeling before Saint Anne and the Virgin, enveloped in a cloud appearing in the upper register of the

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Fig. 2.24  Ex voto des Trois Naufragés De Lévis, 1754, oil on canvas, anon., Musée de Saint Anne, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, Québec, Canada, photo: Robert Derome, reprinted by permission of Madeleine Landry.

painting. Le Moyne d’Iberville holds out to the extended hand of Mary an escritoire containing documents. In the background is a becalmed French warship. The crew had prayed to Saint Anne for wind and apparently received it, thus the ex voto of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville. Another of the many such representations is seen in the ex voto of Monsieur Juing who, in 1696, found himself in a French ship surrounded by the enemy fleet on the Saint Lawrence River (Fig. 2.23). M. Juing invokes the intercession of Saint Anne, and his ship is enveloped in a whirlwind of snow and fog, obliterating it from the view of the hostile fleet and permitting escape. The painting, by Antoine Plamondon, shows three enemy ships, one firing on the French ship of M. Juing. Above the maritime scene, Saint Anne in nimbus on her knees prays to Jesus who, on the viewer’s left, accompanied by cherubim, reaches his left hand toward his grandmother.



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Fig. 2.25  Ex voto de Monsieur Roger, 1717, oil on canvas, anon., Musée de Sainte Anne, Ste-Anne-de-Beuapré, Québec, Canada, photo: Robert Derome, reprinted by permission of Madeleine Landry.

The more typically naïve style of the ex voto is seen in the 1754 painting, “Les trois naufragés de Lévis” (Fig. 2.24). Saint Anne is shown in the top portion surrounded by clouds, while in the lower register are seen two men – one formally dressed, the other in peasant garb – atop an overturned canoe. Three bonneted women struggle in the choppy water. In the upper part of the painting, the narrative of the accident is written in abbreviated form along with the names of the donors of the ex voto. A variation on the theme of Saint Anne intervening for those in peril at sea is seen in the “Ex voto de Monsieur Roger” (1717) (Fig. 2.25) in which passengers of an ice-bound galleon attempt to escape in a skiff, several with hands clasped in prayer and eyes raised to heaven. Here Anne is depicted according to the motif of the “Education of the Virgin”; she and Mary sit passively in the clouds reading a book, apparently unaffected by the scene below.

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Fig. 2.26  Le miracle de 1630 or ex voto á Notre Dame de Foy, ca.1648 oil on canvas by  Claude François (1614–85), Neuville-les-Lœuilly, France, photo: Alain Dulin, reprinted by permission of Alain Dulin.

One of the most riveting ex voto of all (although not featuring Saint Anne) is that painted by Claude François, known as Frère Luc (Fig. 2.26). In it the artist himself stands in the background, off to the left of the viewer, behind the Virgin Mary who, with her right arm, holds the child Jesus. With her left hand, Mary touches the corpse of a dead child held up to her by Saint Augustine. Frère Luc holds up, behind the Virgin, another painting of a child falling into water, one to which the child Jesus points. In his youth, the artist had an accident in which he fell into a river and was drowning. Saved from death, Claude François vowed to enter the Order of the Recollets (Franciscans) when he reached



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adulthood. The painting depicts the Franciscan-robed artist himself, having fulfilled his vow, presenting an ex voto within an ex voto. The intimate involvement of the life of the devotee with the reality of the patron saint is here vividly portrayed. These ex voto present a wordless means of continuing the story of Saint Anne and her devotees and, by continuing her story, continuing her life on earth. Even in the modern period, the practice continues among Catholics, as we see in one incident related to the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956. Nicolas Masseu, a noted Quebec tenor, and his family were aboard the ship when it sank. In thanksgiving for their deliverance, the family offered an ex voto in the form of a marble plaque for the procession chapel at SainteAnne-de-Varennes, where it may still be seen.88 The forms of devotion to Saint Anne came largely from France but were elaborated by the French Canadians. The thirteenthcentury Confrérie des Menuisiers de Paris adopted Anne as their patroness and, as part of their veneration, developed the practice of joining to their offerings to the saint letters of petition, on the understanding that Anne would pass them on to the Virgin Mary who, in turn, would pass them on to Jesus.89 The same practice was continued by the Confrérie de Sainte Anne à Québec, inaugurated in 1657. We see in such a practice not only an expression of the strong position of Saint Anne, but also the hierarchical structure of petition: Anne, like all saints, is a conduit to Jesus, who alone grants divine favours. We recall that in the film, La Neuvaine, the devotee writes out a petition to Saint Anne and deposits it in the base of her statue. The scrupulous distinction seen here between dulia – the veneration paid to saints, hyperdulia – the special and greater honour paid to the Virgin Mary, and latria – the worship paid to God alone, is seen in a devotional book published in Quebec in the mid-fifties: “The cult of Saint Anne is grafted on to our love for Jesus and Mary. It has invaded our thoughts. It is enthroned in our hearts. It has entered into our most cherished habits. It is hung, talisman divine,

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on the walls of our churches and our homes.” The author adds to this encomium a personal prayer to the saint: “O good Saint Anne, give us in French Canada a great number of truly Christian families; families in which the couples, in imitation of Sara and Tobias, pray to God to be blessed with many children.”90 This peculiar reference to the Book of Tobit reminds us again of the intriguing association of Saint Anne with the mysterious story of the marriage of Sara and Tobias and suggests, once again, the power of the cult to transmit elements of a tradition sub-verbum, as it were. As we have seen in the discussion of the Frankfurt altarpiece depicting Esmerentia’s betrothal of Anne to Joachim, this association of Tobias and Sara with Joachim and Anne is ancient, and its appearance in North America in the twentieth century says much about cultural transmission. The virtues that were to be emulated by the French Canadian devotees of Saint Anne were patience, humility, purity, sobriety, and the performance of one’s duties according to one’s station in life – all virtues essential to the survival and development of a fledgling society surrounded, as French Canada was, by a much larger, well-established, English-speaking, Protestant society. A litany to Saint Anne, authorized by Pope Alexander VI and still in use, addresses her as “mirror of obedience, mirror of patience, mirror of mercy, mirror of devotion,” and goes on to echo her other auspices: “hope of sailors, port of safety in storms, anchor in perils.”91 However, her role as teacher dominates French Canadian devotion to Saint Anne. She is seen, of course, as a model for the teaching of girls, not boys, and this likely has much to do with the exceptional level of literacy among women in Quebec. By 1891, according to Kathleen Rochefort Murray, 87 per cent of Quebec women could read, a rate much higher than the average in Europe, for instance.92 Credit for this goes to the Quebec Catholic clergy who, among other pedagogical initiatives, encouraged devotion to Saint Anne. Some forms of veneration and enactment have less obvious origins than others. A wooden statue of Saint Anne in the church that



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Fig. 2.27  Madonna dei palafrenieri, 1605–1606, oil on canvas by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610), Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy, photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

bears her name in the town of Sainte-Anne-de-Yamachiche, north of Montreal, depicts the saint with a brass serpent. This is unique in Saint Anne’s Canadian iconography, and there is no trace of it in the written accounts. Its meaning is apparently revealed by the phrases recited by pilgrims during a procession from the church to Saint Anne’s statue in the adjoining cemetery: “The mere laying

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of eyes upon the brass serpent was able to cure the Israelites of the cruel wounds inflicted on them by serpents. Our confidence in you will turn away the evils from off our heads and will strengthen us in times of hardship.”93 The theme is further clarified by a plaque beneath the statue of Saint Anne in the cemetery: “Lift up your eyes to this statue and like the Israelites when they gazed upon the brass serpent, you shall be healed.”94 A splendid Selbdritt by Caravaggio (Fig. 2.27) shows Mary teaching the boy Jesus to destroy the serpent, the scene cautioned by Saint Anne, who stands by witnessing the lesson. Mary’s foot crushes the serpent’s head and Jesus’ foot is placed on top of hers. The iconography of Anne with a brass serpent is certainly older than Canada, and it was likely brought over from France where, although its history is murky, there existed in Villedieu-les-Poeles a Confraternity of Saint Anne of the Brass Serpent.95 It is tempting to speculate that the cult of Saint Anne intuited links between the saint’s connection to Sara, possessed by a devil in the form of a serpent, and the brass serpent (of Num. 21:8–9) that cures those who have been stung by serpents of flesh. Such an association involves the antilogic so often found in the cults of the saints: an idea based in similitude between two things becomes the perfect opposition between those same things through iconographic and ritual activity. This activity is a continuous writing of the Vita, enlivening the saint herself and projecting her into the psychological life of the supplicant.



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Chapter Three

SAINT THOMAS BECKET

Few Lives of mediaeval saints are more voluminously documented than that of the twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral by four knights acting on the wishes of King Henry II. The force of the historical in Thomas’s Vita is assured by the fact that the principal authors of his first biographies were men who knew him and were present at his martyrdom. There are many accounts of the murder as well as of other aspects of Thomas Becket’s life, most of which are available in James Craigie Robertson’s Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. It is the very historicity of Saint Thomas that makes him a useful example in our study, since one might well suppose that, given the amplitude of historical information, little or no imaginative elaboration would be needed; Becketian iconography could content itself with merely illustrating the abundant historical material, and the ritual practices of the cult would become transparent, seen through the lens of the historical Vitae. But, as we will see, that is not the case. Not only do the iconography and cult develop the Life of Saint Thomas Becket, even the eye witness accounts of his martyrdom differ in sufficiently significant ways as to appear as fragments requiring a weaving together through an act of interpretation in-

formed by a collateral act of critical analysis of the iconography and the cult. Words Thomas Becket was born around 1118 to parents who had migrated to England from Normandy. Thomas entered the service of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1141 and quickly endeared himself to the archbishop, just as he did in his relations with the young King Henry II, who soon after their friendship began made him Lord Chancellor of England. We are told that: “He was slim and unusually tall, pale of complexion, dark hair, a long nose, and straight features.”1 Several of the Lives depict the young Thomas of London, as he preferred to be called, as a very physical person. An accomplished horseman, he distinguished himself in battle as a mounted warrior, in one campaign unseating a veteran French knight. It was this physical vigour, perhaps, that initially inspired King Henry’s admiration, an admiration that with time deepened into an intimate friendship, an affection so profound that it was said of them that they “had but one heart and one mind.”2 It is in this role of friend that we perceive what seems to have been the most outstanding quality of Thomas’s character: loyalty. Alfred Lord Tennyson captures this in the verses that he has Thomas speak in his play, Becket: “I served our Theobald well when I was with him, / I served the King well when I was Chancellor. / I am his no more, and I must serve the Church” (Act I). The King’s friendship benefited Thomas in exactly the ways that one would expect. The chancellor became famous, and in some quarters, infamous, for the splendour and richness of his way of life. His attire and his entire household’s were sumptuous, and although he had always had a deep reverence for religion, Chancellor Becket seems to have been a thoroughgoing hedonist. The dramatic change



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of character that occurred when Thomas became a priest and archbishop was thereby the more striking and became an important part of the hagiography that arose. When the office of Archbishop of Canterbury became vacant in 1161, the king apparently saw the advantage of having his best friend and chancellor in that post, and some Church officials, for their own reasons, were also favourable. Becket is said to have resisted vigorously, going so far as to warn the king that he was aware of his plans to weaken the power of the Church and that, as archbishop, he would oppose them. Nevertheless, Henry persisted and, combined with the insistence of Cardinal Henry of Pisa, overcame the candidate’s objections, raising Thomas of London to the Archbishopric of Canterbury on 3 June 1162, the day after he had been ordained a priest. The king could not, however, convince Thomas not to resign as chancellor. Turning away from the life of material pleasures and worldly honours, the newly ordained priest devoted himself to his moral purification and spiritual perfection, adopting the practice not only of wearing a rough hair shirt that extended down to the knees in order to mortify fleshly desire, but also of daily flagellation. As an act of humility, the archbishop also adopted the practice of washing the feet of the poor once a week before providing them with food and money. It is clear, too, that once ordained, Thomas became as fervent in his loyalty to the Church as he had been in his loyalty to the monarchy, and when the interest of these two conflicted, this high official of the Church, with what appears to be an extremely rigorous sense of duty, sided with the Church. Henry II wished to confirm certain powers of the monarchy over the Church, powers that he claimed had long been exercised by his royal predecessors, and he counted on his best friend to help him in this endeavour as he had helped him in every other endeavour in the past. But, as he had forewarned the king, Thomas, now a servant of the Church, resisted assaults upon her rights. These royal exercises of power, considered secular

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abuses of ecclesiastical rights, appeared to Thomas as unjust, and while as chancellor he had been willing to turn a blind eye, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he would not.3 As the rift between the two men grew wider and more bitter, Thomas seemed to waver and give in, no doubt distressed at his friend’s anger, assuring the king that, with certain restrictions, he would agree to confirm what the king called his grandfather’s customs (avitae consuetudines), all of which strengthened the power of the monarchy over the Church. At the Council of Clarendon (1164), urged on by other bishops, Becket, though dubious, agreed orally to the avitae consuetudines, the specific articles of which had not yet been written. Almost immediately Thomas regretted his cowardice and became deeply penitent (it has been suggested that it was at this moment that he donned the hair shirt and breeches).4 When the king insisted that the bishops sign a copy of the oaths that they had sworn at Clarendon, now with highly controversial specifics written down and thus given permanence, Thomas refused and recanted, thus casting the die that would lead to his murder. The king, who had, we might say, reasonable expectations of Thomas’s cooperation and loyalty, became more and more bitter and angry as his former chancellor became clearer and firmer in his position. Because of the escalating persecution by the king, it was thought prudent for Thomas to flee England for France, where King Louis VII held him in great esteem and where also Pope Alexander III was in residence at that time. Henry retaliated against the archbishop’s absconding by seizing Thomas’s property and exiling all his relatives from England. The pope had arranged for Thomas to reside at the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny, and in response royal vengeance reached beyond the shores of England. Thomas soon had to leave the abbey when King Henry threatened to attack the whole Cistercian Order in England if the archbishop continued to be harboured at Pontigny. After six years of negotiation in exile, Thomas returned to England on 1 December 1170, apparently believing that reconciliation



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had been effected. However, on Christmas day, the archbishop said Mass and gave a sermon in which he seems to have predicted his own martyrdom.5 On the last day of his life, 29 December, Thomas heard Mass, went to confession, and was flogged three times. He ate a hearty lunch of pheasant and drank a large quantity of wine, reportedly defending this action by saying, “He who must lose much blood, must needs drink much wine.”6 This quip, along with his Christmas sermon, strengthens the view that Thomas foresaw his martyrdom7 and makes the important thematic link between blood and wine, one that would spawn remarkable analogies in the hagiography of the English saint. That afternoon four knights of Henry’s court arrived at Canterbury Cathedral. Apparently the archbishop received the barons in an arrogant and dismissive manner, while they demanded that he present himself before Henry’s son and make satisfaction. The messengers explained that several of the archbishop’s ecclesiastical sentences were displeasing to the king.8 Anger mounted on both sides when Thomas refused to go to Winchester to be put on trial: “When in the afternoon of December 29, 1170, the four knights – Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Bret – arrived at the archbishop’s palace at Canterbury, they first laid down their swords, and then entered the hall of the palace where the servants were partaking of the remains of the dinner served to the archbishop at three o’clock. With the knights was an archer named Ralph. The four were shown into a room to which the archbishop had withdrawn: and there followed a discussion in which Becket would make no concessions as regards the points at issue.”9 Tempers flared, and Thomas finally sent the knights packing. While one might have expected the knights to have then arrested Thomas and taken him off to Winchester, it is probable that they feared the gathering crowd of citizens who held their archbishop dear. The fact that Thomas would not go willingly was also a factor. Instead, they went off to find reinforcements: “The knights eventually left the palace, calling out as they did so, ‘To arms, to

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arms.’ They now picked up their swords, and the door of the hall having been bolted, Robert de Broc, who had meanwhile appeared on the scene, took the knights up a staircase known to him in the archbishop’s palace … [I]n mounting the staircase they had picked up an axe and some hatchets, left behind by some workmen who had been repairing the wooden steps of the staircase.”10 These details inform the subsequent iconography but are, as we will see, greatly expanded there. Kay Brainerd Slocum, in her meticulous study of Becketian liturgies, notes the anomalies between different versions of the events and thus points to the gap between written narrative and literary conventions: “Edward Grim reported that Thomas was dragged and pushed, indeed half carried, all the way to the cathedral. But William of Canterbury, Benedict of Peterborough, and William Fitzstephen, using the image of the bonus pastor, preferred to report that he walked slowly and calmly, with great dignity behind his little flock, ‘driving all before him, like a good shepherd [driving] his sheep.’”11 Once again we have here an example of elaboration of the facts for interpretive purposes. One way or the other, Thomas proceeded to the cathedral to attend vespers, which had just begun. The procession was headed by a clerk, Henry of Auxerre, bearing the archbishop’s cross staff: “Advancing through the cloisters, he eventually reached the door of the north transept, and having entered the cathedral, noticed that the door behind him had been shut and bolted, from fear of the knights and their adherents, who had by now found their way into the cloisters and were approaching the door through which Becket had passed a few minutes before. The archbishop with his own hands threw the door open, and there now followed a general sauve qui peut in the cathedral.”12 This act not only suggests something of Thomas’s boldness but reinforces both the idea that he foresaw his death and the suspicion that he actively sought out martyrdom, a potential moral problem. Several other details are added in the Vitae and in legend to support the view that the martyr went willingly to his death. Thom-



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as’s meek submission to the death blow is one of them, and it is noteworthy that the narratives are careful to include the detail of Thomas’s formidable physical struggle with the four knights who attempted to drag him from the cathedral: all four were no match for the six-foot-eleven priest, still in good form in his early fifties. This resistance distinguishes his submission to martyrdom from a form of passive suicide condemned as fanaticism by the Church: “Reginald Fitzurse was the leader, entering the cathedral ahead of the others, sword in one hand and the carpenter’s axe in the other. ‘Thomas Becket, traitor to the king,’ having been called for by the invaders, the archbishop answered them with great dignity from the steps to the choir which he was then ascending: he thereupon descended into the transept and here eventually the actual struggle (in which Becket at first gave a very good account of himself, far back though his athletic days then lay) took place between a pillar and the wall forming one of the corners of the chapel of St. Benedict.”13 Up to this point Thomas was attended by several clerics: John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, Henry of Auxerre, Benedict of Peterborough, William of Canterbury, William Fitzstephen, and his chaplain, Robert of Merton. The importance here is that each of these men was eyewitness to what occurred in the cathedral that day (although it seems that only Grim witnessed the murder close up),14 and – more importantly still – several wrote accounts of what they saw or believed they saw. In the group of assassins (according to Grim, Fitzstephen, and the biography known as Anonymous I), Hugh de Moreville acted as watchman at the doors of the cathedral. The first to strike was Reginald Fitzurse, whose blow severed the crown of Thomas’s head and wounded Grim. With the archbishop down, Richard le Bret delivered a fierce blow that further split the head, the sword landing on the pavement with such force as to break off its tip. This piece of metal, left behind by the murderers, became an important relic placed upon an altar built in 1172 – the altare ad punctum ensis, the Altar of the Sword Point. Today there is a modern version of the altar in Canterbury Cathedral.

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Generally the accounts agree that Thomas was too strong for his four assailants to force him from the church, but that after a ferocious struggle, the archbishop simply knelt and prayed, commending his soul to God, Mary, Saint Elphege of Canterbury, and Saint Dionysius. During the struggle, Thomas’s companions fled in fear to hide in various parts of the cathedral (John of Salisbury behind an altar, in this way blocking his view of the subsequent events). Gaps in the narrative have been filled by various commentators.15 Some report that Fitzurse was, indeed, the first to strike with his sword but missed, succeeding only in knocking off the archbishop’s cap. Tracy was the first to hit Thomas, but the blow was deflected by Grim, who thus received a deep wound to his arm. The final blow, as stated above, was given by le Bret with such force that the end of the sword broke off on striking the pavement. However, as to who struck the first blow, which blow severed the crown, whether Thomas was standing or kneeling, where he was located in the cathedral – all of this is reported differently in different eyewitness accounts. According to the early Lives, accompanying the four assassins was a clerk, Thomas Horsea, and it was this Horsea, “son of Belial” (Anonymous II), who, egged on by the four knights, strew the brains of the victim with his sword: “He searched with the point of his sword for the remaining brain in the remnant of the skull of the now lifeless head, and scooped it out, scattering it on the ground, not so much to remove lingering doubts about death … as rather to allow his frenzied cruelty to satiate itself.”16 According to the Lives, sympathy was generally for Becket and against King Henry. The subsequent revolt of King Henry’s son against Henry was seen by those who took Thomas’s side as retribution for his sin, and chaos broke out throughout the country. William, King of Scots, attacked Northumbria, and Norfolk, Yorkshire, and the Midlands were in open rebellion. Although these events were not reactions to the archbishop’s murder, Henry himself seems to have seen his plight as punishment for his attack



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on Becket and went to Canterbury to do penance: barefoot and clothed in sackcloth, he prostrated himself at the tomb of the martyr where, naked, he submitted to whipping by the monks of Canterbury, fasted, and prayed. That very day, his armies captured William, King of Scots, and his rebellious son’s invading fleet was destroyed by a storm.

Images Despite the variations from one account to another, the Lives give a composite picture of events that occurred in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. The cult that developed immediately around these events and the iconography that augmented them contribute significantly to the meaning of what happened. One of the many contradictions between the early written accounts and the visual depictions has to do with who was carrying the cross staff as Becket’s party entered the cathedral. Early accounts have Henry of Auxerre as the cross bearer, but a wall painting in Saint John’s, Winchester (Fig. 3.1), shows Grim holding the cross and being wounded at the same time. In most other iconography depicting this scene, it is possible to identify the cross bearer as Grim. Since the earliest visual representations of Grim as cross bearer predate the earliest written description of him as such – the thirteenth-century Golden Legend – it is likely that the visual detail not only preceded the verbal account, but may have originated it. Tancred Borenius, discussing a reliquary in the church of Heidal, Norway (ca.1250), states: “Grim is represented carrying the Archbishop’s cross staff, which is strictly inaccurate, but by this time had become the tradition – a tradition indeed, incorporated into the Golden Legend.”17 It is likely that the visual composition combined the cross carrying with the wounding of Grim because that was the dramatic element and because Henry of Auxerre played no role in the narrative other than heading the procession.

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Fig. 3.1  Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, 13th C. wall painting (destroyed), St John’s, Winchester, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932), plate XLIV.

Another far more important anomaly in the eyewitness accounts, an anomaly that had a significant effect on the iconography and the cult, has to do with the locus of the murder. In all but one of the early Lives, the murder took place at the foot of the stairs leading to the choir in the north transept of the cathedral. Indeed, early written tradition specified the very pavement stone that had received the martyr’s blood and brains as a place of miracles. John of Salisbury, however, writes that the murder took place before an altar, and thus fiction overcomes history and dominates the subsequent iconography because, one assumes, it is more visually powerful. The most dramatic element of the story of Saint Thomas is, of course, his murder, and it has understandably received the most



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attention in iconography. The events as recorded in detail by his biographers and eye witnesses to the scene may be quickly summarized once more. There were four assassins plus the clerk, Hugh of Horsea, rarely depicted in the visual accounts. Thomas was accompanied by five men. He was standing by a pillar in the north aisle at the foot of the stairs to the choir. There he was struck down by a sword blow to the head. Another blow severed the crown of his head, and he bled onto the pavement of the floor. His brains were teased out of his open skull and were gathered up by the monks, who realized the power of a martyr’s blood. The iconography that seeks to illustrate the written Lives usually shows a composition of six figures: the four assailants, the victim, and Edward Grim, as we see, for instance, in the late twelfthcentury illumination of a psalter in the British Library (Fig. 3.1a) and the mid-thirteenth-century Carrow psalter (Fig. 3.1b) which succeeds in depicting all of the details of the written account with great accuracy, even identifying Fitzurse by the blazon on his shield. In most visual accounts there are, however, many important variations in the number of figures present, and the visual narrative generally exhibits considerable independence from the written accounts. The most striking departure from most of the eyewitness accounts is, as has been mentioned, the locus of martyrdom. Most visual accounts place Thomas at the foot of an altar, in many cases in the act of saying Mass. This fiction seems to have had an irresistible attraction for the visual authors of the scene for it enhances the dramatic aspects. In a particularly realistic rendition by a fifteenthcentury artist of the Tyrolean school of Master Pacher (Fig. 3.2), Thomas, in his bishop’s attire, his miter placed upright at the base of the altar, kneels in prayer. A halo is already in place above his head, which is receiving the blow of the sword wielded by a young, gruesome-looking courtier. Two of the king’s men stand behind the killer, while the third is seen in the distant background apparently guarding the entrance. Five clerics stand slightly behind and to the left of the altar, witnessing the scene.

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Fig. 3.1a (left)  Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket (perhaps the oldest representation of the murder of the archbishop), 1190–1200, MS illumination, Harley 5102, British Library, London, England, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art. London: Metheun & Co. (1932), plate XXXVII .1 Fig. 3.1b (right)  The Death of Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170, ca.1250, Carrow Psalter, anon., The Walters Art Museum, photo: Snark/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of the British Library.

Here historical accuracy consisting of the number of assassins, the number of Thomas’s attendants, the nature of the weapon, is ultimately transcended through the invention of the fictitious locus so as to constitute simultaneously an act of interpretation and an act of invention – that is, an act of the imagination. Despite his eyewitness credentials, John of Salisbury’s claim that Thomas was slain before an altar goes directly against all other eyewitness accounts. It cannot be attributed to error since Salisbury was present at the event that he describes, and even though he hid



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Fig. 3.2  The Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, 15th C. painting from the school of Master Pacher, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

himself, he was not far from the scene. Rather, what has occurred is a literary manoeuvre that collapses past and future. Years after the murder, an altar was, in fact, erected at the historical site of the event so as to commemorate it liturgically. The authorial intention here is not directed by historical fact but by literary, hagiographical convention, and it is meant to intensify the holiness and innocence of the victim and to deepen the evil of the actions of the assassins by introducing the sacrilegious nature of their crime: “A stone is still pointed out on the pavement which tradition assigns as the exact spot on which Becket fell … In some monastic representations of Becket’s fall he is slain at the very foot of an altar, but this

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Fig. 3.3  Martyrdom, ca.1582 wall painting (destroyed) by Niccolo Circignani (1530/35–1591), Venerable English College, Rome, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

is only introduced to heighten the sacrilege. The altar was erected afterwards.”18 Iconography continued this contradiction of history by showing Thomas, not only at the altar, but saying Mass, sometimes with a chalice and Mass book. Many departures from the written accounts may be noticed in these images. In a reconstructed wall painting (Fig. 3.3) that narrates the events leading to the murder and the murder itself, the assassins are dressed as Roman warriors; Thomas’s miter is already on the ground before he has been struck; a monk is seen in the act of scooping up the blood and brains of the martyr



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Fig. 3.4  The Murder of Thomas Becket, 1527, Flemish manuscript illumination, anon., British Library, London, England, photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

before the martyrdom takes place. While these are, of course, devices used to represent a series of temporal events, they nevertheless change and amplify the overall narrative. In a sixteenthcentury Flemish miniature (Fig. 3.4) we see Thomas dying as he kneels before the altar at which he was saying Mass, but we also see that the altar is identified as the altar of Saint Benedict and Our Lady. There are three assassins, not four, and the martyr is not struck by a sword; one of the killers plunges a dagger straight into the top of Thomas’s tonsured head. Another prepares to strike Grim, whose arm is raised to receive the blow. The visual theme of Saint Thomas with a dagger or sword tip in his head is widespread, despite its ahistorical nature. Tancred Borenius shows us the fourteenth-century stained glass (Fig. 3.4a), which he claims is at Fairford, where the point of a sword is lodged in the martyr’s skull. Two other depictions show him with a sword splitting his head in two, not, as the historical record has it, shearing off the crown (Fig. 3.4b). Several other iconographic representations adopt the visual tradition of the cephalophore, wherein the martyr carries his severed head; a statue in Wells Cathedral (Fig. 3.4c), for instance, shows Thomas headless from the eyes up, holding the missing crown of his head in his hands. All of this is iconographic innovation. In its own way, each of the various eyewitness accounts of the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett seeks to transcend historical fact while remaining grounded in it so as to express the spiritual meaning of the events. This is fully achieved through the iconography and ritual developed around Thomas’s biography. John of Salisbury’s intention in fictionalizing the locus of the event is transhistorical and seeks to bring out the spiritual dimension of the event. This is also the reason for the presence in the Vitae of a number of minor narrative facts that hint at larger literary themes – themes that in many cases are flushed out and developed either in the iconography or in the cult or both. As we have seen, in some images there are three assassins (Fig. 3.4); in others there are four (Fig. 3.1). Most visual representations show the victim attacked by knights who, in



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Fig. 3.4a (left)  Martyrdom, 14th C. stained glass fragment, anon., window no. XIV, Fairford Church, Fairford, England, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932); Fig. 3.4b (right)  Martyrdom, ca.1647 etching by Wencelaus Hollar (1607– 1677), British Library, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

many instances, are identified through the heraldry on their shields (Fig. 3.5). Several iconographic representations stylize the murder in ways that directly contradict the written accounts as, for instance, in the replacement of the sword by the dagger in figures 3.4, 3.4a, and 3.4b. In other cases, iconography invents whole aspects of the Life, without any basis at all in historical fact. A painting (Fig. 3.6) by Girolamo da Treviso (1499–1544) shows Thomas in rich clerical garb, holding his staff of office, in attendance at the Presentation of Mary at the Temple. Saint Anne and Saint Joachim watch with the archbishop as the crowned Virgin carries a lit taper up the stairs

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Fig. 3.4c (left)  St Thomas holding the crown of his head, 13th C. statue, anon., Wells Cathedral, England, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co (1932) Fig. 3.5 (right)  The Murder of St Thomas à Becket, restoration by T. Carter, Becket window, north ambulatory, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England, photo: Anthony Scibilia / Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 3.6  Presentation at the Temple, 16th C. painting., Girolamo da Treviso (1508–1544), Church of San Salvatore, Bologna, Italy, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

of the Temple. This allegorical expansion of the text is achieved through visual symbolism in the service of an eternal, as distinct from temporal, perspective. A theme that has been widely recognized in the hagiography of the Becketian cult is that of the Novus homo, inspired by the reports of his behaviour before and after being consecrated to the priesthood. It is Saint Paul who creates the topos of the “new man” and

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being “born again,” and its enormous influence in the Middle Ages and afterward is attributable to the apostle’s prestige, but even more to the profound psychic attraction of the concept of conversion. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2 Cor. 5:17) Paul insists on this theme throughout his writings. Inveighing against lying, he tells the Colossians that they have “put off the old man,” and have “put on the new man,” and so must renounce old, unvirtuous ways.19 Thomas’s suitability as a paragon of the new man has its basis in his renunciation of his youthful shallowness and love of display and finery. As Slocum points out, however, the accounts of this phase of his life are careful to avoid depicting the future saint as youthful profligate.20 All insist that moral probity marked Thomas’s early years as clearly as it marked his maturity; it is his deep spirituality that is new. The identification of Thomas as the embodiment of the new man was established by John of Salisbury immediately upon the death of the martyr: “However, immediately when he was consecrated he threw off the old man [and] took on the hair shirt and the monastic habit, crucifying his flesh together with his sins and desires.”21 Although the iconography concentrated on the more dramatic scenes surrounding the martyrdom, the Novus homo idea is suggested in depictions of Thomas and Henry II together, such as that found in Brunswick Cathedral and described by Borenius as “among the most important documents for the iconography of St. Thomas.”22 Here (Fig. 3.7) a wall painting of the early thirteenth century pictures in the first panel King Henry II present at the crowning of Thomas as Archbishop of Canterbury. This is followed in the second panel by an illustration of Thomas disputing with the king. The altarpiece in the Church of Saint Jurgen in Wismar combines the ideas of the worldly glory of Thomas being crowned at Canterbury with that of his humility by depicting him washing the feet of the poor. The contrasting scene establishes the change that



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Fig. 3.7  Scenes from the Life of St Thomas, early 13th C. wall painting, anon., Brunswick Cathedral, Germany, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

took place within Thomas and thus the theme of “putting on the new man.” Although the topos of Novus homo symbolically connotes baptism and other spiritual events, it was, in the life of Saint Thomas as in the writings of Saint Paul, employed as moral metaphor and exhortation. Whereas the apostle didactically commands “put off the old man,” the iconography of Saint Thomas shows it being done. The historical depictions of the moral regeneration of Thomas present the audience with an exemplar and urge them to do as the hero of the narrative did. But here the text is not only John of Salisbury’s written document, which was probably the version least accessible to the laymen of the community. The expansion of the theme in the hymns and prayers for his liturgy, along with the visual presentations of Thomas as Novus homo, bring the theme alive through visual illumination and doxological enactment. Even greater liberties are taken by the artist who did the woodcuts for Caxton’s 1483 edition of the Golden Legend (Fig. 3.8), which an overly enthusiastic iconoclast has defaced. The exuberance of

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the visual composition contrasts with de Voragine’s rather sparse account of the actual murder. In the image depicting the murder, the archbishop, in all his regalia, kneels at the altar saying Mass; a knight stands behind him with a sword raised, the end of which is broken off. We see the tip of the sword stuck in the martyr’s head, from which blood flows. A second knight, behind the first, thrusts an inordinately long sword into Thomas’s back; he is depicted as a grotesque, grimacing as he looks away from the scene and directly at the viewer. A third knight stands behind the second, with his back to the viewer. Edward Grim is present holding the cross staff. Here, then, the visual narrative begins to go in a new direction – three assassins, not four; one attendant with Thomas, not five. The sword point is lodged in Thomas’s head, but the skull is not broken open. The martyr is stabbed in the back as well as being struck on the head, and the character of one of the murderers is interpreted and portrayed through caricature. None of these details corresponds to the written accounts; they are the invention of the artist. The authorial intention in these visual accounts is not concerned with fact, which is, after all, straightforward – the sword point broke off and remained on the pavement of the church; the crown of Thomas’s skull was sheared away, and this was his only wound.23



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Fig. 3.8  Jacobus da Voragine, The Golden Legend, Caxton edition, early 15th C. manuscript illumination, anon., University of Glasgow Library, photo and permission by University of Glasgow Library.

Rather, what the visual artist wants to express by combining sword point and head or by varying the direction of the death blow is the truth of the event – the sense of the martyr’s self-sacrifice, the evil of the assassins, and the existence of a relic that, by the nature of relics, continues his presence on earth as saintly intercessor. Thomas Becket has been a constant source of inspiration to creative writers and their audiences ever since his death. Jean-Marie Grassin has inventoried fifty dramatic works specifically on the subject of Thomas Becket or that include his story, more than half of which were written in the twentieth century.24 An examination of the poetry and drama that have been written about him reveals two elements of attraction: the dramatic nature of his death and the stuff of the man’s character. In addition to the many biographies written from the twelfth century to our own time, these creative versions of Thomas’s life enlarge the full “text.” The creative render-

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ings of Saint Thomas’s life tend toward one of two basic views. In the more negative one, Thomas of Canterbury is worldly, arrogant, and aggressive; in the more positive view, Saint Thomas is seen as a convert from the pleasures and glories of the world, a courageous, saintly martyr. According to the first, Becket’s story is fundamentally political; according to the other, it is fundamentally spiritual. Tennyson, already quoted, adapted the story of the Archbishop of Canterbury to a verse drama in which he adopts the negative view (a view more congenial, perhaps, to Queen Victoria, who had made Tennyson Poet Laureate). T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral emphasizes the spiritual and religious dimensions of Thomas’s character. Jean Anouilh’s Becket: ou l’honneur de Dieu, on the other hand, renders the meaning of the life and death of the Archbishop of Canterbury in political and ethical terms, providing an interesting contrast with Eliot’s perspective. Taken together, these two plays demonstrate the diverse ways in which the “text” of the Life develops through dramatic enactment. Both Anouilh’s and Eliot’s plays were turned into films, and the film versions provide still another expansion of the text. As literature, theatre and film, these versions straddle the categories of image and enactment used in this discussion. Anouilh’s play is better theatre than Eliot’s; Eliot’s play is better poetry. Becket: ou l’honneur de Dieu provides spectacle and, like La Neuvaine, is better discussed as iconography. Murder in the Cathedral, structured along the lines of classical tragedy and employing liturgical language and movement, fits more easily in the discussion of enactment. Both, of course, involve image and enactment, and both enhance and become part of the holistic text of the life of Thomas Becket. Anouilh’s Becket is only slightly indebted to the twelfth-century Vitae and the general historical record. In fact, the author claims not to have consulted the biographies of Thomas or of Henry II in preparing his play. Here Thomas is given a mistress, and Anouilh describes his activities with King Henry as loutish and depraved.



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Henry refers, for instance, to having shared the same girl with Thomas in bed together and to other sensual pleasures that the king himself greatly enjoyed, all of this invented by the playwright. However, like virtually all other creative interpreters of Thomas’s life, Anouilh centres his play on peripeteia, Thomas’s sudden change from a materialistic debauchee to a morally exacting man of the Church. The dramatic tension in Anouilh’s use of this peripeteia is considerable because it brings about not only the change in Thomas but incomprehension and anguish in the king. Henry is depicted, not as a villain, but as a perpetual adolescent with a limitless capacity for affection yet completely deprived of both self-knowledge and insight into the nature of others. The play opens strikingly and somewhat brutally as Henry enters Canterbury Cathedral and walks to the tomb of Saint Thomas. He casts aside his cloak, underneath which he is naked and, clothed only in his royal crown, kneels in penance before the shrine of the man he has had killed. The exchange between the dead saint and the penitent king establishes early on a conflict that is developed throughout the play: the impossibility of mutual understanding. To Henry’s wistful query, “Don’t you think we’d have done better to understand each other?” Thomas replies, “Understand each other? It wasn’t possible” (Act 1). Thus is established the major undercurrent of the play: state versus Church, the conflict between two centres of power and the men who personify them. Within this opposition, however, is similarity: for Anouilh, the king and the archbishop are both motivated by the same desire for power. It is this view and the characterizations that flow from it that give the play its secular and sometimes comical worldview. Although Thomas is by the end of the play a moral man, his morality appears limited to loyalty and defending what the subtitle of the play calls “the honour of God.” Anouilh describes a man who has simply switched allegiances (or has had them switched for him) and is as scrupulously loyal to God as he

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was once to his former worldly Lord: thus a man without a personal centre. Anouilh takes many liberties with history. As the biographical records make clear, Becket’s origins were Norman, the family having immigrated to England when Becket’s father was middleaged, but in Anouilh’s version Becket is made a Saxon. (Henry calls him “my little Saxon” [my emphasis], further deforming history by the diminutive.) Whether, as he claimed, Anouilh consulted no biographical material on Becket, we know that he had read at least one book on the subject, Augustin Thierry’s Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normans, and that it provided him with all the “historical” material he wanted. The work is “a colourful, romanticized and inaccurate account of the events of the Norman invasion and its aftermath, which itself owed a great deal to Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe.”25 Important among his historical errors, Thierry attributes to Thomas Becket a Saxon father and the condition of bastardy. It is possible, but I think unlikely, that Anouilh picked up this detail ignorant of the fact that Thomas was pure Norman. Nevertheless, it suited his purposes for by this means he could manage the story so as to make it one concerning some of his and his epoch’s favourite themes: “Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu is in fact particularly Sartrean in its emphasis on role-playing, bastardy, incommunicability, solitude, and the importance of facing up to the consequences of one’s actions, coupled with an awareness of the absurdity of the human condition.”26 Anouilh changes Thomas’s genealogy in order to further politicize the meaning of the play: the Saxons were the defeated and dispossessed underlings of the Normans, loathed by their conquerors and loathing them in return. The specific political theme is carried out in a subplot, also completely unhistorical, in which Grim, who had stood by the archbishop when he was attacked and received a grave wound for it, is transformed into a sullen and murderous



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“little Saxon” bent on killing at least one Norman before he dies. Unlike the historical Grim, he dies beside Thomas, failing to achieve his vengeful goal. The change of Thomas’s nationality also allows Anouilh to develop another of his favourite themes – collaboration, a subject to which the post-World War II French were especially alert. Part of Thomas’s moral dilemma in Anouilh’s play is his role as a Saxon collaborator with the new Norman regime. The issue is addressed directly in the play, and the fact that Becket’s collaboration is sympathetically explained may remind us that Anouilh himself was suspected of collaboration with the Nazi occupation forces. Thomas’s character, according to Anouilh’s interpretation, is more complex than in any of the eyewitness biographies. The awkward addition of Gwendolen, young Thomas’s mistress, functions rather transparently to reveal Thomas as a man incapable of genuine, forthright love. Early in the play, the ever insecure Henry blurts out: “Do you love me, Becket?” to which he receives an ambiguous answer: “I am your servant, my prince.” Henry persists, hoping to discover the ground of Thomas’s heart: “Do you love Gwendolen?” to which he receives a perfectly parallel answer: “She is my mistress, my prince” (Act 1). In Becket it is “ought” that determines affectivity. He ought to love the king, and so he does; he ought to love Gwendolen, and so he does. From Anouilh’s perspective, it is this same concept of obligation that characterizes Thomas’s relation to God; once given the responsibilities of archbishop, he ought to love God and serve him, and so he does. It is a portrait of a cerebral character empty at the core. In a move of childish reprisal and male sexual dominance, Henry calls in a favour (he once conceded to Thomas a girl that he wanted himself, demanding “a favour for a favour”) by requiring Thomas to let him have Gwendolen for the night. Henry’s motive is partially to humiliate Thomas and partially to test whether he really is capable of love: “You care about her, then? Can you care for something?” As the audience recalls from the earlier scene, Henry’s first question was “Do you love me?” (emphasis added), for through-

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out the play Henry begs for Thomas’s love, always fearing that his friend is incapable of it. “What looks like morality in you is nothing more than aesthetics. Is that true, or isn’t it?” Thomas replies: “It is true, my Lord.” The answer to whether Anouilh’s Thomas is capable of love is provided by Thomas himself when Gwendolen, as she departs for Henry’s bed, asks: “My Lord cares for nothing in the whole world, does he?” Becket: “No” (Act 1). It is from this affective sterility that the archbishop is turned in the conversion that precedes his death, but even then Anouilh limits the spirituality of his hero by presenting the Novus homo that Thomas becomes as one whose inner worth is ethically, not spiritually, constituted through loyalty to the Church. Anouilh undermines even this virtue by burlesquing and satirizing the Church and her clergy. The last scene of act four has Pope Alexander and Cardinal Zambelli plotting and scheming about how to handle the Becket affair so as to reap the greatest political benefit for the pope. The scene is preceded by King Louis’ warning to Becket: “Beware of the Pope. He’ll sell you for thirty pieces of silver” (Act 3). The two clergymen, deeply distrustful of one another, are a cliché combination of Machiavellianism and mediaeval sophistry that taints the commitment of Becket, who by the end of the play has found the meaning of his life in the defense of the Church. The fullest expression of the nature of the “new man” that Thomas has become is found at the end of act three in his long prayer-like speech in which he clearly perceives the danger of the spiritual pride that comes with the hair shirt he wears, the fasting, and the night long praying. He recognizes, too, that even in pleasure, power, and riches Grace can be found: “In power and in luxury, and even in the pleasures of the flesh, I shall not cease to speak to You, I feel this now” (Act 3). Thomas’s decision to return to England and resume his functions as Archbishop of Canterbury is thus, in Anouilh’s view, a greater act of humility than the various mortifications of the flesh Becket has practiced until now: “Lord, I am certain now that You



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meant to tempt me with this hair shirt, object of so much vapid selfcongratulation!” (Act 3). In this way Anouilh enters the debate, found in so many versions of the Life of Thomas Becket, concerning just how saintly his martyrdom was. The pride that would attach to deliberately seeking martyrdom is generally disproved in the biographies by having Thomas resist his attackers, but Anouilh has him stand stoically as the assassins fell him and hack him to death. The play’s interpretation of Becket’s deepest motive in resisting the king and accepting martyrdom is complex and unique to Anouilh. The author sees Becket as an idealist in search of a genuine self, and in the vocabulary of the play this search is called “my honour.” It is, we come to see, this lack of a self, the missing inner life, that disables Becket’s capacity for love; there is, so to speak, no one there able to feel. In a revealing dialogue with Henry in the last act of the play, Thomas himself discovers this: “I was a man without honour. And suddenly I found it – one I never imagined would ever become mine – the Honour of God. A frail, incomprehensible honour, vulnerable as a boy-king fleeing from danger” (Act 3). This leaves the question of the authenticity of Becket’s spirituality ambiguous; was his self-sacrifice a desperate last act of vanity or a genuine self-discovery and self-transcendence? In the murder scene, Anouilh combines both historic accuracy and invention. In the biographies, Becket insists that his pursuers not be hindered as they attempt to enter the cathedral, nor at any other point in their attack. The early writers interpret this as further proof that Thomas foresaw his martyrdom and knew that it was ordained by God. Thomas’s detractors point to it as evidence of his pride and a lust for martyrdom that led to a form of passive suicide. In the play, Thomas clearly foresees his murder and, with the little Saxon monk (Grim), dresses for the event in his finest ecclesiastical regalia. He resists the efforts of the priests to protect him and, in a stage direction that puts Anouilh on the side of Salisbury’s original fiction, goes to meet death standing at the altar. Thomas

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turns his back on his assassins, faces the crucifix on the altar and is hacked down by their swords. In Anouilh’s view, the moral and intellectual richness to be found in the life of Saint Thomas is the spectacle of an intransigent idealist confronting an inherently corrupt world and choosing death rather than compromise. There is nothing “spiritual” in this, it is all existential confrontation. Thus through the workings of a secular playwright, the text of Saint Thomas’s Life is visually extended in the direction of agnosticism and contemporary morality. The last scene is a return to the first in which King Henry II is doing penance before the shrine of the martyr he made. The naked monarch is being whipped by four monks, duplicating (as the stage directions state) the blows of the four knights who had attacked Becket and thus, through this gesture, structurally suggesting a kind of equivalence between the sufferings of the two men. The play ends with a strong suggestion of cynical politics. One of the barons who has helped to murder Becket assures the king, referring to Henry’s just completed mortification, that the “operation has been successful” because the crowds outside the cathedral are cheering Henry’s humility and acclaiming his name “in the same breath as Becket’s.” And so Henry’s penance is revealed as a political stunt, one worsened in callousness when the king assigns to this same guilty baron the responsibility of finding and punishing Becket’s murderers: “Our justice will seek them out, Baron, and you will be especially entrusted with this inquiry, so that no one will be in any doubt as to our royal desire to defend the honour of God and the memory of our friend from this day forward” (Act 3).

Enactments Canterbury Cathedral was temporarily closed after Thomas’s murder because of the sacrilege that had taken place and out of fear of further retaliation by Henry, whose forces kept the common people



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away from the site and arrested anyone suspected of venerating the new martyr. It was finally the poor of Canterbury who defied the royal troops and began the veneration.27 Beyond the shores of England, where there was no opposition to the celebration of Thomas’s life and death, the martyr’s cult developed earlier than in his home country. When at last it was reopened to the public, the cathedral was overrun by pilgrims honouring Thomas and seeking cures. With astonishing rapidity, the cult of Saint Thomas Becket, canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1173, swept over all of Europe to its farthest reaches, along with expanding legends about him and his murder.28 Naturally one of the questions that arose had to do with the fate of his murderers. History and King Henry, it appears, were much kinder to the four assassins than popular legend for, whereas in fact they all went unpunished and prospered (although excommunicated), popular belief had them all dead within three years of their crime. Dogs could not eat the scraps that fell from their tables, bread turned rotten in their hands, and food flew off any table at which they sat.29 The veneration of most saints is characterized chiefly by the pilgrimages to their shrines.30 Many pilgrimages are local affairs, requiring only the displacement to a neighboring village, but the pilgrimages to major saints’ shrines were international, as we see in the itinerary of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath who had been to Jerusalem (three times!), to Rome, to Compostella, and to Cologne and who, when we meet her, is on her way to the other great pilgrimage site, the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Saint Thomas’s cult had formed almost as quickly as news of his martyrdom reached the ears of the faithful, and by April 1171 the doors of the crypt holding Thomas’s body were opened to admit pilgrims. John R. Butler says that the first stop for pilgrims to Canterbury was the Altar of the Sword’s Point, erected at the site of the martyr’s murder.31 Here is another example of the interaction between historical account and enactment, found in the detail of the broken sword tip having been

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left behind after the murder and transformed from a neutral object to a relic venerated by thousands. The pilgrims continued to the crypt where the monks of Canterbury had built a substantial tomb: “It consisted of four strong walls constructed of stone and compacted with mortar, lead and iron. A huge slab was placed on top of the walls. Two oval apertures were left on each side wall through which pilgrims could place their hands, heads, and in some case their whole bodies to be closer to the coffin. Many depictions of the tomb, with its oval openings, can still be seen in the ‘miracle windows’ in the Trinity Chapel, and similar tombs survive of St. Osmond in Salisbury Cathedral and St. Candida in Whitchurch Canonicorum.”32 In 1220, after a fire that destroyed portions of the cathedral’s choir, the construction of a new shrine was begun in the Trinity Chapel. On the fiftieth anniversary of his martyrdom, Saint Thomas’s relics were translated to what was described as the most magnificent saint’s shine in the world: It was raised up on steps and fronted by an altar and consisted of three parts: a stone plinth with an open arcaded base, the richly gilded and decorated wooden casket in which the feretum containing the relics of the saint was laid, and a painted wooden canopy, suspended from the roof by a series of pulleys that enabled it to be raised or lowered to reveal or cover the casket itself. The casket itself was covered in gold plate and decorated with fine golden trellis work. Affixed to the gold plate were innumerable jewels, pearls, sapphires, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, together with rings and cameos of sculptured agates, cornelians and onyx stones. Also attached to the casket was the great Régale of France which King Louis VII had given at the tomb in the crypt in 1179.33 According to legend, the enormous ruby given by Louis VII was as big as a hen’s egg or, according to Erasmus, bigger than a



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goose’s egg!34 Louis le Jeune, possessed of a fear of drowning while crossing the Channel to make his pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas, prayed to the saint for protection, promising to donate his famous Régale if he survived the passage. Kneeling safe and sound at the shrine days later and gazing at the magnificent gem, the king experienced increasing reluctance to part with it. Suddenly the jewel leapt from the mounting in which it was ensconced and adhered to the casket of the saint. After his destruction of the shrine and pillaging of its treasure, Henry VIII wore the Régale of France on his own person. 35 Such legendary material augments the text of the Life of Saint Thomas and is created precisely for that purpose. It departs from the written account of King Louis’ donation of the jewel and Henry VIII’s theft of it so as to embellish the text with the marvelous and miraculous. Legend fills the gap between the two events by inventing the story of the jewel’s leap to Saint Thomas’s tomb. The magnificence of the shrine was widely commented upon: “Most of the several visitors who have left written records of their impressions concurred with the Venetian ambassador who reported to his Doge at the end of the fifteenth century that the tomb was of a magnificence ‘which surpasses all belief’; and of the many priceless treasures that surrounded the shrine itself there was general agreement, too, that Louis VII’s famous ruby, the Régale, ‘left everything else far behind!’”36 Describing the state of the cult of Saint Thomas in England at the end of the Middle Ages, Barrie Dobson writes: “The monastic, collegiate, and parish churches of later medieval England (and not England alone) were literally honeycombed with chapels, chantries, and altars dedicated to Saint Thomas, and hence with the acts of intense and, usually, personal devotion which those dedications implied.”37 One of the most remarkable aspects of the devotion to Saint Thomas Becket is his function as Christ figure. In all hagiography, the Christian who attains sainthood does so through living his life

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and dying his death in imitation of the life and death of Jesus. In the recorded lives of the saints, some aspect of this mimesis is always evident: virgins, like Christ, preserve their innocence; doctors teach the gospel just as Jesus preached it; martyrs, like their master, give up their lives to defend and give witness to the truth. In the case of Thomas Becket, however, the imitation Christ appears to have been surpassed in a way that seems to promote him as almost the equal of Christ. The early written accounts emphasize analogies between incidents in the life of Christ and several in Thomas’, and from the earliest veneration the cult puts into practice these similitudes. No serious thinker entertained the idea that Thomas was equal to Christ; rather the identification appears to have been an innocent excess of the popular cult. In the cult, Thomas’s Christ-likeness is brought about dramatically through the theme of blood. The eyewitness accounts relate that the blood and brains that stained the cathedral floor were gathered up by the monks and combined with the blood drained from the martyr’s body after death. These remains – relics empowered through the willing sacrifice of his life – later became the centre of the cult of Saint Thomas.38 The monks who were in the cathedral when Thomas was killed saved the martyr’s brains and blood no doubt fully aware that they were preserving the remains of a saint. However, the ritual development of their actions went well beyond anything that the saint’s biography alone could have inspired. Although the quantity of blood from such a slaughter was great, it was not sufficient for the purposes that the monks had in mind for in the early days of the cult they fed a drop of Saint Thomas’s blood to each of the pilgrims as they arrived in greater and greater numbers at his shrine. The monks soon resorted to a more economic means of distributing this exquisite relic. Speaking of what came to be called the “Water of Saint Thomas,” James Craigie Robertson, referring to Benedict’s account, describes the practice: “As to the origin of this, we are told that, when the saint’s blood had been



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Fig. 3.9  Ampulla, 15th C. lead or pewter ampulla, anon., British Museum, reprinted from Tancred Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, London: Methuen & Co. (1932).

found to possess a miraculous power, there was a fear that it should be soon exhausted,”39 so they added to large quantities of water a small drop of the blood that remained. Pilgrims carried this liquid in small ampullae (Fig. 3.9) hung around their necks and also drank it as a cure.40 How extraordinary all this was is pointed out by Professor Slocum: “There was also the theological reality that until then the only blood consumed in Christian ceremonies was that of Christ. The drinking of a martyr’s blood, and one who was officially unconfirmed as such, was not only revolutionary – it could be considered to be wrong and even blasphemous.”41 The drinking of Thomas’s blood, especially when mixed with water, irresistibly suggests the sacrament of the Eucharist and therefore seems to equate Thomas with Christ, both of whom “gave their

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blood” for the people. This parallel did not stop with the drinking of blood, for the cult deepened the identification of the saint with his miracle-working Lord by claiming that during his life Thomas had turned water into wine. Part of the ritual of the veneration of the Archbishop of Canterbury includes the recitation of an antiphon received, according to legend, in a dream and thus of divine origin, by one Reginald, priest of Wretham: “Holy Thomas, citizen of heaven, / To all apostles equal, / The Martyrs thee receive / Daily in their hands. / A rare thing did our Lord / That he thy water changed into wine.”42 In the antiphon it is clear that Christ is performing the miracle, but it is thought that the antiphon itself may have helped to spread the less orthodox legend that while at table with Pope Alexander III during his exile Thomas changed water into wine, not once, but repeatedly.43 The ritual extension of the legend is seen in the Venetian wine coopers’ adoption of Saint Thomas as their patron saint for, in such an occupation, what better patron than one who changes water into wine. Thus we see again the cult creating aspects of the text that, in this case, solidify the identification of Thomas with Christ. Although Professor Slocum is correct in stating that this aspect of the cult skirts the boundaries of the blasphemous, we note the care with which the antiphon, cited above, attributes the changing of the water to wine, not to Thomas, but to Christ himself through Thomas. Another miracle involving a similar but more popular kind of transformation is found in the legend that Saint Thomas could also cause fermentation. The legend behind this has it that a certain couple wishing to make a pilgrimage to Saint Thomas’s shrine at Canterbury found themselves too impecunious to afford the trip. They decided to invest their slim resources to procure what was needed to brew beer in order to raise the funds for their travel. The brew they concocted failed to ferment, and the wife in despair threw into the brew a cord that had held an ampulla of Thomas’s blood. The liquid immediately fermented into the finest beer and brought



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the couple ample funds to make their pilgrimage to Canterbury. As a further result, Saint Thomas Becket became the patron saint of London brewers.44 The depiction of Saint Thomas as Christ-like is found throughout the cult. In the office for his feast day, the archbishop’s return to England from exile is acclaimed with the same exclamation that greeted Jesus as he entered Jerusalem: “He was received, consequently, by the people and the clerics with inestimable joy, as all wept and sang, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”45 Furthermore, the liturgy specifies that just as Christ’s crucifixion typologically fulfilled the prophesy of Psalm 22:18 – “They part my garments among them” – so Thomas’s clothes and possessions are taken by his assassins: “As if to liken the passion of the servant even more completely to the passion of the Lord, they divided his clothing among themselves.”46 In subtle ways the orthodoxy of the cult was asserted while at the same time affirming the Christ-likeness of the Canterbury martyr. In the office for the saint’s feast day, for instance, there is an echo of Christ’s sacrifice in shedding his blood for us but in a reversal that has Thomas shedding his blood for Christ, who then mediates that sacrifice so that it is, in fact, for us and becomes the power by which we may be saved: “Through the blood of Thomas / Which he shed for you, / Cause us, Christ, to ascend, / Where Thomas rose.”47 The theme of Novus homo found in both the written accounts and the visual narratives is also present in the liturgy. References to Thomas as a “new man” are plentiful in the prayers and praises of the saint, as Professor Slocum has amply shown. These offices, created soon after the martyr’s death, celebrate his feast day, 29 December, as well as his return from exile to Canterbury. One of them, the Studens livor, is typical, and the theme of Novus homo is prominent: “Raised to the highest / Priestly office / Thomas was suddenly changed / Into another man.”48 Thomas’s conversion from service to the world to service to the Church is also captured in a fourteenth-century, Spanish hymn

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where its Pauline origin is specified: “Adolescens fere Saulus / Praesul factus vere Paulus / Commutavit stadium.”49 Still another example is seen in the late thirteenth-century Quadrilogus published by Slocum: “For when consecrated, he was suddenly transformed into another man. He secretly put on a hair shirt and wore hairy breeches reaching to his knees.”50 Thomas also echoes Jesus in being designated in the liturgy as the Good Shepherd, a compliment extended to other outstanding clerical saints. But in addition to the Christological title, Saint Thomas is said to raise the dead: “First, at the time of his martyrdom, the martyr began to glisten with remarkable miracles, restoring sight to the blind, walking to the lame, hearing to the deaf, speech to the mute, then cleansing lepers, restoring paralytics, curing dropsy and all varieties of fatal, incurable disease, even resuscitating the dead.”51 Raising the dead is a power usually reserved to Christ himself since it is an indication of divinity. Thus John of Salisbury calls Thomas’s act “a thing unheard of from the days of our fathers.”52 The principal enactment of the devotees of Saint Thomas was accomplished through prayer, and their prayers were, more often than not, petitions for cures. Saint Thomas’s help was sought for numerous ailments, and these intercessions and the miracles that sometimes followed were the origin of the written accounts that reported them, not the other way round. In the details of Thomas’s biographies, there is no particular reason to be found why the blind should seek his aid and certainly none to encourage castrated men to pin their hopes for restored virility on the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But they did! In this way enactment engenders biography and iconography, and together they expand the text. An example of this mutual reinforcement of the three dimensions of the holistic text can be seen in Benedict’s account of the miracle: “And something that ought to be more wondered at by all, and to the whole world extraordinary, the fact that new eyes and new genitals were created for someone who was mutilated on both eyes and genitals, the martyr having been continually invoked.”53



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Fig. 3.10  Castration and blinding of Eilward of Westoning, ca.1215–20. Miracle Window n.III -, anon., Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England, reprinted from Bernard Rackham, Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, London: Lund Humphries (1949).

The iconographic expression of this is found in the Canterbury Cathedral Miracle Window where Eilward of Westoning is blinded and castrated (Fig. 3.10) and, in another panel, where he is restored to sight and manhood after praying to Saint Thomas (Fig. 3.10a). In the enactment that is the monastic office, the event is further celebrated: “Thomas shines with / Wondrous miracles, / He endows

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Fig. 3.10a  Eilward cured after he prays to St Thomas, ca.1215–20 miracle window n. III -, anon., Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, England, reprinted from Bernard Rackham, Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, London: Lund Humphries (1949).

the castrated / With male genitalia, / He provides sight to those / Deprived of eyes.”54 While the restoration of sight to the blind is commonplace in hagiographical miracles, its combination with the restoration of genitals is not, although Thomas is not the only saint to accomplish this – Saint Walstan of Bawburgh was also adept in restoring the private parts, not only of men, but also of animals.55 The story has its origins in the cure received by one of Thomas’s devotees and recorded in the Vitae; Benedict records it in detail and William lists it as the first of Thomas’s miracles (lexio ix). In the gruesome tale, Eilward of Westoning, having been rebuffed in an attempt to collect a debt, steals trifling objects from his debtor – a pair of gloves and a grindstone. The debtor accuses him of theft but is advised by a conniving judge that the objects stolen are of



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too little value to merit the severe punishment desired, and that he should claim that other items were stolen, as well. Eilward, now accused of a crime punishable by blinding and mutilation, attempts to prove his innocence by undergoing trial by water but fails the test. The execution of the terrible sentence is, as mentioned above, depicted in detail in the iconography of the Canterbury Miracle Windows.56 Benedict reports that Eilward, instructed by Saint Thomas in dreams, prays until he begins to see from the empty sockets of his head a light that grows brighter and brighter. Tiny eyeballs, we are told, begin to develop in the sockets until they fill the orbs. One, it is specified, is black, the other parti-colored.57 While Benedict makes no mention of the restoration of the genitals, liturgical enactment celebrates it. One of the practices found in the cult of Saint Thomas, as in other cults, was the measuring of the body of the saint’s devotee so as to craft a wax candle of the same size, the candle then being offered at the shrine of the martyr. Just as the devotee sent up his or her prayers to the listening ear of the patron saint in heaven, the candle, now an image of the petitioner, sent up its silent prayer in the symbolic form of fire and smoke. Wax, as well as metal, was also the medium in which simulacra of bodily organs and members were left at the shrine as ex voto by those who had been cured through Thomas’s intercession. Wealthier devotees expressed their gratitude with pewter or silver images of their healed body parts. These ex voto were among the casualties of the iconoclastic attacks on Saint Thomas’s shrine instigated by Henry VIII, but a window in Canterbury depicts one instance of a pilgrim leaving ex voto. One of the medallions shows pilgrims arriving at the tomb of Saint Thomas and a cleric receiving what seem to be their ex voto – a candle and a casket placed on the top of the tomb (Fig. 3.11). The same window depicts mad Henry of Fordwich, bound and being forced to Saint Thomas’s tomb which exhibits the openings provided for pilgrims to touch the relics of the saint (Fig. 3.12).

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Fig. 3.11  Presentation of ex voto candle, 1215–20 miracle window, anon., Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, England, reprinted from Bernard Rackham, Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, London: Lund Humphries (1949).

Because he was insane, we may guess that it was Henry’s head that was thrust into one of the apertures. In any case, a pendant scene shows the now-tranquil Henry cured of his madness, and the ropes that bound him and the sticks with which he was driven to the tomb left there as ex voto. Saint Thomas’s tomb is represented with oval apertures at the base below the section in which the martyr’s body rested (Figures 3.11, 3.12 for instance). According to early accounts, the structure was so arranged to permit pilgrims to reach into it and touch the coffin of the saint. The openings were, however, large enough



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Fig. 3.12  Henry of Fordwich, 1215–20 miracle window, anon., Canterbury Cathedral, England, photo: Anthony Scibilia/Art Resource, NY, reprinted by permission of Art Resource, NY.

to permit a pilgrim to crawl inside the area just below the saint’s resting place.58 Incubation, the practice of lying or sleeping upon, under, or in proximity to the body of a saint or other relic, seems to have been widely practiced in the cult of Saint Thomas. The power of relics is initiated by physical touch: in incubation the whole body of the penitent or devotee comes into contact with the remains of the sanctified person. It is thought that the relic thus transmits a sanctifying or restorative power through such contact. Benedict records the success of a very portly pilgrim, Edward of Selling who, despite his girth, was able to squeeze into the tomb and spend the night lying “his head to the martyr’s feet, and his feet to the martyr’s head. Thus extended over the body of the saint, he slept but little.”59 Considered by the monks as the most sacred relic after his blood, the part of Saint Thomas’s skull sheared off in the attack was encased

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in a silver container in the form of a head, and pilgrims kissed the exposed bone, which was placed, along with other relics, at the eastern end of Trinity Chapel.60 It was particularly revered not only as a body part of the saint, but because it was the part anointed with holy oil when Thomas received Holy Orders. Other cult practices and beliefs remain inexplicable and seem to have no connection at all with the biography: for instance, on the eve of the saint’s feast day, horses throughout England knelt down reverently; on the day itself, 29 December, women went from house to house collecting gifts, an echo, perhaps, of the Christmas practice.61 In addition to formal ritual and veneration, popular legend also extends the text of the life of Saint Thomas Becket. Legends about the English martyr swept through Europe, many of these stories having to do with assertions that Thomas had at one point or another lived, visited, said Mass, or otherwise been present in a particular place. In France, such legends addressed the time that the archbishop was in exile there, but there are so many such local legends that it is impossible, given the time that Becket was in France, that he could have visited so many places. One legend has it that a street in Lille, rue d’Angleterre, was so named in honour of the martyr because he had, it is believed, lived there for a time. It was generally believed that Becket had imparted to the waters of a well at his house there an efficacy for the healing of fever and other maladies. This belief has apparently been preserved to the present, owing to the many cures that have been attributed to the miraculous water.62 A further aspect of enactment is seen in music and theatre. Although Henry VIII succeeded in destroying most of the liturgical manuscripts in England, enough survive to reveal a vigorous musical hagiography. Among the survivors was the In Rama sonat gemitus, the oldest musical composition in praise of Saint Thomas, first preserved in Scotland and later sent to Germany, as Denis Stevens tells us: “In that text we read: ‘In Rama a cry escapes the lips of the unhappy English Rachel. A son of Herod delivers her to



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ignominy: Behold! Her first born, a Joseph of Canterbury is in exile as if sold into bondage, and he lives in the Egypt of France.’”63 The allegory is obvious but brilliant. The author of the musical text has extended the facts of Thomas’s life backward in time to join them to the scriptural story of Joseph and his brothers, itself a typological foreshadowing of the betrayal of Christ by his own people. History is transcended, and meaning swells: Rama is Canterbury; Rachel is Mother Church, whose first born, Joseph, is Thomas, child of the Church, persecuted by the latest of Herod’s moral descendents, Henry II. A visual clue to the gloss is provided by the figure of a bishop’s or archbishop’s cross in a capital of the manuscript, as interpreted by Stevens. Another musical composition honouring Becket is found in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The Novus miles sequitur uses the common theme of miles Christi, adapting it to Thomas Becket. This text involves three voices singing three couplets. The first intones, “A new soldier follows in the footsteps of a new king.” Stevens explains, “If Becket is here called a soldier, it is not thanks to his exploits at Toulouse, but rather to his canonization, 21 February 1173, which made of him Christ’s knight: Miles Christi gloriose.”64 In the second couplet, the images of Christus medicus and Bonus pastor are attributed to Saint Thomas; the theme of his miraculous blood and the many miracles it has effected is sung. In the third couplet, more contemporary and topical references occur: Thomas is praised as the champion of young Prince Henry and of the clergy and people.65 Stevens also brings to light the office of Saint Thomas’s liturgy, composed soon after the martyr’s death. This music is sung during the procession on the eve of Thomas’s feast day, and it punctuates the progress of the movement from one part of the church to another in such a way that both chant and movement are woven into a text. At the outset of the procession toward the altar of Saint Thomas is sung the response. The choir begins to sing, a soloist sings the versicle and then the choir repeats the end of the response:

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“At this point the procession arrived at the foot of Saint Thomas’s altar and while the celebrant censed the altar and the image of the Saint, soloists sang the prose Clangat pastor, alternating the couplets (which went 2 by 2); after each demi-couplet, the choir echoed the melody on the a vowel: ‘Clangat pastor in tuba cornea, AUt libera sit Christi vinea.’ A-66 The musical compositions for the liturgy of Saint Thomas often adopt the same metaphors as the images and the hagiographical attributions. As polyphony, however, the musical renditions make clearer the interweaving of these attributions, so that in the case of Thomas, the martyr is seen as soldier, shepherd, physician, novus homo, and so on, not consecutively, but simultaneously. Denis Stevens also provides examples of popular musical tributes to Saint Thomas in the three extant carols he cites, one in Latin, one in English, and a macaronic in Latin and English: “‘Carols’ on the one hand, and the liturgy on the other exchange ideas and motifs, which leads one to imagine that the ‘carols’ were sung at the end of the services between Christmas and Epiphany, a period that included the principal feast of Saint Thomas.”67 Other forms of liturgy or quasi-liturgy also enact the text of Thomas’s Life. The fact that Murder in the Cathedral was written for the 1935 Canterbury Festival at the request of the Bishop of Chichester suggests that it functions as liturgical enactment as well as dramatic entertainment. Its language, structure, and style further strengthen this view. The structure of the play is simple and formal. In addition to the archbishop, there are three priests, four “tempters,” four knights, and the chorus. It is the chorus that lends a ritual tone to the drama; it is identified as constituted by “Women of Canterbury,” and as with dramatic choruses generally, they represent us, the audience, beholding what we behold, feeling what we feel as the narrative unfolds. The four tempters simultaneously suggest the



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temptations of Christ in the desert and also cancel the suggestion by being four, not three. The same imbalance inheres in the relation of the three priests to the four tempters. On the other hand, the four tempters balance perfectly with Thomas’s four assassins. Thus both correspondence and non-correspondence become significant, both at the structural level and at the level of meaning. The play’s language is formal and poetic. The play is written in verse, and the use of refrain and repetition is extensive. Central images are established and carried through to the end of the play, gathering further meaning with the progress of the action. The address to the audience by the four knights who have murdered Becket breaks the liturgical style for an important purpose, and the fact that their speeches are in prose underscores the divorce – stylistic and philosophical – between their address and the rest of the play. Reminiscent of classical drama, Murder in the Cathedral opens with the chorus. Here they are the women of Canterbury, poor and devout, victims of the politics of their time: “King rules or barons rule; / We have suffered various oppressions.” The Third Priest later picks up the theme of political oppression first established by the chorus by repeating its line, “King rules or barons rule” (Part I, 22–3), a comment on politics absent from the early historical accounts of Thomas’s life. In its first speech, the chorus also establishes the theme of “seven years” (“Seven years and the summer is over / Seven years since the Archbishop left us.”). This is repeated by the First Priest as the three priests come on stage: “Seven years since the Archbishop left us.” As all of the historical accounts tell us, Thomas left for France in October 1164 and returned in November 1170, and he was thus away from Canterbury, not for seven full years, but for six years and a month. Eliot was certainly aware of this fact, so the change must be seen as intentional. Other than the number seven’s greater symbolic significance, which the author does not exploit, all that the change effects is the added syllable in the verse (“Seven years

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and the summer is over”), so it may be possible to deduce that the choice of “seven” over the historically correct “six” is principally for metrical reasons. However, this verse also introduces the theme of time or, more precisely, the passage of time. A paradox is created by the Third Priest who repeats the line but joins it to an image of stasis: “For good or ill, let the wheel turn. / The wheel has been still these seven years, and no good.” This symbolic element unites Murder in the Cathedral to the rest of Eliot’s poetry for the wheel is one of the recurring symbols in his work. This has not gone unnoticed by Eliot scholars, as Louis Martz shows in his essay “The Wheel and the Point.” The image of the wheel, famously used by Boethius to indicate mutability, is for Eliot the perfect image of the mystery of time. The puzzle of time itself had been existentially solved by Saint Augustine, a singularly great influence on Eliot, in his Confessions. For Eliot, however, the relation of mundane time to eternity remains something beyond logic and is represented by the wheel, the movement of which emanates from the hub where, at its very centre, there is no movement. The wheel is thus the perfect figure of the paradox of time and eternity – movement and stasis. The turning of the wheel further suggests the relation of time and space, another “mystery” in the poetic view. Martz acutely observes that at the centre of the wheel, the hub from which all motion extends but where there is perfect stasis, Eliot posits the spiritual state of peace. He quotes Eliot’s lines from Burnt Norton: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement.” Martz continues: “Becket alone by the true path of conscious submission to the central Word, as explained by his definition of Peace in the Christmas sermon. Becket’s death is thus the still point of the world that turns within the play.”68 Eliot’s rendition of Becket’s life teases out of the more taciturn historical accounts the profound spirituality of a sacrifice that renders the event into poetic statement. Identifying Becket’s death as



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the arrival at the still point of the turning wheel, the “text” of Saint Thomas Becket expands into the mystical. The mundane life that constantly inclines toward death is seen in the chorus’ description of its own existence: “Living and partly living,” while in contrast, Becket’s death inclines toward life: “I give my life / To the Law of God above the Law of Man.” The chorus possesses the wisdom of the world, and it is right to fear the return of Becket to England for, in some imprecise way, it sees and fears the transformation of the world that his martyrdom will effect. Thus the insight of Becket’s words to the priest who would silence the chorus: “Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation. / They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding. / They know and do not know” (Part I, 206–8). The dramatically powerful function of the Four Tempters is to bring out and resolve a question that haunts the Becket text – whether his virtue ever really overcame his vices and led him to true sanctity. Thus he is tempted in each of the ways of his life’s weaknesses. The first Tempter reminds Thomas of the sensual pleasures that he enjoyed when they were all three friends – Thomas, the king, and the Tempter – pleasures not only of food, drink, and sex but also aesthetic and intellectual pleasures, “wine and wisdom, viols in the hall” (Part I, 260–1). Thomas easily resists the first Tempter, rebuking him with the insight that: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think / He can turn the wheel on which he turns” (Part I, 289–90). The relative banality of the vices proffered by the first Tempter is brought out by the Tempter himself who, defeated, quits Thomas with the insightful words: “I leave you to the pleasures of your higher vices” (Part I, 309). These higher vices come through the ministrations of the second, third, and fourth Tempters, and we glean that the author is presenting a kind of hierarchy of evils. The second Tempter reminds Becket of the delight that power and worldly glory once held and that may be had again. The rewards and pleasures of power, the second Tempter declares, reach beyond

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death, seen in the “templed tomb, monument of marble” (Part I, 337). The second Tempter, subtler than the first, presents power as a tool to effect morality, a means to “protect the poor,” “disarm the ruffian,” “dispensing justice, make all even” (Part I, 346–50). This is one of the great temptations of the religious man, the temptation to atrophy spirituality in morality. Thomas is tempted to rationalize lust for power, a way of being in and for the world, by using that power, at least sometimes, for the “good.” The second Tempter is dismissed with Thomas’s declaration that to use power to build a good world not ordered to the will of God is no power at all. The third Tempter begins with a litany of what he is not, concluding that he is “a rough, straightforward Englishman” (Part I, 410), a cliché worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan and which attempts to conceal the Tempter’s demonic subtlety. The Tempter lures Becket by telling the truth, or at least some of it – in particular, that the friendship between Thomas and Henry can never be repaired. The third temptation is revenge – to join a group of barons seeking the overthrow of Henry II. It, too, is wrapped in morality and noble idealism – saving England and saving the Church. The three temptations of Jesus after his fast of forty days represent the lure of fundamental vices, all related to pride. Becket’s three temptations correspond roughly to those endured by Jesus, reinforcing in Eliot’s version the widespread theme of Saint Thomas as a Christ-figure. Satan first tempts Jesus through the senses by telling him, after forty days of fast, to feed himself by turning stones into bread. When this fails, the Tempter offers him all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus will worship him, a temptation to lust for power. At last he dares Jesus to throw himself from a high place and to call upon the angels to save him, a temptation to hubris and presumption. All of the temptations are to use divine power for trivial things. Had he fallen, the Messiah would have acted as a mere magician, turning what is real into illusion.



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Eliot adds a fourth temptation to Thomas’s ordeal, and Thomas himself is surprised: “I expected / Three visitors, not four” (Part I, 476–7). So had the audience. This discontinuity with the paradigm of Jesus’ temptations reinforces the paradigm ever more stringently and forces the parallel into the conscious awareness of the audience. The fourth Tempter is within Thomas himself and is therefore the most dangerous. The other temptations were to things external, things of the world that any man might desire or might resist, but the fourth Tempter resides and works within Becket’s heart: “I am only here, Thomas, to tell you what you know.” He is the voice within blowing into flame the coals of Thomas’s real vice – spiritual pride: “But think, Thomas, think of the glory after death. / When king is dead, there’s another king, / And one more king is another reign. / King is forgotten when another shall come: / Saint and martyr rule from the tomb. / Think, Thomas, think of enemies dismayed, / Creeping in penance, frightened of a shade; / Think of pilgrims standing in line / Before the glittering jeweled shrine” (Part I, 528–40). It is only the religious man who can be tempted in such a way, and it is the worst temptation of all because, annulling the very spirituality of the pious man, it thus annuls the man himself. It turns good into evil in a way more complete than the practice of all the other vices. This question, the question of the paradox of humility, had been posed early on concerning the authenticity of Becket’s conversion and martyrdom, but it achieves a full resolution only in Eliot’s play. The fourth Tempter goes straight to the heart of the matter when he reveals Thomas’s most secret thoughts, which correctly reflect the future of the cult of Saint Thomas Becket from pillage by iconoclasts to neglect by once faithful devotees: “When miracles cease, and the faithful desert you, / And men shall only do their best to forget you. / And later is worse, when men will not hate you / Enough to defame or to execrate you, / But pondering the qualities that you lacked / Will only try to find the historical

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fact. / When men shall declare that there was no mystery / About this man who played a certain part in history” (Part I, 553–60). With these lines, Eliot leaps out of the play and addresses directly the subject of our discussion – the nature of the living, holistic text – through a description of its opposite – the text reduced to written fact, deprived of image, of enactment, of a faith community. Eliot, of course, knows that in his own time this is what has happened, and his play, like his poetry, is an attempt to reincarnate words through their reunion with image and act. The fourth Tempter is added by Eliot in contradiction of the scriptural model because that to which he tempts Thomas, Jesus could not have been tempted since, born without original sin, there is nothing “in” him that is evil or that tends to evil. Thomas, in the face of the fourth Tempter, is fallen man whose peril comes, not from without, but from within. The enactment that is Murder in the Cathedral brings this out more clearly and profoundly than any other expression of the “text” of the saint’s life. It is thanks to the fourth Tempter that Thomas is able to overcome the most insidious of temptations because through its articulation he can “see it” for what it is: hubris. As long as his hubris was hidden within his heart, the temptation was part of him and loved as such. Once externalized, represented dramatically, the real nature of these desires must be faced and, when faced, overcome. Becket’s transcendence is reflected in the Christmas sermon he delivers a few days before his martyrdom. In Eliot’s revision, Thomas defines in a personal way what it is to be a martyr: “A martyrdom … is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God and no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr” (Interlude, 65–70). In such complete submission, Thomas will neither seek nor shun martyrdom; he will seek the will of God. What, then, is the “text” of the Life of Saint Thomas Becket? Without doubt it begins with the historical accounts written by those



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who knew him, although those texts are not in complete agreement as to details. Here we might point to the curious analogy between the various accounts concerning Saint Thomas’s life and the four gospels constituting the record of the life of Christ. The evangelists’ accounts are famously diverse, although they tell exactly the same story. The reception of these sacred texts in the faith communities for which they were written is one that regards the differences as complementary, not contradictory, seeing them as parts of a greater and richer whole. Similarly, the reader confronted with one statement that Thomas was standing at the high altar when struck down and another that he was standing by a pillar near the altar of Saint Benedict transcends the literal level of factuality to a symbolic level where the contradiction is resolved in meaning. It is the purpose of the image and the enactment to promote that transcendence.

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Chapter Four

SAINT mAXImILIAN KOLBe

With the last saint to be discussed, we have a modern figure historicized according to modern standards. There is ample documentation concerning his parents, his childhood, his youth and mature years, and his death. There are many letters, articles, conferences, and other documents written by him and a host of eyewitnesses who knew him, some still living. His life is documented in a twentieth-century manner. In comparison to the saints we have discussed, however, our twentieth-century saint possesses a much smaller cult and what might be called an incipient iconography. Thus the historical dimension of the text that is Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s Vita is dominant and the written word prominent. It is this dominance that makes Kolbe a good test case for the concept of the holistic text. Words Biographies of the saint range from the pious and devotional to the objective and factual, but each in its way tells more or less the same story. Some are organized chronologically, beginning with Raymund Kolbe’s childhood and ending with his death in Auschwitz;

others, while communicating the events of his life, are structured along the lines of an exegesis on its meaning. Raymund Kolbe was one of three sons of Julius Kolbe and Maria Dobrowska, poor Polish weavers, both of whom were deeply religious. Maria outlived her son, but his father was executed in 1914 for his participation in the efforts to liberate Poland from Russian dominance. Raymund, the middle son, is described as a difficult boy in his early years, during which the first event that forms his hagiography took place. Having tried the patience of his very strict mother, Raymund heard her wonder, “Whatever will become of you?” The question evidently impressed the boy deeply for he disappeared for long periods of time behind the kitchen cabinet where there was a prie-dieu and a small altar with an image of the Our Lady of Czestochowa. He became uncharacteristically taciturn and preoccupied for days on end. To his mother’s insistent inquiries, the boy finally revealed that he had taken her question about his future to the Virgin Mary, and that she had appeared to him, offering two crowns, one red, the other white, representing alternately a life of martyrdom and a life of chastity. Mary asked Raymund which he would choose, and he replied, “Both!”1 Raymund was tutored by the local pharmacist who had been impressed by his ability to order medicines for his mother in Latin. The family had enough money for the tuition of only one of their children, and it was the eldest who was sent to school. However, thanks to the generosity of his tutor and his own intelligence and perseverance, Raymund passed the entrance examinations along with his brother Francis, and his academic career began. In school he was quickly recognized as an extraordinarily intelligent student, particularly talented in sciences and mathematics. In 1907, at thirteen, he entered the Franciscan monastery school in Lwow, Austria with his brother, Francis. From boyhood, Raymund had been given to military fantasies and had dreamed of a career as a soldier. It is said that he hesitated between the army and

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the Church, and that as he was on his way to tell the Father Provincial that he had chosen the army, his mother arrived to reveal that the youngest son, Joseph, had decided on the priesthood, his father had joined the Franciscan friars, and she was on her way to join the Benedictine sisters in Lwow. “Now,” she declared, “the whole family will belong to God.”2 Raymund renounced the army and embraced the Church. It is interesting that one of his biographers, discussing Raymund’s days in the seminary, employs the same Pauline figure that we saw applied to Saint Thomas Becket: “His novitiate served to replace little by little the ‘old man’ by the ‘new man,’ Obiit Raymundus, natus est Maximilianus.”3 The tradition of choosing, or being assigned, a new name upon entering the religious life echoes the Pauline concept of being “born again.” The theme arises in Kolbe’s life out of the religious ritual by which he entered the Franciscan order: “On Friday 4 September 1910 after the conventual Mass, Raymund knelt before the altar in the ancient ceremony to enter the novitiate. Firstly the Provincial relieved Raymund of his lay jacket, saying in Latin, ‘May the Lord deliver you from the old man and his actions.’ Vesting him with the habit he prayed, ‘May the Lord clothe you with the new man created in justice and the holiness of truth.’”4 Raymund’s new name was to be Maksymilian, appropriate for a youth who had only reluctantly turned his back on the military and chosen to be a miles Christi for it commemorated the Roman martyr, Maximilian who, obliged by law to become a soldier in the Roman legions, refused: “‘I will not be a soldier of this world for I am a soldier of Christ. My army is the army of God!’”5 The Roman martyr proved a perfect model for the young Franciscan, who soon began to develop military strategies for the conversion of the world. In 1912 Maximilian, as one of the exceptional students at Lwow, was chosen to do advanced studies at the Gregorian University in Rome where he would eventually take two doctorates, one in philosophy and one in theology. He was, however, initially reluctant to go because he had heard that in that city the women were so aggres-



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sive that they accosted seminarians on the street. But it would seem that the only woman who accosted the young seminarian was the “Immaculate” for it was there in Rome that his boyhood devotion to Mary Immaculate became fervent and fixed. So also, unfortunately, did his tuberculosis. Much of the time that Maximilian spent in Rome, he was seriously ill with the disease that he would carry with him through life. In 1917 the second centenary of the Free Masons was celebrated in Rome. It involved its members displaying banners depicting the triumph of Satan over Saint Michael and demonstrations proclaiming that Satan would come to rule the Vatican and the pope would be his slave.6 The enormity of the insult stirred Maximilian’s warrior temperament and led directly to his creation of the Militia of the Immaculata, an organization that would combat heresy around the world, principally through its official publication, The Knight of the Immaculata. The martial vocabulary of his plans for the militia clearly echoes his early enthusiasm for things military, and it is also probably from the military that he now drew the main theme and virtue of his life – obedience to authority. A strong leitmotif of the biographies of Saint Maxilmilian is that of overcoming obstacles by nonresistance. Over and over again, Kolbe launches projects that seem doomed at the outset by opposition from his superiors, lack of money, or the general impracticality of the project. In each instance, the young Franciscan succeeds, not through struggle against the odds, but by willing obedience and faith. This is, of course, a staple of hagiography; in the modern period, it is the story of Saint Giuseppe Cottolengo, who founded a home for the indigent and ill with nothing but hope. It is too, of course, the story of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Though the theme is part of pious rhetoric, it is in the cases of so many saints also factually true. Although given permission to publish his magazine, Maximilian received no financial support from the cash-strapped order. The

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first issue of The Knight consisted of five thousand copies and was paid for by money got from the poor of Cracow through Maximilian’s begging door to door. Most of the copies were given away free in the streets. In 1922, the year of the first issue, the Depression was at a devastating point and many newspapers were folding. The Knight flourished. When the second issue of The Knight was ready, Maximilian had not a cent to pay the printers. That day, after Mass, Kolbe found a sack left on the altar with a note saying, “For my dear mother, the Immaculata,” and in it exactly the amount of money needed to pay the printer.7 When his superiors told him that they could not find the funds to purchase land he had chosen for the site of Niepokalanow, the “city” where the militia was to be headquartered, Maximilian had to inform Prince Druki-Lubecki, its owner, that he was unable to complete the purchase. Asked by the prince what should be done with the statue of Mary Immaculate that Kolbe had already set up on the site, he replied, “‘Let it remain where it is …’ The Prince thought for a moment, then abruptly decided. ‘Well, take the land with it! I give it to you for nothing.’”8 Niepokalanow, City of the Immaculata, built on the Prince’s land where the work of the militia was to be conducted, had started as Kolbe’s youthful fantasy and the enthusiasm of six of his fellow seminarians and eventually developed into the largest religious community in the world. Perhaps impressed by the violence of the Free Masons’ attack on the Church, Kolbe developed more and more clearly the nature of his mission – the conversion of all nonbelievers. The chief means to that end was to be communications – first the publication of a magazine, The Knight, then the publication of a daily newspaper, and later the establishment of a radio station at Niepokalanow. Kolbe was renowned for his enthusiasm for the latest technology and his refusal to condemn modern innovation, claiming, for instance, that all that was wrong with the cinema (illviewed in Catholic circles) was how it was used. One of his biog-



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raphers, noting Maximilian’s call for Catholics to adopt film as a means to make the world better, has called for Saint Maximilian Kolbe to be named patron saint of cinema and film makers.9 Similarly transgressive was Maximilian’s insistence on democratic structures within the City of the Immaculata. Conservative, aristocratic Poland, like most of Europe, retained traces of the hierarchies that had characterized society for centuries, and these traces were no more evident than among the Polish clergy. In particular, priests, recruited from amongst the educated, were always on a higher plane than brothers, recruited usually from the uneducated working class. But not at Niepokalanow! There they worked hip to haunch, ate the same food, and slept in the same rough conditions. Kolbe surprised and somewhat scandalized Polish society by publishing photographs of his priests and brothers arm in arm and hunkered down, all sharing the same work.10 By the time he left Rome in 1919 to teach at the Franciscan seminary at Cracow, Maximilian’s tuberculosis had become serious. He was never to become a successful teacher or public preacher because, due to the tuberculosis, he was unable to speak loudly or clearly enough.11 Astonishingly, Kolbe, who by 1922 had but a fourth of one lung functioning, was able to withstand the extreme rigours of his mission in Japan, not to mention the later tortures of Auschwitz. Although a failure as a public speaker, Maximilian was more than a success in one-to-one encounters and conversations with small groups. Recuperating from severe hemorrhages in a Polish convent in 1921, Maximilian began to visit patients in a sanatorium reserved for university students in nearby Zakopane: “Under the influence of Communism (which was taking hold in neighboring Russia) and other philosophical and social movements, most of the students, he found, were lapsed Catholics, many atheists.” Kolbe used an informal method of relating to these students, lending books, conversing and exchanging, “‘very informally, so that everyone would express his opinions,’ as he wrote in a letter to Jerome Biasi, one of

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the M.I. founders.”12 Conversions were so numerous that the atheist director of the sanatorium ordered Maximilian to stop visiting. He refused, and the conversions continued. The Militia of the Immaculata attracted men from all walks of life, and Niepokalanow knew how to employ them. Architects, engineers, university professors, skilled workmen, and labourers applied for admittance by the hundreds. On average there were eighteen hundred applications a year, but the screening process was very demanding, searching not only for enthusiasm for the work, but above all for spiritual commitment. About one hundred men were admitted per year, and only half of them finished by professing their vows. In 1927, three years after the founding of Niepokalanow, Maximilian, seeing the extraordinary progress of the project (circulation of The Knight had gone from 5,000 to 50,000), set out for the Far East with four brothers to export the success. Rebuffed in China, the Franciscans had a better reception in Japan, and it was there, in Nagasaki, that the Asian City of the Immaculata was established. Exactly a month later, the first 2,000 copies of The Knight in Japanese, Seibo no Kishi, was printed. Kolbe had purchased land very cheaply because it was on a slope so steep as to be unsuitable for farming, and being on the other side of the hill from the city of Nagasaki, it had no desirable view. The conditions in Japan were horrendous. The brothers had no furniture and slept on the floor of a shack open to wind, rain, and snow. The food was apparently the greatest of sufferings, and Father Maximilian became desperately ill, to the point that even he believed he was dying. Nevertheless, by 1939 Mugenzai no Sono (Garden of the Immaculate), the Nagasaki Friary, consisted of twenty-five priests and brothers and eighteen Japanese and Korean seminarians. The circulation of Seibo no Kishi had reached a record 65,000. When the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, one of the few surviving structures was Father Kolbe’s Franciscan friary, shielded from



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the blast by the hill between it and the ruined city. One thousand Japanese children were taken in and cared for in the relatively small and financially beset friary. Father Maximilian returned to Poland in 1936 to become head of an enormously successful Niepokalanow, which boasted a population of 800 devoted religious men and a circulation of The Knight that had reached 700,000 copies per issue. Despite Kolbe’s habitual drive to expand the work of the militia, upon return to Poland he seemed to shift focus and became more concerned with the spiritual fortitude of his fellow Franciscans at Niepokalanow. It is strongly suggested by all his biographers and many witnesses who knew him that Maximilian Kolbe in many instances foresaw the future, although he himself never made that claim. His shift from technological development to the development of spiritual forbearance may have been due to his having foreseen the inevitability of war and the particularly severe suffering it would bring to the religious. Patricia Treece quotes Father Cornel, Superior at Poznan, describing a pre-war incident: “Father Maximilian had a map of Europe in his cell and was marking the places with little flags where he had sent the monastery publications. Pausing for a moment, he said to me, ‘There will be a war. The boundary between Poland and Germany will be here.’ And he sketched the exact location of the boundary as it is today.”13 Treece also cites a talk that Father Maximilian gave to his friars in May 1938: “My sons, a frightful struggle threatens. We don’t know yet what will be its details. But here, in Poland, we must expect the worst. War is much nearer than one can imagine … and if war comes, that means the dispersion of our community. We needn’t get worried, just bravely conform our wills to the will of Mary Immaculate.”14 It might be argued that in 1938 many people foresaw war, but Kolbe provided details that were impossible to know then. Even after the war had begun and Kolbe found himself in prison in the

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German city of Amtitz, he declared to his fellow prisoners, beating his cane on the ground: “Dear children, you will see that even here there will be a Poland!” Today Amtitz, known as Gebice, is in Poland.15 It also seems that Kolbe foresaw that he would die in Auschwitz. Again one might say that, given the horrors of the place, it would not be surprising to think one would not survive there, but Kolbe not only foresaw his own death but correctly predicted the survival of certain other prisoners. Henry Sienkiewicz, a young Auschwitz prisoner who had his bunk next to Father Maximilian, tells of his deep and growing depression and the assurances given by Kolbe as he comforted him: “When I was close to despair and ready to throw myself on the wires [to commit suicide by electrocution], he was the one who gave me new courage and told me I would be victorious and get out alive. ‘Only keep relying on the intercession of the Mother of God,’ he urged.”16 To another fellow prisoner he is reported as stating, “No, my son, I will not survive the camp, but you and the other young ones, yes.”17 The cruelty and suffering at Auschwitz is well known, and Kolbe experienced a great deal of it. In the Nazi economy of evil, priests and other religious in the concentration camps were one notch above Jews, and their torture was commensurate with that station. Father Maximilian’s physical suffering came to an end when, in July 1941, a prisoner from his cell block was found to have escaped. According to established procedure of retribution, ten men from the same block were chosen to be sent to an underground bunker where they would be starved to death, an excruciating process as the internal organs slowly and painfully wither from lack of water. The ten men were chosen, but before being marched away, a wail of grief was heard from one of them and the words, “Ah, my poor wife and children, I will never see them again!” At this, Kolbe made his way out of the ranks of prisoners and addressed the commandant, an act totally unheard of and one for which being shot on the spot was all but guaranteed. But it didn’t happen. Astonish-



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ingly, the commandant listened to Maximilian’s request to take the place of the weeping man and then asked, ‘“Who are you?’ ‘I am a Catholic priest. I want to die for that man. I am old. He has a wife and children.’ The priest gave a shrewd answer which took account of the Germans’ philosophy to liquidate as priority the old and the weak.”18 How it was, given the general malevolence of the Nazis, that Kolbe was not simply added to the condemned along with the man he wished to save is hard to understand, but in fact Franciszek Gajowniczek was allowed to step back amongst the other prisoners, and Maximilian was taken away in his place to the starvation cell. The condemned could last for days, a week, at most two weeks without water. Only four of the ten were still alive two weeks later on the Vigil of the Feast of the Assumption, and only Kolbe was still conscious. What happened in the bunker is attested to by Bruno Borgowiec, a prisoner assigned to keep records of the dying. He reports that from the time they entered the cell, prayer and singing, led by Father Maximilian, was heard from the ten condemned men. When only Kolbe was left alive, the SS decided the torture was taking too long and sent for someone from the infirmary to administer a fatal injection of carbolic acid. As the killer entered the bunker, Father Kolbe raised his arm to receive the injection. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified in 1971 and canonized as a “martyr of charity” in 1982.

Images Because the life of Saint Maximilian is so heavily documented historically, little is left to iconographic innovation, and much of the visual serves as illustration of the biography. Nevertheless, a nascent symbolic iconography is observable in the peculiar arrangement of the images of biographical details and in the development

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of iconographic attributes. Interestingly, Saint Maximilian’s chief iconographic attribute seems to be emerging as eyeglasses. The saint himself pointed to his eyeglasses as metaphor. In the early 1920s at Grodno, the first site of his press, Kolbe took to his bed, seriously ill: “One day during his illness, he asked the friars to put his glasses and his watch at the foot of the Immaculata’s statue. They thought he was delirious. Then he smilingly explained, ‘My glasses are my eyes, my thought, my work. The watch is the time that I have left. All this belongs to her, to her alone.’”19 Although this detail arises out of the written account of his life, the eyeglasses as such take on a symbolic importance beyond the biographical. That the great Japanese writer Shusako Endo would put Kolbe’s glasses at the centre of his remarkable short story, “Japanese in Warsaw,” adds weight to the idea that the glasses hold some kind of inherent symbolic power. In Endo’s story a Japanese tourist, during a sex tour of Warsaw, remembers that as a child in Nagasaki he once watched a weary priest climb the hill to the Catholic mission. In the man’s memory, the priest stops to catch his breath, and the only significant gesture that is remembered is the priest’s removing and wiping his glasses. At the top of the hill, the priest greets the child in Japanese, but like all the children of his village, the boy is afraid of the strange-looking foreigners they call “amens,” and he hides behind a truck without answering. Endo makes the glasses the very vehicle of the story’s denouement when the same tourist, left momentarily alone in the apartment of a prostitute he has picked up, glances at pictures on her desk: “Mixed in with several Christmas cards was a portrait of a man drawn in black ink. The man was looking directly out at Imamiya, with a closely shaved head, round glasses and sunken cheeks. Imamiya remembered that weary expression. It was the foreigner who had painfully climbed the hill at Ōura that day in summer. It was the missionary who had stopped midway up the hill to wipe his clouded glasses, and had greeted Imamiya with a ‘Konichiwa.’



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When the woman came out of the bathroom in a dressing gown, she spoke to Imamiya, who was staring intently at the portrait. ‘That’s Kolbe.’”20 Like other texts, this fictional account changes and develops the Vita. Saint Maximilian’s story is recited to the Japanese tourists by a Polish customer in a restaurant. In this account, Kolbe’s labour assignment in Auschwitz is to remove the dead bodies from the gas chambers and dispose of them. This is not historical. It may, perhaps, be part of the Japanese Kolbe tradition or more simply an invention by Endo. Be that as it may, for those who read Endo’s story, this detail enters permanently into the hagiographical tradition. Other anomalies in Endo’s rendition are less significant. In it, Gajowniczek, the condemned prisoner, does not cry out, as in the biographies, “Ah, my poor wife and children. I will never see them again!” Instead he simply weeps. According to the Polish character in the restaurant, two weeks after being enclosed in the starvation bunker, four men and Father Kolbe were still alive and all were put to death by lethal injection. In all of the biographical accounts, only Kolbe was alive and conscious when the Nazis decided to end the torture, a detail that adds considerable drama to the scene by concentrating the deadly action on the martyr alone. The gesture of raising his arm to the needle containing the carbolic acid is absent in the short story. In most of the images of the saint, Maximilian is shown wearing glasses. Surprisingly, his glasses seem to have survived even the beatings at Auschwitz and were the only material object that he possessed at the time of his death. In a medal by Tadeusz Karpuk (Fig. 4.1), the eyeglasses and a rosary held by the saint receive such extreme emphasis that we must suppose that the artist intended to draw attention to them. In another image (Fig. 4.2), Kolbe is seen before the Virgin Mary who offers him the two crowns, and he is wearing glasses. We recall that Raymund Kolbe had this vision when he was ten years old, a time when almost surely he did not wear glasses (nor could his parents have afforded them); further-

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Fig. 4.1 (left)  St Maximilian Kolbe, 20th C. medal by Tadeusz Karpuk, photo from Święty Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, http://www.kolbe.pl. Fig. 4.2 (right)  Maximilian Kolbe, book cover illustration by Patricia Edward Jablonski, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Karen Ritz illustrator, Pauline Books and Media (2002), reprinted by permission of Karen Ritz.

more, photographs of Raymund as a child show him without glasses. In this image, Kolbe is a mature young man, not a boy as biographical accuracy would demand; here iconography transcends the logic of time so as to conflate an incident of the saint’s early life with a later time that the earlier incident had made possible. In many cultures, eyes are thought of as “the windows of the soul,” an idea that seems to have been behind Maximilian’s offering of his glasses to the Immaculata. Moreover, when we consider the chief function of eyeglasses, we arrive at another of their associations, reading. As in the case of Saint Anne, the insertion of eyeglasses into a visual depiction of the saint expresses his or her principal activity. This attribute was, as we have seen, used to communicate to the viewer Anne’s iconic embodiment of the teacher,



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Fig. 4.3  Maximilian Kolbe, book jacket (2001) by Brother Francis M. Kalvelage, reprinted from Kolbe, Saint of the Immaculata, Ignatius Press (2002).

and the same device is operating in the iconography of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. We know from his written biographies that Kolbe’s chief activity was publishing and, through his publications, teaching. Despite his personal simplicity and humility, Maximilian Kolbe emerges as an intellectual. Possessing two doctorates, speaking most of the prominent European languages as well as Japanese, excelling in science and technology, Saint Maximilian cannot be relegated to the category of emotional mystic; nor was he only a courageous martyr. His faith was as great as other saints’, but he was not, as was Joan of Arc (with whom he has been compared), a fearless illiterate. It is the iconography that most forcefully brings out the intellectual aspect of the saint, and it does so mainly through the visual device of the eyeglasses. Not surprisingly, most of his iconography refers to Kolbe’s life and death in Auschwitz. However, one representation in particular (Fig. 4.3) succeeds in conflating the principal events of the saint’s life into a single image. In the painting, a bespectacled Kolbe stares

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Fig. 4.4  Maximilian Kolbe beaten at Auschwitz, sketch by Miecislaus Koscielniak, reprinted from Patricia Treece, A Man for Others: Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz, San Francisco: Harper and Row (1982).

directly at the viewer while holding in his right hand two copies of The Knight of the Immaculata (Rycerz Niepokalanej). He is clothed in the habit of the Franciscan order, but over his left shoulder is slung the Auschwitz prisoner jacket bearing the triangle-enclosed P for Political Prisoner and his internment number, 16670. In this way the image tells, not a story different from the written text, but one that transcends the linearity of written narrative by visually creating an eternal “now” in which events occurring at different moments in the saint’s life achieve simultaneity. Two pictures executed by fellow prisoner Miecislaus Koscielniak illustrate the most often discussed incidents during Kolbe’s stay at Auschwitz. All biographers recount the cruelty of one of the camp’s capos, named Krott, who seemed to have developed a particular animosity toward Maximilian because he was a priest. Noticing that the prisoner stumbled under the weight of logs and tree trunks



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Fig. 4.5  Maximilian asking to replace fellow prisoner, by Miecislaus Koscielniak, reprinted from Maria Winowska, The Death Camp Proved Him Real: The Life of Father Maximilian Kolbe, Franciscan, Kenosha, Wisconsin: Prow (1971).

that he was obliged to carry, he loaded him down with the heaviest pieces and made him run. When Kolbe fell, Krott repeatedly kicked him in the face, stomach, and ribs. Then he ordered one of the brawniest guards to apply fifty lashes to the prostrate Kolbe and, after dumping him in a furrow, covered him with branches and left him for dead.21 The sketch does not show Maximilian having fallen or being kicked, but rather standing straight, bespectacled, with his arm raised to ward off the blows being delivered by a club in the capo’s hand (Fig. 4.4). The second picture (Fig. 4.5) shows Maximilian having stepped forward to request to be exchanged for Gajowniczek, who cowers beside him.

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Fig. 4.6 (left)  Maximilian leading prisoners out of Auschwitz, painting by J. Molga, photo from Święty Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, http://www.kolbe.pl. Fig. 4.7 (right)  Assumption of Maximilian, painting by B. Bernini at the main altar of the Church of St Maximilian Maria Kolbe in Pabianice, Poland, photo from Święty Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, http://www.kolbe.pl.

These images are made by an eyewitness to the events and thus literally illustrate an historical occurrence. But compare the painting by J. Molga (Fig. 4.6) that shows Kolbe at the head of a crowd of Auschwitz prisoners and holding with his left hand the hand of a fallen comrade while his raised right arm points to an apparition of the Immaculata, who hovers in the upper left corner of the image. The crowd gathered behind Maximilian includes a child, a man on crutches, and a kneeling figure who appears to be female, a combination of types that would certainly never be found all together in Auschwitz. The image, completely ahistorical, is symbolic. The Virgin Mary is present to the eye of the viewer analogous to the way she was present to the spirit of Kolbe. All types of prisoners are presented together visually to express a certain timeless solidar-



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Fig. 4.8  Stained glass window by John and Laura Gilroy, The Chapel of St Maximilian Kolbe, St Joseph’s Church, Bristol, England, photo from http://www.commissionacrafts man.com/piece_viewer.asp?id= 370&page by permission of the artists.

ity through suffering that transcended the evil-in-time that was Nazism. A further example of this extrahistorical iconography is seen in the painting by B. Bernini (Fig. 4.7) which shows a youthful looking Saint Maximilian in his Franciscan habit, ascending to heaven from a flowery spot on earth. Thus the visual text exceeds the historical in asserting that Maximilian Kolbe resides as a saint in paradise. The written biographies certainly imply this and suggest it repeatedly, but they cannot, as historical accounts, state it directly. The visual can, and here it does. We can point to at least one example of stained glass depicting the saint in a church in Bristol, England (Fig. 4.8). In comparison with the magnificent stained glass of mediaeval cathedrals, this modern example will be found wanting aesthetically, but it accomplishes something of what its predecessors achieved by presenting a visual story that manifests the verbal story. We see fifteen people in a long receding line with (presumably) Father Maximilian in the foreground, seeming to lead them. He wears no glasses but is wrapped in a shawl or blanket. Several of the figures who follow him, including a small child, bear stars of David identifying them as Jews. There are no further attributes or details of significance.

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Where are they going? The figures in this representation are clearly moving toward a goal not shown in the window, and so the viewer is led to posit a locus. The gas chambers? But Kolbe did not die in a gas chamber. The gates? Are they free? But Kolbe did not escape Auschwitz, nor did most Jews. The window illustrates no historical facts. Indeed when Maximilian Kolbe was in Auschwitz not many Jews had yet been rounded up and incarcerated. It was after 1941, the year of Maximilian’s death, when Jews arrived in great numbers. In any case, Jews that were there at the time lived in quarters separate from the political prisoners of which Kolbe was one. He did, of course, encounter Jews in Auschwitz, as the beautiful testimony of one of them shows, but a situation in which he and numbers of Jewish prisoners could mingle, let alone set out on a march, would have been impossible and is unattested historically. Once again the window expands the text of Saint Maximilian’s Life by presenting a tableau of triumph over death through solidarity in suffering, and it achieves this meaning by freeing itself from the literal record of the horrors at Auschwitz and transcending the historical facts that segregated Jews from political prisoners, men from women, children from adults. The case is similar for one in a set of stations of the cross by the sculptor Karel Stadnik. The seventh station, also known as the fifth in another tradition, represents, not Christ stumbling and being aided by Simon, but instead nine haggard men in prisoners’ uniforms standing before barbed wire (Fig. 4.9). A tenth man, looking directly at the viewer, stands in the foreground. No attributes directly identify the men or explain the scene. The viewer “reads” it symbolically, first comprehending through the element of barbed wire; then by the significance of ten, the number of men in the image; and then through the one figure, distinct from the others but joined to them. But how can this function as the seventh station of the cross? Simon helped Jesus carry his cross to the place of execution; metaphorically understood, he “shared” Christ’s cross, exactly what is



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Fig. 4.9  Stations of the Cross: Station 7, sculpture (1973–75) by Karel Stadnik, Church of the Virgin Mary, district of Lhotka, Prague, photo from Radio Prague, old.radio.cz/en/html/easter05_cesta.html.

enjoined to every Christian and successfully accomplished by every saint. The iconography identifies Maximilian Kolbe and his nine companions as symbolic Simons, imitators of Christ, and expresses the redeeming power of suffering. Its basis is the account of Kolbe’s death at Auschwitz, and yet it surpasses the written accounts. It illustrates nothing in the written biographies, but as a part of the holistic text of Saint Maximilian’s Vita, it universalizes the meaning of the man’s sacrifice. Without doubt the most striking, powerful iconography of Saint Maximilian so far is the statue by Adam Antoni Rzasa at the Nova Huta Church near Cracow (Fig. 4.10). A long, emaciated figure in prison garb rises several feet above ground, his arms raised straight above him with forearms bent back down, his hands grasping his head in an impossible physical posture. The figure’s prison jacket bears the number 16670, identifying him as Maximilian Kolbe. The statue is an extraordinarily expressive work, and what it expresses

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Fig. 4.10  Maximilian in Agony, 20th C. statue by Adam Antoni Rzasa, Nova Huta Church (Cracow), reprinted from Diana Dewar, Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz, London: Darton, Longman, Todd (1982).

through its grotesquely physical contortions is the very essence of suffering. However, despite the slightly twisted mouth, the face is marked more by graveness of purpose than by pain. The eyes look down at us as if wordlessly communicating the profoundest of truths. The head held in the hands is at once a gesture communicat-



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ing severe pain and sorrow, and at the same time a gesture of blessing, as when consecrating hands are placed upon the head. In this supremely simple icon is thus expressed both the pain of suffering and our triumph over it, a conception that is an existential fact of Maximilian Kolbe’s life but one that could only be fully incarnated through image. Enactments Saint Maximilian Kolbe has been declared the patron saint of prisoners in general, political prisoners in particular, journalists, families, drug addicts, and the pro-life movement. An examination of the written historical record makes evident the reasons for the first three patronages, but what of the others? There is nothing in the biography of Maximilian Kolbe to connect him directly to the prolife movement or abortion. He was, without doubt, pro-life, but so were all saints and, for that matter, all faithful Catholics. What, moreover, is there in the written record to connect Kolbe in a particular way to the family? Like most people, he had a family, and it was a loving and supportive one, but this in and of itself does not make him an obvious candidate for patron of families. Still more remote is Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s connection to drug addiction. He was not a drug addict, he did not preach or write about drug addiction, nor is there any historical record of his curing a drug addict. The answer to these questions can be discovered in Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s cult of veneration, in which a constant process of both learned and popular exegesis takes place. That is, the assignment of patronage of certain causes is the product of symbolic interpretation of the life by the faith community and as such becomes part of the Vita itself. The interpenetration of the written text and its interpretation provoke the evolution of the text into its holistic form. Saint Maximilian’s patronage of drug addicts is the product of intensely symbolic exegesis based upon the iconography. By the

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fact that Kolbe was put to death by inoculation, an association is created with drug addicts injecting themselves with their poisonous serum. The martyr’s dramatic action of raising his arm to the death-bearing needle becomes the epiphanic gesture that reveals the link between him and the drug addict, the latter reaching out toward a living death, the former toward a life through death. This radiation of the text begins with the biographical fact of Kolbe’s gesture of extending his arm to the killer. It progresses to a visual image of that gesture detached from the specificities of the historical moment. Further progression occurs through the transfer of the visual image to the idea of drug addiction and to a universalized drug addict, a transfer enacted through the veneration of the cult of Saint Maximilian. By the same poetic logic, Kolbe’s having taken the place of a man who cried out, “Oh! My poor wife! My poor children!” makes his sacrifice one offered up, not only for the man himself, but for both him and his family. The condemnation of the family man, Gajowniczek, was unjust; he had committed no offense against anyone, yet he was selected to die. The injustice is not only against Gajowniczek, but against his family as well, and is seen through the eyes of Saint Maximilian’s devotees as an offense against all families. Through this perspective, Kolbe sacrificed himself for all families and is thus proclaimed their protector. Again poetic logic perceives an analogy between the Auschwitz prisoner and the unborn child selected for abortion. Just as the family man was selected arbitrarily to die in retribution for an event he had not caused, so the unborn child is selected for destruction, not for any act of hers or any choice made by him, but by the choice of others. Through this perspective, Saint Maximilian emerges as the champion of the unborn. The bunker in which Kolbe died is now a shrine visited by thousands of pilgrims to Auschwitz. As the locus of his passion, it constitutes a first-class relic. There are, in addition, many shrines and churches dedicated to him throughout Europe and North America.



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The American national shrine is in Libertyville, Illinois. His feast day is 14 August, the day of his death and the Vigil of the Feast of the Assumption. Saint Maximilian’s martyrdom is frequently coupled in prayers to him with the words of Christ – “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) – for his biography so dramatically enacts this statement. Maximilian himself quoted these words in a talk he gave to his fellow friars in 1939 as a prediction of their future suffering and martyrdom. This fact intensifies their importance for the cult that venerates him as a martyr.22 A stunning example of enactment in the holistic Life of Saint Maximilian is found in Eugene Ionesco’s one act opera, Maximilien Kolbe, with music by Dominique Probst, written during the 1980s.23 Ionesco’s short libretto may at first appear as a dramatization based on some written text, but it is not. Deliberate changes to the established narrative – some for practical reasons of performance, some for symbolic value – rewrite the Vita radically and add to it extremely rich philosophical and spiritual dimensions that are mute in the written historical accounts. The opera’s narrative concentrates all of Kolbe’s life into its last fifteen days in Auschwitz. Ionesco achieves this by altering the timeline of the biography so as to include, within the present of the operatic enactment, events that had already taken place earlier but that have to be included in the present time of the opera so as to bring out the full meaning of the text. For instance, when Kolbe was first arrested and sent to Pawiak prison, still dressed in his Franciscan garb, a Nazi officer, incensed by the sight of the rosary the prisoner was wearing, held the crucifix of the rosary in front of the priest and asked him if he believed in it. When Kolbe responded that he believed, he was savagely beaten. Ionesco has retained the event as it happened but has transferred it to Auschwitz as Maximilian steps forward to ask to take the other prisoner’s place:

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Commandant: A Catholic Priest! So you believe in God! Father Kolbe: Yes, I believe in God. (The Commandant slaps Maximilian.) Commandant: Do you still believe? Father Kolbe: Yes, I believe in God. Commandant: (He turns to the others.) Have you heard that, this pile of shit believes in God. (The soldiers burst out laughing. The prisoners through cowardice also try to laugh.) Ask him to get you out of here. (Gives him a lash with his crop) Is your God powerful? Father Kolbe: My God is All-Powerful. Commandant: You lie. I ask you to answer me: why doesn’t your all powerful God come to get you out of here? Father Kolbe: I believe in God. Still another incident in the past, one that had taken place in Auschwitz earlier, is also incorporated into the present scene: Commandant: (signaling to the guards to attack Maximilian): Get him! (The guards violently beat Maximilian.) Commandant: Is he dead yet? (He approaches Maximilian.) He’s not moving anymore. He’s dead. (To the Father of a Family [Gajowniczek]: ) You are going to the bunker. There is no one now to take your place. Father of a Family: Oh no! It’s not possible, I can’t die, my wife, my children, no! Not me, not me! Commandant: Pile of shit! Sow’s shit! Abomination! You are going to croak, piece of filth! (At this moment, bleeding and trembling, Maximilian rises painfully from the ground.) Maximilian: You shall not die … I will take your place. 24



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Here Ionesco is projecting the incident from the past when Kolbe was attacked by the Auschwitz capo, Krott, while carrying tree limbs and was whipped and left for dead. The scene is also managed in such a way as to create spiritual symbolism through physical movement. Leaving Kolbe for dead, the commandant proceeds to carry out his plan to take the ten prisoners to the starvation bunker when, “At this moment, bleeding and trembling, Maximilian rises painfully from the ground.” The slow-rising movement of one who has just been declared dead dramatically suggests the Resurrection, and the redemptive Christological association is reinforced by Maximilian’s next words: “You shall not die. I will take your place.” This is one of the several devices by which Maximilian is identified as a Christ-figure. The miraculous sense of the moment is communicated through the speechless acquiescence of the SS officer to Kolbe’s request to replace the doomed prisoner. Marguerite JeanBlain, who has produced the definitive edition of the work, duly notes what the author has rearranged and invented: “Ionesco has concentrated within the opera, that is, in Father Kolbe’s last fifteen days of life, all of the details of the saint’s character and representations of the periods in which he was deported to different camps. But he had to be able to imagine his last hours, to dare to express his last prayer. This arises out of spiritual intuition.”25 She notes, as well, the outright contradictions of historical fact, deliberate on Ionesco’s part since he had exhaustively read the historical record: whereas in fact, the escapee was never found, in the opera his dead body is dragged on stage and placed at the feet of the Commandant; although Father Kolbe’s body was immediately cremated after death, his corpse is cradled in the arms of the Father of a Family at the end of the work. It is interesting that the commentator attributes these anomalies, if they may be so called, to both the exigencies of the form and the search for symbolic richness. 26 Ionesco also gives names to the nine prisoners whom Kolbe joined and whom history has left anonymous. Four of the nine bear distinctive Jewish names; one is French, two are German, and two

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Polish. The effect of this is not to personalize the characters for they are given no further particular traits and only one speaks; the effect is to universalize the suffering that they will all share. One of the author’s most remarkable and important innovations is the creation of Pouchovski, one of the condemned, who is given not only a name, but a voice that history has denied the prisoners. Pouchovski represents several things: he articulates the inevitable despair of the condemned men as they confront an excruciating and sordid death; he expresses Ionesco’s agonizing, personal questions about meaning, good and evil, the human condition – questions that also arise in the minds of the audience as it beholds the representation of the reality of the Holocaust. The creation of Pouchovski spotlights another dimension of the meaning of Saint Maximilian’s life: the real existence of evil: “What I know of the history of this world is that it is long, terrible, terribly long. For thousands and tens of thousands of years it is a history of war, disaster after disaster, an unsteady planet that trembles and cracks. All animals are equipped by nature to kill other animals: hooks, claws, sharpened nails – natural daggers. Even plants can smother other plants. The Massacre is universal, in the sky, on the earth, among men and among beasts. Whole races have been exterminated. We, too, are a race doomed to extermination. Only the lambs are unarmed – yet even they have teeth to destroy the grass. There are no innocents.”27 Pouchovski unites author and audience by proclaiming the doubts that both harbour. As readers of the Life of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Ionesco and his audience are forced to ask questions that are not to be found on the surface of the written accounts, which highlight the goodness of the saint, but are inescapable when that Life is presented as image and enacted as existential event. Is there a spiritual reality that redeems the material reality that we live? Was Kolbe’s sacrifice efficacious, or was it merely one more meaningless gesture of a deluded idealist? Ionesco writes the answers to these questions through Father Kolbe’s reaction to Pouchovski, and the



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audience also writes them into the Life to the degree that it personally integrates them – that is, to the degree that it says, “Yes, this is the right, the only, answer!” We are not made to be able to understand, and it’s our own fault. And yet everything is simple, everything will become simple. Love, love regardless of everything, love to the very last instant, just as Jesus loves you, just as I love you; at the very last minute, the last second, everything will become clear. The passage has seemed long, has seemed long to us because we are caught in time. Eternity knows no time. Eternity is a moment that never ends, and I am here to assure you of that and to tell you that there will be peace among all and that understanding will be yours. I cannot say more; I don’t know now how to explain this mystery that you think unfathomable and that resides within the divine soul. The arguments that you pose are the arguments of poor men, of all poor men. Meanwhile, this hell can be transformed into a moment of grace if you begin to love one another as God loves you, despite everything. I can give no further explanation for I, too, am only a poor man.28 It is said that Ionesco spent his last twenty years struggling with the idea that he had wasted his life in art, but that his engagement with the story of Saint Maximilian had produced the closest thing to a resolution of his angst.29 In a remarkable confession at seventyone years of age, the famous playwright reflected upon the limitations of art in a preface he wrote in 1978: “I have not fulfilled myself through literature. A writer’s life is not a real life. Like Sartre and so many others, I, too, have lined up word upon word, eked out [texts]. The thirst and hunger for the absolute cannot be satisfied by

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literature. I go on living because I have my wife and daughter and a few friends, but neither my heart nor soul is in literature.”30 Ionesco had been reading about Maximilian Kolbe for several years at this point and meditating on the meaning of his own life. Into these reflections on what we may call a philosophy of art, Ionesco introduces the biography of Saint Maximilian: “It is said that in the bunker of hunger and thirst where Kolbe and the others were put, chants and hymns could be heard, not the screams of pain and anguish that were usually heard in this place. Maximilian Kolbe was the last to die. To help another to die, to accept death, is even more extraordinary than to die for another … Can it be said that I am jealous of Maximilian Kolbe? For me, that is the only kind of existence worth envying, the only existence worth living, an existence that justifies not only death, but even life itself.”31 Ionesco’s view of the failure of art in the quest for moral and spiritual truth seems not to have been shared by another playwright to whom Ionesco had sent a copy of the libretto: Recently, you were kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of the Opera that you composed about Maximilian Kolbe. Your gesture has greatly moved me … May the Lord – through your vocation as dramatic artist – support your efforts for the reconciliation of man to God and of men to each other. The Vatican, 31 October 1988.32 Most of those who have seen and heard the opera are likely to agree with John-Paul II that it is, indeed, through just such a dramatic elaboration of the text of the Life of the saint that a “reconciliation of man to God and of men to each other” may be advanced. Although there is no historical record of the conversations between the prisoners in the bunker, the opera supplies the exchange between Pouchovski and Kolbe as a means of exfoliating the philosophical and spiritual concept of the work. At the end of this dialogue, Dominque Probst added a chorus in which the eight other



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prisoners sing the prayer popularly known as the hymn of Saint Francis. (“Oh Lord, make me an instrument of peace, Where there is hate, let me bring love.”) While there are reports that the prisoners sang and prayed, the actual prayers, songs and exchanges between them are unreported. The enacted text that is the opera fills this lacuna, and it does so not only through words set to music, but through words stifled by grief. Part II of the opera opens with a scene set in the bunker of starvation. Here the prisoners intone a dirge with mouths tightly closed while a voice giving orders in German is heard over a loud speaker. Ionesco lamented the suppression of the traditional rite of the Catholic Mass after Vatican II, particularly the disappearance of Gregorian chant, and he turned to the Orthodox liturgy. However, for the opera he resurrects the Latin of the Tridentine Mass that Father Kolbe would have known. In Part III, Maximilian walks among the nine dead bodies of his comrades, singing the requiem of the traditional Latin Mass: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et Lux perpetua luceat eis. The scene is wholly fictional but expresses a truth deeper than fact: “This Requiem is thus inscribed following all the Requiem Masses sung by the Catholic Church and performed by the greatest musical artists. It resonates in the bunker of death and assumes a significance which is almost terrifying in the context of an extermination camp: it gives a meaning to death, it restores dignity to the departed, and the very peaceful character of the melody creates a hint, a fore-taste of Paradise.”33 In the last part of the opera, the bunker is described as a “cavern, a cave” in which eight prisoners are prostrate, and two – Kolbe and Pouchovski – are still standing. This shift of vocabulary from bunker to cave dilates the historical text in such a way as to include associations with other texts in which “cave, cavern” take on metaphoric dimensions. Marguerite Jean-Blain develops just such an idea: “The term “cavern” permits a glimpse of a Platonic reference: those in the cavern are precisely prisoners, condemned to see mere shadows but never Reality. The Supreme Reality is not in this hell

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hole; the physical world is but an odious simulacrum, an ignoble deformation. It was necessary that a man with the understanding that there existed something greater than egotism and hatred, freely descend into the cavern, his eyes shining with the reality of the sublime which he has experienced through faith.”34 The descent of the Platonic hero into the cave to free the ignorant is here propelled into an analogy to Jesus’ descent into hell to redeem the virtuous. This concept further propagates an analogy to Saint Maximilian’s descent into the cavern where he transforms death into liberation and fulfillment. Or the path of analogy goes as easily in the other direction, the way it is presented in the opera: Maximilian’s descent into the bunker and his work there lead the mind of the audience to Plato’s Myth of the Cave, and this in turn leads to a vision of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. An extraordinary expatiation of the text is found in the very last scene. The Commandant enters the bunker accompanied by a doctor and the Father of a Family to see whether the ten men are dead. The Father of a Family indicates that Kolbe is still alive, and the doctor is ordered to inject poison into his vein. Raising his arm to receive the injection, Saint Maximilian slumps into the arms of the Father of a Family who cries out, “I have killed a saint and a martyr!” Commenting on the opera’s infidelities to the historical record, Jean-Blain considers this particular contradiction of fact a stroke of genius: “In our opinion, the practical limitations of the production and the sobriety they imposed take on an intensely spiritual significance and lead to a startling final tableau: the Father of a Family holds the dying Kolbe in his arms and thus becomes the first to receive the fecundity of grace emanating from that death, first in the form of his physical survival, but ultimately through the experience of human love capable of such sacrifice, and through it the experience even of God’s love. This sudden awareness freezes the characters in a final tableau comparable to the Pietà that is magnificently interiorized by the chanting of the Beatitudes.”35



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Although the dramatic gesture is not equivalent to the gestures involved in ritual and veneration, it is the closest thing to them. The difference consists in the nature of the involvement of the audience. In veneration, the author of the ritual gesture and its audience are identical; in theatre, there is an obvious distinction. The gap, however, is progressively reduced according to the aesthetic success of the piece. In relation to Ionesco’s rendition of the story of Saint Maximilian, the integration of the audience into the action and symbolic dynamic of the opera is made clear in Jean-Blain’s analysis of the final, Pietà-like tableau: “The public, although it sits in the shadows nevertheless shares this vision through the miracle that is theatre, and it is called upon, interrogated by the vision, without the tone slipping into a didactic register or philosophical allegory. We imagine that the public, too, is invited to turn its gaze toward the authentic reality: what it sees on the stage is an etiolated image, a deformed image, of the Reality that lies in the future, of the Beauty of the risen body that is proclaimed hic et nunc. [The scene] infuses the audience with the understanding that there exists something more than what it sees on stage.”36

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CONCLUSION

The idea of an ancient loss of an original symbiosis of the arts is a recurrent one, and there have even been attempts to retrieve that unity. Such was behind Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk and may have been on the mind of the young Stephen Daedalus, as well. The desire to bring into mutuality the verbal, the visual, and the gestural has behind it a lingering sense that the divorce of these forms is somehow a limitation, not an expansion, of human expressivity. Yet there is a loss more ancient than that which occurred within the arts: the loss of the bond between art and religion. Indeed, so fundamental is the unity of word, image, and act in religious sensibility that in the traumatic age of the Reformation the sundering of them could provoke the onset of neurosis, as we see in the pathetic sixteenth-century confession of Andreas Karlstadt, reported by Virginia Nixon: I want to confess my secret thoughts to the whole world with sighs that I am faint-hearted and know that I ought not to stand in awe of any image … But (I lament to God) from my youth onward my heart has been trained and grown up in the veneration and worship of pictures. And a harmful fear has been bred into me from which I would gladly deliver myself

and cannot. As a consequence, I stand in fear that I might not be able to burn idols. I would fear that some devil’s block of wood would do me injury. Although on the one hand, I have scripture and know that images have no power, no blood, no spirit, yet on the other hand, fear holds me and makes me stand in awe of any image. But now I know how I stand before God and images, and how strongly and deeply images are rooted in my heart.1 In a highly informative study, Paola Spinozzi reviews the long, complex history of the thinking on the subject of the relation and non-relation of the various aesthetic modes of expression.2 This is a history, it appears, that fails to engage the problem of where fragmentation originates, and while there are any number of efforts to reunite word and image and to re-evaluate their respective predominance, little is said about enactment. If, in fact, what one is trying to theorize is the natural cohesiveness of human expressivity, then gesture, that most ancient and fundamental of all forms of expression, must be included. The aesthetically elaborated form of gesture is enactment, and it is closely related to liturgy. As we have seen, enactment in theatre consists in gestural depiction that entertains an audience that remains passive. Liturgical enactment consists in an audience as author engaging the supernatural so that something happens ontologically. It is, as I have said, efficacious. The word liturgy comes from the Greek λεώς, λαός “people” + εργος “who work” or “are working, doing.” Its etymology perfectly captures the senses in which the hagiographical liturgies were texts that were formed through enactment, that were public, where audience and author were one, and that were, in short, the “people doing.” This doing in the holistic text includes gazing, the audience contemplating the image of the subject of the text to the extent that the beholder and the beheld in some sense merge. Both of these dimensions of the text are sustained by the verbal narrative, the story in words.

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Texts of this sort achieve an integration of parts sufficiently strong that perfect equilibrium between them is not necessary. In many saints’ Lives, the verbal is dominant, and the visual functions as illustration of the word. In others, the visual establishes a narrative of its own, weaving meaning-bearing images into the verbal discourse and expanding the text as a whole. In both cases, the text is completed, as it was intended to be completed, when the audience authors it in their own lives by becoming like the subject of the text itself. The enactment of the text in the life of the devotee is the moment when all fragmentation is overcome: the audience is the author, the author is the text, the word is the image, and word and image are the doing. In this discussion, the inclusion of ancient and modern examples was intended to demonstrate the nature of the holistic text as it existed in a culture less univocally committed to the verbal and as it exists today within the faith community’s practice of liturgy and veneration. Although Margaret Miles draws a sharp distinction between the culture of today and that of “historical communities,” by which she means religious culture of the past, it should be remembered that the vast majority of peoples in the world even today are religious and engage in religious practices of various kinds  – all of them involving word, image, and enactment. The detachment, described by Miles, with which the intellectual elite regards the sacred image in a museum is a result not only of the viewer’s loss of certain aesthetic and religious sensibilities; it is also due to the locus of the viewing: precisely what happens in a museum is that the visual image is isolated from the written text that once likely accompanied it and from the enacting liturgy that brought it to life. The removal of the museum image to a church radically changes the text. All communities are historical, but not all are historically bound. It is certain that, as Miles states, “physical experience, status within the community, education and spirituality” influence the viewer’s interpretation of an image,3 as well as, we may add, his or her par-



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ticipation in enacting the text, but these differences are more than compensated for by the commonalities of being human and belonging to a continuous community. While it is true that a contemporary, secular reader with no education in or sensitivity to Catholic Christianity will have a vastly different interpretation of the written story of a saint’s life, of images of the saint, and of the very idea of veneration than the “historical” viewer, it is conceivable that a twenty-first century, traditional Catholic may experience these things very much like his Catholic predecessors. It is the essence of tradition to minimize change. Faith communities by the nature of their shared beliefs – intellectual and affective – are capable of transcending the differences that the historical process introduces without, however, needing to negate them. Saints’ Lives are an instance of that transcendence but not the only one. In our own time, the transformation of the noun “text” into the verb “to txt” perhaps indicates a new occurrence of the weaving of a holistic text, confirmed by the designation of its field as the “network” and later the “world wide web.” The “txtrs” who do this webbing have many and various intentions, but the phenomenon of communities creating and sharing texts capable in various ways of integrating word, image, and enactment reflects, albeit distantly, the aliveness of the text of the saint’s Life and its community of readers. In an intriguing and moving study, Jonathan Rosen explores the technological and spiritual interconnections between the religious life of the Jew, past and present, and the recuperation, expression, and broadcasting of it. In The Talmud and the Internet, it is the subtitle, A Journey Between Worlds, that reminds us of the spiritual transport made possible through the holistic dynamic of texts like the saint’s Life and points to renewed possibilities of Plato’s ifainein or the Gesamtkunstwerk for which Wagner strove.4

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NOTES

Preface

1 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend. Introduction



1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Plato, Cratylus, 388b ff. Plato, Statesman, 279. Referred to variously throughout as Vita, Vita Sacra, saint’s Life. See my discussion of Saint Christopher in Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature, 290 ff. Miles, 8. Fish, 2079. Ibid., 2087. Ibid., 2089. Eco, 3. Joyce, 184. Greetham, 30. Ibid., 35. del Ninno, 23. (my trans.) Ibid., 24.

Chapter One

1 Curtright, 58. 2 Book XI of Augustine, Confessions. 3 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. See vol. 1, chap. 2, “Emplotment: A Reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, 31 ff. 4 Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a 8. 5 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 92. 6 Veith, 17 ff. 7 Gadamer, 134. 8 Ibid., 135. 9 Jankovic, 120. (my trans.) 10 Ibid., 121–2. (my trans.) 11 Ibid., 122. (my trans.) 12 Gadamer, 126. 13 Miles, 67. 14 Lentes, 360. 15 Plato, Timaeus, 45 ff. 16 For an extended discussion of the mediaeval theories of sight, see Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham, and her article, “Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” See also, David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Keppler. 17 Ringbom, 12. Citation of St John of Damascus from J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum. nova et amplissima collectio XII (Florence, 1767), col. 378 ff. 18 Ibid., 16. 19 Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, esp. chap. 4. 20 Gerald of Wales, book II, chap. 7, 191. 21 Nixon, 107. 22 Karkov, 8. 23 Camille, 18. 24 Ibid., 20. 25 Ibid., 22. 26 Ibid., 31. This view is reversed by G.K. Chesterton’s reaction to first seeing the images lit up on Broadway: “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be to anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read.” 27 This is evident with texts, such as Caxton’s Golden Legend, originally accompanied by visual images that are eliminated or greatly reduced in modern editions, presumably because they are thought to be unessential

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28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

to the meaning of the text. Consider, for instance, the most recent edition of the Golden Legend (Granger Ryan and Helmut Rippenger, trans.), which contains only sixteen of the illustrations of Caxton’s original. Hamburger, “The Place of Theology,” 13. Ibid., 21. In the opening essay, Jeffrey Hamburger warns that overemphasis on the autonomy of the visual experience risks implying a Romantic analogy between the art historian and the mystic who, “having ‘seen’ God, translates that ineffable encounter into a discursive mode.” Miles, 123. Muir, 148–9. Freedberg, “Holy Images and Other Images.” See also Scribner, “Incombustible Luther,” 163 ff. Garside, 159–60. Muir, 10. (my emphasis) See Bynum’s discussion in “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of Saint Gregory in the Fifteenth Century.” Lentes, 371. Miles, 7. Freedberg, The Power of Image, 91–2. Miles, 19–20. One might object that if anything typifies the contemporary moment it is the obsession with the visual: the bombardment of the eye by image after image on television and other media. However, the modern image is a “moving” image, fleeting and ephemeral, prohibiting any possibility of contemplation or even sustained concentration. In this sense, it approximates the spoken word – transient sound that evaporates as it is uttered and heard. The meditative gaze made possible by the stationary image is entirely different. Caviness, 77. Mâle, 29. McNamer, 261. Basile, 23. Acres, 241 ff. Miles, 71–2. Ringbom, 11 ff. Bowie, 145–6. Lambrinoudakis, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum, vol. I, 2. Muir, “The Eye of the Procession, 130–1.



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51 Ibid., 130. See also Tachau, “Seeing as Action and Passion,” 336 passim. 52 A version of the discussion of relics was previously published in my article, “‘Lo how I vanysshe.’” 53 Dictionnaire de la théologie catholique, vol. 13, 2313. (my trans.) 54 That being said, one notes how rare the use of lockets has become in contemporary secular society. 55 For an elaboration of this subject, see my article, “‘Lo how I vanysshe,’” 153–7. See also Leclercq, “Reliques et reliquaires.” 56 Polanyi, 195. 57 Ibid., 197. 58 Innis, 205. 59 Polanyi, 197. 60 Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, 2:7.

Chapter T wo

1 The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Liber de ortu beatae Mariae et infantia Saluatoris. An English translation is provided in J.K. Elliott, A Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity and Infancy Narratives. 2 Nixon, 41. 3 In his Merchant’s Tale, for instance, Chaucer has the libidinous old fool who seeks a young wife compare himself to the laurel tree: “My heart and my limbs are as green as is the laurel.” (IV, 1465–6) in Chaucer, Riverside Chaucer. (my trans.) 4 Elliott, Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity and Infancy Narratives, 10. 5 Here Anna seems to have adopted her husband’s voice, since it was he who was thrust from the Temple. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Ibid., 7. The Protevangelium has the angel say, “Thou shalt conceive,” whereas Pseudo-Matthew has him say something rather vague: “There is seed for you in the decree of God.” The moment of Anna’s conceiving of Mary in the narrative becomes of the utmost importance. 8 Ibid., 8. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 See, for instance, Paul Foster, “The Gospel of Philip,” The Expository Times.

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12 See de Gaiffier, 289–98. 13 Mary Cleophas and the Virgin Mary were sisters-in-law as well as halfsisters since it is believed that Cleophas was Saint Joseph’s brother. John refers to this Mary as the Virgin’s sister (John 19:25). 14 See Horrall, Lyf of oure Lady. 15 See Sokoloff, 45. 16 Sermon on Saint Anne. 17 There is a topos being enacted here that, while not directly pertinent to Saint Anne’s Vita, is loosely related to it through the importance of genealogy: it is the topos of God’s mysterious preference for the younger son, which begins in the perplexing rejection of Cain’s offering and the acceptance of Abel’s, continues through the story of Esau and Jacob (the latter born seconds after his twin and thus the “younger”), and the story of the choice of David over all his older brothers to be King of Israel. Christian exegesis usually interpreted this as God’s preference for his younger “child,” the Church, over the elder, the Synagogue. 18 Wittebolle, 22 ff. (my trans.) 19 Jacobus de Voragine, 522. 20 See Nixon, 46–7. 21 Bokenham, The Legend of Holy Women. 22 According to Mary Sarjeanson, editor of Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Bokenham’s source seems to have been a Latin legend based on the Evangelium de nativitate S. Mariae and the Historia de nativitate Mariae et de Infantia Savatoris. Anne’s ancestoral line seems to have been taken from the Acta sanctorum, 26 July. 23 Sarjeanson, 37. 24 Ibid. 25 Nixon, 14. 26 Bokenham, 39. 27 Ibid., 41. 28 Parker, Stanzaic version, 133 ff. 29 Ibid., 169. 30 Block, Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi, 162–4. 31 For an exhaustive discussion of the late mediaeval German iconography of Anne, see Virginia Nixon. See also Jacqueline Lafontaine-Desogne, and for Quebec see Nicole Cloutier. 32 Masseron, 38. 33 See Ladis, The Arena Chapel and the Genius of Giotto, and Stubblebine.



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34 The Liber de ortu beatae Mariae et infantia Salvatoris has it that all three shepherds accompanied Joachim, but given that this account comes three hundred years after Giotto’s depiction, it is likely that the image inspired the account. 35 These views are summarized by Virginia Bush. 36 Ibid., 178. 37 Roman de la rose. See D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), plate 18. 38 See The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, fig. 2.16 and fig. 2.3. 39 The theological alternative to the idea of the Immaculate Conception was “maculate conception” in which it was believed that Mary was miraculously freed of original sin in the womb after being conceived. 40 See Brandenbarg, 31–68. 41 Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 105 ff. 42 Nixon, 104 passim. 43 Ibid., 126 ff. 44 Ibid., 8–9. 45 Ibid., 56. 46 Ibid., 150. 47 Réau, vol. 2, 168. 48 Lafontaine-Dosogne, vol. 2, 108. For a developed discussion of Anne as teacher, see Pamela Sheingorn, 69–80. For the Croughton frescoes, see E. Tristram and M.R. James, 179–204, plates xxxvii, and xlvi. See also Norton, Dominican Painting in East Anglia. 49 See the Acta Sanctorum for 13 June and The New Catholic Encyclopedia article “Anthony of Padua.” 50 See Taylor and Smith, Women and the Book. 51 The portrait of Hugh of Provence in the Sala capitolare of San Nicolo, Tréviso. 52 Nixon, 110. 53 Ibid. 54 Stanley, The Book of Margery Kempe, I, part I, 406–12. 55 See Cloutier. 56 de Tervarent, vol. 2, 35 ff. 57 See Kleinschmidt. 58 Manzalaoui, “Of kepyng of body,” 45–6. 59 Wittebolle, 38. (my trans.) 60 Ibid.

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Ibid., 40–1. de Tervarent, vol. 2, 36. (my trans.) La Neuvaine. (my trans.) Miles, 30. Ibid., 8. Gibson, 95. Lubbock, 267. Sautman, 69. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 77. Charland, 95, citing P. Cahier (Caractéristiques des saints, I, 607). (my trans.) Ibid., 98. Nixon, 77. Charland, 163. (my trans.) Yolande was obliged to seek a dispensation from her promise when she discovered the cost of such a statue and was allowed to present a smaller version. Sautman, 81. Nixon, 102. These rituals are also described in the fifteenth-century “Legenda seu Vita Beatissime Anne” in the Speculum Rosarium Jhesu et Mariae (Antwerp: Geraert Leeu, 1489). Ibid. See also Brandenbarg, 33–4. For number symbolism, see Peck, 15–64, and Hooper. See Cloutier, I, 21–2. Ibid., I, 17. See Gangé. Cloutier, I, 57–9. Ibid., 59. For a discussion of ex voto in Quebec, see Landry, 114 ff. Carroll, 34. Landry, 116–17. Milot, 90–1. See Levack, 63–4. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 63. See Murray. Cloutier, 208. (my trans.) Ibid.



NOTES TO PAGES 86–111

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95 Ibid., 208 ff. Chapter Three

1 From the Icelandic Saga, as cited by Winston, 45. A similar description is found in the Vita S. Thomae of William Fitzstephen: “Erat siquidem placido vultu et venusto, statura procerus, naso eminentiore et parum inflexo, sensilius corporeis [vigestus] vegetus, eloquio, comptus (comis) ingenio subtilis, animo magnus.” Robertson, Materials, III, 17. 2 New Catholic Encyclopedia, article “St Thomas Becket.” 3 The two major issues were Henry’s insistence that the Church pay “voluntary contributions” into the royal treasury and that clergy accused of criminal offenses be subject to secular law. 4 See Slocum, 31, 40. 5 See Fitzstephen, Vita, in Robertson, Materials, III, 150. 6 Borenius, Archaeologia 79, 29–54 and Archaeologia 81, 19–32. 7 Thomas seems to have predicted his martyrdom after his return to England. See Fitzstephen in Roberston, Materials, III, 130 and Slocum, 65. 8 Thomas had suspended the bishops who had agreed to participate in the crowning of Henry’s son, an office that the pope had confirmed as belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury alone. Henry’s courtiers demanded he withdraw these sentences. 9 Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, 70–1. 10 Ibid., 71. 11 Slocum, 65–6. 12 Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, 71. 13 Ibid., 72. 14 However, according to Fitzstephen, Becket was abandoned by all except Merton, Grim, and himself. 15 See Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, 73 ff. 16 Slocum, citing the Vita, Anonymous II, 69. 17 Borenius, “Iconography of St. Thomas Becket,” 46. 18 See Erasmus, 118. 19 Paul uses the same conceit to address the idea that sin divides the self: “for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace” (Eph. 2:15). See also Eph. 4:24. 20 See Slocum, 19.

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21 Consecratus autem statim veterem exuit hominem, cilicium et monachum induit, carnem crucifigens cum vitiis et concupiscentiis suis. Cited and translated in Slocum, 141. 22 Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, 54. 23 This is not the hagiographical convention of the cephalphore since, unlike St Denis and others who were decapitated, Thomas retained his head, but without the top of the skull. This subject of the “corona” is well covered in Butler, 63 ff. 24 Grassin, 290–1. (my trans.) 25 Smyth, 13. 26 Ibid., 4. 27 See Slocum, 81. 28 The cult of the saint was vigorous even in Iceland where by the fourteenth century there existed the Thòmas Saga Erkibyskups, C.R. Unger, ed. Christiana (1869). 29 Herbert of Bosham, Vita lib. V (9) in Materials, III, 484, and for a full account of the many legends concerning the fate of the assassins, see Brown, 138 ff. 30 See, for example, Ronald C. Finucane, esp. chap. 9, and Patrick Geary. 31 Butler, 25–6. 32 Ibid., 16–17. The artist’s rendering of the shrine distinguishes the shrine from the tomb, although most representations do not. See also Sarah Blick, 256 ff. 33 Butler, 25. An illustration of the tomb can be found at Butler, 26. 34 Erasmus, 55. I am assuming that it was the Régale to which Erasmus was referring when he said of the jewels on Becket’s casket, “Some of them [were] larger than a goose’s egg.” 35 See Dalton and King, part II, 367–8. Here the Régale is called a diamond. 36 Dobson, 137. 37 Ibid., 138. 38 Materials, II, 42 ff. Benedict of Peterborough describes the gathering of the blood and its distribution to pilgrims as well as the miracles that occurred upon its being imbibed. A similar description is given by Fitzstephen, Materials, III, 150. 39 Robertson, Materials, II, xxx. 40 Ibid., “Datur ei sanguinis gutta, quam postulat; insuper et potus aquae stilla simili santificitae impenditur.” Fitzstephen recounts the story of



NOTES TO PAGES 131–46

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41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61

an eye witness to the killing who soaked a cloth in Thomas’s blood and brought it home to his paralytic wife who drank the water into which the blood of the cloth had been washed. She was cured. See Abbott, vol. 1, 234, and Robertson, Material, III, 146. Slocum, 92. Abbott, vol. 2, 7. Arnold of Lubeck, Chronica Slavorum, in Robertson, Materials, II, 290–1. Three times water is brought to Pope Alexander, who asks Thomas to bless it. Each time, at the moment of blessing, the water is turned into wine. See also Brown, 88 ff. Abbott, vol. 1, 328. Slocum, 216. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 30. Borenius, Saint Thomas Becket in Art, 3. Slocum, 140–1. Studens livor, lesson 9, in Slocum, 142. Salisbury, Vita., trans. in Slocum, 143. Benedict’s prologue, in Slocum, 143. It is intriguing to consider Freud’s speculations on the symbolico-psychological relationship between eyes and genitals, blindness and castration, as developed in his analysis of H.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman. Responsory 9, in Slocum, 143. See Duffy, 200–5. The story is found in Benedict, lib. III, cap. ii, in Robertson, Materials, II, 173–82. Strange eyes are often described as parti-coloured and sometimes associated with the evil eye. A sign of Alexander the Great’s divine origin was his eyes: one black, the other parti-coloured. See my essay, “Alexander and the Eyes of Desire.” For a photograph of an existing shrine with such apertures, see Butler, 19, who shows the shrine of St Candida, Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset. The purpose of the openings, Butler says, was to allow “pilgrims closer access to the relics housed within.” Benedict, in Robertson, Materials, II, 31. Butler, 31, 90. See Obelkevitch.

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62 63 64 65 66

Brown, 218. Stevens, 277. (my trans. throughout) Ibid., 278. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 279. “Let the pastor sound-off by horned trumpet / That the vineyard of Christ be free.” 67 Ibid., 283. 68 Martz, 17–18. Chapter Four

1 The form of the question and the answer is reported differently by different writers, as are many biographical details. More often, Mary says, “Do you want these crowns?” and Raymund answers, “Yes!” 2 Winoska, 25. Although at first reading these seem to be the words of Maria Kolbe, they are authorial comment. Compare Patricia Treece’s report, 10, of the incident: “No one knows what Maria Dobroska Kolbe said – but the boys reversed their decision.” 3 Winowska, 26. 4 Dewar, 27. 5 Ibid., 26. 6 Ibid., 42 ff. 7 Ibid., 77. 8 Ibid., 103. 9 Ibid., 56. 10 This is remarked in all biographies, but see, for example, Dewar, 50, and Winowska, 87–8. 11 Treece, 18. 12 Ibid., 19. 13 Ibid., 69. 14 Ibid., 72. 15 Ibid., 83. 16 Ibid., 156. 17 Winowska, 163. 18 Dewar, 112. 19 Winowska, 82. 20 Endo, 112–13. 21 Winowska, 162.



NOTES TO PAGES 155–80

211

22 Treece, 76. 23 There are several versions of the libretto and music. All of my references are to the splendid critical edition of Marguerite Jean-Blain. The translations of the French text are mine. 24 Ibid., 136–9. 25 Ibid., 20. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 141. 28 Ibid., 143. 29 Ibid., 29. “Ionesco confronts with nostalgia the shaft of light that exposes the vacuity of literary careerism, the absurd quest for ephemeral immortality.” 30 Ibid., 28–9. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 50. 33 Ibid., 74–5. 34 Ibid., 96. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Ibid., 96. Conclusion

1 Taken from “On the Removal of Images: A Reformation Debate,” cited in Nixon, 111. 2 See Spinozzi. 3 Miles, 35. 4 See Rosen. It is interesting that “txtrs” who “txt” have seen fit, as in Hebrew, to forego vowels.

212

NOTES TO PAGES 188–200

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INDEX

abortion, 186–7 Abraham, 48, 85 Acres, David, 36 Acta Sanctorum, vii, 6 Alexander VI [Pope], 109 Alexander the Great, 85 Alexander III [Pope], 115, 139, 142, 147 Alpheus, 52, 64 Altare ad punctum (Altar of the Sword Point), 118 Amtitz, Germany (Gabice, Poland), 173 Andrea Doria, 108 Anglo-Saxon poetry, 4 Anna Selbdritt, 56, 69-73, 78, 99-100, 111 Anna Selbviert, Esmerentia Selbviert, 73 Anonymous I, 118 Anonymous II, 119 Anouilh, Jean, Becket: ou l’honneur de Dieu, 15, 135–41

Aristotle: analogy, metaphor, 20–1; and Alexander the Great, 85 Asmodeus, 85 Augsburg Life, 53 Augustine, 19; psychology of vision, 26–7; natural signs and relics, 41–2, 46, 107, 159 Auschwitz, 165, 170, 173, 176, 178–9, 181, 183–4, 187, 188–9, 190 Bacon, Roger, on optics, 26, 40 Basile, Giuseppe, 36 Baudoin (Emperor), 101 Belting, Hans, 29, 31 Benedict of Peterborough, 117–18, 145, 149, 151, 154 Bernini, B., 182 Biasi, Jerome, 170–1 Bokenham, Osbern, 54–5 Bonus pastor (Good Shepherd), 117, 149, 156

Book of Hours of Anne de Bretagne, 68, 76 Book of Tobit, 83–8, 109 Borenius, Tancred, 120, 127, 131 Borgowiec, Bruno, 174 Bowie, Fiona, 38 Burgos retable, 60 Bush, Virginia, 60 Butler, John R., 142 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 32n35 Camille, Michael, 27–8, 30 Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 110 Carroll, Michael, 103 castration, 149–50 Caviness, Madeline H., 34 Caxton, William, 132 cephalophore, 209n23 Charland, Paul-Victor, 97–8 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 64, 142, 204n3 Chesterson, G.K., 202n26 Christus medicus (Christ the curer), 156 Cleophas, 52 Cloutier, Nicole, 102 Confraternity of Saint Anne of the Brass Serpent, 111 Confrèrie de menuisiers de Paris, 108 Confrèrie de Sainte Anne á Québec, 108 Council of Clarendon, 115 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 66 Croughton, 75 Curtright, Travis, 18 Czestochowa, Our lady of, 166 da Modena, Tommaso, 79

222

Dante, Alighieri, 60–1 da Treviso, Girolamo, 128 David, King of Israel, 74 de Broc, Robert, 117 del Ninno, Maurizio, 14 de Moreville, Hugh, 116, 118 de Tervarent, Guy, 84, 87-8 de Tracy, William, 116, 119 Dobson, Barrie, 144 dolce stil nuovo, 34 drug addicts (patron saint of), 186 Druki-Lubecki (Prince), 169 Duerer, Albrecht, 71, 80 Ecclesia, 60 Eco, Umberto, 11 Edward of Selling, 154 Eilward of Westoning, 150–2 Eliot, T.S.: Murder in the Cathedral, 15, 135, 158-63; Burnt Norton, 159 Émond, Bernard, 88 Endo, Shusako, 175-6 Erasmus, Desiderius, 143 Esmerantia, 53, 83–4 Esmeria (Hismeria), 52, 55 Eucharist, 31, 32, 146 ex voto, 102–8, 152, 153 eyeglasses, 79, 103, 175–8 Fish, Stanley, 8-11, 82 Fitzstephen, William, 117, 118 Fitzurse, Reginald, 116, 118–19, 122 François, Claude (Frère Luc), 107 Freedberg, David, 31, 33 Free Masons, 168–9

INDEX

Freud, Sigmund, on E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, 210n53 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 23–5, 43, 44, 82 Gajowniczek, Franciszek, 174,176, 180, 187, 189 Garside, Charles, 31 Gerald of Wales, 27 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 95 Giotto di Bondone, Arena Chapel frescos, 34–6, 57, 60–1 Godin, Jean, 83 Golden Gate, 36, 50, 51, 54–6, 57, 60, 61 Golden Legend, vii, 6, 36, 53, 120, 132 Gospel of Philip, 51 Gospel of the Birth of Mary, 49, 54 Grassin, Jean-Marie, 134 Greetham, D.C., 12–13 Gregory the Great, 26, 37 Grim, Edward, 117–18, 119, 120, 122, 127, 133, 137–8, 140 Gwendolen (Anouilh character), 138–9 Haimo of Auxerre, 51 Hanna (prophetess), as source of the name Anna, 47 Henry of Auxerre, 117–18, 120 Henry of Fordwich, 152 Henry of Pisa, 114 Henry VIII, 144, 152, 155 Henry II, 112–14, 131, 135, 141, 156, 161 Herod, 155, 156 Heures á l’usage d’Angers, 73



Hildegard of Bingen, 85 Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normans, 137 Holy Kinship, 53, 56, 64, 65–9, 71 Horsea, Thomas, 119, 122 Hours of Catherine of Clèves, 63, 77 Iceland, 209n28 iconography, vii, 56–7, 61, 63–5, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74–5, 80, 88, 92, 94, 99–100, 110–13, 117, 120–2, 125, 127–8, 131, 132, 135, 149, 152, 165, 174, 177–8, 182, 184, 186 image in modern technology, 34n40 Immaculata, Militia of, 168, 171; Knight of (publication), 168–9; 170, 175, 177, 179, 181 Immaculate Conception, 50, 51, 54–5, 61, 63–4, 73, 74 incubation, 154 Innis, Robert, 44 Isaac, 49 Ismary, 55 James the Greater, 52, 64 James the Lesser, 64 Jankovic, Zoran, 23–4 Jean-Blain, Marguerite, 190, 194–6 Jesse of Bethlehem, 74 Joachim, 33, 36, 48, 50–1, 53-5, 57–9, 61, 63, 67, 77, 78, 83, 86–8, 99, 109, 128 John of Eck, 52 John of Salisbury, 118, 119, 121, 123, 127, 131–2, 149 John-Paul II, 18, 193

INDEX

223

Joseph, son of Rachel, 49 Joseph and his brothers, 156 Joses, 52, 64 Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist, 12, 197 Karkov, Catherine, 27 Karpuk, Tadeusz, 176 Kempe, Majorie, 82 Kleinschmidt, Beda, 84 Koscielniak, Miecislaus, 179 Krott, 179, 180, 190 Labouret, Auguste, 83 Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jacqueline, 75 La Neuvaine, 15, 88–95, 108, 135 Le Bret, Richard, 116, 118, 119 Legend of Holy Women (Bokenham), 54 Legenda sanctae Annae, 53 Legenda sanctissimae matronae Anna, 84 Leinberger, Hans, 70 Lentes, Thomas, 25–6, 32 Libertyville, Illinois, 188 Lille, 155 liturgy, 5–6, 29, 36, 38, 44, 96, 132, 148–9, 156, 157, 194, 198–9 Logos, 6, 12, 99 Louis VII, 115, 139, 143–4 Lubbock, John, 95 Ludus Coventriae, 55 Luther, Martin, 31 Lwow, Austria, 166–7 Mâle, Emile, 35 Martz, Louis, 159

224

Mary Cleophas, 52, 64, 68, 77 Mary Salome, 52, 64, 68, 77 Masseron, Alexandre, 57 Masseu, Nicolas, 108 Mauch, Daniel, 67 McNamer, Sarah, 34–5 Meditationes Vitae Christi, 34–6 Miles Christi (soldier of Christ), 156, 167 Miles, Margaret, 7, 25, 30, 31, 33–4, 36, 94, 199 Molga, J., 181 Monsieur Juing, 105 Mother Teresa, 168 Mugenzai no Sono (Garden of the Immaculate), 171 Muir, Edward, 30, 31, 40 Murray, Kathleen Rochefort, 109 Nagasaki, 171 Nicolazic, Yvon, 101 Niepokalanow, 169–72 Nixon, Virginia, 27, 47, 67, 69, 73, 80–1, 82, 98–9, 197 Nova Huta Church, 184 Novus homo (new man), 130–9, 148, 157, 167 numerology, 100 Pacher, Michael, 122 Pawiak prison, 188 Penelope, 3–4 Petit Livret faict á l’honneur de Madame Sainte Anne, 61 Philomela, 3–4 Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, 104 Plamondon, Antoine, 105

INDEX

Plato, 4; Cratylus, Statesman, 194, 195, 200 Polanyi, Michael, 43–4, 94 Pontigny Abbey, 115 Pouchovski, 191 Prisoners (patron saint of), 186 Probst, Dominique, 188, 193 procession, 39–40 Procne, 3 Pro-life movement (patron saint of), 186 Protestant Reformation, and iconoclasm, 30–2, 197–8 Protevangelium of James, 47, 50–1, 57, 83 Pseudo-Dionysius, 21; invoked as saint, 119 Pseudo-Matthew Gospel, 47–51 Pygmalion and Galatea, 62 Quebec, 56, 83, 101–4, 108, 109 Rachel, 49, 54, 83, 155–6 Réau, Louis, 75 Reginald of Wretham, 147 Reimenschneider, Tilman, 71 relics, 40–2, 98, 101, 103, 118, 134, 143–5, 154–5, 187 Ricoeur, Paul, 19–20 Ringbom, Sixten, 26 Robert of Merton, 118 Robertson, James Craigie, 112, 145 Rosen, Jonathan, 200 Rzasa, Adam Antoni, 184 Saint Anthony of Padua, 75 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 51 Saint Blaise, 5



Saint Bonaventure, 51 Saint Christopher, 7 Saint Colette, 64–5 Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, (Saint Anne de Beaupré) 83, 89–93, 102 Sainte-Anne-d’Auray, 101 Sainte-Anne-de-Varennes, 101, 108 Sainte-Anne-de-Yamachiche, 110 Saint Elizabeth, of Hungary, 34; cousin of Mary, 52–3, 55, 64 Saint Elphege of Canterbury, 119 Saint Giuseppe Cottolengo, 168 Saint John Evangelist, 12, 52 Saint John of Damascus, 26 Saint John the Baptist, 52, 53, 55, 64 Saint Paul, 64, 130, 132 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 51 Saint Walston of Bawburgh, 151 Salome, 52 Samson, 49, 54 Samuel, 49, 54 Sara (wife of Tobias), 83–8, 109, 111 Sarah (wife of Abraham), 48, 54, 83–5 Sautman, Francesca, 96–7, 98–9 Scott, Walter, author of Ivanhoe, 137 Seibo no Kishi (Knight of the Immaculata), 171 Simon, 52, 64; (of Cyrene) 183–4 Slocum, Kay Brainerd, 117, 131, 146–8 Song of Songs, 74 Spinozzi, Paola, 198 Stadnik, Karel, 183

INDEX

225

Stanzaic Version of the Life of Saint Anne, 54 Stevens, Denis, 155–7 Stollanus, 52, 84, 87 Synagoga, 59 Talmud and the Internet, The, 200 Taymouth Hours, 62 Tennyson, Alfred, 113, 135 Theobald (Archbishop of Canterbury), 113 Thierry, Augustin, 137 Thomas of Hales, 52 Thompson, E. Maunde, 28 Tower of Babel, 21 Treece, Patricia, 172 Tridentine Mass, 194 trinubium, 51 typology, 45-6, 48, 75, 88 Ulysses, 3 vagina dentata, 84

226

van Cleve, Joos, 78 Veith, Gene, 20 von Trittenheim, Johann (Trithemius), 54 Wagner, Richard, vii, 4, 197, 200 water of Saint Thomas, 145 web, 3; world wide web, 200 Wife of Bath, 64; pilgrimages, 142 William (King of Scots), 119–20 William of Canterbury, 117–18, 151 Wittebolle, Paul, 86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34 younger son, God’s preference for, 205n17 Zaccharias, 52 Zakopane, 170 Zambelli (Cardinal), 139 Zebedee, 52, 64

INDEX