A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Biography, Autobiography, and Hagiography

  Sarah Insley and Jeanne‐Nicole Mellon Saint‐Laurent

  23.1 Introduction

  Late antiquity was a fertile period for the writing and reading of Lives, both as independent texts and embedded within larger works, spurred largely by the changing fortunes of Christianity from the beginning of the fourth century. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the related literary forms of autobiography, biography, and hagiography – especially the last of these – enjoyed a period of intense attention and innovation in the Mediterranean world in the period. In addition, recent advances in scholarship make this a rewarding time in which to focus on these three interrelated traditions. While premodern biography and autobiography have received less systematic scholarly attention than other literary forms, this is changing with respect to the classical period and late antiquity (see, e.g., Hägg 2012; Marasco 2011; McGing and Mossman 2006; Urbano 2013). Likewise, hagiographical scholarship has traditionally focused on the collection, classification, and editing of hagiographical texts and less on their theoretical interpretation. This is hardly surprising given the complexity of the literary tradition and the difficulty of establishing a critical corpus of texts with which to work. In recent decades, however, hagiography, too, has become a subject of renewed and invigorating scholarly consideration. This is beginning to reward the application of new critical methodologies and a more sophisticated appreciation of hagiography’s centrality to its late antique historical and cultural context (for a recent guide to advances in the field with bibliography, see Efthymiadis 2011–2014 and Harvey 2008).

  Though autobiography, biography, and hagiography were related and mutually productive literary forms in late antiquity, all three present unique critical difficulties. Not least is the fact that they can only loosely be considered “genres,” or distinct literary forms, at all. Tomas Hägg has noted as much with respect to ancient biography:

  I do not regard [it] as a literary genre with a strong identity or developmental force of its own. It owes much of its vitality and topicality to its parasitic dependence on cognate literary forms and to contemporary cultural fashions. (2012, p. 380)

  As will be shown below, the same can certainly be said of autobiography and hagiography in late antiquity, so that it is perhaps best to follow the recommendation of M.J. Edwards and Simon Swain (1997) and focus on “autobiographical, biographical, and hagiographical writing” in this period, rather than upon three discrete forms with clearly demarcated characteristics and conventions.

  For example, when referring to “autobiography” in late antiquity, are we to consider only free‐standing texts in which the subject is ostensibly a roughly chronological narrative of the author’s life, such as Augustine’s Confessions and Gregory of Nazianzus’s De vita sua, or should we also include any text in which authorial self‐representation is a primary aim? Likewise, it is now generally agreed that “hagiography” should be thought of as a discourse found in a variety of literary forms, both prose and verse, whose subject is the life, acts, and/or sayings of a holy person (Van Uytfanghe 1993; Hinterberger 2014). This idea necessarily affects our classification and interpretation of hagiographical literature. Finally, while “biography” is a recognizable classical form from about the fifth century BCE (Momigliano 1993; Hägg 2012), beginning in the late third and fourth centuries CE it is frequently difficult to discern where “biography” ends and “hagiography” begins (see, e.g., Cox 1983; Hägg 2011; Hägg and Rousseau 2000).

  What is clear, however, is that biographical and autobiographical writing underwent significant development in late antiquity, and that experimentation with these forms contributed, in particular, to the evolution of Christian hagiographical writing in this period. Late antique hagiography thus draws as much on the classical literary tradition in both Greek and Latin (biography, panegyric, romance, etc.) as it does upon Judeo‐Christian forms such as Scriptural narrative, apocryphal acts, and martyr passions. And, while biography and autobiography were very much the arena of élite Greco‐Roman authors and intellectuals, hagiography, by contrast, became the domain of a more varied writing and reading public. The form seems to have encouraged the development of a literary vernacular in Greek and Latin and also enjoyed considerable success among Coptic, Syriac, and, later, Arab Christian audiences.

  In this chapter, we will necessarily be limited to a very brief and partial sketch of these three interrelated forms. Although it is impossible to be comprehensive, we will, nonetheless, attempt to provide a general overview of life‐writing in late antiquity. We begin with autobiographical and biographical traditions in the Greek‐ and Latin‐speaking Mediterranean and then proceed to offer a general account of the emergence of hagiography, focusing primarily on the Syriac tradition in order to give a more holistic impression of the writing of Lives in late antiquity. Because of the multiplicity and diversity of texts, each section will be organized around a few exempla that we feel best represent the creativity and hybridity of late ancient Lives. Our intention is thus to offer a basic outline of late ancient biographical writing in its various forms.

  23.2 Autobiography

  “Autobiography” in the modern sense – namely, an ostensibly complete, chronological narrative of the author’s life from birth to the moment of composition, particularly as regards the explication of his/her private life – did not exist in antiquity (for issues of generic classification, see Niggl 2005). The period did give rise to exciting developments in what we might term “spiritual” autobiographical writing, in which the author’s religious identity is explored at length. Still, of the three literary forms we ar
e considering, autobiography remains the least represented both in terms of late antique literary history and in modern scholarship. With respect to the latter, the primary study for both the classical period and late antiquity remains Georg Misch’s two‐volume History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1951; see also Momigliano 1993, p. 18 for comment), with the recent addition of three edited collections (Baslez, Hoffmann, and Pernot 1993; Marasco 2011; Reichel 2005). With the exception of studies of individual texts – notably the substantial bibliography on Augustine and the Confessions (see, e.g., Brown 2000; O’Donnell 1992, 2005; Quinn 2002; Vessey 2012) – there is comparatively little systematic consideration of autobiographical forms in classical and late antiquity, rendering this an exciting field for future research.

  From the outset it is important to remember that, as with both biography and hagiography, autobiographical writing in the classical period and late antiquity was largely devoted to the representation of the author as a public persona – in which sense we can, with Marasco 2011, refer to much of it as “political” autobiography. Libanius, for example, wrote a lengthy autobiographical narrative of his fortunes and misfortunes over the course of his career. Composed in at least two stages, beginning in 374 and then revised until 392, his “autobiography” stands in final form at 279 chapters, and was transmitted at the head of his rhetorical corpus as Oration 1 (Norman 1965). The emperor Julian’s corpus also contains substantial autobiographical writing, including the satirical self‐portrait in the Misopogon, addressed to the citizens of Antioch after his ill‐received stay in the city in 361–362, and the Letter to the Athenians, in which he defends his installation as Augustus and impending campaign against Constantius.

  With the unique developments in Christian autobiographical literature, however, a new focus on the author’s spiritual trajectory – and the resulting tension between the demands of his spiritual and public lives – provides a new focus for self‐representation in late antiquity. For example, in Latin, in addition to Augustine, we should also note the Eucharisticon of Paulinus of Pella, an autobiographical poem of thanksgiving to God in the midst of the author’s misfortunes, written ca. 460 (Evelyn White 1921, pp. 293ff). Nonetheless, even in Christian autobiographical writing of this sort, we shall be disappointed if we expect a portrait of the author as a private individual to emerge: he remains for the most part defined by his social status, his selected models, and his role as a public figure, whether that be in society at large or specifically within the church as a bishop or theologian. Although Augustine, for example, tells us much about his life in the first nine books of the Confessions, his experiences are refracted through the lens of his ultimate reception into the Catholic Church and his concomitant rejection of the Manichean religion with its view on creation and its understanding of the human person. When we consider all 13 books of Augustine’s Confessions together, the main subject is not Augustine himself but rather the Trinitarian God in whom he comes to believe and in whom he longs to rest (O’Donnell 2005, pp. 63–86; Fredriksen 2012).

  Rapid changes within the Christian Church and the evolving role of Christianity in late ancient society facilitated the development of new autobiographical forms among Christian intellectuals. The first extended example of Christian autobiographical writing thus fuses classical literary forms with Christian self‐expression. Between his retirement from public life in 381 and his death ca. 390, Gregory of Nazianzus penned more than 15 000 lines of poetry spread across nearly 100 poems (White 1996, p. xxv). Because much of this material is about himself, these poems may be considered autobiographical in nature, if not entirely in form. They range in length from a few lines to nearly 2000. They include epigrams, an epitaph, and poems that could be classed as quasi‐tragedies, and they display a range of meters, including iambic trimeter, elegiac couplets, and hexameter, replete with full epic dialect (Tuilier and Bady 2004). The overall effect of this calculated experimentation with classical poetry is, broadly, to inscribe the author within the Greek traditions of epic and tragedy while simultaneously using classical verse forms to legitimize his status as a Christian leader and intellectual.

  At about 1950 lines, Gregory’s De vita sua (Eς το`ν ε῾αυτο βíον) provides the most complete autobiographical narrative, beginning with his childhood and ending with his retirement from public life in 381 (Jungck 1974). In this, as in his other lengthy autobiographical poems (e.g. De rebus suis [Περι` τω˜ν καθ᾽ ε῾αυτóν]), Gregory’s focus is largely on his misfortunes in public life. The decision to concentrate his autobiographical narrative on his personal suffering also informs Gregory’s choice of verse over prose. By serving as a remedy to suffering and as a source of enjoyment for himself and others, verse is best suited to his aims (see Poem II.1.39 in White 1996, pp. 2–9). Similarly, in addition to what might be termed “free‐standing” autobiographical texts like the De vita sua, Gregory’s orations, notably Oration 42 (the “Farewell Address to the Bishops”) and Oration 43 (the epitaphios on Basil of Caesarea), involve lengthy autobiographical excurses, frequently with an apologetic tone (see Elm 2000; McLynn 1998).

  At this juncture, a word should also be said about other types of embedded autobiographical narrative, such as the inclusion of the author’s vita/βíος at the conclusion of biographical and hagiographical collections. The Lausiac History of Palladius, for example, includes the author’s own βíος as its final chapter (see Krueger 2004, pp. 106–109). In like manner, Jerome, an author who uses various literary forms as part of an extended project of self‐fashioning (Cain 2009), leaves the last word to himself in his De viris illustribus, inscribing his own corpus among those of literati past and present. Finally, current scholarship on late antique liturgical poetry, focusing in particular on the sixth‐century hymns of Romanos the Melode, highlights the importance of autobiographical writing in a wider variety of literary forms. Derek Krueger’s recent assessment of self‐representation in Romanos, examining the performance of a penitential Christian subjectivity in first‐person passages in these liturgical texts, opens up new horizons in the study of late ancient autobiographical writing (Krueger 2014). We can thus see the degree to which autobiographical discourse was developing as an innovative and multiform means of authorial self‐expression in the late antique period. This will reward systematic study in the future.

  23.3 Biography

  It is generally agreed that biography is one of the more difficult forms to classify and assess, not least because it is so closely aligned with historiography and epideictic oratory in both classical and late antiquity (Hägg 2012; Hägg and Rousseau 2000). In the late antique period, the added difficulty of distinguishing between biography and hagiography – particularly in the fourth century, when both underwent significant innovation in the hands of Christian authors – renders late ancient biography a challenging and exciting field of study (see, e.g., Cox 1983 and the response of Dillon 2006). Because any overview of biography in late antiquity of necessity must be selective, this section will focus on the biographical writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, which we feel best represent the major characteristics and features of the form in the period.

  Eusebius is currently the subject of critical reassessment and is becoming much better appreciated for the innovation and creativity of his literary achievement (Inowlocki and Zamagni 2011; Johnson and Schott 2013). While he is known primarily as a historiographer and scriptural commentator, Eusebius’s biographical writings, which include his four‐book Life of Constantine (hereafter VC; Winkelmann 1975) and the life of Origen embedded in book six of The Ecclesiastical History (hereafter HE; Bardy 1952–1958), best highlight his spirit of literary experimentation. Both texts have been the subject of thoughtful discussion in recent decades, and both are perfectly representative of the developments in biographical writing that occurred in late antiquity, but three representative features of these two works underscore the unique nature of late antique biography: (1) the “hybrid,” multiform nature of biogr
aphical writing; (2) the use of biography as a tool for communal and self‐definition; and (3) the ethical purpose of biography to produce ideal models for individual behavior rather than “objective” or “complete” accounts of the subject’s life.

  In discussions of the VC as a literary text, the question of its genre is frequently emphasized (see, e.g., the main outline of the discussion in Barnes 1990; Cameron 1997). At the outset of their translation and commentary, Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall (1999, p. 1) note, “While the work certainly has biographical elements, it is better described as an uneasy mixture of panegyric and narrative history,” highlighting the difficulty of classifying a text that otherwise seems to resist categorization. Yet if we read the VC, and likewise the life of Origen embedded in HE 6, in light of studies of ancient biography as a “parasitic” genre comfortably existing at the boundaries of historiography and panegyric (as suggested by Hägg 2012), these texts are immediately recognized as examples of late ancient biographical writing par excellence. In fact, we might neatly describe the life of Origen as – both literally and figuratively – existing at the confluence of biography and historiography, just as the VC emerges from epideictic rhetoric. Both texts thus allow us to see Eusebius as a biographer working at the intersection of the literary forms of historiography, apologetics, and panegyric, all of which he had already mastered. They also allow us to observe the process by which a Christian intellectual actively negotiated and adapted classical literary forms to suit the particular needs of his contemporary context.

  With regard to the use of biography for individual and communal self‐definition, Arthur Urbano (2013) highlights the ways in which biographical narratives were employed in the context of competition between philosophical schools and religious groups in late antiquity. As such, the life performs an apologetic function by using the portrait of its founder both to make implicit arguments for the superiority of a particular “school” and to erect a model of individual excellence intended to shape the intellectual activity and ethical behavior of readers/disciples. In the life of Origen and, on a grander scale, in the VC, we can trace precisely this process of communal and self‐definition at work. Eusebius’s account of Origen, embedded at a key point within his universalizing account of Christian history, functions both as an apologia for the subject and as an argument for a Christian intellectual ideal representing the natural marriage of secular paideia, scriptural exegesis, and heroic leadership within the Christian community.