Comparison as Collaboration: Notes on the Contemporary Craft of Hagiology

Abstract

A workshop on “comparative hagiology” over the course of three years at the American Academy of Religion has yielded not only a series of articles but an experimental methodology by which scholars hailing from different disciplines and working in different fields might collaborate in threshing out commonalities and entanglements in their respective treatments of holy figures. This article’s response to the workshop identifies three pillars of general consensus among the participants that serve as promising footholds for aligned innovation in our respective fields: That hagiography (1) is constituted not only in verbal texts but in a wide array of media, both material and ephemeral; (2) is best interpreted by attending substantially to the “processes” of thought, life, and society in which it is rendered; and (3) opens possibilities of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary comparison by way of the many family resemblances in how saints (or more broadly, religious and even para-religious exemplars) are rendered in transmittable media and mobilized for a particular group’s benefit. The article concludes by suggesting vectors for further development on these grounds, indicating how the category of “hagiography” affords a resource for interpreting unauthorized and apparently irreligious phenomena akin to sanctification, and calling for a professional and pedagogical ethic of collaboration that extends beyond any particular scholarly fruits of hagiological comparison.

1. Comparison and Collaboration

A roundtable on “comparative hagiology,” at which questions of theory and method in the study of holy figures (broadly construed and continually contested) are in the foreground, is an outstanding opportunity not only to compare the materials and methods with which a group of scholars spends its time but also to consider more generally what role comparison plays in one’s larger scholarly objectives. What are the prerequisites of productive comparison, and for what is it a condition of possibility? For my part, I would locate comparison as bound up with (both fueled by and allowing for) two other modes of scholarly activity. Before comparison is possible there must be a degree of comprehension: considerable enough expertise in the subjects under consideration to be able to assess not only their differences but also the significance of those differences.1 In addition, while comparison can stand as a proximate end in itself (as in a publication providing edifying conclusions as to the nature or significance of some difference), I would commend the craft of comparison as a means of facilitating the wider and more open-ended tasks of collaboration: public scholarly itineraries determined not primarily by the individual interests of those walking them but by mutually articulated needs in the academy and/or society.2 Such an interplay of comprehension, comparison, and collaboration is certainly of meaningful utility in the two primary fields in which I locate myself and to the flourishing of which I dedicate my hagiological research—interreligious studies and ecumenical theology.3

It is in light of this general sense of the function of comparison in my own work that I can examine and evaluate the AAR workshop on comparative hagiology that has led to this collection of essays. At the outset I would note that in none of the phases of this project—the original papers circulated by five participants, the interlocking conversations on site at the AAR in Denver (in 2018), and the subsequent production and exchange of response essays by the workshop’s other participants—has the sense of “comparative hagiology” been limited (or even primarily dedicated) to comparing the varied hagiographical media on which we work. Rather, we have embraced the opportunity to bring into the foreground a comparison of our methodologies and orientations, contextualized as these are by different disciplines, fields, and institutions. Accordingly, I would like to reflect, first, on my sense of some shared hagiological commitments that seem to have emerged in the core papers and our conversations around them, so as, second, to highlight what I take to be some lingering tensions and promising directions for future deliberation.

It seems appropriate at this point to pause and make explicit, as other contributors have done, what I take as my working distinction between “hagiology” and “hagiography”—terms which I use frequently and together, but not interchangeably. I describe the materials on which I work as “hagiographical media,” that is, media that inscribe and transmit human understandings and experiences of holiness (and that include but are not limited to verbal inscriptions such as texts and prayers), and the discursive work of interpreting them as “hagiology,” that is, the study of how holiness (or its analogues) is construed and of the media in which it is purported to be manifest. In this framework, hagiography and hagiology are not mutually exclusive: Hagiological discourse, scholarly or otherwise, might well itself become a means of hagiographical mediation, depending on its context and participants.4 However, I am in no way eager to insist that this working distinction is valid for everybody. (Philippart 1994) established the wide historical variability of both terms’ use in European scholarship and ecclesiastical use more broadly, and, in my own context of study (Greek Orthodox Christianity), it is important to recognize that the two terms have an emic utility of distinguishing between verbal and visual representations of holiness (with agiographia referring today mainly to icons and freschi—images of saints—and agiologia mainly to texts such as Lives, passion accounts, hymns, etc.—words about saints). Both terms, then, are worth retaining in scholarly analysis—in this position I differ from most, but not all, of the core essays of this special issue, which tend to prioritize (explicitly or implicitly) one term as more adequate than the other for the task at hand.5

Our emphasis on comparing methods for scholarship pertaining to holiness, saints, and their representation (and on comparing the possible definitions and taxonomies of such key terminology)6 has meant that a kind of fruitful frustration has prevailed in our conversations. As Jon Keune poses the question: “How is meaningful comparison even possible without first clarifying the criteria by which scholars selected items to be compared?” (Keune 2019, p. 1). Recognizing the need for such metatheoretical reflection has led the comparative hagiology workshops into a kind of two-steps-forward-one-step-back rhythm, as every apparent agreement has been accompanied by the recognition that the agreement obscures differences in our working definitions of core problems and holds a tenuous common ground between different frameworks of scholarly sense-making. However, it is my sense that these delaying detours, sending us back through the weeds of suppositions we had not yet worked to explicate, can be counted as features rather than as liabilities of comparison. We are all the better off for having reckoned with approaches that we do not share and the challenges leveled by those approaches’ differences, whether or not we come (or even want to come) to consensus on particular elements of them.

That said, it is heartening to see the degree of agreement around some key, yet more or less novel, parameters of hagiological scholarship. I would identify three of these matters in which participants (myself included) were generally convinced, and which seem to me to be representative of what can be identified as a contemporary approach to hagiographical sources. These areas of alignment provide initial frames for collaborative sense-making even in the absence of shared material or scholarly goals.

2. Common Grounds

Hagiography, whether understood as “a text about the life of a figure regarded as holy by some subset of a population” (DiValerio 2019, p. 1), “texts about exemplars, when texts include objects, non-verbal images, and ritual actions (procession, votive offering, pilgrimage)” (Ritchey 2019, pp. 2–3), or, most capaciously, “the complex web of behaviors, practices, beliefs, and productions (literary, visual, acoustic, etc.) in and by which a given community constructs the memory of an individual who is recognized as the embodied perfection of the ‘religious’ ideal promoted by the community’s tradition and socio-cultural context” (Rondolino 2019, p. 5, presupposing the longer discussion in Rondolino (2017, pp. 35–40)), is an analytical category more capacious than the literary productions that have typically exhausted it. Already in 1994, Felice Lifshitz demonstrated how the notion of hagiography as a distinct “genre” of religious literature is problematic in light of this definition’s reliance on obsolete historiographical suppositions about the opposition of history and fiction.7 However, much of the hagiographical scholarship in the years since has remained invested in construing hagiography as essentially literary or verbal: for instance, as “a variety of literary forms” in which special individuals are glorified (Rapp 1999, pp. 64–65), or as “a set of discursive strategies for presenting sainthood” (Miller 2009, p. 118). By contrast, the papers under consideration at the recent comparative hagiology workshop, and the contributions of the other participants in conversation, have for the most part embraced the subsequent move of classifying as hagiographical non-verbal or trans-verbal “texts” (such as images, objects, apparitions, buildings, processions, festivals, etc.).8 While this move should not be made merely for convenience and should be robustly theorized (a project in which I am engaged as well), I take it as promising that “hagiography” is recognized to be a heuristic tool rather than a stable and single set of data. This allows for the interpretation of family resemblances and integrated functions between a vast array of media that, as enough of us have found, work together and amplify one another’s interventions in the life-worlds of their consumers.9

So too, there seems to be an encouraging level of (at least provisional) agreement with Rondolino’s proposal that hagiography be considered not only in terms of the “productions” in which the sanctity of some person is constructed but also in terms of the “behaviors, practices, beliefs,” and other ways of life of which those material productions are but one manifestation (Rondolino 2019, p. 5). Rondolino describes this overall theoretical thrust as being concerned with “hagiographical process” (Rondolino 2017, 2019, throughout)—a formulation that sparked excitement and recognition among other participants, myself included. My doctoral dissertation, to take the example with which I am most familiar, interpreted the relationship between the (multiple and interlocking) material textures and the (public and private) political functions of the hagiography of St. George in modern Cyprus. In that work, I developed a framework for interpreting hagiography as “the multimediation of holiness,” that is, as designating not solely the media themselves but also and more fundamentally the psychosocial processes that generate and mobilize these constructions of holiness for a wide array of purposes in the world. I was delighted to find that this framework was at home in the comparative hagiology workshop, and it was evident that the other primary contributions besides Rondolino’s were resonant with the “hagiographical process” approach as well.10

Finally, although there was not as much consensus (indeed there was some heated dispute) as to whether “hagiology” and “hagiography” could be useful categories of analysis in the context of religious traditions that either do not use the terms (or analogous terms) or that do not frame phenomena as “saints” or “holiness,” etc.,11 there was a sense that all of our many approaches to dealing with many incommensurable materials have something to do with one another, even if the act of intellection around our commonalities (particularly where we are using terms derived from Greek or Latin and regularly associated with Christianity) sounds all the usual alarm bells. After all, there we all were, taking the time and effort to participate in a shared workshop, able to build upon one another’s contributions and conceive of a collaborative future even when we could not agree on the definition or specific utility of the terms we were working with. It may be my ecumenical disposition speaking, but I take this to be enormously promising: The comparative hagiology project is constrained, unsurprisingly, by all the challenges of comparative work in religious studies more generally, but it is also fueled by the recognition that hospitality to one another’s contributions across our wide range of hagiological construals and analytic suppositions is worthwhile even without the ability to translate perfectly and without a lockstep commitment to the same intellectual goals. This is, of course, the norm of human communication more broadly—we can never understand other people (or other languages, or other traditions, or other disciplines) exactly as they understand themselves, yet communication, translation, and multilingualism are not only possible, they are overwhelmingly the norm. As Keune points out, we may not need conclusively (or even preemptively) come to consensus on our terms before we begin the collaborative work of comparative hagiology.12 Thinking together, including about these differences and disagreements, is transformative—we will not see our own material and our own methods the same way when we can accompany others gleaning insights from their own.13

I will conclude these reflections with an indication of where my own approach, while wholly aligned with the above areas of general agreement, would try to massage through some lingering knots in our enterprise of comparative hagiological interpretation.

3. Where Next?

First, insofar as we are asking about the processes of thought and life that give rise to hagiographical media (by which, in Rondolino’s terms, “the embodied perfection of the ‘religious’ ideal” (Rondolino 2019, p. 5) is constructed in publicly-available forms), we ought to consider within the field of view not only those processes of hagiographical production but also those of what I would call hagiographical consumption. The many authorized and unauthorized uses to which hagiographical media are put in people’s lives are indispensable to the continued construction and circulation of the ideals of which these media are representative. Indeed, an object that plays a hagiographical role in the life of a community need not even be deliberately “produced” to be hagiologically significant. To take an example from my own material: Across the island of Cyprus there are shrines that have developed around stones bearing the hoofprints (ta pathkia) of St. George’s horse; such shrines may eventually be formalized through recognition by the institutional church, but well before this point they have coalesced as sites of holy significance and power through the procedures by which people interact with them. Whether at such informal sites as this or in the established churches, practices of veneration may be ephemeral but still constitute part of the status and indeed the very form of the holiness that is there represented. Hagiographical consumers become part of the mediating field for one another, their devotions being publicly perceptible, and the offerings that are frequently left behind (wax or tin votives, photos of loved ones, candles, coins, crutches, etc.) remain as a cumulative precipitation from acts of consumption that amplifies the content and power of the media in question. In Michel de Certeau’s formulation, such consumption is itself a co-production, not only of a site’s significance but even of that which is available to signify in the first place. It is important not to let an allergy to over-broadening our categories foreclose on including such phenomena in our hagiological analyses.14

Second, while I am in agreement that the analytical use of “hagiography” as a category is broader than those religious traditions in which the term has emic significance, I would also suggest that this breadth extends past religious studies as a discipline, or perhaps better, offers a point at which religious studies may contribute to broader questions in cultural and political studies. The study of saints has already made room for this recognition (for instance in Lawrence Jasud’s short but significant piece, “St. Elvis,” (Jasud 2011)), yet the opportunity exists for more thoroughgoing theoretical attention to how such transreligious hagiographical phenomena are related to those that are more familiar to scholars of religion.15 Such an applicability at the margins of religious studies was, unsurprisingly, a point of tension in our conversation (around the reasonable but, I think, ultimately untenable worry that once everything is hagiography, nothing will be), yet I would suggest that Rondolino’s definition of hagiography may in fact remain rather too narrow. As Keune puts it “But that’s not religion, and those aren’t saints” (Keune 2019, p. 6) is a gatekeeping move that, though well-intentioned to keep a firm grip on the reins of interpretation, will impede some of the most interesting analyses that comparative hagiology may engender—for instance around sanctifying representations (verbal and otherwise) of politicians, soldiers, celebrities, or animals.16

Third, I would like to encourage those of us committed to pursuing comparative hagiology not to view the insights available in this comparative key as self-sufficient. I mean this not only in the sense that sound comparative work can and should open the door to collaborative scholarship that mobilizes diverse strengths in shared projects, but also in the sense that comparative methods risk giving a pass to obsolete parameters for examining religious traditions, practices, or texts “individually,” as it were, as if such phenomena were discrete entities that could be set next to one another as non-overlapping spheres.17 Where hagiographical production and consumption are concerned, however, a community’s dealings with holy figures are often if not usually preconditioned by a history of interreligious interaction, in which the community’s own understandings and behaviors are oriented in no small part by what they have witnessed on the part of religious others, whose presence and activity have contributed to their repertoire of self-understanding. In this respect, I would offer the methodological resources of interreligious studies—in its early days as a formal academic apparatus but earning ample recognition and enthusiasm from practitioners across a range of disciplines—as valuable assets for the project of comparative hagiology, useful as they are for illuminating and accounting for the entanglement of even apparently distinct religious phenomena.18

Where we go from here is as wide open as the breadth of imagination on the part of participants in this series of workshops and of those in our own networks and beyond who are inspired by the work. The collaborative commitment on the part of those involved is encouraging indeed, in light of an academic profession that will not easily survive (or at least, will not easily flourish again) in the absence of such collaboration. In a way, the fact of how such a contemporary hagiology is being pursued—a circulation of drafts, an in-person negotiation of parallels and divergences, a collaborative editing process, and a shared publication in a setting that amplifies each scholar’s contribution in light of its resonance with the others—is as significant as the content of any of its scholarly accomplishments. This experiment, whatever its quantifiable products, has moral implications not only for our responsibility to steward the profession sustainably for the next generation, but also for our pedagogy as teachers of students who will need to navigate a world of religious difference and will do so for better or worse. The collaborative comparison in which we are engaged is—if we apply it thus—of substantial value in the classroom, as we work to equip our students to think differently, and more precisely to think with others, decoupling their commitments and horizons from a sense of self-evidence and offering these destabilizing comparisons as opportunities to practice intellectual empathy and hospitality.19 If the collaborative enterprise that has led to this collection can help cultivate the recognition that individual excellence is not a sufficient end toward which to dedicate our scholarship, then our students, our professional networks, and our interlocking publics will be much better for it.