Historic component of Byzantine hagiography

Abstract

The quasi apparent anti-historicity of Byzantine hagiography is manifested as in unconcretizing the described objects and phenomena and in the corresponding uncertainty of dating and attribution of the monuments themselves. At the same time the hagiographic narrative in its sense is aimed to resolve the task of historicization of an action that proves the uncommonness, sanctity, moral and spiritual greatness of the hero. It is characteristic that hagiographers like to stress their own participation in his deeds. The principle of “autopsy”, maintained in hagiography, helps to prove the reality of what is happening, even the most unusual, at first glance, miracles.
The attention of the Lives to the events of everyday life, private life, to the individual details of the usual daily ritual, often ignored by chronicles and monumental stories, is characteristic. Beyond the stereotypy of hagiographic images in the Lives, one can often catch portrait characteristics of representatives of completely different social strata, socio-psychological descriptions of such categories as holy fools, beggars, hermits, and other individuals or outsiders. The most peculiar in hagiography seems to be the function of time. Time is neither cyclic, as in histories and biographies of classical antiquity, nor linear as in medieval annals and historiography. The nature of temporal revelation is as iterative (the events of modern history are as if repetition or copy of the Biblical history) so sudden. The hagiographic space is full of features of teratomorphism, whether in the desert, the wilds or in the deserted mountains. Thus, the historical approach to hagiography is expressed indirectly, in accordance with the genre etiquette, the socio-psychological and historical conditions of medieval mentality. The historicity of hagiography seems to be characterized mainly as an “apocalyptical historicity” (from the Greek. “apocalypse” – revelation, discovery).