Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Hagiographical Strategies

A Comparative Study of the Standard Lives of St. Francis and Milarepa

Massimo A. Rondolino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472479051
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book examines the potential of conducting studies in comparative hagiology, through parallel literary and historical analyses of spiritual life writings pertaining to distinct religious contexts. In particular, it focuses on a comparative analysis of the early sources on the medieval Christian Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa (c. 1052-1135), up to and including the so-called 'standard versions' of their life stories written by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274) and Tsangnyön Heruka (1452-1507) respectively.

The book thus demonstrates how in the social and religious contexts of both 1200s Italy and 1400s Tibet, narratives of the lives, deeds and teachings of two individuals recognized as spiritual champions were seen as the most effective means to promote spiritual, doctrinal and political agendas. Therefore, as well being highly relevant to those studying hagiographical sources, this book will be of interest to scholars working across the fields of religion and the comparative study of religious phenomena, as well as history and literature in the pre-modern period.

1Introduction

On comparative hagiology¹

Preliminary consideration

The present book is a cross-cultural investigation of the hagiographical process. As such it is primarily concerned with the study of the life narratives of saints from religious traditions pertaining to independent cultural contexts, separated in time and space. Critically, the term saint is here adopted as a metalinguistic category, with an emphasis on its broadest etymological connotation as an identifier of the moral and spiritual incorruptibility of particular human beings, especially in light of the public recognition of their exceptional spiritual achievements.² Similarly, hagiography, literally “the writing of the divine/holy,” or “sacred writing,” and its related terms are here employed as a metalinguistic category referring to sources that offer a codified rendering of the life, deeds, and teachings of saints, both as a testimony, which preserves their memory and their cult, and as a relationship with an incorruptible human being in the form of a written discourse.³ Yet, in view of the fundamental Christian character and history of terms such as saint, holy, and hagiography, of their historically acquired essentialist connotations, and of the consequent post-modernist critique both of the comparative method and of universalizing projects, this book also wishes to offer a possible methodological solution to place religions in dialogue with each other effectively and meaningfully in a post-post-modernist perspective.⁴

At this point in the history of the study of religious phenomena, if we are to understand sanctity as a universal and super-cultural entity (in the sense that it supersedes any cultural differentiation), and as a phenomenon that exemplifies the transcendental nature of reality, then any direct comparison is necessarily receptive to critiques of cultural subjectivism, and of essentializing culture-specific realities that are, in fact, rooted in socio-historical circumstances that are all fundamentally relative and contextual. Conversely, if we understand sanctity as a culturally constructed concept that is intimately and exclusively tied to Christianity, its doctrine, and soteriology as well as its social history, then, as post-modern critiques have often argued, direct comparison is impossible. Yet, in the context of the study of religions, forgoing comparison also necessarily entails abandoning the possibility of both working towards the definition and understanding of possible cross-cultural human traits, as well as assessing and re-elaborating the viability and value of metalinguistic categories of analysis.

The major flaw in most past comparative studies of religious phenomena, as Oliver Freiberger observes, rests on their fundamental deductive nature. In such studies, Freiberger argues, the process of comparison serves the sole goal of providing evidence to postulated universalizing theories. Such studies, then, inevitably overstate the significance of similarity and often result in the development of ahistorical essentializing arguments.⁵ Jonathan Z. Smith’s prominent critique of comparison arose from similar considerations.⁶ Yet, as Wendy Doniger notes, “comparison makes it possible for us to literally cross-examine cultures.”⁷ In particular, this can be achieved using a seemingly similar datum in two distinct cultural contexts (in Doniger’s case, a given myth or mytheme) to discern what about it is manifest in one culture and what is not in the other. In other words, the use of comparison is functional to the identification of culture-specific occurrences, in light of identifiable cross-cultural similarities. Thus, as Doniger further notes, the comparative method should not be negated in toto: difference cannot be absolute. If it were so, then, the other would become fundamentally alien and ultimately unintelligible.⁸

In conclusion to A Magic Still Dwells, Jonathan Z. Smith also reflects on the end of comparison, with a word play on the subtle double meaning of the expression as (in a rather post-modernist sense) “the eventual cessation of all comparative enterprises” or as “the ultimate aim of comparison.” Thus, Smith notes, comparison cannot be an end to itself. Rather, it has to be functional to the description of a first datum, its comparison to a second other datum, a description of the second datum, and then a final “rectification of the analytic categories in relation to which [the exempla] have been imagined.”⁹ In this perspective, the present book provides a method, and a first test of its applicability, for the study of the processes underpinning the creation and circulation of saintly narratives as they can be historically and philologically discerned in distinct religious, cultural, geographical, and historical contexts: what I here call the hagiographical process.

Indeed, in the perspective of a comparative cross-cultural study of saints, attempting to compare the “actual” human beings – who they were, what they did and said – risks not only falling into the pitfall of essentializing a given cultural datum, but also uncritically embracing the narrative rhetoric contained in the very sources on the saints. Even if it were possible to discern without doubt who Francis of Bernardone or Thopaga (Thos pa dga’) was, for example, we would still be left ignorant as to the religious, doctrinal, social, and political dynamics that determined their respective recognitions as St. Francis and Milarepa (Mi la ras pa). Therefore, any study on St. Francis and Milarepa that wishes to engage fully with their status and nature as holy beings also necessarily has to frame and understand the hagiographical tradition in which their recognition as saints is formalized, within the doctrinal, historical, and socio-political context in which each such recognition was compiled and communicated. Thus, it is not the historical personas of the saints, or the world in which they have lived, or the cults that developed around their memory, that such a study would focus on. Rather, as Guy Philippart notes in the opening lines of the introduction to the ambitious project of the Histoire de la littérature hagiographique en occident des origines à 1550, it is the texts themselves; their narratives; their internal dynamics; and, possibly even more crucially than the literary works themselves, the authors, the hagiographers, that are the object of study.¹⁰

Such considerations on hagiographical sources have become, over the past fifty years, the accepted norm within the greater field of medieval studies, as they also have, in more recent decades, in the context of Buddhist studies at large, and of Tibetan studies in particular.¹¹ Yet, there remains a latent skepticism and post-modern reticence to employ fundamentally western and Christian categories as metalinguistic mediums for the taxonomy and systematic analysis of any datum from non-western and non-Christian cultural contexts. In reading the Tibetan Buddhist sources on Milarepa, in fact, one may indeed see similarities with the life and teachings of St. Francis, or even, as on occasion it has been the case historically, see St. Francis in Milarepa’s deeds and teachings as portrayed in the narratives. Seeing the other through our own cultural lenses carries the intrinsic danger of leading us to project ourselves onto the other and certainly seeing it as comparable to our world-view, though only to the extent that what we see is ourselves – because we had put ourselves there, by ourselves, in the first place. Indeed, as some have argued, for the sake of pursuing comparative projects, neologisms may help us avoid projecting our own cultural biases onto and into the historical and doctrinal dimensions of the observed non-western and non-Christian cultural datum. In coining neologisms, though, we risk superimposing latent biases that have not yet clearly been identified, or new ones of which we are yet unaware.

One such example is Thomas Heffernan’s 1988 adoption of sacred biography as a replacement for hagiography in virtue of the latter having come to signify “a pious fiction or an exercise in panegyric . . . which can foster misreadings of these texts and obscure their originality.”¹² Overall Heffernan’s work is not dissimilar in scope and method to many others that have before and since focused on the study of religious life writings (including the present book), in that it aims to uncover the basic paradigms that inspired and characterized such texts. Yet, although adopting the neologism sacred biography certainly offers a radical solution to the lingering positivist critique of hagiography as falsification (in opposition to history as truth), it also dismisses the complex history of the category and, with it, the possibility of a historical awareness of the field.¹³ Furthermore, the expression sacred biography itself is not free from bias. Positivist critics of religious writings have famously identified biography as true and objective, as a form of scientific history, and thus accurate and unprejudiced. Replacing hagiography with the neologism sacred biography as a means of resolving positivist tensions effectively results in reinforcing the very same positivist bias that it sought to defuse, effectively also dismissing the complexity associated with the original metalinguistic category.¹⁴

Running the risk of replacing old biases with new ones may certainly resolve immediately the dangers associated with the uncritical adoption of existing categories that have historically developed within our own culture. Yet, unless we maintain that it is possible for us to identify neologisms that are and will remain free of cultural bias, thus effectively essentializing the neologism’s referent, we are bound, as soon as the neologism has itself been revealed to be culturally charged, to have to replace it with a new one. Thus, the solution would seem to rest not on the neologism itself, but on the critically and culturally self-aware use that we make of it. In other words, it rests on the approach and method we adopt in applying a given metalinguistic category to our study of human phenomena. In this perspective, and in light of this book’s project of cross-cultural analysis of saintly figures, I argue that a critical and self-aware application of existing metalinguistic categories is in fact a preferable solution for a meaningful pursuit of comparison as a method for the study of religious phenomena. Furthermore, I propose this not in spite of the categories’ fundamental western and Christian character, but exactly because of it. Briefly identifying whom the we in the above reflection actually refers to should help clarify this point.

The present book is an academic work and it is intended primarily for an audience of other academics; students, who themselves are training in an academic context; and the wider public, who, in reading this book, demonstrate an interest in and a certain familiarity with academic inquiry. Academia and the academic pursuit of knowledge at large as we now understand them are and have always been fundamentally western and Christian, to the extent that they have developed in European Christian countries and that they have either defined themselves in light of these origins or against them. This, I believe, should be obvious. Thus, any contemporary academic pursuit that wishes to engage critically both with the object of its study and with its methods of analysis needs to be self-aware and mindful of its European- and Christian-centric character – for even when reacting against it, the response can be properly understood only through it, its history, values, and modes of being. I, academic and human being educated in a western academic context, as well as, by extension, my audience (thus, we) cannot but see the world through cultural lenses that are defined by the historically European- and Christian-centric environment in which knowledge and information are produced and circulated.¹⁵

If, then, the manner in which we approach the pursuit of knowledge (as well as our idea of knowledge itself) is necessarily informed by the European and Christian roots of the social institution of academia within which it is conducted, how can we ever truly free ourselves from this bias? It is my view that rather than attempting to resolve this tension or, alternatively, avoiding comparison as a means to defuse it (and with it the dangers of cultural projection), we should strive to understand thoroughly the culturally charged web of relations proper to our own historically defining categories of analysis and then apply them critically, even in a cross-cultural context, ever mindful of the terms’ European and Christian-centric references. Such a process is not different in method from a post-modern critique of cultural projection, as it moves from the same self-analysis of academic endeavor. Yet, in doing so, it also retains the defining traits and referents of our historically European and Christian metalinguistic category and, by means of its cross-cultural application, strives to implement that ideal method for comparison advocated by Jonathan Z. Smith. It apprehends the objects studied through comparison, independently from and in light of each other, as a means to further the academic project for the acquisition of knowledge and the understanding of human phenomena. It redefines and rectifies our understanding of the category itself, as a valid and valuable tool for scientific inquiry. It fosters the development of a historical awareness of the field and the ensuing critical assessment of our own biases.

This last point, in my view, is crucial for the implementation of a truly scientific approach to the study of human phenomena in general, and to religious phenomena in particular. First and foremost, evidence must be gathered that is also available to all those who wish to engage in its study. Such evidence must then be understood and interpreted by means of comparison, classification, and analysis. This necessarily entails the adoption of metalinguistic categories that arise from existing theoretical frameworks and are thus employed in the creation of hypotheses and, eventually, new theories to explain the evidence thus examined.¹⁶ Yet, our ability to relate to the culturally dependent, historically constructed as well as formal nature of our own theories and methods is also as crucial as the process of investigation just outlined. Thus, it is necessary...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• A note on tibetan names
• Figures
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The early lives
• Part II The standard lives
• References
• Index