JACOBUS VORAGINE - Golden Legend
From the Big Book List, I drew Jacobus Voragine’s Golden Legend which is the 13th century French collection of the hagiography of the early church. I have to be transparent here and say that I have study Christian theology in a mainline Protestant seminary, and I was wholly unaware of much of the work in this text.
Hagiography – noun – the writing of the lives of saints.
Here is what is weird about the word hagiography. It seems in modern parlance it means something that is obviously false and fantastic but sort of benign and whimsical in a way that is nonthreatening. I could be wrong here, but my first experience with hagiography was in my undergraduate days when I came across the story of the life of Brandon which is a magical tale of the first Europeans to make landfall on the North American continent. Brandon’s life is not recorded here in the Golden Legend version from Penguin I read for reasons I don’t understand. It is not in the exhaustive list from the Internet History Sourcebook which I will get to later. Brandon apparently sailed on the back of a whale to North America. He and his fellow monks didn’t know it was a whale until they started a campfire on it and the whale began to talk with them.
(Weird side tangent – I have heard told that Brandon was from Galway and his tale is well told there, and one the key players on Christopher Columbus’s voyages was an Irishman from Galway who may have given Columbus the idea of the western passage *this is a real life version of hagiography because I am not going to do the work of looking this legend up it makes me believe in a magical universe that an Irish monk from the 300’s is responsible for the expansion of the map of the world in the 15th century).
Voragine and his legend here was a difficult read and one that I am not sure I would recommend to others to read really. I am have a religious leaning to be interested in this work, and I did not find it enjoyable to read. There were several stories that were funny, many, many others so violent that it was hard to manage reading more than a few at a time. The fixation on martyrdom in the early church makes a ton of sense because it was what they all experienced and in fact is a way to describe Jesus’ actions in the world as well. Voragine’s retelling is interesting enough where he hedges his bets at times, and says certain facts he is not very confident in his research into these stories. It is odd to think that he has no problem claiming that St. Christopher was over 12 feet tall, but a certain part of tradition seemed too far to lend credence to. Two saints kill dragons, but whether a certain saint had been a certain place was a bridge too far. St. Jerome taught a lion to carry water because a particularly stubborn donkey didn’t want to any more. According some thin research, apparently this story is lifted from Aesop’s Fables which is a retelling of an older story as well.
This brings me to one of the most obviously falsified or reused for a different reason stories in the Golden Legend. The story of Judas is one of the strangest stories in the collection because Voragine gives Judas the life of Oedipus before he comes to meet Jesus. Apparently, plot point by point, Judas kills his dad and marries his mom and realizes it then his poking out his eyes is coming to know the Lord and following Christ, but then because he couldn’t escape his own wickedness, he betrays Jesus because he is actually more evil than he thought. This disrupts the central tenet of the faith in redemption and reconciliation but who cares, Judas was bad for some inescapable reason and should receive shame in these stories. I could be wrong about this because I read this book quickly but it is bizarre.
Now its time for a new segment called: Weird Internet Resource
In my research of this text (because I had to put it down quite often), I found a resource called Internet History Sourcebook put out by Fordham University that has an unreal amount of historical texts catalogued and available for free online in a way that as an amateur archivist and reader of weird, old books I found staggering the amount of work this type of document would have taken. I emailed the website organizer, Paul Halstall but at this point he has not emailed me back. I will continue to draw upon this resource, and if you just want to look at a thing that obviously took years to compile, jump over there to see what’s going on.
Highlight from the Golden Legend: St. Agnes was encircled in a ring of flames to burn her and survived until someone stabbed her to death – it is a horrific yet hauntingly beautiful scene.
In the works of the lives of saints recorded by Penguin classics that I read there were 71 tales of the saints including Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux who would have known Abelard and may have been mentioned obliquely in the text, Judas, Paul, Peter, but then the 7 sleepers, and 10,000 martyrs. It as a raucous time. There is a laugh out loud funny moment when St. Benedict who was probably a ruthlessly strict person has a comedic relief character named Maurus who constantly gets stuff wrong and is worth a read really for a laugh.
Like the Guaman Poma reading, the Internet History Source Book records 252 lives of the Golden Legend, and once I found this stat out I was greatly relieved that Penguin cut my reading so short. 71 was a haul, but I am glad it was not 252 and I am also glad it is over.
Lastly, Voragine claims that St. Jerome was an avid reader before becoming a Christian and translating the Bible into Latin. St. Jerome curses the vanity laden work of reading secular texts and especially curses the profane works of Cicero. Again, this project hopes to capture what classic literature says about itself, and this is a humorous note in that ever evolving symphony.
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