Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints

262 Pages·1987·5.2 MB·English

by  Alison Goddard Elliott

Roads to Paradise

Roads to Paradise
Reading the Lives of the Early Saints
Alison Goddard Elliott
Published for Brown University Press
by University Press of New England
Hanover and London, 1987
Theology Library
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
Claremont. CA
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
BROWN UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND
CLARK UNIVERSITY TUFTS UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
© 1987 by the literary executor of the estate of
Alison Goddard Elliott
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews, this
book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For further information contact University Press of New
England, Hanover, NH 03755.
Printed in the United States of America
co
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Elliott, Alison Goddard.
Roads to paradise.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
i. Hagiography. I. Tide.
BX4662.E44 1987 8o9'.935i7 86-40384
ISBN 0-87451-389-8
5 4 3 2 1
This project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a
federal agency that supports the study of such fields as history, philosophy, litera­
ture, and the languages.
To Charlie, who took me to Sant’ Onofrio

Contents
editor’s foreword by Charles Segal ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE XV
i Introduction i
2 Hagiographie Epic 16
The Ethos of Martyrdom 18
To Speak a Martyrdom 23
3 Hagiographie Romance 42
Gradational Structures 45
The Romance Model 51
4 The Saint Sets Forth: Motifs of Departure 77
The Childhood of the Hero 77
The Break with the Past 81
The “More” Motif 83
Secret Flight 85
The Flight from Marriage: Lévi-Strauss
in the Desert 92
5 The Downward Journey 103
Symbolic Death and Burial 104
Unusual Guides 116
Disguise 119
The Journey’s Goal 120
Seeking the Woman 126
6 The Ascent: Paradise Regained 131
Food and Sex 137
The Peaceable Kingdom 144
viii Contents
7 The Saint as Liminal Hero 168
8 The Road’s End: Postscripta i8i
Hagiography and Epic: The Power of Discourse 182
Hagiography and Romance: 192
Animals 193
Liminality 204
The Persistent Dream 209
APPENDIX: TABLE OF THEMES AND MOTIFS 215
BIBLIOGRAPHY 217
Abbreviations Used 217
Primary Sources 218
Secondary Works 221
INDEX 237
Illustrations
Frescoes in the Campo Santo, Pisa, Fourteenth Century
Figure i. Paphnutius buries St. Onuphrius. 56
Figure 2. St. Macarius the Roman and his lions. 64
Figure 3. St. Antony, helped by two lions,
buries St. Paul of Thebes. 109
Figure 4. The devil, disguised as a lady pilgrim,
tempts a monk at his cave (St. Macarius). 112
Figure 5. The monk drives the disguised female
pilgrim from his cave (St. Macarius). 114
Figure 6. The devil, disguised as an elderly pilgrim,
tempts a monk in his cell. 121
Figure 7. A desert monk at work, plaiting a
basket of leaves. 134
Editor’s Foreword
Alison Goddard Elliott died of cancer on September 18, 1984
XL at the age of forty-seven. She had just been promoted to As­
sociate Professor of Classics, with tenure, at Brown University. She
left behind the manuscript of Roads to Paradise in a nearly com­
pleted state, having entered the manuscript into the Brown Uni­
versity main-frame computer and made revisions systematically as
she went along. The editorial work necessary to putting the book
into final form consisted mainly in checking and completing refer­
ences, translating some passages of Greek, Latin, French, and Old
French, doing some stylistic retouching, and adding a few details
that she had indicated in marginal notes. One chapter required ma­
jor stylistic revisions, but these did not alter the tone or substance of
the work. Had she lived to see the work through the press herself,
she would doubtless have made many improvements and refine­
ments. Even as it stands, however, the work certainly achieves her
main objectives: to demonstrate with very full documentation the
underlying narrative structure of the lives of the early saints, to
show their affinities to and differences from the classical myths of
the questing hero, and to trace continuities into the literary epics of
Medieval Europe.
Roads to Paradise makes a number of different but comple­
mentary contributions. First of all, it makes accessible to the gen­
eral reader a fascinating body of texts generally studied only by
specialists. Many of these have never been published in a modern
language, much less studied from the point of view of narrative
structure. Alison Elliott elucidates this structure and the mythical
symbols it contains. Using the recent work of Charles Altman, she
demonstrates how the saints’ lives show a “gradational” pattern
X Foreword
(attaining “more” holiness), in contrast to the contrastive or di­
chotomizing patterns of the early martyrologies, with their absolute
polarities of right and wrong, Christian and pagan. She shows how
these lives, recounting a quest for the Earthly Paradise, resemble
folktale and mythical narratives, especially romance narratives.
These ascetics’ denial of even the most basic physical needs corre­
sponds to contemporary theological concerns with the Fall, the cor­
ruption of the body, the evil of sexuality, and the idealization of a
prelapsarian paradise of corporeal purity. In classical thought the
forms of civic life and social organization differentiate man from
the beasts and constitute the essence of his true estate. Only by
being a “political animal,” in Aristotle’s celebrated formulation,
does man fulfil his humanity. For the desert saints, on the other
hand, man’s real goal is the heavenly kingdom, and civic life consti­
tutes a state of alienation from his “true” condition. Hence to ne­
gate civilized life, to replace culture by nature, is also to bypass the
fallen condition of humankind. To draw closer to the beasts is, par­
adoxically, to regain a lost proximity to the divine.
In attempting a unified interpretation of texts composed over a
thousand-year period and over a geographical range extending
from Spain to the Byzantine East and from France to Egypt, Alison
Elliott concentrates on the continuities of narrative patterns rather
than on the historical specificity of individual works and their
cultural milieus, although these are not entirely neglected. Never­
theless, the author would not, I think, want to claim that hers is the
only approach. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a “reading”
rather than an exhaustive analysis, and its focus is literary rather
than historical in the narrow sense, although it holds rich implica­
tions for further strictly historical study. It uncovers a narrative
model of remarkable tenacity over the centuries and thereby places
hagiography within the larger context of both classical narrative
patterns (e.g. the Greek novel) and the medieval romance. It should
contribute considerably to bringing hagiography into the main­
stream of contemporary critical discourse about myth, symbol, and
narrative.
Alison Elliott discusses these texts with a freshness, synoptic vi-