LONDON
JOHN C. NIMMO
14 KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND
MDCCCXCVII
_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
_At the Ballantyne Press_
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
TO FIRST EDITION
(1872)
The Lives of the Saints, which I have begun, is an undertaking, of
whose difficulty few can have any idea. Let it be remembered, that
there were Saints in every century, for eighteen hundred years; that
their Acts are interwoven with the profane history of their times,
and that the history, not of one nation only, but of almost every
nation under the sun; that the records of these lives are sometimes
fragmentary, sometimes mere hints to be culled out of secular history;
that authentic records have sometimes suffered interpolation, and that
some records are forgeries; that the profane history with which the
lives of the Saints is mixed up is often dark and hard to be read; and
then some idea may be formed of the difficulty of this undertaking.
After having had to free the Acts of a martyr from a late accretion of
fable, and to decide whether the passion took place under--say Decius
or Diocletian, Claudius the Elder, or Claudius the younger,--the writer
of a hagiology is hurried into Byzantine politics, and has to collect
the thread of a saintly confessor's life from the tangle of political
and ecclesiastical intrigue, in that chaotic period when emperors
rose and fell, and patriarchs succeeded each other with bewildering
rapidity. And thence he is, by a step, landed in the romance world of
Irish hagiology, where the footing is as insecure as on the dark bogs
of the Emerald Isle. Thence he strides into the midst of the wreck
of Charlemagne's empire, to gather among the splinters of history a
few poor mean notices of those holy ones living then, whose names
have survived, but whose acts are all but lost. And then the scene
changes, and he treads the cool cloister of a mediaeval abbey, to glean
materials for a memoir of some peaceful recluse, which may reflect
the crystalline purity of the life without being wholly colourless of
incident.
And then, maybe, he has to stand in the glare of the great
conflagration of the sixteenth century, and mark some pure soul passing
unscathed through the fire, like the lamp in Abraham's vision.
That one man can do justice to this task is not to be expected. When
Bellarmine heard of the undertaking of Rosweydus, he asked "What is
this man's age? does he expect to live two hundred years?" But for the
work of the Bollandists, it would have been an impossibility for me to
undertake this task. But even with this great storehouse open, the work
to be got through is enormous. Bollandus began January with two folios
in double columns, close print, of 1200 pages each. As he and his
coadjutors proceeded, fresh materials came in, and February occupies
three volumes. May swelled into seven folios, September into eight,
and October into ten. It was begun in 1643, and the fifty-seventh
volume appeared in 1861.
The labour of reading, digesting, and selecting from this library is
enormous. With so much material it is hard to decide what to omit, but
such a decision must be made, for the two volumes of January have to
be crushed into one, not a tenth of the size of one of Bollandus, and
the ten volumes for October must suffer compression to an hundredth
degree, so as to occupy the same dimensions. I had two courses open to
me. One to give a brief outline, bare of incident, of the life of every
Saint; the other to diminish the number of lives, and present them to
the reader in greater fulness, and with some colour. I have adopted
this latter course, but I have omitted no Saint of great historical
interest. I have been compelled to put aside a great number of lesser
known saintly religious, whose eventless lives flowed uniformly in
prayer, vigil, and mortification.
In writing the lives of the Saints, I have used my discretion, also,
in relating only those miracles which are most remarkable, either
for being fairly well authenticated, or for their intrinsic beauty
or quaintness, or because they are often represented in art, and are
therefore of interest to the archaeologist. That errors in judgment,
and historical inaccuracies, have crept into this volume, and may find
their way into those that succeed, is, I fear, inevitable. All I can
promise is, that I have used my best endeavours to be accurate, having
had recourse to all such modern critical works as have been accessible
to me, for the determining of dates, and the estimation of authorities.
Believing that in some three thousand and six hundred memoirs of
men, many of whose lives closely resembled each other, it would be
impossible for me to avoid a monotony of style which would become as
tedious to the reader as vexatious to myself, I have occasionally
admitted the lives of certain Saints by other writers, thereby giving a
little freshness to the book, where there could not fail otherwise to
have been aridity; but I have, I believe, in no case, inserted a life
by another pen, without verifying the authorities.
At the head of every article the authority for the life is stated,
to which the reader is referred for fuller details. The editions of
these authorities are not given, as it would have greatly extended
the notices, and such information can readily be obtained from that
invaluable guide to the historian of the Middle Ages, Potthast:
_Bibliotheca Historica Medii Aevi_, Berlin, 1862; the second part of
which is devoted to the Saints.
I have no wish that my work should be regarded as intended to supplant
that of Alban Butler. My line is somewhat different from his. He
confined his attention to the historical outlines of the saintly lives,
and he rarely filled them in with anecdote. Yet it is the little
details of a man's life that give it character, and impress themselves
on the memory. People forget the age and parentage of S. Gertrude, but
they remember the mouse running up her staff.
A priest of the Anglican Church, I have undertaken to write a book
which I hope and trust will be welcome to Roman and Anglican Catholics,
alike. It would have been unseemly to have carried prejudice,
impertinent to have obtruded sectarianism, into a work like this. I
have been called to tread holy ground, and kneel in the midst of the
great company of the blessed; and the only fitting attitude of the
mind for such a place, and such society, is reverence. In reading the
miracles recorded of the Saints, of which the number is infinite, the
proper spirit to observe is, not doubt, but discrimination. Because
much is certainly apocryphal in these accounts, we must not therefore
reject what may be true. The present age, in its vehement naturalism,
places itself, as it were, outside of the circle of spiritual
phenomena, and is as likely to deny the supernatural agency in a
marvel, as a mediaeval was liable to attribute a natural phenomenon to
spiritual causes. In such cases we must consider the evidence and its
worth or worthlessness. It may be that, in God's dealings with men, at
a time when natural means of cure were unattainable, the supernatural
should abound, but that when the science of medicine became perfected,
and the natural was rendered available to all, the supernatural should,
to some extent, at least, be withdrawn.
Of the Martyrologies referred to, it may be as well to mention the
dates of the most important. That of Ado is of the ninth century,
Bede's of the eighth;[1] there are several bearing the name of S.
Jerome, which differ from one another, they are forms of the ancient
Roman Martyrology. The Martyrology of Notker (D. 912), of Rabanus
Maurus (D. 856), of Usuardus (875), of Wandalbert (circ. 881). The
general catalogue of the Saints by Ferrarius was published in 1625,
the Martyrology of Maurolycus was composed in 1450, and published
1568. The modern Roman Martyrology is based on that of Usuardus. It
is impossible, in the limited space available for a preface, to say
all that is necessary on the various Kalendars, and Martyrologies,
that exist, also on the mode in which some of the Saints have received
apotheosis. Comparatively few Saints have received formal canonization
at Rome; popular veneration was regarded as sufficient in the mediaeval
period, before order and system were introduced; thus there are many
obscure Saints, famous in their own localities, and perhaps entered in
the kalendar of the diocese, whose claims to their title have never
been authoritatively inquired into, and decided upon. There is also
great confusion in the monastic kalendars in appropriating titles
to those commemorated; here a holy one is called "the Venerable,"
there "the Blessed," and in another "Saint." With regard also to the
estimation of authorities, the notes of genuineness of the Acts of
the martyrs, the tests whereby apocryphal lives and interpolations
may be detected, I should have been glad to have been able to make
observations. But this is a matter which there is not space to enter
upon here.
The author cannot dismiss the work without expressing a hope that it
may be found to meet a want which he believes has long been felt; for
English literature is sadly deficient in the department of hagiology.