Afterlives of the Saints

Hagiography - the writing of the lives of the saints - is a curious genre, now mostly forgotten.

Hagiography - the writing of the lives of the saints - is a curious genre, now mostly forgotten.

You can't treat a saint as you would an ordinary human. When I think of the saints, what comes to mind are the "replicants" in Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner, androids of advanced strength and intelligence whom their creator describes as "more human than human."

Conques, meanwhile, was still without its saint. Unable to get Vincent of Saragossa, they decided next to try to acquire Saint Vincent of Pompejac - one Vincent being apparently as good as the next.

But even as more and more hermits climbed atop pillars to escape the world, Simeon, the first of them, remained the most well known, the originator of a strange craze that swept the desert in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Let your first image of Gregory be this: singing hymns one morning in 580 to a passed-out Christ.

Agatha's torture included having her breasts cut off, and she is commonly depicted as holding those breasts on a tray before her. But the laity didn't always recognize these tan lumps as breats. They were misread often enough both as bells and as loaves of bread that she has become the patron saint of bell-forgers and bakers. And then there's Bartholomew, flayed alive, who holds, in addition to his own skin, the tool used to cut that skin off, a tool that looks sort of like a cheese cutter, so Florentine cheese merchants took Bartholomew as their patron.

She is not the only military saint, but she is the saint of the cannon, of the powder, of the sudden and convulsive explosion. Saint Barbara, who blows things up for justice.

According to the Palimpsest, George was forced to wear iron boots into which nails had been hammered, his head was beaten with a hammer, a ret-hot helmet was placed on his head, more nails were pounded into his head, his skin was pierced with iron hooks, he had molten lead poured into his mouth, he was placed inside a bronze bull lined with nails and spun around, and then he was set on fire.