In our first episode of Season 2 of Paideia Today, we look at the  now-neglected genre of hagiography, and debunk the popular misconception  that medieval hagiography was the product of weak artistry or even a  form of propaganda, a type of embellished historical document recording  superhuman individuals. We tend to read it as if hagiography were a  Christian variation on the nineteenth-century accounts of the lives of  great men, as Thomas Carlyle made famous.

On the contrary, we explain that authors of hagiographic accounts had no interest in the  Romantic obsession with originality as an indicator of artistic merit,  or with making their subjects superhuman.  On the contrary, they are  thoroughly generic in their portrait of virtue and seek to hew very  closely to the pattern of imitatio Christi.  We mention the lives of St.  Paul the Hermit, St. Martin, and St. Anthony as variations of lives  patterned upon the well-known deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in  Scripture.

The greater the saint, the less exemplary he will be, and the more Christ will be seen in the pattern of his life.