Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century
Derek Baker
As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei , man of God, has been a christian type since time St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in Athanasian picture Vita Antonii possessed coherence completeness which made it proto-type for whole range literature late antiquity Middle Ages. In hagiography Antonine sequence early life, crisis conversion, probation temptation, privation renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge authority, is, its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, their individual differences, forced into same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, named, as exemplifies - at times pre-eminent – vocation. Yet if insight provided by such mind medieval instructive about his society social organisation, illuminating ideal aspirations, literary convention itself always limiting, frequently misleading. Professor Momigliano said, ‘biography was never quite part historiography’, one might add that not biography.
Studies in Church History