January 2023 Print

By Jonathan Wanner

If all the books of the 13th century held a popularity contest, the Golden Legend would give the Bible and the Book of Hours a run for their money. Handwritten copies of this martyrology were so numerous that over 1,000 venerable manuscripts survive to this day, and between 1470 and 1500 it was reprinted over one hundred times—more than any other book within that span. It wasn’t just a bestseller; it was a better-than-best seller, and for good reason. It was the first encyclopedic tome of saint stories widely disseminated in print. Arguably, Blessed Jacobus was the first American (in spirit, if not in time), since he seems to have skipped the process of selection altogether and opted for including everyone. There is not a major Apostle, Evangelist, Father, Doctor, Martyr, Confessor, Virgin, or Holy Woman of the pre-Medieval West that is not listed under his index. If saints were stars, this book would be about the entire night sky: vastness is a most natural property of communion.

As a member of the still-new Order of Preachers, Blessed Jacobus especially designed The Golden Legend as a preaching aid. He arranged the saints liturgically according to their feast days and even included commentaries upon major Solemnities. It was meant for you to take in piecemeal as a daily office. Nor was it popular only among the clergy: artists and artisans enthusiastically depicted the miracles and valiance of Voragine’s godly heroes. How enthrallingly St. Margaret bursts forth from the belly of the dragon who swallowed her; how wondrously St. John the Evangelist survives being deep-fried in oil; how fantastically the relics of St. Agatha repel the eruption of Mount Etna. Then there is St. George’s iconic clash with a dragon, a tale famously recast by Edmund Spencer in The Fairy Queen (1590), and later by Trina Schart Hyman in her dearly illustrated “St. George and the Dragon” (1990). Of course, the saint’s body does not always prevail: with at least 81 varieties of martyrdom, from the griddling of St. Lawrence to the flaying of St. Bartholomew, the compendium is a trove of the bite-your-fingernail kind of holy drama. There is enough spectacle here for poets, playwrights, painters, and stained-glass glaziers until the end of time.

Each saint story, with a few exceptions, follows the same template: the etymology of the saint’s name, a narrative about his life, a list of his miracles, and a list of citations and sources. Of these, the etymology stands out as the oddity. Some abridged editions leave it out altogether upon the grounds that it is unnecessary and fanciful. Take, for instance, the name Agatha. It has a simple Greek origin, coming from the feminine form of the adjective ἀγαθός (agathós), “good.” In his “Life of St. Agatha,” however, Blessed Jacobus ignores this fact altogether and instead resorts to a series of fictional etymologies:

Agatha is said of agios, which is as much to say as holy, and theos, that is God, that is to say the saint of God. Or she is said of A, which is to say without, and of geos, earth, and of theos, God, as a goddess without earth, that is without earthly love. Or she is said of aga, that is to say speaking, and of thau, that is perfection, that is that she was speaking and accomplishing much perfectly, and that appeareth well in her answers. Or she is said of agath, that is service, and thaas, sovereign, which is as sovereign service, and because she said that servage is sovereign noblesse. Or she is said of aga, that is solemn, and of thau, that is perfection, for the perfection was right solemn, like as it appeareth by the angels that buried her.¹

Of course, the goal here is not historical accuracy, but spiritual accuracy. As fictional as the above passage is, its allegorizing strikes at a higher poetic truth: that as God knew St. Agatha’s sanctity at her conception, it is fitting her name should encode the same knowledge of her life’s purpose and end. Form and content, after all, ought to share a due proportion, so that if her name did not augment her birth’s meaning, then surely her sainthood should augment her name. Nor is it Blessed Jacobus’ fault if a name’s origins lack holy wonder: in the case that it does, his diligence to mend the error is his virtue. Just as an artist illuminates first letters with gold foil, Jacobus illuminates first names with the gilding of Latin and Greek roots. Etymology, he shows us, need not be a temporal fact when poetry can transfigure it into an eternal one.

These etymologies have a second purpose: memory. A name becomes a mnemonic device when it symbolizes a saint’s fate or essential virtues. To lisp it is, in a microcosmic way, to tell the entire story of his sanctity. Such is the case with the Legend’s Saint Jerome. Historically, Jerome means “sacred name”: it is a composite of the Greek ἱερός, “sacred,” and ὄνυμα, an alternative form of ὄνομα, “name.” Inside this Golden tome, however, Jerome means “sacred grove” (from gerar, holy, and nemus, grove), a phrase that has a multifarious meaning:

He [Jerome] was holy, that is to say steadfast, in holy work by long perseverance, he was clean in mind by purity, he was dyed in blood by thinking of the passion of our Lord Jesu Christ, he was deputed to holy usage by the exposition of holy Scripture, he was said a holy wood by the conversation that he sometimes did and abode in the wood.²

By way of simple exposition, the tagline “sacred grove” becomes a two-word definition of Jerome’s character, a short-hand symbol of his patience, purity, Christ-centeredness, biblical knowledge, and contemplation. Nor is the significance of Jerome’s “sacred groveness” limited to Jacobus’ account. It extends to a larger iconographic and literary heritage upon which the image is founded. As April Oettinger explains,

The association of Jerome with a leafy grove belongs to a vast tradition that extolled nature, especially forests, as an ideal space for solitary contemplation, a topos celebrated in patristic writings, the verse of Medieval dream poetry, and most notably, the writings of Petrarch … Although the desert described in the thirteenth-century hagiography is bereft of greenery, the idea of the Vita Solitaria, a concept portrayed through the green world, played a vital and increasingly important role in devotional images that pictured Jerome’s hagiography from the early fifteenth-century and after.³

A “sacred forest,” we might say, is a wild counterpart to the Hortus Conclusus (“garden enclosed”) tradition that so elegantly emblemizes Mary’s virginity in the Song of Songs. Of course, trees have Christological resonances as well: we might recall the tenth-century poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which the “Saviour’s Tree,” bleeding from its side, recollects how it was “cut down at the copse’s end.”⁴ Add to this the many paintings that depict St. Jerome in a grove—as Lorenzo Lotto’s “St. Jerome in Penitence” and Paolo Caliari’s “St. Jerome in the Wilderness” do—and what began as an etymological analysis ends as a figurative continuum. Only you must speak the language of eternal facts, not historical ones, to read it.

St. Anthony being tormented by demons, with an historiated initial “A”(nthoine) of Anthony being blessed by another saint.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room: even after the etymology lessons, so many of the pious stories in the Golden Legend don’t feel factual. Any parent of a normal child—I mean the sinning kind—might find it hard to believe that St. James the Lesser “was ever holy after he issued out of his mother’s womb,” and that the proof of this is “He never drank wine, mead, ne cider, ne never ate flesh, ne never rasor touched his head, ne he never bathed.”⁵ Surely he’s gone swimming once in his life. Oh, and even in his youth “He knelt so oft in prayers that his knees were as hard as the horn of a camel.” The “Life of St. Martha” reads even more like a fairytale, describing a dragon (excrement included) with fantastic effect:

There was that time upon the river of Rhone … a great dragon, half beast and half fish, greater than an ox, longer than an horse, having teeth sharp as a sword, and horned on either side, head like a lion, tail like a serpent, and defended him with two wings on either side, and could not be beaten with cast of stones ne with other armour, and was as strong as twelve lions or bears; which dragon lay hiding and lurking in the river, and perished them that passed by and drowned ships. He … was engendered of Leviathan, which is a serpent of the water … And when he is pursued he casts out of his belly behind, his ordure [i.e. excrement], the space of an acre of land on them that follow him, and it is bright as glass, and what it toucheth it burneth as fire.”⁶

When St. Martha encounters the beast, he is in the middle of eating a man. What follows is no description of her surprise, fear, or hesitation: in more casual course, she tames the dragon with holy water and the sign of the cross before binding him with her belt. No less miraculous is the story of James the Martyr (a.k.a. James the Mutilated) who was slowly cut into twenty-eight pieces. According to Blessed Jacobus, the Saint had this polite colloquy to say after his executor hacked off his fingers, toes, hands, feet, arms, and legs one by one:

O good Lord, hear me half alive, thou Lord of living men and dead; Lord, I have no fingers to lift up to thee, ne hands that I may enhance to thee; my feet be cut off, and my knees so that I may not kneel to thee, and am like to a house fallen, of whom the pillars be taken away by which the house was borne up and sustained, hear me, Lord Jesu Christ, and take out my soul from this prison.⁷

What can one do but marvel? Even in the throngs of dismemberment, St. James the Martyr spoke more logically than your average college freshman.

But did these really happen? Jacobus himself doubts his sources at times, yet not enough to withhold any legends. The modern sensibility is otherwise. As George O’Neill puts it, “we are all too concerned with the difference between history, conjecture, and mere romance.”⁸ The truth is there is no possible way for us to verify these legends as we might verify the wattage of a lightbulb. Nor does it really matter. Whatever our historical doubts, it is a scientific fact that these golden marvels charm us with poetic truths. Even if dragons never existed as a common species of lizard, and even if a demon never disguised himself as a dragon, St. George is a treasurable emblem of fortitude and magnanimity, and his battle allegorizes the end times. We may not be able to imitate his gallantry by hunting a literal dragon of our own, but then the value of poetry is not particular truths—but universal ones. In the words of Aristotle, as translated by Philip Sidney,

The historian and the poet are distinguished by this—that the one relates what has been, the other what might be. On this account Poetry is a more philosophical and more excellent thing than History. Poetry is chiefly conversant with general truth; History with particular.⁹

The earliest known image of Saint Patrick, from a 13th-century Legenda Aurea at the Huntington Library.
Cosmas and Damian, attaching the black leg to the sick man.

It is possible to imitate the knight’s faithful courage, even when the particulars differ. After all, saints don’t work miracles because “they struggle, too” in the particular and precise ways we do, but because their ability to prevail in common matters makes them uncommon. That some of the most fantastic miracles in the Golden Legend may or may not have ever happened is a fact—but a useless one that neither satisfies curiosity nor excites heroic sanctity. Besides, it is only because our time lacks heroism that we find it is so improbable, and it is because our vision is so ordinary that we lose sight of the miraculous.

Let us, then, pluck up some courage and illuminate our eyes with the marvelously Golden Legend of St. George, whose very name, as Jacobus tells, means “tilling the earth, that is his flesh” (from geos, “earth,” and orge, “tilling”):

The dragon appeared and came running to them, and S. George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear and hurt him sore and threw him to the ground. And after said to the maid: Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon and be not afeard. When she had done so the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair. Then she led him into the city, and the people fled by mountains and valleys, and said: Alas! alas! we shall be all dead. Then S. George said to them: Ne doubt ye no thing, without more, believe ye in God, Jesu Christ, and do ye to be baptized and I shall slay the dragon. Then the king was baptized and all his people, and S. George slew the dragon and smote off his head, and commanded that he should be thrown in the fields, and they took four carts with oxen that drew him out of the city.

Then were there well fifteen thousand men baptized, without women and children, and the king did do make a church there of our Lady and of S. George, in the which yet sourdeth [i.e. arose] a fountain of living water, which healeth sick people that drink thereof. After this the king offered to S. George as much money as there might be numbered, but he refused all and commanded that it should be given to poor people for God’s sake; and enjoined the king four things, that is, that he should have charge of the churches, and that he should honour the priests and hear their service diligently, and that he should have pity on the poor people, and after, kissed the king and departed.¹⁰

St. George and the Dragon, ms. of Legenda aurea, Paris, 1382.

Endnotes

¹ Jacobus de Voragine, “The Life of S. Agatha,” The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, trans. William Caxton, vol. 3 (Temple Classics, 1900), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume3.asp#Agatha

² Ibid., “The Life of Jerome,” vol. 5, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume5.asp#Jerome

³ Oettinger, April. “Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1509 St. Jerome.” In Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth, edited by April Oettinger, Karen Hope Goodchild, and Leopoldine Prosperetti (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 56.

⁴ Quoted in Sara Ritchey’s “Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Spiritual Imagination,” Spiritus 8, no. 1 (2008): 72.

⁵ Jacobus de Voragine, “S. James the Less,” The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, trans. William Caxton, vol. 3 (Temple Classics, 1900), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume3.asp#James%20the%20Less

⁶ Ibid., “The Life of S. Martha,” vol. 4, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume4.asp#Martha

⁷ Ibid., “S. James the Martyr, vol. 7, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume7.asp#James%20the%20Martyr

⁸ Jacobus de Voragine, “Biographical Introduction,” The Golden Legend: Lives of the Saints, trans. William Caxton, ed. George V. O’Neill (Cambridge University Press, 1914), 12.

⁹ Philip Sidney, “A Defense of Poetry,” from A Defense of Poesie and Poems, ed. David Price (Cassell & Company, 1891), footnote 35, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1962/1962-h/1962-h.htm

¹⁰ Jacobus de Voragine, “St. George, Martyr,” The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, trans. William Caxton, vol. 3 (Temple Classics, 1900), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume3.asp#George