Acta Sanctorum

“ Finlay observed that the Acta Sanctorum contain an unexplored mine for the social life of the Eastern Empire. But before they can be confidently dealt with, trained criticism must do its will on the texts; the relations between the various versions of each legend must be defined and the tradition in each case made clear. The task is huge; the libraries of Europe and Hither Asia are full of these holy tales. But Usener has made a good beginning and Krumbacher has rendered the immense service of pointing out precisely what the problems are. ”

“ BOLLANDISTS, the Belgian Jesuits who publish the Acta Sanctorum, the great collection of biographies and legends of the saints, arranged by days, in the order of the calendar. The original idea was conceived by a Jesuit father, Heribert Rosweyde (see Hagiology) , and was explained by him in a sort of prospectus, which he issued in 1607 under the title of Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in Belgicis Bibliothecis manuscriptae. His intention was to publish in eighteen volumes the lives of the saints compiled from the MSS., at the same time adding sober notes. ”

“ Children born in the district are sometimes called after the saint, and the local legend of his life agrees with the lives in the Acta Sanctorum (Acta SS. Antwerp, 1721, July, vol. ii.) He was already a bishop before he left Ireland about 689 (Baronius, xii. 89) . ”

“ A divine hand had thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee. [320] St. Philip enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations. The Acta Sanctorum relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the distinguished 2-219favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size, and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. ”

“ In several of his discourses St Augustine pronounces the eulogy of this martyr, and refers to Acts which were read in the church. It is doubtful whether the Acts that have come down to us (Acta Sanctorum, January, ii. 394–397) are those referred to by St Augustine, since it is not certain that they are a contemporary document. ”

“ This reached its 25th volume in 1906, and was edited by the Bollandists de Smedt, F. van Ontroy, H. Delehaye, A. Porcelet and P. Peeters. This review contains studies in preparation for the continuation and remoulding of the Acta Sanctorum, inedited texts, dissertations, and, since 1892, a Bulletin des publications hagiographiques, containing criticisms of recent works on hagiographic questions. In addition to this review, the Bollandists undertook the analysis of the hagiographic MSS. in the principal libraries. ”

“ A Jesuit father, John Bolland, was appointed to carry on the project, and was sent to Antwerp. He continued to amass material, and extended the scope of the work. In 1643 the two volumes for January appeared. The three volumes for February appeared in 1658, the three for March in 1668, the three for April in 1675, and so on. In 1635 Henschenius (Godfried Henschen) was associated with Bolland, and collaborated in the work until 1681. From 1659 to 1714 Papebroch (Daniel van Papenbroeck) collaborated. This was the most brilliant period in the history of the Acta Sanctorum. ”

“ Clear glimpses through this Celtic mist are rare. This is not to be wondered at when we consider how much of the mythology has been long forgotten, and how many hands have worked upon the remainder. The stories are relics of a dead past, as defaced and inexplicable as the battered monuments of the old religion. Romancers, would-be historians, Christian opponents of paganism, biographers of saints, ignorant yet half-believing folk, have worked their will with them. ”

“ What you say about the survival of folklore as a living heritage is absolutely true—how true perhaps few know, except those who have lived among the Gaels, of their blood, and speaking the ancient language. The Celtic paganism lies profound and potent still beneath the fugitive drift of Christianity and Civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the coming and going of the tides. ”

“ Thus, though the ancient fathers, and, since them, others have in general agreed, that the Sortes Sanctorum cannot be cleared of superstition, 282though they assert that it was tempting God, to expect that he would inform us of futurity, and reveal to us the secrets of his will, whenever the sacred book is opened for such a purpose, though it contain nothing which looks like a promise of that kind from God ”

“ The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. ”

“ But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and let us who are alive go on unto perfection. Let the Celtic members of this empire consider that they too have to transform themselves; and though the summons to transform themselves he often conveyed harshly and brutally, and with the cry to root up their wheat as well as their tares, yet that is no reason why the summons should not be followed so far as their tares are concerned. ”

“ The Sortes Sanctorum had succeeded the Sortes Homericæ and Sortes Virgilianæ of the Pagans; among whom it was customary to take the work of some famous poet, as Homer or Virgil, and write out different verses on separate scrolls, and afterwards draw one of them, or else, opening the book suddenly, consider the first verse that presented itself as a prognostication of future events. Even the vagrant fortune-tellers, like some of the gypsies of our own times, adopted this method of imposing upon the credulity of the ignorant. The nations of the East retain the practice to the present day. ”

“ The Romans, I observe, seem to care little for what to us is the kernel and marrow of these ceremonies—the exhibition of the holy relics. They seem more occupied in comparing the pomp of one year, or of one church, with another.
We must not, I suppose, measure the good things done us by our own thoughts and feelings, but simply accept it on the testimony of the Church.
Otherwise I might be tempted to imagine that the relics of pagan Rome do my spirit more good than gazing on the sacred ashes or bones of martyrs or apostles. ”

“ But despite such minor inconveniences, the Greek witch had little to fear in the way of persecutions, so that her mediæval successors might well have looked back to the days of ancient Hellas as their Golden Age, alike spiritually and materially.
If the Greeks, who recognised no predecessors in the possession of their country, yet imported so much of their witchcraft from abroad, it is little to be wondered at that the Romans, by their own account foreign settlers in Italy, should have done so. Unlike those of Greece, Roman legends provide a definite beginning for Rome itself. ”

“ But, in like manner, he goes on to show, that Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian) , Lithuanian, old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are also eight varieties of one common and more ancient type, and no one of them could have been the original from which the others were borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resemblance as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages. ”

“ Slowly she replies:—“The terrible altar never lacks a victim!”
Suddenly rose loud cries of anger; and through the thick throng of worshippers there ran several armed Gauls, bearing in their midst a man dressed in Roman garments.
“A Roman found in the sacred temple.”
Who was this man—this Roman? She, Norma, trembled as she saw him; and she whispered the word “Pollione!”
There was a suppressed cry of joy amongst the Druids—their gods had sent this sacrifice—this Roman, their enemy, who had dared to enter the sacred forest.
“Take thou the sacred sword and slay him.” ”

“ That is, however, but an accident of the medium, so to say, through which our information about Celtic paganism has reached us: the gods have, in the course of the transmission of the legends about them through Christian channels, been reduced to the status of men playing parts, more or less heroic, in a mythic history. So it is only by careful comparison that one is enabled to find that such and such a hero of our stories was, in the pagan period, such and such a god. Let me call your attention to one of the kind, who, in the Mabinogion, bears the name
Gwydion Son of Dôn. ”

“ The few partisans of the theory that folk-tradition is only a later and weakened echo of the higher culture of the race are invited to study the present case. A Celtic tale, after supplying an important element to the Christianised Grail legend, has gone on its way entirely unaffected by the new shape which that legend assumed, and yet it has worked out a moral conception of fundamental likeness to one set forth in the legend. ”

“ That literature was the outcome of the age, and something akin to it would have sprung up had Celtic tradition remained unknown to the Continent. The conception of feudal knighthood as a favoured class, in which men of different nations met on a common footing; the conception of knightly love as something altogether disassociated from domestic life, must in any case have led to the constitution of such a society as we find portrayed in the romances. What is claimed is that the spirit of the age, akin to the Celtic, recognised in Celtic tales the food it was hungering for. ”

“ Religion sanctioned anything. The primal gods, supplemented with the lords and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every superstition, the temple of every crime. Asiatic monsters, which Hellenic poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native hideousness unchanged. It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome transformed. Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind the mask of Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian. ”

“ If the Early History be an integral part of the romance, the probabilities in favour of a purely Christian legendary origin for the Grail itself are immensely increased, and the utmost the Celtic partisan could hope to show was that a Christian legend had somehow or other been strongly influenced by Celtic popular traditions. ”

“ And the same set of ideas which operated among the Celts to create their Fairy-Mythology—ideas arising out of a belief in or knowledge of the one universal Realm of Spirit and its various orders of invisible inhabitants—gave the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Teutons, the Mexicans, the Peruvians, and all nations their respective mythologies and religions; and we moderns are literally ‘the heirs of all the ages’. ”

“ Celtic mythology developed likewise, but to an extent as far less as the Celt had lagged behind the Greek in the race of civilisation. The old gods, themselves an outcome of the primitive agricultural creed, were transformed into the wizard champions and enchantresses of the romances, but they remained in touch with their earliest forms; the link between the fairy of the peasant and the fairy of literature (for heroic saga is literature although traditional literature) was never wholly snapped ”

“ Classical writers, of course, may have known of what appears to have been a sporadic Celtic idea, derived from old beliefs, that the soul might take the form of an animal, but this was not the Druidic teaching. Again, if the Gauls, like the Irish, had myths telling of the rebirth of gods or semi-divine beings, these may have been misinterpreted by those writers and regarded as eschatological. But such myths do not concern mortals. ”

“ If they exist, they exist either as phenomena of unrecognised character or as phenomena which are still unobserved. I therefore proceed to the examination of a group of phenomena disclosing the existence within the Celtic area of a system of Paganism which was not of Celtic origin; and I turn to these phenomena as the only materials available for the demonstration of the character of Pagan burial—premising that they belong to a time when, owing to the intrusion of a foreign element, the Christian form and the Pagan form were closely contiguous and contemporary in Scotland. ”

“ On the whole, if we follow the authority of the ancients themselves, we seem bound to conclude that the Roman gods, like those of many other early peoples, were believed to be married and to beget children. It is true that, compared with the full-blooded gods of Greece, the deities of Rome appear to us shadowy creatures, pale abstractions garbed in little that can vie with the gorgeous pall of myth and story which Grecian fancy threw around its divine creations. ”

“ Now, as those monks came with authority from the traditionary home of ghostly lore, why question their knowledge of the life beyond the grave? Many Anglo-Saxons were prepared to fix their gaze upon a life to come and to let their fancies fill with visions of the great last severance unto heaven and hell. When once impressed by the monastic Christianity [11] of the Roman, or the Irish, mission, they were quick to throw themselves into the ascetic life which most surely opened heaven's doors. So many a noble thane became an anchorite or a monk, many a noble dame became a nun ”