Not angel eyes command
The glorious lot that waits,
As, meekly, hand-in-hand,
Ye leave the temple’s gates!
May, 1878.
THE BOLLANDIST ACTA SANCTORUM.
For many reasons the Bollandist series of saints’ lives is one of the most remarkable works that ever issued from the pen of man. As a serial publication, what other work of the kind extends over a period of nearly two centuries and a half, comprises upwards of sixty volumes in large folio, and is still advancing, with upwards of one-sixth part of the whole remaining to full completion? Or as a monument of devotion to the saints of God, as a vast storehouse of example and instruction in the way of eternal life, there is nothing that can be put in competition with it. Even this view of it is narrow, as compared with other claims to regard which it possesses, and which are fully recognized by literary men, even among those who have little or no sympathy with the religious side of this great work. The whole range of history, from the foundation of Christianity, forms an essential portion of it. The lives of the apostles demand the investigation of all that is known of that remote period; a large proportion of the Roman pontiffs are among the canonized, and their records belong to the history of the Christian world, including that of the middle ages. The sainted founders of religious orders, from Benedict to Ignatius, from Anthony to Paul of the Cross, cannot be described without entering at length into the origin and progress of their holy institutes, many of which were asylums and homes of refuge for letters and learning during the darkest and most troubled periods of European history, and others served as training-places, whence the confessors and martyrs of the Christian faith went forth to the ends of the earth to propagate divine truth and love at the sacrifice of everything that humanity holds dear, even of liberty and life itself. Or, if it is question of kings and emperors whom the church venerates as saints, the secular history of their dominions naturally falls within the scope of their biographies: as of Hungary under St. Stephen; of Germany under Henry II.; of England under Edward the Confessor; of Denmark under Canute IV.; of Spain under Ferdinand III.; and of France under Louis IX. Not unfrequently the biography of a saint comprises the history of his age: as of the fourth century in the life of St. Athanasius; of the eleventh in that of St. Gregory VII.; of the twelfth in that of St. Bernard; and of the thirteenth in those of St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi. The limits of the Acta are not confined to Europe; they are as wide as our globe itself. Wherever the seed of the Gospel has been sown or watered by the blood of martyrs, among every race of mankind, from China to Paraguay, from Lima to Japan, nothing is foreign to the Bollandists’ pen; their work embraces, incidentally or formally, all the history of all nations.
Intimately connected with the historical researches of their work are several auxiliary branches of knowledge which largely enter into it and cannot be overlooked in estimating its scope and value. The aid of geography, for example, had to be called in to settle the boundaries of episcopal sees, of provinces, of kingdoms; to reconcile history with topography by determining the obsolete or corrupted names of certain places, about which different authors may have held different opinions. Several treatises on chronology entered into the general scheme. Archæology furnished the means of a minute and complete examination into ancient manners, rites, laws, arts, and the rudiments of languages, and of a comparison among the sacred and secular monuments of various nations. Then, again, the art of employing the materials, characters, and other portions of ancient MSS. for the determination of dates engaged the attention of the Bollandists, and of Père Papebroch in particular; and this father, with the frankness inseparable from true genius, did not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to the illustrious master Rei Diplomaticæ, the Benedictine Mabillon. As might have been expected, theology, canon law, and ecclesiastical history are largely represented in those sixty volumes. The teaching of the holy fathers, the decrees of councils, the laws of the church constantly demanded scientific statement and vindication, as also did the perpetual glory of miracles, of prophecy, of celestial revelations, and the undying gift of the loftiest contemplation, as against a class of critics who, while affecting to patronize letters, assume that the lives of saints must be nothing more than a tissue of idle tales and old women’s fables, or at least speak of them as if they thought them so. In the judgment, however, of several eminent critics of the modern school even the legends of saints, regarded as popular beliefs in a remote and half-instructed age, have their value as evidence of the ideas, manners, and customs of the people in the middle ages. M. Guizot was at pains to count twenty-five thousand legends in the Bollandists’ work; and these, he remarks, were the real literature of the first half of that period, and served for aliment to the intellectual, moral, and æsthetic life of those ages, and, from a historian’s point of view, were on that account beyond all price. Another French critic, M. Renan, also regarding the Acta from an external point of view, expresses himself in language of eulogy little to have been anticipated: “Quelle incomparable galerie, en effet, que celle de ces 25,000 héros de la vie désintéressée! Quel air de haute distinction! quelle noblesse! quelle poésie! Il y en a d’humbles et de grands, de doctes et de simples; mais je n’en connais pas un seul qui ait l’air vulgaire. Tous m’apparaissent tels que les pose Giotto, grandioses, hardis, détachés des liens terrestres, et déjà transfigurés. Ils plaisent peu au sens positif, je l’avoue; mais qu’ils ont, après tout, mieux compris la vie, que ceux qui l’embrassent comme un étroit calcul d’intérêt, comme une lutte insignifiante d’ambition et de vanité.”
Such being the character of the Acta, who conceived the comprehensive scheme and gave it actual form and being? The names of its originator and early continuators are preserved in the following lines:
Quod Rosweydus preparaverat,