Quod Bollandus inchoaverat,
Quod Henschenius formaverat,
Perfecit Papebrochius.
Herbert Rosweyd, a native of Utrecht in Holland, entered the Society of Jesus in 1589, at the age of twenty, and taught philosophy and theology successively at Douay and Antwerp. He was a man in whom great learning was united to great piety. He composed and edited many works in Latin and Flemish, and among the rest published an edition of the Oriental ascetic Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow, and an original treatise on the Imitation of Christ to prove its author to have been Thomas à Kempis. Eleven years before his death, in 1629, Père Rosweyd published the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, in a folio volume, at Antwerp. It may be regarded as a first instalment of the Acta Sanctorum. While he was engaged on one of his books the idea occurred to him to collect in some twelve volumes the lives and acts of the beatified and canonized saints of the Catholic Church. At the time when he first conceived his great plan he was too deeply committed to other literary works to take it up at once; but the idea never was abandoned, and death alone prevented him from at least commencing it. When the project was mentioned to Cardinal Bellarmine, he inquired if Père Rosweyd expected to live two hundred years; such was the cardinal’s estimate of the magnitude of the undertaking—an estimate fully borne out by the result. Yet, as we shall presently see, in the first century and a half of the work not a dozen only but four times that number of volumes were published; and if twelve volumes could have comprised it the end would have been reached in little more than forty years from its commencement. What Papebroch said of Bolland may be said of Rosweyd: It was providential that he who first started such a work could not foresee its vast extent. Who but a rash man, or one assured by divine revelation of his success, would otherwise ever have dared to extend his plans and hopes to an age beyond his own, or counted upon the co-operation of future authors yet unborn in an association of labor up to that time without a parallel in the history of letters? It was probably only in the bosom of a religious order like the Society of Jesus, in which years count for days and centuries for years, that such a scheme could ever have been carried out.
Rosweyd, then, was dead, but his conception survived him. The duty of giving effect to it devolved on John Bolland (Latinized, in the style of the period, into Bollandus), after whom the whole body of succeeding editors has since been named Bollandists.[[154]] Bolland was by his birth, August 13, 1596, a native of Tillemont, in Flanders. At the age of sixteen he entered the society, and professed the four solemn vows January 27, 1630. His studies had been distinguished, and as a professor he stood high in many various attainments, in letters and in Oriental and other languages. But, better still, his piety and religious fervor kept equal pace with his other acquirements. Even after his appointment to carry on the work suggested by Père Rosweyd, Père Bolland would never intermit the duties of the confessional in the church of St. Ignatius attached to the house of the professed fathers of the society at Antwerp—now the church of St. Charles Borromeo, at the corner of Wyngard Street and the Katelina Rampart. It was only the spare time unoccupied by hearing confessions that he gave to sacred literature.
A glance at what had been previously done in the way of saints’ lives will enable us the better to understand the plan now adopted by Père Bolland. Of the acts of the martyrs and the other saints the very earliest form is the record of St. Stephen’s origin, arrest, trial, condemnation, and martyrdom, contained in the Acts of the Apostles. Similar records began to be kept first of all in the Roman Church by order of Pope Clement. Notaries were appointed for the purpose of collecting and authenticating the acts of martyrs. The testimony of eye-witnesses was taken down, and, when duly attested, the records were submitted to the judgment of the pope. Similarly the martyrologies took their origin from the burying-places of the martyrs in the catacombs. When a martyr was carried to his rest from the Amphitheatre an inscription was placed beside him, a name, a date, a title, a palm-branch or a dove, perhaps a monogram. Such were the rudiments of the earliest martyrologies. The Roman martyrology, in a few lines, each day records the names of the martyrs of the day under the favorite term of Depositio. The earliest calendar of the Roman Church is composed of a list of depositions copied as it were from the galleries of the cemeteries. These honored names thence passed into the diptychs, and were read aloud to the Christian assemblies on public occasions. Separate churches had their own diptychs, and frequently exchanged them with one another. At first martyrs only were admitted among the select number; but in the fourth century in the Western Church the first exception was made in favor of St. Martin. In the East the lists were opened to confessors somewhat earlier in favor of SS. Ephrem, Athanasius, Hilarion, and Antony. As regarded confessors, the acts were in fact an authenticated narration of their lives. In this way the martyrologies and acts of the martyrs and other saints assumed the form we now know, subject to the scrutiny of the bishops of particular sees, till a later date, when the admission of a new name into the calendar was reserved for the Supreme Pontiff. During the middle ages the literature of saints’ lives was in great part the work of the monasteries. Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, at an earlier period laid the foundation of this class of composition. Prudentius, in the third century, celebrated in verse the martyr’s crown of victory. There was the Spiritual Meadow of Moschus, and the Mirror of Vincent of Beauvais; and, most celebrated of all, the Legends of the Saints, composed by Da Varaggio, or De Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa—a work better known by its title of the Golden Legend, given it by its admirers. This collection was by far the most popular of all the works of the kind, and was translated into nearly every European language. It was one of the earliest books printed in England by Caxton, in 1483, in folio. To a somewhat later period belonged Surius the Carthusian, from whose Lives, in seven folio volumes, we find Charles Kingsley admitting that he had picked up his knowledge of ecclesiastical history. After Surius came Père Ribadeneira, the Spanish Jesuit, author of the Flower of Saints’ Lives. The work contemplated by Rosweyd and put in hand by Bolland was different from everything of the kind that had gone before it. The new scheme aimed at the collection and publication of the original acts and lives of all the saints in the order in which they stand in the Roman calendar and martyrology. Difficult and obscure passages were to be elucidated. It was adopted as a general rule that no testimony could be admitted which the editors had not thoroughly examined; that, in adducing an important witness, the age he lived in, his trustworthiness and judgment as an author, should be rigorously estimated. Nothing which tended to fuller acquaintance with any saint was to be slurred over without discussion; no place to be deemed too obscure, no people too ignoble, no country too remote, to which a saint had at any time belonged; and, in a word, no language too rude to occupy their careful attention, as far as either the intervention of published and unpublished authors, or correspondence, or the agency of ubiquitous friends could utilize human labor. Their plan was not simply to write a history of the church in numerous countries, strenuously as they meant to labor for that; its scope included the particular foundations of bishoprics, of cities, of monasteries, and of religious orders, the successive stages of whose histories they professed, to the full extent of their powers, to investigate.
Père Bolland’s first care was to collect materials for so extensive a work. He opened a correspondence with churches and monasteries all over Europe and beyond its limits, inquiring in all directions for offices peculiar to different places, and for copies of the rarest archives of the religious houses. These he gradually accumulated, until the foundation of a valuable library and museum was established, which long occupied the upper floor of a detached building in the professed house at Antwerp. Out of these materials Père Bolland then commenced to form his Acta for the month of January. Six years he toiled single-handed; but in 1635 a coadjutor was given him in Père Godfrey Henschen, S.J., a native of Gueldres, in Holland, then in the thirty-sixth year of his age and the sixteenth of his religious profession. The fathers prosecuted the work in company for eight years, and in 1643 the first two volumes were published, comprising the saints belonging to the month of January, to the number of upwards of twelve hundred. Père Bolland struck the keynote of his great work at a sublime height in these few words of dedication:
SANCTO SANCTORUM
JESU CHRISTO
ÆTERNO PONTIFICI