Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Hagiographical Strategies: A Comparative Study of the "Standard Lives" of St. Francis and Milarepa by Massimo A. Rondolino (review)

This study is the second volume in the new Routledge series Sanctity in Global Perspective, which, in the words of its editors, is dedicated to the exploration of the notion of sanctity in "literary, artistic, ideational, and socio-historical" (p. ii) dimensions. Interestingly, this blurb does not include the categories "speculative" or "theological," and indeed, Rondolino's study is not written from a confessional perspective: His goal is not to chart the development of the notion of holiness in two distinct religious traditions through the lenses of two of Buddhism and Christianity's most representative figures. Rather, his juxtaposition of Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) and Milarepa (ca. 1052–ca. 1135) embraces an explicitly sociocultural and historical perspective: Setting out to map the emergence of what Roman Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism have come to regard as the normative accounts of their lives, this study uncovers the internal dynamics within the two traditions that led to the composition of the two "standard" hagiographies by Bonaventura of Bagnoreggio (1221–1274), himself a canonized saint, an influential theologian, and a major figure in the history of the Franciscan order, and Tsangnyön Heruka (1452–1507), a nyönpa—"religious madman"—who played a crucial role in the collection and transmission of the aural teachings of the Kagyud tradition. The goal of the author, therefore, is not to guide the readers to a discovery of the "real" Francis or the "real" Milarepa underneath the pages of the hagiographies—an enterprise no less doomed to failure than the rediscovery of the historical Jesus or the historical Buddha behind the portraits of the Gospels or the Pāli canon. Rather, Rondolino's work is an exercise in comparative hagiology: Readers are introduced to the way in which the biographies of two influential practitioners are consciously pieced together so as to serve as a benchmark for the traditions' theological and institutional self-understanding.

In his introduction to the study, the author observes that holiness is sometimes understood "as a culturally constructed concept that is intimately and exclusively tied to Christianity, its doctrine and soteriology" (p. 1), thereby making cross-religious comparisons essentially impossible. Other scholars, on the contrary, view it as a phenomenon superseding cultural differentiation, thus ignoring culturally specific realities that are relative and contextual. Rondolino invites us to steer clear of a-historical essentializing arguments, and reaffirms the value of the comparative enterprise, but underscores the necessity of reassessing the viability and conceptual fruitfulness of standard analytical categories. In his perspective, the comparative study of hagiographies allows us to hone in on the culturally specific factors that condition the emergence of "holiness" as a fundamental principle within distinct traditions. In addition, according to Rondolino, focusing on textual analysis—as opposed to the comparison of "actual" human beings—saves us from the pitfall of "uncritically embracing the narrative rhetoric contained in the very sources on the saints" (p. 2). This joint exploration of the textual genealogy of two hagiographies seeks then to provide and test a method for the study of the processes "underpinning the creation and circulation of saintly narratives" in their specific cultural contexts—what Rondolino calls "the hagiographical process" (ibid.).

Rondolino acknowledges that the very term "hagiography" is characterized by a fundamentally Western and Christian bias, but he counters that alternative terms such as "sacred biography" would burden his analysis with a positivist bias and a claim to impartiality that is impossible to deliver. Any attempt on the part of Western scholars to read Christian and Buddhist texts from a position of neutrality is doomed to fail, because even in the absence of explicit theological commitments, these scholars—no less than their audience—are bound to see the world through ultimately Eurocentric "and Christian-centric" cultural lenses. This epistemological position—which actually echoes Lonergan's understanding of "perspectivism" in Method in Theology—does not preclude, but...