It has been much disputed of late, whether the work which stands at the head of this literature, Athanasius' Life of Antony, is really Athanasius' or is a work of fiction. Perhaps we do not need to treat the alternative as absolute. The book can scarcely be denied to Athanasius, and if we conceive it as a work of fiction, it ceases to be wholly un- worthy of him. "In spite of its bad Greek — Athanasius was anything but a master of form" — writes Reitzenstein,55 "the book belongs distinctly to the category of 'great liter- ature,' and its appearance may be spoken of as an event of world-historical importance." T. R. Glover, who con- siders that it has been demonstrated that the book is a "work of fiction," points out56 that "it was fiction as Uncle Tom's Cabin was fiction," and wrought even more powerfully; "of all the books of the fourth century it had the most immediate and wide-spread influence, which, though outgrown by us, lasted on to the Renaissance." How great the misfortune was that the ascetic ideal should be commended to the world-weary people of God in this age of dying heathenism through the medium of a romance of such undeniable power, the event only too sadly showed.
MONKISH BELLETRISTIC 63
The elevation of the work above its successive imitators — Jerome's Paul and Hilarion and Malchus, Sulpitius Seve- rus's Martin and beyond — is immense. Reitzenstein sug- gests it to us57 in the contrast he draws between it and Je- rome's Life of Hilarion. It is Jerome's obvious purpose to outvie Athanasius, and he does it with vigor. "The dif- ference between the two works," says Reitzenstein, "is certainly very great. Athanasius handled the miraculous narrative as a concession to his public, laid all the stress on the discipline of the monk, and precisely thus raised the work to a value which must be felt even by one who is filled with horror by this pedagogically presented union of the fervor of Christian faith and Egyptian superstition. Jerome has retrenched even the preaching and the exhor- tation which form the religious kernel of the heathen as well as the Christian aretalogy ; the miracle narrative is its own end; it is 'great history' which he is giving, and he presents it by this means." 58
Thus a new literature sprang up synchronously with monasticism — a monkish belletristic, as A. Harnack calls it.59 "Feuilletonists in monks' clothing made romances and novels out of the real and invented experiences of the penitents, and the ancient world delighted itself with this preciosity of renunciation." The miraculous was in this literature a matter of course ; and the ever-swelling accounts of miracles in that age of excited superstition transferred themselves with immense facility to life. "The martyr- legend," says H. Gunter strikingly, at the opening of his Legend-Studies,60 "is older than the Christian martyrs — ■ of course with a grain of salt — in its presuppositions"; and the same is true of the monk-legends. Gunter illustrates what the martyr-legend did with Bible passages by bidding us observe what is done in the Acts of Peter and Andrew with Christ's saying about the camel passing through the eye of a needle. This aretalogist is so zealous for the saving of rich men that he makes a camel actually pass
64 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
repeatedly through the eye of the smallest needle that can be found, before our very eyes.61 There is nothing too hard for the monkish legend. A veil of miracle settles down over everything, covering up all historical and indi- vidual traits.