Lives of the Serbian Saints

tr. Yanich and Hankey, 1921

d1

This collection of lives is taken from what we should call the martyrology of the Church in Serbia. There were, at one time, a number of these martyrologies in use in Europe containing different lists of saints, together with their lives. In the West these tended to give place to a calendar and lives of a more or less official character; but in the East the monasteries in particular seem to have kept their own calendars and their own special traditions about their saints and special offices in their memory. This was the case in Serbia, where many monasteries preserved their own separate collection until the middle of the last century. In all these old office books certain great national saints would be sure of a place. No Serbian martyrology would be complete without a life of St. Sava, for instance. But the stories of their lives, affected by local tradition or by some contact of the saints with the monastery in his lifetime, would often show considerable variety. Other saints would be included only in the commemoration of churches of a particular district because their fame had never sufficiently penetrated beyond it. Two classes of difference thus arose in these various collections. There was the variety in the list of saints included; and there was sometimes considerable variety in the stories of their lives.

In the middle of the last century, however, there was issued one martyrology for the use of the Church throughout Serbia. A certain list of national saints thus obtained recognition, and the stories of their lives received a fixed form. It is a translation of the lives included in this book which is here presented.

The result of this treatment of the old office books may be compared with the outcome of the work of the various writers who edited the original documents of the Hexateuch. Sometimes a selection has been made from a choice of stories. Sometimes one detects that the paste and scissors have been at work. Sometimes part of a story seems to have been rewritten because edification is more important than a close adherence to tradition. And just as the student of the Hexateuch would like to be able to see the original documents, untouched by the hand of the redactor, so it is probable that the reader of these lives will wish at times that he could compare them with an earlier version, or could read the other stories from which this particular one was selected. The work of harmonizing the different accounts has not been perfectly done in every case, and it is possible to observe in the narratives the remains of a double tradition. In the case of several of the lives, those of the less national saints, it is probable that not more than one history of them has survived and that this has been incorporated almost, if not wholly, as it stood.

Such is, in outline, the history of this collection. What is its importance? Any list of national saints, with some account of their lives, however jejune, has importance for the historian. If we know the sort of men and women whom a nation delights to honour in this way, we know something of that people. And that particular “something” is very difficult to discover in any other way. At first glance, a nation’s saints will often appear to have been selected in a haphazard way. The list will be found to contain names which we feel have no place in such exalted company. There is a bewildering variety of type. Yet these men and women have shown themselves possessed of spiritual qualities to which their countrymen have specially aspired. To people of another century and another civilization the general impression created by the life of some national saint may be fantastic or crude, or commonplace or even immoral. The nation itself, however, has seen in him only those qualities which it most urgently desires for itself. And to know a nation’s ideals is to know something of the roots of its vitality. It is not easy to discover the ideals of one’s own day with precision; the task of the historian is far more difficult. Will he not be wise to pay more attention than he has done in the past to what is rather contemptuously known as hagiography?

In the collection before us we find a large proportion of kings and great churchmen. They are the men who made of the Serbians an independent people and built up the short-lived Serbian Empire. Of some of them that is about all that can be said. But to the Serbian whose freedom was his life—whose liberty was threatened from the north or the south for decade after decade—that was enough. And later generations, living under the Turk, looked with love and reverence on the men who had once made their people free; and when he could, he saw to it that their relics lay in a country which was at least free from the infidel. This type is represented in almost all national calendars. Our Edward the Confessor has much in common with these church-building kings of the early Serbian state. St. Dunstan and St. Thomas of Canterbury played parts in our history which have parallels in that of Serbia.

A second type is less fully represented. But the recluse, the follower of the “angel way of life,” has also his place in his countrymen’s affection. For, however “national” his conception of religion was and is, the Serbian could recognize that “something better” and reverence the austerity and detachment by which alone it could be attained. This, again, is not peculiar to the Serbian calendar.

But there is a third type which is by far the most characteristic. There are lives of men and women in this book which contain no deed of heroism or voluntary denial. Their stories are not of a struggle against external forces or the enemy within them. The only sense in which their lives may be said to be a struggle is in that sense in which the word is used of the outcast and poor, the broken man and the beaten woman. Their nobility has only one chance of showing itself, and that is in the patient endurance of unmerited and unavoidable suffering. Such saints as Stephen and his wife Angelina, and the later members of the Nemanya dynasty, received no hero-worship. They were always failures—conscious and hopeless failures—failures who made no heroic effort to change their lot. Yet it is these lives which are written with the most touching affection and understanding. We may account for this in part by the singular tenderness which the Slav is so quick to feel not merely for the unfortunate, but for the material or moral failure. But it is probable that its significance lies far more in the circumstances of the lives of Serbians when they lived unfree under the Turks. It has, in fact, somewhat the same meaning as the observance of the anniversary of their great national disaster, Kossovo, as the national day of honour. In those miserable years the patience of a blind prince, the faithfulness of a widowed queen, the misfortunes of rulers with no one to rule, made a special appeal and had a special lesson. That patient faithfulness among indignities and sufferings which has been such a marked characteristic of this people up to our own times is here described increasing in those who were first called upon to exhibit it. No western people could treat so tenderly of those who were so conspicuously unsuccessful. No western historian will understand this people unless he remembers that the luckless King Stephen is numbered among its saints.