HOW DOES ONE WRITE THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SAINT?
HOW DOES ONE WRITE THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SAINT?

Summary/Abstract: These goals seem to be fulfilled in Ishoʿyahb's conduct of life. Therefore, he was ideally suited to serve as a graphic expression for comments on dogmatics and ethics, which would otherwise remain too theoretical, although they might very well endure even without the graphic example thanks to what the text has to offer about them. Concrete information, the details of Ishoʿyahb's biography which we know today and which are available in extensive material, would only interfere. What was called for was not the historically concrete, but the human element that can be generalized. How, then, does one write a saint's life? By using a saint as an example for that which is sacred, by „verifying‟ it through him. Whether there still was a personal acquaintance, or whether the venerated saint was no longer within reach of anything but literature and the oral tradition, remains irrelevant here.

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