Holy Men

This chapter assesses the special relationship between the ancient genre of biography and the religious phenomenon of holy men. Spiritual biographies are performative texts: there are many examples of characters who were established as holy men by the texts written about them. Some of these were totally invented by the authors, others lived in such a distant past or the information was so scarce or the intention of the authors were of such a nature that nothing can be accepted as historically reliable. These texts were written to serve a purpose: examples for moral mimesis, establishment of spiritual or philosophical authority, or the promotion of a cult with all its implications of power and wealth. There is no formal unity: spiritual biographies exist in prose and in verse, in narrative and in dialogue-form, as letters and speeches, they can be very short and very long, and contain many or few miracles.