<i>Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend</i> (review)
1981; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bio.2010.0842
ISSN1529-1456
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoREVIEWS 365 "The great Dr. Alonzo Clark": there is no malice, but there is surely a vast amount of skepticism and good sense in the description. It seems to suggest that there is, in truth, no greatness here below, so why all the fuss and bother? "A hot day." Day follows day, as it always has and as it always will; it does not matter whether we are present or not, or whether we notice or not. So we might as well notice as not: this is a cheerful clarity, not an alienated one. And the joking metaphor has a deeply serious import: we all rot, here below, fish and men, and though in some seasons and some instances we rot rather faster than others, the process is the same, and we all endure it, like it or not. So we might as well smile, both at it and at ourselves. It seems apparent that Strong was in too much pain—that is, too drastically out of balance —to keep up his diary toward the very end. If he could not write himself cheerfully, sanely, he would not write himself at all. It is, I think, a perfectly representative final act, as George Templeton Strong is almost an ideal representative of delicate balances in American life which have, since his time, gone badly out of whack. It should be obvious that his like cannot be reconstructed, cannot be fabricated: it is an individual personality, as it is also a national ethos, which can only be fashioned from the inside out. Burton Raffel University of Denver Charles W. Jones. Saint Nicholas ofMyra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 558 pp. $14.95. In this scholarly study Charles W. Jones, the well-known medievalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, seeks not to unearth the individual beneath the legend but to expose the forces and developments which have permitted a fiction to bestride the earth as if it were a man. To avoid confusion, the author refers to his subject as "N" or "Nicholas," who transcends this or that particular persona and is the imaginative figure who has assumed many roles and whose personality has evolved through the centuries. Jones opens his Prologue with a couplet from As You Like It, "One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." It is important, for the figure of seven ages has structured this biography. This study of the most popular nonbiblical saint in Christendom commences in the fourth century, when Nicholas supposedly lived in 366 biography Vol. 4, No. 4 Myra, and concludes in 1969, when Pope Paul VI removed him from the Church's calendar of saints. In chapter I, "Infancy," which delves into the origins of the Nicholas legend, the author notes that Saint Jerome, who lived near Damascus and in Bethlehem early in the fifth century, makes no mention of him. In fact, it is not until the sixth century , during the reign of Justinian, that the historian Procopius provides the first reference to him, and it is not until the ninth century that the first life of Nicholas appears. Nonetheless, Jones does not discount the possibility that there was a Nicholas who helped establish the Christian cult in the area following Constantine's edict of toleration in 311 A.D. What is known is that sailors on the south coast of Asia Minor, who had earlier looked to Artemis or Diana for protection, needed someone else once the pagan gods had been discredited. The fact that Nicholas' day is December 6, regarded as the symbolic start of winter when danger at sea was greatest, suggests that Nicholas became the replacement and protector of mariners. In chapter II, "Boyhood," which covers the years from the eighth to the tenth centuries, the author examines the influential life of Nicholas written by John of Naples (880 A.D.) from which most subsequent accounts of the legendary bishop are drawn. During this period the story of Three Daughters presented the bishop as the anonymous bearer of gifts. It was widely believed that his relics as well...
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