The Novelistic and the Byzantine Hagiographic Hero

Traditionally, the hero of the novel is, in terms of Northrop Frye, “superior neither to other men nor to his environment;” he is “one of us.” Unlike the mythic hero’s, his narrative world is comparable to that of a historical or potentially historic audience. The hagiographic hero, on the other hand, is “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment”, or even, in some cases, “superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men.” The hagiographic hero sides with the epic hero against the protagonist of the novel in one crucial trait: he is superior to other men; unlike the epic hero, however, his power, in particular the ability to work miracles, is derived directly from divine intervention. The novelistic hero, just like the hagiographical one, is inserted in an ordinary environment and not in the mythic past (against the epic hero). The crucial novelty of the hagiographical storyworld lies in the combination of a chronotope, akin to that of the ancient novel, with a superior hero, akin to the protagonist of the epic. I will argue that this presence of the most elevated in the most ordinary settings, and of the most serious matters in the least refined settings (and styles), has a first triumphant apparition in the Gospels. I will also show that this characterization plays a crucial role in numerous characterization devices in the Byzantine world and beyond.