Twilight Zone: the Topos of Miracles (on the Life of St. Macarius of Rome)
Twilight Zone: the Topos of Miracles (on the Life of St. Macarius of Rome)

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to systematise the source base and to analyse the narrative of a remarkable and enigmatic monument of Early Christian literature – the Life of St. Macarius of Rome – in the light of the intertextual relationships in its structure and of the contextualisation of miracles. Attention should be focused on the circumstance that the literary narrative betrays a possible mysterial character with eschatological nuances and psychagogic mythology. A mystic journey to the World Beyond and the faith in the afterlife should occupy a central place in that circle of notions. The emphasis is laid on the ancient (i.e., non-biblical and non-Christian, respectively pagan) traditions in early medieval Christian literature, and especially on the place and functions of the literary (and possibly non-literary) traditions of the Romance of Alexander the Great. In this context the Life of St. Macarius of Rome is closer to Hellenistic milieu than the Old Testament. We are attempting to find the correlation between the text and the preceding ‘hypotext’ as well, i.e., the text or respectively the genre it is based on, having however transformed it, modified it, re-coded it, elaborated it, etc., so as to unveil the nature of the intertextual relationships abstracted in the analysis as a product not only of literary syncretism or mimesis [of literature, not of life] in the Platonic sense of the notion.The aim of this paper is to systematise the source base and to analyse the narrative of a remarkable and enigmatic monument of Early Christian literature – the Life of St. Macarius of Rome – in the light of the intertextual relationships in its structure and of the contextualisation of miracles. Attention should be focused on the circumstance that the literary narrative betrays a possible mysterial character with eschatological nuances and psychagogic mythology. A mystic journey to the World Beyond and the faith in the afterlife should occupy a central place in that circle of notions. The emphasis is laid on the ancient (i.e., non-biblical and non-Christian, respectively pagan) traditions in early medieval Christian literature, and especially on the place and functions of the literary (and possibly non-literary) traditions of the Romance of Alexander the Great. In this context the Life of St. Macarius of Rome is closer to Hellenistic milieu than the Old Testament. We are attempting to find the correlation between the text and the preceding ‘hypotext’ as well, i.e., the text or respectively the genre it is based on, having however transformed it, modified it, re-coded it, elaborated it, etc., so as to unveil the nature of the intertextual relationships abstracted in the analysis as a product not only of literary syncretism or mimesis [of literature, not of life] in the Platonic sense of the notion.

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