ABSTRACT
All saints are foreigners of a sort among other, less holy human beings. However potently they may model correct behavior and subjectivity, their perfection ultimately exceeds imitation. If not, that is, literally foreigners in the national or ethnic sense, they incorporate the distinction as they straddle the boundary between the human Same and the transcendent Other. As Thomas Heffernan has argued, the meaning of saints for their communities arises from exactly this collision, the collision and the conflation of the imperfect earthly and perfect heavenly significations and identities. 1 In this respect martyrs prove especially problematic: as the martyr suffers at the hands of persecutors who are more explicitly and simplistically foreign (in the sense of outside the community which reveres the saint’s memory) he or she draws from the faithful responses not only of emulation, affection, and desire, but also of awe, horror, and pathos. And yet, the tortures these foreign persecutors enact upon the martyr’s body are precisely what establish the martyr’s sanctity—and therefore ironically create the saint’s cult. In some measure, then, the persecutors, however foreign, respond to the saint by acting out passions and desires which those who most revere the saint both recognize and refuse. 2 Produced within and serving the needs of a cultic community, hagiographic narrative enacts this inherent negotiation of licit and illicit desires, and the subsequent formation of boundaries between “us” (the saint’s community) and “them” (the persecutors and other non-believers) upon the textual body of the saint.
