Hagiography

The writing of saints' lives — a theological genre preserving the witness of the holy; portrait, not biography.

Hagiography (from hagios, holy, and graphe, writing) is the literary genre of saints' lives. The Life of Antony by St. Athanasius (c. 356 AD) established the form: a narrative of the saint's ascetical struggle, spiritual gifts, and final words, presented as a model for imitation. Orthodox hagiography is not biography in the modern sense — it aims at theological portrait: what did this person's life reveal about God and about the human vocation?