Pope Gregory the Great (s. 590–604) wrote two letters to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles, reproaching his acts of iconoclasm that had led to schism in his community. These short documents are considered to contain Gregory’s theory of art as a book for the illiterate and have been criticized for destroying the aura of sacred art to all subsequent Western developments. Here, I argue that the pope’s fundamental contribution is to offer instead a theory of iconoclasm. Relying on previous ideas about the pedagogical and communicative power of art and its ability to reach a larger audience beyond the elite, Gregory defends the rights of the community of ‘gentiles and illiterates’ who find in portable painted panels an expression of their identity in the church at Marseilles. Serenus’s wish to impose a superior orthodoxy on the pious if incorrect habits of his flock cannot justify his resorting to iconoclasm. The pope’s vigorous condemnation protects the vulnerable minority and sets an important precedent against any acts of iconoclasm in the West.

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.