Faces of faith and destiny: Alexius, a model of abnegation in the service of human experience

Abstract

This article explores the intricate relationship between technological advancement and human evolution, Saint Alexius—often sidelined within the hagiographic canon—emerges here as a potent cultural operator in normalising abnegation as virtue. Combining close reading with a critical review, the article argues that “destiny,” frequently invoked to legitimise renunciation, is a historical, symbolic construction. It reconstructs the medieval genealogy of sacrifice (particularly the sacramental economy and hagiographic pedagogy—and tracks its modern metamorphoses, when novel and stage replace the promise of glory with a critique of compliance devices. The itinerary runs from Alexius to Tolstoy, Ibsen (1879), Camus (1942) and Woolf (1925) and, in Portuguese literature, from Camilo and Eça to Florbela, Sophia and Saramago (1991). The central claim, grounded in specialist scholarship, is that abnegation operates as an affective technology of social cohesion—converting pain into meaning and service into merit—yet literature preserves the power to denaturalise that device and return it to ethical scrutiny. In short, the essay reframes abnegation from timeless virtue to a historically produced technique, testing its moral validity today.