“But even when the servant of Christ was dead and buried, the miracles which he worked whilst alive did not cease.” So wrote St. Cuthbert’s eighth-century biographer, Bede, intent on showing how his subject had become a saint. Biographers then had forsaken Plutarch’s focus on the peculiarities of personality and the vagaries of the self. Plutarch’s biographies contain an inherent psychology, Bede’s include an intrinsic piety.These two biographers exemplify the genre’s extremes: the desire to lay bare the minute particulars of the self, which Samuel Johnson so prized, and the wish to exalt the qualities that make the self a model for others.

In Plutarch the subject is uniquely himself within the rich context of his culture. Coriolanus is a noble Roman but also a mama’s boy, brought up in an era, Plutarch emphasizes, that valued martial valor above all else. His life comes to grief because he cannot reconcile the rigid discipline of the soldier with the pliability of a politician. In a vulnerable moment, he surrenders his plan to invade Rome, succumbing to his mother’s plea while crying out, “What hast thou done to me, my mother! …Thou art victorious, and thy victory means good fortune to my country, but death to me; for I shall withdraw vanquished, though by thee alone.”

In Bede’s case, the biographer becomes a postulator, that “combination of researcher and advocate who shepherds the cause [the process of canonization] through its many steps,” as Douglas Brinkley and Julie Fenster write in “Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism” (William Morrow, 256 pages, $24.95). Father McGivney’s actual postulator is Father Gabriel O’Donnell, and if he is successful – documenting two miracles “attributed to the intercession of Father McGivney” – the “canonization is complete.” Father McGivney would become the first American-born parish priest to be made a saint.

Unlike Bede, who provides evidence of St. Cuthbert’s miracles in nearly every chapter (“How He Changed the Winds by Prayer, and Brought the Scattered Ships Safe to Land”), Father McGivney’s biographers do not establish their subject’s miraculous powers in the medieval sense. If there is a flaw in Father McGivney’s saintly life, however, they have not found it.

Samuel Johnson, a devout man as well as an impassioned biographer, would have rejoiced in “Parish Priest.” Father McGivney (1852-90) achieved a sort of “vulgar greatness” – to use Johnson’s term – when he founded the Knights of Columbus, now nearly 2 million strong and expanding into countries like Poland, where it provides aid and comfort to individuals and their families.

Father McGivney grew up in an era still rife with hostility to Catholicism (his work was attacked, for example, by the New York Times), and his native state of Connecticut had just emerged from an era in which Catholics were not allowed to purchase land. Accused of giving their allegiance to Rome, papists were regarded as a kind of fifth column subverting the American commonwealth. In a stroke of genius, Father McGivney decided to call his nearly all-Irish immigrant founding membership the Sons of Columbus – before agreeing to a member’s suggestion that “Knights” would be an even more popular term. In p.r. argot, Father McGivney mainstreamed Catholicism.

Yet, as Mr. Brinkley and Ms. Fenster insist, he was just a parish priest. His good work is mirrored by thousands of parish priests, whose mission and methods – unlike those of other professions – have not changed for centuries.The lives of any of those priests, Johnson would say, would be a biography worth reading.

After establishing the Knights of Columbus (against the wishes of certain members of the church hierarchy, who condemned secret organizations such as the Masons, as well as the apathy of Catholic businessmen focused on their worldly pursuits), Father McGivney relinquished control over the burgeoning organization and returned to obscurity, remaining, as his biographers call him, “the most unassuming of Catholic clerics.”

Not hagiographers in the medieval sense, Mr. Brinkley and Ms. Fenster write with one eye on the modern skeptics when they describe Father McGivney’s retirement from his Knights of Columbus work: “Whether or not he had been under any pressure within the diocese to surrender direct influence over the order, he was comfortable in being, once again, nothing more or less than a parish priest.”

Absent from this biography is the supposed psychodrama of being a priest. If Father McGivney suffered inner turmoil or temptation, his biographers are not privy to it.They acknowledge the damage done to the American priesthood because of the recent sex scandals but affirm: “Like many others, we each counted at least a few priests among the most impressive people we had ever known.”

The photographs and portraits of Father McGivney included in this biography represent a rather dour man, especially in the firm set of his mouth, which his biographers see as revealing a man of “indomitable will.” That will had a harsh side, which Father McGivney occasionally exercised on his recalcitrant parishioners. But his biographers are also quick to cite evidence of his humor – and are positively giddy with delight that he liked to watch and to play baseball.

Modern biographers seek what the distinguished biographer Leon Edel called the “figure under the carpet,” the secrets Freud saw lurking in every biographical subject. Gazing at Father McGivney’s portraits, his biographers observe that his “grim expression … was typical of him, at least in repose. Or maybe, like most people, he had an image he wanted to project whenever his picture was taken and, like most, he tried a bit too hard to project it.”

Such a fascinating sentence recalls the investigations of Erving Goffman and others into the self as persona or actor, a concept inconceivable in the world of the Bedeian biographer.There is no gap between Cuthbert the man and Cuthbert the saint. Neither St. Cuthbert nor his biographer had image issues.Yet Bede, for all his credulity about miracles, still acknowledges a surprisingly modern skepticism.

Like Mr. Brinkley and Ms. Fenster, Bede believed in his subject’s goodness but felt he had to prove it: Explaining the provenance of one of St. Cuthbert’s miracles, the biographer emphasizes that he received his account from “one of the most worthy brothers of our monastery … [who] heard it from one of those who were present, a man of the most rustic simplicity, and altogether incapable of telling an untruth.”

Like the interrogating Bede, Father McGivney’s biographers scour the testimony of their subject’s parishioners, analyze his few surviving letters, and collate contemporary newspaper accounts. Ultimately, though, their faith in the exemplary man makes their narrative possible, and that makes biography itself a form of model-building and pattern-making.

As philosopher Nelson Goodman has suggested, such narratives are half-perceived and half-created, a matter of evidence and projection. To use the title of one of Mr. Goodman’s books, biography is one way of worldmaking, a genre that has perhaps not changed as much over the millennia as we might suppose.

crollyson@nysun.com