The article analyzes the functioning of traditional stylistic formulas that go back to the texts of Holy Scripture (such as soul and heart, joy and gladness, crying and sobbing, etc.) in the church-book genre (Russian hagiography). The considered material demonstrates the transformation of traditional formulas of a twofold nature: structural expansion (complication) of the original syntagma or contraction (truncation). In both cases, the destruction of the initial structure (formulas, syntagmas) takes place. But this is a creative transformation, since the result is a new syntactic structure, and another level of semantic actualization.