Why the Saints?
Scudder, Vida D.
WHY THE SAINTS? By VIDA D. SCUDDER WHY the Church? was the title of a questionnaire recently sent out by an eager association organized to enquire into a Christian way of life. The Catholic...
...that it is natural to dedicate tender and intimate devotion to them rather than to the Lord of saints, cannot be questioned...
...Gardner's Saint Catherine of Siena is a living woman to us...
...Jesus in the Gospels loved people dearly, liked to be with them, enjoyed children, moved among crowds tenderly and at home...
...sometimes I get a little jealous for them...
...and the reformers took, as they often did, the facile short cut of avoiding a danger by abrogating a privilege...
...For recovery of interest in the saints would be particularly wholesome...
...So should the arresting methods of the new school of biography, of men like Strachey...
...The saints went with the rest...
...The sacramental sense of the Divine Life mediated through earthly and finite means was alien and repugnant to them...
...He "was everywhere...
...Lives of them written in the light of all the knowledge given by modern psychology, with the keen touch now demanded from biographical work, might have a unique fascination, and render a unique service: for they might fill that strange vacancy which for so many begins when physical substance ends, with rich and ordered glory...
...Too long have they been empty for the rest of us, those far mysterious spaces...
...The secularization of life has gone on apace...
...been obscured, and so it is to be feared that most people who are drawn into communion with the unseen in the bright autumn stillness of November first, are thinking quite as much of their own dear and dead—who may not be saints at all—as they are of the radiant array whom the Church has exalted to her altars...
...and all those helps of ritual, liturgy and symbolic art, which had been the instinctive language of the soul throughout Christian history, were sternly discarded...
...That a danger of sheer polytheism may be involved for simple folk in the veneration of the saints is indubitable...
...Their faults should not be blinked...
...fortunate is he...
...And how unnecessary the dullness...
...But what can be done is to turn toward the saints in history...
...and we can picture them to ourselves in the other world with no loss of identity, because the kind of things they cared for here, they are likely, if there is another world at all, to go on caring for there...
...So the years went on...
...Probably the terminology of Holy Writ is as good as any...
...And so it came to pass that the heavens grew vacant...
...They led highly picturesque lives, presenting great variety...
...And there too—here was the great redeeming fact—there was Jesus...
...The trouble is with the way their lives have usually been written...
...He heard every whisper...
...And if we will, we can...
...We know little about that other plane...
...Cynicism febrile or forlorn has assumed control of the arts...
...will be answered...
...so is Saint Teresa...
...The angels were there too—quite unrelated to us poor mortals—in a strange heaven, dim and shining...
...How...
...Science was all the time enlarging our physical universe, leading us to contemplate the grand realities of stellar depths with their vast and rhythmed glories...
...There is no possible reason why hagiology should be arid...
...divorced from the things of time, what can they find to do ? But one is sure that Teresa or Francis de Sales or the Cure of Ars are happily busy...
...The revival of historical studies should help...
...The Church tells us that communication between that plane and our own is not cut off...
...Many exceptions come to mind...
...they made a tremendous impression on their contemporaries, so tremendous that all sorts of stories, true and sometimes doubtless false, were handed down about them...
...This is a time if ever there were one, when attention should be directed toward the people who have been intensely aware of things beyond sense, when examples of spiritual heroism and faith triumphant should spur us on...
...The reason that the Reformation turned away from the rich complexity of commemorations in the mediaeval Church is easy to see...
...Christian history in last analysis is less concerned with doctrines or events than with life, and the life which flows from the doctrines is what this series would help the world by manifesting anew...
...To be sure, the student can find plenty of delightful legendary lore, whether in literature or art: predellas, illuminations, ivories, the stories of the Golden Legend, of numberless other compilations, a treasure house of celestial fairy tales which the world is sadly the poorer for rejecting...
...so is Saint Jane de Chantal, in her Letters as translated by the Sisters of the Visitation...
...To put the same thing in other words, the saints while here on earth were far more truly alive than other people...
...Dante well understood when he made his Manfred say, "Qui per quei di la molto s'aiuta," and stress throughout his Purgatorio the yearning of blessed wistful souls for the help of earthly prayers—even as the prayers of the saints ascend for those on earth forever...
...Within it, or beyond it, very far away, was enthroned a more awful 128 THE COMMONWEAL December 9, 1925 God...
...Why the saints ? Here is a cognate question, but one which would not occur to many in the Protestant world...
...Why not a new series of saintly lives, written by Catholic scholars and authors of distinction...
...but All Souls Day has...
...but He had to be reached by prayer or thought across that terrible intervening space...
...so is the other Catherine, of Genoa, in Von HiigePs magnificent book...
...politics make the idealist wince...
...They lived, they live...
...One lovely day to be sure is set apart for a general commemoration...
...Why can't we have more vivid readable biographies of holy men and women...
...a plane where the energies of the spirit are not imprisoned in matter, at least as matter is known to us...
...Oh, for fewer victims of Main Street, whining over lack of inspiration in their environment, oh, for more studies of the glorious men and women who through all sordidness and murk have pressed onward to their God, Him alone desiring...
...It has continued to this moment, deepening more and more our amaze at life, and "wakening a sort of soul in sense," to use a Shelleyan phrase...
...but we realize that it exists, and is intimately related to our mental life...
...We cannot define the life that obtains there...
...Saints are not negative creatures, though the naughty world, which wants to think evil more vivid than goodness, always pretends that they are...
...He knew what little boys and girls were doing, He "loved" them, with an emotion hard for a child to understand...
...Nothing could more invigorate the imagination, or help us more to escape that imprisonment in sense which so grievously obtains in the western world...
...One has hazy ideas about the life after death of Napoleon or Julius Caesar...
...What use...
...They are saying that if only we would pay attention to them once more, we should find our universe much more satisfactory, our apprehension of reality immensely enlarged...
...But when it comes to the nobler aspects of sanctity, to the true record of exalted lives, how dull is often the presentation...
...too dead our ears to catch the heavenly harmonies...
...Their interests even here below belonged to eternity, and would only be enhanced by escaping thither...
...They are not made up of sentimentalities and raptures, they are simply the men and women who have known the adventure of the inner life, which is the most exciting there is, more perfectly than other people...
...but by and large everyone will probably agree that the conventional biographies of saints ancient or modern are curiously dismal reading...
...Saints were real...
...They picture them standing monotonously, carrying their emblems, in stained glass windows, or absorbed in a wearisome and unmodern round of mortifications and ecstasies...
...The normal recognition of continuity between our plane of being and the Eternal, would be wonderfully fostered if we knew the saints better...
...Incidentally, such a series if rightly conceived, might almost form a consecutive history of Christianity as viewed from within...
...He stimulated others...
...The Church is always on her guard against this danger, but she can hardly deny that it exists...
...As imagination insists on pressing into that far experience which we are so soon to share, it finds a world not less but more tenanted than our own...
...Well, it is not likely that at one blessed stroke we can recover effective belief in the communion of saints for the public at large...
...Would it do any harm if they were clever—if they had the modern knack of penetration to the quick of personality, to the distinctive points of character...
...If we gained more adequate knowledge of them as actual men and women, an atmosphere would be created in which Catholics could grow...
...religion instead of augustly claiming men's allegiance, is too often apologetically on the defensive...
...This is an epoch of series...
...The saints should be given back to the world, and Catholics are the people who ought to do it...
...We are passing through a discouraged moment in history...
...it would almost seem to have reached its climax today...
...and nothing is more important for us than familiar knowledge of persons who had established sure and evident contacts with the supernatural world...
...He is a fascinating person, Saint Francis, and the Protestant world has adopted him—though it rarely occurs to anyone to follow him...
...Bring that answer home to the public heart, and the question, Why the Church...
...No clear idea is conveyed by the resounding terms, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers: but consolation comes, and a reverent sense of grateful intimacy, when we read of the spirits of just men made perfect...
...Since the Reformation it has turned its mind away...
...and perhaps one was going to be an angel oneself some day, for one mixed them up sadly with the souls of the dear departed...
...The Catholic thinks he knows the answer...
...For of all the denizens of that world of light, the saints seem nearest to us...
...Saints have character...
...Meanwhile, perhaps the saints are laughing at us, and crying over us too, from that strange plane where they abide...
...For Protestantism rarely thinks about saints at all...
...If we could but turn the gaze of youth toward them...
...Saints were the most vital people of their day, so vital that one can not possibly think of them as dead...
...It is there...
...That rare mystical fellowship is probably beyond the reach of any but the practising Catholic...
...But now, those who had loved and followed Him were lost in that great emptiness which it was irreverent to try to people...
...we must use human words to indicate the multiplicity of the forms it surely assumes...
...A few Scriptural saints—seventeen to be accurate—have special days in the Anglican Church, with collect, epistle and gospel...
...but apart from these no provision is made for commemorating the individual holy ones who shine like stars in the Christian heaven...
...But when all is said, it leaves us matter-bound and earth-bound still...
...But Jesus, be it reverently said, appeared lonely in those great solitudes...
...they had faults aplenty, horrid ones, from David down, and they can stand frank treatment...
...We have a mysticism of our own...
...Hagiology is dreary reading for the most part...
...and the universe of the spirit has become to nearly everyone in the great non-Catholic world, a sort of luminous void...
...and now from Jorgenson and Father Cuthbert, to Chesterton and Housman, delightful books make Francis live for us...
...The supernatural element in their lives should never be minimized...
...But there are other saints...
...Why the saints ? Their lives are the answer...
...And we perceive that the old Protestant way of veiling it in a sort of religious mist is unfortunate...
...Many people do not realize this vitality of the saints...
...Doubtless there are many other brilliant biographies...
...but he is aware that throngs of people are asking that question today, now wistfully, now contemptuously...
...The onward moving days, generally speaking, bring to the Protestant no association with saints...
...and thought was vague as it tried to picture things, to bring Him near...
...A Protestant pastor rediscovered Saint Francis a good many years ago...
...They were intensely anxious to perform a most difficult task: to bring men, with no secondary aids, into the direct presence of God...
...Before long, the ordinary Protestant child confronted an earth peopled with warm interesting human beings—and a mysterious other world which was an awful vacuum...
...And it is a pity...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 5
