More than ever, our time is calling for the inspiration of the saints. This little essay aims at suggesting that, if a moral improvement is to accompany material progress, the saints ought to be not only honored, but studied and copied as well.
To the amorphous crowd practising, not religion, but rather indifference to religious matters, the saints appear as strange anomalies, almost as monsters, devoid of all social utility. The average citizen listlessly believes that he need not pay any serious attention to them, nor take their attitude into account in his practical life. By their very sublimity, these giants of piety and admirable deeds escape the comprehension of the shallow intellectual, who will not take the pains to ponder sufficiently upon their character and mission. To be sure, this intellectual understands Anatole France and Casanova better. Laically speaking, the saints are of all great men the most misunderstood, although in fact, best worth knowing if we would draw from their example lessons by which to profit according to the measure of our capacities.
For its rehabilitation and justification mankind has produced not only heroes and geniuses, but also prophets and saints, who are geniuses and heroes withal, to such a degree as to bewilder the intellect of the proud and refresh the heart of the faithful and the lowly. In history, Isaiah thunders louder than Homer. The ethical fortitude of the saints has more importance for our races than talent in politics and war.
In his Port Royal, the French master-critic, Sainte-Beuve, no saint himself despite his name, has paid an enthusiastic homage to these figures—”splendid,” in his own words, “even from the purely human viewpoint.” The example of the saints challenges the blasphemy against God’s mercy and human dignity as proferred by the advocates of degeneration, libido’s worshippers and hierophants of immortality in man. As witnesses to the spirit, these chosen among the elect are its most convincing demonstration. Their immortality already shines through their charity. The body and its energies, the soul itself in its ordinary state, are ostensibly “powerless” to explain the “power” manifested by them.
Since would-be spiritualists at their congresses in Paris and all over the world, are endeavoring to found some sort of religion on the queer and abnormal phenomena produced in their seances, let us recall the sound and beautiful miracles of the saints. These miracles enable us to see mediumistic trances, phantoms and quack cures in their true proportions. The pythonic gesture pales and fades away before authentic graces; the celestial hymn of the blessed renders the sound of the ghostly trumpet cracked indeed. There is no practical usefulness in Conan Doyle’s “under-human” (and not superhuman) experiments; on the contrary, mankind has vastly benefited and will profit again and again by Aquinas’s and Augustine’s theology, by Teresa’s gentle wisdom and sublime ravishments, by Joan of Arc’s divine visions, whereas only trouble and “vexation of the spirit” have resulted from the psychical acrobatics of Home, the charlatan, or from the self-delusions of Stanton Moses.
Saints live by the “spirit of the mind” and the melody of the heart. They are, in our cities of noisy laughter and secret tears, the first fruits of the Church Triumphant, because they have “put on the new man, that, after God, hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.” They seem to come out from prehistoric legends, yet their behavior is a prophecy of a better earth. They seem to be saying—”We and God, we have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to His influence, our deeper destiny is fulfilled.”
I do not design to encroach on the theological field, which is not mine, nor to compete with Hello’s Physiognomies of saints. My limited purpose is to show that the virtues of these peerless men and women are not a dead letter for the elite nor for the common people. Pious souls know already what a fountain of wisdom and comfort flows from the triumphant hearts of those who are our spiritual captains. In the highest degree they possess the fundamental attributes which are wanting in us or have remained so feeble that they ap- pear, as it were, paralyzed.
Neither have I the space here to deal with the super- natural gifts of the saints, their lilial purity and tremendous asceticism, their power of “reversibility,” their miraculous endowments; nor how they soar above our carnal slavery into God’s freedom. I shall be content to speak as a psychologist and attempt to demonstrate that individually, sociologically, economically, the world’s welfare needs within it the leaven of saintly qualities.
Saintly qualities belong to the category of those “despised virtues,” about which the regretted Madame Lucie Faure Goyau has written an unforgettable chapter. May we enumerate some of them? The spirit of poverty; humility linked to equanimity and magnanimity; obedience and persuasive authority; a victorious detachment; fortitude united to exquisite sensitiveness; indulgence to the falterings of others contrasted with severity to oneself; suavity and steadfast- ness; the silent possession of a wider life; an income parable knowledge of the human heart and mind, learnt not in the books of our libraries, but in “the book of Life;” an inexhaustible “goodness” which perpetually redeems this earth of its egoism and cruelty; and finally, poetical vision allied to a practical efficiency, yet ignored by the multitude because it never advertises nor aims at vogue and personal popularity.
To begin from this final quality of vision: the saint is the greater creative artist, for he knows how to build his soul a second time. Thus, as the Apostle puts it, he becomes “God’s cooperator.” In his quest, he approaches nearest to the Summum Bonum and accomplishes the real Magnum Opus. I sometimes wonder whether modern poetry has not grown prosaic, just because our age has departed from these original models and has envisaged the universe and man from the commonplace point of view of the cynic or of the sentimentalist. But a Catherine of Sienna, a Teresa, or a Francis of Assisi is not merely a poet, but the poem itself.
The saints possess an “auroral openness.” To the creative faculties their uplifted conscience imparts a certain caroling note. As an old minstrel has well remarked—”If they divest themselves of our futile ambitions, they never forget to take with them their lyre.” This lyre is, of course, their soul, attuned to nature’s harmonies and the heavenly chorus; and across the cords of this lyre stray angelic fingers. Those Christian Orpheuses communicate to us, as we listen, the most needful vigor, resulting from enthusiasm and from a kind of mysterious happiness that passes all understanding. On the other hand, the saint, although his is a character more virile than ours, knows better than we how to respond to the most delicate stimuli coming from universal nature. To quote one example among a thousand, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier, was still endowed, with what the Church considers as a celestial favor—”the gift of tears.”
A saint, who is irked far more than we by the conditions of a world quite antagonistic to his tastes, still enjoys the unfettered life. He is free, like Saint Paul with his enchained hands. Resignation and courage, generosity, equanimity and patience compose his inward tranquility, in contrast to our own restlessness and perennial attitude of rebellion against people, events and fortune. Fiat voluntas tua is his motto. (Fiat voluntas mea is ours.) And we seldom get what we want, while he finally succeeds. The new psychology is teaching us that most of the complexes poisoning our blood and existence find their solvent in the act of giving up an unreasonable resistance to the inevitable law.
We would rather perish than abdicate our own will. The saint has no self-will. We imagine that obedience is a derogation of the majesty of the human being. Even our children look sulky when they are called to order. None the less, without a disposition to obedience discipline is an empty word; and, without discipline, there looms no justified hope for self-control, and consequently no hope for any health, physical, moral and social, nor any deep satisfaction in this life.
Another virtue, dear to the blessed—the spirit of poverty—not only is forgotten today but almost suppressed. Yet our century stands sorely in need of just such a spiritual attitude. “Among us English speaking peoples especially,” declared William James, “do the praises of poverty need to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.”
I am inclined to think that other races, also, speaking other languages than English, are more or less following the same wrong path. “Holy poverty,” chanted Francis of Assisi. He enrolled under her banner, and was jubilant. On the contrary, the superstition of wealth at any cost will, if it be not checked, bring ruin and disaster on a civilization that is already perilously materialistic, industrial and mechanical. There is such a thing as honorable wealth, honorably and usefully employed. But to sacrifice everything to the god Plutus amounts to ceasing to serve Christ and to becoming the worshipper of Mammon.
Our society is beginning to awaken to the evidence of the practical ability of the saints and to see how this practical ability, not devoted to any selfish advantage, but to the glory of God, has worked for the general good.
Out of meditation and sometimes rapture, the saints go more valiant and more clear-minded to their immediate duty, be it great or small. They do much and in many ways, multum et multa, because they have the spirit of poverty, even when in possession of material wealth. In any case they are always rich with the true riches that come from faith and the consciousness of working the providential work. Loaded with honors, they remain modest. Humble, they retain full dignity. Because they have a glimpse of the Fountainhead of all beauty and are clothed with Its splendor, they weep over what they call their unworthiness.
Their historic glory surpasses that of the most famous conquerors and legislators. They bear witness in favor of the Spirit which moulds the universe more grandiosely and more usefully than do brute force and cunning. St, Paul’s impress upon our present-day society is more profound than Solon’s, Alexander’s, Caesar’s, or Napoleon’s. The divine philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas transcends the lofty conjecture of Aristotle and Plato. Saint John of the Cross went deeper into the abyss of the human soul than Socrates or William James.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, I remember having attended a lecture delivered at the Odeon, Paris, by Maurice Barres, then scarcely touched by the first ray of his fame. He had just discovered the Exercises of Loyola. He was lavish in his admiration for this unique masterpiece, pronouncing, as a layman, that no moralist could be compared to this founder of order, that none had to the same degree explored man’s inward constitution, and that his training of character was the best that could be proposed, not only to monks but also, as a method, to all mankind. The saints are the real pragmatists. Their achievements proscribe dilettantism and solemn frivolity. They never make much ado about nothing. They act from above—they tame human nature and bend it to due ends because their own aureole hovering over it shows them the reality without our delusions. Their abode lies in the majestic empire of causes. They themselves are causes.
Through the Crusades, Saint Bernard built a bridge between the Orient and the Occident, and initiated the unity of the world which is the aim of our civilization. Joan of Arc did more for France than Louis XIV. Francis Xavier showed himself a more efficacious colonizer than Scipio, the African; or Cecil Rhodes. Saint Vincent of Paul shines like the sun itself besides the little lamps of our philanthropy. Were it not for the saints, the world would have been uninhabitable, even from the material standpoint. As for those whose mysticism seems to evolve exclusively in the inner realm, they, too, spread all around them a revivifying influence. The invisible cross they bore on their shoulders illuminated their shadow with its regenerating rays. The noblest ideals, by force of their example, were able to slowly triumph in spite of the reluctancy of the herd, whereas philosophers, like Seneca, with their golden aphorisms, could not arrest the degeneration of Rome. The saints have at no time been sophists or rhetoricians, but true teachers and masters.
“These spiritual heroes,” William James stated, “are like pictures with an atmosphere and background; and placed alongside of them, the strong men of this world and no other, seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stone and brickbats.” And he concluded—”Let us be saints, then, if we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally.”
To become a saint is a vast and superhuman undertaking for which we need special grace from God. But in any case, let us no longer assume that the example of the saints is entirely beyond our reach, and that the air they breathe in their lofty sphere is irrespirable for our lungs. The reverse is the case. This air conveys the very oxygen our impoverished atmosphere needs. By treading in their footsteps we shall achieve enlightenment and serenity. A country which would establish in every school classes for the study of the experiments and merits of the saints, would soon become the nursery of better citizens; and its pupils would stand out from the rest of mankind as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
