All the Saints of God

Apologies for the gap in posting: I was in San Felice del Benaco last week to give a paper at a Russian Catholic congress, and working simultaneously to finish another paper at another conference next month. I will, in several places, have much more to say about this congress and the plight of Russian Byzantine Catholics today, whose treatment by Rome is, and has for decades been, an absolute scandal and utter disgrace. They, more than any other Eastern Catholic Church, illustrate the truth of Flannery O'Connor's observation that one is called upon to suffer ever so much more from the Church than for her.

But on this All Saints day, I pause to record a few thoughts by way of introducing a new book that arrived on my desk some weeks back:

I confess to a rather pronounced dislike of most of what passes for popular hagiography, that is, story-telling about those called saints. For too much of that literature has rendered too many men and women into little more than what Cardinal Newman called “clothes racks for virtues.” They seem, improbably, to be dripping with all the right attitudes and behaviors; they have primly checked all the proper boxes; they seem not even so much as to have sworn at stubbing their toe, never mind to have violated a single moral precept. They do not, as it were, have a single hair out of place on their perfectly sculpted, halo-bedecked heads. They are bloodless portraits of humourless and tedious bores. If you were seated beside one such as this at a dinner party or on a bus, you would curse your bad luck and move as fast as possible.

But the vision in the letter to the Hebrews used in the Byzantine lectionary on today's feast is much livelier and more exciting: “so great a cloud of witnesses.” Here I think immediately and vividly of a great crowd of the most diverse people, all pressing around, huddling in ever closer and cheering ever more boisterously at the finish line of a race on a bright, sunny, warm day as each of us—some huffing and puffing, most walking awkwardly and lamely in some pain, and only a very few racing smartly across the finish line—makes it to the end. That cloud of witnesses is filled with liveliness, with hope, with great good cheer, and above all with a love that overflows: they love us enough to want us to finish the race set before us so that we can join them in their endless feasting. They love us and so do not laugh at our funny walk, or strange running style, or badly misshapen bodies. They love us and so only want us to win the crowns of eternal life spoken of in today’s gospel.

How do we run this race? Some may be called to heroic achievement, to spiritual Olympics, as it were. But most of us are not--and we have, inter alia, Michael Plekon most recently to thank for his tireless reminders of ordinary and hidden holiness, and for showing us saints as they really are.

Beyond Plekon, the greatest figure of 19th-century English Christianity, John Henry Cardinal Newman, in a short meditation from 1856, argues that “it is the saying of holy men that, if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well.” That, Newman says, is  “a short road to perfection—short” but not always easy. For sometimes daily work seems like drudgery and we crave excitement. But Newman, with the whole weight of the desert fathers and mothers behind him, reminds us to resist those desires for adventure, saying instead:

If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first—Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.

All of which is just a homiletical introduction to the book I mentioned by Leonard J. DeLorenzo: Work of Love: A Theological Reconstruction of the Communion of Saints (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 362pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The saints are good company. They are the heroes of the faith who blazed new and creative paths to holiness; they are the witnesses whose testimonies echo throughout the ages in the memory of the Church. Most Christians, and particularly Catholics, are likely to have their own favorite saints, those who inspire and “speak” to believers as they pray and struggle through the challenges of their own lives. Leonard DeLorenzo’s book addresses the idea of the communion of saints, rather than individual saints, with the conviction that what makes the saints holy and what forms them into a communion is one and the same. Work of Love investigates the issue of communication within the communio sanctorum and the fullness of Christian hope in the face of the meaning—or meaninglessness—of death. In an effort to revitalize a theological topic that for much of Catholic history has been an indelible part of the Catholic imaginary, DeLorenzo invokes the ideas of not only many theological figures (Rahner, Ratzinger, Balathasar, and de Lubac, among others) but also historians, philosophers (notably Heidegger and Nietzsche), and literary figures (Rilke and Dante) to create a rich tableau. By working across several disciplines, DeLorenzo argues for a vigorous renewal in the Christian imagination of the theological concept of the communion of saints. He concludes that the embodied witness of the saints themselves, as well as the liturgical and devotional movements of the Church at prayer, testifies to the central importance of the communion of saints as the eschatological hope and fulfillment of the promises of Christ.

Formation of the Syriac Churches: an Interview with Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent

As I have often noted on here, Syriac Christianity has been undergoing a period of wholly welcome sustained scholarly attention for more than a decade now, and it is splendid to see younger scholars picking up from the pioneers--Sebastian Brock, Sidney Griffith, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Robin Darling Young, and others. The Syriac tradition, as Brock famously phrased it, is the "third lung" of Christianity--in addition to the Latin and Greek lungs, these latter two having, until recently, seemed to hog all the attention, scholarly and otherwise. But that has been changing for a while, and we are all the richer for it.

I am delighted to have this interview with a lovely young scholar whom I met briefly at a conference in Washington, DC in 2011. Shortly after that, Marquette, in its great wisdom, scooped up Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, a specialist in Syriac Christianity who studied with the Orthodox scholar Susan Ashbrook Harvey at Brown University. Saint-Laurent is the author of Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac Churches (University of California Press, 2015), 232pp. I asked her for an interview about this book, and here are her thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background

I grew up in southern California and was raised in a Catholic family.  My late parents, George and Michaeleen Saint-Laurent, were both educators.  My father taught Religious Studies at Cal State Fullerton, and my mother taught religion at a Catholic high school.  We travelled extensively, and learning about different cultures, languages, and religions of the world was a formative part of my childhood.  

I went to Gonzaga University, where I studied Classical Languages and Religious Studies.  In college, I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, and my visit to the catacombs outside of Rome led me to want to study the early Church.  I earned in an M.A. in Early Christian Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and it was there that I began my study of the Syriac language and tradition with Prof. Joseph Amar.  I went on a Fulbright scholarship to Salzburg, Austria, and then finished my training at Brown University with Susan Ashbrook Harvey where I finished my PhD in 2009.  She was a terrific mentor. 

I was junior fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 2008-2009.  I then taught at St. Michael’s College from 2009-2013, and now I teach at Marquette University in the historical section of the Theology Department.  I am married to a wonderful person, Matthew Mellon.  We have a son, Damien, and a poodle, Blaise Pascal.     

AD: What led to the writing of this book, which treats two areas some readers may not be familiar with: hagiography, and then the Syriac tradition.

My interest in hagiography began in graduate school at Notre Dame.  I read monastic hagiography in a class that I took with Dr. Blake Leyerle. I discovered that it was a rich genre to learn about the social history of the early Church.  And so with my interest in the Syriac language, Syriac hagiography was a natural fit, especially when I discovered that so many stories from this rich tradition had never even been translated.  It struck me that this was a field that in which I could make a contribution.  I wanted also to be help the Christians in the Middle East by increasing the knowledge of their heritage.

AD: How did you arrive at the 7 figures you treat--were there others you wanted to look at but had to exclude? Are these 7 the most important? What were your criteria for focusing on them?

I wanted to choose figures whose stories were particularly formative for the Syriac late-antique church. I also had a chronological limit – I did not want to go very far into the Post-Islamic era, since my knowledge of Arabic is so very limited, and so I did not have the scholarly expertise to tackle post-Islamic Christian literature.  I wanted to show the literary and cultural links among these missionary saints and their stories. 

AD: Your introduction notes that hagiography "is a problematic--though entertaining--genre to tackle and study." Tell us a bit more about why you say that. What are the major problems?

The main issue is how to read hagiographic texts.  Should they be treated as literature or history?  If they don’t have “historical” content, should they be dismissed?  Or are overly literary readings of these texts a disservice to the historical context to which the stories point?  There are many methodological hurdles with hagiography.  I still haven’t resolved them, but I made a first attempt with this project.  

AD: You note that one way of trying to analyze and understand hagiography is to view it as similar to painting or "works of art." Tell us a bit more about what you mean.

Art and story go together in the formation of religious memory.  One need only look a church from the early Christian period to see how pictures told stories for the faithful.  Both use religious symbolism in important ways.  Very often the hagiography of a saint’s life is influenced by the depictions of that saint or vice versa.  In both artistic presentations of a saint’s life and hagiography, bold images are used to create a memory of person’s life. Both artistic and narrative representations are non-linear ways of creating a communal memory of a holy person.  In both art and story, saints are clothed with symbols of holiness that represent the ideals of a particular community.        

AD: Skeptics today might dismiss hagiography as just a lot of pious folk-tales nobody should take seriously. But is there not an argument to be made that many, perhaps most of us, nonetheless create hagiographies all the time--whether about some movie star, or football player, or politician? Is hagiography, in other words, something of a universal impulse in humans?

That is an interesting idea! It is certainly true that modern media enjoys embellishing people’s lives, accentuating their admirable traits and “forgetting” their flaws!  I suppose that what is universal is our desire to romanticize (and demonize) our heroes or foes.  What we learn through studying cultural idealizations of our heroes often tells us more about ourselves than about the subject who is admired. Through attending to a society or community’s heroes (whether religious, athletic or political), we learn about what is valued in that particular historical or cultural milieu.  In hagiography, for instance, military saints might become popular in times or war – medical saints in times of plague, and so on.    

AD: Very recently I've been working on questions of memory in the formation of Orthodox-Catholic conflicts, especially around the papacy. Thus I noted with great interest that your "book considers hagiography's role in the creation of religious memory" (p.13). Tell us a bit more about how you see the relation between hagiography and a community's shared memory.

Synaxis of the Syriac Fathers by Fr. Vladimir Lysak 

Saints are created within the context of a community.  What is remembered about a person’s life, and what is forgotten, are the impressive or outstanding features that distinguish him or her. It is the community, the hagiographer, who determines what it is about a person that makes that person an exemplar of holiness. A hagiographer chooses the ideals of that person’s life with which he wants his community to identify.  Often many versions of a saint’s life circulate, each with different details about the saint; one community will not tell the same story of a saint as the next.  That is why it is important to do comparative studies of hagiography to see how the lives of these persons were diffused and translated.  Shared motifs as well as absences in competing forms of a saint’s life teach us how particular communities crafted a saint’s memory.  Typically, later versions of saint’s story become more embellished as he or she achieved a higher status in a community’s religious memory.   

AD: Sum up the book and your hopes for it. Who especially should read it?

My hope for the book is to bring a greater awareness of the richness of Syriac hagiographical tradition. I also hope that readers can find a model in my work for using hagiographical sources in their historical interpretations of the past.  I hope that it can be useful for specialists in Syriac studies as well non-specialists with an interest in late antiquity or hagiography.  

AD: Having finished the book, what projects are you at work on now?

I am currently working with Syriaca.org as the co-editor (with David Michelson) of a two-part digital database on Syriac hagiographic literature: the Gateway to the Syriac Saints. The first volume is entitled Qadishe, and it is an on-line database featuring information on holy people venerated in the Syriac tradition. 

The second database is called the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriac Electronica.  It features bibliographic data on over 1000 saints’ lives in the Syriac tradition.  We have encoded all of the data in TEI, or Text Encoding Initiative.  This will make it open, free, and linkable, so that other libraries and databases can access our work and use it for their own resources.  We hope that this project will be a useful tool for specialists and non-specialists alike.  It will be published in the coming months.  You can see a draft form here.


Finally, my friend Kyle Smith and I are producing a translation and commentary of a 12th-century Syriac hagiography, Behnam and Sara, for the series from Gorgias Press entitled the Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac.   

Sainthood and Race

Eastern Christians, perhaps more than their Western brethren in some ways, struggle, as is commonplace, with questions of ethnicity, nationalism, and related problems. Do those struggles extend even to the dead and long departed? I'm not entirely convinced that they do insofar as a figure such as Francis of Assisi or Seraphim of Sarov or Mary of Egypt have long transcended Umbrian or Russian or Egyptian categories to achieve global devotion. But a new book raises intriguing questions about race and saints: Molly Bassett and Vincent Lloyd, eds. Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh (Routledge, 29014), 232pp.

Eastern Christians will be especially interested in ch.7 which treats Coptic realities. About this book the publisher tells us:

In popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood, and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race?

Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and universality by combining both theoretical and ethnographic studies of saints and race across a wide range of subjects within the humanities. Additionally, the book’s group of emerging and established religion scholars enhances this discussion of sainthood and race by integrating topics such as gender, community, and colonialism across a variety of historical, geographical, and religious contexts. This volume raises provocative questions for scholars and students interested in the intersection of religion and race today.