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Unseeing Sainthood ELIZABETH SUTHERLAND Crossing: The INPR Journal Vol. 1 (2020): 112-129 DOI: 10.21428/8766eb43.1f767536 Unseeing Sainthood Elizabeth Sutherland University of Steubenville [email protected] The saint. What sort of saint? No one has ever seen a saint. For the saint remains invisible, not by chance, but in principle and by right.1 Jean-Luc Marion The saint is “the ‘stranger’ par excellence.”2 Saints transcend material reality through their close affinity with the divine. They share in that which marks God’s alterity: his holiness. If saints join God in being set apart, can they be recognized precisely as set apart? The dialectic between presence and absence, hiddenness and revelation, intimacy and ineffability, homeliness and the uncanny haunts all aspects of cultic devotion. This tension emerges in a special way with regard to the hagiographical tradition. According to the apophatic or negative theological school of thought, holiness cannot be represented mimetically. Aesthetic depiction of an ineffable phenomenon should be impossible. Yet this is the task of hagiography. The literature of sainthood must produce saintly visibility, rendering sainthood perceivable by imagining what holiness looks like. Saints are made, by God but also by culture. In both cases “making” has the full force of poesis. Legendum, one of several words used throughout the Middle Ages to describe the genre of saint’s life, indicates the deep textuality of sainthood. From the Latin verb legere (“to read,” “to collect or gather together”), legendum translates “ought to be read.” The word “legend” has come to signify a quasi-historical event imbued with mythic (if not 1 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Invisibility of the Saint,” trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Saints: Faith Without Borders, ed. Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 355. 2 Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 91. 112 Crossing: The INPR Journal, Expositio I (2020) 112-129 Unseeing Sainthood actual) truth and, in its colloquial usage, often has fantastical connotations. Despite its givenness in the mode of textuality, hagiography seeks to preserve the mystery of the holy even as it depicts holy persons. In order to represent holiness as such, hagiography must constantly undo its project of cataphatic (that is—affirmative, imagistic) representation. It must mortify the gaze, hide the saint, offend the mind’s eye—all in an attempt to let the dark luminescence of the holy shine forth more brightly. Because of this, the hagiographical mode of literature can be said to have an apophatic, or negative, poetics. It must render the icon without creating an idol. Hagiography has the difficult task of preserving the transcendent prerogative of holiness while creating an imaginary space within which one might contemplate holy persons. The aesthetic apparatus of sainthood—the cult-making—provides a backdrop against which the phenomenon of sainthood can emerge, even if the holy itself can never been seen in its essence. Christ’s concrete personhood, and its attendant theology of Word-made-flesh, guarantees sainthood’s ability to manifest, however fuzzily. While the cultic process necessarily distorts the phenomenon of sanctity, it indicates the presence of something real and positions devotees within an epistemological darkness that is generative rather than void. It may seem surprising that holiness should be considered ineffable, given the wealth of images that flood the mind as soon as one hears the word “saint.” Within a Christian framework, a holy life participates in the vita Christi. The sanctified person becomes conformed to Christ, an alter Christus.3 Holiness, then, is an irreducibly supernatural phenomenon. Sainthood does not refer to moral perfection, though goodness bears a direct relationship to holiness, and the two are often conflated. Ethicists working within the analytic tradition have taken up the concept of “moral sainthood,” coined by Susan Wolf, in an ongoing conversation about supererogation. Those interested in the possibility of a postmodern ethics have occasionally made a similar move. 4 Zooming outward from the personal to the 3 See Candida Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958): “We generally take ‘holy’ as meaning ‘completely good’; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness… But this common usage of the term is inaccurate” (5); Susan Wolf’s now-classic essay “Moral Saints” has sparked an interesting conversation about this exact issue. In it, she equates sainthood with moral perfection. Robert Adams answers her directly in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, emphasizing the supernatural and non- pragmatic aspects of sainthood. Discussions of postmodernism sometimes turn to saints as exemplars of an optimal ethics. Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism affords one example. This conception of sainthood as pure ethics would have been foreign to medieval thinkers. See Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419-439; Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); 113 Crossing: The INPR Journal, Expositio I (2020) 112-129 ELIZABETH SUTHERLAND civic, sainthood is sometimes viewed as fundamentally political.5 So charismatic is the saint as a cultural force, the idea of such a figure compels even when evacuated of spiritual content. It makes sense that sainthood has proven an enduringly slippery phenomenon, difficult to pin down. The “definition” of sanctity has no independent content of its own; rather, it describes a mode of relationality toward the divine. Its sense is more directional than prescriptive. It reconfigures the thrust of one’s existence. Only God’s own activity can complete the process of becoming holy. Sanctification transfigures individual human persons. Orthodox thinkers refer to this transformative process as theosis, or divinization, focusing on the soul’s ability to share in the divine life. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God’s holiness is coordinate with his transcendence. When a person becomes sanctified, she enters into this alterity. Participating in the divine life entails a partial sharing in God’s ineffable nature. If saints as such share in God’s unknowability, then it would seem we have no hope of recognizing them as saints. One contemporary strain of phenomenology articulates this paradox most starkly. Following Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion applies phenomenology to the revelatory, transcendent realm. His doctrine of saturation has created an entire field of inquiry, with implications for many topics. He addresses sainthood specifically in an essay titled “The Invisibility of the Saint.” For Marion, anyone who thinks he has recognized a saint fools himself: saints are invisible. “The saint. What sort of saint? No one has ever seen a saint. For the saint remains invisible, not by chance, but in principle and by right.” 6 He borrows the language of praise for this declamation: le saint, le saint?, le saint. Holy, holy, holy.7 He affirms, questions, then negates the saint, arguing that she retains her invisibility in all circumstances. In order to recognize saintliness in another person, one must have experienced the phenomenon of holiness within oneself. Upon what other basis can one attribute it to another? Holiness cannot be defined, only known by direct experience. How does this work, though, if “no one can say ‘I am a saint’ without total self-deception”?8 To account oneself holy is to commit the sin of pride. In fact, the holier a person becomes, the more fallible she seems in her own eyes. The evidence of one’s holiness Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 5 David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 6 Marion, “The Invisibility of the Saint,” 355. 7 Petra Turner, “The Unknown Saint: Reflections on Jean-Luc Marion’s Understanding of Holiness,” The Postmodern Saints of France: Refiguring ‘the Holy’ in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. Colby Dickinson (London: T&T Clark, 2013), 231. 8 Marion, “The Invisibility of the Saint,” 356. 114 Crossing: The INPR Journal, Expositio I (2020) 112-129 Unseeing Sainthood must manifest during an encounter with the holiness of another. True recognition of the holy consists in understanding one’s own lowliness. It is known not by similitude, but by disparity. Rudolf Otto calls this reaction the mysterium tremendum, a shuddering awareness of one’s own creaturely nature.9 When Jesus’s identity as the Christ begins to dawn on Peter, the disciple does not gape or touch. He takes a step back: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” (Luke 5.8). So strong is his reaction, he dares to address Jesus with an imperative. This reaction sanctifies Peter. According to Marion, presuming to comprehend and label the holy verges on idolatry, and “all idolatry actually results in self-idolatry.”10 One’s own standards become the measure of the divine. The holy’s elusiveness consigns
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