by Colin Dickey
Gibbon had a strong contempt for Christianity, blaming its spread for the decline of the empire that had once tried to eradicate it, so his distaste for Simeon is not surprising— but beyond his personal aversion to the desert saint, his comments came at a time when attitudes toward ascetics were turning from awe to contempt and pity. It was Gibbon's account of Simeon, along with that in William Hone's Every-Day Book, that inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to write a long, dramatic monologue from the saint's perspective in 1833. "The watcher on the column till the end," Simeon calls himself in Tennyson's poem, one "unfit for earth, unfit for heaven." The saints belong to both worlds, but in occupying that strange halfway position, they paradoxically belong to neither. Unlike angels, their home is not in heaven; unlike Jesus, they are not on loan. They are Earth's rejects; they have no real place here and so spend their time with their eyes watching God.
As he surveys his final hours, Tennyson's Simeon is plagued with doubt. Rather than speaking as a figure of certainty and piety, he's unsure whether he's earned sainthood, or even if anyone has witnessed his devotion.
O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?
Show me the man hath suffer'd more than I.
For did not all thy martyrs die one death?
For either they were stoned, or crucified,
Or burn'd in fire, or boil'd in oil, or sawn
In twain beneath the ribs; but I die here
To-day, and whole years long, a life of death.
Simeon became a saint not because of his good works or his martyrdom but because he outmartyred the martyrs. He didn't die; he turned his life into death. "A life of death": This is the true vocation of the saint— the walking dead, zombies in their faith.
Over a hundred years after Tennyson's poem, the Spanish director Luis Buñuel revisited the saint's legend with his film Simon of the Desert, in which a similarly named stylite and his trials embody all the failings Buñuel perceived in the Catholic Church. Buñuel's steadfast Simon is beset by peasants who plead for relief and offer no gratitude, or even surprise, in the face of Simon's miracles; he is surrounded by bickering monks whose banal concerns create an endless babble of noise beneath his pillar; and he is tormented by a low-rent Satan (played by Silvia Pinal), who seems to tempt Simon mostly out of boredom. Simon, the straight man to this absurdity, remains pious, if sometimes exasperated— yet it's clear that his refusal to engage with the world has itself become part of the problem.
For Buñuel, as for Tennyson, the saints are not just more than human; they are also less than human: cast off and exiled, mar ginal figures on the border of ridicule for their absurd failures to live among us. But even so, the hermit himself is not Buñuel's target. As the film critic Michael Wood notes, "what's worse than ridiculous, in Buñuel's view, is the religion that has taken this man's life away from him, the service of that God who never dies. Simon is neither the first nor the last to abandon the intricate human world for the sake of an extreme idea; and his crazy, admirable virtue is part of the problem because it is admirable as well as crazy."
Buñuel fought a lifelong struggle against the Catholic Church and what he perceived as its backward thinking and hypocrisy, but, as Wood notes, "God can't ultimately condemn serious atheists. They pay far more attention to him than halfhearted believers do, and they help to keep him in business." Buñuel is closer to Milton than he is to the average churchgoer because, despite his derision, he remains deadly serious. He knows the stakes, and he takes his adversary seriously. In films like Belle du Jour and Viridiana, Buñuel takes aim at those who are repressed by decorum and religion, unable to free their desires. He despises the saint's piety but not his excesses. Indeed, Buñuel's cynicism hides a desire for that excess, for a life lived at the margins.
Like Buñuel, I am less interested in the piety of the saints than in their excesses, their madness, their inability to live normal lives. I want to open up the meaning of the saint. I want to see what moves at the margins; I want to push at the boundaries of the human until something gives way.
We now live in a world far less tolerant of such extremes, which is why, perhaps, it has become so compelling to revisit the saints in a contemporary context. Buñuel's film ends in the city, as the fifth-century saint is miraculously transported via a jetliner to an unnamed metropolis and deposited in a nightclub, where young kids are dancing something called "Radioactive Flesh." It's the "final dance," Silvia Pinal's Satan tells Simon: "You'll have to stick it out. You'll have to stick it out until the end."
Gustave Flaubert, too, who spent his life trying to write a book based on the life of Saint Anthony, ended one draft in a city where Anthony walks through an urbanscape where "smoke escapes from the houses, tongues of fire twist upwards in the dense air. Iron bridges span rivers of filth; carriages, sealed as tightly as coffins, encumber the long, straight streets." The temptation to strand the saint in the modern city comes perhaps from the fact that saints no longer belong there. Though there are modern saints, the idea of a saint is always anachronistic— an occupation from another time that has no real corollary in contemporary life.
"At the base of a stylite's pillar," the English writer William Dalrymple notes, "one is confronted with the awkward truth that what has moved past generations can today sometimes be only tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith, while remaining quite inexplicable and absurd when seen under the harsh distorting mi croscope of sceptical Western rationality." A modern ascetic risks being labeled with all manner of clinical diagnoses: Masochism, anorexia, schizophrenia— those former paths to sainthood nowadays run straight through the DSM IV and psychopharmacology. In short, those old obsessions are incompatible with modern life, which sees them as pathologies that interrupt a productive life. The saints have become, in Buñuel's words, "singular individuals who are placed at the margin of history, of daily life, and all because of a fixed idea."
Perhaps these fixed obsessions are why I find the writings of the saints so fascinating. There's a simplicity in their writing that reduces the entire world, all of lived experience, to a single idea, a locus from which everything else must be seen. Whether it's Gregory of Tours narrating the history of time and space or Teresa of Avila narrating her ecstatic visions, the writings of the saints all revolve around a singular, divine moment.
If we can no longer experience the world through an extreme lens, as did the saints who once walked among us, with their bodies pushed to the limits, then the best we can hope for is a parallel experience in art. Tennyson and Buñuel were not alone in turning to this subject matter; many artists and writers have found their muses in the saints, from atheists like Buñuel and Flaubert to more reverential artists like Caravaggio or Georges de La Tour. The saints have become a creative engine by which artists can tap into bloody excess, a kind of superhuman insanity. If I follow in their footsteps, it is not as a theologian but as one more writer trying to learn something about my own time by retelling these stories once more.
Hagiography— the writing of the lives of the saints— is a curious genre, now mostly forgotten. Take, for example, the life of the Belgian saint Vincent Madelgarus, who died in 677. When an unknown priest set out to write his story, he began by copying the prologue from the life of Saint Erminus, followed by a second prologue stolen word for word from Gregory of Tours's life of Saint Patroclus. The story of Vincent's marriage is also stolen, this time from Gregory's life of Saint Leobard, as is a divine vision Vincent experiences and the description of his son, Landric. His decision to embrace the ascetic life is borrowed, exactly, from the life of Saint Bavon, and his death is also a reworking of the death of another, Saint Ursmar.
In this hagiography, Saint Vincent Madelgarus is nothing more than a collage of plagiarized sources, a seventh-century version of sampling. And this is by no means the only case of such plagiarism; the hagiographies of Saint Lambert and Saint Rem
aclus are identical, and there's so much overlap between the lives of Hubert and Arnold of Metz that modern historians are at a loss as to which event happened to whom.
Plagiarism was common among early writers of hagiography, who would not have understood the term plagiarism anyway. If Eddius's Life of Saint Wilfred steals from Evagrius's Life of Saint Anthony, which in turn took material from Sulpicus's Life of Saint Martin, the point was the grand scheme of perfection that lay behind all these lives and all these stories. Hagiographers prized not the individual details of one's life but the universals, the commonalities. The abbot Bede, who had known Saint Cuthbert personally, wrote an eighty-five page narrative of his life but went out of his way to eliminate any factual detail, any specific point of reference, any historical location or date. Anything that would ground Cuthbert as a real person who lived in a real time and place was excised.
It's not that a writer like Bede was lazy or didn't have his facts straight. Rather, as a hagiographer, he had a specific goal. He and other writers wanted to make the saints look the same. In hagiography, the story is written to tell us not the facts about that person's life but rather how that person's life exemplifies the glory of God. The true protagonist of the hagiography is never the saint; the true protagonist is always just offstage, in His heaven.
As I began writing the stories that became this book, I wanted to avoid precisely this approach to these lives. I wanted to find their individuality and the unique legacies that they left to the world they sought to change.
There are thousands of saints, and no book could hope to treat them all. I haven't tried: The saints in these pages are only a tiny fragment of the many to be written about. But they are the ones who have spoken most to me over the years, either because of what they wrote (Part One), because of the art and literature they inspired ( Parts Two and Three), or because of the wide range of beliefs they encompassed (Part Four). Finally there are those who were never formally recognized as saints but whose lives and actions speak to the divine in all of us.
"Sainthood itself is not interesting, only the lives of the saints," the philosopher E. M. Cioran once wrote. I, too, am uninterested in writing that downplays the humanity of the saint in favor of God's divinity. For me, saints exist not as a medium for God but as a lens for humanity.
Part One: The Labyrinth of the Word
F I G U R E 1 : Scene from the Apocalypse, the Opening of the Fifth and Sixth Seals (1511), Albrecht Dürer. BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, PARIS, FRANCE/GIRAUDON/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
·one·
The Singer at the
End of the World:
Gregory of Tours
This is how the end of the world looked in the sixth century: In Gaul, above the River Rhône, a "curious bellowing sound" was heard for sixty days before a hillside collapsed. In Auvergne in 571, a plague that decimated the population was preceded by "three or four great shining lights" that hovered around the sun. There were eclipses and comets and birds that flew into churches, miraculously extinguishing every candle "so quickly that you would have thought that someone had seized hold of them all at once and dropped them into a pool of water." On November 11, 578, during a celebration of mass in Tours, "a bright star shining in the very center of the moon" appeared. In 580, floods devastated the region, and a sound "as of trees crashing to the ground" was heard for fifty miles in every direction.
The signs were everywhere. A fire in Paris in 585 burned everything but the churches of Saint Martin and Saint Germanus. In the ruins, a mysterious bronze statue of a snake and a rat was found; when it was removed, the city became infested with snakes and rats for the first time. In April 586, an epidemic decimated Tours and Nantes, death proceeding rapidly from a slight headache. In the town of Limoges, those conducting business on the Sabbath were consumed by fire, while elsewhere in France a drought destroyed acres of farmland. Men sold themselves into slavery to get something to eat. In Chartres, people discovered their jars inscribed with characters they could neither remove nor read. Shortly thereafter, new grapevine shoots appeared mysteriously in October, along with deformed grapes. Flashes of light shot out from blood-red clouds; snakes dropped from the sky; entire villages disappeared.
The Messiah appeared and reappeared, and reappeared. A man named Desiderus emerged in Tours in 587, calling himself the Savior and offering to cure the paralyzed and the crippled, forcibly stretching out their bodies as he called on his divine power; those he did not cure were sent away, half dead and broken. In Gaul, plague broke out, and during the epidemic a woodcutter was attacked by a swarm of flies, went insane, and proclaimed himself Christ. He attracted some three thousand followers and began his own plague of banditry: He and his followers robbed everyone who passed on the road and gave what they took to the poor. After a few months, he took his army to lay siege to the cathedral; once he was there, the bishop sent out emissaries claiming to be peace envoys— when they reached this Christ, they summarily executed him and dispersed his followers, torturing any who remained.
Another man claiming to be Christ was arrested and jailed without protest. Shortly thereafter he broke out and escaped to the local monastery, whereupon he promptly passed out, dead drunk. When the bishop of Tours found him the next morning, he smelled so bad the bishop could not stand to go near him. Unable to get his attention, he tried to wake this Messiah by singing as loudly as he could.
Let your first image of Gregory be this: singing hymns one morning in 580 to a passed-out Christ. Imagine him the singer, singing the end of the world.
Gregory was a diminutive man, short enough to have been mocked for it by the pope. Beyond that, though, is a humility that comes across in his writing and that makes his books a pleasure to read. He was the descendent of bishops, popes, and senators, and in 573 he found himself in charge of the important bishopric of Tours, where Saint Martin's tomb was located.
Important tombs were not only pilgrimage sites, they were also a major source of revenue as well as a source of miracles. Not just the relics but everything about the tomb of Saint Martin radiated magic. When Saint Aredius visited Martin's tomb, he gath ered some dust in a box, which he took back to his monastery, but miraculously the dust "increased in quantity until it not only filled the box but forced its way through the joints wherever it could find an opening."
Gregory understood the power of such dust. In an age when disease rampaged unchecked and medicine was poorly understood, Gregory inoculated himself against everything from a cold to the plague by mixing the dust from Martin's tomb (along with a few other ground-up relics) into various elixirs and tonics. On more than one occasion, he reported, the miraculous dust saved his life, including the night before his ordination as bishop of Tours, when he said Martin's remains saved him from dysentery.
This is the second great image of Gregory: the dust eater.
Gregory's masterpiece, A History of the Franks, has long struck me as analogous to epic modern novels, in particular Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's In Search of Lost Time. For Joyce and Proust, the goal was to take a single moment— a walk through Dublin, the taste of a madeleine— and explode it into a thousand pages, to take the nearly infinite layers of experience and lay them all out on the page.
Gregory similarly wanted to write the whole of human experience, but his method differs— rather than single out that one moment that could act as a microcosm, he set out to narrate the history of human experience from its dawn to its end. Gregory begins not with the origin of the Franks or his own life but with the beginning of the world; his book's original title was simply Decem Libri Historiarum (The ten books of history). Book I contains the Bible in paraphrase, and the line of history moves unbroken into Gregory's own time (starting in Book IV), the entire work offering a seamless progression of history from Adam and Eve to his own time.
He writes of the end of dynasties with remarkable lack of pity, as in his cool and objective account of King Lothar's ordering that his son Chramm along with Chramm's wife and
daughters be burned alive. Just as easily he tells of close human dramas and the pain of learning of his own brother's murder. Gregory was close enough to the political intrigues of his time to see how behind-the-scenes machinations were set in motion, and he recorded the passing of the seasons with the detail of an almanac.
Numerical tallies end each of the ten books of his opus so that one can trace the exact record of days since Eden. "For the sake of those who are losing hope as they see the end of the world coming nearer and nearer," he writes, "I also think it desirable that, from material assembled from the chronicles and histories of earlier writers, I should explain clearly how many years have passed since the world began." One must start from the beginning, above all, because the end is imminent.