THE real nature of sanctity, all that its existence means for our view of human personality, still remains strangely ignored by the modern world. The saint is acknowledged as an exaggerated religious type, an interesting subject for psychological investigation; but seldom for that which he is—a creative genius in the spiritual sphere, whose very existence witnesses to the priority of God. Yet surely St. Paul, in his marvellous vision of the whole Christian society as the organ, the 'mystical body' of one eternal Spirit, 'dividing to every man severally as He will' gave us once for all a clue to the peculiar significance of the saints. For these are spiritual realists, self-given without condition to the purposes of God; and therefore accepting without compromise that ineffable vocation, with all that is involved in it of suffering and labour, of total and joyful subjection to the demands of that same God who worketh all in all'. And by one of the paradoxes which abound in the spiritual life, it is only when his life is thus given to the purposes—however strange and costly—of an abiding Perfection that lies beyond the world, that the human creature seems able to achieve such perfection as is possible within the
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world. For him sanctification and sacrifice are two faces of one fact. He 'partakes of the Divine nature' in the degree in which he is self-given to it. Subdued to the pressures and the demands of that mysterious energy, Its loving and untiring friend and servant, he becomes in his turn and in his small measure a creative personality; takes up his part in the eternal process of bringing forth within the world the life and love of God.
'Man', says William Law, 'has a Seed of the Divine life given into the birth of his soul, a Seed that has all the riches of eternity in it, and is always wanting to come to the birth in him and be alive in God.' The flowering of that Seed is sanctity; for the life of holiness is really part of that universal process which Christian theology means by Incarnation. It reproduces, and even continues in its measure, the life of Christ within the world; especially that life's most awful and mysterious reaches, its energizing power and its costly redemptive action on suffering and sin. As the souls of the saints grow, and their real spiritual personality begins to appear; so on one hand we find that their loving identity with all other souls grows too, and on the other hand that loving union with God which makes them in a special degree the friends and agents of the Eternal Charity, becomes ever deeper, more delicate, more selfless, more complete. They are possessed and devoured by the longing to help, to heal, to save. Thus the deep joy which persists through their darkest hours and utmost weariness, has nothing in common with the placid happiness of the devotee. Feeling and bearing
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the mysterious burden of the sins and sufferings of the world, their growth in sanctity is always a growth in meekness and in penance. That beauty of holiness which we reverence in them, they cannot see; for their eyes are fixed on the absolute Beauty and Holiness which they follow and adore. The attitude of the redeeming saint, in his simplicity and selfment, remains to the end the attitude of the Publican. His many reasons for thanksgiving never include his own superior state. We notice too in the best of them a certain sweetness, easiness and lack of rigorism, which comes from dying to self and its limitations: a death which is never without suffering, and must be constantly renewed. 'We see saints smiling, and persons praying peacefully', says Huvelin, 'but only just consider what is going on in the depth of their souls!'
This strange thing Holiness, this entire self-giving of the human soul to the Eternal, takes as many forms as human character itself. Some of these forms charm us; others disconcert and even repel the natural mind. All have a quality which is calculated to make that natural mind feel rather uncomfortable. For in truth the vocation of the saint is always a call to those heroic levels of existence which a bourgeois spirituality prefers to ignore; and in whatever way this call is obeyed, it casts an unbecoming light on that which Huvelin was accustomed to call our 'incurable mediocrity of soul'. It is both humbling and bracing to contemplate the self-oblivious passion and adventurous trust which wedded St. Francis to Poverty, determined the great career of St. Ignatius, laid on St. Catherine of Siena or the Cure d' Ars the holy cross of vicarious
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atonement, sent Bunyan to Bedford gaol, Henry Martyn to India, Foucauld to the Sahara, or Father Wainright to the lifelong service of the poor; yet more illuminating to contrast the natural equipment of these souls as they first come before us, with the mature spiritual personalities which are formed of this various raw material under the steady reciprocal action of the divine and the human love: out of its very weakness bringing fresh beauty and power.
Thus Francis, a pleasure-loving boy and natural artist, feeling to the full the natural human loathing for squalor and for hideous sights, conquers that disgust by a sublime movement of charity, and makes of it a stepping-stone to God. Ignatius, beginning as a worldly and self-indulgent young soldier, devotes that militant temper to the struggle for holiness; and is described in his last years as 'having become all love' and never making a decision without resort to God. Catherine of Genoa, a melancholy and disillusioned woman, becomes by persevering communion with the invisible Love a great philanthropist and mother of souls. Teresa, a high-spirited, romantic, passionate creature, confessed that the devil often sent her a 'spirit of bad temper' and was accustomed to refer to the unreformed and comfort-loving Carmelites as 'cats'. She comes by courage and love to the height of self-abandonment at which she can refuse the temptation to 'serve God in a corner' and renounce the very joys of contemplation, in order to obey the secret pressure which sends her out to reform the religious life of Spain. Augustine Baker, forsaking in discouragement the contemplative pathway for nine
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years, meekly and bravely returns to it; and becomes in consequence one of its surest, deepest, and gentlest guides. Fenelon, the brilliant courtier and ecclesiastic, driven into disgrace by the combined results of misunderstanding and jealousy, humbly devotes himself to the self-occupied penitents who pursue him with their ceaseless letters; saying with perfect patience to one of the most exacting, 'I had rather die, than fail a soul sent me by God'.
Such people show us what the common stuff of human nature can do, when abandoned without reserve to the action of God. They teach us, moreeover, that Christian holiness is never monotonous. The household of faith is full of the variety and action, the ups and downs and temperamental surprises of real family life. There is room in it for artist and thinker, inventor and explorer, the nurse and the teacher and the simple useful woman, the mystic, the ascetic, and the practical man. Most of us, at one time or another, have been brought into contact with a saint of our own day; and this experience, if we realized its nature, will almost certainly have seemed to us quite different from anything we had a right to expect. Looking back upon it, we see how baffled we were, and how entirely unselfconscious the saint was; so simple, direct and disconcerting, with a certain sturdy spiritual realism, a happy childlike interest in small things, free from all taint of that professional piety which is sometimes mistaken for holiness. Sometimes, it is true, the saint may seem to us a solitary and almost terrible figure; matured by sufferings and renunciations of which we hardly dare to think, and
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standing, like St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, on the very summits of human nature, where the common life with its ceaseless stream of small events ceases to have meaning, and the unchanging God is all in all. But this is only one side of the truth about him; and for Christians, perhaps, the least important side. That definition which describes the saint as doing all that others do, but for a different reason, brings him into focus; and corrects the other-worldly emphasis. It reminds us that Christian holiness is always very human. It finds God in all things, as well as all things in God; transforms, but does not abolish, personality. There is no such thing as a 'saintly type'. The psychological material which is transmuted by the Spirit is common to the race; and retains to the end its deeply human characteristics.
The passionate desires, conflicts, weaknesses and rebellions, which are so frankly disclosed to us in the early lives of Jerome and Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth of Hungary, Angela of Foligno, Ignatius Loyola, Catherine of Genoa and Teresa, are those with which our daily experience makes us only too familiar. So too their gifts of mind and temperament are those of the natural man. The massive personality of St. Bernard, together with his personal charm, the forcible character and brilliant mind of St. Hildegarde, would have given these people dominance in any walk of life. The humour and intelligence which led St. Teresa to ask for deliverance from 'silly devotions' and Mother Janet Stuart to tell the ardent novice to pray for common sense, were a part of their natural endowment: and even the peculiar
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insight exhibited by St. Philip Neri, the Cure d'Ars, Huvelin and many others, was at least as much a psychic as a spiritual gift. It is not the possession of abnormal faculties, but the completeness of their abandonment to the over-ruling Spirit and consequent transformation of personality, which separates these men and women from ourselves.
It is true that the steady pressure of this Spirit compels the growing saint to die—sometimes with a drastic suddenness, as St. Paul; sometimes bit by bit, as St. Teresa,—to the restless, unreal, and self-occupied life of average men and women. But this is only in order to become a more wide-open channel of the Absolute Life; a serviceable weapon of the Divine creative will. Living with an intensity which entails for him the extremes of suffering and of joy, the saint is always, at his full development, both active and contemplative—as indeed every living member of the Mystical Body is bound in some manner to be—giving in elevated service that which he receives in childdlike prayer. This must be so, since for the Christian saint, union with God means union with One who is both Here and There, both humble and Almighty, self-given and transcendent. Therefore it cannot mean mere flight from this world and its needs, or any other private satisfaction however spiritual and exalted. The very genius of Christianity is generosity, Agape; and the saint stands out as the self-emptied channel of that supernatural Love. The rich, active and life-giving character of Christian holiness depends directly on the Christian doctrine of the Nature of God. By that constant re-immersion in the
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atmosphere of Eternity which is the essence of his prayer, the Christian saint becomes able in his turn to radiate Eternity: and the more profound his contemplation, the more he loves the world and tries to serve it as the tool of the Divine creative love. Though his more obvious labours may be as homely as those of Santa Zita or Brother Lawrence, as apparently academic as those of St. Thomas Aquinas, he is a fountain of ghostly strength springing up to eternal life within the world. For he has become—and this is perhaps the most satisfactory of all our imperfect definitions—a 'pure capacity for God'.
When we turn from these thoughts and observe the saints as they appear in history, their courage, their untiring labours, their heroism and homeliness, their amazing conquests over circumstance, their bracing common sense and eager generous love; then we get a wonderful and even a disconcerting vision of those 'diversities of operations' in which St. Paul discerned the working of the same Spirit of Life. We find at the birth of every great spiritual movement, an awestruck and surrendered personality, seized and used by a Power other than itself; subdued to a purpose which he or she does not understand, and imperatively called to a career or an action, which often seems to bear little relation to its vast religious or historic results. Nor is the saint's vocation a satisfaction of his 'natural' tastes. St. Paul, in defiance of his deepest prejudice, must obey the goad, capitulate to the unseen Victor, and set out 'in perils oft' to the conversion of the Graeco-Roman world. The Church which timidly welcomed that disconcerting convert,
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received in his person an influence which was to transform her own character and ultimately the history of mankind; and the bewildered soul chosen for this mighty office must take up a vocation he never fully apprehended, and go forth 'as poor to make many rich, and as a liar yet telling the truth'. St. Jerome and St. Augustine, clever, passionate and fastidious, not obviously informed by charity, are drawn inch by inch, as by some skilful angler, to the place in the scheme which they alone can fill. We see them both thirsting for God, and therefore accessible to God; long before they are aware of all that the drinking of this chalice must entail. St. Jerome sought in the desert the exclusive joys of a contemplative life, only to retreat with exasperated nerves from that over-peopled solitude, and the maddening intimacy of the professionally pious. Thus he found in the end, by devious paths, the life-work for which he was most fitted, and most needed; and gave the Latin Bible to the Western Church. No one who reads the Confessions can suppose that St. Augustine, with the soul of a mystic and the tastes of a don, enjoyed being an over-driven Bishop, worried by the Donatists, and by the ceaseless demands of administrative work. Yet here too the over-ruling Spirit achieves Its purpose; with small regard to Augustine's natural desires and apparent gifts. Brain and heart are subdued to the occasions of God, and the son of Monica and student of the Platonists becomes a Father of the Church.
Again, St. Benedict only wished to escape the uncongenial worldliness of Roman society, and find a retreat where he could make good men '; and there sprang
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from this desire the vast Order which was one of the chief instruments of European civilization. St. Gregory was dragged from contemplation, St. Cuthbert from his solitary prayer on the Farnes, and obliged to become rulers of the Church, and shepherds of souls.
When we come down to the early Middle Ages and look at those two remarkable figures of the twelfth century—the young French aristocrat, who sacrificed his rank, his wealth, his comfort and became St. Bernard, and the German child of genius who grew up in the cloister and became St. Hildegarde of Bingen —we again find ourselves in the presence of the ruthless transforming Power. Both of them were people of immense initiative, energy and intelligence; captured and dominated by the passion for Reality, for God. Bernard—a monastic reformer and a great ecclesiastical statesman, who left his mark on the Europe of his day and influenced Christian devotion for centuries after his death—was all this and did all this, as the sacramental expression of his interior communion with God: Who, he says, entered his soul in prayer 'living and full of energy', and sometimes transported that soul out of itself and gave it 'a clear vision of the Divine Majesty'. There is the real Bernard, telling us what the real Bernard loved. But though we may be sure from his spiritual writings that the life he desired for himself was one of silence and loving contemplation, he became as a matter of fact one of the busiest men of his day; and said that the whole object of mystical contemplation was to make men better shepherds of souls—in other words, to increase their spiritual efficiency. It might
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be worth while, alike for the placid pietist and for the hurried modern Christian, to think a little about this deliberate judgement of a great and active saint. So too St. Hildegarde, possessed by that vivid first-hand sense of God which she called the Living Light, might not keep it to herself; but was compelled against her own will to act under its commands, and tell the world what it revealed to her. Again, that vision of the Crucified which changed the whole life of St. Francis filled him, it is true, with an unconquerable certitude and love; but it also said 'Repair my Church' and Francis, who was not specially drawn to labours of this kind, obeyed. What St. Thomas Aquinas, whom we think of as a great intellectual, really felt about his own academic career can be guessed by those who compare the Summa with the Corpus Christi hymns and such fragments of his personal prayers as we possess. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said of him, that he was 'a philosopher in public and a mystic in private, like all sensible men'.
Sometimes the hidden power makes startling choices. It lays hands on Angela of Foligno, vain, soft and hypocritical; forces her to tread one by one the thirty-three steps of the Way of the Cross, gives to her astonished soul a series of mighty visions of the Being of God, and makes of her a transforming influence upon the lives of her countless disciples. It hides Julian of Norwich in the anchoress's cell; and gives her a revelation of which the searching beauty only becomes fully operative centuries after her unmarked death. It calls the marvellous girl, Catherine of Siena, from humble surroundings to change history, produce a
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masterpiece of Italian religious literature, and die before she is thirty-three: and beyond all this—her greatest title to our reverent admiration, and greatest proof of holiness—makes of her a saviour of sinners and 'Mother of thousands of souls'. A transforming energy from beyond the world seemed to pour out through her to those whose lives she touched, because of the intensity of her Godward life. She was a creative spiritual personality: one of the wicket gates through which God came to men, and men went out to God. This young fragile girl of the people, simply in virtue of her passion for God, transformed the lives of turbulent men of action and learned ecclesiastics, and forced the most arrogant sinners to penitence by the energy of her secret prayers; bearing their sins and carrying their sorrows, and at last dying exhausted yet full of joy. I think she is one of the greatest witnesses to the power of pure sanctity, the direct action of the Infinite through finite souls, which history contains.
Again, St. Teresa, of whom most people still think as a visionary, an ecstatic, and writer of mystical works, is revealed when we study her life as supremely a woman of action, who was first prepared and then driven by God to the reform of a great religious order, in the teeth of all difficulty and opposition: undertaking in middle-age, burdened by ill health, journeys and labours which might well have daunted the young and strong. Or, on the other hand, St. Vincent de Paul, that most practical saint—taken from the tending of sheep to lay the foundations of modern philanthropy and reform the clergy of France—is found when we investigate his life to be driven and supported
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by the same other-worldly love. All that he does and all that he bears, is the fruit of his secret union with God. Again, a young French widow is inexorably driven from shop to convent, and thence as a pioneer of education to heroic adventure in the New World: and thus Madame Marie Martin becomes the Venerable Marie of the Incarnation. The luxurious Parisian, De Rancé, is sent to the austerities of La Trappe, the fastidious aristocrat, Aloysius, to the revolting duties of the pest-house, Elizabeth Fry is brought from a quiet country house to Newgate gaol, Henry Martyn from a Cambridge common room to labour and die in the far East.
That selfsame Spirit 'dividing to every man as He wills', snatches at short notice a young Jesuit from his spiritual father, and sends Francis Xavier to his lifelong exile as Apostle of the Indies. It gives the humble cobbler, Jacob Boehme, a stupendous revelaation of Reality; and reaches out through his spirit in another time and country to transform the soul of William Law. It takes a dull and unattractive peasant lad, makes of him the hardly-educated priest of an obscure French village, and gives to him a passion for redemption which draws to the confessional of the Cure d' Ars every troubled soul in France. It calls the Abbe Huvelin, a brilliant Hellenist, a man of subtle intellect and delicate sensibility, to do that same transforming work by the power of sheer holiness, in the obscurity of a small Parisian church: and sends his great pupil Foucauld to find in the Sahara a martyr's death. It draws Mary Slessor from the Scottish mill and Albert Schweitzer from the Professor's chair;
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and sends them to the African jungle in the same 'royal service'. And in all these, and countless others, it is one secret spring of action that operates a diversity of gifts. Even George Herbert's poetry is far better understood by us when we think of that figure prostrate before the altar in the tiny church of Bemerton—symbol of a self-immolation to the purposes of Reality which every artist shares in some degree—while the parishioners waited for the door to be unlocked, and the new rector's induction to begin.
How, then, are we to regard this mysterious passion; and where are we to place it in our chart of the nature of man? for without it, that chart is incomplete. In its highest reaches it may be as rare as any other form of genius, and certainly costs more than most: but it never dies out of the world. Yet there is nothing in that world's life to account for the emergence of Holiness. It is inexplicable from the naturalistic standpoint: for it does not serve the biological purposes of the race, but wages relentless war upon those very instincts by which racial dominance is assured. The saints, differing from one another in glory, character and call, do not represent a special triumph of human evolution. They represent the capture and transformation of the creature by an other-worldly energy and love, which becomes ever more absolute in its demands upon life: subordinating to itself, though not necessarily exterminating, all other interests, activities and loves. What we see here is the growing correspondence of a created spirit with the Absolute Spirit, God: and because of this correspondence, this reception by the
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soul of the penetrating radiation of the Holy, its gradual and utter transfiguration. The present moment comes to everyone fully charged with God. To respond to Him without flinching as He comes in that moment—there to touch and accept His Eternity, undeflected by self-will or self-love—this is sanctity. It is, of course, the Foundation of St. Ignatius translated into the terms of actual life: the end of Man is to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord. Hence the great importance of the saints for any deep and rich view of human nature: an importance which belongs to metaphysics at least as much as to psychology, and points beyond both to the mysterious relation of the spirit of man to the Spirit of God.
