Studies in Sanctity
[We propose to publish during the next few weeks a series of studies of saintly characters who have in different ages and different. manners exercised a-tranfortning influence on the life of their day. Next week Canon Hannay (George A. Birmingham) will write on The Hermits of the Thebaid.]
I.—The Meaning of Sanctity
BY EVELYN UNDERHILL
THE real nature of sanctity, all that its existence 1- means for oar -view of human personality, remains
strangely ignoi:e4 the modern world. The saint is acknowledged as " air 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 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, who accept without compromise that ineffable vocation, with all that is involved in it of total and joyful subjection to the demands of " that same God who worketh all in all." Only when his life is thus given to the purposes—however strange and costly—of a Perfection that lies beyond the world, does the human creature seem able to achieve such perfection as is possible within the world. Then, subdued to the pressures and demands of this mysterious energy, its loving and untiring friend and servant, he becomes in his turn and his small measure a creative personality ; an agent and witness of the Eternal Order within the world of time.
Sometimes 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 itanding, 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 ; 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. The saint, it is true, must die to the restless, unreal, and self-occupied life of average men and women ; but only in order to become a 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, he is called upon to be at once active and contemplative. By that constant re-immersion in the atmosphere of Eternity which is the essence of prayer, he becomes able in his turn to radiate Eternity. Though his more obvious labours may be as homely as those of Santa Zita or Brother Lawrence, he is a fountain of ghostly strength springing up to Eternal Life within the world. 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 taints as they appear in history, their courage, their untiring labours., their heroism and homeliness, their amazing conquests over circumstance, their 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 an unearthly Power ; and impera- tively called to a career or an action, which often seems to bear little relation to its vast 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 an unseen Victor,. and set out " in perils oft " to the conversion of the Gracco- Roman world. 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. St. Benedict only wanted to " make good men " ; and there sprang from this desire one of the chief instruments of European civilization. St. Cuthbert was dragged from his solitary prayer on the Fame, and obliged to be a ruler of the Church. St. Hildegarde must speak " as the Living Light demandeth," and collapsed under the strain of resistance, when she tried to disobey the inward Power. " Repair my Church," said the Voice to St. Francis, who was not specially drawn to labours of this kind. What St. Thomas Aquinas felt about his own academie career can he guessed by those who compare the Stmuna with the ('opus Christi hymns. The note of joy still sounds in the little story of the philosopher putting away his pens and parchment, and saying, " I have seen too much I I can write no more."
Sometimes the hidden Power makes yet more startling choices and demands. It sends one intrepid girl to Avignon to face and reprove the Pope, and another from a Scottish mill to the African jungle in the same royal service " ; takes Vincent de Paul from the tending of sheep that he may become the founder of modern philan- thropy ; gives a rough and clumsy peasant the passion for redeMption, and so makes the Curd d'Ars a magnet, drawing to his village confessional every troubled soul in France. 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 better understood by us, when we think of that figure prostrate before the altar in the tiny church of Bemerton—symbol of a self-immola- tion 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 ? 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 Holi- ness. It is inexplicable from the naturalistic standpoint. It does not serve the purposes of the race. 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 transforthation of the creature by an other-worldly energy and love. Hence their great importance for any deep and rich view of hu- man 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.
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