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 Remaclus 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.
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