Abstract
Women and men of special holiness have been celebrated by Christians from the days of Christ. This desire to recognise sainthood shows no sign of abating, even in a deeply sceptical age. Indeed, John Paul II, during the 27 years of his pontificate, canonised 483 new saints.
Simon Yarrow does not offer a compendium of saintly lives in this book, still less a hagiography. This is a history of sainthood, of what and who makes a saint. Thankfully, he also offers us plenty of human interest; stories of saints, ancient and modern, famous and obscure. ‘A saint is a person who by various means has demonstrated such worth during their lifetime as to posthumously merit the company of God.’ We learn here how different ages and different cultures would define this worth in different ways.
In early Christian centuries martyrdom was considered an almost incontrovertible proof of sanctity. As the faith became more settled, holiness was discovered in those drawn to the ascetic disciplines of the monastery and those who ‘confessed’ the faith through their teaching and example. Even nowadays more men than women are singled out for sainthood, more clergy and religious than laity. A chapter on ‘Gendering the Saints’ explores why this is so (and offers us an intriguing comparison of three saintly Teresa’s: Avila, Lisieux and Calcutta.)
Yarrow sustains a careful balance between critical insight into the changing priorities and expectations of the church, not least following the Reformation, and warm appreciation of the saints themselves. For the church, sainthood was and is beset by issues of power and control, of inclusion and exclusion. And long before the Reformation, theologians like Augustine were uncomfortable with any understanding of the prayers of the saints that threatened the uniqueness of the Incarnation and the Sacrament as means of grace.
Perhaps ‘we might think of the saints as both a map and a compass,’ suggests Yarrow. On the one hand, the historically contingent ‘true north’ which requires sainthood to meet the needs of the faithful; on the other hand, the ‘magnetic north’ of the divine attraction seen in the transfigured lives of holy people.
We live in an age that wants heroes and yet delights in proving that these heroes are, after all, merely human. This book reminds us that mere humanity can be a wonderful and holy thing, and that God’s touch on an individual may be an example to others, and a blessing.