Afterlives of the Saints. Colin Dickey

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      The renegade replicants in Blade Runner become violent because they are rapidly reaching the end of their four-year life spans, and they're desperate to extend their lives in any way possible. The saints, however, desire the opposite. They don't want more life; they want more death. In a 2005 interview, the novelist Mary Gordon described her memories of the path to sainthood in the 1950s:

      I remember, before we were being prepared for our first communion, we would be six or seven, we were told that we should pray for a martyr's death. So you would have these seven year olds saying, "Oh my God I better pray that . . . a Communist will say, 'Either say there is no God or we'll shoot you.' " . . . [So] when I was about nine or ten, I would put thorns in my shoes, to try to walk around, to experience the preliminaries of martyrdom, so I'd be toughened up for the real thing.

      In a religion centered around a God who willingly allowed Himself to be crucified, the idea of a martyr's death has always been important. The chance to die, to be rid of one's body, all the while affirming one's faith, was nothing short of a gift. Christianity isn't unique in this, of course; Gordon's childhood memories echo those of the Japanese writer Kenzaburo O¯e, who was born in the years before World War II and underwent similar indoctrination. Called to the front of the classroom, like all Japanese schoolchildren, O¯e was asked, "What would you do if the emperor commanded you to die?" The young boy replied, knees shaking, "I would die, sir; I would cut open my belly and die."

      Neither Gordon nor O¯e, both just children, really wanted to die. Gordon recalled how, even with thorns in her shoes, "I didn't want my feet to hurt, so I would put the thorns in my shoes, then I'd try not to step on them. So it was a sort of equivocal appetite for martyrdom, and nonetheless always feeling that I wasn't quite up to scratch, because I wanted to live, I didn't want to die." But that is what it means to love a divinity: to crave death, to want to die daily, to reject this world in favor of the promise of another. It's why most of us aren't cut out to be saints, why many of us find something fairly unhealthy about the very idea. To be a saint is to see one's body as nothing more than a chance to demonstrate that love of death.

      After the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, there was no longer an easy and straight path to martyrdom. Without persecution, torture, and execution, many saints turned to self-inflicted punishment: self-flagellation, deprivation, asceticism. "I have no greater enemy than my body," Francis of Assisi wrote. "We should feel hatred for our body, for its vices and sinning." But few still consider this mode of worship through extreme physical self-torment holy, and this kind of extreme vocation represented by the saints is hardly to be celebrated. Even while Pope John Paul II was (according to some sources) privately whipping himself, he publicly preached the sacredness of the human body and the need to respect it.

      The saint's hatred of the mortal body, after all, entails a recklessness bordering on the suicidal. One of Italy's patron saints, the fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena, regularly shoved branches down her throat to make herself vomit the meager food she ate (a process she called "retribution") and was ultimately killed by this holy anorexia, dying of malnutrition and thirst at the age of thirty-three.

      The saints, one realizes, are to be revered but not imitated. They're there to show us how to be human by being what we could never be.

      Simeon the Stylite chose his own mode of self-punishment in part because of its symbolic value: Standing on a column, he was elevated, above the world literally and figuratively, yearning for heaven and for God. It was because of this that other hermits followed his example, and why living atop a pole became a particularly popular form of asceticism for hundreds of years. It was a very visible metaphor, clearly announcing one's devotion to heaven.

      At the same time, Simeon's gesture announced his rejection of the ground below, and for this reason many commentators since have been particularly derisive toward the stylites. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the nineteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon had nothing but scorn for Simeon and his asceticism: "This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility both of the mind and the body," he noted, going on to claim, "nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves are susceptible of any lively affection for the rest of mankind." For Gibbon, the crime of an ascetic like Simeon is the implied narcissism in such a renunciation of the world, an internal struggle at the expense of a life of charity.

      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.