Christianity

"Long ago the famous Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye wrote: 'Happy is the saint who finds a biographer worthy of him.' The remark is as true today as when it was first penned many years ago. On the whole the quality of recent candidates for canonization has not been high. Too often individuals have been made to fit into conventional patterns of piety which make it difficult to capture individual character. In addition to this problem is that of language, especially for the martyrs of the Far East. Latin and 'live' European languages are indispensable here, but cannot be a total substitute for the native languages of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. However, the effort had to be made to present these saints to English readers, to whom they are usually unfamiliar. For quite different reasons the numbers and significance of the martyrs of the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and 20th century Mexico are little known to most English readers. Hence it seemed useful to include them in this volume along with the other recently canonized saints mentioned above. It is salutary to remember that Christian martyrs are not confined to the early centuries, but still exist today. No doubt in the 21st century as well as in previous ones men and women will give their lives for Christ, while others will inspire by comparable generosity in other walks of life an provide exemplars for generations yet to come."

"Of one hundred people who take up the spiritual life, eighty turn out to be charlatans, fifteen insane, and only five, maybe, get a glimpse of the real truth. Therefore, beware."

"The soul can only receive impulses from another soul, and from nothing else. We may study books all our lives, we may become very intellectual; but in the end we shall find that we have not developed at all spiritually (...). This inadequacy of books to quicken spiritual growth is the reason why, although almost every one of us can speak most wonderfully on spiritual matters, when it comes to action and the living of a spiritual life, we find ourselves awfully deficient. To quicken the spirit, the impulse must come from another soul. The person from whose soul such an impulse comes is called the guru, the teacher; and the person to whose soul the impulse is conveyed is called the sishya, the student."

"Men, she thought, had always been able to seek holiness when they wanted to because some woman was back at home taking care of their obligations. That’s why most of the saints were men and why most of the women saints were virgins."

"The master by residing in the Tao, sets an example for all beings. Because he doesn't display himself, people can see his light. Because he has nothing to prove, people can trust his words. Because he doesn't know who he is, people recognize themselves in him. Because he has no goal in mind, everything he does succeeds."

"Saints do not die. It is their lot, To die while on this earth To all that God is not."

"By the way, I have been reading the last volume of the Bible (the Epistles & Apocalypse) in your modern edition. I long for notes; but even half understood the stuff is extraordinary. What could be more remote from polite religion than this palpitating, ... eschatological, revolutionary delusion? And what fisticuffs—controversial and perhaps physical—among these new-born saints!"

"Holy words, full of nectar, coming out of the mouths of the true Gurus vibrate throughout the world. (...) From every pore of their bodies blessings are pouring forth to all beings."

"Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching."

"Stay in the company of lovers. Those other kinds of people, they each want to show you something. A crow will lead you to an empty barn, A parrot to sugar."

"The voyeurism in the martyrologies was employed not to evoke outrage against torture but to inspire reverence for the bravery of the martyrs. As in the story of Jesus, torture was an excellent thing. The saints welcomed their torments, because suffering in this life would be rewarded with bliss in the next one. The Christian poet Prudentius wrote of one of the martyrs, “The mother was present, gazing on all the preparations for her dear one’s death and showed no signs of grief, rejoicing rather each time the pan hissing hot above the olive wood roasted and scorched her child." Saint Lawrence would become the patron saint of comedians because while he was lying on the gridiron he said to his tormenters, “This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite.” The torturers were straight men, bit players; when they were put in a bad light it was because they were torturing our heroes, not because they used torture in the first place."

"Here are just a few saints whose names, if not their causes of death, are widely known. Saint Peter, an apostle of Jesus and the first Pope, was crucified upside down. Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, met his end on an X-shaped cross, the source of the diagonal stripes on the Union Jack. Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a gridiron, a detail unknown to most Canadians who recognize his name from the river, the gulf, and one of Montreal’s two major boulevards. The other one commemorates Saint Catherine, who was broken on the wheel, a punishment in which the executioner tied the victim to a wagon wheel, smashed his or her limbs with a sledgehammer, braided the shattered but living body through the spokes, and hoisted it onto a pole for birds to peck while the victim slowly died of hemorrhage and shock. (Catherine’s wheel, studded with spikes, adorns the shield of the eponymous college at Oxford.) Saint Barbara, namesake of the beautiful California city, was hung upside down by her ankles while soldiers ripped her body with iron claws, amputated her breasts, burned the wounds with hot irons, and beat her head with spiked clubs. And then there’s Saint George, the patron saint of England, Palestine, the republic of Georgia, the Crusades, and the Boy Scouts. Because God kept resuscitating him, George got to be tortured to death many times. He was seated astride a sharp blade with weights on his legs, roasted on a fire, pierced through the feet, crushed by a spiked wheel, had sixty nails hammered into his head, had thefat rendered out of his back with candles, and then was sawn in half."

"More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from the crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren’t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity. According to this way of thinking, death by torture is not an unthinkable horror; it has a bright side. It is a route to salvation, a part of the divine plan. Like Jesus, the early Christian saints found a place next to God by being tortured to death in ingenious ways. For more than a millennium, Christian martyrologies described these torments with pornographic relish."

"Your own self is your ultimate teacher (sadguru). The outer teacher (Guru) is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher, that will walk with you to the goal, for he is the goal."

"People find it difficult to understand why one must travel to the master in order to hear the teaching from his lips (...). There is a great difference between hearing the truth from the master directly, and hearing it quoted by others (...) and reading it in a book."

"We belong to the Society of Friends, a community of love, a family of persons. In so far as we are not just another “denomination,” we know also that the salvation of our age is in our keeping; that is, that it lies in the divine-human society which is "rooted and grounded in love." This is the unity which alone can make one world out of "one world", and not one nightmare, one hell, one burned-out cinder. We know also and in a way we respond to the fact that we have a mission, we are "called to be saints"."

""How do you expect me to become a saint?""By wanting to," said Lax, simply. ... "All that is necessary to become a saint is to want to be one. Don't you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it."A long time ago, St. Thomas Aquinas had said the same thing—and it is something that is obvious to everybody who ever understood the gospels."

"I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories."

"The saints of Christianity have been drawn from all classes, yet the book of the would probably show that most of them were drawn from the and had led poor, dull, illiterate lives. The saints of Hellenism were drawn from another class. They are Pindar and Pericles and Thucydides and Socrates, and those men before whose minds had passed visions of art or the conception of science, or the dream of a race of beings living a beautiful, complete, and human life."

"The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint."

"It could be argued that normal life is after all nothing but a chain of clever compromises. The man who understands how to live well, the Lebenskünstler as the Germans call him, is nothing but a virtuoso in compromises. The hero and the saint, on the other hand, are "clumsy," quixotic, and maladroit. They have nothing of the Lebenskünstler and cannot help inflicting upon themselves wound after wound. The virtuoso of life, no less than the bonvivant, is a thoroughly feminine as well as effeminate product."

"Accurate reading on a wide range of subjects makes the scholar; careful selection of the better makes the saint."

"Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review."

"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints."

"The world is full of half-enlightened masters. Overly clever, too "sensitive" to live in the real world, they surround themselves with selfish pleasures and bestow their grandiose teachings upon the unwary. Prematurely publicizing themselves, intent upon reaching some spiritual climax, they constantly sacrifice the truth and deviate from the Tao. What they really offer the world is their own confusion."

"Let us never forget that if we wish to die like the Saints we must live like them. Let us force ourselves to imitate their virtues, in particular humility and charity."

"We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. Kropotkin was a genial man, almost saintly according to some, who promoted a vision of small communities setting their own standards by consensus for the benefit of all, thereby eliminating the need for most functions of a central government."

"The saints are simple people. It is the condition of divided allegiance, doubt and compromise and the twists and turns of self-deception, that is complicated, not holiness."

"They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints — 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world."

"You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. ... No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues."

"There are truly moral people who unconsciously live a life in entire harmony with the universal moral order and who live unknown to the world and unnoticed by others without any concern. It is only people of holy, divine natures who are capable of this."

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

"No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things."

"Although fine studies have explored how medieval devotional traditions such as pilgrimage, Purgatory, and the Eucharist continued to ripple through the consciousness of early modern writers and to influence their works, the same attention has not been paid to the literally thousands of saintly men and women who constituted the late medieval canon (the virgin Mary is the signal exception here, one to which I return below. Ironically, the one major study of the impact of hagiography on early modern Protestant literature, Julia Lupton's Afterlives of the Saints, is premised on the idea that the saints themselves had largely disappeared, leaving behind only an empty genre, the legend, which the early modern period would then refill with new, secular contents. Lupton makes a compelling case for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century preoccupation with hagiography, but her thesis implies that early modern men and women had more or less forgotten about the individual saints themselves."

"[A]s James Simpson points out, Henry VIII moved against saints' cults as an adjunct to is move to centralize political power because the saints represented a social model based on intermediaries in which people gave their first allegiance to a local lord instead of to the king. In other words, the saints were not just theologically problematic. Because of their association with human lords, they were also politically and socially problematic for the Tudors, who were committed to a consolidation of power in the person of the monarch. Since, in Simpson's words, a saint's power was so often "felt along the networks of noble and gentry families," Henry tried to limit the power of the saints as a means to limit the independent power of these families."

"Both saints and lords were patrons in the sense of serving as the pater, the father, to those beneath them Indeed, our modern linguistic distinction between a "patron" and a "patron saint" is largely a product of the eighteenth century; before that time, the single word "patron" normally designated both categories."

"When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist."

"As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies."

"The Hasid, the individual disciple, must seek to be continually in touch with the rebbe. He spends certain holy days in his court, within the radius of his direct influence (...). The radiance of the rebbe's influence is elicited especially by being within the range of his vision and the touch of his hands (...). The rebbe is in sense a redeemer - a redeemer of the holy sparks imprisoned in the world. He helps effect the reunion between God and His creation."

"The spiritual influence that a person of higher stature exerts on the environment, which comes about through the constant encounter, purifies the environment. It lends the graces of holiness and freedom on all who come in contact with him. And this nobility of a holy grace returns after a while with stronger force and acts on the person himself who exerted the influence and he becomes sociable, abounding in spirituality and holiness. This is a higher attribute than the holiness in a state of withdrawal."

"We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?"

"Just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation."

"Be a saint but do not wear the grab of a saint without being one."

"A saint, whether Buddhist or Christian, who knows his business as a saint is rightly meditative and in proportion to the rightness of his meditation is the depth of his peace. We have it on an authority which Mr. Chesterton is bound to respect that the kingdom of heaven is within us. … Failing like many others to discriminate between romanticism and religion, Mr. Chesterton has managed to misrepresent both Buddhism and Christianity. The truth is, that though Christianity from the start was more emotional in its temper than Buddhism, and though an element of nostalgia entered into it from an early period, it is at one in its final emphasis with the older religion. In both faiths the emphasis is on the peace that passeth understanding."

"Some say this world of trouble Is the only one we need But I’m waiting for that morning When the new world is revealed. Oh when the saints go marching in, When the saints go marching in, Oh lord I want to be in that number, When the saints go marching in!"

"And Jehovah proceeded to answer Job out of the windstorm and say: "Who is this that is obscuring counsel By words without knowledge? Gird up your loins, please, like an able-bodied man, And let me question you, and you inform me. Where did you happen to be when I founded the earth? Tell [me], if you do know understanding.""

"You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live." Jehovah said further: "Here is a place near me. Station yourself on the rock. When my glory is passing by, I will place you in a crevice of the rock, and I will shield you with my hand until I have passed by. After that I will take my hand away, and you will see my back. But my face may not be seen."

"And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the : And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them."

""Elohim", the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God", but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses". Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still."

"Jehovah, it seems clear, was once regarded as a devoted son of the Great Goddess, who obeyed her in all things and by her favor swallowed up a number of variously named rival gods and godlings—the Terebinth-god, the Thunder-god, the Pomegranate-god, the Bull-god, the Goat-god, the Antelope-god, the Calf-god, the Porpoise-god, the Ram-god, the Ass-god, the Barley-god, the god of Healing, the Moon-god, the god of the Dog-star, the Sun-god. Later (if it is permitted to write in this style) he did exactly what his Roman counterpart, Capitoline Jove, has done: he formed a supernal Trinity in conjunction with two of the Goddess's three persons, namely, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, the counterparts of Juno and Minerva; the remaining person, a sort of Hecate named Sheol, retiring to rule the infernal regions."