#625: The Strangeness of Sanctity

Being weird not Godliness, but it's close.

“Eternally they praise the minor,

Because they have never known the good.”

— Christian Gellert

I could not keep this lovely little line out of my mind, much less off my lips, as I finished teaching my “Great Texts” course earlier this week. Over the course of the semester, my students trudged through Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Dante’s entire Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, and a number of other medieval texts. Few of my students are humanities majors and a number of them expressed bewilderment at some point in the term about why they should carry on reading such texts when their science or business classes were upon them. One answer—so that one can catch a glimpse of the ‘good,’ even if not the great, and become the kind of person who recognizes the minor for what it is.

There is a moral equivalent to the problem of recognizing the good, which I have never answered very satisfactorily either. The problem with defending marriage in the year of our Lord 2024, for instance, is not that people will think you are a bigot: it’s that so few of us have actually encountered a genuinely chaste person that we cannot imagine what it must feel like. My cynicism about the world runs far deeper than I have realized: I have long thought that the saints have long left us and that we are a people without any meaningful contact with the good. In any other generation, C.S. Lewis would be a minor figure: for us, he is an unfathomable soul, a Thinker Greater Than Which We Cannot Conceive. This is not to demean Lewis, who I think knew real saints and understood his real worth—which is part of his genius.

My basic intuition is: saints are strange. A few months ago now, I was asked by an undergraduate how they might grow in confidence that they were not suffering from cultural ‘blind spots’ in their pursuit of justice. The only answer I could come up with is the one I have offered here: be strange like Socrates.

We cannot escape being creatures of our time—except for those few who, somehow, manage to avoid being ‘conformed to the pattern of this world’ and so live on a different plane. Strangeness is not intrinsically saintly: but I think that one cannot have saintliness without it. I don’t even need any “Quit Netflix” jokes here: for all the reasons I gave for doing so, the mot basic, fundamental reason is because we have to opt out of the normal at some point if we are going to learn to see its distortions appropriately. So why not start with the low-cost practice of screening hours of television and movies in our home? Being weird is no more godliness than cleanliness is—but they both might be next to it.

Arthur Schopenhauer was the opposite of a saint. But he understood their character better than our own age. The “more someone belongs to posterity,” he wrote, “i.e. to humanity in general and as a whole, the more alien he is to his own age, since what he produces is not particularly dedicated to it…” One can hear tinges of an incipient self-justification for his own shrieks against humanity, as though he was anticipating the misanthropy that has finally taken hold of our present age. But his principle is in this case sound, even if misdirected and incomplete: being alien in our own time is not on its own evidence that we are proclaiming the whole truth, but we can be sure we are not so long as we sound like everyone else around us.

The “great saint was sane,” Chesterton wrote about the very strange little man Saint Francis of Assisi, even if he was sane with “an almost elvish eccentricity.” He did not embrace his eccentricity for its own sake: “he took the queerest and most zigzag short cuts through the wood, but he was always going home.” The oddities of his life were perfectly rational; it was the world he lived in that had gone mad. Chesterton himself wore a cape, a fact which I can almost forgive him on behalf of my debt to Orthodoxy.

Around the Web

World Magazine did a podcast on evangelicals and IVF, in which I had a few things to say. Feedback is welcome, as always.

This is an extraordinary story about a doctor in Helena, Montana who seems to have fabricated cancer diagnoses to line his own pockets.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has a new report out saying evangelical churches are not especially politically active—which basically tracks my experience. Hardest hit: Christian nationalists and their many critics.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of my favorite living essayists….and this is probably my favorite essay from her desk: Seamus Heaney (yes, that Seamus Heaney) wrote a poem for her baptism.

If you have not seen this Alasdair MacIntyre talk on dignity, it is worth watching. I may write about it in the newsletter in the next few weeks.

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The Penultimate Word

“Whereas God is a just and a true God, it is important to enquire how and in what sense He shows that He had afflicted Job without cause….For it was necessary that the holy man, who was known to God alone and to his own conscience, should make known to all as a pattern for their imitation with what preeminent virtue he was enriched. For he could not visibly give to others examples of virtue, if he remained himself without temptation. Accordingly it was brought to pass, both that the very force of the infliction should exhibit his stores of virtue for the imitation of all men, and that the strokes inflicted upon him should bring to light what in time of tranquillity lay hidden. Now by means of the same blows the virtue of patience gained increase, and the gloriousness of his reward was augmented by the pains of the scourge.” — Gregory the Great