I wrote another article on the saints titled “Saints: The Imitators of Christ.”  It serves as a good prologue to this article.  You may want to read it first, but you can also read today’s article as a standalone.

Perception

How we perceive a thing affects how we interact with that thing and how we interpret the relationship between us and that thing.

This is true about the way we perceive the saints.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines perception as “A thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances.”

The dictionary on Google defines perception as “a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression.”

Both definitions are right, and we could combine them to mean “How we regard, understand, and interpret is based onthe thoughts, beliefs, or opinions we hold.”

Now how we perceive the saints makes the difference between a stagnant spiritual life and a vibrant one.

There is this widespread perception about the saints that they are those who show us how to live a simple life following God.

Well, what is simplicity then?

Those who advocate for simplicity will define it as something like this “The practice of virtue without thinking about how to do it.  Thinking just complicates things, but what is important is what we do and how we live.  Such virtue also comes through intense struggle.”

This is a misperception.  Now let’s take a look at how this affects how we understand the saints.

Our Perceptions Affect How We Remember the Saints

The intellectual saints such as St. Athanasius, St. Basil, and St. Gregory the Theologian, who together have left us hundreds of writings ranging from treatises, to orations, to sermons, letters, and poetry, when they are mentioned in the synaxaria of the Church, which are read in liturgical services to commemorate the saints and to share their lives with the congregation, almost nothing of substance is mentioned of their writings.  Rather, they are treated as simpletons that we should imitate for their virtue alone, and the impression given of their writings is nothing more than a cherry sprinkled on the top of their stories.

Here are two examples of synaxaria entries for St. Athanasius.

The first is from the Coptic synaxarion for his feast day on May 15.  Toward the end of the entry, only one paragraph mentions his writings, and it reads:

“He wrote several books about the Arians, on the Incarnation, and other subjects. Abba Cosma (The 44th. Patriarch) praised these publications by saying: ‘I ask anyone who would find the books of Athanasius to write them on paper, and for those who could not find paper, to write them on their clothes’” (“Feast of the Departure of St. Athanasius,” 7 Pashons; May 15, Coptic Synaxarion).

The powerful comment by the Patriarch Cosma makes sense if you have read his writings, or at the very least know something about them.  If you don’t know anything about St. Athanasius, it does not become clear why we should do as the Patriarch Cosma said, and how St. Athanasius’s books are different from any other writer in the Church.  And if all we know about Christian literature are modern books, and we operate on the bias that the present is better than the past, then we think that there is little value to reading the writings of St. Athanasius and that his only virtue was in resisting accusations and the heretics, or persevering under persecution, or enduring his exiles patiently.  While these are definitely virtues that he had that we can emulate, such a portrayal presents an incomplete picture of the saint.

Now when we go to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s Synaxarion, this is all that is said about his writings:

“The great Athanasius passed the remaining seven years of his life in peace. Of his fifty-seven years as Patriarch, he had spent some seventeen in exiles. Shining from the height of his throne like a radiant evening star, and enlightening the Orthodox with the brilliance of his words for yet a little while, this much-suffering champion inclined toward the sunset of his life, and, in the year 373, took his rest from his lengthy sufferings, but not before another luminary of the truth, Basil the Great, had risen in the East, being consecrated Archbishop of Caesarea in 370. Besides all his other achievements, Saint Athanasius wrote the life of Saint Anthony the Great, with whom he spent time in his youth; ordained Saint Frumentius first Bishop of Ethiopia; and in his Paschal Encyclical for the year 367 set forth the books of the Old and New Testaments accepted by the Church as canonical. Saint Gregory the Theologian, in his Oration On the Great Athanasius, said he was ‘Angelic in appearance, more angelic in mind; … rebuking with the tenderness; of a father, praising with the dignity of a ruler … Everything was harmonious, as an air upon a single lyre, and in the same key; his life, his teaching, his struggles, his dangers, his return, and his conduct after his return … be treated so mildly and gently those who had injured him, that even they themselves, if I may say so, did not find his restoration distasteful’” (“Removal of the Relics of St. Athanasius,” May 2, GOARCH Synaxarion).

The Greek Synaxarion’s wording is so incredibly beautiful and poetic, which I think should be necessary for any Synaxarion entry, but as you can see in the only section about his writings, that there is no detail about what they were other than the Life of Anthony and his Paschal Encyclical.

But who was St. Athanasius and why is he a saint?  What is it that we should emulate most from him?  The unique trait of St. Athanasius (and the main reason that the Church universally recognized his sainthood) is how he clearly he articulated the belief of the early Church including using powerful analogies to build an understanding of the faith in his readers.  How widely he appealed to the Scriptures and explained them in his texts is also exemplary, especially for someone who did not have a computer to search for verses.  Such a mind and the attitude that underlies it is what is worthy of emulation.  The best way I can describe St. Athanasius is that he is the C.S. Lewis of the early Church.  And it is fitting that I should give such a description because C.S. Lewis was highly influenced by St. Athanasius’s thought and style as evidenced by his multiple references to him (such as in the “Introduction to On the Incarnation,” Miracles, and The Discarded Image).

St. Athanasius was not new to this endeavor, but rather had a tradition of such saints before him and many who came after him were inspired by him to do the same.  He was exemplary because of the level to which he took his exposition.  But when synaxaria ignore this aspect about such saints, they do not actually portray the saints for us, but rather portray the anti-intellectual bias of the compilers of the synaxaria.  By so doing, they have ended up distorting the picture we have of such saints.

And it is for such reasons that so many churches think that preaching simplicity is in line with Christian history because they have received it solely through these synaxaria.

Taming the Saints

This is not where the issue ends, but rather is the beginning.  As mentioned above, a perception is “held thoughts, beliefs, or opinions.”  In the West, we are of the opinion that we should be well off, preferably upper middle class or upper class.  We should be high-earning, prestigious, and respected in the community.  In order to get to a such a place it requires academic discipline and shrewdness in career.

It is the good boys and good girls who are obedient, who complete all their homework, and who never give trouble to their parents or teachers who get to such places.  We often describe such characteristics as “Christian.”  Such characteristics are to be expected from children raised in Christian homes.

Too many times we tame the saints to have such an appearance in order to project our modern aspirations and values onto their stories.

Now back to St. Athanasius, from the sources of his time period, we know that he was not born into a Christian family but converted some time in his late childhood or early teenage years.  The Coptic synaxarion addresses this fact in one short sentence; the Greek synaxarion does not acknowledge it at all, but rather makes it appear that he was formed from an early age in a classical education and the Scriptures (which is true if you consider it from a late elementary to an early middle school age).  Such a portrayal by the Greek synaxarion might make it appear to the listeners that St. Athanasius was raised as a good boy in a Christian family.  By doing so, we project our modern Western values onto the saints rather than letting their lives inspire and transform us on their own terms.

Too many saints were pagans by birth.  Some were adulterers or fornicators before conversion, some were brutal who became as meek as doves following their encounter with Christ, some converted to Christianity against their pagan families’ wishes and died as a result.  And some died as martyrs in spite of their pagan families wishes.

We cannot tame the saints by making them look like us, but rather we should come to look like them.

Transformed by the Saints

We should be transformed by the saints even when it makes us uncomfortable.

We should not deify modern Western middle-class aspirations and values and project them onto the saints and make them gods who exemplify these values.

But the saints were varied, and some were quite colorful.  The master-disciple duo of St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Jerome are two examples.

St. Gregory the Theologian was an incredibly sensitive man whose temperament was clearly revealed in his letters and orations and poetry.

He turned whatever he was going through (probably some type of loneliness, despondency, or depression) into something beautiful.  Whether he did so in his orations such as his Oration # 2: Apology for his Flight, or his poetry.  His poems were wildly popular in the Byzantine Empire until the Renaissance.  And they are only beginning to be translated into English.

His disciple St. Jerome also had some serious struggles and mood swings (most of which were a result of his own doing).  One time he wrote what can be compared to a diss track about a priest he did not like in Rome named Onasus where he dissed his appearance and stutter.

But was he a sincere Christian?  He was and perhaps more than most of us.  He had struggled to find a place for the Roman pagan writings with his Christianity (a conflict that was mostly in his own head, but came as a result of sincere reflection on the meaning of history and Christ’s incarnation).  In the midst of this struggle, he had a dream where he saw Christ enthroned and asked him to whom he belonged, and St. Jerome answered that he belonged to Christ, and the person in the vision told him that he was lying and that he had really belonged to Cicero the Roman stateman and orator.

Now Cicero, of all Latin writers, was acknowledged by multiple Church Fathers, most notably St. Augustine, with developing a sensibility in them that opened them up to receive the message of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He served as a way to till the ground of the heart to make it fertile for the seed of the Gospel to grow in it.  But in the case of St. Jerome, we see a saint who truly and authentically reflected on how he was to relate Cicero to the Gospel, and whether he should, and while it may seem weird to us, he provides an introspection that we can emulate when we are examining ourselves and whether we are being authentic or whether we are deceiving ourselves.  It was more a matter of examining where his heart was rather than evaluating pre-Christian pagan writings.

Both St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Jerome show us that even when we deal with some serious personal and emotional (and possibly psychiatric issues), that we can become saints and we can do so incorporating both our minds and hearts into our journey with Christ.

These saints also show us what repentance looks like (both intellectual repentance and moral repentance).

In the case of St. Gregory the Theologian, he shows us intellectual and moral repentance when he returns to the town where he was ordained as an assistant bishop after he fled, and he offers an oration to them about his flight, his Oration # 2, which has become a classic source for understanding how the early Christians viewed the importance of the priesthood.

St. Augustine (who was a contemporary of both St. Gregory and St. Jerome and corresponded with the latter) on the other hand, toward the end of his life wrote a book called the Retractations, where he reflected upon all his writings, the circumstances under which he wrote them, and also explains what he now realizes that he should not have said in some of them, what he should not have praised, and how he has grown since to realize what is right and shares those insights with his readers.  This is a form of repentance (both intellectual and moral), and it is public too.  He does not repent privately for his public mistakes, but makes them clear to his readers for their own spiritual growth.  What is interesting is that in his translations to English, the good translators (of which there are many) include his sections of the Retractations in addition to the book they are translating and either put them in footnotes or toward the end of the book so his readers today can see what St. Augustine later changed his mind about and why.  This is in line with his vision in writing the Retractations.  While it may seem intellectual, you may have already noticed that this is a strong example of the virtue of humility.

These saints also show us how the mind and the heart (how the intellectual life and the moral life) are so tied together.

They also provide a model for those Christians who are intellectual (who often don’t fit in with the anti-intellectual congregations, but who truly want to behold and live the spiritual life).

The Parable of the Talents

I was discussing this with a friend recently, and he said that when churches overly emphasize the simple saints, they ignore something from the teaching of Christ in His Parable of the Talents.

He reflected that our Lord Jesus Christ did not command us to be simple, but to invest the talents which we were given in order to make more with them for the Kingdom of God.  So those who were given two talents and invested them made two more for a total of four talents.  And those who were given five talents and invested them made five more for a total of ten talents.

What mattered was not how much they were given or how much they made compared to each other, but that they invested all they were given for the furthering of the Kingdom of God.

Those who overly emphasize the simple saints and exhort us to be so, and to only be so, and not to do any more because that is complicated, are asking us to bury the talents that we were given.  In the Parable, the one who buried the talent was condemned.

Recounting the Lives of the Saints

When we delve into the writings of the early Church, we see disjoints between the life of the Church then and the life of the Church today such as our over-emphasizing simple saints and simplifying the intellectual saints, who also happen to be commemorated as the greatest saints in our Church.  Something has interfered in the continuity.

The solution to this interference is to recount the lives of the saints on their own terms using the original texts they wrote and the ones that were written about them within living memory of them.  This gives us an accurate picture of them, one that can be emulated, and which is not a projection of our own modern values.

After we do this, then we can celebrate the diversity of the saints both the simple and the intellectual because both show us how we can welcome Christ to live in us and be formed in us.

And when we do so, when we really recount the lives of the saints on their own terms and not on ours, then we will see a great change in our own lives and in our congregations.  We will be transformed.  We will come to resemble them as they resemble our Lord Jesus Christ.  And we will continue the work of furthering the Kingdom of God.

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