THE SUBSTANCE OF SAINTHOOD: AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROBERT MACSWAIN
Statues of saints from St. Peter's Basilica. Public domain.
As All Saints’ Day approaches this year, the perennial question returns: “What is a saint?” Most people have some idea of saints being holy people, but what do the saints mean for our theology and for our own faith? The Rev. Dr. Robert MacSwain, associate professor of theology at the School of Theology at the University of the South, has been exploring this question for several years. He recently was awarded a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to further pursue this research in his forthcoming book The Saint Is Our Evidence: The Hagiological Argument for the Existence of God. You can read more about his research project here: https://templetonreligiontrust.org/explore/the-saint-is-our-evidence/
I caught up with Dr. MacSwain to talk about saints, his research, and how understanding sainthood might help us to understand the Feast of All Saints’ Day.
So, what is a saint?
Answering this question turned out to be the most interesting and surprising task of the project. On one hand, there is a simple official answer: a saint is a deceased person who has been formally approved for veneration in a specific religious tradition—that is to say, “canonized.” But, on the other hand, after surveying the six fields of philosophy of religion, ethics, theology, church history, comparative religion, and cultural studies, I found over twenty distinct definitions of sainthood. In addition to the official one cited above, in some of these definitions saints are exemplary individuals living among us, in some they are people who manifest extraordinary goodness or altruism (such as Dorothy Day or Martin Luther King, Jr.), in others they are conduits of numinous holiness or religious experience, in yet others they are projections or representations of what we most value regardless of the historical reality or lack thereof. For example, musical artists like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, political leaders such as Che Guevara, Harvey Milk, and Barack Obama, and cultural icons such as Oprah Winfrey have all been described and represented in saintly terms. Although not in a conventionally religious sense, they are still persons who are regarded as in some way salvific or redemptive, or worth imitating, or as providing identity, meaning, and purpose to the lives of others. (1) But the definitions perhaps most relevant to this project are provided by Robert Merrihew Adams, who says that saints are “people in whom the holy or divine can be seen,” and Lawrence Cunningham, who defines a saint as “a person so grasped by a religious vision that it becomes central to his or her life in a way that radically changes the person and leads others to glimpse the value of that vision.” (2)
Austin Farrer once said that “the saint is our evidence.” Who is Austin Farrer to you? What do you find compelling about that statement?
Farrer (1904-68) has been described by Rowan Williams as “the greatest Anglican intellect of the past century” but he remains surprisingly neglected by contemporary readers. (3) This is perhaps because Farrer divided his academic energies among three fields—philosophy, theology, and biblical studies—while maintaining a pastoral and administrative role at a series of Oxford colleges. It’s thus difficult to get a handle on his thought or a clear picture of his total achievement, but his sermons are masterpieces of theological acuity and spiritual insight and probably the best place to begin reading him. (4) As an Episcopal priest who also tries to bridge the divide between philosophy and theology, I am inspired by Farrer’s interdisciplinary adventures and likewise by his conviction that sermons are where some really serious theological work can be done both effectively and winsomely. In saying that “the saint is our evidence,” in five short words Farrer brought together the two topics of sanctity and epistemology: I have spent the past six years exploring the fecundity of this interface and have only just scratched the surface!
How have contemporary/secular understandings of saints influenced the project? Can a non-Christian saint still provide evidence for God?
This is a really interesting question. Ever since J. O. Urmson’s 1958 essay, “Saints and Heroes,” the term “saint” has been used in moral philosophy in a non-religious sense to refer to someone who manifests supererogatory goodness—that is to say, someone who exceeds performing their moral duties and thus goes beyond what most people are either willing or able to do. (5) This is one of the definitions I explore in the book. But Urmson’s claim is controversial for various reasons. First, some people think that supererogation is simply impossible, and therefore there are no saints in this moral sense; for others, supererogation is possible but we should not feel compelled to “go above and beyond the call of duty” because there is more to life than ethics—“moral saints” are thus not necessarily models for us to emulate (as famously argued by Susan Wolf). (6) By contrast, an important contemporary movement called “effective altruism” has argued that, in fact, we should all do much more than the average person feels is their moral obligation when it comes to helping others. According to Peter Singer, we should thus strive to perform “as much good as we can do” even if that means embracing a far more self-sacrificial life than is the norm even among most religious people. (7)
Effective altruism is a mostly secular movement, inspired by Singer’s utilitarian or consequentialist philosophy, although there are religious adherents. (8) But I find the movement of considerable interest for several reasons. First, I do think that such morally-driven individuals can exemplify divine goodness even if that is not their personal intention. So, yes, in answer to your question, I do think that non-Christian and even non-religious “saints” can still provide evidence for God, whether they mean to or not, and even if they want to or not! But, second, we can fairly ask whether the ultimate motivations for such altruism are best explained by the secular rationales provided. And, third, Christians and members of other religious traditions can be challenged to be more generous and concerned with the welfare of others by the example of the effective altruists. (9)
In terms of your research, how does the old hymn “I sing a song of the saints of God” hold up? Would you agree that “the saints of God are just folk like me?”
Well, yes and no! The “saints of God” are human beings, of course, and even the greatest of them are thus far from perfect. Against overly-hagiographic accounts of sainthood that make them into bloodless paragons of perfection who have totally transcended the human condition, rather than those who still struggle daily in their quest for holiness, Jean Porter argues that we must make room in our understanding for what she calls the “flawed saint”. (10) So in that sense saints and the rest of us all have a single shared humanity. But saints are exemplary in ways that do set them apart. Robert Cohn argues that “saints are recognized by their religions as both subjects of imitation and objects of veneration. The tension between imitability and inimitability, between likeness to humans and otherness than humans, lies at the core of the saint’s identity.” (11) So while I think that we should indeed all aspire toward sainthood, we should also recognize that saints in the fullest sense are extraordinary and rare individuals. This is why they are so special, interesting, and precious.
How then, are we called as Christians to recognize the saints, either on All Saints’ Day or on the various feasts of the church? How does this understanding affect your observance of these feasts, as well as your preaching
The danger of saints is that they can be so fascinating that we begin to focus on them to the exclusion of Jesus Christ, or that appropriate veneration slides off into idolatrous worship. This is why the Reformation churches abolished the cult of the saints and their commemorations. Speaking as an Anglo-Catholic, it’s thus a real balancing act in the contemporary Christian tradition to, on the one hand, retrieve aspects of that ancient and medieval hagiological devotion without, on the other hand, falling back into precisely the same problems the Reformers reacted against.
However, my own doctoral supervisor David Brown argues that, properly understood, thinking about and even celebrating the saints should not supplant Christ but rather help us bridge the gap between his life and our own, and thus facilitate “Christ’s continuing impact in the present.” In Brown’s view, it is not so much that saints are moral or spiritual exemplars as such, or simple imitators of Christ in some fixed conventional way, but rather they are imaginatively-compelling figures in whom the pattern of Christ is worked out effectively and creatively in the context of a different culture or period such that the metaphysical, spatial, and temporal distance between Christ and believer is bridged. Saints are thus a crucial component of what Brown calls “the dialectics of discipleship.” (12)
If that’s correct, and I think it probably is, then it is indeed right and proper for us to commemorate the saints both collectively on All Saints’ Day and individually on their specific feast dates. And we should also have a lively sense of our continuing relationship within and among “the communion of saints.” But we should always remember in these commemorations that the saints themselves desire only to point us to Christ, to his redemptive grace overwhelming their sins and faults and gradually conforming them to the divine likeness. As interesting and precious as saints may be, at least in the Christian tradition they are never ends in themselves but always fragmented reflections of God’s holiness, truth, and love.
For this broader cultural understanding of sainthood, see Saints: Faith Without Borders, ed. Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh, ed. Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd (London: Routledge, 2015).
See Robert Merrihew Adams, “Saints,” originally published in Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 392–401, republished in his The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 164–73, and here quoting from 170; Lawrence S. Cunningham, The Meaning of Saints (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 65. Adams uses the phrase “the substance of sainthood” on 168 of his essay, from whence the title of this interview.
For Williams’s claim, see the final paragraph of http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2282/the-word-of-god-in-anglican-tradition-archbishop-addresses-focolare-bishops (accessed on 20 October 2021).
See also the recently-published volume, Austin Farrer for Today: A Prophetic Agenda, ed. Richard Harries and Stephen Platten (London: SCM Press, 2020).
J. O. Urmson, “Saints and Heroes,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. A. I. Melden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 198–216.
Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419–39, republished in her The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11–29.
Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).
See, for example, https://www.eaforchristians.org.
For more on all this, see my essay, “Are Effective Altruists Saints? Effective Altruism, Moral Sainthood, and Human Holiness,” in Religious Perspectives on Effective Altruism, ed. Dominic Roser, Stefan Riedener, and Markus Huppenbauer (Baden-Baden: Nomos, forthcoming).
Jean Porter, “Virtue and Sin: The Connection of the Virtues and the Case of the Flawed Saint,” The Journal of Religion 75 (1995): 521–39.
Robert Cohn, “Sainthood,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition, Editor-in-Chief: Lindsay Jones, Volume 12 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference / Thompson Gale, 2005), 8033–38, quoting from 8033.
See David Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), here quoting from 62 and 32 respectively; and see also his more popular treatment of these ideas, Through the Eyes of the Saints: A Pilgrimage Through History (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).
Robert MacSwain is Associate Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. An Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of East Carolina, he is the author of Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), and has edited or co-edited seven other books, including Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein (SCM Press, 2004), Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary (Ashgate, 2013 / Routledge, 2017). https://theology.sewanee.edu/faculty-staff/robert-macswain/
