Christian Martyrdom and Christian Violence by Matthew D. Lundberg;

Author:Matthew D. Lundberg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Theology of Sainthood (I)

Though the concepts are closely related, we frequently distinguish between holiness and sainthood. For most people, sainthood is what Lawrence Cunningham calls “heroic sanctity,” up a few notches as a superior form of holiness.125 Where does this distinction come from, and is it theologically tenable?

Early in Christian history, as we have already seen with some of the early martyrs, saints were seen as exemplars of faith and discipleship who could inspire other Christians as they lived their lives of faith. Rather quickly they became not only honored for their faithfulness but also revered as sources of divine power, with their relics becoming prized possessions imbued with the power of their holiness. Over the course of time, as Cunningham shows, the miracles performed by and through the saints became more of a focus than the saint’s exemplarity.126 Miracles were seen as pivotal (though not sufficient) proof of the saint’s genuine holiness.127 Both in holiness and in power, a Christian could be honored as a saint only if he or she fulfilled “supererogatory norms.”128 The effect of this, in Cunningham’s words, was that the “paradigmatic example” and “intrinsic value” of the saint’s life were “obscured or unwittingly denigrated by the rather thick patina of the miraculous.”129 “This emphasis on the miraculous,” he writes, “was so complete in the early Middle Ages that the saints, by and large, lost any exemplary value as persons of paradigmatic worth and became instead a locus of power” through the miracles and the supernatural power of their remains.130

In the Western Catholic world, the business of identifying the saints, which had begun informally via the acclaim of the Christian populace, became formalized and institutionalized, or, in Cunningham’s words (which he does not intend in an overly pejorative sense), increasingly “bureaucratized.”131 The formalizing of the process of “canonization” of the saints occurred partly as a reaction to the “imaginative fancies” of the people that generated farfetched saint stories with significant historical difficulties,132 and also partly as an inevitable byproduct of the growing institutionalization of the church itself. In the process, miracles and doctrinal orthodoxy became the key criteria for sainthood. At the same time, there arose a preference for clerical and therefore celibate saints, a preference that parallels the two-tier view of vocation that we examined in the previous section.133 The upshot of the canonization process in the liturgy and spirituality of the Catholic Church is that the saints came to play an important role in interceding for the faithful, that is, functioning as mediators of the power and presence of God for the church as it continues its pilgrimage. As such, they could be “venerated,” while of course “worship” belongs to God alone.134 But they were separated out, made almost unreachable, in comparison to the Christian hoi polloi. In the face of this trend, Cunningham argues, it important for the church “to recover a sense of the embodiment of the holy in the life of a concrete person.”135

The saints played such a pivotal role

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