Vigils Reading

THE CHRISTIAN SAINT

From “The Faith and Modern Man” by Fr Romano Guardini5

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We associate the word saints with the idea of exceptional persons. In the

New Testament, however, it signifies Christians generally. Being a Christian at

all was extraordinary. For the Christians stood out sharply from the

environment; either one lived in the Old Testament world, or in the Hellenistic-

pagan world, and by both they were regarded as something strange if not

hostile. The experience of conversion lifted them out of the environment. A

sense of the reality of God not learned from natural religious experience or from

the teaching of the Old Testament had shaken and, at the same time, blessed

them. In the existence of Christ, God’s countenance had been unveiled. The life

of Christ had made them aware of how God is toward us. These experiences had

changed their whole lives. They had acquired new ideas of God, new standards

of judging the world.

The “renewal of mind” of which the Gospel speaks and which they had

begun to fulfill, now consisted not only in a conversion to a good and pious life,

but in a change of direction in their whole way of thinking. Thus for them “all

things had become new” — and with all these “new things” they found

themselves still in an old world, a world which regarded them with distrust and

hostility. All this is, in itself, extraordinary — indeed the very essence of the

extraordinary, and the “saint” was one who led this existence.

But the spread of Christianity and its increase in members tended to

obscure its unique nature. Time went on, the Gospel grew familiar, and the

sense of newness wore off. Christianity became the state religion and, as such,

the official order of society. Thus the fact that being a Christian at all was in

itself extraordinary faded out of people’s consciousness, and Christianity grew

to be regarded as normal and usual.

By contrast, a new form of the unusual arose. Now it belonged to the idea

of a special calling, a divine favor and testing, with a wearisome, dangerous way

of life granted only to the few. Such tendencies had appeared in Christian

antiquity as in the reverence for those who had given their lives for the Master

—the martyrs — or for those who had retired into solitude to live a life of

extraordinary austerity — the hermits and ascetics. But this concept of

saintliness developed particularly in the Middle Ages, great human and

religious forces expressing themselves in extraordinary intensification of

Christian daring and achievement. Then arose also the ideas of missionaries of

the Faith… masters of sacred science, mystical writers. In modern times

something else came in — the Renaissance feeling for the exceptional in human

life which affected the concept of the saint. With the ideas of Christian election

and testing now blended that of the great man, the pioneer, the man of genius

and the hero.

But the original concept of the saint was of a purely religious, of a purely

spiritual character. The concept of perfection, to be sure, includes religious

perfection — all that is signified by redemption, grace, providence, God’s inward

working. Nevertheless…if anyone had asked Paul what constituted the holiness

of the saint, he would probably have replied that it came into the world at

Pentecost. The Holy Ghost is holy, and so also is the man whom the Spirit seizes.

The God Who reveals Himself in Christ is holy, and so also is the man whom the

Spirit brings into the kingdom of God. The saints, then, were those in whom the

mystery of God held sway, in whom His providence was working to bring about

God’s kingdom, that is to say, those who have believed and have been baptized.

5 The Faith and Modern Man, New York 1952, 128-133.11