“Make your aim the Crucified Christ, hide in the wounds of the Crucified Christ and drown in the blood of the Crucified Christ.”
—St Catherine of Siena
In one of several essays on the topic, Karl Rahner argues that the Saints (the capital-s matters, you’ll see) have a unique grace because they have a special responsibility. They’re tasked, he says, with creating new models of the Christian life, showing how it is possible for the rest of us—who are not (yet?) Saints—to shoulder our share of Christ’s unbearable burden.
[The Saints] are the initiators and creative models of the holiness which happens to be right for and is the task of their particular age. They create a new style; they prove that a certain form of life and activity is a really genuine possibility; they show experimentally that one can be a Christian even in this way; they make such a type of person believable as a Christian type.1
Rahner acknowledges that the church is necessarily a church of sinners, an ark on whose floor all kinds of impure animals are fed and sheltered. But he insists that it is essentially a church of capital-s Saints who “tower over all other ‘saints’”—that is, you and me and all the other ordinary Christians—because of their “‘heroic’ virtue.”2
It’s not quite right, of course, to talk about the saints as heroic. (Rahner, you’ll notice, admits as much by setting off the term in quotes.) Sam Wells has described the hero and the saint as utterly opposed. And Michael Plekon has written a series of books countering the cult of celebrity saints with a call to worldly, everyday spirituality.3 What makes the saints extraordinary, at least in his estimation, is precisely that they’re unafraid of the ordinary. They let their roots down in the “quotidian mysteries” of each moment, no less at home “out there” than “in here,” assured, often in not always in spite of themselves, that what matters most is fully present even when “nothing is happening.” The saints, unlike our heroes, never tower over others; never take a posture of superiority or dominance. Instead, they lean down, draw near, open up. Holiness, to Plekon’s eye, looks like nothing so much as Simone Weil playing the piano with a mess of kids at her elbows or Madeleine Delbrêl listening intently to a small child’s stories. In other words, the saints know better than the rest of us how to unwind.
Olivier Clément’s theology of the saints differs as much from Plekon’s as it does from Rahner’s, at least at a glimpse. “Real history is the history of love,” he argues, because the only events that really matter are events of “saved and conscious love.” Precisely for that reason, the saints alone, whose fully-awakened love is “the bosom of the church,” are “the true masters of the world.”4
The saints’ “mastery” is wholly unlike and entirely at odds with the mastery of Great Men, however. The destiny of the world hangs on the secret prayers of unknown saints. And anyone—yes, anyone—might at any moment do what we’ve imagined only God can do:
The true historical actors are to be found among those whom superficial history ignores or distrusts—among the outcasts, émigrés, prisoners, and the sick, those “failures,” those “little people” whose very existence is an offense to the idolatry of wealth. If these turn toward God, they do so with their hearts opened by their experience of “historical defeat” and by the teaching of the divine school of suffering. Likewise, the women and children, whose humble secrets of “private life,” filled with the sense of mystery, are more valuable than any collective raptures. These innumerable “suffering servants” make up, as it were, the reserve of love from which the martyrs arise, because God makes his strength shine through our weakness.
Rahner, it seems, believes the saints are there to be seen. Plekon, by contrast, believes that the saints are purposefully hidden, kept from sight as a sign of faith. Rather than being larger-than-life, the saints are at peace with themselves, at ease with their smallness. Whether they’re spectacular or not, what matters is that they are made a spectacle (2 Cor. 4.9), despised by the rich and powerful, recognizable only to the poor and the pure in heart. Clément holds that both are true, at least in some sense, but declares that how they see matters even more than how they are seen.5
The truth is, Rahner’s account is far deeper and more involved than first appears. He does insist that the capital-s Saints stand apart from the rest of us, but he does not think of them as heroic in any plain sense. He is quick to acknowledge that the holiness of even the most celebrated Saints was rarely obvious to their contemporaries. And he holds that the Saints need to be seen only because “the rest of us” simply cannot recognize ourselves or our neighbors—especially those neighbors we’ve learned to regard as threatening and unworthy—without contemplating their image as the very likeness of God. The Saints, for Rahner, are not our betters; they are not the best of us. The Saints simply are us, bested by God.
He knows, of course, that many saints are “unknown,” not only never canonized by the Church but also never recognized by the vast majority of their nearest neighbors and dearest companions. And he is sure that this is as it should be. “The greatest part of holiness must take place in silence, in being taken for granted and in forgetting about self, so that even the right hand of the Church does not know what the left hand is doing.”6 By his accounting, the Saints are all the proof we need that God has acted sovereignly in our midst.
[The Church] must praise the grace which has had powerful effects, which has conquered, which has become real and manifest to us. Hence she must say: God really has redeemed, he really has poured out his Spirit, he really has done mighty things for sinners, he has let his light shine in the darkness.
It would be easy to think—I confess I’ve said as much many times—that the canonized saints show us that saintliness is possible, providing the standard of faithfulness to which all believers can and should aspire. But Rahner rightly dismisses that as misguided and misleading. If Clément is right to say that the saints are the true masters, then that can only be because they have themselves been mastered by God.
The Church is bound to bear witness to God’s grace. But this cannot be done, Rahner warns, merely by pointing to ideals, aspirations, teachings, artifacts, relics, buildings, rituals, stories, etc. There must be persons whose lives have been determined by that grace and whose graces have been determined to be nothing but gift.
Still, it is God’s grace that must be praised, not the Saints’. The Church sings the song of the redeemed, delighting in the fact that the God who has loved her has in that love made her to be who and what she is. “The Church must in all ages proclaim—even though in a sense ashamedly, yet quite clearly—that she is the holy Church.”7 But she can affirm this about herself only because God’s actions are for her as undeniable as they are incomprehensible. Love for the Saints must arise not from the “purely human desire for hero worship” but from glad astonishment at God’s desire for us at our worst.
God always has “the last word.” This, in Rahner’s view, is why the Church forces us to look to the Saints. Their lives bear unmistakable witness to the fact that God won’t let himself be forgotten. They are themselves the marks—signs, yes, but also scars—left by God’s passing among us. The saints are, like Jesus, wounded by God. Not because God violates them in any way, but precisely because they feel in their bones the violence done to God in every wrong done to their neighbors. They are touched by the feelings of God’s infirmities, wounded by his wounds.
On this, Clément and Rahner wholeheartedly agree. In one of his most breathtaking passage, Clément appeals to one of Jesus’ strangest sayings, arguing that the church fulfills its calling only by accepts its failure:
The Church exists in the world as an opening, an exorcism: it is a mortal wound for this idolatrous and deceitful world, but for the created world it is the offer of transfiguration: “Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered.”8
We are used to thinking of the church as Christ’s body. And we’re used to thinking of Christ’s body as once-dead and now-living. But the Scriptures speak of something far more mysterious and unsettling: the “coming of the Son of Man” happens not after his death as the next thing in a necessary sequence but in and as that death (Mt. 24.27-28). The church, therefore, is the lively body of Christ only insofar and inasmuch as its members are dead to anything and everything but the Spirit’s desire. As St Paul says, apart from Christ we are dead/deadened to God, sensitive only to the pressures of the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col. 2.20), the powers that make the world work as it does. In Christ, however, we are alive to God and so dead to those powers, uninterested in their promises and undeterred by their threats. The saints are those who’ve learned to live, at least at times, like they’re as dead as Christ on the cross.
The collect for All Saints’ Day directs us to praise God for having “knit together your elect in one communion.” It also directs us to petition God for the grace “to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.” If we take seriously what Rahner and Clément said about the saints, we cannot help but think of that knitting as a being wound together by the Spirit in a shared woundedness. And God’s wounds, thankfully, are not like ours. As Dickinson knew, our wounds, if not quickly noticed and tended to, soon swallow us up and drink us down. Christ’s wounds keep us alive.
That’s not meant poetically. It’s not lost on me, as I’m sure it’s not lost on you, that Rahner’s Catholicism is at odds with Clément’s Orthodoxy and that both are at odds with my Pentecostal Anglicanism. I have no business writing something like this on a day like today. (Who does, in fact?) I know this kind of talk is lost on our divisions. ButI’m not trying to heal those wounds; I’m simply admitting God’s. And that, God willing, is just enough.
Karl Rahner, “The Church of the Saints,” Theological Investigations 3 (New York: Seabury, 1974), 91-104 (97-98).
Rahner, “The Church of the Saints,” 98.
See Michael Plekon, Living Icons: People of Faith in the Eastern Church and Holiness in Our Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); Hidden Holiness (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Saints as They Really Are: Patterns of Holiness in Our Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); The World as Sacrament: Ecumenical Reflections on Worldly Spirituality (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017).
Olivier Clément, Transfiguring Time: Understanding Time in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2019), 140.
My first pass at a theology of saints is in the middle part of the second edition of Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, Scripture (2nd ed.; Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2020).
Rahner, “The Church of the Saints,” 103.
Rahner, “The Church of the Saints,” 96.
Clément, Transfiguring Time, 103.