Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  Afterlives of the Saints

  Stories from the Ends of Faith

  COLIN DICKEY

  U N B R I D L E D B O O K S

  Unbridled Books

  Copyright © 2012 by Colin Dickey

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any

  form without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickey, Colin.

  Afterlives of the saints / Colin Dickey.

  p. cm.

  Summary: "Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays

  that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges' "Library of

  Babel," the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation,

  the pleasures of castration, "and so forth"— each essay focusing on the story of a

  particular (and particularly strange) saint"—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-60953-072-3 (hardback)

  1. Christian saints—Biography—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  BR1710.D53 2012

  270.092'2—dc23

  [B]

  2011046236

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  B O O K D E S I G N B Y S H • C V

  First Printing

  FIG. 1: Scene from the Apocalypse, The Opening of the Fifth and

  Sixth Seals (1511), Albrecht Dürer. Bibliotheque Nationale,

  Paris, France/ Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library

  FIG. 2: Saint Jerome Writing (c.1604), Michelangelo Merisi da

  Caravaggio Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy/ The Bridgeman

  Art Library

  FIG. 3: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652), Giovanni

  Lorenzo Bernini Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy/

  Alinari/ The Bridgeman Art Library

  FIG. 4: Flayed Man Holding a Dagger and His Skin from Juan Val

  verde de Amusco's Antomia del Corp Humano (1560),

  artist unknown

  FIG. 5: Detail from The Last Judgment (1537–1541), The Sistine

  Chapel, Michelangelo Buonarroti Vatican Museums and

  Galleries, Vatican City, Italy/ The Bridgeman Art Library

  FIG. 6: "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank

  you note for the Jap skull he sent her," Life Magazine,

  May 22, 1944 Ralph Crane/ Time & Life Images /

  Getty Images

  FIG. 7: Mary Magdalene with a Night Light (1630–35),

  Georges de la Tour Louvre, Paris, France/ Giraudon/

  The Bridgeman Art Library

  FIG. 8: The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (1520), Sebastiano del

  Piombo Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy/ The Bridgeman

  Art Library

  FIG. 9: Saint Sebastian (1615), Guido Reni © Cheltenham Art

  Gallery & Museums, Gloucestershire, UK/ The Bridge

  man Art Library

  FIG. 10: Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the Isenheim

  Altarpiece (c.1512–16), Matthias Grünewald Musee

  d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France/ Giraudon/ The Bridge

  man Art Library

  FIG. 11: Reliquary statue of Saint Foy (c.980) Church of Saint

  Foy, Conques, France/ The Bridgeman Art Library

  FIG. 12: Statue of Saint Lucy, Saint Roch's Cemetery, New Orleans © Joanna Ebenstein

  For Nicole

  As I continue to follow the marc of history I recount

  for you at one and the same time, and in the muddled

  and confused order in which the e events occurred,

  the holy deeds of the Saints and the way in which

  whole races of people were butchered.—Gregory of Tours

  Sainthood itself is not interesting, only the lives of the saints.—E. M. Cioran

  Afterlives of the Saints

  Prologue: The Earth's Rejects

  On May 21, 2011, the entertainer Hezi Dean was hoisted to the top of a specially constructed ten-story pillar in the middle of Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. His goal was to stay there for the next thirty-five hours, in order to outlast the magician David Blaine, who had accomplished a similar feat in Central Park nine years earlier. Dean met his goal, beating Blaine's time and then jumping, as Blaine had done, onto a waiting pile of cardboard. Afterward, Dean told reporters, "It was very hard. I want to tell you only one important sentence: Nothing stands in front of the will."

  Though Dean outlasted Blaine, he could hardly be said to be the record holder when it came to standing on tall pillars for long periods of time. That record, it turns out, has been unbroken for over a thousand years, and neither Blaine nor Dean came even close to touching it, for in the early fifth century, a saint named Simeon walked out into the Syrian desert, found an abandoned pillar, and climbed to the top of it. He stayed there not for thirty-five days but for thirty-seven years.

  The first time I heard of Simeon, I was an undergraduate in a Western civilization class, and my professor made an offhand reference to strange Christian saints who would "go out in the desert and stand on poles and have people throw bread up to them." It was around this time that I first read the writings of Gregory of Tours, who ate the dust off the ground of Saint Martin's tomb. I first read of the horrific self-mutilations of Saint Radegund around then, too. And then I began collecting these stories— the bizarre miracles of Saint Foy, known as her "jokes"; the gallows humor of Lawrence, which earned him the title of patron saint of comedians; the torture of Bartholomew, flayed alive, which led to his becoming the patron of cheese-makers. Though I'd gone to a Catholic high school, these stories seemed very different, an alternative history of early religions and nations. It was through the saints, you could say, that I first began to understand that history is not a solid, purposeful arc from the darkness of the early ages to the enlightened modern era. It is, instead, full of strange detours, odd obsessions, embarrassments that were often meant to be forgotten.

  Looking at the history of the saints is a bit like looking at a cliff 's face: You can see an unbroken wall of rock, smooth and timeless, or you can read it as a geologist would, tracing the striations, the vestiges of geological epochs, an entire history of dynamic change that only slowly formed into the unmovable thing before you. So, too, with the saints; you can read them all as separate manifestations of the same unalterable divine moment, or you can read them as a long history of endlessly changing, constantly shifting expressions of faith. As I've collected stories of these strange saints over the years, what has repeatedly struck me is how far they seem to deviate from what most of us understand to be orthodoxy— these are saints who murder, saints who gouged out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. Put another way, the history of these saints helps enlarge our concept of faith. It was this realization that spurred the making of this book.

  Saint Simeon never spread the gospel in a foreign, dangerous land, and he didn't spend his life devoted to charity and improving the life of his fellow humans. He was not martyred for his faith. He became a saint simply for standing on a pole in the desert for a really long time, which says as much about the time he lived in as about his current reputation. He was born in the Syrian town of Sis around 390 C.E. and joined a monastery when he was sixteen. He took to the monastic life and its deprivations immediately, but he didn't get along well with the other monks. Eager to prove his soul's purity and his scorn for his physical body, he took to waiting until the rest of the monks had gone to sleep and then hanging a heavy stone around his neck to stand vigil all night long. He sought a mastery of his own body, a denial of basic needs like sleep, as proof t
hat his spiritual self was superior to his physical self. But it didn't always work; annoyed that his body, in its weakness, would occasionally fall asleep, Simeon started standing on a small wood log so that if he fell asleep he'd fall off and wake up. It was this behavior that finally alerted the other monks to what he was doing. Bothered by his excessive piety, which they thought bordered on hubris, they asked him to leave.

  He ended up in Antioch and gradually became famous as a holy man. He attracted so much attention that, weary of the constant crowds, Simeon wandered out into the desert, where he found the column he first mounted. He eventually moved to increasingly higher posts and spent the last thirty years of his life on a pillar more than sixty feet high. Unlike Blaine or Dean, he did not have a catheter to handle bodily needs; one church historian described excrement running down the side of Simeon's pillar "like wax dripping down a candle." He stayed there until he died.

  Simeon was not alone; there are records of at least ten other saints who were revered for standing on poles, including Alyspius, who had two smaller pillars constructed on each side of him for those seeking his counsel (one for monks and one for nuns), and may have even outlasted Simeon's record (contemporary sources claim he was up there for about fifty years). These ascetics were known as "stylites," from the Greek stylos, meaning pillar or column— the pole sitters. But even as more and more hermits climbed atop pillars to escape the world, Simeon, the first of them, remained the most well known, the originator of a strange craze that swept the desert in the fifth and sixth centuries.

  Temperatures in the Syrian desert can get down into the 40s in the winter; there are stories of one stylite who was found covered in frost after three cold days— brought down from his pillar, he was found to still be very much alive. In February and March come the rains, followed by sandstorms. And then comes the summer, when the temperature ranges from a low of 104 to highs in excess of 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

  At that temperature, the arteries begin to dilate in order to help dissipate the heat, which leads to a drop in blood pressure. The heart beats faster, trying to keep up, but as the body continues to lose water through dehydration, blood pressure drops further. Fainting, confusion, and hallucinations are common; in addition, the dilated blood vessels can allow for the accumulation of fluid just under the skin, a potentially dangerous condition once known as dropsy. Muscles contract unexpectedly and stay rigid; the body goes into shock.

  But modern medical literature can only tell us so much about the stylites. Even having read the multiple stories— some firsthand— of these pole sitters, it seems simply inconceivable to me that a person, poorly hydrated and malnourished, could last even a few weeks exposed to such conditions, let alone several decades. Perhaps the stories are just fanciful exaggeration. Perhaps Simeon and the others survived due to some extremely rare and lucky constitutions or due to some fluke of physiology. Perhaps it was a miracle.

  Idon't know what really happened, and I've decided that it's not worth asking these questions. You can't treat a saint as you would an ordinary human. When I think of the saints, what comes to mind are the "replicants" in Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner, androids of advanced strength and intelligence whom their creator describes as "more human than human."

  This is the phrase that always comes to my mind when I think of the saints. Unlike the Christ, they are not divine, though divinity may pass through them. They may be miraculous, but even so they remain fully, stubbornly mortal. But while they participate in a common humanity, they lie at the very limit of that humanity— they have pushed what it means to be human to the breaking point, and then beyond. They have taken their own humanity and shattered it.

  As with replicants, there's something dangerous about the saints. To see someone standing on a pole for thirty-five hours is to be impressed; to think of someone standing on a pole for thirty-seven years is to question all notions of will and self, devotion and sanity. Imagine for a moment what you've done in the past thirty-seven years— the cities, countries, continents you've visited; the jobs you've held; the accomplishments you could list; the lives of your children. Then imagine the gesture that renders all of that meaningless, that replaces it with a few motions: sitting, standing, eating, shitting. Praying. We know of repressive regimes that have forced such horrors on dissidents and other prisoners, but willfully to impose that obliteration on oneself for so long seems beyond comprehension.

  In Blade Runner, the replicants are dangerous because they're perfect. They are a threat because they reveal our own limitations, our own obsolescence. It's why they have a four-year lifespan built in, why they're banned from Earth and hunted by crusaders like Harrison Ford's Lieutenant Deckard. Perfection is dangerous; it terrifies ordinary humans. What Deckard learns as he hunts down these replicants is that the line between human and more-than-human is elusive and that it's impossible to know for sure on which side each of us falls.

  The renegade replicants in Blade Runner become violent because they are rapidly reaching the end of their four-year life spans, and they're desperate to extend their lives in any way possible. The saints, however, desire the opposite. They don't want more life; they want more death. In a 2005 interview, the novelist Mary Gordon described her memories of the path to sainthood in the 1950s:

  I remember, before we were being prepared for our first communion, we would be six or seven, we were told that we should pray for a martyr's death. So you would have these seven year olds saying, "Oh my God I better pray that . . . a Communist will say, 'Either say there is no God or we'll shoot you.' " . . . [So] when I was about nine or ten, I would put thorns in my shoes, to try to walk around, to experience the preliminaries of martyrdom, so I'd be toughened up for the real thing.

  In a religion centered around a God who willingly allowed Himself to be crucified, the idea of a martyr's death has always been important. The chance to die, to be rid of one's body, all the while affirming one's faith, was nothing short of a gift. Christianity isn't unique in this, of course; Gordon's childhood memories echo those of the Japanese writer Kenzaburo O¯e, who was born in the years before World War II and underwent similar indoctrination. Called to the front of the classroom, like all Japanese schoolchildren, O¯e was asked, "What would you do if the emperor commanded you to die?" The young boy replied, knees shaking, "I would die, sir; I would cut open my belly and die."

  Neither Gordon nor O¯e, both just children, really wanted to die. Gordon recalled how, even with thorns in her shoes, "I didn't want my feet to hurt, so I would put the thorns in my shoes, then I'd try not to step on them. So it was a sort of equivocal appetite for martyrdom, and nonetheless always feeling that I wasn't quite up to scratch, because I wanted to live, I didn't want to die." But that is what it means to love a divinity: to crave death, to want to die daily, to reject this world in favor of the promise of another. It's why most of us aren't cut out to be saints, why many of us find something fairly unhealthy about the very idea. To be a saint is to see one's body as nothing more than a chance to demonstrate that love of death.

  After the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, there was no longer an easy and straight path to martyrdom. Without persecution, torture, and execution, many saints turned to self-inflicted punishment: self-flagellation, deprivation, asceticism. "I have no greater enemy than my body," Francis of Assisi wrote. "We should feel hatred for our body, for its vices and sinning." But few still consider this mode of worship through extreme physical self-torment holy, and this kind of extreme vocation represented by the saints is hardly to be celebrated. Even while Pope John Paul II was (according to some sources) privately whipping himself, he publicly preached the sacredness of the human body and the need to respect it.

  The saint's hatred of the mortal body, after all, entails a recklessness bordering on the suicidal. One of Italy's patron saints, the fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena, regularly shoved branches down her throat to make herself vomit the meager food she ate
(a process she called "retribution") and was ultimately killed by this holy anorexia, dying of malnutrition and thirst at the age of thirty-three.

  The saints, one realizes, are to be revered but not imitated. They're there to show us how to be human by being what we could never be.

  Simeon the Stylite chose his own mode of self-punishment in part because of its symbolic value: Standing on a column, he was elevated, above the world literally and figuratively, yearning for heaven and for God. It was because of this that other hermits followed his example, and why living atop a pole became a particularly popular form of asceticism for hundreds of years. It was a very visible metaphor, clearly announcing one's devotion to heaven.

  At the same time, Simeon's gesture announced his rejection of the ground below, and for this reason many commentators since have been particularly derisive toward the stylites. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the nineteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon had nothing but scorn for Simeon and his asceticism: "This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility both of the mind and the body," he noted, going on to claim, "nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves are susceptible of any lively affection for the rest of mankind." For Gibbon, the crime of an ascetic like Simeon is the implied narcissism in such a renunciation of the world, an internal struggle at the expense of a life of charity.