Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  Which would have suited Dante; his poetry described a sym

  bolic world rather than one of flesh and blood. In Dante's world, criminals are punished and saints rewarded, but all not only according to justice but also according to a poetic and symbolic system. When he wrote of Lucy, he wrote in careful, beautiful verse, an explanation of a pure, ordered world in which each creature and object and saint was in its right place. Lucy, patron of lucidity, of a clear picture of the world even in the darkness, perhaps best exemplifies this. John Freccero contends that "the purpose of the entire journey is to write the poem, to attain the vantage-point of Lucy," from which Dante hopes to perceive "the coherence in life, and to bear witness to that coherence for other men." But while this may be true, the splendor of Dante's great opus may also simply be a ward against a deeper fear, that there was nothing but suffering, nothing but Chaos, the mother of Night.

  Dante's poem takes place over Easter, but Lucy's time is the winter, when the nights are long and unforgiving. Midwinter is sometimes called the "days of roughness," precisely because it was impossible for earlier cultures to identify that exact moment when the earth begins its tilt back. Lucy, patron saint of blindness and of the darkest nights of the year, is meant to be celebrated on the solstice itself, but pinpointing the exact moment of the solstice has never been easy. Her feast day was originally on December 16, though it later changed to December 13. Neither of these is close to the solstice as we now understand it, but prior to the Gregorian calendar, the date of the solstice changed every hundred years. The Julian calendar was based on a calculation of

  365.25 days to a year, when in fact the number is closer to 365.2422, creating a slight slippage that had added up to thirteen full days before Pope Gregory XII rectified it in 1582.

  Lucy's day was still December 16 when Dante wrote his epic in the early 1300s, though the solstice then would have fallen on December 12. When John Donne took Lucy as his muse three hundred years later, the longest night of the year was December 9. But Donne's great poem to Lucy, "A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day," is dated December 7. Donne didn't know when the solstice occurred, nor when Lucy's actual feast day was, but he understood on some level that Lucy's is a movable feast— her day is every night, since at night all calendars stop.

  Study me then, you who shall lovers be

  At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

  For I am every dead thing,

  In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

  Donne was far less sanguine than Dante that the world is perfectly ordered and just. He had been born Catholic in a newly Protestant country, which was being torn apart by religion and by conflicting views of the order of the world. His brother Henry was imprisoned in 1593 for harboring a Catholic priest and died of disease in prison (the priest, meanwhile, had been hanged until he was nearly dead, at which point he was disemboweled). Donne had learned to keep his faith a secret throughout his early years before ultimately converting to the Anglican faith in 1627.

  It was three years later, with the deaths of both his patron, Countess Lucy of Bedford, and his young daughter Lucy, that Donne turned to the Catholic saint of darkness. Like Dante, he came to Lucy in his darkest hour, beset by gloom. But unlike the Italian, Donne could not find solace in a divinely revealed master plan of the universe. Dante found a love beyond death through Lucy's intercession, but Donne saw death hidden even in love, despair that outweighed belief, darkness to match the longest night of the year. The bleakness of Donne's work dispels the order in Dante. If the Italian found paradise emerging from the inferno, Donne found midnight in a summer's kiss. "I am re-begot," he tells us, "Of absence, darkness, death— things which are not." Donne called on Lucy in the wake of a personal loss, and his poem suggests that if God exists, His purpose is only to affirm our emptiness. Lucy's name is here invoked to remind Donne that the world will yet turn back on its axis, even if Donne himself can't yet see it.

  Van Gogh might have been the third of Lucy's most famous acolytes, The Night Café seen as the final panel in a triptych. But he could not make it through the darkness, nor could he find Lucy waiting in the gloom. A shame. To Dante's certainty and Donne's gloom Lucy could have added Van Gogh's madness, carnivalesque in its motley, a fluorescent night of death. Lucy could have seen through the dark streets of Arles and the harsh glare of the Night Café, which was, after all, just one more inferno to be navigated. All of us, at one time or another in our lives, must follow Lucy, even if we don't call to her out loud.

  Part Five: The Uncanonized

  ·sixteen·

  The Consolations of Castration: Origin

  A s strange as the stories of the saints are the stories at the margins of sainthood, the men and women who might have been saints but somehow failed to make the cut, those who lived their devotion but died in obscurity or ignominy. They are perhaps even more beautiful because of their failure, the ones who wagered all and were repaid with apathy— or, in the case of the third-century theologian Origen, were held up repeatedly as an example of error. I first learned briefly of Origen while in Catholic school; a powerful mind and a major figure of the early church, once mentioned in the same breath as Augustine and Jerome, he was brought up as an aside and quickly dismissed. Despite the sway he once held, his legacy has been largely forgotten or actively suppressed. Within the grand narrative of the church, there is now not much to be said about him at all.

  So to tell Origen's story well, one must start earlier— before his birth, before Christ, before everything, even time itself— with a simple love story. It goes like this: A man and a woman love each other very much; there is nothing in the world but the two of them. The man loves the woman so much, in fact, that he's terrified of anything that could ever come between them. His love for her is so all-encompassing that he begins to dread the thought of children, of children who he thinks will divide the two of them. He loathes the thought of his own offspring, even though he cannot keep her from getting pregnant.

  This man has reason to fear their children, after all. When they come, they are monstrous, so unspeakably hideous that he cannot stand the sight of them, so horrific that they defy description.

  Finally he solves his problem. When his wife gives birth, he simply shoves the child back into her womb. One by one, he takes his awful progeny and crams them back up the birth canal, as if to undo the atrocity of their birth. To keep these monsters inside the womb of their mother, he decides simply never to pull out; he plugs her birth canal with his penis, blocking his offspring's entrance into the world.

  It is an intolerable situation, and it cannot last. Finally this woman, unable to bear the pain of so many monsters trapped inside her, devises a plan; she gives one of her children— the smart est, the most bold— a sickle, and he acts. He castrates his father, freeing the children's escape route and ending the tyranny of the father once and for all.

  This is how the love affair ends; and how the woman, Gaia, the earth, becomes separated from Uranus, the sky; and how their son, Chronos, his wife and sister, Rhea, and the Titans finally enter the world. This is the birth of chronology, the end of prehistory, and the beginning of time.

  In Greek mythology, castration makes the world. Castration sets everything in motion; it creates love, it creates beauty, it creates justice. The blood dripping from Uranus's penis spills on the ground, and from these drops of blood are born the Furies, who dispense justice, as well as the Giants and the Nymphs of the Ash Tree. Then Chronos tosses his father's penis into the sea, and when it touches the sea foam, Aphrodite is born— the goddess of love, born of castration and the sea.

  From Aphrodite comes a second great love story, this one in the very real time of the twelfth century and the very real place of Paris. There, possessed by Aphrodite, by love and desire and lust, a young and promising theologian seduced a young woman he had been tutoring, impregnating her. When her uncle learned of this, the theologian agreed to marry her, but after their son's
birth, he had her sent to a convent, and her uncle, believing she had been abandoned and ruined, sent thugs to this young man while he was sleeping and had him castrated. This is the story of Heloïse and Abelard.

  Castration made Abelard, as it made Heloïse. Abelard was a rising scholar, one of the greatest minds of medieval Europe, but only after his castration, only after he was permanently separated from Heloïse, only after the two of them began writing letters to each other did their story achieve immortality. Now their story was tragic, and in time their names would be said alongside those of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet— a love triumphant in spite of, and because of, castration.

  In his misery, Abelard turned to the story of Origen for comfort. Abelard had already been compared to Origen for his rhetorical brilliance, his ability to use the profane arts of secular literature and culture "as a hook, baited with a taste of philosophy, to draw listeners towards the study of the true philosophy." But now he had another thing in common with Origen because Origen is the patron saint of the castrated.

  Origen's story, too, is a love story in which he is in love with Christ, in which he is the bride of Christ. Origen strove to be perfect, without sin or distraction. He read Jesus's words in Matthew 19:12: " There be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake," and in Matthew 18:9: "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes and be cast into hell." Origen had an unrivaled intellect but eventually started to feel that his own biological urges might distract him from a full dedication to God, and so, offended by his own sex, he castrated himself.

  Castration looms large in the history of Christianity, but nowhere as large as in Russia. It was there, in 1771, that a local prefect arrested a man named Andrei Ivanov for persuading thirteen other men to castrate themselves. Ivanov was knouted— that is, whipped with a special cat-o'-nine-tails tipped with metal rings and hooks— and then sent into Siberia. But his assistant, Kondratii Selivanov, managed to flee and soon set up shop in Saint Petersburg as the returned Christ, the lord of castration.

  Selivanov's teaching was simple. After Adam and Eve had eaten the apple but before they were expelled from the Garden, they had cut the apple in half and grafted it onto their bodies. A woman's breasts and a man's genitals were the literal remnant of this sin, protuberances not natural to the human body, the markers of our transgression and the key to our salvation. If the Greeks saw castration at the beginning of time, the Skoptsy cult (the word means simply "eunuch") that followed Selivanov saw castration as the means to heal the wound at the beginning of time. Castration was no longer just generative; now it was also regenerative, redemptive.

  The Skoptsy cult quickly seized Russia in the nineteenth century. There was the "lesser seal," the removal of one's testicles, and the "greater seal," which included the removal of the penis as well— or, in the case of a woman, a double mastectomy. This was the only means to purity for the Skoptsy, who also called themselves "the White Doves."

  What started as a movement among illiterate peasants quickly grew to include nobility, merchants, and clergy, even after Kondratii Selivanov's imprisonment and eventual death in 1832. The government tried to crush the sect by deporting over seven hundred Skoptsy to Siberia in the middle of the century, but the movement continued to grow: By 1874, there were close to six thousand members, over eight hundred of whom had received their greater or lesser seals.

  The Skoptsy were apocalyptic; they believed that when their numbers reached 144,000, the Messiah would return to earth. Theirs was a castration to heal the world, castration to end the world. While they waited, they continued to populate the world; at their height, they estimated close to 100,000 members. The Romanian writer I. L. Caragiale quipped that in turn-of-the-century Bucharest, every horse-drawn carriage was driven by Skoptsy who had fled the persecutions in Russia. In Kaputt, his bleak dispatch from the wastelands of Eastern Europe during World War II, the Italian ex-fascist Curzio Malaparte described a Skoptsy in a similar role, a coachman for a sadistic Moldavian princess, prepared to destroy a shopkeeper over a bag of tea. This description was one of the first times I had read of the Skoptsy, though years before, I had seen the skull of a former cult member on display in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Malaparte's description of the driver raising a whip toward the miserable shopkeeper, "lifting and stretching his arms as if he were holding a flagpole in his fist," helped cement in me the image of the Skoptsy as otherworldly, greater or lesser than human, a sign of the end of the world to be sure.

  We may never know whether castration would have brought about the end of the world as it brought about the beginning, since the Soviets thoroughly crushed the Skoptsy movement, which died out sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. Malaparte's driver, in fact, may have been among the last of the dying sect. But modern psychiatric literature includes a diagnosis of Skoptsy syndrome, a desire to castrate oneself. Indeed, a Philadelphia urologist has recently claimed to have performed over twelve thousand voluntary castrations at his practice.

  If Origen had no literal offspring, he can still claim these White Doves as his children. Castration has its own consolations. What troubled both Origen and the Skoptsy is the eternal problem of Christian genitals— if they're the root of sin, then isn't their removal a possible path to purity?

  Origen's name appears regularly as one of the four theological titans of the early Christian church, with Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome. But of the four, only Origen was never made a saint by the church. Considering what he's contributed to doctrine, this seems somehow unjust. Most commentators agree that Origen was denied sainthood for a few ideas later deemed heretical: his belief in the preexistence of souls, for example, in which he went so far as to claim that even devils— even Satan himself— had immortal souls. His castration alone might not have been enough to bar him from sainthood, but it clings to him anyway, a persistent stain on his character and further evidence of his wrongheaded approach to theology. Particularly now, when those early theological debates have long since faded from all but the most esoteric memories, Origen is remembered not as the heretic but as the castrated one.

  Other saints mutilated themselves, including (supposedly) Lucy. But then, eyes are not testicles. And though it may be better to enter the kingdom blind than in sin, castration really is something altogether different. Leviticus 22:24 warns, "Ye shall not present to the Lord any animal if its testicles have been bruised, or crushed, torn or cut." And Deuteronomy 23:1 pointedly proclaims, "No man whose testicles have been crushed or whose organ has been severed shall become a member of the assembly of the Lord." Of all the bodily mutilations one can suffer, castration is the most taboo. The word unmanned has this other definition: The eunuch is no longer a member of the human community. Abelard, after all, was a rising figure in the church, but after he was unmanned, he was forced to leave the clergy. One cannot testify without one's testicles.

  But, as in many areas of doctrine, it turns out that the attitude of the church on this matter isn't quite so simple. "Let women keep silent in church," Paul says in First Corinthians, 14:34. And so church fathers who wanted the beauty of a soprano voice to say mass had to find other means. Starting around the Renaissance, a new solution was devised: A boy with a promising voice would be taken to a bath infused with herbs and given opiates or asphyxiated so as to numb the pain of what was about to happen. Then someone would reach in and brutally massage his genitals until the testicles were crushed; eventually they would dissolve and be reabsorbed by the body.

  Without testosterone, the body changes— the bone joints do not harden, and so the bones grow long and thin; the limbs elongate along with the ribs, creating an increased lung capacity. This, along with underdeveloped vocal cords, gives a castrato an incredible range and an otherworldly voice. A castrato is not just a soprano but an unreal figure, unmanned, ethereal, somehow more than human.

  Cas
trati were enormously popular, and their fame lasted for three centuries. Operas were written for them and about them, and every major church choir was populated with them. Their decline was due less to ethics than to taste and a rise in the popularity of tenors in the mid– nineteenth century. Though castrati were finally outlawed in Italy in 1870, the Sistine Choir still had them as late as 1903.

  Modern church history, then, is oddly intertwined with castration. The same prohibition in Leviticus that kept Abelard out of the church was trumped, two centuries later, by a Bible verse that brought in the castrati. So I find myself returning to this question: Was castration truly the horrible fate that kept Origen out of the pantheon of saints? Certainly Abelard didn't think so. In his second letter to Heloïse, he mentions Origen as his brother in emasculation but goes on to suggest that Origen's problem was not castration but poor interpretation of the Scriptures. "The great Christian philosopher Origen," he writes, was not afraid to mutilate himself in order to quench completely this fire within him, as if he understood literally the words that those men were truly blessed who castrated themselves for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, and believed them to be truthfully carrying out the bidding of the Lord about offending members, that we should cut them off and throw them away; and as if he interpreted as historic fact, not as hidden symbol, that prophecy of Isaiah in which the Lord prefers eunuchs to the rest of the faithful.