Timely Saints

"The portrait of a saint," writes Clare Boothe Luce, "is only a fragment of a great and still uncompleted mosaic--the portrait of Jesus." Although a sizable portion of Christendom (including the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communions) honors the saints as man's intercessors with God, historical distances have dimmed most saintly portraits even for the modern Christian, to say nothing of the skeptic who lives next door. To show the "timeliness" of the saints in 1952, Clare Luce has edited Saints for Now (Sheed & Ward; $3.50), 20 sketches of triumphant Christians of the past.

The contributors' list of Saints for Now covers a wide literary spectrum. Among them: Novelists Evelyn Waugh, D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Kathleen Norris, Journalists Vincent Sheean, Rebecca West and Whittaker Chambers, Sportswriter Paul Gallico, Poet Alfred Noyes and Moviemaker John Farrow. The majority are Roman Catholics, and all but two--Trappist Thomas (The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton and Sister Madeleva, president of Indiana's St. Mary's College--are laymen.

Each contributor was asked to write about his favorite saint. Two saints, Francis of Assisi and the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, were selected twice. Poet Noyes has written about St. John the Evangelist as the most "intuitive" of the Apostles. George Lamb, a young British Catholic, discusses St. Simeon Stylites, the 5th century hermit who spent 37 years sitting on a pillar. Psychiatrist Karl Stern writes about St. Thereese of Lisieux, a bourgeois French girl who died in 1897, at 24, in a Carmelite cloister. Also included: one Pope, Pius V; two Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola and his missionary follower Francis Xavier; one parish priest, St. Jean Vianney, the 19th century cure of Ars.

Some of the saints, as their 20th century biographers see them:

St. Augustine, the 5th century Bishop of Hippo, was Christianity's first great philosopher. Writes Anglican Rebecca West: "His works are the foundation of modern Western thought . . . He took as his subject matter a certain complex of ideas which intrude into every developed religion and are present in Christianity also; the idea that matter, and especially matter related to sex, is evil; that man, wearing a body made of matter, living in a material world, and delighting in the manifestations of sex, is tainted with evil, and must cleanse himself before God; and that this atonement must take the form of suffering. He examined these ideas from a philosophical point of view and discussed how they looked in the new light cast on the world by the life of Christ . . . The construction thus built stood up so well that the Western mind made it its home, and its finest achievements since then have consisted largely of modifying and extending the original structure . . ."

St. Benedict founded the Western monasticism which saved Europe in the Dark Ages. Writes Quaker Whittaker Chambers: "Against that night and that ruin, like a man patiently lighting a wick in a tempest, St. Benedict sets his Rule ... In an age of pillar saints and furiously competing athletes of the spirit, when men plunged by thousands into the desert, in a lunge towards God, and in revulsion from man, St. Benedict's Rule brought a saving and creative sanity. Its temper was that of moderation as against excesses of zeal, of fruitful labor as against austerities pushed to the point of fruitlessness."

St. Pius V, Pope, led the 16th century Counter Reformation and excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. Writes Catholic D. B. Wyndham Lewis: "The high, narrow forehead, the big, imperious nose, the deep-set, challenging eyes, the firm, bearded lips are those of a man whose weakness, as some assert, was his refusal to take advice; that is to say, human advice . . . Heroic, an adjective freely lavished by the press nowadays on firemen rescuing stray kittens up trees, is the final, banal and inevitable adjective for this Pope . . . It is amusing to reflect that but for being a saint, and on the wrong side. Pius V possesses every attribute of the Strong-Man-as-Hero postulated and proclaimed by Carlyle, and, except that he devoted it exclusively to God's service, all that Will-to-Power about which Nietzsche made such a hullabaloo."

St. John of the Cross, who died in 1591, is possibly the greatest mystic of Catholic Christianity; his lofty writings on the union of man and God have been a modern rediscovery. Writes Trappist Merton: "The life of charity was perfect in the great Carmelite reformer ... It was so perfect that it can hardly be said to shine before men. His soul was too pure to attract any attention. Yet precisely because of his purity, he is one of the few saints who can gain a hearing in the most surprising recesses of an impure world.

"The hardest thing to accept, in St. John of the Cross, is not the Cross, but the awful neutrality of his interior solitude . . . The two words 'desiring nothing' contain all the difficulty and all the simplicity of St. John of the Cross . . . They are simply an echo of two words that sum up the teaching of Jesus Christ in the Gospel: 'If any man would come after me, let him deny himself.' "

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