WHAT qualities make for a saint? Interestingly, Andrew Shanks takes his standard not from the New Testament, but from two Old Testament writings. He sees in the prophet Amos a willingness to stand with the outsider and challenge the herd mentality, and in the later Isaiah a willingness to suffer on behalf of others. It is the combination of these two which makes for sainthood.
He calls this sublime virtue, drawing on a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, going back to Edmund Burke. The sublime disturbs us. Where one or other is missing, the claim to sublime virtue is problematic, and this Shanks explores in a dozen novels, beginning with Middlemarch, often described as the greatest novel in the English language. George Eliot, herself a non-believer, set out to depict someone with the temperament of St Teresa of Ávila trapped in limiting and mundane circumstances. The famous critic F. R. Leavis, while championing the book, nevertheless criticised the character of the heroine Dorothea as being immature, and Eliot as identifying too much with her. Shanks robustly rebuts both criticisms and seems to allow Dorothea genuine sainthood.
He does not allow this in relation to either Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov; for, while both are willing to suffer for others, neither is really willing to challenge the groupthink, the herd mentality, the mob, which is so fundamental to Shanks’s view of sublime virtue. Neither will he allow it to the view of St Joan of Arc put forward by some French writers or to Manolios in Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis, but for different reasons.
He then discusses three books that I had not come across before, under the heading of “The solidarity of the shaken”. Each tells a very powerful story of suffering under terrible conditions: one in China, one in California, and one against the background of the Holocaust. Then he considers The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, which he finds lacking as a model of sainthood, as he does John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s quartet that involve him; for, although Ames is an exemplary pastor to his flock, he has not in fact been properly alert to the hardships experienced by the black population of the town or challenged the racism so rampant in the 1950s.
The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West is considered, as is the priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory who, despite his addiction to whisky and his adultery, brings the sacrament to his people even at the risk of being killed by anti-clerical forces. Shanks then looks at Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford and Shusaku Endo’s powerful The Silence, in which a priest’s denial of faith in order to save others is seen as a Christ-like act.
This is an erudite and provocative book, which succeeds in its aim of getting the reader to reflect seriously on the nature of virtue and, therefore, of sainthood; and the criteria that he uses are helpful ones.
But there is also a hidden kind of sainthood which is also to be seen in literature. It is perhaps there in the highly disfigured odd-job man with his strange attachment to a paedophile in Darkness Visible by William Golding and the riders of Patrick White’s The Riders in the Chariot. It is there in Alphonsus Rodriguez, who spent his life as a monastery doorkeeper and about whom Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem. It is there also in the other great novel of Endo, The Samurai, in which a Japanese former monk lives a hidden life among native Americans.
Perhaps these are examples of what Shanks would term beautiful as opposed to sublime virtue.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. He is the author of Haunted by Christ: Modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK, 2018). His latest book is Wounded I Sing: From Advent to Christmas with George Herbert (SPCK, 2024).
Sublime Virtue: “Sainthood” as rendered problematic by a dozen novelists
Andrew Shanks
DLT £16.99
(978-1-915412-28-7)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29