To Be A Saint
It comes to this, Tarrou said almost casually; what interests me is learning how to become a saint.
...Perhaps, the doctor answered. But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
Yes, we're both after the same thing, but I'm less ambitious.
Albert Camus, The Plague
To be a Saint
Two monks sat on the stream-bank to wash their dishes, as they were accustomed to do in the afternoon, when they became aware of a scorpion crawling on the rocks beside them. When the scorpion slipped from the rocks into the water, and began to drown, one monk calmly lifted the creature from the water and set it safely back on the rock from which it fell. As the scorpion was released to safety, it stung the hand of the monk, who did not cry out in pain, only returned his concentration to his afternoon task.
A moment later the scorpion, still crawling along the rocks, fell back into the swurling current. Again the monk lifted the creature to safety, and the scorpion stung the same hand again. As before, the monk returned calmly to washing.
When, moments later, the poisonous insect slipped from the rocks to certain death, the monk reached out to it as before. The monk's companion broke the silence of dish-washing:
—Brother, why do you persist in saving the scorpion, though you know it is his nature to sting? Calmly the monk replied:
—Because, brother, it is my nature to save it.1
To be a saint is to live redeemed in a fallen world, to live with reckless compassion for scorpions and everything that stings, to be selfless and so one with God.
But the realm of the Spirit to which our souls aspire is so far beyond what our human minds can reach: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor or your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways (Isaiah 55:8-9)." We as humans see the world the only way we can—through human eyes, in a human language whose roots lay in a basic ambiguity, a primal division between what we speak—or even think—and what is in the spectral realm of the transcendent Real.
Even our unconscious speaks to us, as does the world outside us, with an uncanny language that is not our own, from some Other place we cannot come to occupy: our Egos and the symbols of our social consciousness prohibit us. Our most cherished prize of humanity—self-consciousness—keeps us from attaining what we as humans most aspire to—that state I call 'sainthood.'
And yet, as Freud says, "Wo Es war, soll Ich verden"—I (the Ego) must come to be where it (the Id, our unconscious desire) was"—and so it is with our Spirits also. But how do we at once acknowledge the flaws attendant on our humanity and yet assume for ourselves a spiritual goal defined, as it must be, in human terms?
Our substantial selves are alienated from the attainment of both our instinctual, animal desires and from our spiritual aspiration to sainthood. And yet from the division, a new consciousness emerges that can discern the scorpion and the saviour locked within each of us.
Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
St. Paul, Philippians 4:12
God, making us in his image, has given us the gift of consciousness, that we might seek Him—this is our spiritual purpose, our mission as human beings within God's creation. And yet we work with human tools toward this saintly end. Barred from the Real, transcendent truth of the Spirit, the mind of God, we hear the uncanny voice of understanding, and that is what we chase after.
"There is no truth," writes Lacan—at least not one that we can understand in human terms, in the Symbolic Order of human thought—"yet we chase after it all the same." But to systematise the Mind of God, to set down Faith, Hope, Love, and the uncanny power of the Spirit in human symbols—'doctrines' are the name given to dialectisations of this type—is to deny the Real power of the Spirit. At the same time, however, if our human minds are to come to know God at all, to see him in the world he created ("For what can be known about God is plain to [us], because God has shown it to them," Romans 1:19), we must achieve it with the only tools we as humans have at hand. Therefore when Jesus explains the mysteries of Faith to his followers, he speaks in parables, human stories that encapsulate impenetrable, uncanny truths. To the enlightened mind, the Truth is illumined, albeit veiled in gauzy signifiers of the mind. And when he gave himself for his people, he did it in a mystery:
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, "Take, eat, this is my body." Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins..."
Gospel of Matthew, 26:26-29
Thus God does not present us with a task for which we are unequipped. But we should not expect to approach the secrets of the Divine with our penetrating human intellect: neither scientific precision or doctrinal dogmatism can contain the Real. Jesus invites us, rather, to come meekly to the table, where we will witness a miracle.
And to be a saint—for me, at least, to be a saint—is to approach the world, with all its particularities—the whole expansive cosmos, the sacred alter of the Creator—with such cultivated awareness that we might see the miracles happen. Not to systematise or to explain, but simply to appreciate the clean spiritual aesthetic of the Spirit dancing among the rocks and flesh of the world that is our home.
"Perhaps," [Tarrou] wrote, "we can only reach approximations of sainthood. In which case we must make shift with a mild, benevolent diabolism."2
The kind of understanding I have tried here to outline is an intensely personal one; it is in fact the process by which we become individuals, the coming-to-be of our individual $ubjectivity, that which makes us who we are and scribes upon us the dharma of who we may come to be—Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
St. Paul, Philippians 3:13-14
But this dharma, this uncanny kernel of human $ubjectivity, prepares for us a place in relationship to the Eternal, depends not on our selves, but on the Divine objectivity itself. So, though individuals may approach the Divine by different paths, God transcends difference; He is the unified Other to which our souls aspire. And so we, given an intensely subjective glimpse of the Divine, must chase after it in the human community we share with all of humankind. Hatred has no place in this community, neither intolerance, nor even the selfish neglect of our neighbour. In Tarrou's "diabolical benevolence," we confess our limitations, and yet we do what we as humans can, like the Buddha who left the sacred canopy of the boddhi tree to teach, to show others the Way, "just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve (Matthew 20:28)." Our purpose is one no other creature in heaven or earth can fulfill: not Angels, wrapped in the unity of ecstatic Spirit, not the cunning animals in their unconscious oblivion. "Do your job, then let go. That is the meaning of the Tao."3
All I maintain is that on earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't'judge if it's'simple, but I know it's true.
Jean Tarrou4
References
1. Zen Story, source unknown
2. from Albert Camus's The Plague
3. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
4. Camus
Quotations from The Bible in the
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
12 February, 1976