Sainthood as Selfhood: The Dramatic Art of Becoming Holy

Abstract

Sainthood as Selfhood:The Dramatic Art of Becoming Holy Jennifer Newsome Martin (bio) I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decreeBitter would have me taste: my taste was me;Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I seeThe lost are like this, and their scourge to beAs I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.1 In the first volume of his The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau, SJ, suggests that saints and mystics have complicated the longstanding Delphic injunction of the Western tradition—"know thyself"—by posing to it two further questions: "Who else lives inside of you?" and "To whom do you speak?"2 Thus, for the self so conceived by de Certeau, A problematic of being and consciousness is rerouted from the onset toward illocution, that is, toward a dialogal structure of alteration—"you are the other of yourself." The soul becomes the place in which that separation of the self from itself prompts a hospitality . . . that makes room for the other. And because that "other" is infinite, the soul is an infinite space in which to enter and receive visitors.3 Similarly, Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, known for a strong emphasis on what he dubs a "metaphysics of the saints,"4 wrote that "the saints are lost in [End Page 5] the depths of God, they are hidden in him. Their perfection grows not around the center of their ego, but solely around the center of God, whose inconceivable and incalculable grace it is to make his creature freer in himself and for himself to the extent that he becomes freer for God alone."5 For Balthasar, then, as with de Certeau, the saint is the figure who gets gradually refigured into a holy, dialogal subject who, as with the central metaphor of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, contains nearly infinite multitudes, for whom the inner life becomes a rich warren of unexplored terrain and who indeed houses the infinite God in "a reciprocal indwelling that lies beyond all imagination."6 Even casual readers of St. John Henry Newman will think of that classic formula, which emerged from his 1816 inward conversion, wherein he comes to experience himself henceforth as "two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator."7 This realization was so tremendously radical that Newman identifies, though likely hyperbolically, a dramatic break between "the identity of the boy before and after August 1816."8 As Louis Bouyer [End Page 6] describes Newman's growing consciousness of himself in and after this inner spiritual conversion at age fifteen, "this 'self,' so adamant in its nature, was suddenly projected into the 'self' of that Other and became wholly obedient to Him."9 Newman's sense of self-reliance was thus exchanged with a sense of the interior presence of the divine Other, a sense of presence that on Newman's telling never waned. This sense of duality also comes to bear on Newman's various ruminations on the dictates of personal conscience, especially in Callista wherein the eponymous character speaks of conscience decisively as "the echo of a person speaking to me."10 What is curious is that even as Newman identifies from an early age this plurality and porosity and ever-saintly displacement of the self, at the same time and from the same early age it could be said that he also evinces a peculiar preoccupation with the self. This preoccupation is particularly noticeable, perhaps, in his scrupulous care to archive, narrate, edit, and preserve testaments to the self in such media as school notebooks, scraps of papers salvaged from his boyhood, or the production and subsequent preservation of his letters. He was "a confirmed hoarder" of "every kind of article that had a personal bearing . . . he treasured these possessions, just because they formed, as it were, an extension of his personality."11 Moreover, his autobiographical writings witness to a profound sensitivity to what he perceived as his own hyperbolic self-consciousness; his Anglican sermons sound the tone again and again to look not to the self but...