Wilfrid Ward on the Revelatory Nature of the Saints

Abstract

This article examines how Wilfrid Philip Ward (1856–1916) explains his understanding of the saints as a categorical means of explicating divine revelation within the structures of a religion, particularly Catholicism. A description of the late nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, as perceived by Ward, is provided, followed by an explanation of how Ward responds philosophically to his perceived Zeitgeist with a description of the saints as revelatory of the incarnation in the particularity of historical and social contexts of those outside of the historical Jesus’s own context. This article concludes that Ward’s epistemology of the saints is the foundation for his incarnational ecclesiology.