The enthusiastic reaction to Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s choice of the name Francis underscores the ongoing power of the saints in shaping the Catholic sacramental imagination. The new pope implicitly suggests that the things that mattered to St. Francis-concern for the poor, care of creation, a commitment to pacificism and the reform of religious life-may also matter to him and therefore to millions of Catholics.
But getting a sense of saints as real people can be difficult, since joining the cloud of witnesses tends to both smooth over the sharp edges of their personalities and over-polish the tarnished ordinariness of their day-to-day lives. The cloud quickly becomes a disorienting fog when it comes to saintly women in the church, who not only faced the challenge of living authentic responses to the countercultural call of the Gospel in the midst of narrow social and religious ideals of femininity, but also mediated their relationship with the sacred in the midst of far more profane relationships, voluntary and involuntary. Perhaps Dorothy Day was thinking of Joni Mitchell when she resisted sainthood-It’s cloud’s illusions, I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all.
Three new novels imaginatively attempt to bring three women saints-Hildegard von Bingen (canonized and made a doctor of the church in 2012), Joan of Arc (burned as a heretic in 1431 but made a saint in 1920) and Xenia of St. Petersburg (canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988)-into focus for the 21st century by exploring the gaps in the historical and hagiographical record. The authors blend the factual drama of each women’s historical context and mundane details of their daily lives with more fictitious accounts by named and anonymous people affected by their holiness-biological and religious family members, lovers and comrades, friends and bystanders.
In portraying actual women shaped by a variety of circumstances beyond their control and haunted by multiple personal longings, the novels suggest that the power of the saints rests not so much in what they did but rather how they wrestled with the demons that arose from their need for relationships with other people-Hildegard’s loneliness in a vocation not of her choosing, Joan’s fear of disappointing the men she led, Xenia’s grief at the loss of the love of her life.
In Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen Mary Sharratt debunks the romantic myth of the medieval anchorage by invoking the terrifying perspective of a child of 8 years entombed in two tiny rooms with a mentally unstable woman whose relentless narcissistic asceticism could only be described as psychologically and physically abusive. We observe Hildegard finding solace year after year for three decades, growing plants in a walled outdoor cell warmed by the sun for a handful of moments each day or in brief encounters across the screen with her confessor. Sharratt contrasts the suffocating demands of solitary confinement with Hildegard’s free ranging spaces of internal freedom-in her writings, her music, her cosmic sensibility and her deep prayer life. She also captures the anchorite’s balancing act as she came into her own-carefully not surpassing the literal outsiders’ sense of the glory of her magistra, Jutta, as she herself begins to attract devotees; judiciously not overstepping hierarchical authority in forming her own community; piously not allowing herself to favor any women in her community or to allow her love of them to surpass her love of God.