St. Chrysostom
[Rambler, May 1859, etc.]
1.
I CONFESS to a delight in reading the lives, and dwelling on the characters and actions, of the Saints of the first ages, such as I receive from none besides them; and for this reason, because we know so much more about them than about most of the Saints who come after them. People are variously constituted; what influences one does not influence another. There are persons of warm imaginations, who can easily picture to themselves what they never saw. They can at will see Angels and Saints hovering over them when they are in church; they see their lineaments, their features, their motions, their gestures, their smile or their grief. They can go home and draw what they have seen, from the vivid memory of what, while it lasted, was so transporting. I am not one of such; I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. I am touched by what I read about, not by what I myself create. As faith need not lead to practice, so in me mere imagination does not lead to devotion. I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo. I gain more from three verses of St. John than from the three points of a meditation. I like a Spanish crucifix of painted wood more than one from Italy, which is made of gold. I am more touched by the Seven Dolours than by the Immaculate Conception; I am more devout to St. Gabriel than to one of Isaiah’s seraphim. I love St. Paul more than one of those first Carmelites, his contemporaries, whose names and acts no one ever heard of; I feel affectionately towards the Alexandrian Dionysius, I do homage to St. George. I do not say that my way is better than another’s; but it is my way, and an allowable way. And it is the reason why I am so specially attached to the Saints of the third and fourth century, because we know so much about them. This is why I feel a devout affection for St. Chrysostom. He and the rest of them have written autobiography on a large scale; they have given us their own histories, their thoughts, words, and actions, in a number of goodly folios, productions which are in themselves some of their meritorious works.
I do not know where else to find the daily life, the secret heart, of such favoured servants of God, unveiled to their devout disciples in such completeness and fidelity. Modern times afford some instances of the kind: St. Theresa is one of them; St. Francis de Sales is another: still, on the whole, what should we have known of the generality of the great Saints of the later centuries, had we been left to themselves for the information? We should of course have had the treasure of their recorded visions, prophecies, and meditations; but these are portions of their divine, not their human life, and rather belong to what God did for them, than to what they did for themselves. There is one circumstance, indeed, which tells in their favour; we have their portraits. This, I grant, is in favour of the moderns; certainly we have no idea at all of the personal appearance, the expression of countenance, or the bearing of St. Athanasius or St.. Hilary. It is assuredly a great point, if the case be so, that we have likenesses of the modern Saints. But I am not sure that we have; often there was no attempt at all made to take their likenesses in their lifetime; sometimes they would not let themselves be taken when there was. St. Philip Neri once caught an artist in the very commission of that great offence, and stopped him; and the unfinished picture hangs up to this day at the Pellegrini, a memorial of a painter’s devotion and a saint’s modesty. Sometimes, again, there may be a good likeness; but, perhaps, however interesting in itself, it was taken before the Saint’s conversion, and can only satisfy a human curiosity: sometimes it was taken, indeed, but has been lost, and the copies, if there are any, are not to be trusted. Sometimes the artist’s veneration has idealized the countenance, or the popular demand has vulgarized it. How has a devout poetry embellished some of the ordinary portraits of the great St. Carlo! how does the original likeness of St. Ignatius differ from the military countenance and figure which ordinary pencils have bestowed upon him! You cannot thus wander from the original, in the new edition you put to press of St. Ambrose or the blessed Theodoret.
I repeat, what I want to trace and study is the real, hidden but human, life, or the interior, as it is called, of such glorious creations of God; and this I gain with difficulty from mere biographies. Those biographies are most valuable both as being true and as being edifying; they are true to the letter, as far as they record facts and acts; I know it: but actions are not enough for sanctity; we must have saintly motives; and as to these motives, the actions themselves seldom carry the motives along with them. In consequence, they are often supplied simply by the biographer out of his own head; and with good reason supplied, from the certainty which he feels that, since it is the act of a Saint which he is describing, therefore it must be a saintly act. Properly and naturally supplied, I grant: but I can do that as well as he; and ought to do it for myself, and shall be sure to do it, if I make the Saint my meditation. The biographer in that case is no longer a mere witness and reporter; he has become a commentator. He gives me no insight into the Saint’s interior; he does but tell me to infer that the Saint acted in some transcendent way from the reason of the case, or to hold it on faith because he has been canonized. For instance: When I read in such a life, “The Saint, when asked a question, was silent from humility,” or “from compassion for the ignorance of the speaker,” or “in order to give him a gentle rebuke,“—I find a motive assigned, whichever of the three is selected, which is the biographer’s own, and perhaps has two chances to one against its being the right one. We read of an occasion on which St. Athanasius said nothing, but smiled, when a question was put to him: it was another Saint who asked the question, and who has recorded the smile; but he does not more than doubtfully explain it. Many a biographer would, simply out of piety, have pronounced the reason of that smile. I should not blame him for doing so; but it was more than he could do as a biographer; if he did it, he would do it, not as an historian, but as a spiritual writer.