The Saints in Scripture, Tradition and Anglicanism

The Witness of Scripture

In the Old Testament, the great story-cycles about Abraham and Jacob, Moses, Joshua, and King David are all acts of commemoration. Most of these stories are meant to generate wonder and awe; they celebrate the power, wiliness, wisdom, or military prowess of Israel’s ancestors. The idea that the people should follow their examples -though certainly present - is very much in the background.

This began to change with the cycle of stories about the prophet Elijah (1 Kings 17 – 2 Kings 2). The Elijah cycle includes stories of the prophet’s prowess in working mighty signs and wonders, but they are subordinate to stories which recognize Elijah as an example for the rest of God’s people. He remained faithful even though, as he complained to God, “the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and slain your prophets with the sword” (1 Kings 19.10). He bore witness to God’s justice “against the odds”, and so became a sign and model for Israel to do likewise. Commemorating Elijah was not only a matter of wonder and awe; it was also a call to imitate his faithfulness.

In a similar way, the story of the Maccabees (in the Apocrypha) commemorates their fierce resistance to pagan overlords and recounts how whole families perished rather than break the covenant. Such stories were both a celebration of their wondrous faithfulness and a call for all Jews to go and do likewise.

The same sort of commemoration is present in the New Testament. After all, the gospels themselves are stories which celebrate the mighty acts of Jesus and call his disciples to follow the example of his great obedience. The pattern is continued in the book of Acts, especially in the dramatic story of Stephen’s martyrdom (Acts 6-7). Stephen’s faithfulness even at the cost of his life was recounted not only to excite wonder in the faithful who heard the book of Acts, but also to give them an example and a model to follow.

Image: Transfiguration of Jesus

The Ancient Church

Persecution of the Church by the pagan Roman authorities reinforced this trend. Many thousands of Christians were put to death, often by very gruesome means, because they refused to renounce Jesus Christ. The Church felt that these martyrs had been given a unique gift - the power to imitate Christ’s passion and death in their own bodies. For this reason, the early Christians came to believe that the souls of the martyrs must already have entered the joys of heaven.

A good example of what happened is the story told by the Christians of Smyrna, a city on the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor, after their bishop Polycarp was martyred in AD 156.

(We commemorate Polycarp on February 23.) The Roman authorities tried to cremate the bishop’s corpse, because they feared that the local Christians might “abandon the Crucified and begin to worship this man”. In their account of the episode, the Christians of Smyrna made it clear that such a fear was utterly groundless:

Little did they know that we could never abandon Christ, for it was he who suffered for the redemption of those who are saved in the entire world, the innocent one dying on behalf of sinners. Nor could we worship anyone else. For we reverence Christ as the Son of God, whereas we love the martyrs as the disciples and imitators of the Lord, and rightly so because of their unsurpassed loyalty towards their king and master. May we too share with them as fellow disciples!

To Christ alone they gave worship, but for the sake of Christ they desired to give honour to his great martyr Polycarp. This distinction led the Christians at Smyrna to an important decision. They not only collected Polycarp’s bones and ashes and buried them “in a fitting spot” outside the city walls. They also resolved to gather at the grave every February 23, when we will be allowed by the Lord to celebrate the anniversary day of Polycarp’s martyrdom, both as a memorial for those who have already fought the contest and for the training and preparation of those who will do so one day.

The Christians of Smyrna continued to have fellowship with Polycarp by celebrating their eucharistic fellowship with Christ. To eat and drink the eucharist was to share in the same banquet which Polycarp now enjoyed in glory; and to have eucharistic table-fellowship with Christ was to have table-fellowship with all Christ’s true disciples in heaven and on earth.

The church of Smyrna was not alone in its commemorative instinct. About the same time, quite independently, other churches began to pay the same sort of honour to their own martyrs, often treating the anniversary of a martyr’s death as a festival equal to Easter and Pentecost. It was the martyr’s dies natalis, her or his birthday in heaven. And just as people held a party on the birthday of one of their family, so the Church held a party on a saint’s dies natalis. They remembered the martyr by celebrating the eucharist, with prayers and scriptural readings appropriate to the occasion. This practice was the origin of the cycle of saints’ days which we know today.

Image: Icon of the Three Church Fathers

The Medieval Church

Early in the fourth century the Church was granted toleration, and well before the close of the century Christianity became the established religion of the Roman empire. The faithful certainly continued to celebrate the memory of those who had suffered during the time of persecution. But they also began to include others among the special “friends of God.” Monks and nuns, bishops, teachers of the faith, and missionaries came to be honoured as saints.

At the same time the commemoration of saints began to acquire a narrower focus.

Church-people came to judge holiness more and more by a person’s reputation for working miracles. For the ability to perform miracles was a sign that the person in question was indeed a true “friend of God” - and therefore had influence in the heavenly court of the almighty Emperor of the universe. Thus, Christians asked a saint to offer prayer in heaven and intercede with God on their behalf - a practice known as “the invocation of the saints.” The principle was the same as when Christians ask for one another’s prayers - “I have an appointment with the doctor,” one might say to another, “say a prayer for me, will you?” In the case of invoking the saints, there was of course one important difference. Because the saints were so highly favoured by God and already beheld the divine glory face-to-face, they had a far better chance of obtaining their requests from God than one’s next-door neighbour. One’s neighbours rarely showed any evidence of miraculous powers - and miracles were precisely what a saint’s intercession was supposed to obtain.

By the Middle Ages, then, the saints were venerated chiefly as workers of miracles; and miracles wrought at the tomb of a saint, or obtained by pleading for a saint’s intercession with God, were the basic evidence necessary in the process of canonization. In the West, from the twelfth century onwards, this process was entirely in the hands of the Roman papacy. It came to involve several steps, in which the life and posthumous miracles of the proposed saint were subjected to trial-like scrutiny.

The cult of the saints involved a number of assumptions about human life after death. First and foremost, it took for granted the distinction between body and soul. The souls of the saints entered glory, while their bodies remained buried on earth. But their earthly remains were still believed to have a potent connection with their souls in heaven. The horizon of glory lay along their graves, and their physical remains in shrines and under altars made the other world a next-door neighbour in this world. The relics of the saints, it was thought, continued to embody the power of their personalities even after death; they were the “real presence” of the souls of “the friends of God” in heaven.

Medieval theologians were well aware of the dangers which could attend upon the cult of the saints. As a safeguard they developed the distinction between latria, or the worship which is due to God alone, and dulia, the honour which may be given to humans who manifested, more fully than others, the image and likeness of God’s power and dominion. Nevertheless, the medieval Church found it difficult to resist the pious conviction that the saints represented approachable power, whereas God’s power was inaccessible except through the saints. This attitude led to a great irony. The emphasis on miracles tended to deprive the saints of power in another direction - the power to act as examples for other Christians to follow. The prayers appointed for their feast-days rarely asked that “we” might follow “their” example, and the stories told about them were not designed to elicit imitation by fellow disciples but the sort of awe that clients should feel in the presence of a mighty patron.

Image: Stained glass window of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Anglican Communion

In the sixteenth century the cult of the saints came under fierce attack by the Protestant reformers. In their view, it violated the scriptural principle: “There is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human” (1 Timothy 2:5). They also felt that, regardless of the theologians, the ordinary folk of the Church were not just honouring the saints but worshipping them. So, wherever they gained power, the Protestant reformers suppressed the cult of the saints. In England, for example, shrines were ransacked and broken up, and the images of saints were systematically destroyed.

This did not mean that Protestants rejected the whole concept of sainthood - on the contrary. But they did have difficulty when they sought an appropriate way to commemorate particular saints. No reformed community struggled with this problem more than the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Church of England.

The first Prayer Book appeared in 1549, and its Calendar drastically pruned the number of observable feast-days. In general, the only festivals named and given proper collects and readings were those with warrant in the New Testament. The second version of the Prayer Book, which was published in 1552, relaxed the rule somewhat and included four non-biblical saints - George (23 April), Lammas Day (1 August), Laurence (10 August), and Clement of Rome (23 November). In the Calendar, the New Testament feasts were printed in red ink and provided with proper collects and readings; the four non-biblical feasts were printed in black ink. This was the origin of the Anglican distinction between “red letter days” and “black letter days.”

In 1561 Queen Elizabeth I issued a royal decree which added fifty-eight more “black letter” feasts to the Prayer Book Calendar; still more were added in 1604 and in 1662. These commemorations, however, were never provided with propers or even commons to enable their observance.

The early Prayer Books of our tradition presented commemoration as a twofold event. Nowhere was this expressed more clearly than in the Eucharistic Prayer of the first Prayer Book (1549): And here we do give unto thee [Almighty God] most high praise and hearty thanks, for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy saints from the beginning of the world: And chiefly in the glorious and most blessed Virgin Mary, mother of thy Son Jesu Christ our Lord and God, and in the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs, whose examples, O Lord, and steadfastness in thy faith and keeping thy holy commandments, grant us to follow.

This petition balanced the two elements that we noticed in the second century commemoration of Polycarp - a thanksgiving for God’s work in the lives of the saints, and a petition for grace to follow their examples and become similar vehicles of God’s working. Early Anglicans did not confine sainthood to figures from the New Testament and the ancient Church. They also recognised saints among their own contemporaries.

One of the most popular books in England, from its publication in 1563 well into the nineteenth century, was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of matters happening in the Church, commonly called “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”. In vivid prose and with a sure instinct for the dramatic, Foxe told the stories of those who had died for the Protestant faith during the reign of

Queen Mary I (1553–58). He considered them martyrs and saints in the strict sense and clearly wished them to be commemorated in some way. He even provided a Calendar in which each of the martyrs was assigned a day. The Church of England did not adopt this Calendar, nor did it provide for the liturgical commemoration of any of the Marian martyrs until this century. Nevertheless, their stories entered the common consciousness of succeeding generations and became a touchstone for what it meant to be Christian, Protestant, and English.

The tradition continued into the seventeenth century and bore fruit in a crop of edifying biographies. The most famous of these works is Izaak Walton’s biographical quintet, published between 1640 and 1678, The Lives of Dr John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert, and Dr Sanderson. Walton and other seventeenth century biographers presented their subjects as contemporary saints who had lived godly Christian lives and borne loyal witness to “the sober principles and old establishment of the Anglican Church.” Their stories proved very popular and kindled among the faithful a genuine affection for their memories. But again, the Church of England had no procedure for acknowledging its saints and giving them liturgical commemoration. This meant that, over two or three generations, the intention of Walton and the other biographers was frustrated. It was not for want of devotion, but for want of appropriate means to express that devotion, that the active remembrance of many seventeenth-century saints eventually withered.

Only at the beginning of this century, in fact, did Anglicans begin to do something about the commemoration of saints. In the years between the two World Wars many churches of the communion enriched their Calendars and began, for the first time, to commemorate post-Reformation names. Those same churches usually supported their reform of the Calendar by providing a Common of Saints - sets of prayers and readings for “A Martyr”, “A Confessor”,

“A Monk or Nun”, and so forth. In addition, local communities - parishes, deaneries, dioceses, and religious orders - began to supplement the national Calendars with names of saints and heroes of the faith who were of special importance to them. Calendar reform was endorsed at the Lambeth Conference of 1958, and the churches of the Anglican Communion have not looked back since then.

Image: Thomas Cranmer