Angels

This week's readings helped me to understand angels more, but I still have A LOT of questions, which I underlined below. Please feel free to discuss with me, answer my questions, correct me and teach me!

Creation of Angels

It is interesting that the Bible didn’t mention the creation of angels except for the subtle allusion in the finished work of “all the host of them” (Genesis 2.1). Huge of St. Victor claims that angels and men were created at the same time--both in the beginning. However, he later confirmed that man was created to replace the number of the fallen angels. If we assume Hugh is not self-contradictory, then I guess that angels and men were created at the same time but located in different places. After some angels fell, men were taken to the same society where the good angels were to fill the number of the fallen. But, when did the angels fall then? The place good angels were in should have been where God was, and thus is it Eden?

They were begotten by the God, who Himself have the presence as an angel. I like the metaphor Barker used to describe the “begetting”. Angels are the expansion of God, as they are like the fire passed on by matches. Angels are part of God, and one with God. All come from one and all is one.

Nature of Angels

Angels were made as good, with the likeness of God, with wisdom. Their four features are immateriality, personal distinction, rationality, and free will. Because they are made from wisdom, which is the rational creation, they have spiritual attributes. And that’s why they are invisible and immaterial, because they don’t have the corporal body made of matter. They were made as individuals, and all together form a beautiful hierarchy/order of angels. They were created, like humans, each different, with different levels of power, wisdom, and freedom. Some are superior, some inferior, like some matches with bigger light than the other, they are content with their place in the order and don’t feel pride over the inferior, because they have the knowledge of their Creator and respect the oneness with Him. They have free will--they can move and desire as they will. Hugh uses aversion (progressing over that) and conversion (falling below that) to describe this movement. It seems that the “that” is the way they were created by God, which I think is rationality. If they move and desire according to how God made them to be--be rational, they naturally go towards Grace and become better angels. If not, they don’t, their guilt abandons them from Grace, and they fall.

Difference between Angels and Men

I think the biggest difference lies in that men are made of body and soul, while angels are made of the latter, the spiritual. Our free will include that of the mind, body and sensuality. When our mind follows the will of God, our body and sensuality naturally are in the right track(mind leads the latter two), whereas if our sensuality becomes the leader, sin follows. Because angels don’t have bodies, their free will move only with the mind or spirit. A great confusion came up when I compare the angels and Saints. Both of them reflect light from God, as they are oneness with Him. When Saints are alive, obviously because of their corporal body, they are different from angels. They become the men as when Adam and Eve were first created, living with the angels. But, after they die, do they become angels? Or are they souls of men, living with the big angel families?

What do angels do? What are they created for?

Barker states that angels sing to praise God. They worship God and praise his beautiful creation. And the singing has another function, that is, to maintain the order of the world. Through their singing, with one voice, in harmony, they bring “the discordant” back to the order. As they are light from God, they bring the light to the world, illuminate people and bring them back to the oneness with God. Angels have the power of virtue, domination and administration. They are leaders in the angel order, and they also are the leader of humans. I like this idea a lot. Humans also have power. It makes me feel that, if without sin, we all shall find our place in the world and feel content about it, like the angels are in the order. We have the power to govern ourselves, to lead our companions, and to take care of the animals.

Interaction between angels and men

Yes. Angels lead us, illuminate us, bring us back. This is of the good Angels.

What about the fallen ones, the evil spirits? I often hear about spiritual wars. It seems, at least according to my Christian friends, the warriors of God and those of Satan are constantly fighting each other through men. Human beings’ Fall was led by the serpent. And we are constantly facing temptations in our life. Is it what the fallen angels are doing? When our sense of sensuality overcomes that of the mind and body, is it totally our own choice or is it part of the fallen angel’s contribution? Does our free will mean choosing sides between God and Satan?

--YLT

United in Light

Every time angels appear in a Biblical story, they share one characteristic that is described in different ways. They are either “of light,” “flame of fire,” “illuminated glory,” or “countenance like lighting and clothing as white as snow.”[1] Barker mentions this aspect while discussing the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and while I do not think that the angels are priests in the heavenly temple, I do agree with Barker when she says that their role is to shine light and transform those who go through the light (Barker 9). Anyone who is illuminated by one of these angels reflects his knowledge into the world; they reflect the glory and knowledge of God to His people. Light and fire are the connection between angels and humans, and are at the basis of their unity together and with God. It seems that most of the tasks angels carry out are because they are united, whether they are fighting against the forces of darkness or praising God as He sits on his throne which some of them are carrying.

So what are they? They are beautiful, other-worldly souls of light that were created by God. When He made them no one knows, since it is not written clearly in the Bible, but they probably belong to the “heavens and all that is therein” (Genesis 1:1). He created them to have loyalty and love, wise minds and extreme beauty, and most importantly, free will. He gave them names and ranks, and their tasks depended on both of those characteristics. While Hugh of St. Victor goes on a long discussion regarding their nature & works, and this problem of free will, I think it is quite simple. God created them as souls who were qualified and had free will, and when it was time to examine them, some succeeded and were crowned with righteousness while others failed and lost the righteousness that could have been theirs. The ones who fell were of different ranks but many readings make it clear there are more on the side of God than there are against Him. But does that mean that they no longer have this free will after being tested? No. Each of the angels and the fallen angels maintained that free will which is why the “good” ones continue to do the will of God, which as Hugh concluded, is good and never evil, while the fallen angels have the free will to tempt and make evil works (as long as they get permission from God). Hugh sort of brings up the question that people have asked ever since there was religion: if there is a God, why do bad things happen to people? Well, as it is illustrated numerous times in the book of Job, God allows the devil to act out and tempt whoever he wants but God refuses to have the devil “touch” His faithful. While this can be understood in different ways, I think it means that God allows good and bad people to be tempted but He does not allow their faith to be questioned, and if their faith is strong, then they have succeeded.

As to the question on their relationship with God, it is evident in their names and ranks. Each of the angels is a manifestation of one of God’s features. While I do not agree that they are a part of Him, I do believe that God has created them, like the humans, in His image and with a specific task in mind. There are nine ranks of angels as discussed by Dionysius: Seraphim (those who brightly lit in fire), Cherubim (full of knowledge and wisdom), Thrones (angels of justice and dispenses of God’s judgement), Lordships/Dominions (receiving orders from higher ranks and guidance of lower ranks), Authorities/Virtues (angels of choice and sparks of light), Powers (warriors and theologians), Principalities (leaders and overseers of the world), Archangels (ministers of God and protectors of human life), and Angels (guardians and messengers of God). Whatever their rank is, they execute the will of God without discussion. They deliver messages like Archangel Gabriel (meaning God’s strength) when he appeared to St. Mary, fight Lucifer like Archangel Michael (meaning He who is like God), or heal the servants of God like Archangel Raphael (God’s healing) when he appeared to Tobit.

As mentioned earlier, the function of angels who speak and interact with humans is to lead them to God and His righteousness. A famous example of this is when St. Stephan was getting stoned by the mobs that listened to the words of Saul. When he looked up to the heavens and saw God, everyone around him “saw his face as the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15). This also highlights the difference between angels and humans; in their journey to find God, humans become angels on earth when they arrive to extreme holiness and righteousness. We view those who are described as such as saints. Once again, we are all sons of God because of the unity we share through his light and righteousness. While I believe that we share more with saints because they have lived our physical life and suffered similar circumstances, our prayers to angels bring a similar outcome since they when we pray and carry those prayers up to heaven. They’re also happier when we follow in the path they paved with us which is why Christ said that “...there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15: 7).

I brought this up with my brother when I was telling him how hard this specific assignment was because it made me question so many things about my faith that I never thought were important and when I asked him if he would rather be an angel than a human, his answer was, and no pun intended, “hell yes.” He then proceeded to tell me how he’d wish he didn’t have to deal with annoying people all the time and he would love to fly around and not be limited by his body. But on a more serious note, above all, he wished he could be one of the thousands and thousands who do nothing but stand in front of God and praise Him because how amazing would it be if you’re standing around with an infinite number of illuminated souls that share their love for this one particular thing and show it constantly. It would be amazing. When he asked me, I told him that all sounded nice and beautiful, but I realized, angels don’t have bodies. They couldn’t receive communion. They couldn’t receive the one thing that is the definition of God’s love towards His creation. So why would I want to be one?

There is an artwork I found that I thought was pretty cool but it was too large to share so I just linked it here if anyone wants to check it out.

http://failmacaw.tumblr.com/post/68936265178/the-nine-choirs-of-heaven-an-info-graphic-for-my

MT

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[1] 1 Corinthians 10:14, Psalm 104:4, Revelation 18:1, Matthew 28:3

The Inescapable Self in Anselm’s Prayers to the Saints

It seems to me that a key issue that Anselm grapples with throughout his prayers to the saints is how the self is to seek God when it is the self that is causing the distance.  How is Anselm as a sinner supposed to find the strength within himself to start on the path towards healing, when the self that must find the strength is so sick? It seems a hopeless putting-the-fire-out-from- inside-the-house kind of situation.  In his anguished exploration of his own disease and his attempts to gain the mercy of the saints and the Father, he unfolds how complex the concept of self is as it pertains to God. On the one hand, he recognizes a certain “true self,” given to him by the Creator, that he should be working back towards - “Reconcile me to myself” (“Prayer to St. John the Baptist,” 213), he begs of his Creator and Saint John the Baptist.  In this particular prayer it is especially clear that this “myself” is his created state, pre-Fall and sinless. True, born post-Fall he was born in the “old rags of original sin” (56), but by his baptism he was “re-made” (85) by God, “clothed in the garments of innocence” (57); “You refashioned your gracious image in me” (66), he claims. Washed and remade in the image of God, in this state he is as the Creator intended him to be. 

However, if this is who he truly is, it is also clear that he is truly something else. Sin has pushed him far from this true self.  He laments how he has “superimposed” (68) the image of sin on the image of God, and knows that by the removal of such sins, he might do what he was meant to do - offer praise back up to the Creator (166-68). However, though these sentiments might suggest that his created, baptized nature is really there, subsisting below the image of sin, a temporary layer, it is abundantly clear in most of his language that he has been utterly changed by sin, made into a new self that is a stranger to this authentic self that he knows to be from God. “What was I, O God, as you had made me - and how I have made myself again” (41-42), he mourns, and “my sins have made me what I am” (33).  He has been recreated, as it were. Thus the confusing doubling that happens in his plea, “Restore me to myself”: both “me” and “myself” are, in his thinking, who he is. He yearns to become “myself,” the created self that is his from God which he sees as his true self, but at this moment he is “me,” a sinful self that he very truly is in the present. This doubling is most powerfully present at the beginning of the long passage where he tries to incite himself to escape himself - “Flee, flee, you who are of I know not what horrible substance; flee from yourself; be terribly afraid of yourself” (101-103). Here there is the subject who flees, who tries to leave behind the corrupted self that has separated him from God, and the corrupted self he flees from.  Yet the language here admits that in actual point of fact there are not two selves - the person fleeing is indeed the one of “horrible substance.” Thus, this true created self, this being made new after baptism, is who he is only insofar as Anselm recognizes it to be so. He grasps it with his reason, knows it to be his true self, who he should be, but it is not actual, a reality of existence. Reason might encourage him to flee, but in the end it is hopeless, for the fleeing subject is the same as the one he flees from. 

Anselm does acknowledge outright that this reason is powerless to help him.  As he says in his prayer to Saint Paul, “In fact, if I did see the reality I should not feel it or be moved by it.  Reason teaches this, but my heart does not grieve. I see this because it is so, and alas that I do not dissolve entirely in tears because it is so” (“Prayer to Saint Paul,” 79-82).  He knows one thing to be so, the reality of his fallenness, but here he laments that he cannot experience that knowing. Without this experience, there can be no change - he cannot “dissolve.”  With vivid, visceral imagery he conveys throughout the prayers how this self corrupted by sin is a hardened self, one that he is entirely trapped by - he describes how he is locked in the “chains of sin” (“Prayer to Saint Peter,” 128), “fast in despair” (“Saint Paul,” 122), “silent and insensible” (123), “Buried... hardened” (119), and ultimately “dead” (245).  His condition is all-consuming and totally binding, such that he cannot get beyond himself; his knowledge of this condition, purely cognitive, is inadequate. He requires an all-consuming reaction for an all-consuming problem - not knowledge, but understanding.  He writes, “... I did not grieve, as if unfeeling.  I knew through my rational nature, but I did not understand; death had made me insensitive” (263-266).  Understanding here is linked with grief and feeling, and speaks to a softening of the insensible self, a dissolution of the hardness.  It is the ability to feel again, the experience of the knowledge. This grieving is the first step on the path to recovery, for it gives the sinner hope of healing, and with this hope he may at last approach God, may know how to pray (86-90).  And for Anselm, it is through the saint that this softening is made possible. As he pleads with Saint Paul, “Sir, sir, come down upon this dead man; stretch yourself upon this dead man; make yourself not dead, but like the dead man. Let the caress of your compassionate touch make the dead man warm…” (282-286).  He begs the empathy of the saint, not that he meet Paul in his glorified state, but that Paul would meet him in his (Anselm’s) fallen state, and fit himself to him. He wants perfect community with this human who was once on earth, who himself was once hardened against God, and hopes that if he can rely totally on the saint’s relationship with God, insert himself into it, then he, too, might ultimately be softened, and might know how to approach God. 

Overall, Anselm seems very interested to me in dealing with what it is to be a human in the world, the grit reality of this present life - the painful, inescapable immediacy that comes with living in time, living mortally.  In other words, what it is to be a body.  It is not enough for him to simply know, to grasp a truth by means of reason; he wants to experience what he believes.  The visceral terms in which he describes his predicament speak to the fact that he has a very real and physical presence on earth, inside time, that cannot be denied, contrary to the promises of the Platonists or the Stoics.  Humans can know the creeds to be true, but that does not alter the fact that they must work through reality, all the pains of the present, who they really are at this very moment, even though they might know they were created in His image. The remedy required is equally visceral - weeping, grieving, dissolving.  Bernard of Clairvaux’s first kiss (Song of Songs I, Sermon 3, p. 17). Here community with the saint can come into play - a glorified human who once worked through the all-encompassing nature of sin, the very real condition of not being what you know you are meant to be, and by the grace of God overcame it. 

- JM

References

Saint Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion. Translated by Benedicta Ward. London: Penguin Books, 1973. 

Bernard of Clairvaux. Song of Songs I. InThe Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Vol. 2, trans. by Kilian Walsh. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1971. 

imag(in)e: finding your own face in the angelic image

By Dawn Treader

We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face.[1]

Cover of a Case for a Mirror with Courteous Scenes. 14th Century. The State Hermitage Museum, Inventory Number Ф-2317

Throughout our readings on angels, we find the invocation of the mirror. For his part, Dionysius conceives of the celestial hierarchy as a series of mirrors, receiving and fountaining light: all the members of the hierarchy are “mirrors most luminous and without flaw, receptive of the primal light…spreading this radiance ungrudgingly to those after it…”[2]

Likewise Margaret Barker writes of how “in traditional Christian art, both angels and saints have haloes; they reflect the glory they have seen…”[3]

In Hugh of St. Victor, rather than an explicit gesture towards the mirror, there is a more implicit rhetorical patterning that works according to the logic of reflection, in the sense that angels provide him with an opportunity to reflect on and think through those difficulties that we humans experience when we try to think of God.

If we then find ourselves reading through a hall of mirrors, it would seem that the phenomenon of the mirror itself calls for our reflection and study. On the one hand the mirror donates the world back to the world in uttermost clarity, but bent to the wrong purpose, the mirror itself can be bent to deception—smoke and mirrors, after all, and with them: nausea, vertigo, the sickness of a spiritual duplicity wherein I discover I have believed too readily in an illusion—

I want to write of this difficulty: how to reconcile my own capacities of deceptive self-projection with the power of a God who radiates his glory through an infinite act of refraction?

reflection: where it is never certain whether I am seeing merely myself or whether something truly other has broken into the horizon of vision.

mirror and the drama of projective atheism

mirror: what appears there is precisely my own face—but not myself. It is the image I throw out, the image I bestow on the inanimate, yet my reflection lacks all that is me: freedom of movement, interiority of thought, warmth of skin. In throwing myself outwards—in finding my own image—I’ve nonetheless reduced myself, so that I’m now alone with an appearance that looks like me but can’t approximate my capacities. As Ludwig Feuerbach writes in The Essence of Christianity,

Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself…. Thus, in and through God, man has in view himself alone.[4]

This is the mirror in its most empty, most draining, most atheistic sense. We project a God who  must save us so that we can avoid the harrowing act of attempting to steal divinity back to ourselves in order to save ourselves. Again, Feuerbach: “pleasanter to make one’s salvation dependent on a person than on the force of one’s own spontaneity.”[5]

Can Feuerbach’s vision ever be reconciled to the life of faith? Perhaps not wholesale, but Feuerbach is not without his devotional uses,[6] especially if we use his writings to draw our attention to the way we live this projective atheism: even those of us who are believers, because we love our own face more than we love the living God. I needn’t absorb Feuerbach wholesale, though he does bring me to admit that the object of devotion is bound by pre-conception:

I allow the appearance of God only under my own terms.

But to say that God appears to me only under the bounds of my conception doesn’t exclude the possibility of a real theophany. Here I break with Feuerbach and turn to Dionysius, who writes that “the Word of God artlessly makes use of poetic representations of sacred things…out of regard to our intelligence…moulding the inspired writings for it” [6.5]. It is precisely my preconceptions that God takes into account when he appears; therein,

emergence and shedding forth of light,

a light of which I can’t conceive but which I receive.

Only then does conception become possible,

when barrenness admits its bondage and binding.

Then what is in me and of me is no longer my own.

Simone Weil, steeped in the mystical tradition of Catholicism, confesses both this conceptual barrenness and the divine fertility in her essay “Atheism as a Purification”:

A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.[7]

Yet Weil echoes an idea that can be found in Dionysius himself, as Eric D. Perl writes,

But Dionysius’ Neoplatonic negative theology transcends atheism no less than it does theism. To be sure, Dionysius is not a theist, since theism, as ordinarily understood, involves the claim that God exists (whatever qualifications may then be added concerning the ‘mode’ of his existence); and many misunderstandings have arisen from attempts to interpret Dionysius and other Neoplatonists theistically and thus not to take with full seriousness their insistence that the One or God is beyond being and is not anything at all, that no common term whatever can embrace both God and his products. But neither is Dionysius an atheist, for on his principles it is no more correct to deny that God exists, to say ‘God is not’ or ‘There is no God’ is still to consider God as some (putative) being, and then to deny that there is such a being, as when we say ‘There is no tenth planet’ or ‘There are no unicorns.’ This still treats God as some distinct conceptual object and so fails to truly intend God at all.[8]

mirror and the reflective reception of an elsewhere light

So I go back to the mirror.

Because if I stand there long enough, I realize that I am not all that appears. After all, there is this other surface—the mirror—objectively before me, in no way the product of my projection. What’s more, it widens a field of vision, otherwise unavailable to me. If I look long enough, I see that light—sourced from elsewhere, from above, from the window in the corner—I see that light is

being thrown on me

and I am the surface of its appearance. If the mirror can act as a solipsistic trap for the ricocheting of my own projections, it nevertheless has this other potential which requires the sudden transformation of my gaze: only once I have allowed this larger world of pure otherness to break forth on me is projection interrupted by reception.

And here we have the second role that Dionysius attributes to the “representations of sacred things,” these mirrors all around us: in them we perceive not only a likeness of form suitable to “our capacity” but we also discover that in the mirror what is revealed is “conceal[ed].”[9]

Which is to say revelation preserves the otherness of what it reveals: revelation is the proclamation of otherness itself.

mirror: I see a light that is neither cast from me nor from the glass itself:

an elsewhere light that enables sight itself:

God’s otherness preserved in my gaze

though because the eye is filled with light

and it is in me, I see it without

me. Shudder of theophany: “through his goodness” my own personhood at every moment “brought into being” so that I can see that I am not God and God is not me:

the integrity of our difference preserved, only then does “participation” in the divine life become possible, because communion is predicated on difference regarded under the terms of love.[10]

And then, looking into the mirror and seeing not myself, I pray with the seraphim: “Lord, to be fed with the food of thy fair face.”[11]

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Endnotes
[1] 1 Corinthians 13:12, Douay-Rheims Version.

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, ed. Roger Pearse (Ipswich, UK: Tertullian.org, 2004), III.2, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm.

[3] Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011), 75.

[4] Emphasis added. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, Second Edition, vol. Volume XV, The English and Foreign Philosophical Library (London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1881), 11, 30, https://libcom.org/files/The%20Essence%20of%20Christianity.pdf.

[5] Feuerbach, Volume XV:140.

[6] On the devotional possibilities of certain atheistic philosophies, see Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).
[6.5] Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, II.1.

[7] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 114.

[8] Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 2007), 15.

[9] Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, II.2.

[10] Dionysius the Areopagite, IV.1.

[11] Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, eds., “The Barkers: The Fall of the Angels,” in York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), l. 76.

Christianity VS. Paganism in the prayers to Saints

When I was reading the stories of Saint in the Golden Legend, I felt very uncomfortable because it reminds me of the superstitious behaviors by the “fake Buddhists” in China. It reminds me of my grandmother’s yearly worshipping of the god of Kitchen, and of the miracles happening to those who worship different Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the temples. They believe that if you pray to a Bodhisattva--a human who reached enlightenment and gained many superpowers--he will come to you and assist your prayer to become true. The saints in the Golden Legend gave me the same impression. They have superpowers. They perform miracles. They fulfill the wishes of those who pray to them, and they were incarnated after death to appear to people and save the good from the evil. If Christianity is the true religion according to my Christian friends (who think all other religions are evil), what’s different between the popular anecdotes of saints and bodhisattvas? How is Christianity different from “paganism”?

As Professor Brown pointed out in the class about temple theology, the core of Christianity is worshipping. From our class yesterday about the saints, I affirmed my understanding that the core difference between Christianity and paganism is that Christians worship the true God--the Lord, Yahweh, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, while pagans worship others. Even though it appears to me that people worship the Saints, they are asking the Saints through the prayers to pray for them to the only God. Saints take the roles of intercessors and mediators between the people and God, and the goal of the prayers to the Saints is to reach God.

However, one might ask, as Jesus is the perfect mediator between man and God, since his task to come to the world is as such, why would people in the Middle Ages need Saints to take this role? Isn’t Jesus himself enough, as he said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”? Let’s probe into this question from three aspects.

Who are the Saints?

Saints are human beings like we are, bearing the original sin when they were born. The difference is that they have a pure mind that tames the senses of flesh and thus they don’t sin. They reached immortality, and become Adam and Eve before the Fall, enjoying themselves in the paradise with God. They are who we are supposed to be, what we are without sin. The halos they wear in the medieval art demonstrates that they enjoy perfect unity with God, and that they become the light from God, who is the source of light.

From Saints to God

The saints seem to make the relationship between God and people more accessible. It is because, firstly, they are human beings, once a sinner like I am, and they understand me a sinner. St. Anselm wrote in his Prayer to St. Peter:

Remember that Christ asked you three times

If you loved him,

and when three times you confessed it

He said to you, “Feed my sheep”.

He is indeed a lover of sheep

Who thus sifts the love of the shepherd

Before committing them to him.

When you had confessed that you loved him,

Then he confided his sheep to you.

How, then, can his shepherd spurn his sheep? (137)

St. Anselm contemplated on St. Peter’s rejection of Jesus. He knows that Peter can emphasize with him as a sinner. As Peter still reaches immortality thanks to God’s Grace, he becomes a model for humans and gives us hope that we can be part of the heavenly family as well. Also, the prayers to the Saints help us to see different aspects of God. God is so complex and wonderful, and it is hard to understand him as a sinner. For the medievals, the biggest dream is to have the vision of God and to see his glory. As the saints are each light of God, they reflect different aspects of God in their own life stories. Through Peter, we see Jesus’s love as mercy and forgiveness. Through St. Catherine, we see God’s dignity, wisdom, and eloquence. Through all the martyrs, we see God’s bravery and transcendence of the worldly suffering. No saints can encompass all the beauty and complexity of the Lord. And their beauty, purity, and holiness are given by the Lord. And thus, to pray to them is to understand God in different forms.

God, Saints, and prayers

God, Saints and the sinner form a triangular relationship through the prayers. The deep sins I have to block me to see God, who is too wonderful for me to understand. But you, my dear Saint, you understand my sins as you were once a human, and you have now become one with the most Holy Father. And please pray for me, the sinner, to the Lord. And because you are rejoicing in the love with Him, I can glimpse and enjoy His love through you. As Professor Brown states in “Anselm and Praying with the Saints”, “God moves the sinner to repentance through the saint; the sinner moves the saint to intercede for him through God; and the saint moves God to have mercy on the sinner” （120）.

The topic on the Saints helps me to understand Christianity’s specialness. It is easy for me to confuse the prayers to the Saints who perform miracles with the worshipping of the gods in China when I see it on the surface. In Christianity, everything always points to the One behind--the Lord Yahweh, while in paganism, Chinese families light fireworks on the fifth day in the Lunar New Year to the god of wealth, because he is the one in charge of the money. I feel uncomfortable about the superstitious acts of some Chinese people back at home because they stay on the surface of the miracles but don’t go behind it. Buddhism is about gaining wisdom, instead of creating images and worshipping Buddhas, the wise men, just as we can’t stay on the surface of waiting for Saints’ miracles, but should honor them as a way to see God.

---YTL

Reference:

Anselm of Canterbury, Prayers nos. 8-16, trans. Ward, pp. 127-206 Rachel Fulton Brown, “Anselm and Praying with the Saints,” in Experiments in Empathy: The Middle Ages, ed. Karl Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (Turnholt: Brepols, 2013), pp. 115-38.