Window Quarterly
Vol. I, No. 4, 1990
Copyright 1990

[Permission is granted to use, print, reproduce this article 
provided the following acknowledgment is given:  From 
Window Quarterly 1, 4  (1990);  ACRAG c. 1990. 

***

The Lost Meaning of Sainthood

by Vigen Guroian

There has been talk of late within the Armenian Church that 
new members should be added to its list of saints.  Hratch 
Tchilingirian cites in his article "Canonization of the 
Genocide Victims," (Window, Summer 1990) the joint 
communique of Vazken I and Karekin II, of  April 1989, in 
which both Catholicoi proposed canonization of the victims 
of the Armenocide.  In his article, Tchilingirian raises the 
important question of whether the Armenian Church is 
actually prepared to engage in such a serious activity. 
Rightly, he points out also the theological and practical 
pitfalls of blanketly canonizing all 1.5 million victims of that 
awful catastrophe.

There is no question that among that number there were 
many who died in the way of the ancient martyrs or whose 
suffering even short of death (need we think further than 
Komitas Vartabed?) must count as a mark of supreme 
holiness. Yet, oddly, perhaps even ironically, the Armenian 
Church, which has given the whole catholic and universal 
Church so many new martyrs and confessors in this century, 
may lack, as Dn. Hratch suggests,  the clarity of vision and 
the will to make the crucial distinction between victims and 
martyrs.  Indeed, the Armenian Church has been confusing 
victimology with martyrology for some time now. The 
political as well as psychological reasons which have 
tempted the Church into this confusion are not difficult to 
identify.  As Dn. Hratch observes: "Seventy five years have 
passed and the world seems to 'ignore' the victims of the 
Genocide, thus, in our frustration, the ultimate honor that we 
can render our victims is to declare them as saints."  The 
confusion of victimology and martyrology has been a useful 
expedient, since a godless world knows what victims are and 
honors them under such banners as human rights and 
national sovereignty but does not know how to value as 
martyrs in the Christian sense victims who died as witnesses 
to the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ.  One cannot wholly 
begrudge Armenian secular and political leaders for adopting 
the strategy of "victim politics."  The Church, however is 
another matter .  It ought to able to make and insist upon the 
distinction between dying because one is Armenian and 
willingly giving one's life up for Christ.

Sainthood and the Culture in Which We Live

The ill effects for the Church of the strategy of victimization 
are compounded by the cultural environments in which most 
Armenians live, whether in the diaspora or within Armenia.  
But here I restrict my observations to the culture in which 
Armenians of the Western diaspora live.  In this culture's art, 
music, literature, television  and cinema the saints are 
virtually absent.   In such a context, even the repeated 
mention of the saints in Christian liturgies loses the power to 
persuade people that the saints are truly present, that there 
really is a communio sanctorum.  I need only look within 
myself to realize that for modern people, including the vast 
majority of those who sit in the pews of Armenian parishes 
here in America , the saints are culturally "useless."  We do 
without them; and if we give thought to why once saints were 
important to people, we are baffled.

Yet within antiquity, as Christianity expanded in a pagan 
world, saints were expected, looked for by Christians as 
proof and testimony to the truth of their faith.  Indeed in the 
early Church the identification of the saints was populist and 
spontaneous.  There were no set rules for identifying saints or 
for their canonization.   At first the honor was reserved 
primarily for persons who died for the faith as witnesses to 
Christ, i.e. martyrs.  But in the second and third centuries in 
the last days of pagan Rome when persecution of Christians 
increased, it became evident that death by capital punishment 
could not be the only test of exceptional holiness and 
imitation of Christ.  There were in the various churches 
individuals who for reasons largely beyond their control 
escaped violent death but who, nevertheless, made supreme 
public profession of their faith. These took the name of 
confessor.

Later after the great persecutions, with the Emperor 
Constantine's conversion and the legalization of Christianity  
in 313) and its institution as the religion of the empire under 
St Theodosius in 381, persecution ceased.  Martyrdom had 
been held forth as special because of its likeness to Christ's 
willing surrender of his life for the sake of God's redemptive 
truth and purpose.  Now the lives of the ascetics and monks 
were venerated because of their cruciform way of living. 
Their paths of discipleship and self-denial were held up as 
equal in holiness to the way in which the martyrs had died 
and the confessors had expended their lives.

And so there followed from this new veneration of the lives 
more than the deaths of persons other categories of 
sainthood.  Confessors came to include men, most often 
bishops, who dedicated their lives to pastoral concerns.  
Nobility and monarches who served the Christian realm well 
were also included.  And the lists expanded to include 
mystics and scholars, missionaries and founders of monastic 
orders. In this duration, the process of identifying saints 
became increasingly more formal requiring the interventions 
of local bishops and, later, gatherings of the bishops in 
councils and special sessions.  In the Latin West, this process 
became highly formalized and legalistic. Very specific 
criteria for beatification and canonization were in place by 
the late middle ages and there was the added requirement of 
papal approval.  In the Christian East there was less tendency 
toward formalization and centralization.  In both East and 
West, however, there were practical reasons and 
circumstances which required some formalization and 
central control of the cults of saints.  For instance, local cults 
of saints and their veneration threatened to overwhelm the 
church calendar, detracting from the significance and 
commemoration of other feast days.
	
All this makes very interesting history.  But one is bound to 
question whether this discussion about  sainthood gets any of 
us closer to a knowledge of  the saint.  The church historian 
Peter Brown has argued in his remarkable study The Cult of 
the Saints, that for Christians of antiquity and the middle 
ages "the holy man" served "as Christ made accessible."  In 
him was available "in distilled" form the very character of 
Christ.  The saint bridged in a personal and immediate 
fashion, as the high theology and doctrine of the Church 
could not for the peasant or villager, life and death, time and 
eternity, the here and the hereafter.  So it is not surprising 
that after the holy man's death early Christians held forth 
such a  figure as an efficacious intercessor through prayer 
and worship with a divinity who in so many other respects 
was hidden and unapproachable. As the Roman Catholic 
theologian John A. Coleman has put it: "Saints... traditionally 
served as God's mediators, signs of the divine presence even 
at the level of the trivial, local and everyday."
	
I find it difficult, however,  to imagine how Coleman's or any 
similar experience and understanding of the saints can be 
rehabilitated in our time.  Let us face it, the many saints of 
the Armenian calendar whose initial, often local, veneration 
got their lives included ultimately in our Haysmavoork [the 
book that contains the daily readings of the saints' lives] are 
about as remote to contemporary Armenian Christians as the 
Chinese emperors of the Middle Kingdom.   And how many 
believers turn to these saints as a comfort to their own 
suffering, as illumining of Christian virtue ,or as intercessors 
in prayer.  Those saints with whose lives Armenians are most 
familiar are celebrated because they have become understood 
as creators and defenders of the Armenian nation and 
symbols of a resurgent nationalism.   There is little sense that 
I get when in Armenian churches that the invocation of the 
names of the saints is experienced as a holy presence among 
the worshippers, that those living are in real communion with 
the saints, or that the saints represent a compelling example 
as to how those living ought to conduct their lives in 
conformity to a crucified God.
	
But we are all moderns.  We carry our cameras and notepads 
and we visit the places where our ancestors once worshipped 
- in Armenia, where Gregory with his God-scorched eyes saw 
the Son descend, where the holy translators labored to breath 
the breath of God into the flesh of Armenia, where the monks 
prayed and martyrs shed their blood. Do we, however, hear 
the voices of the saints?  Do we experience their presence? 
The great twentieth century poet T. S. Eliot raised these 
questions when he wrote of a sojourn to the site of an 
abandoned 17th century English monastic community.  Yet it 
might have been in Armenia or anywhere where Christians 
have set down the cross and prayed: "If you came this way/ 
Taking the route, starting anywhere, / It would always be the 
same: you would put off/ Sense and notion. You are not here 
to verify? Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity/Or carry 
report.  You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid.  
And prayer is more/ Than an order of words, the conscious 
occupation/ Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice 
praying./ And what the dead had no speech for, when living,/ 
They can tell you, being dead; the communication/ Of the 
dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the/ living./ 
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England - 
[Armenia] - and nowhere.  Never and always."

Why We Need Saints

A version of this article was given as a lecture this year at the 
annual retreat of priests of the Prelacy.  The retreat is 
traditionally held on the feast of St. Levond, the patron saint 
of priests.  I noted, how remote such a  feast was from the 
consciousness and daily living of the people priests serve.   
Did any of us honestly believe that for the vast majority of 
even those who were regular church attenders patron saints 
and guardian angels had any strong reality?   Wouldn't it be 
more honest to admit that patron saints were about as 
important to Armenian Christians as other curiosities of 
medieval folk, such as fairies, demons, and leprechauns?   In 
the minds of us moderns, sickness is accounted for in strictly 
scientific terms.  Vocations and professions are not perceived 
as having any relation to an eternal or supernatural destiny of 
persons. In such a world what need is there for healing 
intercessors or models of holiness?
	
At issue in the Church's contemporary consideration of 
sainthood is our very identity as Christians in a post-
Christendom world.  We may not be aware of it, but we need 
saints for reasons we have forgotten. The Russian religious 
philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev once observed: The Christian 
world created the ideal of the saint, i.e. of man completely 
enlightened and transfigured that had conquered its old 
nature.  What image of man comparable to the ideal . . . of 
the saint . . . has been created by modern history?  The ideal 
of the citizen cannot be put on the same level. . . A number 
of professional types which have their own ideal 
qualifications have appeared - the type of the scientist, the 
artist, the politician, the business man, the workingman.  It is 
characteristic of our age that the ideal of man is split up into 
a number of professional images and ideals, [but] the 
wholeness is lost. . . . [Marxists have tried] to convert  [the 
type of the workingman] into a complete ideal image - the 
image of the "comrade" .  . . But in the "comrade" the ideal of 
man is finally extinguished, the Divine image and likeness is 
distorted.

We live in a culture which does not know what virtue is, 
except in the loose and distended sense of just and fair 
treatment of others.  Ours is a culture which has not the 
sufficient narrative accounts of life to persuade us that there 
are some things worth dying for (except perhaps nation), that 
truth and error have eternal consequences, or that love is 
more than a pleasant sentiment or good feeling but is the 
divine measure of our sinfulness and the purifying flame of 
God's judgment.

Still more importantly,  Berdyaev was making the point that 
we moderns have lost a unified vision of the virtues and of 
the whole human being before God.  We live fragmented 
lives with a multitude of roles which compete in our minds 
with no sense of coherence or goal.  Marxism tried to 
rehabilitate the complete image of the ideal human being in 
the new Communist man.  We all know better than ever as a 
result of the events and disclosures of our most recent 
contemporary political history, even in Armenia itself, the 
utter disaster of that Promethean venture.  The ancients 
achieved an image of the whole and mature human being in 
the sage and in the Homeric hero.  For Christians it was the 
saint.  The saint was the ideal of the theanthropic human 
being.- the perfect practitioner of divine-manhood.  In the 
saint, the virtues were united and gained a permanence of 
character through a profound love which witnesses to its 
divine origin and burns with a desire for a life with God.  In 
the saint, the Christian recognizes the path to perfection to 
which Adam was called by God when he created the human 
being in his own image and likeness.

Our culture has lost the example of the saints and the stories 
of their lives which once upon a time provided in Eastern and 
Western Christendoms alike the narrative contexts in which 
persons could strive to be virtuous and discern to what end 
such a life well lived was directed.  But then I am resigned to 
the fact that Christendom has passed, as has Christian 
Armenia.  As  Christians in a post-Christendom age we are 
challenged to answer the question posed by a twentieth 
century Christian martyr and victim of Nazism,  Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer.  Asked Bonhoeffer: How can we live the 
Christian life in a "world come of age?"

St. Anthony of Egypt, St. Basil, Sts. Hripsime and Gayane, 
St. Gregory the Illuminator, St. Nersess the Gracefull can yet 
be instructive to us in living the Christian life.   I am 
convinced, also, that they need the help of new saints whom 
we have not yet named.   Remembering the holy men and 
women of the Old Testament the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews says: "What a record all these men have won by 
their faith!  Yet they did not receive what God had promised, 
because God had decided on an even better plan for us.  His 
purpose was that only in company with us would they be 
made perfect" (Heb. 11: 39-40).  It is important that 
Armenians today identify persons of this age who have lived 
sanctified lives and from whom we can take example in 
living the Christian life.  These new saints will bring alive 
the old and contribute to our union and perfection in Christ.

One sure indication of the vitality of a Christian religious 
community is not only its capacity to produce such lives but 
to know how to identify them and hold them forth for 
remembrance and veneration.  And so there is much to think 
about and be concerned about as to why the Armenian 
Church has been incapable of identifying and honoring such 
lives since Gregory of Datev in the 15th century.  We are 
desperately out of practice in naming saints, leave aside 
giving up our lives to imitation of their lives.

The point I want to close with is that the ancient wisdom of 
the catholic churches which have retained the veneration of 
saints is worth keeping.  Christians gain an understanding of 
salvation, of holiness, and receive instruction in good and 
evil not primarily from something called Christian 
philosophy or in bodies of ethical rules or laws but in the 
person of Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection.  On 
the basis of this revelation our vision extends backward to 
the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs and prophets of the 
Old Testament who in faith waited upon the Messiah; and 
our vision extends forward from Christ to the proto-martyr 
Stephen and all the martyrs, confessors, ascetics and monks, 
bishops, doctors of the faith, Christian princes and queens 
who followed Christ's example and whom we call saints.

The call for the Armenian Church to canonize those martyred 
in the Armenocide is valid.   But I tremble at what meaning 
might be given to these lives and deaths by a national 
community traumatized with a sense of victimization and 
driven by all too often desperate nationalistic aspirations.  
Will these new saints merely serve our most atavistic and 
self-preservationist instincts or will we recapture in their 
lives and deaths the paschal and redemptive meaning of our 
Christian faith?  Martyrs and confessors of the Genocide 
must be remembered.  But I suspect also that the saints we 
need most are those we look for least.  For Armenians in the 
diaspora, especially, are thoroughly modern and captive to 
the same myopic and morally vacuous secularity as their 
non-Armenian neighbors and fellows in the workplace.  We 
must look for saints of ordinary life, saintly parents, lawyers, 
businessmen or teachers, whose lives strike us as, in and of 
themselves, a kind of miracle, in so far as they show in their 
lives a measure of heroism and sanctity not expected by the 
world in which we live.  Let us always remember that the 
first mark of a saint is quite simply holiness.


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