The Saint and the Writer between Life and Work

What is it about?

A Christian saint is to a cultural saint what life is to work. If work is part of a saint’s life, life is part of a cultural saint’s work; if work testifies to a saint’s life, life testifies to a cultural saint’s work; and, if a saint’s work is as saintly homogeneous as his or her life, a cultural saint’s life is as culturally heterogeneous as his or her work. Initially, complex communities imagine themselves as being embodied in a saint. Such communities enter modernity by forsaking this iconic, vertical imagining for textual, horizontal imagining made possible by the novel and the newspaper, works that belong not to any individual life but to the community that can identify with them. Thus, paradoxically, a saint’s life becomes mortified in an icon, a work, and a cultural saint’s work is continued in the next work and thus given life. A saint is the hero of a monologic hagiography, and a cultural saint is the author of dialogic novels. A saint is an object of belief reproduced in church, and a cultural saint is the object of knowledge reproduced in school. Finally, the synchronic opposite of a saint is a secular saint, a Protestant worker in service of the holy, and the opposite of a cultural saint is a “cultural worker”, a worker in service of culture.

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Why is it important?

Links the social role of pre-modern religious sainthood to modern cultural sainthood and post-modern celebrity sainthood.