In a letter to Eberhard Bethge written in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered a conversation with ‘a young French pastor’ (identified by the editor as Jean Lasserre):
He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast.
[1]Bonhoeffer’s intuition is that intending ‘to become a saint’ is not the way to become one.
[2] Even though desiring the honour of heaven appears to be a way to surmount the lust for earthly glory, is it not merely a displacement of the same desire? Eliot’s Thomas is not swayed by the promise of earthly honour, appealing though it is. Far dearer to his heart is the promise of heavenly glory. This temptation introduces a complex problem for Eliot and indeed for the whole theological tradition: what place does the heavenly prize have in the motivation of the holy to serve God? Does the offer of a heavenly reward or a martyr’s crown corrupt the pursuit of true sanctity? The question is most troublesome: the very idea of martyrdom threatens to collapse under its weight. Is the heavenly city merely the earthly city on a larger scale? Is the desire for a higher place in heaven, which Origen among others certainly believed would be bestowed on the martyrs,
[3] any better than a desire for earthly glory? Thomas discovers himself in the untenable situation of wanting that for which the desiring makes the having apparently impossible.
[4]Is some form of what has been known as ‘Quietism’ the only way forward? The controversy over Quietism in late seventeenth century France brought just this dilemma to the fore. The impulse of the movement was certainly not new: Meister Eckhardt had been promulgating its main features over four hundred years earlier. Essentially, Quietism taught that any action motivated by self-interest to any degree was offensive to God. To achieve the purity of love characteristic of a saint, one must utterly divest oneself of self-interest – even to the extent of renouncing interest in salvation itself (and thus, like Bonhoeffer, renounce the desire to become a saint). As Madame Guyon wrote: ‘[W]e must suppress all desire…even the desire for the joys of Paradise’.
[5] Her ecclesiastical advocate, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, defended this ideal in more academic terms in his Explication des Maximes des Saints, arguing that , for a few especially gifted saints, there was the possibility to achieve a pure or disinterested love of God. Pressed by his adversary and fellow-bishop Jean-Bénigne Bossuet, Fénelon conceded that the saint might continue to hope, but argued that this was simply because this is commanded by God. Rightly, Bossuet could see that his opponent was stretching: this was no hope worthy of the name, just as Fénelon’s ‘pure love’ was mechanistic and inert, and barely recognisable as a species of love at all.
[6] Quite apart from the problem of the overwhelming Scriptural testimony to heavenly rewards which it is apparently right to desire, the Quietist alternative foundered on the rocks of its own logic, not least because, in making a nothing of the self, it made the value of self-sacrifice questionable.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM, 1999), p. 369.
[2] His bracketed comment is perhaps to be read as not wishing to appear malignant about Lasserre.
[3] Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom L
[4] In his study on martyrdom, von Balthasar makes a comment that in one sense encapsulates Thomas’ predicament: ‘Man is capable of misusing and abusing everything for his own selfish ends, even the invitation to sacrifice his life for the sake of that love from which faith springs’ Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, p. 36.. Could even the pursuit of martyrdom turn out to be perverse? Certainly, this is what the modern world (Salman Rushdie being our example) has suspected.
[5] Quoted in Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God : The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum, Bampton Lectures (London ; New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1931), p. 454.
[6] Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment : The Bampton Lectures, 2003, The Bampton Lectures (Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), p. 300-1.
