Who Are These Holy Ones? by Romano Guardini

Saint Paul was the great witness to the Christian life in its beginnings, and his words will always remain a great watershed of truth about any religious question that concerns us. But if we inquire in his writings for an explanation of the meaning of sanctity, his ideas seem at first quite strange. Read, for instance, his salutation at the opening of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians:

"Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the Church of God that is at Corinth, with all the saints that are in the whole of Achaia."

At the end of the same Epistle we read: "All the saints send you greetings". The saints in this reference are the people of the country from which the Apostle is writing, Macedonia.

What could Paul have meant by his use of the word "saints'' in these passages? Evidently he was referring to all the Christians who received the Good News, who confessed the Christian faith, and who were reborn in baptism to a new life. Accordingly, he intended something different by the word "saints" than we ourselves do. When we speak of saints, we think of those great individuals of Christianity whose solemn figures are found in our churches. But here is Saint Paul, speaking of people who live out their lives at Corinth, at Thessalonica and at Ephesus; who believe, who hope, who struggle against their weaknesses in the spiritual order and who from the standpoint of religious history do not seem to be extraordinary in any way. What then constituted for Paul the special character designated by the word Saint?

First of all we should appreciate the fact that in the early days of the Church it was something quite remarkable just to become a Christian, just to try to live as a Christian. If a man made up his mind to become a Christian, he tore himself loose from a whole skein of practices and habits and social customs that identified his life up to that point. He became a stranger even to his closest friends. If his family did not join him in his conversion, he was frequently rejected by them and separated from them forever.

In Roman and Greek antiquity, moreover, the whole of life was permeated with pagan customs. Language was filled with illusions to the gods, to myths; the manner of life differed entirely from that which the Christian considered a matter of obligation. It was a painful thing to become a Christian-it involved misunderstanding, troubles, difficulties without number. Religious celebrations of the community, altogether brilliant in many cases and become a matter of intense sentiment for the average citizen, were forbidden to the convert. Since the ceremonies of the city and the state were bound up with the national gods, it was impossible for the Christian to participate in them. Either that, or else he had to maintain a very difficult reserve - one that required as much renunciation as it did wisdom. In matters dealing with the State, which considered itself to be divine just as the Emperor viewed himself as a high priest, it was inevitable that the Christian should get into troublesome predicaments. He thus found himself sharply at odds with the public law and the local courts.

Whoever became a Christian undertook, then, a course burdened with terrible consequences. He entered upon a life in which he had frequently to defy his friends, to swim in a sea of renunciation, and to look forward to eventual imprisonment, persecution or even death. In this light it is not hard to understand why Paul would refer to the early Christians as saints.

However, there is yet something else, and this is the main point. The people of early Christian times really understood what it was to be a pagan. They knew from their own experience the limitations of paganism, They knew that in spite of its great culture and refinement, one remained a prisoner of the forces of nature. They knew that despite the fantastic intellectual and artistic achievements of paganism, it offered little consolation to the distressed and lonely human heart. They knew that the beautiful poetic myths and fables of paganism notwithstanding, relatively little was done to satisfy the profound human aspiration for truth and liberty.

In Christianity, people of ancient times encountered for the first time grandeur, Good News. They experienced the profound meaning of matters to which we have become so accustomed that we are almost blind to their greatness: "Christ's love which surpasses all knowledge" (Eph. 3:19), for example, the story of the hundredth sheep for which the Good Shepherd ceaselessly searches, the Bread which is given for the life of the world. Christians were learning what it is to grow every day in the new life of the Kingdom of God. They were, quite simply, living a new kind of existence ruled by the God who was also their King and their Saint; the apostle thus had the right to call them saints themselves.

Condensed from The Saints in Daily Christian Life, by Fr. Romano Guardini. © 1966 by Dimension Books.  This article appeared under the title, Who Should Be a Saint in the had copy of the Charismatics.    Editors' Note: In the newer translations of 2 Corinthians, the word "saints" has been replaced with the words, "holy ones" in the New American Bible.