Trying on Faith
Eliot Weinberger weaves fact, fiction, and faith into his curated collection of angels and saints.
Review by Mark Clemens
It’s simple enough to describe Eliot Weinberger’s Angels & Saints: a survey of theological teaching, mystic writings, folk traditions, and legends about—obviously—angels and saints. How to read this odd, highly polished book is another story. That New Directions, the publisher of Pound and Bolaño, issued it provides one clue. Another is Weinberger’s career as a grouchy antiquarian and belletrist of the old school, an incorrigible snob redeemed by the passion and felicity of his writing. Always scholarly but never academic, he maintains omnivorous historical interests while also championing modern poetry—he has translated Octavio Paz, Cecilia Vicuña, and Bei Dao. Here he draws on a small library’s worth of Christian writings and history from the New Testament era through the 1950s (plus some gleanings from Judaism and Islam) to create a collage of overlapping voices—or, better, a catena.
The book is split into two parts, “Angels” and “Saints” (there is also a single-page coda, “The Afterlife,” a great grim joke which I will not ruin). “Angels” is a compendium of assertions and arguments made over the centuries about those “ever movable intellectual substances,” as John of Damascus called them in the 8th century. Weinberger catalogs the activities of angels in the Bible as well as later speculations: their appearance, duties, names, hierarchies, what they are made of, their means of perception and speech, whether and how they can sin—the devil is discussed as well. We learn Cotton Mather saw an angel. We learn John Calvin thought they eat real food while Aquinas said they only appear to. We learn Meister Eckhart believed Gabriel was an assumed name and not his real one, which “no one can know.” In spite of Eckhart’s claim we are treated to a long litany of angels’ proper names (“Penemue, who taught mankind the corrupting art of writing; Hakamiah, guardian angel of France”), all taken from mystic writings. The tone here is scholastic, the sources mostly clerical, the object inquiry and enumeration: reasoning from the available evidence, what can we say about these beings? Quite a lot, it seems.
“Saints,” on the other hand, is about devotion. This section is comprised of short biographies of 143 Christian saints, a few taking up several pages but most very short, some a single sentence long, arranged in rough chronological order with some whimsical groupings—saints who had pets, saints who escaped arranged marriages, saints named Hyacinth. A few mystics are presented entirely through their own words. Well-documented figures are presented next to and in the same way as the obscure or unreal (the entire entry for Dathus: “He became bishop of Ravenna after a dove miraculously appeared above his head, but it is doubtful that he existed”).
The emphasis is on the miraculous and the legendary. Each life is pared down to anecdotes that have captivated believers and amused or disgusted skeptics. This technique is startling with Weinberger’s best-known saints, who are sometimes cut out of their own story. Gregory the Great is restricted to briefly playing the foil to an unnamed hermit, Bernard of Clairvaux to a dream his mother had while pregnant. Of Elizabeth of Hungary, the great patron of the poor, Weinberger only notes her Orpheus-like dismemberment after death.
The book is a kind of acting exercise—the reader is invited to try on the sort of faith that takes miracles seriously.
Weinberger is not a Christian, and yet he presents his material largely free of eyerolls. Everything interests him. He notes when his sources contradict or misquote each other, and introduces ironies through his editorial choices, his framing and juxtapositions, but mostly grants the tradition the dignity of speaking for itself. Often this is achieved through basic verb choices: St. Brigid was not “said to” hang her cloak on a sunbeam, she simply hung it. In this way the book is a kind of acting exercise—the reader is invited to try on the sort of faith that takes miracles seriously.
This presents a challenge to the modern reader, believer or not, but also makes the book great fun to read. The tone is dry and detached, but the structure is poetic—both in the way Weinberger braids together individual facts and commentators, and in the arrangement of larger pieces. “Angels” begins with speculation about the materiality of angels and ends with the mute fact of a corpse, a symmetry reminiscent of a pair of wings (the point where they join is a line from Rilke). Not coincidentally, that corpse is present to illustrate a phenomenon of lividity where pooling blood creates a pattern of wings across the shoulders. This is the cunning way Weinberger has built his book, allowing new things to be seen with each reading.
Angels & Saints is a puzzle, an object for contemplation. By highlighting the weird and supernatural, Weinberger isolates what is most polarizing about the cult of the saints. That is, he points us to what must, if it happened at all, be the work of God. This is difficult for the contemporary sincere believer who would like to—not downplay the miraculous, not exactly, but make it supplemental to the work of salvation, to render it trivial with a shrug and a vague appeal to “mystery.” I myself have never given a moment’s thought to what substance angels might be made of, but seeing the sheer volume of words devoted to this question through centuries, I begin to wonder whether my indifference is really to my credit. Those rigorous investigations, almost scientific, are not mere pedantry: these catalogers and cranks are trying to pin down the precise nature of angels in order to better understand God and so worship him better, more truly. Perhaps this is one reason Weinberger includes seventeen illuminated “grid poems” created by the ninth-century Benedictine Hrabanus Maurus. These are Latin devotional poems overlaid on iconography or allegorical geometric figures: holy content that demands a form splendid enough to contain it.
The beauty of these lives and thoughts entices us to read them earnestly, but not credulously: Weinberger provides good cause for doubt as well—long stories about Magdalena de la Cruz, Philomena, and Thérèse of Lisieux are clearly meant to focus our attention on how saints are created and the way devotion and more cynical motives can alike cloud the truth. Even when he misattributes a line from Paul’s letter to the Romans to Peter, we might wonder whether this is intentional, a lesson in how an innocent mistake can reroute tradition like a stone in a stream. Ultimately Angels & Saints asks us to reflect on what kind of truth is captured in theology and hagiography. The latter is not biography, or includes it only incidentally. Rather, it is an attempt to write about people as God sees them. Legends are part of this practice. By embellishing a life, they invite us to consider what goes on beneath its surface.
For the unbeliever, this book may be something like strolling through a well-curated museum, getting to examine certain choice bits of Christianity up close (as in a museum, Weinberger’s clippings are divorced from their context). Yet in another way, this arrangement is their context. Consider how an artist is known through her paintings: when we view a work in isolation, we start by admiring its subject or its technique, what it is “about.” When we walk into a gallery filled with an artist’s paintings, we start looking for connections, the essential union between them. We begin, in other words, to think about their creator.
Mark Clemens is the winner of the 2018 Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize. He lives outside Chicago.
Angels & Saints was published by New Directions on September 1, 2020. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
