THE PASSING OF THE SAINT

John M. Mecklin's New Book Reveals Scholarship And Sympathetic Insight of Famous Teacher

by John M.Mecklin. University of Chicago Press, 1941,206 pp. $2.00.

THE RISE AND DECLINE of the saint in relation to the social order is the theme of this work. Augustine, building on the foundation of Pauline dogma, erected an imposing intellectual edifice for the sacramentarian Church. However, the masses of people found small comfort in such a rarefied, intellectual atmosphere. In an uncritical and irrational era, the demands of popular piety created the saint and his cult. The prevalent supernaturalism made it possible to regard the saint as a citizen of two worlds, who moved in the realm of prayer, vision and miracles with as much ease as in the world of mundane reality. When the saint became institutionalized, the creation of the cultural type was completed. Just as the medieval world found its intellectual synthesis in Aquinas, its poetic interpretation in Dante and its political ruler in Innocent 111, so it attained the acme of piety in the great saints, Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi.

The Renaissance and the Reformation, the rise of the middle class, the natural-rights philosophers, the emergence of the democratic myth and the growth of capitalism brought about a social setting in which the saint was not and could not be the expression of the age. Serious efforts were made from the time of the Puritan Revolution on to reinterpret and to rehabilitate the saint. All such efforts were foredoomed to failure. The author concludes that, if it be granted that a malady of our times is the loss of spiritual values which has led men to make a religion of lower interests (nation, blood, party, science), the restoration of these spiritual values will come only with the creation of a congenial social order.

The foregoing sketch does scant justice to this book. Here is the fruit of mature scholarship in many fields. Historically, the analysis is anchored to the bedrock of facts. Theologically, the reader will look far to find a more penetrating analysis, in brief compass, of the work of Augustine. Sociologically, the author is keenly aware of the entire social milieu and its relation to the creation of cultural types.

But there is infinitely more here than scholarship. There is that insight, akin to scientific imagination, which enables the author to identify himself sympathetically with the spirit of an age, however remote from our own. It is this kind of identification which makes the reader waver between admiration and condemnation of a Bernard or a Francis but leaves him in no uncertainty over the fact that he has a better understanding of the man and his age. This combination of scholarship and sympathetic insights is well known to the generations of Dartmouth students who have sat at the feet of this great teacher.