The Amphibium, pt. 10
This is Vol. 10 of the Amphibium.
Foundress of nothing
Today is All Saints' Day in the Catholic Church. Like it says on the tin, it is the feast day for all saints, "known and unknown," with an implicit emphasis on the "unknown"--that is, saints who have not been formally canonized by the Church. The idea is that there have always been holy men and women leading exemplary lives but not doing so on the epic scale that earns widespread recognition. Though they are unknown to us, they are known to God, and this is the day the Church sets aside to honor them.
I have always felt a particular attraction to this idea, not because I think of myself as an under-appreciated holy man, but because I think of myself as a novelist, and it seems to me one of the novel's chief jobs to illuminate exemplary lives that are not lived out on the epic scale of heroes and saints. The literary depiction of such lives was, in fact, the "novel" thing about the novel.
On this matter, I think of Middlemarch, possibly the greatest novel ever written. The book begins with a brief description of the life of St. Teresa Avila, a Spanish noblewoman who became a reform-minded Carmelite nun and attempted to return the Order's rule to its mendicant roots. She eventually founded her own off-shoot, the Discalced Carmelites. St. Teresa is one of the great figures of the Counter-Reformation, a "known" saint of world-historical importance. "Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life," Eliot writes.
All of this seems like an odd beginning for a book about ordinary people in nineteenth century England, a book subtitled "a study of provincial life." But Eliot goes on:
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. ...Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
This is one of my favorite passages in Eliot, and really in all of literature, and I think of it every year on this day, a day set aside to recognize the Saint Theresas, foundresses of nothing.