Aviad Kleinberg begins his book on late antique and medieval Christian saints' stories with a revealing personal anecdote about Mother Teresa. He saw her on television telling an interviewer about the very first dying leper in the streets of Calcutta whom she picked up, cleaned, and fed. When the leper asked why she had done it, she said: "Because I love you." Kleinberg, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, relates his own response to her words, which "shocked and confused" him: "I believed her. For an instant, at least, I believed that those words were the pure truth, that she had truly loved him, the leper dying in her arms." But then, as he tells the story, he came to his senses, recovering his usual stance toward religion: "I am a skeptic by nature, and when it comes to religious phenomena, my field of specialization, I am even more skeptical." According to Kleinberg, "Freud forever demolished the sublime. When saintliness is not a con, it is self-deception … . The subconscious [sic] is a cruel master. Some find their pleasure in feeding their id, some in nourishing their superego. The moment of 'faith' that took hold of me while watching Mother Teresa was brief. Immediately I was filled with doubts, beset by my usual cynicism. I was almost ashamed of my naïveté."

Not much can be said to someone determined to believe that Mother Teresa's apparent holiness was really just her version of pleasure-principle bondage to her unconscious (which is presumably what Kleinberg intends as the correct rendering of Freud's Unbewusste, insofar as the subconscious, das Unterbewusste, plays such a marginal role in Freud's thought). What might have been—pace Freud—an initial response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit working through the televised broadcast of Mother Teresa, Kleinberg regarded as an embarrassing lapse from the interpretive clarity ostensibly afforded by skeptical cynicism. For fifty years Mother Teresa served the wretchedly poor in ascetic self-denial and intensely self-conscious imitation of Christ, despite—as we now know from her posthumously published letters—enduring for decades a profound sense of forsaken emptiness that was anything but "nourishing [her] superego." If that doesn't count as real holiness, love of God, the following of Christ, and selfless service to others, then nothing does—which indeed seems to be Kleinberg's view, and the one that animates Flesh Made Word. "Sanctity is in the eye of the beholder," he asserts (and reasserts), "and different beholders can have altogether different eyes." That's one view. Another is that sanctity is real, notwithstanding its simulacra and varieties, despite the fact that some people fail to behold or refuse to acknowledge it.

Central to Kleinberg's book is a Weberian notion of charisma embedded within a Durkheimian view of religion and society, both of which serve a Foucauldian conviction that all human interactions are reducible to power relations. Kleinberg sees so-called sanctity as a species of charisma, an unstable, constructed product of negotiation between contending parties over an ultimately arbitrary range of human behaviors: "The person to whom it is attributed has something the group wants; the group indicates in various ways what that something is and what it is willing to pay for it." This claim overlaps with arguments in his first book, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). In Flesh Made Word, however, Kleinberg's chronological ambition is greater: more than half the book is devoted to early Christianity from its beginnings "as a personality cult" through late antiquity, primarily in the East, after which he shifts to the West up through the Golden Legend, the influential hagiograpical collection compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s.

For well over a millennium, Kleinberg argues, the élite, motivated by a desire to exercise power and control over "the masses," deployed stories about saints as an attempt to instill obedience. The sincere among the clergy were self-deceived; the conformist among the laity were conned. Clerically controlled saints' stories, their content shifting to serve society's constant need for order, told the masses what was "right" and "good," whether members of the laity were themselves aspirers to or just admirers of "holiness." Asceticism became trendy after Christianization rendered martyrdom a thing of the past; centuries later, the mendicant orders were the agents of unprecedented attempts to control lay lives through regular preaching, in which exempla about the saints were central.

But clerical élites played a risky game, because extreme expressions of "holiness" were charismatic bids for power that threatened the institutionalized "system": "Thus visionaries, seers, dreamers, hearers of voices, and prophets again and again appear in the 'wrong' places, in the margins of society, where they constantly seek detours to avoid the many roadblocks set up by the elite." Such expressions resisted clerical domestication—at least while the "saints" were alive. Once they were dead, stories about them could be manipulated and rendered safe for lay "consumers" in ways that sought to reinforce clerical power: "The storybook saint always has the last word."

Yet even as appropriated, reworked, and deployed by the clergy, saints' stories are laden with ambiguities, inconsistencies, and troubling material that rendered them confusing and potentially seditious. Although "the narratives can be reconciled with an orthodox interpretation," as Kleinberg concedes, this "does not obliterate their subversive potential." To show this is Kleinberg's chief aim. He attempts to make his case through his own readings of a number of saints' stories; the main ones on which he focuses concern Perpetua, Antony of Egypt, Jerome's eremitic Paul, Simeon Stylites, Francis of Assisi, and the Franciscan Fra Ginepro, in addition to briefer readings of several stories about ancient saints from the Golden Legend.

Much of what Kleinberg says is well known and indeed uncontested. That hagiographers shaped their materials to suit their audiences is a scholarly commonplace—so too that ecclesiastical authorities viewed some expressions of holiness as unsettling and unacceptable. It is firmly established that the ideal of Christian sanctity shifted from martyrdom to asceticism and monasticism after Constantine, and that far from conforming to a predictable, narrow script, the vitae of holy men and women reveal a wide range of behaviors—some saints are gregarious whereas others are socially withdrawn, some are stern and others jocular, and so forth. It has long been known that many of the early Christian saints venerated in the Middle Ages, especially once the Golden Legend became so popular, were either legendary in the sense of invented, or that their stories were constructed on the thinnest of historical bases.

Oddly, despite the fact that critical hagiographical research was pioneered by Catholic scholars responding to Protestant denunciations in the Reformation era, an enterprise that influenced more broadly the development of modern, critical historical methods, not once does Kleinberg mention the Bollandists, the Acta Sanctorum, or the Analecta Bollandiana—even the great Belgian Bollandist, Hippolyte Delehaye (1859-1941), for example, is cited only in passing in the notes. Except for his anecdote about Mother Teresa, Kleinberg writes as though saints had not remained central to Catholicism in the five centuries since the Reformation, both as intercessors and as exemplars of the virtues. Kleinberg's personal belief that sanctity itself is nothing but a construct should be distinguished from his mere tautology that would-be saints' social recognition was a function of whether or not they were socially recognized. It is entirely possible that large numbers of extraordinary imitators of Christ passed and continue to pass their lives in deliberate obscurity, consistent with the virtue of humility.

What is new in Flesh Made Word is Kleinberg's argument that the potentially subversive elements he finds in saints' stories, taken together by medieval lay "consumers," nourished oppositional "parallel systems of belief" among "the masses," whose resistance to the institutional church grew gradually yet steadily in the later Middle Ages. Were it true, this would indeed be a revolutionary finding. It would mean that a Christian genre integral to the church, conceived and promulgated by the clergy, was used contrarily and subversively by the laity—not just idiosyncratically, here and there (who would argue with that?), but in ways that sustained entire alternative systems of belief. Hagiography as a key tool of lay opposition would also, by Kleinberg's lights, brighten the otherwise thoroughly depressing story of Christianity as an oppressive amalgam of self-deception, con game, and the arbitrary exercise of power.

Kleinberg acknowledges the prima facie implausibility of his argument: "It is clear that whatever subversive content we [by which Kleinberg presumably means himself] may see in them, saints' Lives did not spur the Christian public to man the barricades." Indeed. Nevertheless, Kleinberg assures readers that "[w]hat the saints' stories created was a system of thought that existed alongside the official system created and dominated by the elite and that subverted it with no conscious plan of action behind it." Where is the evidence for this astonishing claim to be found? "It would be impossible to describe the countless ways the alternative messages of saints' stories have influenced the populus Christianus, just as it would be difficult to identify the thousand ways inertia, silent hostility, and subterfuge obstruct the actions of tyrannical regimes." To describe countless ways or a thousand ways would doubtless have been a daunting task. But readers might reasonably have expected at least one description of even a single way. (Kleinberg rightly qualifies and questions the character of his only potential example, Waldo's use of St. Alexis in the 12th century.) Instead, Kleinberg offers an analogy with the Soviet Union, suggesting that "[c]hange comes through the accumulation of incalculable little glitches in the system" and is eventually expressed in "moments of crisis": in this case, "when Martin Luther realized the revolutionary potential of the Epistle to the Romans." In short: the "evidence" for Kleinberg's claim—that medieval people not only read and used saints' stories in subversive, oppositional ways but made them integral to alternative belief systems—is the fact that the Reformation happened. The previously hidden, incremental accumulation of resistance finally exploded.

Unfortunately, Kleinberg offers not a shred of evidence for his central argument. Worse still, all the late medieval evidence runs powerfully in the opposite direction. Inertia, hostility, subterfuge? In Kleinberg's spectacular understatement, not only did late medieval hagiography "not spur the Christian public to man the barricades"—it was central to unprecedented levels of lay devotion within the church. Wide-ranging research over more than half a century has established that the saints had never been more popular, among laity as well as clergy, than they were in the century before the Reformation—and in ecclesiastically encouraged ways. Like the secular clergy and the members of religious orders, laypeople invoked the saints according to custom as God's powerful, intercessory friends, capable of providing protection and working miracles for their devotées. They made saints the patrons of proliferating confraternities, thronged to pilgrimage sites dedicated to them, bought prayer sheets and woodcuts with their images, subsidized their carvings on rood screens and altarpieces, prayed their litanies in many hundreds of editions of printed Books of Hours, and in their wills left bequests in saints' names. After the Reformation had begun, Luther's own prince, Friedrich of Saxony, still retained a relic collection with thousands of items. Luther's protest against indulgences and repudiation of papal authority had nothing directly to do with the cult of the saints, which was but one of many secondary symptoms of what he came to regard as a fatal doctrinal error about justification. People wrongly invoked the saints as intercessors, he thought, because they neither understood nor believed that salvation comes by faith alone in Christ through God's grace, with which Luther thought prayers to saints competed.

Kleinberg gets it so wrong because he is so determined to argue for hagiography as hidden subversion. He is unconcerned to understand, as nearly as can be discerned based on surviving sources, what late antique or medieval people actually thought and did. That would have required starting with and interpreting the evidence of their responses and practices. The irony of Kleinberg's endeavor is considerable: whereas he regards holiness as merely a socially constructed projection attributed to "saints," he projects his own reading into the past and in the face of masses of countervailing evidence.

By seeing how Kleinberg's scholarship as wish fulfillment trumps an interest in past lay lives, one can make sense of otherwise incomprehensible aspects of his book: his almost complete neglect of the Virgin Mary, for example, by far the most important and popular saint in medieval Christianity. How was devotion to the saints related to life in medieval parish communities, and to the sacred-and-secular annual cycle of liturgy and agriculture, prayers, and processions, that marked Christian life as a whole? Kleinberg doesn't ask such questions, because not only would the answers fail to support his reading—they would provide much evidence against it. How did thousands of mendicant preachers over three centuries understand the saints in relationship to Christ's commands and the moral exhortations of Scripture? Jesus explicitly told people to follow him, and asked, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46). Paul told the Christians at Corinth to "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Cor 11:1). Is it just possible that some preachers might have gotten this message across to the laity? Might at least some laypersons have acted accordingly? And might some laity and clergy—just perhaps—have aspired to holiness because they wanted to, and found joy in the faith they believed was true?

If they did, then according to Kleinberg they were as self-deceived as Mother Teresa—and could only have been, in keeping with his dogma that Christianity, like all religion, is an illusion imposed to control behavior. It is one thing to cleave to this as a personal credo; it is quite another to make it the basis for interpreting the lives of other people who believed (and believe) differently. When scholars with religious convictions impose their beliefs without warrant on those whom they study, they are criticized for practicing "confessional history"—biased, uncritical, distorting, self-serving. Flesh Made Word is no less an example of flawed confessional history; the difference is that Kleinberg's dogmas are anti-religious, skeptical, and cynical. They seem to be based on a belief in the truth claims of Freud, Weber, Nietzsche, and other reductionist critics of religion. Beginning with its opening anecdote, Flesh Made Word reveals much about its author but disappointingly little about saints, their stories, or what Christians centuries ago made of them.

Brad S. Gregory is Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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