Having grown up in the (in those days) still strongly protestant south of England, where adherents of the various denominations criticised each other’s doctrines and were scarcely aware that other sorts of Christianity existed, I knew nothing about saints. We were non-conformists, and saints’ days weren’t on our calendar. So I was surprised recently to realise that I had just read two novels one after the other each with a saint as a major character.
The first of these was Godric by Frederick Buechner (pronounced ‘Beekner’) (1926-2022).1 Buechner was a novelist before he turned to faith and became a Presbyterian minister. He continued writing—both novels and theology. His readers, it seems, either love his writing or dislike it so much that they give up. After reading Bebb some years ago I was in the second category.2 But Buechner is very much a one-off. I gather that each of his novels is each quite different from the previous one, and they aren’t obviously the novels of a theologian. So when I came across yet one more essay on the web, this one by Lucas Thompson,3 extolling Buechner’s virtues and particularly the excellence of his novels about saints, I decided to give Buechner another go and read Godric. I enjoyed it! And let me add that Thompson’s essay is far, far more penetrating than anything I write here, and I recommend it.
Godric is a fictionalised life story of the mediaeval English saint, Godric of Finchale. Apparently Buechner came across the account of Godric’s life written by the Benedictine monk Reginald of Durham. Buechner was so taken by it that he decided to write a new life of Godric, without the idealisation that is typical of mediaeval hagiographies. The real Godric allegedly lived a very long life, even by 21st-century standards. Born of Anglo-Saxon parents, he lived from 1065 to 1170. The first half of his life was one of adventure. He started trading as a pedlar, becoming a merchant with a half-share in a ship that took him to Flanders and Denmark and finally to Jerusalem, and served for a time as steward to a Norman lord. In mid-life, reflecting on the various shameful acts and shady deals he had been involved in, he felt called to become a hermit. He lived with and learned from the hermit Elric of Wulsingham from perhaps 1105 until Elric’s death in 1108, and went to school with the choirboys of St Mary-le-Bow in Durham. Finally he settled into a hermitage (a cave in the novel) at Finchale on the River Wear near Durham and hardly left it during his remaining sixty years.
The novel opens with Godric already in his hermitage, and the reader comes to realise that Godric is telling his story to Reginald. Buechner weaves the episodes of Godric’s life into the stories Godric tells to Reginald, with periodic returns to the context of the hermitage and Godric’s uneasy relationship with Reginald. Initially I wondered how well this framework would work, but Buechner’s control of it is masterly, and the reader is taken from the hermitage to events in the first part of Godric’s life and back to the hermitage with surprising ease.
But all this is a preface to the two things that struck me in Buechner’s retelling of Godric’s life. The first is rather obvious, but I had never thought about it. Namely, that a saint’s adult life typically begins with a period of ordinary, secular living that includes thoughtless sin. As the sin mounts up, the saint-to-be reflects on how s/he has lived, and is convicted to live a different, “saintly”, life. In Godric’s case this first part of his life lasted forty-odd years, and he had committed, probably without thinking much about it, plenty of sins that came back to haunt him. He betrayed his family by leaving home to pursue life as a peddler and eventually a merchant, a life in which he had swindled others. As an estate steward he recognised the abuses that his lord committed against his young wife, but did nothing to mitigate her situation. And then in a midlife crisis he reflects on all this, and decides that his life must change.
I will return to Godric in a moment, but, first, briefly, a little about the novel I read immediately before Godric, namely Morris West’s The Devil’s Advocate. I had been looking for a rollicking historical novel to distract me.4 I certainly wasn’t looking for a novel of Christian experience but once into West’s novel, I found myself in the middle of one, and a fine historical novel too. Morris West’s novels are well known, so I won’t say much about this one. It is set towards the end of the second World War. The main character is not the saint. He is an elderly English priest, dying of cancer, who after a career in the Vatican is sent to an Italian village as ‘devil’s advocate’ to investigate the claim to sainthood of a man revered by the village’s inhabitants and allegedly a source of miracles. ‘Devil’s advocate’ is the title of the official charged with debunking such a claim—if he can. So we hear about the “saint” through the priest’s ears as he interviews people in the village. The saint, known in the village as Giacomo, turns out to be an English army officer who had been involved in the British army’s drive into southern Italy against its German occupiers. In the process, Giacomo had committed a war crime that killed civilians, and in his remorse he deserts from the army and makes his way northward, landing up in the village and returning to his Catholic faith. He sets out expiate his crime by assuming a leadership role in the village and working effectively to improve the grim war-torn lives of its occupants.
I said earlier that two things stayed with me in Buechner’s version of Godric’s life. The first was that Godric recognised his own sinfulness and sought to turn away from it. The second is that in his life as a hermit Godric is never able to turn completely from sin—his thoughtlife and dreams reflect anything but the mind of Christ. But more significantly, despite thousands of hours on his knees, he is never certain of his salvation, sure that he has been forgiven. Giacomo, from the little we know of him, is similar. He embraces village leadership to make up for his sin, and goes bravely to his death, but with no certainty of forgiveness.
What are my thoughts about these saints’ lives? Of course I thought, what a pity it is that neither of these characters shares in the Reformation rediscovery of the grace of God, the unearned forgiveness of the sin of those who believe in Jesus’ crucifixion sacrifice, and the consequent assurance of their salvation. But I also wonder how many of those who do believe in God’s grace are nonetheless like Godric because their intellectual assent to God’s grace has not reached down to become an emotional experience of forgiveness. Or because they have experienced that forgiveness but have long since buried it in their past. Or, unlike Godric, have taken forgiveness so lightly that they feel no responsibility for past misdemeanours. Most of us continue in need of God’s grace.
- Published in 1980 by Atheneum, New York, and a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. ↩
- I also admit that when I first picked up Godric to read, I was put off by its pseudo-mediaeval diction. The opening sentences are:
Five friends I had, and two of them snakes. Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man’s arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit’s heart till in a grim pet I bade them go that day and nevermore to come again, nevermore to hiss their snakelove when they saw me drawing near or coil themselves for warmth about my shaggy legs.
The subject-matter is weird. This didn’t bother me. The language did. But I soon became used to it and indeed enjoyed it. ↩ - By Lucas Thompson on the Australian ABC’s Religion and Ethics website. (https://www.abc.net.au/religion/lucas-thompson-on-frederick-buechner-saints/14043610) ↩
- This was after reading half of Heinrich Böll’s brilliant but chokingly oppressive Wo warst du, Adam? about life in eastern Europe during the second World War. ↩