Saints and Soldiers

      In his book The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley writes about the saint as "one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision--to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads toward light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God." (p.43)
      I like Huxley's metaphor, because he positions spirituality as a choice that happens at every moment. In one way, there  is a commitment to moment-to-moment awareness, to being present, and to surrendering to life's conditions rather than trying to fight conditions through desire or rejection. If I am not choosing the way of pointing to the mind, I am only following vexations of some kind or another. The thing that Huxley really appreciates is that spiritual practice is not so easy. He at one point describes a soldier as someone who is trained to put themselves  aside in some circumstances, particularly in times of having to fight or risk one's  life in battle. In contrast, Huxley maintains, the saint 's spiritual training "leads to a transcendence of personality...in all circumstances and to all creatures."  (p.44).
    The question I had while I was reading Huxley was: why did he choose to compare saints to soldiers? In a sense, doing so makes the two kinds of people appear to be similar, in that they are waging a kind of battle, perhaps even with themselves. But I have to wonder whether the experience of being a saint is really about conquering or transcending the self. It could be the opposite: in giving up my struggle to transcend anything (let alone myself) I see its impermanence, and I give up trying to create a solidified sense of self. In fact, I recollect one vignette in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience where a person only starts to realize the real nature of 'self' when he stops even trying to get rid of self. There is a kind of space there where I have exhausted every possibility at my disposal to even conceive of 'conquering' self by way of self.  It is that moment of surrender when I realize that the self was not really substantial in the first place.
   I sometimes wonder if in fact the idealized notion of the saint was ever achievable. Why is the saint held up as an example for others to follow? Huxley humorously alludes to the decline in the genre called hagiography (p.46), or 'biographies of saints', in favour of the more adventurous distractions of tragedy or thrillers. It may appear that the saint has 'conquered' her or his desires, but is that the real experience of being a saint? In recent years, I have hardly heard anyone referred to as a saint, except in colloquial terms ("oh, that guy-he brought hot dogs to our barbecue--what a saint he is"). I wonder if the practice has either declined, or perhaps only the social framing has changed over time.
   What I can suggest  is that the account of saint as one who conquers self is problematic for many people. Perhaps that is so because it conjures images of people who practice extreme self control on the outside, but might repress desires inside. Such is the model 'soldier' but it is also a picture of someone who is trying to get rid of things they judge as unsavory (or perhaps the greater society anyway). People have a harder time these days buying into the idea of good coming at the expense of other impulses that are considered 'profane' or less-than-human, especially  at a time when we have studied the mechanisms of denial and suppression, as well as their deeper legacies in schools and churches. Equally interesting is the realization that any term that polarizes or divides people can be problematic. If there are saints, how does one describe the non-saints? And how to educate non-saints so that they can be like saints? Whenever there is a division, "what to do with the rest of us" becomes an unresolved management question.


Huxley, Aldous (1945) The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper