Saint Peter and Saint John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic.

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.

When's there ever been a decent saint who didn't start out as a thief?

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

A saint is a sinner who loves; it's that simple!

Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh.

I'm trying to be kind, you know, for I admired your parents. Fine people, and your father was a fair-minded man to every faith. But there are spiritual dangers you Protestants don't even seem to know exist, and this monkeying with difficult, sacred things is a sure way to get yourself into a real old mess. Well I recall, when I was a seminarian, how we were warned one day about a creature called a fool-saint.

Ever hear of a fool-saint? I thought not. As a matter of fact, it's a Jewish idea, and the Jews are no fools, y'know. A fool-saint is somebody who seems to be full of holiness and loves everybody and does every good act he can, but because he's a fool it all comes to nothing — to worse than nothing, because it is virtue tainted with madness, and you can't tell where it'll end up. Did you know that Prudence was named as one of the Virtues? There's the trouble with your fool-saint, y'see — no Prudence. Nothing but a lotta bad luck'll rub off on you from one of them. Did you know bad luck could be catching? There's a theological name for it, but I misremember it right now.

A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He — or she — freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

St. Francis is not only the most attractive of all the Christian saints, he is the most attractive of Christians, admired by Buddhists, atheists, completely secular, modern people, Communists, to whom the figure of Christ himself is at best unattractive. Partly this is due to the sentimentalization of the legend of his life and that of his companions in the early days of the order. Many people today who put his statue in their gardens know nothing about him except that he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. These bits of information are important because they are signs of a revolution of the sensibility — which incidentally was a metaphysical revolution of which certainly St. Francis himself was quite unaware. They stand for a mystical and emotional immediate realization of the unity of being, a notion foreign, in fact antagonistic, to the main Judeo-Christian tradition. “I am that I am” — the God of Judaism is the only self-sufficient being. All the reality that we can know is contingent, created out of nothing, and hence of an inferior order of reality. Faced with the “utterly other,” the contingent soul can finally only respond with fear and trembling.

Surely, if anyone were to come forth today claiming to be a messiah and preaching the message of Jesus, he would be considered crazy. There are thou- sands of similar bedraggled souls who have ended up in mental asylums. Jesus was so exasperating to the established authorities that they crucified him, a much worse fate. But was one of the reasons that he was psychotic? I do not mean to be unfair to Jesus, and no doubt devout Christians will be offended at the suggestion.

He was an arrogant, pigheaded doctrinaire fool.

Ill-timed admiration is enough to enrage a saint.

Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity.