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Excess cannot but provoke excessive response. Saints are ignored, imprisoned, tortured, killed—all more or less successful attempts at containment. They are also—with or without institutional blessing—adored, mobbed, and worshipped. Such excess extends to language; a saint can be justified or rejected on the basis of rhetorical forms such as polemic and apology, which are by definition exorbitant. The body itself can be a site of surplus for the saint: relics, the saintly body parts that are worshipped as sacred metonyms; the saint's own body, where gender may be unstable, wounds freakish, bleeding perpetual, stigmata and transfiguration desirable; the devotee's body, which the saint miraculously cures of disease; and privation or asceticism, from enemas and phlebotomies to anorexia and self‐flagellation. The saint's world is filled with endless antinomies: violence/quietism; speaking in tongues/vows of silence; apophasis/hypernomination; nudity/camouflage. It is a world of transgressions: transvestism, possession and exorcism, astral projection, talking to animals, supranormal visions and voices, leprosy cured and leprosy attained. And there are many ways to force the saint's exit: burning, boiling, roasting, shooting, stoning, beheading, throwing to wild beasts, drawing and quartering, burying alive, tearing to pieces, crucifying (recto or verso), skinning alive, or merely ridiculing emphatically.

Françoise Meltzer teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Humanities in French and Comparative Literatures, as well as professor in the Divinity School. She has been a coeditor of Critical Inquiry since 1982. She is the author of several books, the most recent of which is For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001). Presently, she is finishing a book on Baudelaire's vision of modernity (2009) and is also starting on another book project, Ungendering Subjectivity. Jaś Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the place of visual and textual representation in religion and in particular on pilgrimage in the context of the transformation of the Roman world from pagan polytheism to Christianity. Most recently he is coeditor, with Simon Coleman, of Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (2003) and, with Ian Rutherford, of Pilgrimage in Greco‐Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (2005).

In Cuba saints, gods, and heroes are lumped together in an extricable Afro‐Cuban performance of the orishas, the intermediaries between human beings and God. The religion best called Afro‐Cuban, though it has many traits that make it resemble the religions of Africa (especially those of the Congo and Nigeria), for the first time anywhere incorporates European colonization and allows the priests who preach it (the santeros and babalawos) and the people who follow it to think of themselves as intermediaries between the world of reason and the other world, where life is not ruled by schemes of reason but by forces (life, death, sex, envy, sympathy, love) beyond the control of a single individual. This relation between two separate but intertwined universes carries with it its own phenomenology, which Cabrera Infante explores in the epigraph above.

Marc Blanchard is Distinguished Professor of comparative literature at University of California, Davis. He is the author of, among many works, Description: Sign, Self, Desire (1980), In Search of the City (1985), and Trois Portraits de Montaigne (1990).

See also: Ambrosio Fornet, Cuba: Nation, Diaspora, Literature  ·  Roberto Fernández Retamar, These Are the Times We Have to Live in  ·  W. J. T. Mitchell, Havana Diary

Within contemporary Protestant evangelical traditions, which have often been voluble in their criticisms of idolatry, there is, arguably, no overt cult of the saint in part because everyone is a saint. Contemporary evangelicals frequently echo the Pauline tradition of addressing fellow believers as saints, as human vehicles for the workings of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, such apparently democratic intentions are challenged by the fact that some believers seem more spiritually virtuosic than others. Indeed, great evangelical leaders inspire an awe that implies a remoteness from the lives of ordinary believers. This essay is concerned with one particular evangelical tradition, a branch of the contemporary neocharismatic movement that embodies such seeming contradictions in its particular juxtaposition of practices of imitation and transgression in the construction of paradigmatic holy figures.

Simon Coleman is professor of anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (2007).

See also: Gregory S. Jackson, A Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction

The prime coordinates of Memphis culture are Elvis and barbecue. This essential knowledge is carried by the ever‐present humidity and absorbed through one's skin. The sources and inspiration for my work, as I discovered long ago, are grounded in place.

Every year since his passing, on the evening of the 15th of August, the faithful gather outside Graceland for a candlelight vigil and solemn procession past Elvis's grave. They wait for hours in the hot and humid Memphis night for a chance to pay homage to the King. It feels like church. As many as fifty thousand fans visit Graceland during Death Week, that week in August commemorating Elvis's death, and some six hundred thousand fans make the pilgrimage over the course of a year. This has been going on for thirty years.

For fifteen years I photographed the immortelles (the southern term for floral tributes) that Elvis fans from around the world brought or sent to Graceland for Death Week. At one point, I overheard someone say that Elvis was the first Protestant saint. This immediately struck me with the force of revelation.

Lawrence Jasud is a photographer and associate professor in the department of art at the University of Memphis.

See also: Joseph Kerman, A Few Canonic Variations  ·  Susan Willis, Hardcore: Subculture American Style

No brief discussion of stigmata can hope to take account of the many, and sometimes conflicting, dimensions of this historically datable, and relatively recent, religious phenomenon. A more appropriate title might have been “Miracle, Mysticism, Malady: The Iconography and Philosophy of Stigmata.” A thorough discussion of stigmata ought to consider them in the contexts of the history of the miraculous, the history of mysticism, and the history of psychiatric explanations of stigmata. In this essay, however, I will concentrate almost exclusively on interpretations of the stigmata as miraculous, for reasons that I hope will soon become clear. Furthermore, I will restrict my discussion to the stigmatization of St. Francis, a limitation whose motive will become evident as I develop my argument. I would like to begin with a few brief observations on points of view that I will not consider here.

Arnold I. Davidson is the executive editor of Critical Inquiry and the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

See also: Arnold I. Davidson, An Introduction to Pierre Hadot  ·  Arnold I. Davidson, Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality

In the current era, the competing ways of perceiving a Catholic saint are best illustrated by the cult of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887–1968), a twentieth‐century Capuchin monk, who has become one of the Catholic world's “most revered saints” for his Christlike suffering, supernatural visions, and stigmata, as well the poverty‐alleviation projects he carried out through the foundation of a technologically advanced research hospital, Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, at his monastic home of San Giovanni Rotondo.¹

1. Tracy Wilkinson, “Padre Pio Exhumed for a Second Life,” Los Angeles Times, 25 Apr. 2008, articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/25/world/fg‐padre25

Michael A. Di Giovine is currently completing his Ph.D. in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on tourism and pilgrimage, heritage and placemaking, development and revitalization movements, historic preservation and museums, and religion and popular piety in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Italy.

See also: Adriano Sofri, On Optimism

The young woman who was called Joan of Arc and who was tried by the Church and burned for heresy in 1431 was long in being recognized as a saint by the same Church. The ecclesial reluctance was largely outweighed by the 1890s, however, by the anger festering between conservative French Catholics, who rejected the end of the monarchy that heralded the birth of the secular Republic(s), and the democratic government, which wanted nothing more to do with the Church's interference and historical wielding of power. When the Church finally moved on the Joan affair, it did so fairly fast; Joan was proclaimed venerable in 1894, beatified in 1909, and canonized in 1920.¹ All three of those dates are heavily weighted in European and French politics. After the German victory over France in 1871 and the annexation of Alsace‐Lorraine, the popularity of Joan soared in France; she was, after all, the heroine who had liberated her country from a foreign invader—a fact that obviously resonated in the recent wake of German incursions into France. But equally important is that starting around 1890 Pope Leo XIII, admitting (finally) to the irrevocable demise of the ancien régime and facing up to the apparently permanent installation of the French Republic, had called on his French faithful to rally around (ralliement) the Republic and to cease boycotting (if only in attitude) the government.² The divorce (séparation) between Church and state, in other words, was finally to be, and to be amicable.

1. It should be added that the town of Orléans, which Joan delivered from the English siege, considered her as their patron saint from the beginning, with and (mostly) without the Vatican's confirmation.

2. The Vatican's move toward reconciliation was not merely magnanimous; it also wanted its faithful in positions of power in the French government.

Françoise Meltzer teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Humanities in French and Comparative Literatures, as well as professor in the Divinity School. She has been a coeditor of Critical Inquiry since 1982. She is the author of several books, the most recent of which is For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001). Presently, she is finishing a book on Baudelaire's vision of modernity (2009) and is also starting on another book project, Ungendering Subjectivity.

See also: Françoise Meltzer, Antigone Again  ·  Françoise Meltzer, The Hands of Simone Weil  ·  Françoise Meltzer, Color as Cognition

The grave of Rabbi Meir Baal Haness is one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world. Rabbi Meir is known as “Baal Haness” which means miracle maker. Very few know his real name, thought to be Rabbi Nahori or Rabbi Mischa. He was called Meir because it means “to illuminate,” as he brought his followers to know the light of G‐d.¹ The Talmud states that Rabbi Meir was one of the most important scholars of the second century C.E. He was one of Rabbi Akiva's students and an active participant in the Bar Kochbah revolt. Rabbi Meir was the author of Haggadot and Halachot that are still studied today. Although he was a revered scholar, he was a very humble man who loved the land of Israel. Though he died in The Diaspora, he was brought to Tiberias to be buried on holy soil. After his death, thousands of Jews continue to come to his grave to receive his blessings and miracles.

1. For a recent discussion of the relation of Rabbi Meˀir to light and light symbolism, see Galit Hasan‐Rokem, “Rabbi Meˀir, the Illuminated and the Illuminating: Interpreting Experience,” in Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. Carol Bakhos (Leiden, 2006), pp. 227–43.

Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubmann Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the rhetoric and Near Eastern studies departments. His most recent book, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo‐Christianity (2004), won the award for historical research from the American Academy of Religion in 2006, the year in which he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, which will appear in 2009, Deo volente. He doesn't think that venues like this are the occasion for humor.

See also: Daniel Boyarin, The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic  ·  Daniel Boyarin, Circumcision and the Erotic Life of God and Israel

The allusion in my title to Stuart Clark's magnum opus of 1997, Thinking with Demons, is manifest.¹ One of the justifications behind Clark's title was the insight that early modern thinkers used witches and witchcraft to think through issues not only concerning magic but also in other fields.² Early modern political theorists, natural philosophers, and theologians, as well as demonologists, all found that witches were good to think with just as a certain twentieth‐century French anthropologist found it helpful to understand the role of animals in totemism by acknowledging that they were chosen not because they were ‘good to eat’ but because they were ‘good to think’ with._³ However, I should immediately admit that by using Clark here I am not claiming any structural or epistemological equivalence between saints and demons. Rather, my choice of Clark has been motivated by the fact that I have found his insight into the discursive fertility of demonology a very useful way to explore the dynamically different uses to which saints and sanctity were put during a period when traditionally they have been seen as embattled symbols of a beleaguered age of faith—a target of derision by Protestants and a source of embarrassment to Catholics.

1. See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

2. ‘In effect, demonology was a composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity, and the nature of political authority and order. Inevitably, its authors took up particular intellectual positions in relation to these four major topics of early modern thought. Quite simply, their views about witchcraft depended on concepts and arguments drawn from the scientific, historical, religious, and political debates of their time. Equally, by theorising about witches, they made important contributions to these same debates… . In many cases, indeed, the subject of witchcraft seems to have been used as a means for thinking through problems that originated elsewhere’ (ibid., p. viii).

3. Claude Lévi‐Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, 1963), p. 89.

Simon Ditchfield is a reader in history at the University of York. His research interests relate to perceptions and uses of the past in previous societies, but particularly within the context of urban and religious culture in the Italian peninsula ca. 1300–ca. 1800. He is currently writing a major survey volume about the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion (1500–1700) for the Oxford History of the Christian Church series. In 2006–8 he was a British Academy Research Leave Fellow.

See also: Lorraine Daston, Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe

Moroccan authoritarianism has reincarnated itself in the form of “liberalized authoritarianism.”³⁶ Less tyrannical, it is liberalized in the sense that it is now less prohibitive of political expression. It is able to publicly showcase its liberality, as long as this new mode of authority does not threaten its own power. This reincarnation has made the regime appear less despotic, while ensuring the continuity of the monarchy as the ultimate holder of power in the political arena, even inciting observers and foreign allies to talk about and praise a transition to democracy. This new mode of authority has tamed some of the critics of the monarchy by making them participate in the mechanism of liberalized electoral politics. Therefore, the transparency and publicity accompanying regular elections and public deliberations are not necessarily what might allow a political regime to become more democratic. Furthermore, these discursive exchanges, circulations of statements (critical and not critical of the state), and electoral performances take place through mediated politics, which disarm the radical critics of the monarchy. This is how a set of new institutionalized mediations has dismantled the unique proximity that the rebellious saint had been able to build in relation to the king in order to articulate a powerful opposition under tyrannical authoritarianism.

36. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, 1986), p. 9.

Malika Zeghal is associate professor of the anthropology and sociology of religion and Islamic studies in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

See also: Paul Allen Anderson, Casablanca and the Music of War  ·  W. J. T. Mitchell, Report from Morocco

Jews did not have to wait for the modern era to be disenchanted with God. For almost two thousand years, we have been increasingly displeased with his conduct. Judaism is based on the notion of a covenant, a pact between God and his people. He has chosen us of all the nations and has given us a long list of demands (the commandments) and a shorter, though grimmer, list of the punishments that await us for breach of that contract. But, then, he has also stipulated quite clearly what rewards we can expect if we observe the agreement religiously. This, after all, was the great advantage of being the chosen people.

Aviad Kleinberg is a professor of medieval studies in the Department of History, Tel Aviv University. He is also the director of Tel Aviv University Press. His latest books, Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination and Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List, were published in 2008.

See also: David Stern, Midrash and Indeterminacy  ·  Daniel Boyarin, Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic

I emphasize dead in worldly terms because in a fuller sense the saint's existence had not ended. The goal of Christian life is the life in the world to come, eternal life in the presence of God. Saints are conceived to be effective because they are thought to be in heaven. Eternal life, though, is not just the preserve of saints but of all the saved, the goal of all the faithful. The distinction is that the nonsaintly dead were not held to be in a position to help anyone, least of all themselves. They could simply wait and undergo the purgation which the later Middle Ages conceived for them. The living could pray for them and, indeed, invoke the saints to do so in an attempt to limit the extent of that purgation—the material appurtenances of this mechanism famously account for much of the surviving art of the premodern West—but the dead themselves had an entirely passive role. No one expected anything from the dead, other than from the saints. This suggests a practical definition of sainthood: the saints are dead people from whom one wants something.

Robert Maniura is senior lecturer in the history of art at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa (2004)and coeditor of Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (2000). His current project explores the role of images in the religious culture of Renaissance Italy.

See also: Leo Steinberg, The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting

The point of comparing Jesus with Apollonius—in many ways a comparison of incomparables—is not simply to follow the lead of so many who have tried it in the long tradition from Eusebius to Newman. Rather, in examining the (endlessly tendentious) differentiation of their respective kinds of divinity, we may understand some of the fundamental issues in the argument between pagan polytheism and early Christian culture and, beyond this, some of the ways Christianity has finessed its self‐differentiation from the ancient culture out of which it emerged and against which it defined itself. While the comparison of two kinds of divinity—at stake in the claims for Jesus to be God and for Apollonius to be a divine man—is not strictly a comparison of sainthoods, both figures were invented as exemplary models by their respective apologists (Philostratus in the case of Apollonius and almost every Christian writer since Paul and the Evangelists in the case of Our Lord), as exemplary models in imitation of which patterns of sainthood (as paradigms of an ethically excellent, often ascetic and self‐sacrificial life) could be constructed. Yet, if Jesus and Apollonius are—despite, or even because of, all the attempts—not really comparable, then to use a Christian term like saint for pagan and Christian alike is itself also, at the very least, contentious.

Jaś Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the place of visual and textual representation in religion and in particular on pilgrimage in the context of the transformation of the Roman world from pagan polytheism to Christianity. Most recently he is coeditor, with Simon Coleman, of Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (2003) and, with Ian Rutherford, of Pilgrimage in Greco‐Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (2005).

See also: Jaś Elsner, The Genesis of Iconology  ·  Jaś Elsner on Erwin Panofsky  ·  Jaś Elsner, Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen

In his 1879 book on Milton, Mark Pattison, George Eliot's Casaubon, called ‘Lycidas’ ‘the high‐water mark of English Poesy’.¹ Not all have agreed. It is a very odd poem. Not only does it seem to turn back on itself when the famous ending (‘Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new’) unexpectedly introduces a new voice that calls the poet of the rest an ‘uncouth swain’,² but it makes sudden twists and shifts among other voices all the way through. When the drowned and newly sainted hero gets to heaven near the end of the poem it is not always noticed that the first thing he does up there in order to feel better is wash his hair: ‘With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves’ (‘L’, l. 175, p. 255).³ And there are further oddities. The poem is a pastoral elegy, hence the sheep and shepherds. But the wolves who intrude into the fold of the poem will require a bit more explaining. On the face of it, wolves and sheep, sinners and saints, are enemies, clearly opposed to each other. A question often asked but never properly answered may, however, unsettle these neat oppositions. Why, among all the pastoral names he might have chosen, did Milton give his shepherd the name Lycidas?

1. Mark Pattison, Milton (New York, 1879), p. 27; quoted in C. A. Patrides, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in Milton's ‘Lycidas’: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. Patrides (1961; Columbia, Mo., 1983), p. xiv. The Casaubon connection is explored in Peter Thonemann, ‘Wall of Ice’, review of Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don by H. S. Jones, London Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2008, pp. 23–24.

2. John Milton, ‘Lycidas’, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (1968; London, 1997), ll. 193, 186, p. 256; hereafter abbreviated ‘L’.

3. ‘Oozy’ means ‘slimy’. The poem shows a narcissistic fascination with hair. Apart from Milton's desire to get the brine out of Lycidas's hair, Camus has a hairy mantle (see ‘L’, l. 104, p. 250), St Peter shakes ‘his mitred locks’ (l. 112, p. 251), the pastoral tradition is called in a fine phrase ‘the tangles of Neaera's hairs’ (l. 69, p. 248), and even the island of Anglesey has a ‘shaggy top’ (l. 54, p. 247). This preoccupation with hair (Milton's own seems to have been quite beautiful) soon returns in the prose via an image that recurs several times before the last great poems: the image of Samson.

Neil Forsyth is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the author of The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth(1987) and The Satanic Epic (2003). Recently he was coeditor, with Christophe Tournu, of Milton, Rights and Liberties (2006).

See also: Stanley E. Fish on Milton’s Lycidas  ·  Annabel Patterson, Spenser-and-Milton in Educational Theory

Then, since all idolatry actually results in self‐idolatry, this idolized sanctity immediately presupposes that those who assert and define it claim to know what holiness means, hence they claim to experience it and consequently to incarnate it themselves. Yet, by an obvious fact in no need of justification, we know perfectly well that no one can say “I am a saint” without total deception. Through a performative contradiction that is intuitively irrefutable, someone who lays claim to sanctity disproves it in him‐ or herself. Why can't holiness lay claim to itself? Not only because one does not want to fall into the massive trap of pride in one's own satisfaction and self‐affirmation, which is involved, but above all because holiness is unaware of itself (for reasons that will have to be specified later). In any case, we know that there is no such thing as a self‐proclaimed saint. To the contrary, self‐proclamation (albeit through the intermediary of disciples or the community the saint has founded or tolerated) is the surest measure of the alleged saint's fraud. The false prophet, like the false saint, always stands out conspicuously by the fact that this affirmation may never be questioned.

Jean‐Luc Marion is professor of philosophy of religion and theology in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. In 2008 he was elected to the Académie française.

See also: Jean-Luc Marion, Metaphysics and Phenomenology  ·  Jean-Luc Marion, The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness

The idea of the sacred is fundamental to all religious thinking. The most important aspect of sacredness is transcendence. The sacred is set apart. It is beyond.

Aviad Kleinberg is a professor of medieval studies in the Department of History, Tel Aviv University. He is also the director of Tel Aviv University Press. His latest books, Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination and Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List, were published in 2008.

See also: Mark C. Taylor, Denegating God

The editors would like to announce that Andrew Skomra has joined us as the new manuscript editor. Andrew's predecessor, Anat Benzvi, who first was employed at the journal as a college intern, is seeking her fortune in Berlin.