"Yeah, I've got some arrows sticking out me. And?" -- on moral exemplarism and Catholic reverence of saints

Some intercultural reflections on what we can do with moral exemplars

Saints were an important and very salient part of my religious upbringing. My grandma on my mother's side had several small statues (Mary, St Anthony, a few others). My father grew up Catholic, and Malacca Portuguese Catholicism is an interesting blend with Southeast Asian culture, showing how very international and intercultural Catholicism can be (a picture of the annual celebration of St Peter's (San Pedro's) feast day in Malacca, from 2018, below.)

St Peter festival in 2018, source: https://ultramalaysiafestival.blogspot.com/2017/11/fiesta-san-pedro-2018-malacca-historic.html

My parents are still devout practicing Catholics and to petition for my illness they recently visited the chapel/shrine of St Rita of Cascia, part of St Stephen's church. She suffered a lot (check out her bio here, it's wild), which is why her intercessory prayers are supposed to be particularly powerful. If she escalates up to the big boss, you can be assured of a fair hearing. She is the saint of “hopeless causes.” My cause is not without hope, so practically we extend this to mean to difficult causes too—all the way from the Terry Pratchett's million-to-one chance to cases like mine. A picture of her shrine they took below.

Now I want to reflect on the idea that saints are moral exemplars. I read Linda Zagzebski's fascinating theory on this topic in Exemplarist Moral Theory where she discusses three kinds of exemplars (saints, heroes, sages). According to Zagzebski, the emotion of moral admiration facilitates our emulation of those exemplars, allowing us to become virtuous ourselves. It didn't resonate with me. You can end up emulating contemptible people. How do you know if someone is worthy of moral admiration? What if they're really terrible, and you don't realize?

Now, I think of exemplars differently. Moral exemplars are people who show us a certain style of doing things, and who thereby increase our range of options of being in the world. By emulating their style, we can achieve certain moral goals and attain certain virtues. Admiration does play a role in this, but ultimately, what we gain is a broadening of our options and perhaps a different way of styling our actions in the world.

I first began to think about this due to the role of exemplars in Confucian philosophy. In the pre-Qin books such as Mengzi, Kongzi, and the Great Learning, the sage kings of old (e.g., King Wen and the Duke of Zhou) are put up as people from whom we can learn a style of doing things. In the Great Learning, section 7 (my bad translation below), we read:

Majestic was King Wen
He rested in bright and unceasing reverence, 
As the Son of Heaven he rested in benevolence,
As the minister he rested in honor,
As the son he rested in filial piety,
As the father he rested in kindness,
Mingling with the people of his country, he rested in trustworthiness.

This emphasizes the importance of role ethics: for Confucians, you don't behave the same to everyone, but you differentiate your conduct, being sensitive to the social relationship. King Wen does it entirely naturally; it is second nature to him. In this respect, he is likened to a little bird from the Odes who naturally knows where its resting place is. Kindness is appropriate down, filial piety is appropriate up. Now, I know many people who successfully conduct an egalitarian approach to social relationships: they have a certain bluntness and honesty in dealing with everyone, which is admirable, it also avoids groveling upward and kicking downward. But I'm not suited to this way of interacting, so I am looking at the Confucian exemplars for role ethics: respect upward, kindness downward. This may work better for me. We shall see. Being blunt and egalitarian to everyone the same is a style of social engagement. Being sensitive to role and carefully tuning your social engagement to it is a different style. Both styles can be virtuous**.

Compare moral exemplars to sartorial ones. Your friend Alyssa is known for her daring, yet tasteful and aesthetically pleasing clothes combinations, and her fun, slightly outrageous hairstyles. You are generally quite shy in expressing yourself in clothes, but you want to be more like Alyssa in this respect. You want to choose, as Richard Pettigrew put it, for a changing self. A daring self. You'd never think that these kind of shoes, that sweater, and this dress could possibly go together, but Alyssa shows it can be done. If she can do it, so can you. By emulating Alyssa you will become more adventurous in your choice of apparel.

Similarly, moral and spiritual exemplars give us a sense of how we can style our moral and spiritual actions. Suppose you have difficulties arguing with people who have very different political, religious, and other views. You tend to lose your patience, and you end up in shouting matches or with a shutdown of the dialogue. Usually you are Ok with this, but sometime you wish it were possible to be able to engage in joint projects with people who are not completely aligned with you in all respects. Your friend Tariq is very patient, diplomatic and good at doing this while also clearly articulating his own position. So, you see it is possible and it can be done. You carefully observe Tariq and you learn how he does it. By emulating Tariq, you will come to embody some virtues he has: diplomacy, seeking common ground, trying to see the value in multiple perspectives, open-mindedness, kindness.

I remember being in a committee led by, let's call him Andrew. Before being part of this committee, which had difficult decisions to take, I thought leadership is all about trying to win people over to your vision, trying to make sure there are no warring factions that break out and if so, try to adjudicate and keep the peace. But Andrew showed me that leadership is a lot about making the people you lead feel secure and empowered. By making them secure and empowered, you avoid that resentment builds up and then bursts open later. He also always was explicit of his own vision, sharing it knowing that, and inviting, other viewpoints. He made plenty of space for dialogue and explicitly invited less popular ideas. I admired Andrew and when talking over dinner to another committee member she said, “Oh yeah, he's always like that. I wish we could duplicate him.” Moral admiration, as Zagzebski points out, was indeed an important starting point for my desire to emulate Andrew in any future leadership initiatives. But I also got a distinct sense of “Oh wow, I didn't know it was possible you could do it like that.”

Now back to saints. You can use anyone as an exemplar, but ideally it's someone who is at least somewhat upright. Nobody is perfect. Saints are human, they're not perfect either. But they can show a style of doing things. Many female saints broke stereotypes and gender restrictions (often at great personal cost): St Joan of Arc, St Hildegard of Bingen.

In a discussion on social media, a friend said that he liked St Sebastian. It's an intriguing saint. St Sebastian rose to prominence in the late middle ages because of the great plague. He was shot through with arrows, so this connection to infectious disease seems strange, but it is not. The bubonic plague makes boils, and so wounds that remind one of arrow wounds.

Moreover, St Sebastian survived his ordeal! He was taken down by Irene of Rome, who thought of burying him but discovering he survived, she saved him and nursed him back to health. Now you can easily see how hopeful this is when a devastating, disfiguring illness is going around.

Nicolas Régnier - Saint Sébastien soigné par Irène et sa servante, ca 1625, photo by François de Dijon

These (clearly erotic) pictures of Irene nursing St Sebastian, and the pictures of St Sebastian being pierced (as Christina Van Dycke put it, “Yeah, I’ve got some arrows sticking out of me. And?”) help us to understand why he is the patron saint for gay and queer people too (there is something BDSM about the way he tilts back his head as the arrows come in). He's the patron saint for athletes because of his extreme endurance in surviving his first martyrdom. Emperor Diocletian, who ordered the arrow shooting was in for a surprise. Once well, St Sebastian waited for him at the stairwell, and began to criticize him loudly and publicly for the way he treated Christians. After Diocletian recovered from his initial surprise, he ordered St Sebastian be clubbed to death and watched, just to make sure. So, you could see him as a patron saint for freedom of speech too.

Ok one more. St Francis is a personal favorite. Here's a drawing I did of my friend Blake Hereth as St Francis, preaching to birds. Like Blake (who advocates animal rights and who has a cool theory that Gods can be animals, zootheism), Francis loved animals. He treated them with respect. Preaching to birds may look a bit silly, but it shows that St Francis believed animals were capable of rationality (views on this varied throughout the ages, it's not an obvious view. Susan Hurley quite recently defended it.).

In one story, a rabbit was caught in a trap. St Francis put it in the woods but it hopped right back in his lap. However, Francis wanted the wild animal to go back to the wild, so he asked another monk to release it far off, away from him. And it did. This little action shows so much wonderful respect for animals and their autonomy as wild creatures that need be in their natural habitat.

Animated gif of Ursula von der Leyen and her archenemy, the wolf

Probably, the most famous story of St Francis is that of the Wolf of Gubbio. According to the story, the wolf attacked and killed livestock and people (this latter part is unlikely). Surely, if it happened today, we would kill the wolf. The EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen's pony was killed by a wolf and she declared a personal vendetta on the poor animal. The wolf survived a bounty put on its head. Not only that, she is trying to downgrade the animal protection status of wolves. Von der Leyen is an anti-moral exemplar in animal protection. She is using her political power to further personal vendettas and grievances, which are not based in ecological fact (e.g., about the concentration of wolves in European natural reserves). As a politician one needs to be extra mindful to exercise gentleness and restraint, the more power one has.

St Francis shows a different way is possible. He negotiated a treaty with the wolf: Stop attacking people and livestock and the villagers will come and feed you. The wolf accepted. It lived happily ever after, alongside the villagers. While this story is certainly a fable, it does give an interesting message, namely as animals as stakeholders who also have certain moral considerations and concerns. Arne Naess, the famous Norwegian environmental philosopher, considered the theme too, thinking of bears and wolves as stakeholders in the ecosystem, alongside of Norwegian farmers and their sheep. Both have rights, both have duties toward each other, a modus vivendi must be found.

A lot of stories of saints like this one above are completely apocryphal. But that doesn't matter. You can find ways of styling your moral actions in people who are entirely fictional, such as e.g., Uncle Iroh or Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Both I think are virtuous people, but their style is very different. Saints in the Catholic imagination are a bit like this: Catholics know these stories and so they have a shared repertoire of stories through which they can think about moral action, style, and virtue. This can be dynamic and evolving, as e.g., St Sebastian becoming the patron saint for gay and other queer Catholics—this is obviously not mainstream as the Catholic church's position on homosexuality leaves a lot to be desired, but it is still there). But they give a shared repertoire of moral action that we can think about today, which I think is a cool feature of Catholicism.

**Styles can be constrained by neurodivergence. But this is not a problem for my account of exemplars as showing a certain style; you need to find a style that suits you. For example, as someone with OCD I tend to keep on rehearsing bad social interactions in my mind to the point of self-torture, so bluntness does not work for me. But I feel very easily attuned socially, so role ethics can work for me. Someone with, say, ASD, might find her options constrained to a different range of styles.