Descent to Ascent: Jessica Hooten Wilson on Saints, Martyrs, Icons, and Heroes

The Table Audio w/ Evan Rosa

"I'm a Protestant who loves saints," says Jessica Hooten Wilson. Why do we read and write saints' lives? Hagiography is a long-practiced depiction of the holy and often wacky stories of saints and the wondrous elements of their lives as dedicated to God. Jessica Hooten Wilson identifies one of Flannery O'Connor's primary goals in her unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? as attempting to write a saint's life. And really, from one angle, a great deal of texts are trying to do this. In attempting to articulate the narrative of a saint's life, we are exercising a spiritual imagination for the sake of understanding the fullest expression of Christ in merely human life.

What follows the suggestion of the descent and ascent of saintly lives is a rich conversation about martyrdom, iconography, what it means to understand a great or holy text, as well as an appreciation for the aesthetic side of spirituality.

Click here for images referenced in the interview: Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"

Show Notes

• 1:15—"I'm a Protestant who loves saints." David Lyle Jeffrey's phrase "inextricably middled." How God can create a saint's life in your own life.
• 2:49—Saint Theresa of the Little Way—"Our lives don't have to make headlines to be saints lives."
• 3:50—What to do with the "white-washed" saints stories; "The reason you read the saint story is not because that person was holier than thou, but because God was holy in that person. That's where the beauty of the saint's life comes from."
• 4:33—Augustine's Confessions, Lady Continence, St. Monica
• 5:15—The three great works that everyone should read: Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
• 6:25—O'Connor's use of the Descent-to-Ascent Model of saints lives
• 7:13—Wilson defends O'Connor from the idea that O'Connor is too horrific. "Everyone has hold of the wrong horror." / Reference to "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
• 8:53—Icons, Art, and Martyrdom; Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"
• 9:36—21 Lybian Martyrs (February 12, 2015); Matthew Ayariga: "My God is their God."
• 12:30—The moral and religious uses of art, icons, stories, books, and sacred texts.
• 13:50—"It reads us rather than us consume it. ... It puts us in a different position in which we can be transformed. We can be read. We can be submissive. We can let go. We can be emptied of self before it, rather than trying to consume or get from it, something."
• 14:55—Flannery: "We make the wrongful assumption that anyone who can read a telephone book can read a short story."
• 15:15—How to read art, literature, and scripture: submissive, selfless, and no presuppositions.
• 16:30—Reference to A Wrinkle in Time: "You must attempt to understand in a flash."
• 18:00—The humility required to stand under a text in order to understand it.
• 18:27—Flannery O'Connor on self-knowledge: "...self‑knowledge, for O'Connor, is acknowledging what one lacks. It's measuring one's self against the truth, not measuring the truth against one's self."
• 19:50—Self-knowledge: "Self‑knowledge cannot begin by a self-examination of self. It just sounds tautological, even when you try to explain it.
  Instead, you need the perspective of another. Preferably, a transcendent divine perspective to be an honest true perspective. Therefore, you'd be measuring yourself against the truth. You'd be seeing yourself truly as you are. I think there's a reason that Augustine cannot write an autobiography without having a conversion to Christianity."
• 21:41—Really dumb dad-joke about mimes and St. Augustine's "take up and read" passage.
• 22:20—End Interview, Credits

Credits

• Hosted, Produced, and Edited by Evan Rosa
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme Music by The Brilliance
• Twittering: @EvanSubRosa and @BiolaCCT