COLIN DICKEY
AFTERLIVES OF THE SAINTS: STORIES FROM THE ENDS OF FAITH
In Afterlives of the Saints, Colin Dickey— author of Cranioklepty—presents us with a history of faith as told through some of the strangest stories of the saints. These are saints who murder, saints who gouge out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. These are saints who, when visited in a contemporary context—as saints in the cities—actually enlarge our concept of faith.
With a lively intellect and fresh insight, Dickey reveals that we can no longer experience the world as did the saints who once walked amongst us. Today, such ascetics, pushing their bodies to the edges of experience, would be labeled with all manner of clinical diagnoses: masochism, anorexia, schizophrenia. The old pathways to sainthood are clearly incompatible with modern life. In our world, such practices are pathologies.
And yet, these saints have become a creative engine by which we can tap into the rich attraction of excess, while safely observing a kind of superhuman insanity. Colin Dickey retells their stories, not as a theologian, but as someone trying to understand the ways of the world.
$24.95 / $25.95 CAN | Non-Fiction Hardcover | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 288 pages
June
ISBN: 978-1-60953-072-3 | Carton Quantity: 24
Another man claiming to be Christ was arrested and jailed without protest. Shortly thereafter he broke out, escaped to the local monastery, whereupon he promptly passed out, dead drunk. When the bishop of Tours found him the next morning, he smelled so bad the bishop could not stand to go near him. Unable to get his attention, he tried to wake this messiah by singing as loudly as he could.
Let your first image of Gregory be this: singing hymns one morning in 580 to a passed-out Christ. Imagine him the singer, singing the end of the world.
Gregory was a diminutive man, short enough to have been mocked for it by the Pope. Beyond that, though, is a humility that comes across in his writing and which makes his books such a pleasure to read. He was the descendent of bishops, popes and senators, and in 573 he found himself in charge of the important bishopric of Tours, where Saint Martin’s tomb was located.
Important tombs were not only pilgrimage sites, they were also a major source of revenue, as well as a source of miracles. Not just the relics, but everything about the tomb of Saint Martin radiated magic. When Saint Aredius visited Martin’s tomb, he gathered some dust in a box which he took back to his monastery, but miraculously the dust “increased in quantity until it not only filled the box but forced its way through the joints wherever it could find an opening.”
Gregory understood the power of such dust. In an age when disease rampaged unchecked and medicine was poorly understood, Gregory innoculated himself against everything from a cold to the plague by mixing the dust from Martin’s tomb (along with a few other ground-up relics) into a various elixirs and tonics. On more than one occasion, he reported, it was the miraculous dust that saved his life, including the night before his ordination as bishop of Tours, when he said Martin’s remains saved him from dysentery. This, the second great image of Gregory: the dust-eater.tt
Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. He is also co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles. Author photo by Seth Sherwood.
