On Saints (in Fiction)

 When you read this, I will be at YALLFest going to panels and such, so I went ahead and wrote this before the weekend. I realized, right after I got this idea last weekend, that it would have been suitable for the Saturday after All Saints Day, but it didn’t occur to me then. Oh, well.

In other news, I’ve finished the “Curse of the Pharaohs” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and so I’ll have to decide in a bit what the next game will be. I have a few options. And for whatever reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about Skyrim lately…

On Saints (in Fiction)

I recently picked up and read the Lives of Saints book that’s part of the Grishaverse by Leigh Bardugo, and I’m starting to wonder if people have a clue about saints, and what they are. I think maybe we need a primer on what a saint actually is.

In the Christian religion, at least in Catholicism and Orthodox Churches (as I know I cannot speak for every denomination and variation), and simplified to a ridiculous extent, a saint is a person who has gone to Heaven. The saints are the souls who are rejoicing with God in Paradise. A canonized saint is a person who is recognized by the Church and declared to be an example of someone who has gotten to Heaven. There are also folk saints, mostly by way of legends of holy men and women that pop up, though these days there’s a full process for determining a saint, beatified, venerable, or Servant of God (look into that one guy who tried to have Roberto Clemente designated as a saint).

Most fantasy fiction leans towards the idea of folk saints, people popularly believed to be holy by the masses. Given that many fantasy settings tend to be pre-industrial, this makes a kind of sense. And even today, there are some folk saints that the Church can’t seem to stop people from honoring as such, even when they should. The Mexican cult of Santa Muerte comes to mind, but also if you go to Aachen, they’ll tell you that Charlemagne is a saint, even though he wasn’t actually legitimately canonized. It didn’t stop people from sharing his relics.

Then you have things like the Episcopal Church honoring saints who are people who were never actually part of their denomination because, screw it, they think they’re the Church of America or something, and you need nice role models.

I am aware that non-Christian religious traditions have figures that fill a role that is translated into English as ‘saint’. It seems to me (as someone who is not a religious scholar, so don’t cite me as an expert) that it boils down to “This person is a holy person.” It does not mean “A person who has always been holy,” if you look at the lives of Saint Augustine, for example. Saints are never worshiped, despite what your most recent anti-Catholic propaganda may say. They are merely honored as good examples to us on Earth.

So I will admit to being confused to how sainthood works in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. Saints are mentioned a lot in Shadow & Bone and its follow-ups. Given that the setting is inspired by imperial Russia, one might think that it follows something close to Orthodox traditions about saints. Priests and monks talk about honoring the saints, there are churches, and religious traditions, but we don’t get that much elaboration on it. The religion of Ravka is apparently, according to sequels and spin-offs and supplementary materials, the worship of the saints. If there is a higher power, it isn’t mentioned and it isn’t prominent. Some saints’ stories talk about their piety, or being monks, but does that mean that saints just… worship other saints? Normally, I’d say that the religion that all the characters in-story already know about doesn’t need full exposition; however, this becomes part of the main Plot and prominent character arcs as the stories go on.

According to the fan wiki, at least, Bardugo says that the religion of Ravka, while using some of the outward terms and appearances of Russian Orthodox religion, is actually closer to pre-Christian Slavic paganism. I don’t know if that helps, given that we know very little about Slavic paganism, and I don’t think what we do know involves the deification of noble souls to this extent.

Admittedly though, this is a fantasy book, and the author can do whatever she likes with the religion in her story’s worldbuilding. I mean, plenty of fantasy authors use ‘inquisitor’ to mean ‘witch hunter’ even though, despite popular culture, that’s not what the Inquisition was for (it’s for rooting out heresy, actually). It’s weird though that there are people who are considered “holy” and I can’t for the life of me work out what “holiness” even means in this setting.

It’s also weird because the people have a religion that involves people doing miraculous things, in a world where there are people who already can do miraculous things. Grisha have magic powers, though they don’t consider it magic, and think it’s a rural superstition to think of them as powers. Still, apparently almost no one in the world thinks, “Hey, wait, the saints who did crazy things? Could they have been unusually powerful Grisha?” The main characters do (and in later books it seems as if they’re right), but this is apparently a very unusual thing for them to come up with.

I don’t understand it, and it’s a key part of how the world works, is what I’m getting at here.

Compare this to something like Greatcoats. Saints are a specific thing there, called upon by people, but they’re not worshiped in the way that the gods are. There’s a god of War, for instance, but also a Saint of Swords–he embodies one aspect of that god’s domain. And you become Saint of Swords by defeating the previous one with a sword. Other saints have a less violent way of passing on their power. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I read them), they’re actually drawing on the power of the gods, which the gods sort of resent. 

It’s a fantasy idea, one that doesn’t jive with real-world notions of saints, but it’s close enough that it actually makes sense for a fantasy world. It doesn’t feel like it’s too out there. It makes more sense. Also, in the book where the saints are relevant to the Plot, their role is actually explained.

[I think in one of the AMAs by Jim Butcher, he also had a thing about saints in Dresden Files, which defined them as ‘powerful magic users aligned with religion,’ but that hasn’t come up in the books so we’re going to keep that on standby for a later Note.]

I think if you’re going to use the idea of saints in a fantasy fiction setting, one should consider how this relates to the real world ideal. If the word has no real connection, maybe pick a different one? And again, it’s fantasy, so you can do what you want, so maybe if you want to keep it, at least figure out how the religion itself works, so we, the readers or viewers, can understand how saints fit into the overall scheme of the religion and belief of the people in the stories.

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