Sainthood
SAINTHOOD. Saint is a designation that Christianity has used to recognize individuals deemed to have lived lives of heroic virtue and who, as a result, dwell eternally with God. They therefore may be venerated in a public cult. Historians of religion have liberated the category of sainthood from its narrower Christian associations and have employed the term in a more general way to refer to the state of special holiness that many religions attribute to certain people. The Jewish ḥasid or tsaddiq, the Muslim walīy, the Zoroastrian fravashi, the Hindu ṛṣi or guru, the Buddhist arahant or bodhisattva, the Daoist shengren, the Shintō kami, and others have all been referred to as saints.
The Category of Sainthood
The problem for the historian of religions is whether the term sainthood so broadly applied retains any meaning. Can a category that grows out of one religion be properly and usefully extended cross-culturally? William James described universal saintliness in psychological terms, while Joachim Wach defined the saint as a particular type of religious authority alongside the founder, the reformer, the priest, the prophet, and others. But sainthood may embrace persons of diverse psychological constitutions and religious offices. Fundamentally, then, sainthood may be described as a religion's acclamation of a person's spiritual perfection, however that perfection is defined.
This page contains 201 words.
Sainthood article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 4,961 words
(approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Saint Article
