Per Undset, however, Olaf was primarily motivated by the desire to conquer Norway for himself, with converting defeated enemies essentially an afterthought. Those who perform miracles during their lifetimes, or, as in the case of Saint Olaf, spread Christianity. Next, there are saints for “significant acts”. If we are in the unfortunate position of being threatened or abused, one can hope that our suffering will serve some higher purpose of example, and be honored in the future, but in a 21 st-century America, the likelihood of needing to emulate these examples is (mercifully) low. His action was clearly selfless, but not particularly Christian. Saint Hallvard, in her retelling, was trying to help a pregnant woman accused of theft escape when he was shot full of arrows. There are other examples, though, in Sigrid Undset’s Saga of Saints, where someone was killed simply for doing something good.
At the personal level, I can admire the fortitude of the public martyr, but at the community level, I also feel that those who preserve the tradition (albeit in secret and at risk) have done more to contribute to the community/religion than the one who allows him/herself and their family to be killed. the Conversos in Spain during the Inquisition). There are countless examples of such behavior in Judaism, but there are also counterexamples (viz. Thinking at the level of virtues, this demonstrates courage, but also a form of ego: the martyr believes that his/her statements and example are so important that it is worth dying to avoid even the form of deviation from proper practice. Generally speaking, I thought of this as requiring the faith to be the cause of the threat, as in the case where a pagan conqueror obliges a monotheist to pray to his idols or die, and the believer chooses death. If the purpose of reading saints’ lives is to be inspired to live well and become a better person, some of these paths are more applicable to a modern context (at least in America) than others.įirst, there are “saints due to suffering.” Martyrs fall in the first category, those people who pay the ultimate price for adhering to their beliefs in the face of threat. There are three different ways to become a saint, each indicating something different about the individual involved.
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