Religion: Five Who Moved the World

“Is there anyone who still talks about the materialism of science?” wrote Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech’s famed physi cist. “Rather does the scientist join with the psalmist of thousands of years ago in reverently proclaiming, ‘the Heavens de clare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.’ ” Hungarian-born Rene FtilSp-Miller, a onetime hermit on Mt. Athos who has written biographies of Pope Leo XIII, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Lenin and Gandhi, sees Physicist Millikan ‘s attitude as part of “a new ‘renaissance,’ which is about to bring back man’s appreciation of the con structive wisdom and beauty of faith.” To contribute to that renaissance, Author FtilSp-Miller has selected five saints (of the 25,000 generally recognized by Roman Catholics) and made their five lives into a book, The Saints That Moved the World (Crowell; $3.50).

Saint Anthony of Egypt has repre sented for i, 600 years the spirit of renun ciation. To many painters and writers -including Bruegel, Diirer, Cezanne, Flaubert, Anatole France—St. Anthony’s lifelong struggle with the flesh & the devil symbolized one of man’s most terrible dilemmas.

Saint Augustine, “the Saint of the Intellect,” is enthroned among the saints as “the first great teacher of rational thought.” His Doctrina Christiana, “the earliest pedagogical textbook of the Western world,” supplied “the foundation on which the first European universities were built.” From his teachings arise the famed Protestant tenets of “the pre-eminence of faith over good works, of grace over reason.”

Saint Francis of Assisi, “the Saint of Love,” changed “the stern Christian doctrine of the Middle Ages . . . into a message of good cheer.” Love was not only “the essence of Francis’ life,” it was the only path he could conceive of toward wisdom, action, beauty, human brotherhood, and the bridge between man and God.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “the Saint of Will Power,” was “crowned with the halo of holiness because he fought for it with all his might.” To the mighty organization he founded and led, the Society of Jesus, he bequeathed the rule: to be “all things to all men” in order to win all. Ignatius’ disciples—the Jesuit missionaries, diplomats, scientists, economists, lawyers—became the most skilled, determined, and often the most feared religious brotherhood in history.

Saint Theresa of Avila, “the Saint of Ecstasy,” divided her existence equally between earthly toil and divine rapture. Her strenuous earthly labors led to her founding of the order of Discalced Carmelites; her ecstatic transports made her _one of the world’s great mystic poets. Half genius of the supernatural, half militant nun, Theresa’s gifts to posterity have become part of “the inalienable possessions of mankind.”