Nescience: n. [L. nescientia, fr. nesciens, p. pr. of nescire not to know; ne not + scire to know.] Want of knowledge; ignorance; agnosticism, lacking knowledge,[to be nescient] lacking education in a certain matter, unlearned.
“You Protestants, if you think of saints at all, regard them with quite the wrong sort of veneration,’ he said to me at our first dinner. “I think you must be deceived by our cheap religious statuary. All those pink and blue dolls, you now, are for people who think them beautiful. St. Dominic, so pretty and pink-cheeked with his lily, is a peasant woman’s idea of a good man - the precise contrary of the man she is married to, who stinks of sweat and punches her in the breast and puts his cold feet on her backside in the winter nights. But St. Dominic himself - and this is a Jesuit speaking, Ramezay - was no confectionery doll. Do you know that before he was born his mother dreamed she would give birth to a dog with a lighted torch in his mouth? And that is what he was - fierce and persistent in carrying the flame of faith. But show the peasant woman a dog with a torch and she will not care for it; she wants a St. Dominic who can see the beautiful soul in her, and that would be a man without passions or desires - a sort of high-minded eunuch.
”But she is too much herself to want that all the time. She would not take it in exchange for her smelly man. She gives her saints another life, and some very strange concerns, that we Bollandists have to know about but not to advertise. St. Joseph now - what was his sphere of patronage, Ramezay?”
”Carpenters, the dying, the family, married couples and people looking for houses.”
”yes and in Naples of confectioners; don’t ask me why. but what else? Come now, put your mind to it. What made Joseph famous?”
”The earthly father of Christ?”
”Oho, you nice Protestant boy! Joseph is history’s most celebrated cuckold. Did not God usurp Joseph’s function, reputedly by impregnating his wife through her ear? Do not nasty little seminarians still refer to a woman’s sine qua non as auricula - the ear? And is not Joseph known throughout Italy as Tio Pepe - Uncle Joe - and invoked by husbands who are getting worried? St Joseph hears more prayers about cuckoldry than he does about house-hunting or confectionery, I can assure you. Indeed, in the underworld hagiography of which I promised to tell you, it is whispered that the Virgin herself, who was born to Joachim and Anna through God’s personal intervention, was a divine daughter as well as a divine mate; the Greeks could hardly improve on that, could they? And popular legend has it that Mary’s parents where very rich, which makes an oddity of the Church’s respect for poverty but is quite in keeping with the general respect for money. And do you know the scandal that makes it necessary to keep apart the statues of Mary and those of St John - ”
Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. people in the restaurant were staring, and one or two ladies of devout appearance were heaving their bosoms indignantly. He swept the room with the wild eyes of a conspirator in a melodrama and dropped his voice to a hiss. Fragments of food, ejected from his mouth by this jet, flew about the table.
”But all this terrible talk about the saints is not disrespect, Ramezay. Far from it! It is faith! it is love! it takes the saint to the heart by supplying the other side of his character that history or legend has suppressed - that he may very well have suppressed himself in his struggle toward sainthood. The saint triumphs over sin. Yes, but most of us cannot do that, and because we love the saint and want him to be more like ourselves we attribute some imperfection on him. Not always sexual, or course, Thomas Aquinas was monstrously fat; St Jerome had a terrible temper. This gives comfort to fat men, and cross men. Mankind cannot endure perfection; it stifles him. He demands that even the saints cast a shadow. If they, these holy ones who have liked so greatly but who still carry their shadows with them, can approach God, well then, there is hope for the worst of us.”
from Fifth Business - Roberston Davies
