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Aviad Kleinberg begins his book on late antique and medieval Christian saints' stories with a revealing personal anecdote about Mother Teresa. He saw her on television telling an interviewer about the very first dying leper in the streets of Calcutta whom she picked up, cleaned, and fed. When the leper asked why she had done it, she said: "Because I love you." Kleinberg, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, relates his own response to her words, which "shocked and confused" him: "I believed her. For an instant, at least, I believed that those words were the pure truth, that she had truly loved him, the leper dying in her arms." But then, as he tells the story, he came to his senses, recovering his usual stance toward religion: "I am a skeptic by nature, and when it comes to religious phenomena, my field of specialization, I am even more skeptical." According to Kleinberg, "Freud forever demolished the sublime. When saintliness is not a con, it is self-deception … . The subconscious [sic] is a cruel master. Some find their pleasure in feeding their id, some in nourishing their superego. The moment of 'faith' that took hold of me while watching Mother Teresa was brief. Immediately I was filled with doubts, beset by my usual cynicism. I was almost ashamed of my naïveté."
Not much can be said to someone determined to believe that Mother Teresa's apparent holiness was really just her version of pleasure-principle bondage to her unconscious (which is presumably what Kleinberg intends as the correct rendering of Freud's Unbewusste, insofar as the subconscious, das Unterbewusste, plays such a marginal role in Freud's thought). What might have been—pace Freud—an initial response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit working through the televised broadcast of Mother Teresa, Kleinberg regarded as an embarrassing lapse from the interpretive clarity ostensibly afforded by skeptical cynicism. For fifty years Mother Teresa served the wretchedly poor in ascetic self-denial and intensely self-conscious imitation of Christ, despite—as we now know from her posthumously published letters—enduring for decades a profound sense of forsaken emptiness that was anything but "nourishing [her] superego." If that doesn't count as real holiness, love of God, the following of Christ, and selfless service to others, then nothing does—which indeed seems to be Kleinberg's view, and the one that animates Flesh Made Word. "Sanctity is in the eye of the beholder," he asserts (and reasserts), "and different beholders can have altogether different eyes." That's one view. Another is that sanctity is real, notwithstanding its simulacra and varieties, despite the fact that some people fail to behold or refuse to acknowledge it.
Central to Kleinberg's book is a Weberian notion of charisma embedded within a Durkheimian view of religion and society, both of which serve a Foucauldian conviction that all human interactions are reducible to power relations. Kleinberg sees so-called sanctity as a species of charisma, an unstable, constructed product of negotiation between contending parties over an ultimately arbitrary range of human behaviors: "The person to whom it is attributed has something the group wants; the group indicates in various ways what that something is and what it is willing to pay for it." This claim overlaps with arguments in his first book, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). In Flesh Made Word, however, Kleinberg's chronological ambition is greater: more than half the book is devoted to early Christianity from its beginnings "as a personality cult" through late antiquity, primarily in the East, after which he shifts to the West up through the Golden Legend, the influential hagiograpical collection compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s.
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