One would suppose that on a day like today, September 30, 1897, Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face — secular name María Francisca Teresa Martín — ascended to the glory of God. “Oh, I love you!… My God… I love you…”, were the final words heard by her sisters in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux (Normandy), while tuberculosis carried her away, as if she were a Romantic poet. She was barely twenty-four when the Supreme Worker called her to his embrace. And yet, despite the brevity of her life, as Pope Pius X put it, she lived long enough to become “the greatest saint of modern times.”
Months after the elevation of Saint Teresa of Lisieux — whom her most devoted followers would come to call her — to the Kingdom of Heaven, in 1898, the first editions of her autobiographical writings began to circulate; a “hurricane of faith” swept among the faithful, drawing many to fervently visit the Lisieux Carmel where the young woman led her cloistered life.
Now, though she was raised to the altars, she was not canonized until 1925, the year of her canonization by Pius XI. Yet already in 1918, after the signing of the armistice, hundreds, almost thousands, of French soldiers who had survived the Great War went to Lisieux to offer their medals to the future Saint Teresa, or to beg her sisters to rub their missals, rosaries, and other sacred objects of the pilgrims with anything that had been touched by Teresa’s grace.
Up to that point, nothing particularly remarkable for the experience of a devout woman: her virtues and miracles were studied, the moment she was illuminated by grace, and in 1997 John Paul II proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church. And it even seems fair to compare her to the Maid of Orleans. Teresa of Lisieux and Joan of Arc — the Pucelle — are beloved figures in France and in Catholic tradition. Though their lives were very different, they are sometimes mentioned together as two young French women who inspired many through their courage and faith.
What is truly singular about Saint Teresa, however, is the influence she exerted on a writer such as the Austrian Joseph Roth in the mid-1930s. For Roth — the sharpest and most caustic chronicler of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1927), The Radetsky March (1932), The Capuchin Crypt (1938) — one of the great names in Central European literature —, born Jewish, it is hard to imagine a man who could be pious. Truly incomprehensible for those born in the era Fernando Pessoa spoke of in The Book of Disquiet (1912-1934) — which assigns to his most famous heteronym, Bernardo Soares, a time when “most youths had lost belief in God for the very reason their elders had: without knowing why.”
Time stretches like a specter — the one Pessoa speaks of through Bernardo Soares — a reach that could extend from our days to almost the entire century just past. And now, more than a century after we denied the faith our mother taught us as if its enemies of commerce had charmed us; and another century since we began to lean on adverbs ending in “-ly” to give weight to our words — irrevocably, inexorably, ineluctably… — all of it was simply that we stopped paying attention to childish things.
Yet now it seems that, through Joseph Roth, the saint of diminutives — whom we would never write about except to refer to her — still moves us with one of her miracles, as when a writer sets us on the trail of another.
“God grant us all drinkers a death so sweet and blessed,” Roth’s short novel The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) concludes, a few years before his own death in the same year, in circumstances strikingly close to those that befall Andreas Kartak, his protagonist in those pages, set in Paris in 1934. Indeed, Joseph Roth foreshadowed his own end in his character. Saint Teresa of Lisieux is not a mere narrative instrument. She stands as the theological, symbolic, and biographical center of the tale.
The Caminito (Petite Voie), which her devotees to Saint Teresa also call the Little Way, revolutionized 20th-century Catholic spirituality with its theology of spiritual childhood: the idea that grace and holiness are not attained through grand heroic acts or immaculate moral perfection, but by recognizing one’s own smallness and allowing oneself to be sustained by divine mercy as a child would. Andreas Kartak is the perfect embodiment of that defenselessness. He is a drunken clochard, a common vagabond — weak, stripped of status, and perpetually defeated by his vices. A natural-born loser.
Yet he preserves a simple faith and an innocent sense of honor: he does not want the money a stranger offers him almost as a gift, but he accepts it as a loan. He commits himself, though, to paying off the debt by handing it over to the “little Teresa” in the chapel of Sainte-Marie des Batignolles, where Parisians and visitors alike pay homage to La Caminito. Andreas is not saved by moral merit, but by fundamental innocence and a readiness to receive grace. Each time he gathers money to clear his debt of 200 francs, he lapses again into temptation — the private vice, paid loves, the companions of a blind man… Far from the blame being culpable, in his first confession, the saint he venerates, in his own way, ignored fear and scruples, and this filled her with joy — the novel posits that persistent grace manifests itself through Saint Teresa, who, when a child in Lisieux praying for the killers, even as they faced the gallows kissed the crucifix in despair; Teresa understood that her prayers had been heard.
The little Teresa represents a maternal and indulgent sanctity that does not demand Andreas detoxify himself or become a model citizen in order to be loved. When, at last, he dies in the sacristy, after collapsing in his search for the girl he mistakes for the saint, Roth ends the novel by praying for that sweet and blessed death for all drinkers. And anyone who has known what it is to take in what is given and seek the gift of drunkenness, that moment when a glass is never enough and a hundred does not suffice, or who has seen Death smile from the bottom of a glass, will understand the allusion, even if they gave up “the privā” sixteen years ago.
For Joseph Roth, a Jew of the Galician diaspora exiled in Paris, ruined by drink, overwhelmed by the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the looming Nazi menace, The Legend of the Holy Drinker is an autobiographical spiritual testament. During his final years in Parisian exile, Roth flirted with Catholicism as a search for transcendence, order, and spiritual consolation. Saint Teresa enjoyed mass devotion across France in the 1930s. For a man wrecked by addiction and expatriation, the figure of the saint of unconditional love represented the only harbor of peace where neither personal failure nor poverty prevented divine forgiveness. Saint Teresa acts as a bridge between Andreas’s earthly misery and transcendent dignity: proof that even a broken life can be the object of the highest virtue and a blessed death.
And some fifty years later, the great Ermanno Olmi brought to cinema The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), a masterpiece with Rutger Hauer portraying Andreas and The Little Way inspiring all with its grace.