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But the ways the saints lived are even more astonishing than the ways they died. Margaret of Hungary was born a princess, but she chose to minister to the sick in ways that Attwater describes as "menial, repulsive, exhausting and insanitary." Her imitation of the lives of the poor was so squalidly real that at times her fellow nuns shrank from contact with her. She ate almost nothing, slept hardly at all and died in 1270 at 28. St. Benedict Labre was another dirty saint who spent most of his life tramping from shrine to shrine throughout 18th century Europe, sleeping in sheds or fields, eating meagerly of handouts and garbage, talking to virtually no one and smelling to high heaven. But when he died of a chill in Rome in 1783, "scarcely had he breathed his last when children in the street were heard to raise the cry, 'The saint is dead,' and the chorus was taken up all over the city." Exactly 100 years later he was canonized.
The life of 13th century Blessed Raymund Lull, who made it his life work to convert the Moors, was a failure in almost everything he undertook, but his vision was so bright and his energy so great that he never seemed to notice the defeats and frustrations that would have submerged an ordinary man. Fifth century Daniel the Stylite lived atop a pillar near the Bos-phorus for 33 years, and, like his famed preceptor Simeon, controlled with his prestige the emperors and patriarchs in the world below.
The Seven Sleepers. Editor Attwater has happily spared the shears on some of the best stories in Christian tradition, though modern scholarship and/or common sense deny them corroboration. One such is the legend of St. Marina, whom her father disguised as a boy and took to the monastery with him when he became a monk. In due course Marina, too, became a monk, and was accused of getting a local innkeeper's daughter with child. Dismissed from the monastery to live as a beggar at its gates, Marina uttered not a word in self-defense. Only when she died was her sex and innocence discovered. The lying innkeeper's daughter went out of her mind but was cured when she prayed for Marina's heavenly intercession.
The legend of 4th century St. Malchus is readymade for Hollywood—complete with caravans and capture by infidels, a fake marriage and a lovelorn heroine who became a hermit herself for love of the saint. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, sealed up to suffocate in a cave by a persecuting emperor, were placed in miraculous hibernation by the Lord, to emerge 208 years later to their own astonishment and the edification of all good Christians.
"Writing or revising the lives of the saints is not the dull job most people think it is," said Editor Attwater last week. "It's astonishing what interesting material turns up."