How to Become a Saint With Jean-Paul Sartre is a reflection on Sartre’s claim that ‘one cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day’, exploring how existentialism challenges the idea that holiness requires withdrawal from ordinary life. This piece considers how sainthood, reframed through an existential lens, becomes an ethical stance lived amid exhaustion, routine and responsibility, suggesting that integrity within the everyday, rather than escape from it, is where true moral seriousness is found.

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How to Become a Saint With Jean-Paul Sartre

“This post “How to Become a Saint With Jean-Paul Sartre”, forms part of the Lesser Saints Project, an ongoing series that examines figures whose sanctity emerged not through formal canonisation, but through the quieter, more organic currents of popular devotion. These are individuals who either reached the full honours of the altar but so long ago they’re now almost forgotten, or who have never fully reached the altars. Lives, deaths and/or reputations inspiring reverence, pilgrimage and local cults.

The project explores how such reputations were formed, how they were sustained, and why some figures lingered on the edges of sainthood rather than entering its official ranks. Each entry considers the historical context, the devotional practices that developed around the individual, and the ways in which memory, politics and piety shaped their posthumous identities.

A Thorny Path

Jean-Paul Sartre gave us a damningly honest line in his play The Devil and the Good Lord: “One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.” The words strike with a clarity only those familiar with the daily grind can truly appreciate. Sartre, no friend of easy illusions, was alive to the fact that the rhythm of modern life, the hours spent doing, toiling, earning, leaves little left for the grand gestures of spiritual ascent.

The world is full of what one might call “Lesser Saints“, “secular saints” or “Saints next door”, those men and women who, without the cloister or the carved-out hours, become luminous not by renunciation, but right in the mess and muddle of engaging with the world.

What follows is a journey through the philosophical depth of Sartre’s claim, a forensic look at sainthood’s heritage, and a series of true stories: from the ancient desert hermits to twentieth-century doctors, victims of crime and workers.

We’ll ask, pointedly: what does it mean to be good, or even holy, in a time-starved world? Is “Secular” or “Lesser” sainthood a luxury for the workless or idle, or can that state be, perhaps, found in exhaustion, laundry, and the small ethical choices made between tasks?

Sartre’s Line: Philosophy, Faust, and Banality

Sartre didn’t serve his one-liners cold. The context for “One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day” is thickened by existential grit and the blood and dust of the German Peasants’ War, which sets the stage for The Devil and the Good Lord. In the play,

Goetz, a swashbuckling military commander, is whirled through a moral cyclone: he oscillates between devilry and the almost parodic effort to become, quite self-consciously, a saint. The plot is thick with allusions to Goethe’s Faust, where bargains with the devil aren’t simply about metaphysical evil, but about the entanglements of good intentions, real-life consequences, and the dangers of misplaced generosity.

Sartre’s Goetz, inspired to “turn his coat” and wager on good rather than evil, tries to engineer paradise for the poor. The result is carnage. Utopian intentions ring hollow when swept along by real-world complexity: “In one day of virtue, you killed more people than in thirty-five years of malice!” scoffs Heinrich, the priest-companion. Here’s Sartre’s dig: good and evil, intention and action, are so entangled in lived experience that pure sainthood threatens disaster if isolated from mess and real consequence.

Consider, too, the line’s sardonic heart. To work sixteen hours a day is not merely an economic or physical state: it’s a condition of being-with-others, of belonging to a social machine, an existence that leaves little space for contemplation, let alone sanctity dreamt up in seclusion.

Can moral clarity survive in the thick of routine labour? Or is it, as Sartre suggests, squeezed out by the sheer exhaustion of survival? His philosophy is deeply existential: “existence precedes essence”, we are not born saints; the grind and the choices in that grind shape us.

Sartre’s own words: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Freedom is a weight, not a gift; taking on the world, with all its clutter and fatigue, is to wrestle with responsibility at every moment.

Sainthood: Ritual, Renunciation, and Recognition

The Church’s vision of sainthood is a multi-layered cake, equal parts inspiration and Roman legalism. In the early centuries, saints were martyrs, their stories passed on by those who witnessed their deaths and miracles. In England we hear that “saints were like Blackberries” there were so many of them.

With the legalistic tendencies of the Roman catholic Church, canonisation was systematised: a “Servant of God” becomes “Venerable”, then “Blessed”, and, finally, “Saint”, through a procession involving bishops, the intervention of the Pope, and the rigorous investigation of miracles. Some people avoided such processes through local acclamation although The Emperor Charlemagne although canonised by an anti-pope never gained traction as a cult.

More crucially, sainthood was, until the modern age, most often located in the monastery, the hermitage, the cloistered convent. The saint’s canvas was blank, vast swathes of silence and leisure in which to hear God’s whisper or to forge the self through rigorous asceticism. The monastics pursued otium sanctum, holy leisure, the very opposite of the sixteen-hour day.

Holy Leisure: Otium as Sacred Space

Otia sancta is not idleness, but dedicated non-busyness: the time to read, meditate, chant psalms, and weave together a soul prepared for radical hospitality or spiritual battle. St Augustine craved this: “He sought unburdened time in which he could intensely and uninterruptedly study the Scriptures so as to equip himself better for subsequent pastoral ministry by study…” The ideal? To be “free from many worldly obligations so that, by study of the Scriptures and by prayer, he could better serve the church in whichever manner was required of him.”

St Benedict of Nursia’s Rule, meanwhile, was aimed at balance: prayer, work, study, all in set harmony. Leisure was no luxury, but the fertile soil in which the soul grew.

Table: Contrasts in Sainthood

Tradition	Setting	Means	Main Work	Risks
Monastic	Monastery Cloister	Otium, discipline, prayer	Prayer, study, contemplation	Spiritual pride, isolation
Lay/Secular	Home, factory, office	Routine, “messy” engagement, fatigue	Parenting, labour, social care	Burnout, distraction

In light of this, is it any surprise that much of the Church’s pantheon is filled with Royals, hermits, monks, and nuns? The very architecture of holiness seemed to require space, both literal and temporal. Time for God was architected into the timetable. The world, with its clamour, interruptions, and demands, was supposed to be left behind.

The Saxon Kings, like their cloistered counterparts, fill up the register of ‘lesser saints‘ although they retain a place in the liturgical diary. Even Saint King Charles is remembered in the Anglican Church with five Church dedications despite his actions costing over one hundred thousand lives. Piety takes different forms when it comes to royalty.

Secular Saints: Gathering, Not Renouncing

For every one of these “great” saints, those with fancy titles and feast days, there are countless more whose stories are less glamorous, but no less stirring.

These are the “saints next door”, people who do not escape the world, but wade in and refuse to look away. The broken secular saints such as Matthew Shepard and Danny Lockin are victims and increasingly remembered and even commemorated. Some have local acclamation.

Sartre’s line forces us to see that this kind of sanctity is not born from absence from the world, but from presence in the world. If it’s hard to understand secular sainthood or ‘lesser saints‘ or the saints next door then it’s because sanctity here is not a withdrawal from the world but an engagement with the world. Gathering up the pains of the world, the brokenness of the world rather than renouncing the pain of everyday life. The saints that are often ‘lesser saints‘ are the ones loving humanity amid the clutter and contradiction of daily life.

From Desert to Daily Grind: A Contrast in Saints

The Monastic Tradition: Renunciation, Retreat, Rhythm

St Benedict of Nursia (480–547), patron saint of Europe, spent three years in solitary prayer at Subiaco before founding Monte Cassino and writing his now-famed Rule. Monastic life, in Benedict’s hands, was a “school of the Lord’s service”, where every activity pointed to the divine: five hours of prayer, five of manual work, four of spiritual reading.

Such a schedule would be unrecognisable in the life of a single mother struggling with zero-hours contracts , or a hospital porter darting between operating theatres. Silence, an abundance of time, and lack of worry over dinner were the preserve of either privilege or deliberate exclusion from the world.

St Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582): The Contemplative Reformer

Teresa’s legacy is vast: reformer, visionary, writer, founder of the Discalced Carmelites. She lived in communities where, even amid hardship, the central task was to “practice heroic humility, evangelical simplicity and trust in God”. Her autobiography is full of spiritual struggle, but also moments of deep joy linked to the rhythms of convent life.

She relished her time spent sweeping floors more than her previous life of vanity: “There came to me a new joy, which amazed me, for I could not understand whence it arose…” Ora et labora, prayer and work, in her world, these were not at odds, but the very currency of love.

St John of the Cross (1542–1591): The Dark Night and Mystical Clarity

Teresa’s great companion in the Carmelite reform, St John, gave us the “dark night of the soul”. In his poetry and commentary, spiritual growth is a movement through pain and emptiness towards unity with God. But even this journey presupposed a life able to leave space for introspection, to be “lost in oblivion … leaving my cares among the lilies”.

Table: The Monastic/Reclusive Saints

Saint	Life Circumstance	Signature Path	Key Outcomes/Teachings
Benedict of Nursia	Monastic founder, Italy	Rule, community, routine	Ora et labora, stability, silence
Teresa of Ávila	Spanish nun, reformer	Reform, mystical union	Interior Castle, spiritual autobiography
John of the Cross	Carmelite friar, mystic	“Dark night” journey	Poetic theology, deep union

Leisure, structure, and the withdrawal from the world were not accidental. They framed the conditions under which sainthood, defined as radical openness to God, was thought to flourish.

Walking Amid the World: The Lesser, Secular, and ‘next-door’ Saints

The other side of the ledger is written in sweat, city streets, and the soreness of those for whom prayer is squeezed into gaps. Their sainthood, if we may use the term, is not a product of withdrawal but one of carrying on. Sartre’s “sixteen hours” is not a mystery for them but a lived reality.

The Lay Worker Saint: Pier Giorgio Frassati

Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901–1925), canonised in September 2025, was an Italian layman and student from a privileged family, but one who preferred the company of miners, the poor, and the dispossessed. He did not enter a monastery. Instead, he gathered friends for mountain trips, visited the sick, and distributed his own possessions among the needy. He attended daily Mass, but before work or study, not as the day’s main event.

His sanctity lay not in escape, but in immersion, bringing Christ to “the ordinary impoverished Italian in the street”. At his funeral, the poor of Turin, unknown to his own family, filled the streets in mourning. His faith, his energy for service, was plaited into the long hours of study, work, friendship, and activism.

Even so, Frassati’s life had structure, a certain privilege, and an unusually robust devotional routine. But his model was different from the silent monk: he left the world not at all.

St Gianna Beretta Molla: Profession, Motherhood, and Moral Heroism

Dr Gianna Beretta Molla (1922–1962) was an Italian paediatrician, wife, and mother. Her life was one of intense juggling: medical vocation, family, and charitable work among the elderly and poor. In 1961, pregnant with her fourth child, she was diagnosed with a tumour on her uterus. Given the choice between her own life and that of the unborn child, she chose the path that risked her own death.

The Church, in holding her up as a saint, was not extolling a life of luxury or meditative solitude, but a form of holiness forged in crisis, routine, and fatigue. It’s instructive that her sainthood is intimately tied to her work, both paid and unpaid, and her obligations to a family and community. Here is sanctity stretched to its modern breaking point.

St Francis de Sales: Holiness in the Marketplace

Francis de Sales (1567–1622), bishop and writer, broke rank with the model that saw sainthood as reserved for the cloister and wrote a guide for those “who are living in towns, at court, in their own households, and whose calling obliges them to a social life…” Introduction to the Devout Life is a deeply practical book, insistent that “the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything… every kind of occupation more acceptable and better performed where that is the guide”.

He exhorted laypeople to prayer, patience, and virtue, but not to flee society. Charity for family, neighbours, colleagues; the sanctification of “the noble, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the maiden, and the wife”. Such devotion, he insisted, is for all.

Here is a spirituality that recognises not all those who wish to be holy may carve out eight hours for contemplation. “It were overambitious to aim at being poor without suffering any inconvenience, in other words, to have the credit of poverty and the convenience of riches…” Even poverty, long associated with sanctity, is more “real” when thrust upon someone by life, not chosen in seclusion.

St Josemaría Escrivá: Holiness in Work

In the twentieth century, St Josemaría Escrivá (1902–1975), priest and founder of Opus Dei, reframed work itself as vocation, a divine calling as valid as monasticism. For Escrivá, the workshop, the office, and the laboratory could and should be sites of sanctification: “Work is man’s original vocation. It’s a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken…”

Escrivá’s notion: not only is holiness possible amid the batteries of email, the teaching, nursing, typing, negotiating, and sweeping; it’s demanded. “We have to be contemplative souls in the middle of the world who strive to turn our work into prayer.”

On his view, the struggle is animated by attention, love, and humility. The “sixteen hour day” becomes a crucible, but one whose heat can, with grace, burnish rather than scorch.

Forgotten Saints and Saints Next Door

Not all saints have feast days, or even graves with names. The Church contains stories of saints whose labour was hidden, whose lives were spent cleaning, caring, raising children, or keeping faith quietly against violence or boredom. The “saints next door”, to use Pope Francis’s term, are found in those who see their neighbour’s suffering, who love amid chaos, who replace gossip with compassion, who find time to pray between meal shifts.

The Messy Reality: Gathering, Not Renouncing

A thread emerges: renunciation is easiest for those “set apart”. Benedict’s monks, the anchorites like Julian of Norwich and stylites, wear their poverty and silence as badges. In the world, gathering, not only things, but relationships, obligations, and disappointments, is the name of the game.

As Sartre noted, the demands of the everyday are not always ennobling. Work, as lived by most, is “dehumanising”, a grind that leaves little time for prayer, self-examination, or even a good cup of tea.

Spiritual Formation in the Age of Busyness

Contemporary research on spirituality and the workplace shows the rub. Work that is meaningful, that draws on spiritual values, reduces stress and improves well-being. The balance is fragile. Overwork is now the norm, and “burnout” is a secular affliction.

Spiritual practice, whether prayer, meditation, or service, is proven to buffer the soul against the corroding effects of unending busyness. “Meaningful work” remains a carrot dangled just out of reach for many.

In this light, sanctity carved in the fog of exhaustion is not a matter of easy formulae. It teaches us to find the “little way”, to draw grace from interrupted sleep or uncertain income. The spirituality of “the ordinary” is not sublime, but gritty.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the virtues fray at the edges, and the only prayer left is the itch for rest.

Table: Modern Saints in the Workplace

Name	Main Work/Setting	Notable Virtue	Modern Relevance
St Gianna Molla	Doctor, mother	Sacrifice, integrity, charity	Balancing profession and family
Pier Giorgio Frassati	Student, activist	Joy, service, humility	Engagement in justice
Francis de Sales	Bishop, writer	Guidance, practicality	Devotional integration
Josemaría Escrivá	Priest, founder	Work as holiness, inclusion	Sanctification of the ordinary

These figures challenge us to see saintliness in action rather than in set-apart passivity.

Monasticism, Secularity, and the Virtues of Gathering

A word must be given here to the very nature of monasticism versus secular engagement. Monastic life, in nearly every religious tradition, is about withdrawal, but also about stability, hierarchy, and shared rhythms. The monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience grant, in return, a freedom from many of the messier aspects of gathering. Possessions are minimal; relationships are structured. Even suffering is sanctified by context.

Secular saints, those who haven’t “checked out” of the world, must gather ‘things’ instead. Stuff, relationships, drama, sorrow, joy. Their values are tested not in silence, but in conversation; not in seclusion, but in the clash of personalities, workplace grudges, failing health, and the friction of other people’s needs.

Renunciation, then, is easy when you are set apart and protected. In the world, sacrifice wears another face: compromise, forgiveness, the willingness to keep trying after a day spent in the soulless drip of repetitive tasks.

Is it more noble to give up everything in a flourish and head to a hilltop monastery, or to try to give up resentment, tiredness, and cynicism, over and over, day after day?

Contemporary Reflections: Spirituality, Work, and Balance

Modern theology has started to catch up. Sartre, in his own way, pointed to the terror of authentic freedom: with no God-given essential blueprint, each person must carve out meaning through the choices made in fatigue and cheerlessness. It’s, after all, easy to be brave when you are in a community that is resourced and admired and with a chapel attached. It’s less easy to be brave when alone with doubt and fear on the tenth floor of a tower block apartment.

To become a secular saint is not about clearing the schedule and renouncing everything, but about a thousand small decisions: to love, to forgive, to choose honesty, to tend a dying parent or a wayward child.

Work itself, as modern saints have shown, is holy when wrapped in love and intention. Josemaría Escrivá reminds us: “Let us work a lot and work well, without forgetting that prayer is our best weapon… we have to be contemplative souls in the middle of the world, who try to convert their work into prayer.”. St Francis de Sales, centuries earlier, was already insisting on the possibility and necessity of holiness in every vocation.

The challenge is stark. If the saints of old had time and space for contemplation and heroism, the saints among us must make time or, more often, create holiness in the cracks of necessity.

In practice, this means accepting sometimes awkward imperfections, seeking grace in the unfinished, the half-hearted, the interrupted. It’s a spirituality of crumbs, not loaves.

The Pain and Promise of Ordinary Sanctity

Secular sanctity is not about being perfect, or even “winning” at goodness. The office cleaner who gives a sandwich to the hungry, the tired mother who tries to forgive her child, the worker who refuses to participate in fraud, these are the halting steps of gathering sanctity. They are rarely recognised; rarely canonised. They matter deeply in the economy of grace.

This is not to sentimentalise the brutal truths Sartre points to. Overwork can kill the soul as well as the body. If the system is unjust, sanctity might mean protest, withdrawal, or dismantling the structures that keep others from leisure, justice, rest. The cry for holy leisure is not just a personal plea, but a political challenge as well.

Final Thoughts: Sixteen Hours, a Lifetime

Sartre was right, to an extent. There is a cost to endless work. If sanctity is reserved only for those free from grinding necessity, then the Gospel and the Church has little to say to most of the world.

The testimony of “Secular” and “Lesser” saints, and the “Saint next door”, those who have worked, suffered, cared, endured, died and even sometimes triumphed in the midst of it all, says otherwise.

Their stories, scarred by fatigue and chaos, pulse with hope: that grace can gather in the most unpromising hours, that love is possible even when we have nothing left to give, and that sanctity, if it’s to mean anything in our day, must be found amid sixteen-hour days, unwashed dishes, and unpaid bills.

So, can we all become a saint when we work sixteen hours a day? If sainthood means only shining in cloistered purity, then perhaps Sartre is right, it’s out of reach for most of us.

If saintliness is what happens when we keep choosing love, then maybe, quietly, we become a saint anyway. Saintliness may be in the brokenness that resembles Christ imposed on the human body by those that hate you.

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Further Reading

• Saint: Meta Hub
• The Strange Company of Saints: Martyrs, Passion‑Bearers, and the Rest of Us

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Last Curated: 06 08 2026

Part of the Lesser Saint Project