Christian History Blog: Wrestling With Relics

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Wrestling With Relics

by Ted Olsen | February 19, 2009

My own views would have been terribly out of step in the church's earliest centuries.

St._Vincent_de_Paul.jpg I've been working on a cover story for Christianity Today on the spirituality of travel. In any investigation into what the church has historically taught about travel, there's one subject that absolutely unavoidable—something that's pretty disturbing to a committed Protestant like me.

Relics.

Most of my queasiness, I think, is purely theological. I'm pretty much with Calvin in his critique that

the first abuse, and, as it were, beginning of the evil, was, that when Christ ought to have been sought in his Word, sacraments, and spiritual influences, the world, after its wont, clung to his garments, vests, and swaddling clothes; and thus overlooking the principal matter, followed only its accessory. ... It is of no use to discuss the point whether it is right or wrong to have relics merely to keep them as precious objects without worshiping them, because experience proves that this is never the case.

But part of me, honestly, is also simply put off by the notion of getting close to dead body parts. I'm a queasy man by nature.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me when I read a church father's defense of relics that acknowledged that dead bodies are indeed repulsive. Interestingly, he found this as evidence of why relics were so holy. Everyone is turned off by dead bodies, he said. But every year we have these huge celebrations of the martyr, with his remains on display, and no one is the slightest bit disturbed. Something holy must be going on, he concluded.

I wasn't sold, but I did enjoy a bit of my reporting rabbit trail trying to understand why the early church was so nearly unanimous in their support for the cult of relics.

Christians were by no means the first people to honor the bones of their fallen. The Old Testament tells of Moses taking the bones of Joseph out of Egypt. (Hebrews 11 places Joseph's directive on this point among the great faith acts of history.) 2 Kings tells of an unnamed dead man hastily thrown into the grave of the prophet Elisha who immediately "revived and stood on his feet" upon touching the holy bones.

And in the early church, the martyrs were at the top of the holiness list. Revelation, after all, told that those "beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God ? will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years."

Writing around A.D. 200, Tertullian famously claimed "the blood of the martyrs is seed [for the church]." Whether he meant it as metaphor or not, the literal blood of the martyrs was precious, with Christians sometimes mopping up martyrs' blood with their own clothes. After Polycarp was killed in A.D. 156, his church circulated a letter about his martyrdom:

We afterwards took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place; where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom for the commemoration of those that have already fought in the contest, and for the training and preparation of those that shall do so hereafter.

Such devotion to martyrs and their remains had some critics early on. A priest named Vigilantius, for example, considered such activities to be more pagan than Christian. In response, Jerome insisted that Christians were not worshiping the martyrs any more than the sun, moon, or angels. "We pay honor to the martyr's relics only so that we may venerate him whose martyrs they are; we pay honor to the servants only so that the servants' honor may glorify their Lord." (The fact that we don't even have Vigilantius's own argument and have to read it through Jerome's refutation gives an indication of how thoroughly pro-relic the church was.)

Augustine put it a different way:

The bodies of the dead are not ? to be despised and left unburied; least of all the bodies of the righteous and faithful, which have been used by the Holy Spirit as his organs and instruments for all good works. For if the dress of a father, or his ring, or anything he wore, is precious to his children, in proportion to the love they bore him, with how much more reason ought we to care for the bodies of those we love, which they wore far more closely and intimately than any clothing?

If the bishops like Jerome and Augustine had to defend the veneration of relics to those who said it looked like paganism, they also had to defend it from believers who acted like pagans during the annual martyr celebrations. Sermons from the era are replete with criticisms of drunkenness and prostitution at the celebrations, along with gluttony, nudity, dancing, bawdy songs, commercial activity, and bedlam so great that it prevented any preaching.

And the preaching to such crowds during such celebration mattered. One bishop, Basil of Caesarea, spoke of how important the festivals were to protecting his flock from heresies.

Maybe those fights over heresies were one thing that made relics so important. The early church had spent so much time fighting Gnostics who denied the importance (or the goodness) of the physical world. They fought against those who denied the reality of Christ's humanity. And they fought for the belief in the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints. It makes sense, I suppose, that the physical remains of martyrs would be important in this context. Matter really mattered.

In his 1999 book, The Way of the Lord, Tom (N.T.) Wright talks about his own

slowly turning away from various forms of dualism, to which evangelicalism is particularly prone, and towards a recognition of the sacramental quality of God's whole created world. ... With the incarnation itself being the obvious and supreme example, and the gospel sacraments of baptism and eucharist not far behind, one can learn to discpver the presence of God not only in the world, as though by a forutnate accident, but through the world: particularly through those things that speak of Jesus himself, as baptism and the eucharist so clearly do, and as the lives of holy men and women have done.

This leads Wright to talk about relics. The cult of relics, he says "can be explained, though not (to my mind) fully justified, in terms of the grace of God at work in the actual physical life of a person. Even after their death (so the argument runs) their body can be regarded as a place where special grace and the presence of God were truly made known."

I'm not convinced, especially since my own interest in the "sacramental quality of God's whole created world" has led me to see the presence of God breaking through suddenly in unexpected places more often than in one predictable location indefinitely. But this week, at least, I'm aware that my views would have been terribly out of fashion during the church's earliest centuries. And even though I think I'm right, it still makes me uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than being next to a dead body, I suppose.

* * *
Image: Incorrupt body of St. Vincent de Paul, Paris, France. Photo by Derek89 via Wikimedia Commons. Used by permission.

Comments

This, as with many issues we western Protestants struggle with, is a Christological issue. Can humanity really be interpenetrated by Divinity? Are humanity and Divinity compatible? Christ was always the test case for questions in the ancient church. His flesh was deified before the Resurrection as evidenced in the Transfiguration. Because of the union of the two natures, the Councils called Christ's flesh "life-giving". Matter matters to God. Mary is the mother of God because she carried and gave flesh to an eternal divine Person. The eucharist is the body and blood of Christ because his flesh has become something divine due to it's union with divinity. Baptism is far more than just an outward picture of a past decision because something divine occurs in conjunction with something human in the sacrament. Handkerchiefs are sent from Paul for healing, Peter's shadow heals, and Jesus uses mud and spittle because God likes to use "stuff" to reveal and share himself with his people. I think relics are more about affirming that God really unites himself to us in Christ and this is not only a spiritual thing, but physical as well. (What is not assumed, is not healed). Are we really partakers of the divine nature as St. Peter said in scripture? With God, all things are possible.

I have to admit that, though I'm not interested in body
parts, I would love to own
something, any little thing,
which was once owned by C.
S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.

I would love to have a signed
letter by Lincoln or a piece
of clothing from Washington.
I visit Lincoln's tomb in Springfield and Grant's in New
York. Shouldn't we say the same for our Christian heroes?
No worship, just respect.

I was somewhat surprised to read that "Christians were by no means the first people to honor the bones of their fallen" followed by the mention of the bones of Joseph and Elisha. Nowhere in the Bible have I ever read that Israel ever honored their bones. On the other hand, it seems like the cult of relics was in full vogue at a time when those celebrating those relics engaged in drunkenness, prostitution and the other practices mentioned above (so similar to the works of the flesh mentioned in Galatians.) That rings a bell to me. Should they have followed Jesus and His Word I am sure the resuls would have been strikingly different. This article makes me feel very comfortable to be committed to the Word rather than to men's traditions.

2 Kings 13:20-22

The path of Christian maturity for me and many others has led from seeing bread, wine, baptism and anointing oil as mere symbols to a sacramental understanding of Christ truly spiritually present in those physical realities - a type of incarnation. This ancient truth, lurking in the shadows for most evangelicals, when rediscovered and embraced is faith empowering, and opens the door to an iconic perspective of St. Paul's handkerchiefs, Joseph's and Elisha's bones, and yes the veneration (not worship)of martyr's relics,whereby the very presence of God, in grace and power, are made real, and tangible. This too is faith empowering, inspiring outpourings of praise and worship of our almighty God and savior. Alleluia!

As humans we possess a dysfunctional need to have tangible evidence of our faith. On the helpful side, relics, icons, pictures and buildings help make real our faith. On the fatal side we are incapable of stopping at using them as a learning tool and make them into idols giving them powers reserved for God alone. The attention to an eventual worshipping of idols is another example of the frailty and incapability we have to sustain our faith outside of and exclusively in the Word of God.

Christ in you (plural gr.) the hope of glory.
I am crucified with Christ...we are dead.

Most of the arguements are to be taken Spiritually not literally.

Put on the mind of Christ, not the ones portrate here. And He will soon show us who we really are!

This reminds me a bit of the Celtic Christian belief in the immanence of God within creation. They believed in thin places, places where they perceived the veil between heaven and earth to be thin and therefore conducive to praying. They built their monasteries in such spots.

Among modern Pentecostals, there is a corresponding belief in what they call an open heaven. One Pentecostal group claims that a place where the Moravians prayed for a hundred years is now the site of an open heaven. Holy activity and prayer seem to soften the veil between heaven and earth, even hundreds of years later.

The union of spirit and earth (or flesh) has always been a locus of power. In fact, I sense the same atmosphere sometimes when I walk into a church building, probably because so many people have worshiped there. If there can be an open heaven in a place because people prayed there a lot a long time ago, it stands to reason that, to the degree the spirit and power of God mingled with the body of a departed saint, it still resides to some extent in his bones.

Why is it that when the 'early church' is discussed, that it must be the Catholic Church we are talking about. The Catholic church did not make up all that was the early church. I would challenge you in remembering that there were many who were true to the Word of Christ in the early days and stayed away from the pagan influences of the Catholic church and the so called infallable popes who saw fit to declare what ever they wanted as 'holy'. The Catholic Church may put on the facade of being a Christian church, but they are not.

John,
Eastern Orthodoxy is not the Roman Catholic church and they existed from the beginning. They object to Rome's jurisdictional papal claims, indulgences, purgatory, immaculate conception, filioque etc.

But the bottom line is that the church was virtually unified for nearly a thousand years (except for the non-Chalcedonian's). I'm not sure who you are referring to as those "who were true to the Word of Christ" in the ancient church. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic church was the only one around--other than groups that all acknowledge were heretical. This undivided church recognized and preserved the books of the canon of scripture itself (there is no inspired table of contents to tell you what books are scripture, you are trusting the Tradition of the church if you believe in a canon), they worked through the necessary formulations of the Trinity and Incarnation not clearly articulated in scripture. They fought all heresy and evangelized the world, yet they certainly were not Protestant or proto-Protestant.
The Protestant inability to recognize schism and division as scripturally forbidden has become very troublesome to me. Her incessant divisions are rarely questioned and the smorgasbord of denominations just gets larger and larger, all claiming they follow the scripture alone. Because of a vivid fear of abusive authority (medieval Rome), we either deny that Christ established a Church with any authority at all, or we set up a new church WE agree with and then come under it's authority, so ultimately the individual always trumps the church. Our pervasive atmosphere of individualist, narcissistic and democratic thinking means that we cannot conceive of anything or anyone above us that we can't vote out if we don't agree with them--but what if it's true that, as scripture says, the church which is "the pillar and ground of the truth" has an authority given by Christ and we really are to "submit to those that have the rule over" us?

In Chorley England there is the Church of St Lawrence. Lying in a niche in the wall under a thick plate of glass is a large and ancient bone. The vicar told me that it was reputed to be the thigh bone of St Lawrence and that it had generated many miracles. But his more learned friends opined that it was bovine.
The sense is that many relics carry some residue of the saint which work miracles. God wants to be involved in a material way with our salvation. Perhaps it doesn't need to be actually the bone of St Lawrence to work God's mysteries on earth.

There were earlier examples of relic collection than that cited of Polycarp in 156. Ignatius' (d. 107AD) bones were also revered, as evidenced in the 2nd cent. writing "The Martyrdom of Ignatios" - "only the harder portions of his holy remains were left, which were conveyed to Antioch and wrapped in linen, as an inestimable treasure left to the holy Church by the grace which was in the martyr"
The question is not IF these relics were honored (PC way to say worshiped) but should the bones have been or continue to be worshiped. I stick with Christ on this one - "Let the dead bury their own dead..." That "great cloud of witnesses" (from where we get the word "martyr" meaning messenger that later became those killed due to their witness)is honored when we, as Christians, do as Jesus further instructed: ".... but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." (incidentally, "proclaim" is a different word with near the same meaning as martyr - carry a message through, announce everywhere).
Sadly though, some still would rather cling to something (as did Mary Magdalene want to cling - Jesus told her the same thing - GO and tell) in their "holy huddle" than to get the church OUT of the building and on the streets.

Early Christians had a devotion to relics. As true disciples of Christ, to think otherwise is completely unjustified, isn't the question more about how they integrated their devotion and their belief in Jesus whom they worshipped even at the cost of martyrdom? The earliest disciples after Jesus death and resurrection did not have the bible! It was the Tradition of the "Rule of Faith" that played a great part in discerning which letters and books were divinely inspired and therefor authentic and able to be put in the Cannon. Devotion to the Word is only possible because of Tradition.

Living in and being part of a society where the pervasive religion is Eastern Orthodoxy, one cannot go very far or very long before he meets with the issue of relics. And there is no doubt in the mind of this protestant that things are going to an excess! We have heads of saints flown in and out, the belt of the Virgin Mary paraded here and there, people visiting monasteries to see and "venerate" a person's remains and the faithful flocking from one place to another. A big to do is made of these things and it gets on the main news bulletins. This is considered of the essence of the Christian religion. It is very difficult to believe that such activities are encouraging people to honour and praise the Lord. It is more reasonable to conclude that they are being led astray to give attention to, and become enthusiastic about things that are at best of little importance whereas things like love of God and man as our Lord Jesus showed us is not exemplified and promoted as they should. King Hezekiah had the audacity of destroying the brazen serpent that God himself had commanded Moses to fashion-because it had turned into a stumbling block for people (2Ki. 18:4). If they want to have their relics let them have them although I think it best that they should be allowed to rest underground where they belong. Additionally, there needs at least to be attached a "health warning" to each piece reminding people that the important thing is not to bow to the relic but to bow onesself to the Lord to do His will and follow Him.

Mostly that’ s because most people don’ t realize how many skills they do have. If you have office skills, for example, you may be able to find work as a virtual assistant. If you have transportation you might try mystery shopping , although it can.

What a marvelous post! I am just starting out in community management/marketing media and trying to learn how to do it well - resources like this blog are very helpful. As our company is based in the U.S., it's all a little new to us. The example above is something that I worry about as well, how to show your own actual enthusiasm and share the fact that your product is beneficial in that case.

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