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 RELICS

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RELICS

(Bede, II, 159-61) has made a short Ust of them and shows that they must have been transported into the remotest part of Germany. After the Second Coun- cil of Niccea, in 787, had insisted with special urgency that relics were to be used in the consecration of churches, and that the omission was to be supplied if any church had been consecrated without them, the English Council of Celchyth (probably Chelsea) commanded that relics were to be used, and in default of them the Blessed Eucharist. But the develop- ments of the veneration of relics in the Middle Ages were far too vast to be pursued further. Not a few of the most famous of the early medieval inscriptions are connected with the same matter. It must suffice to mention the famous Clematius inscription at Cologne, recording the tran.slation of the remains of the so-called Eleven Thousand Virgins (see Kraus, "Inscrip. d. Rheinlande", no. 294, and, for a dis- cussion of the legend, the admirable essay on the subject by Cardinal Wiseman).

III. Abuses. — Naturally it was impossible for popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch in a matter which easily lent itself to error, fraud, and greed of gain, without at least the occasional occurrence of many grave abuses. As early as the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine, denouncing certain impostors wandering about in the habit of monks, describes them as making profit by the sale of spurious relics ("De op. monach.", xxviii, and cf. Isidore, "De. div. off.", ii, 10). In the Theodosian Code the sale of relics is forbidden ("Nemo martyrem mercetur", VII, ix, 17), but numerous stories, of which it would be easy to collect a long series, be- ginning with the writings of St. Gregory the Great and St. Gregory of Tours, prove to us that many unprincipled persons found a means of enriching themselves by a sort of trade in these objects of devotion, the majority of which no doubt were fraudulent. At the beginning of the ninth century, as M. Jean Guiraud had shown (Melanges G. B. de Kossi, 73-95), the exportation of the bodies of martyrs from Rome had assumed the dimensions of a regular commerce, and a certain deacon, Deusdona, acquired an unenviable notoriety in these transactions (see Mon. Germ. Hist.: Script., XV, passim). What was perhaps in the long run hardly less disastrous than fraud or avarice was the keen rivalry between re- ligious centres, and the eager credulity fostered by the desire to be known as the possessors of some un- usually startling relic. We learn from Cassian, in the fifth century, that there were monks who seized upon certain martyrs' bodies by force of arms, defy- ing the authority of the bishops, and this was a story which we find many times repeated in the Western chronicles of a later date.

In such an atmosphere of lawlessness doubtful relics came to abound. There was always a disposi- tion to regard any human remains accidentally dis- covered near a church or in the catacombs as the body of a martyr. Hence, though men like St. Athanasius and St. Martin of Tours set a good example of caution in such cases, it is to be feared that in the majority of instances only a very narrow interval of time intervened between the suggestion that a particular object might be, or ought to be, an important relic, and the conviction that tradition attested it actually to be such. There is no reason in most cases for supposing the existence of deliberate fraud. The persuasion that a benevolent Providence was likely to send the most precious pignora sanc- lorum to deserving clients, the practice already no- ticed of attributing the same sanctity to objects which had touched the shrine as attached to the contents of the shrine itself, the custom of making facsimiles and imitations, a custom which persists to our own day in the replicas of the Vatican statute of St. Peter or of the Grotto of Lourdes — all these are XII.— 47

causes adequate to account for the multitude of un- questionably spurious relics with which the treasuries of great medieval churches were crowded. In the case of the Nails with which Jesus Christ was cruci- fied, we can point to definite instances in which that which was at first venerated as having touched the original came later to be honoured as the original itself. Join to this the large license given to the oc- casional unscrupulous rogue in an age not only ut- terly uncritical but often curiously morljid in its realism, and it becomes easy to understand the mul- tiplicity and extravagance of the entries in the relic inventories of Rome and other countries.

On the other hand it must not be supposed that nothing was done by ecclesiastical authority to secure the faithful against deception. Such tests were applied as the historical and antiquarian science of that day was capable of devising. Very often, however, this test took the form of an appeal to some miraculous sanction, as in the well-known story repeated by St. Ambrose, according to which, when doubt arose which of the three crosses discovered by St. Helena was that of Christ, the healing of a sick man by one of them dispelled all further hesitation. Similarly Egbert, Bishop of Trier, in 979, doubting as to the authenticity of what purported to be the body of St. Celsus, "le.st any suspicion of the sanctity of the holy relics should arise, during Mass, after the offertory had been sung, threw a joint of the finger of St. Celsus wrapped in a cloth into a thurible full of burning coals, which remained unhurt and untouched by the fire the whole time of the Canon" (Mabillon, "Acta SS. Ord. Ben.", Ill, 658). The decrees of synods upon this subject are generally practical and sensible, as when, for example. Bishop Quivil of Exeter, in 1287, after recalling the prohibition of the General Council of Lyons against venerating re- cently-found relics unless they were first of all ap- proved by the Roman Pontiff, adds: "We command the above prohibition to be carefully observed by all, and decree that no person shall expose relics for sale, and that neither stones, nor fountains, trees, wood, or garments .shall in any way be venerated on account of dreams or on fictitious grounds." So, again, the whole procedure before Clement VII (the Antipope) in 1359, recently brought to light by Canon Chevalier, in connexion with the alleged Holy Shroud of Lirey, proves that some check at least was exercised upon the excesses of the unscrupulous or the mercenary. Nevertheless it remains true that many of the more ancient relics duly exhibited for veneration in the great sanctuaries of Christendom or even at Rome itself must now be pronounced to be either certainly spurious or open to grave suspicion. To take one example of the latter class, the boards of the Crib (Proesaepe) — a name which for much more than a thousand years has been associated, as now, with the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore — can only be con- sidered to be of doubtful authenticity. In his mono- graph "Le memorie Liberiane dell' Infanzia di N. S. Gesil Cristo" (Rome, 1894), Mgr. Cozza Luzi frankly avows that all positive evidence for the au- thenticity of the relics of the Crib etc., is wanting before the eleventh century. Strangely enough, an inscription in Greek uncials of the eighth century is found on one of the boards, the inscription having nothing to do with the Crib but being apparently concerned with some commercial transaction. It is hard to explain its presence on the supposition that the relic is authentic. Similar difficulties might be urged against the supposed "column of the flagella- tion" venerated at Rome in the Church of Santa Prassede (see "Dublin Review", Jan., 1905, 115) and against many other famous relics.

.Still, it would be presumptuous in such cases to blame the action of ecclesiastical authority in per- mitting the continuance of a cult which extends back