Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/176

150 to images than was lawful. It suffices, says Gerson, that they meant to do as the Church requires.

Thus towards the end of the Middle Ages an ultra-realistic conception of all that related to the saints may be noticed in the popular faith. The saints had become so real and such familiar characters of current religion that they became bound up with all the more superficial religious impulses. While profound devotion still centred on Christ and His mother, quite a host of artless beliefs and fancies clustered about the saints. Everything contributed to make them familiar and life-like. They were dressed like the people themselves. Every day one met “Messires” Saint Roch and Saint James in the persons of living plague patients and pilgrims. Down to the Renaissance the costume of the saints always followed the fashion of the times. Only then did Sacred Art, by arraying the saints in classical draperies, withdraw them from the popular imagination and place them in a sphere where the fancy of the multitude could no longer contaminate the doctrine in its purity.

The distinctly corporeal conception of the saints was accentuated by the veneration of their relics, not only permitted by the Church but forming an integral part of religion. It was inevitable that this pious attachment to material things should draw all hagiolatry into a sphere of crude and primitive ideas, and lead to surprising extremes. In the matter of relics the deep and straightforward faith of the Middle Ages was never afraid of disillusionment or profanation through handling holy things coarsely. The spirit of the fifteenth century did not differ much from that of the Umbrian peasants, who, about the year 1000, wished to kill Saint Romuald, the hermit, in order to make sure of his precious bones; or of the monks of Fossanuova, who, after Saint Thomas Aquinas had died in their monastery, in their fear of losing the relic, did not shrink from decapitating, boiling and preserving the body. During the lying in state of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, in 1231, a crowd of worshippers came and cut or tore strips of the linen enveloping her face; they cut off the hair, the nails, even the nipples. In 1392, King Charles VI of France, on the occasion of a solemn feast, was seen to distribute ribs of his ancestor, Saint Louis; to Pierre d’Ailly and to his uncles Berry and