The cult of relics was already a thousand years old when Hugh staged his raid on the relic-house at Fécamp. In the earliest eyewitness martyrdom story, the account of the execution and cremation of Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna in AD156, the narrator tells how "we 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 . . . to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom". The martyr's shrine and the remains of his shattered body were defiant affirmations of the central Christian belief, that defeat in the cause of Christ was in fact a transcendent victory. The body brutalised by torture and death would shine one day in glory, as Christ's risen body shone, and was already a channel of divine healing and consolation. Christians flocked to the graves of the martyrs, and treasured oil or water or cloth that had come into contact with their blood or bones.
The prestige of these shrines was so great that it seemed to threaten the institutional authority of the church and its bishops, but the problem was solved by moving the bodies of the martyrs under the cathedral altars. The charisma of the saint was thereby united to the power of the institution, the grave of the martyr identified with the tomb of Christ, relic and eucharist joined in a single overwhelming nexus of holiness. One of the most dramatic objects in the exhibition is a sixth-century marble altar, from Ravenna or Constantinople. On it, theatrically carved curtains are drawn back to reveal a central void, through which the faithful could have access to the relics of the saint in the shrine below.
As this suggests, initially it was the grave of martyrs that was the holy place (and later, the grave of any holy person). In the conservative west there was at first reluctance to divide holy bodies. When the Empress Constantina asked Pope Gregory the Great for the head of St Paul, he responded with horror stories of workmen struck dead for accidentally disturbing the apostle's rest, and sent her instead holy oil and "brandea", pieces of cloth, which had been in contact with the relics. But escalating demand made the division of the bodies of the saints necessary, and the dismemberment the saints had endured in their martyrdoms may have made it seem symbolically appropriate. The Fifth Council of Carthage required every altar to have relics "buried" within it, and as Christianity spread north and west, demand greatly exceeded supply. In the churches of Carolingian Europe and Anglo-Saxon England, the relics of the martyrs of the early Roman church were prized above all, symbols of Christian triumph over the still potent forces of paganism, and at the same time a coveted link to the glories of ancient Rome. One ninth-century Roman deacon, Deusdona, ran a lucrative international trade in holy bodies, ransacking the Roman catacombs for the bones of "saints" and sending them by mule-train to the kings, bishops and monasteries eager to acquire them. And those unable to procure a whole body had to settle for a skull, a rib or a finger bone.
Even inanimate objects could be relics, sanctified by contact with holy flesh and holy places, a belief reflected in the souvenirs – flasks of oil or water blessed by contact with the relics – sold at shrines. Inanimate relics ranged from the stones or earth of the Holy Land to the clothing or sandals of the apostles and martyrs. The Emperor Constantine made a bit for his horse from one of the nails of the crucifixion as a protection in battle; in the later middle ages, the kings of France gloried in their possession of Christ's crown of thorns. Several thorn reliquaries, complete with their holy thorns, are on display in the exhibition. The most poignant of them is not included in the catalogue: a small personal reliquary formerly owned by Mary Queen of Scots. The supreme relic of this kind was the wood of Christ's cross, allegedly discovered by the Empress Helena in the late 320s, fragments of which were prized all over medieval Christendom. The exhibition includes several, including the wonderfully enamelled cross-reliquary of the ninth-century Pope Paschal I, one of the many spectacular items on loan from the Vatican.
The enshrining of relics in precious materials was fundamental to the whole cult – ivory, silver, gold, coloured enamel, precious and semi-precious stones were used, even cameos and intaglios from pagan Rome or rock crystal perfume-bottles from the Islamic east. To the outward eye, relics might seem no more than the dust and residue of corruption, gruesome fragments of tortured flesh and broken bone. In God's eyes, however, and eventually, at the last day, in the eyes of all humanity, the reality was and would be otherwise. Relics were the seeds of transcendence, trophies and tokens of the imperishable glory in store for all whom Christ had redeemed. As the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, though flesh might fade, and "mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm", on judgement day "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and / This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond".
And so the lavish display of the reliquary was a glimpse of heaven: the concealment of the dust of death served to reveal a higher truth. Relics, like the bread and wine of the eucharist, sheltered mortal eyes from the bloody and cruel events which had occasioned them, and pointed to the glory those events had earned. That was why, till relatively late in the history of relics, no one seemed to mind if the reliquary hid the relics from sight. The British Museum staff have unpacked one such reliquary to display its contents – an exquisite 12th-century German portable altar, a foot or so square, made of porphyry bound in engraved and gilded copper, and decorated with ivory and rock crystal. On its underside are the names of the 40 or so saints whose relics it supposedly contains, among them the apostles Peter and Andrew, evangelists such as Matthew and John, deacons including Stephen and Lawrence, martyr-bishops Cornelius and Cyprian, bishops and monks such as Blaise and Benedict. In comparison, the relics themselves seem drab and inconsequential chips and scraps of bone and hair, each wrapped in a screw of cloth labelled with a vellum strip. Yet to the medieval believer, these were the real treasures, each tiny fragment a guarantee of the invisible presence of the saint from whose body it had been taken. The collection was more than a souvenir or a metaphor. It was a quasi-sacramental embodiment of the company of heavenly protectors, who would be revealed in their glory at the end of time.
The idea that relics embodied the church triumphant could be expressed visually, in reliquaries shaped like a miniature church, or in the reconstruction of church buildings themselves as elaborate settings for multiple relics, enabling pilgrims to progress round them, enacting the journey of the Christian life towards the heavenly Jerusalem. And if the possession of a great relic often gave medieval communities their status, their local identity and often even their name, the pilgrim routes that criss-crossed Europe and the Middle East transcended locality, to map and bind the Christian world together, in a common set of beliefs, hopes and practices.
If many reliquaries concealed their contents, others proclaimed them. From the 12th century onwards, "speaking reliquaries" proliferated, shaped to represent the relics they contained: head and bust relics to contain skulls, feet reliquaries for foot-bones or sandals, and perhaps most strikingly of all, arm relics, life-sized objects of silver and gold that brandished, beckoned or seemed to bless the pilgrim. In fact, not all such "speaking reliquaries" contained arm bones: some simply held assorted collections of relics, but their form powerfully represented the dynamism believed to reside in them, and could be used to dramatic effect in the liturgy and processions, manipulated to touch or bless. Arguably the most spectacular object in the exhibition is the 12th-century "speaking relic" that greets visitors as they ascend the entrance steps. It is a sensational life-sized gilded copper bust of the Auvergnaise St Baudime, whose raised left hand holds the base of a phial that once contained his blood, and whose magnificently curled and bearded head, with movable white and black eyes, may or may not once have contained his skull. The bust of St Baudime makes no attempt at realism – it is a transcendent expression of the saint's glory, not the likeness of a living man. By contrast, the 16th-century female bust-reliquary from the Netherlands that features on the publicity material for the exhibition is disconcertingly realistic, the product of an age when statues were beginning to displace relics as the commonest focus of pilgrimage. The saint's skull (still present) is concealed in a hinged compartment within the head, and a circular glass brooch between her breasts displayed the fragmentary relics of other saints. Here the reliquary is indeed "speaking", ringing the changes playfully, if not altogether comfortably, on realism and symbol, concealment and revelation.
This millennia-old Christian preoccupation with relics may at first sight strike a modern sensibility as unhealthy or bizarre. A moment's reflection, however, on the fascination with dismemberment and decay in the novels of Patricia Cornwell, or the Hannibal Lector movies, or a TV series such as Silent Witness, will suggest that there is something perennial in play here. But such modern embodiments seem unable or unwilling to look beyond the horror and finality of mortality, to any hope beyond extremity. The catalogue essay on "the afterlife of the reliquary" lists among modern parallels the work of the Italian avant garde artist Piero Manzoni, who in the 1960s carefully canned quantities of his own faeces, labelled them "Merda d'artista" and authenticated them like ecclesiastical relics with signature and date. Manzoni's point, we are told, was that admiration of the artist had supplanted devotion to the saints, and involved "the veneration of even the most abject remains of the holy man". Examples of this "highly successful ironic commentary" were, it seems, acquired "for many major collections round the world". Happily, none of Signor Manzoni's relics are on display at the British Museum. However, a society whose cognoscenti can spend public money on acquiring such productions could usefully learn a thing or two about human dignity, and human hope, from the men and women who commissioned and made and prayed before the objects in this glorious exhibition.
Treasures of Heaven is at the British Museum until 9 October.
Author: Eamon Duffy | Source: Guardian/UK [June 24, 2011]