What do we make of relics?

Recently, the skull of Thomas Aquinas (1225‒1274), one of the most significant theologians of the medieval era, was on tour throughout the United States in a brand-new reliquary. Those who promoted this tour were convinced that viewing a relic like this one helps to draw you closer to God.

The origin of such a conviction goes back to the millennium that we commonly denote as the Middle Ages. So important and so powerful were such relics – usually reputed body parts of those regarded to have lived exemplary holy lives, ‘the saints’ – during this era that it has been aptly described as a thousand years of the veneration of these objects.

Taking its rise from the pagan Roman idea of numen in late Antiquity – the idea that holiness and divine power inheres and can be infused into physical objects – the life of a saint came to be seen as a process of accumulating numen, and after death, the relics of the saint became a vehicle for the transmission of this holiness. By the fifth and sixth centuries Christian churches had begun to accumulate bodily bits of the saints – from fingers, arms, and hair to entire heads – as well as other holy objects, such as supposed pieces of the cross on which Christ died. Even Agustine, the great theologian of sovereign grace wrote approvingly of relics – see his Confessions 9.16.

Placed within the precincts of a church building, these physical items intensified the holiness of these structures and also encouraged pilgrims to travel from afar to view, touch and even kiss them. These visits by pilgrims were especially important when these relics were housed within cathedrals, quite remarkable architectural structures that often took centuries to build. Understandably, financing such projects could be a monetary nightmare. Pilgrims travelling to see the relics within the cathedral were thus vital to the funding of these buildings. In other words, by the High Middle Ages (roughly 1050‒1300), the superstitious accumulation and veneration of relics was deeply interwoven with church finances.

One of the most bizarre stories associated with relics concerns Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln (c.1140‒1200). On a visit to a French Abbey at the port city of Fécamp, where one of Mary Magdalen’s arm bones was supposedly housed, Hugh apparently thought nothing of chewing off a piece of Mary’s arm with his molars, to the horror of the monks of Fécamp, so that Lincoln Cathedral could possess such a powerful relic.

Now, what should we, as heirs of the Reformation, think about relics? Our Protestant forebears at the time of the Reformation had no doubts about the idolatry involved in such veneration. John Calvin, for example, wrote a satirical attack on this entire medieval practice entitled Le Traité des reliques (Geneva, 1543), in which he excoriated the superstitious folly of the whole business of relics and emphasised that it has no place in the Christian life. In his words: ‘the desire for relics is never without superstition, and what is worse, it is usually the parent of idolatry’.

It is in this tract that we learn that when Calvin was a young boy, he was taken to an abbey near Noyon, his birthplace, where he kissed one of the relics of the mother of the Virgin Mary. Calvin noted that in Geneva, there was reputedly an arm of St Anthony; it was kissed and worshipped as long as it remained in its shrine; but when it was turned out and examined, it was found to be the bone of a stag ‘… [Or] let us consider how many relics of the true cross there are in the world. An account of those merely with which I am acquainted would fill a whole volume, for there is not a church, from a cathedral to the most miserable abbey or parish church, that does not contain a piece. … In short, if we were to collect all these pieces of the true cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship’s cargo. … I could quote many instances of this kind; but these will be sufficient to give an idea of the quantity of precious rubbish there would have been found if a thorough and universal investigation of all the relics of Europe had ever taken place.’

To be sure, the desire to recognise the embodied nature of Christian truth needs to be affirmed – indeed, it might have been one possible spring for the development of relic worship. And while the Scriptures do record certain miracles of healing and exorcism associated with items of Paul’s clothing (Acts 19:11‒12; cf. also Acts 5:15; 2 Kings 13:21), it is noteworthy that Luke indicates that these miracles were quite unusual (ou … tychousas, literally, ‘not at all ordinary’). I think it can be safely said that the employment of relics as a vehicle of piety has no foundation at all in the Scriptures.