The worship of holy relics has a long tradition in Christianity. And quite often it is subjected to well-deserved criticism from zealots of the purity of the faith, who see in this a relapse of paganism. Where did this tradition come from and how did it develop?
The first Christians venerated a variety of holy relics - particles of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, the nails with which he was nailed to this cross, the shroud in which he was wrapped, and so on … By the late Middle Ages, the list of relics included objects related both to Christ, and with his immediate environment.
Sometimes the relics were of a strange nature - the milk of the Mother of God, the tears of the Mother of God and Jesus, a candle from the manger where Jesus was born. And some were completely fantastic: the last breath of Jesus sealed in a casket and even the finger of the Holy Spirit! But the most popular were the remains of saints …
Miracles after death
Jesus cast out demons, healed the sick, and even raised the dead. Some of the apostles, faithful to their teacher's work, did exactly the same thing. Judging by the ancient texts, whole crowds accompanied Jesus, and then his disciples and followers, in the hope of finding a miracle of healing.
The blind began to see, the paralytics rose to their feet, the lepers in the blink of an eye were overgrown with clean skin. Of course, an assumption appeared in the minds of the early Christians: if a living apostle is able to heal and heal, then he can practice healing after death. And pilgrims reached out to the places that were recognized as the graves of the apostles.
They pressed their lips to the holy graves, fell on them with their whole bodies, and … some were healed. Their faith was so strong! In 325, the Council of Nicea recognized the relics of the fighters for the faith as saints. True, the further north the new religion went, the more difficult it was for converts to find tombs with miraculous properties. The time of the apostles is over.
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The time of martyrs for the faith began. And it turned out that a well-suffered martyr works miracles no worse than Jesus' disciples. There were many martyrs for the faith then. After all, Christians did not stop perishing at the hands of pagans even after the new religion received official status in the Roman Empire. So the western and eastern churches gradually acquired a whole host of saints and martyrs.
Every Christian city has sought to acquire a sacred grave. No wonder John Chrysostom wrote the following: “The bodies of saints protect the city better than any stronghold and, like high rocks visible from everywhere, not only reflect the attacks of visible enemies, but all the intrigues and slander of demons are destroyed as easily as a strong husband destroys the fun of children.
Indeed, all human means used to protect the inhabitants, such as walls, ditches, weapons, war, etc., the enemy can overcome by other, even stronger means. But if the city is protected by the bodies of the saints, then, no matter how much the enemies contrive, they cannot oppose them with anything equivalent."
Cities naturally began to acquire defenses that were more reliable than a knightly army or an experienced doctor.
Spiritual fortresses
Christians despised the barbarians who burned the bodies of their dead at the stake. They believed that the bodies after death should be preserved for later resurrection at the Last Judgment. This means that you cannot burn them. They need to be carried closer to the grave of a martyr or a righteous man who will take care of the deceased in the next world.
Where to find such a place? Of course, in a Christian church. It was in the church that they tried to bury the martyr who patronized the city. And ordinary Christians, in order to better arrange a relative, buried him right in the church. And when the place ran out - around the temple.
The state of his body could tell how good a dead man would be in the next world. If soon after death it dries up and turns into a mummy - it's good, if it swells and starts to exude a stench - it's bad. It is best if the body quickly becomes a flesh-free skeleton. The Parisians, for example, dragged the dead to the cemetery of the Innocents, buried them closer to the graves of the righteous, and the cemetery worms regularly performed their service.
After a couple of weeks, the cleaned skeleton was removed to give temporary shelter to the new dead. The queue of those wishing to rest properly was huge. Well, in those cities where the worms worked worse, they hoped only for burial in the church.
The Holy Fathers perfectly understood that feasting on stinking graves and many hours of services in a church saturated with miasma would hardly be of benefit to the faithful. Several emperors and church hierarchs even banned the worship of bones from citizens.
True, they based the prohibition on a contradiction with the teachings of Christ, and not on the rules of hygiene. But be that as it may, the bans have improved the urban microclimate a little. Temples have ceased to be burial places.
Now only exceptional people could rest there - martyrs, heroes or religious leaders. And the saints and martyrs, to whose bodies the believers were striving to fall, now lay in caskets or in smaller caskets, if their skeleton was incomplete. This happened often in the Middle Ages. The city's talismans were carefully shared by Christian communities.
Debunking idols
The thought of believers is well voiced by the same John Chrysostom: “Holy relics are inexhaustible treasures, and incomparably higher than earthly treasures precisely because these are divided into many parts and are reduced through division; and those from division into parts not only do not diminish, but even more reveal their wealth: such is the property of spiritual things that through distribution they increase and through division multiply. Simply put, the protective power of holy relics does not diminish upon dismemberment.
And soon all Christian cities had their holy relics. Throughout Europe and Asia Minor, heads, bodies, hands, feet, individual fingers of saints and martyrs were kept in churches. True, if we count the number of arms, legs, and heads that belonged to the saints, then the picture will turn out to be strange.
The Apostle Andrew was buried in five different places, his head was kept in six churches, and the apostle's hands in seventeen! Popular among the people, John the Baptist, whose fate was known to everyone according to the biblical text (the head was cut off, the body was burned and the ashes scattered), received ten graves. Nine churches were famous for a priceless relic - the head of John, which miraculously survived.
The body of Saint Stephen found rest in four graves, and eight of his heads in eight churches. Saint Jerome shared with the believers two bodies, four heads and sixty-three fingers! The body of Saint Peter rested in sixteen places. But the martyr Juliana held the palm in the number of bodies and heads - twenty bodies and twenty-six heads.
In our skeptical times, such a number of body parts is suggestive. In the Middle Ages, they lived according to the views of Chrysostom: the holy relics multiply through division. The holy relics multiplied and multiplied. Until, finally, this multiplication caused the Conservative Church to respond. The Vatican undertook to fight counterfeits and to overthrow medieval shrines. The first to come under the fire of theology was Saint Rosalia of Palermo. Her relics were … the bones of a goat.
In the 60s of the last century, the Vatican began to seriously check the relics. The remains of so many saints - alas! - were recognized as simple bones, albeit in gold or silver caskets. Moreover, such revered persons as Saint George, Saint Brigitte and Saint Nicholas fell under these "sanctions"!
True, some Catholics were outraged by the decision of the Vatican. And they continue to worship the relics demoted to bones. Moreover, the relics of many, for example, the Virgin of Guadalupe in distant Mexico, despite the prohibitions and admonitions of the holy fathers, continue to work miracles …
Fiery rite
The worship of relics also exists in Buddhism. It came from the burial ceremony of Gautama Buddha. His body was wrapped in 500 layers of cotton cloth and placed in an iron coffin filled with oil. Then the coffin was closed with two metal lids and placed on a funeral pyre made of precious woods. After the cremation was over, milk was poured over the fire, and the bones were carefully collected, divided into eight parts and put into urns. Urns were buried, and burial stupas were placed above them.
Now the bodies of the highest hierarchs of Buddhism and those who have attained enlightenment are being cremated. Sometimes in the fires after that they find mysterious relics, which Buddhists call "ring-sal".
Mikhail ROMASHKO