Displaying and Seeing Relics

In Late Antiquity most relics, even after they had been discovered, remained hidden: ordinary people rarely had an opportunity to see them. Visual contact with them, however, was not entirely impossible. This chapter studies various aspects of this contact, trying to answer the following questions: Where were the reliquaries stored and were they visible for visitors to churches? What did their iconography say about their contents? Were they constructed in a way which made it possible to peek inside? Also, it discusses some exceptional situations in which the very bones of martyrs were put on display and explains why this happened.

Burials ad Sanctos

Both textual and material evidence demonstrates that many Christians would go to great lengths to bury their kin ad sanctos, close to the tombs of saints. The beginnings of this practice are often dated to the late third century. This chapter argues that the basis for such an early dating is tenuous. It also deals with the character of physical proximity between the ordinary dead and the martyrs: how close were the bones of the former placed to those of the latter? Were the relics put inside their tombs? Also, this chapter seeks to explain the reasons why people buried their dead ad sanctos. While acknowledging their religious motivation it shows that some Christians simply desired to entomb their dead close to a famous hero rather than to the source of a beneficial power.

Relics and Divination

As early as in the second half of the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus assured his audience that the saints, living or dead, had the power to predict the future. This chapter seeks to explain how such predictions were obtained. There were at least three divinatory practices in which relics could be used: incubation in martyrs’ sanctuaries, interrogation of demoniacs in the presence of relics, and the drawing of lots on martyrs’ tombs. The problem is that the literary evidence for the first practice in the early period is rather scarce, for the second, exceedingly scanty, while for the third it is simply non-existent (we only know about it from material evidence). This reticence of the written sources does not necessarily reflect the actual popularity of these methods and plausibly results from their ambiguous character—neither praised nor condemned, they have left very few traces in literature.

Defenders of Cities

This chapter studies early testimonies to the use of relics as efficient palladia and examines the sources of this phenomenon, which unlike exorcizing and healing had no parallels in the Bible: the prophets, Christ, and the Apostles were never portrayed as powerful protectors of cities. For this reason the Greek and Roman background of this phenomenon deserves a detailed study aimed at finding out if there was any connection between the saints’ relics and the guardian statues and amulets whose growing popularity is attested in the late antique sources. This chapter argues that the Christian belief in the protection provided by the saints ran in parallel with the widespread belief in the power of amulets and that despite evident interactions between Christian and non-Christian practices it cannot be seen as resulting directly from pagan beliefs.

Introduction

The Introduction emphasizes both the novelty and importance of the cult of relics in late antique Christianity. It presents the state of the art, showing that while the early cult of relics attracts interest as an aspect of the cult of saints, it has hardly been hardly studied on its own. It also discusses the main research questions and the general plan of the book, in which the chapters are arranged according to a thematic order, but which also studies the diachronic development of the phenomenon. Finally, it discusses questions of terminology that are important for the cult of relics, and particularly presents its concise vocabulary in various languages of ancient Christianity.

Conclusions

This part of the book summarizes the findings presented in the preceding chapters and in particular traces the chronological development of the cult of relics. It also shows this phenomenon against a wide background of the new Christian religiosity which started to emerge in the Mediterranean in the fourth century and which profoundly changed Christian attitudes to space and time and the material world. The cult of relics was an element of this new religiosity, but it can be fully understood only when studied together with its other aspects, such as the idea of the Holy Land and the practice of pilgrimages, the rise of monasticism and monastic holiness, the development of the Christian calendar, and the habit of feasting.

Eastern, Western, and Local Habits in the Cult of Relics

The cult of relics spread with what was an astonishing speed. This chapter addresses the questions of whether in this process the cult of relics evolved locally, and especially whether the general distinction between Eastern and Western customs is useful for describing it. The chapter argues that although several practices did indeed develop in specific places and remained more popular in their regions of origin, they did proliferate nonetheless. The diversity of customs in this field never disappeared, but is mostly due to limited contacts between different regions and to a lack of interest in making the cult of relics uniform.

Touching Relics

It is often implied that adherents of most religions naturally seek to come close to sacred objects. This chapter shows that in early Christianity this was not always the case. It studies the evolution of attitudes toward the physical remains of saints, dealing with the question of how the taboo of contact with a dead body lost its power. Also, it deals with how close, direct, and frequent the physical contact with relics was, how and how often they were exposed for veneration, whether it was possible to touch a reliquary or relics themselves, how indirect relics were produced, and what made them efficient.

Finding Relics

When the cult of relics developed in the mid-fourth century, very few tombs of saints whose remains were to be venerated in the centuries to come had been identified. This chapter presents the early history of the search for and finding of such graves, which started in the last decades of the fourth century. It seeks to explain the reasons which lay behind this process, focusing both on the needs of the congregation and the role of the discovery in church politics. It also analyses the sense of the literary pattern of inventio and tries to find out how much this pattern reflected reality. Finally, it presents a case study: a literary dossier of the discovery of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 386.

The First Miracles

In the first half of the fourth century Christians did not expect to see miracles in their lifetimes. This chapter explains how this attitude changed throughout the following decades. Above all, it emphasizes the importance of the newly created infrastructure of Christian sanctuaries owing to which they developed into healing centres. It discusses their monumental architecture, the teeming crowds of pilgrims, almsgiving practised in martyria, and the presence of the sick in sanctuaries. Also, it sets the belief in power of relics against the wider background of Christian thaumaturgy and addresses the question of how the belief in the power of relics spread throughout the Mediterranean.