Let us consider for a moment [for example] the
immediate profile and consequences of the beliefs that first encouraged the
translation of relics in the late fourth century. If relics could travel, then
the distance between the believer and the place where the holy could be found
ceased to be a fixed, physical distance. It took on the shifting quality of
late-Roman social relationships: distances between groups and persons were overcome
by gestures of grace and favor, and the dangerously long miles of the imperial
communications systems were overcome by a strenuously maintain ideology of
unanimity and concord. Those who possessed the holy, in the form of portable
relics, could show gratis by sharing
these good things with others, and by bringing them from the places where they
had once been exclusively available to communities scattered through out the Roman
world. Behind every relic that was newly installed in its shrine throughout the
Mediterranean, there had to lie some precise gesture of good will and solidarity.
The inscriptions on an African shrine records merely the fact of distance
overcome: ‘A piece of the wood of the Cross, from the Land of Promise where
Christ was born.’ But Paulinus, writing inscriptions for his friend Sulpicius
Severus, leaves us in no doubt of the reassuring touch of human friendship
behind the ‘moment of high and terrible emotion’ on the arrival of such a
fragment at Nola:
Brought as a gift to Nola by the holy Melania, this, the highest of all goods,
has come from the city of Jerusalem
As a result the transfer of relics, especially of
the Holy Land to the Christian communities of the Western Mediterranean, can
serve the historian as a faithful ‘trace element’ that enables him to take an
X-ray photograph of the intricate systems of patronage, alliance and gift
giving that linked the lay and the clerical elites of East and West in the late Roman Empire. In recent years, the theme
of notable pilgrimages and translation of relics has passed from the sober
domain of hagiographical antiquarianism into a series of elegant studies of
patronage and politics among the Christian governing classes of the late fourth
and early fifth centuries – I refer particularly to the works of David Hunt in
England and Ken Holum of the University
of Maryland.
I would like to point out some of the implications of this development. The yearning
of Pilgrimage and the ‘therapy’ of distance,’ associated with the neutral fact
that a particular landscape lay at an unchangeable distance from other centers,
came to be detached from a purely geographical setting: the holy could be
brought ever closer through gestures of concord and gift giving which the men
of late antiquity and the early middle ages treasured as the cement of their social
world. A network of ‘interpersonal acts,’ that carried the full overtones of
late-Roman relationships of generosity, dependence, and solidarity came, in one
generation, to link the Atlantic coast to the Holy Land; and in so doing, these
‘interpersonal acts’ both facilitated and further heightened the drive to transmute
distance from the holy into the deep joy of proximity.
Without an intense and wide-ranging network of late-Roman relationships of amicitia and unanimitas among the fourth century impresarios of he cult of the
saints, relics would not have traveled as far, as fast, or with as much
undisputed authority as they did. If this had not happened, if the translation
of relics had not gained a major place in Christian piety, the spiritual
landscape of the Christian Mediterranean might have been very different. It might
have resembled that of the later Islamic world: the holy might have been permanently
localized in a few privileged areas, such as the Holy Land, and in the ‘cities
of the saints,’ such as Rome. There might have been a Christian Mecca or a Christian
Kerbela, but not the decisive spread of the cut of major saints, such as Peter and
Paul, far beyond the ancient frontiers of the Roman world, as happened in
Europe of the dark ages. Elsewhere, the holy might have been tied to tye particularity
of local graves that enjoyed little or no prestige outside their own region. By
the early fifth century, the strictly geographical’ map of the availability of
the holy which had tied the praesentia
of the saints to the accidents of place and local history, had come to be irreversibly
modified by a web of new cult sites, established by the translation of relics,
which reflected the dependence of communities scattered all over Italy, Gaul,
Spain and Africa on the enterprise and generosity of a remarkable generation of
distant friends.
Recent studies of the social and political contexts of translation of relics
have revealed with such delightful, and even damaging, circumstantiality the
relations and the motives of the principal human participants, that we should
not forget the prime mover of good things, who was thought by late-antique men
to stand behind the busy story of discovery, the transfer, the accumulation-
even, at times, the bare-faced robbery – of the holy. God gave the relic; in the
first instance, by allowing it to be discovered, and then by allowing it to be
transferred. Augustine said in a sermon on Saint Stephen: ‘His body lay hidden
for so long a time. It came forth when God wished it. IT has brought life to
all lands. It has performed such miracles.’ Nowhere did the silver lining of
God’s amnesty shine more clearly from behind the black cloud of the late-antique
sense of sin than in accounts of the discovery and translations of relics. For
the accounts are shot through with a
sense of the miracle of God’s mercy in allowing so precious a thing as the praesentia of the holy dead to become
available to the Christian congregations in their own place and in their on times.
Behind the awkward Latin of the account by the priest Lucianus of the discovery
of the body of Saint Stephen in a field outside the village of Capargamala, in
415, we can sense the hopes and fears of the Aramaic speakers of the region.
Lucianus is warned to announce the good news to the bishop of Jerusalem:
For
it is especially fitting that we should be revealed in the time of your priesthood
. . .For the world is in danger, from the many sins into which it falls every
day.
When
the coffin of Saint Stephen finally made its appearance the touch of the divine
mercy was overwhelming:
At that instant the earth trembled and a
smell sweet perfume came from the place such as no man had ever known of, so
much that we thought we were standing in the sweet garden of Paradise. And at
that very hour, from the smell of that perfume, seventy-tree persons were
healed.
This mercy was further ratified by a downpour of rain which ended the cruel
winter drought.
And the earth drank its fill, and all
here glorified the Lord, because of Stephen his holy one, and because our Lord
Jesus Christ had deigned to open to this imperiled world the heavenly treasure of
his mercy and lovingkindness.
The discovery of a relic, therefore, was far more than an act of pious
archaeology, and its transfer far more than a strange new form of Christian connoisseurship:
both actions made plain, at a particular time and place, the immensity of God’s
mercy. They announced moments of amnesty. They brought a sense of deliverance
and pardon into the present .They could condense moods of public confidence.i
Photos: Burial of the Body of Saint Stephen (Carlo Saraceni, 1579-1620)
Reliquary of the hand of Saint Stephen
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