Relic

Relics are physical items associated with a religious figure, and frequently believed to hold supernatural power. They can include body parts, clothing, tools, and even instruments of torture, punishment or execution. Relics that were once the body parts of saints or holy people are generally considered of greater holiness than relics that were items they used or touched. Relics are found in many religious traditions, including Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, and some traditions of Islam. Some secular traditions also treat certain objects as relics, as the Soviet Union preserved and displayed the mummified body of its founder Vladimir Lenin. Many religious relics are contained in elaborate and bejeweled boxes or cases called reliquaries, indicating the high value of what they contain.

Brief History

The cult of relics emerged in the first few centuries of Christianity. They were associated with a growing tendency to represent holiness in individuals as opposed to places. The most important relics in the early church were those associated with Christ, such as the True Cross. The legend of Helena, the Christian mother of the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, finding the True Cross while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an important part of the establishment of a Christian identity for the Roman Empire.

At the Second Council of Nicea in 767, it was required that the founding of a new church incorporate a relic in the altar. In the early Middle Ages, there was an active market in the remains or alleged remains of the saints. When monasteries or cathedrals were going to be attacked by pagan Vikings or Magyars or Muslim raiders, monks or other Christians would frequently flee with the relics in order to keep them out of the impious hands of non-Christians. Relics were even stolen and successful relic thieves were venerated. In the Middle Ages many relics were believed to have the power of healing, or of procuring material or spiritual benefits such as a shortened time in purgatory, the place where the dead are purged, through punishment, of their sins before final admission to heaven.

Major relics and relic collections were the objects of pilgrimage, and the building of large relic repositories was one way in which kings and other rulers demonstrated both their power and their piety. Oaths were also sworn on relics, with the belief that the saint whose relics they were would smite oath breakers. Many of the relics of the Middle Ages were of dubious authenticity, and sellers of fraudulent relics, like the Pardoner of the fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, were object of scorn and ridicule as well as the punishments of church law.

Relics Today

The denial of the power of relics was a key difference between Catholicism and Protestantism as it emerged from Catholicism in the sixteenth century. Protestant opposition to relics was connected with the Protestant attack on the Catholic cults of the saints. Catholic reverence for relics was frequently ridiculed by Protestants and later by the Enlightenment. The proliferation of fragments of the True Cross was particularly scorned, as the Protestant leader John Calvin, who wrote an entire treatise denouncing the belief in relics, remarked that there were enough fragments in circulation to build a ship. When a territory went Protestant, relics were often simply thrown away or destroyed. Attacks on relics only made Catholics more fiercely devoted to them, and the miraculous work of relics figured prominently in Catholic propaganda.

Over the last few centuries, relics have decreased in importance for both Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and disagreements over relics are no longer a major issue between Catholics and Protestants. In 1969, the Catholic church abandoned the requirement that an altar of a new church have a relic before it could be consecrated—a move that attracted little opposition or even interest, even among traditionalist Catholics, although relic cults do continue among ordinary Catholics.

Many relics have disappeared from churches into private hands, while some buyers of relics view them more as curios than as objects of devotion. Interest continues in a few high-profile relics like the Shroud of Turin, alleged to be Christ’s burial cloth and to contain an image of him. The issues with the Shroud of Turin, and with many other newly discovered or publicized relics such as the "ossuary of James" recently discovered in Jerusalem, is less their power to work miracles than their relevance to recent debates about the existence or divine nature of Jesus Christ. The authenticity of religious relics is a frequent target of religious "debunkers" or mockers of religious belief. Carbon fourteen dating and other scientific techniques developed in the twentieth century have enabled the authenticity of many relics to be verified, with mixed results.

Relic veneration is also practiced in many branches of Buddhism, including Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism. Like Christian relics, Buddhist relics are frequently the body parts of deceased spiritual masters. Unlike Christians, however, Buddhists are likely to view relics as living things. Those of the Buddha himself are the most revered. The most common alleged relics of the Buddha are teeth and bones, as those would be body parts hard enough to conceivably survive the Buddha’s funeral pyre. The control of relics and the patronage of relic shrines helped legitimate Buddhist kingship, and even communist regimes in Buddhist countries such as Laos have treated occasions of relic veneration as state affairs. A particularly religiously and politically potent relic is the Tooth of the Buddha in the Temple of the Tooth in the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka. The water that the tooth is regularly bathed in is believed to have healing powers, and legend has it that the possessor of the tooth will be the ruler of the island. The connection between the tooth and political legitimacy cuts both ways, however, and the Temple of the Tooth has been the target of attacks from Tamil separatists and Marxists who oppose the domination of Sri Lanka by Sinhalese Buddhists.

Bibliography

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