Never got past the first chapter - my fault ( )

Title: Holy Bones, Holy Dust
Author: Charles Freeman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publishing Date: 2011
Pgs: 306 pages
Dewey: 235.2 FRE
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
Reliquary and Saint cults began growing almost from Jesus' sacrifice at Calvary, though the foundation of the Church in Rome expanded and strengthened the growth. Relics were omnipresent in the medieval world. Bones, teeth, hair, blood, milk, clothes, things they touched, and items, such as the Crown of Thorns...objects to bring the believer closer to the Saints and allow the Saints to intercede on the penitent’s behalf with God. This is a history of the rise of the relic cults in Europe. The Dark Ages, political upheaval, disease, and the threat of hellfire, amid this, relics were venerated and generated a trade and financial aspect on top of the religious motif; traded, collected, lost, stolen, sold, duplicated, destroyed, bargained with, fought wars with and over, and propaganda.
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Genre:
History
Religion
Religious Antiquities and Archaeology
Antiquities
Archaeology
Saints and Sainthood
Christianity
Chrisitan Church History

Why this book:
Wanted stories of the Saints, I got an education in the “miracles” and reliquary cults that falls within my cynical purview.
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Favorite Concept:
And finally, someone I agree with. I find myself in agreement with Basil of Caesarea. “As the sun does not need the lamp light, so, also, the Church and the congregation can do without the remains of Martyrs. It is sufficient to venerate the name of Christ for the church...redeemed by his blood.”

Hmm Moments:
The martyrdoms and the Saints and what's done with their bodies; bits of bone, dust, hair, etc sounds a lot like Wild West Medicine Show bushwa, just in a BC/Medieval European setting instead of the Old West.

So the Cross as a weapon of victory is an Anglo-Saxon pastiche, probably based on the reliquary cults of Roman Empire and Medieval Christianity

King Oswald of Northumbria seems very Arthur-like.

An incorruptible body laid long in the tomb...isn't that a vampire not a Saint?

So, the incorruptible bodies of the Saints may have been a function of the anointing of the body with spices, post-death, in effect, embalming the body, per Bede. And, at least, in the case of Cuthbert, bodies were so anointed that their shrouds and burial clothes were glued to their body. Well, of course, they appear uncorrupted. Effectively, they’ve been lacquered.

If all the fragments of the True Cross that are, supposedly, in all the church and all the reliquaries, all over the whole of Europe, were actual parts of the True Cross than the True Cross must have been three or four stories tall.

As the heavenly indulgences to lessen a soul’s time in purgatory became commonplace and the reliquary cults became more financial institutions and tourist traps than holy shrines, it was only a matter of time before someone like Martin Luther was going to come along.

WTF Moments:
St. Bernard was a freak. Holy milk from a statue of the Virgin Mary. Blaugh. How many of these people drinking from the breast of a statue or making tea from the dust or fragments of Saints gave themselves horribly diseases later in life? ...it is to vomit.

The idea that the sickly sweet smell coming from corpses is divine is disgusting. The very thought of what people were doing with these decomposing bodies is gross and horrific. No wonder the plague kept trying to kill all of them.

John of Damascus saying that fragrant oils burst forth from the corpses of saints. Amazing they didn't all die sooner. It’s not like those people were embalmed back then.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
What I wanted to read was something of the lives of the saints. I expected spiritualism, maybe some wisdom, maybe some owners manual for the human soul kind of stuff. Instead this took me through a history of fairy tale polytheism dressed up as Christian thought about guys asking to be turned over on the spit like Lawrence in Rome in the midst of his martyrdom. Cause you gotta be done on both sides for Jesus, right?

With all this mixing dust with water or splinters with water and drinking it, I'm surprised more of these people didn't die from their saintly cures.

Pope Gregory the 7th declaring that all of his predecessors were saints and that it should be assumed for all popes unless proved otherwise. … ...considering the political juxtaposition that seep into these elections being more powerful than the ecclesiastical. C’mon, man.

The Sigh:
Ambrose of Milan creating his own Christian Martyrs out of whole cloth and promulgating them to Sainthood is a paradigm that became a self-fulfilling prophecy repeated over and over as charlatans and conmen either in priest’s robes or preying on gullible priests created relic after relic in Middle Ages Europe.

And, so, Ambrose of Milan, ever the politician, began trading relics and bits and pieces with others building a power network that had little or nothing to do with Christ or the wider church. Effectively he created a collector network based on martyrs and Saints who may or may not have been genuine. And created numerous new shrines as a circumstance. Shrines = $$$ and power.

I understand the masses being the gullible, but were the people in power this gullible or were they using fraud and counterfeit relics to put one over on the people; both for power and for money. Creating a tourist trap industry for pilgrimages and such.

There are so many moments where I almost put this book down. I mean the milk of the Virgin Mary, a thousand years after Christ.

Wisdom:
Augustine, a 4th century theologian, took Matthew 13:38, where it's saying that the save would be separated from the unsaved and those rejected would burn eternally and used it as a precept a precept that was bought into by the church and the people in general I submit that the modern Church revels in the difference between the saved and the unsaved where is the blood of Christ was for everybody plus my disillusionment.

Juxtaposition:
A bishop in 5th century Constantinople asked God to clear his mind of secular learning. He wanted God to open him instead to the reception of divine words. If that's not a description of modern American religious fanatics, I don't know what is. They are open to the words of religious charlatans clothed as priests, but closed to the voice of God.

And when they run out of pagans to Lord it over, they start playing my Saints better than your Saint in a grab for more power and $$$.

There is a dangerous belief that a victory however nasty and brutal confirms the justification of a war in the eyes of God. Man isn't that a piece of the Middle Ages that still impacts daily life. That’s what right wing clerics told their flocks after Trump’s inauguration in 2016 to glowing Fox News reviews.

The Catholic Church and the reliquary cults seem to have failed to read the part about Moses, the Children of Israel, The Ten Commandments, and the Golden Calf.

Get Off My Lawn:
Why do I doubt the chronicles of Ignatius of Antioch that he said “let me be ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ” instead of accepting help that could have kept him from martyrdom?

This is reinforcing all of my cynicism. The idea that they found the manger where Christ was born...800 years after the fact, and moved it to Rome under Pope Hadrian. Color me skeptical. I just don't know about all that.

Predictability/Non-Predictability:
Pope Pascal I building a shrine at San Prassede, where he brought 2,300 saints that he had collected from the Catacombs of Rome. ...so does that mean that all the bodies in the Catacombs of Rome were Saints?

I am trying not to let my cynicism and thoughts about modern holy men impact the way that I view this. But you can see the roots of the behaviors and the actions, the justifications of the way they act today, juxtaposed in the way the priests, clerics, popes, and courtiers of the king acted and abused the power of relics and Saints to get what they wanted in the secular world, over and over. To the degree that they created their own Saints and jacked up the miraculous powers of the saints, to the degree that those who may have actually been good and holy personages were lost, hidden, or covered over in the deluge.
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Last Page Sound:
Wasn't what I was expecting. My protestant leanings are more fully represented in the later chapters. Though I do normally expect history to be about money and power, so...
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The rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire marked the end of state sponsored polytheism, but the practice of honoring saints, in particular through the veneration of their relics, amounted to a sort of polytheism. Charles Freeman writes that unless one gets within the mentality of medieval Christians, who believed in a variety of spiritual forces emanating from long dead saints’ body parts or clothing, “medieval religion does not make much sense.” This is not to say it makes much sense to post scientific revolution thinkers in any event.

Relics were immensely important to medieval life, but their role has been largely underestimated or even ignored by modern scholars. However, documents surviving from earlier than the 17th century are replete with accounts of miracles and the saints who allegedly performed them. Moreover, many cults continue from those days and some “sacred” objects are still venerated.

Freeman traces the perceived importance of relics to the writings of Augustine of Hippo (also known as “Saint Augustine”). Augustine himself did not write much about relics, but his theology was extremely pessimistic, positing that the vast majority of humans will suffer for eternity. Somewhat surprisingly, his texts became almost as authoritative as Scripture, and for centuries later Church leaders followed him in reveling in the vileness of human nature. Freeman writes that Augustine’s “God was a much less rational and less stable deity than that conceived by the philosophers.” This God was, however, amenable to pressure from the likes of the Virgin Mary or the saints.

[Fortunately for Mariologists, Augustine believed that the mother of Jesus “conceived as virgin, gave birth as virgin and stayed virgin forever.” Otherwise he was quite down on the subject of women: lust was filth, erections were sinful, and women were the cause of it all, given their putative weaker brains and lack of self-control.]

Mary, and of course her son, were thought to be able to intercede with an otherwise vengeful God. But saints were usually the go-to intercessors of choice however, since they were “local” – somewhat like appealing to the government representative of one’s political district. The devout routinely erected shrines to holy men and women, often including an article of their clothing or a body part. Moreover, the relics were perceived to be effective, frequently being the “cause” of some miracle. Writing objectively about such matters is tricky for modern authors. Freeman observes, “we are entering a world where there are thousands of accounts of undecayed bodies, resurrections of the dead, healings and the opportune deaths of those who have offended the dead saint or the monastery or church that he or she was protecting.” Freeman does not express his disbelief in the stories that he passes on—he doesn’t have to. The modern reader just takes it all in with a grain (or in some cases a mountain) of salt.

Some churchmen in the late Middle Ages were skeptical of the efficacy of many of the relics, but the relics were such a good source of revenue that the clerics continued to encourage their veneration. To describe the 1300 years from Augustine to the Scientific Revolution as a time of credulity is a gross understatement. And whether the kings, princes, bishops, and abbots who promulgated relic veneration were delusional or charlatans did not matter. They found a laity predisposed to believe preposterous stories—anything to avoid the fires of hell or purgatory.

The financial incentives to manufacture false relics were just too much to resist. As a result, Europe was deluged with items purporting to be connected with Jesus, the apostles, or later saints. Even the Muslims in the Holy Land got in on the relic business after the First Crusade, claiming to have found traces of Jesus's blood and the head of Adam, inter alia.

John Calvin, the influential French theologian during the Protestant Reformation who helped found the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, also noted the plethora of false relics, excoriating the duplicitous practice in a famous treatise published in 1543 chronicling multiple sightings of the "unique" putative relic in several different places throughout Europe. He wrote that he saw so many pieces of the True Cross they would fill the hold of a cargo ship. Regarding all the pieces of the Crown of Thorns, Calvin suggests that the thorns must have sprouted…. And of the Virgin’s milk, he wryly observed: “Had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers.”

On the other hand, much good came of efforts to house this abundance of relics. For example, King Louis IX of France took out a loan to acquire a great many finds (including the proliferating Crown of Thorns), and then constructed the magnificent Sainte Chapelle in Paris to hold them. Other towns and cathedrals also owed their development or enrichment to the profits from pilgrims coming to see the relics.

In sum, the community of the supernatural formed a very real part of the medieval world. For centuries, there was no questioning of the power of relics. Freeman was perhaps most struck by the intensity of worship at the shrines that were said to house the relics. In spite of the fact that man, being subject to original sin, was unworthy of salvation, it was hoped that God just might be inveigled into relenting. God, Freeman explains, "...was not an abstract, rational being. God and rational behavior do not go hand in hand in the Middle Ages—what could be more irrational than to forgive some sinners but not others on a purely arbitrary basis or let them off years of purgatory on the purchase of an indulgence—yet his irrationality meant that he might be cajoled by the intercession of the saints.”

Evaluation: This is a fascinating examination of the role of relics in early Christianity, augmented by a provocative analysis of the influence of early theologians such as Augustine. Freeman’s prose is accessible and lucid. Rather than giving us a dense treatise as some other authors might have done, he provides an entertaining and enlightening glimpse into medieval times in Europe.

Moreover, Freeman writes about fantastic events and quixotic beliefs with only the barest hint of skepticism, and is all the more effective for doing so. The history he relates reminds us of the importance of rational thought as an antidote to superstition. Or perhaps, the shelf life of all those relics just happened to expire at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution.

Maps and illustrations are included.

(JAB) ( )