A collective work undertakes an anthropology of relics in the classical age. They are not only religious objects, they are also inserted into power relations since they can serve the legitimacy of royal power, relations between States, or even participate in the founding of a national identity.
There are no human remains treated in a more exceptional manner in Europe than Christian relics. This exception does not belong to the Middle Ages alone. It appears even larger from the Renaissance until the beginning of the XXIe century. For although, since the Reformation, Christian relics have been, on several occasions and during great upheavals, not only criticized but destroyed in significant quantities, they remain venerated and their use remains of great significance on the organization of certain social relationships. How did this astonishing phenomenon occur? ? Answers to this question will be found in a voluminous collection, published in two carefully edited volumes, Modern relicsunder the direction of historians Philippe Boutry, Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Dominique Julia.
Relics are, above all, religious. Catholic or Orthodox, they define themselves as “ what remains of a saint “, that is to say not only a fragment of a body but, potentially, any object having been in contact with the saint. Twenty-one studies of these relics, divided into six parts, extend from XIVe century until the very beginning of the 2000s, and place a majority of cases in France alongside others in Spain, Italy, Hungary, Soviet Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico, and in “ New France », in present-day North America.
Critics of the relics
Of XVIe At XIXe century, the criticisms directed against the relics were strong, but they did not stop the veneration of them (“ First part. Holy places and bodies: the time of controversies “). First of all, criticism can focus on showing, as Calvin did in his Treatise on Relics published in 1543, that objects are not what they are supposed to be. On the one hand, their nature may not be human, like an arm of Saint Anthony that turned out to be a deer’s limb. On the other hand – this is Calvin’s most developed criticism – the multitude of relics attributed to the same person demonstrates their falsity as soon as we draw up a list of the places where they are supposed to rest, because it then appears that each saint would have had at least two or three bodies (P.-A. Fabre and M. Wilmart). Criticism can then rely on laughter, whether it appeals to the trivial (the relics of “ Notre-Dame-des-Crottes “) or the absurd (in Lodève a mouse which had eaten a consecrated host would have become a “ Holy mouse “) to win the reader over to the denunciation of superstition, a weapon used in particular by Voltaire, and taken up by Collin de Plancy in the first edition of his Critical Dictionary of Relics and Religious Images in 1821-1822 (N. Courtine). These criticisms come mainly from Protestants who criticize the practices of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and from atheists or people inclined to skepticism.
The criticism is not only external to the Catholic Church. But it then pursues a completely different aim: instead of a general disqualification, the challenge is to strengthen the qualification of certain objects as relics. authentic ”, to the detriment of others who would not be. A decree of the Council of Trent (1563), while reaffirming the legitimacy of relics, obliges to examine and obtain the approval of the episcopal authority for any new relic (D. Julia). The backlash of Calvinist criticism is to have led the Catholic Church to establish its own procedures for authenticating relics. But the device of authentication must be reconciled, within Catholicism, with the story of miracles attributed to a relic, and with the quality of the person who recognizes the story, as in the case of a “ Holy thorn ” having “ cured » the niece of Blaise Pascal at Port-Royal in 1656 (A. Cantillon). Following the assaults on the relics during the French Revolution and to overcome these, the XIXe century, it is marked in France by a “ sacral recharge » (P. Boutry) which takes the form of a restoration of already existing saints, and the invention of new saints, partly coming from the catacombs of Rome.
The power of relics
If relics are subject to criticism, and if the Churches restore them and continue to produce new ones, it is because they are part of power relations (“ Second part. Power and the sacred “). They can function as a recourse and reinforcement to affirm the sacred character of the monarchy, guarantee the legitimacy of the royal power which holds it and be useful in relations between States (as a factor of peace or alliance), as is the case in for the French monarchy in XVIIe century (F. Le Hénand). At XVIe century, Philippe II of Spain had undertaken to collect the relics at the Escorial: this collection served to unify the State, the transfer of the relics effecting a transfer of power both political and economic, the relics being sources of significant income in places of worship where people went to venerate them, which required compensation in return (G. Lazure). The political function of relics as a founding element of a national identity continues or has experienced a resurgence since 1989 and the fall of communist regimes until the 2000s, as illustrated by the use of the relic, both ecclesial and political. right hand of Stephen Ierfounder at the turn of the year 1000 of the Kingdom of Hungary, and exhibited in 2000 at the Parliament of the Hungarian Republic (A. Zempléni).
Relics serving as a support for exercising power by those responsible within religious or state institutions, destroying them becomes an issue when power relations change (“ Third part. The sacred in war “). But when it comes to removing them from the institutional system which is contested, the relics are not buried like corpses. In countries where cremation is prohibited or rarely practiced, relics are often burned, both at XVIe century during the Wars of Religion (D. Crouzet) and during the French Revolution (S. Baciocchi and D. Julia), or they can be exhibited in museums, as the Bolsheviks did in Soviet Russia in the years 1919-1920 who believed that this was the best way to educate the people about superstitions (B. Marchadier). However, even in periods when relics are attacked, the forces are multiple: if, during the French Revolution, the hearts of the kings of France until then preserved in Val de Grace were burned in Place de Grève, other relics may be hidden and preserved, which then allowed their reappearance. In periods of great change during which a political power engages a Church, Catholic or Orthodox, relics serve as points of resistance for the latter. In Soviet Russia, priests encouraged their parishioners to venerate the relics in the museum where they had been moved.
As relics are inserted into power relations, they accompany the dual deployment of European Churches and States in the rest of the world (“ Fifth part. An expanding space “). But in India, Latin America and New France, the Churches’ systems intersect and integrate local practices. In New France, Native American art and European art mixed locally (M. Clair). In India, at Meliapor, the traces left by Saint Thomas (foot marks in the ground, as well as a small bone) have become a place of pilgrimage for Christians as well as Hindus and Muslims) (GI Zupanov). The article by C. de Casltelnau-L’Estoile traces, in Brazil from the beginning of the XVIIe century, the fate of the remains of a missionary, the Jesuit Father Francisco Pinto, killed by Indians, probably Tapuia, and whose bones collected by the Tupinamba Indians are endowed with extraordinary powers, such as making rain or shine and provide food. The Jesuits tried, at first, to recover the bones, but the Indians hid them from them in order to keep them in their entirety, then the Jesuits ended up forgetting Father Pinto, who remained the only object of veneration of the Indians.
The fourth part (“ Inventories and inventions of places “) and the sixth part (“ Relics and reliquaries: an archeology of the sacred “) are less coherent than the others, as sometimes happens in collective works. However, let us point out the article on the large reliquary of the chapel of the Crucifix in the church of San Ignazio in Rome, comprising alone approximately 3150 relics. P.A. Fabre analyzes how the relic is conceived, through an interlocking of spaces, as a witness to what is not in the place, and cannot be circumscribed there.
For an anthropology of relics
A relic can be treated as a thing or a person. This is why the foreword of Modern relics invites us to carry out an anthropology of the relic. Despite this intention, almost no anthropologist is cited, apart from Jack Goody, while among the art historians, we encounter Hans Belting and Georges Didi-Huberman from time to time throughout the texts. Now, probably even more than those of medievalists and art historians, the work of several anthropologists could be useful for analyzing modern relics, first and foremost the major work of the American Alfred Gell, Art and its agentsas well as the Make images by Philippe Descola (too recent to have been taken into account by the authors of the contributions). Gell noted that by recategorizing idols as works of art, they had been neutralized, but he added that we revere these works of art “ as much as the idolater worships his wooden god “. He drew the following conclusion: “ When we write about art, we are not doing anything other than writing either about religion or about a substitute for religion with which those who refuse to submit to the dogmas of established religions are satisfied. “. If the reference to Gell would have made it possible to better identify how the relics fit into a system of action which aims to change the world, it would however perhaps also have led to giving too much weight to their condition as a work of art, and would have attenuated, if not lost, an aspect which makes the importance of Modern relics : show the political function of relics and their insertion into power relations.