The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

spect to the relics of the heathen heroes. There is certainly a true sense in which the saints are the successors of the gods,^^ and the whole body of superstitious practices which cluster around the cult of relics is a development in Christian circles of usages which parallel very closely those of the old heathenism.^° The very things which Delehaye enumerates as the sources of the later cult of the saints and the veneration of their relics — the cult of the martyrs, the honor rendered to their remains, the confidence of Christians in their intercession — are themselves already abuses due to the projection into the Christian church of heathen habitudes and the natural imitation of heathen example.

There are no doubt differences to be traced between the Christian and the heathen cult of relics. And these differences are not always to the advantage of the Christians. There is the matter of the partition of relics, for example, and the roaring trade which, partly in consequence of this, has from time to time been driven in them. The ancient world knew nothing of these horrors. In it the sentiment of reverence for the dead determined all its conduct toward relics. Christians seem to have been inspired rather with eagerness to reap the fullest possible benefit from their saints; and, reasoning that when a body is filled with supernatural power every part of the body partakes of this power, they broke the bodies up into fragments and distributed them far and wide.^^ The insatiable lust to secure such valuable possessions begot in those who trafficked in them a callous rapacity which traded on the ignorance and superstition of the purchasers. The world was filled with false relics,^^ of which, however, this is to be said — that they worked as well as the true.^^ So highly was the mere possession of relics esteemed that the manner of their acquisition was condoned in the satisfaction of having them. Theft was freely resorted to — it was called furtum laudalilef^ and violent robbery was not unknown — and that with (so it was said) the manifest approval of God. St.

Maximinus, bishop of Treves, died at Poitiers (of which town he was a native) on a journey to Rome, and very naturally was buried there. But the inhabitants of Treves wished their bishop for themselves, and stole him out of the church at Poitiers. When the Aquitanians pursued the thieves, heaven intervened and drove them back home, not without disgrace, while the thieves were left scathless,^^ and furthered on their journey.

All sorts of irreverent absurdities naturally found their way into the collections of relics, through an inflamed craving for the merely marvellous. The height of the absurd seems already to be reached when we read in Pausanias that in the shrine of ''the daughters of Leucippus," at Sparta, the egg which Leda laid was to be seen.^^ The absurdity is equally great, however, when we hear of the Christians preserving feathers dropped from the wings of Gabriel when he came to announce to Mary the birth of Jesus; and it is only covered from sight by the shock given by the irreverence of it, when we read of pilgrim monks boasting of having seen at Jerusalem the finger of the Holy Spirit.®^ Any ordinary sense of the ridiculous, however, should be sufficiently satisfied by the solemn exhibition in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damien at Rome of a "vial of the milk of the Blessed Virgin Mary." But Ossa is piled on PeHon when we learn that this is far from the only specimen of Mary's milk which is to be seen in the churches. Several churches in Rome have specimens, and many in France — at Evron, and Soulac, and Mans, and Reims, and Poitiers, and St. Denis, and Bouillac, and the Sainte Chapelle at Paris; the Cathedral of Soissons has two samples of it; and the Cathedral at Chartres three. Then there is some more at Toledo and at the convent of St. Peter d'Arlanza in Spain, and of course in other countries as well. We are fairly astonished at the amount of it.^«

This astonishment is only partly reUeved when we are

told that not all of this milk need be that with which the Virgin nourished her divine Son. The Virgin, it seems, has been accustomed all through the ages to give nourishment to her children in their times of deadly need, and even her statues and paintings may, on occasion, supply it,^^ We are here in contact with a wide-spread legend of mystical nourishment which was current toward the end of the Middle Ages. "Mary was looked upon," as Yrjo

Him explains,'*^ "not as an individual human being, but as an incarnation of an eternal principle which had exercised its power long before it became embodied in the figure of a Jewish girl. The Madonna's motherly care had previously been directed to all the faithful, who had been fed by her 'milk' in the same way as the Child of Bethlehem. In Mechthild's revelations it is even expressly said that the Madonna suckled the prophets before Christ descended into the world. Later, she fed, during His childhood, 'the Son of God and all of us,' and when He was full-grown she offered her milk to the Christian Church. All friends of God could get strength at her bosom. 'Eja, damach sollen wir bekennen — Die Milch und auch die Briiste — Die Jesus so oft kiisste.' " ^^ There is symbolism here, but not

mere symbohsm. Therefore Hirn continues:^^ "There is

no question of symbolism when, in the miracle-histories, it is related that the Madonna cured pious individuals with her healing milk.^^ It is also told of some holy men that they were quite literally refreshed by Mary's breast. The pious Suso relates without reserve, and in a description of great detail, how he tasted 'den himmlischen Trunk';^^ and Bernard of Clairvaux, who merited the Virgin's gratitude more than any other man, was rewarded for all his panegyrics and poems by Mary visiting him in his cell and letting his lips be moistened by the food of the heavenly Child." ^^

"Thus," explains Heinrich Giinter,^^ following out the

same theme, "in the age of the Mary-legend, the Virgin also had to become a miraculous nourisher, and that — in

accordance with the exaggerated imagination of the times — ^with her own milk. A monk gets sick; mouth and throat are so swollen that he can take no nourishment; the brethren expect the end. Then Mary appears — visible only to the sick man — and gives him her breast and announces to him his early recovery. Among the mystical women of the convent of Tof the same thing happened to Sister Adelheit of Frauenberg; she narrates it herself: Mary says to her... *"I will fulfil your desire and will give you to drink of the milk with which I suckled my holy Child," and she put her pure, soft breast into my mouth; and when this unspeakable sweetness was done to me I was on the point of weepmg.'"

As Mary, although the chief, is not the only sustainer of God's people, so, in the incredible materiaHsm of mediaeval thought, it is not she alone whose milk has been given to succor them in their extremities. One and another of the saints, without careful regard to sex, have been recorded as performing the same service. Lacking another, Christina Mirabilis was fed from her own virgin breast.^^ Even the veins of saints, in token of their functions as sustainers of God's people, have flowed with milk as well as with blood.^^ This was the case, for example, with Pantaleon, and there was preserved in Constantinople a vessel containing the combined blood and milk which had issued from his martyred body. "Every year," we read,^^ "they changed places; when ' once in our time, under the Emperor Michael (that is, Paleologus, 1259-82), the blood remained on top, it was a year filled with troubles.'" Pantaleon was a great saint, and his preserved blood even acted as a palladium, giving oracles of weal or woe to the fortunate cities which possessed it. As soon as the famous liquefying blood of Januarius appeared at Naples, Giinter tells us, "the blood of Pantaleon, too, all at once spread over all Italy, everywhere exhibiting the same quality — in Naples itself in three churches, in Ravello, Bari, Valli-

cella, Lucca, Venice — without San Gennaro, however, suffering in the least by the concurrence." The celebrated miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of Januarius is not then unexampled. In the single Church of the Holy Apostles at Rome you may see the perpetually liquid blood of St. James the Less, and the miraculous blood of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, which exudes from his arms whenever they are separated from his body. And at the near-by nunnery of St. Cyriacus, where Cyriacus's head is kept, that head has been said, since the time of Gregory IX (1241), to have become red with blood on the anniversary of the martyr's death, and the reliquary to have become moist. ^'^ Of all the miracles of this kind, however, the liquefaction of Januarius's blood is the most famous. It is exhibited annually at Naples, on the day of the saint's festival. Giinter speaks of it with the prudence which becomes a historian who is

also a Catholic. "A problem before which criticism is compelled to pause," says he.^^ "The fact is assured; the explanation is not yet discovered. The historian may content himself with registering that the blood-miracle first appears suddenly in the late Middle Ages, and that an older notice of a Neapolitan miraculous vial exists, which the popular belief brought into connection, however, with the magician Vergil." This vial enclosed in it an image of

the city, and it was believed that so long as the vial remained intact, so would the city. It was esteemed, in other words, as the palladium of the city, as the vial of Januarius now is. Relics, however, have not been venerated for naught, and it is not merely such spectacular miracles which have made them the object of the eager regard which is paid them.

As Pfister puts it:^^^ "The basis of the Christian cult of relics, as in the case of the antique cult, lies in the belief that the men whose remains are honored after their death, were in their hfetime filled with special power by virtue of which they were in position to work extraordinary things: then, that this power still filled their remains, in the first instance, of course, their bodily remains, but, after that, all that had come into contact with the deceased." It was

because much was hoped from these relics that they were cherished and honored; and since mankind suffers most from bodily ills the relics have naturally been honored above everything else as instruments through which bodily relief and bodily benefit may be obtained. Giinter can

write, ^^ no doubt: ''In the times of the inventions and translations of the relics there were naturally innumerable relicmiracles promulgated. It was not only that the 'blind saw, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard, and the dead were raised,' when they were brought to the graves of the saints; the sanctuaries and healing shrines had something greater still in the incorruptibility of the bodies of the saints, ^^ or of their severed limbs, or in astonishing manifestations of power and Hfe of other kinds. Gregory's Gloria martyrum and Gloria confessorum, and the activity of the miraculous goldsmith of Limoges, and of the later bishop of Noyon, Eligius, served almost exclusively to glorify the graves of the saints. Eligius was endowed from heaven especially for the discovery of relics. He himself, when his grave was opened a year after his death (December I, 660) was wholly uncorrupted, just as if he were yet alive; beard and hair, which according to custom had been shaved, had grown again." But Giinter requires to add: "It is in their power to help (Hilfstnacht) that, on the basis of old experiences, the significance of the graves of the saints for the people still lies, down to to-day." In

point of fact the great majority of the miracles of healing which have been wrought throughout the history of the church, have been wrought through the agency of relics. ^^ Not merely the actual graves of the saints, but equally any places where fragments of their bodies, however minute, have been preserved, have become healing shrines, to many of which pilgrims have flocked in immense numbers, often from great distances, and from which there have