|WE {409}have now travelled far, apparently, from that primitive stage
of god-making where the only known gods are the corpses, mummies,
skulls, ghosts, or spirits of dead chieftains or dead friends and
relations. The God of Christianity, in his fully-evolved form,
especially as known to thinkers and theologians, is a being so vast, so
abstract, so ubiquitous, so eternal, that he seems to have hardly and
points of contact at all with the simple ancestral spirit or sacred
stone from which in the last resort he appears to be descended. Yet even
here, we must beware of being misled by too personal an outlook. While
the higher minds in Christendom undoubtedly conceive of the Christian
God in terms of Mansel and Martineau, the lower minds even among
ourselves conceive of him in far simpler and more material fashions. A
good deal of enquiry among ordinary English people of various classes,
not always the poorest, convinces me that to large numbers of them God
is envisaged as possessing a material human form, more or less gaseous
in composition; that, in spite of the Thirty-nine Articles, he has body,
parts, and passions; that he is usually pictured to the mind’s eye as
about ten or twelve feet high, with head, hands, eyes and mouth, used to
see with and speak with in human fashion; and that he sits on a throne,
like a king that he is, surrounded by a visible court of angels and
archangels. Italian art so invariably represents him, with a frankness
unknown to Protestant Christendom. Instead of {410}being in all places
at once, pervading and underlying nature, the Deity is conceived of
by most of his worshippers as having merely the power of annihilating
space, and finding himself wherever he likes at a given moment. His
omniscience and omnipotence are readily granted; but his abstractness
and immateriality are not really grasped by one out of a thousand of his
believers in Britain.
The fact is, so abstract a conception as the highest theological
conception of God cannot be realised except symbolically, and then for
a few moments only, in complete isolation. The moment God is definitely
thought of in connexion with any cosmic activity, still more in
connexion with any human need, he is inevitably thought of on human
analogies, and more or less completely anthropomorphised in the brain
of the believer. Being by origin an offshoot of the mind of man, a great
deified human being, he retains necessarily still, for all save a few
very mystical or ontological souls, the obvious marks of his ultimate
descent from a ghost or spirit. Indeed, on the mental as opposed to
the bodily side, he does so for us all; since even theologians freely
ascribe to him such human feelings as love, affection, a sense of
justice, a spirit of mercy, of truth, of wisdom: knowledge, will, the
powers of intellect, all the essential and fundamental human faculties
and emotions.
Thus, far as we seem to have travelled from our base in the most exalted
concepts of God, we are nearer to it still than most of us imagine.
Moreover, in spite of this height to which the highest minds have raised
their idea of the Deity, as the creator, sustainer, and mover of the
universe, every religion, however monotheistic, still continues to make
new minor gods for itself out of the dead as they die, and to worship
these gods with even more assiduous worship than it bestows upon the
great God of Christendom or the great gods of the central pantheon.
And the Christian religion makes such minor deities no less than all
{411}others. _The fact is, the religious emotion takes its origin from
the affection and regard felt for the dead by survivors, mingled with
the hope and belief that they may be of some use or advantage, temporal
or spiritual, to those who call upon them_; and these primitive faiths
and feelings remain so ingrained in the very core of humanity that even
the most abstract of all religions, like the Protestant schism, cannot
wholly choke them, while recrudescences of the original creed and custom
spring up from time to time in the form of spiritualism, theosophy, and
other vague types of simple ghost-worship.
Most advanced religions, however, and especially Christianity in its
central, true, and main form of Catholicism, have found it _necessary
to keep renewing from time to time the stock of minor gods--here
arbitrarily known as saints_--much as the older religions found it
always necessary from year to year to renew the foundation-gods, the
corn and wine gods, and the other special deities of the manufactured
order, by a constant supply of theanthropic victims. What I wish more
particularly to point out here, however, is that _the vast majority of
places of worship all the world over are still erected, as at the
very beginning, above the body of a dead man or woman_; that the chief
objects of worship in every shrine are still, as always, such cherished
bodies of dead men and women; and that the primitive connexion of
Religion with Death has never for a moment been practically severed
in the greater part of the world,--not even in Protestant England and
America.
Mr. William Simpson was one of the first persons to point out this
curious underlying connexion between churches, temples, mosques, or
topes, and a tomb or monument. He has proved his point in a very full
manner, and I would refer the reader who wishes to pursue this branch
of the subject at length to his interesting monographs. In this work,
I will confine my attention mainly to _the continued presence of this
death-element in Christianity_; but by way of illustration, I will
preface my remarks {412}by a few stray instances picked up at random
from the neighbouring and interesting field of Islam.
There is no religion in all the world which professes to be more purely
monotheistic in character than Mohammedanism. The unity of God, in the
very strictest sense, is the one dogma round which the entire creed
of Islam centres. More than any other cult, it represents itself as a
distinct reaction against the polytheism and superstition of surrounding
faiths. The isolation of Allah is its one great dogma. If, therefore,
we find even in this most monotheistic of existing religious systems a
large element of practically polytheistic survival--if we find that even
here the Worship of the Dead remains, as a chief component in religious
practice, if not in religious theory, we shall be fairly entitled to
conclude, I think, that such constituents are indeed of the very essence
of religious thinking, and we shall be greatly strengthened in
the conclusions at which we previously arrived as to a _belief in
immortality or continued life of the dead being in fact the core and
basis of worship and of deity._
Some eight or ten years since, when I first came practically into
connexion with Islam in Algeria and Egypt, I was immediately struck by
the wide prevalence among the Mahommedan population of forms of worship
for which I was little prepared by anything I had previously read or
heard as to the nature and practice of that exclusive and ostentatiously
monotheistic faith. Two points, indeed, forcibly strike any visitor
who for the first time has the opportunity of observing a Mahommedan
community in its native surroundings. The first is the universal habit
on the part of the women of visiting the cemeteries and mourning or
praying over the graves of their relations on Friday, the sacred day
of Islam. The second is the frequency of Koubbas, or little whitewashed
mosque-tombs erected over the remains of Marabouts, fakeers, or local
saints, which form the real centres for the religion and worship of
every village. Islam, in practice, is a religion {413}of pilgrimages to
the tombs of the dead. In Algeria, every hillside is dotted over with
these picturesque little whitewashed domes, each overshadowed by its
sacred date-palm, each surrounded by its small walled enclosure or
_temenos_ of prickly pear or agave, and each attended by its local
ministrant, who takes charge of the tomb and of the alms of the
faithful. Holy body, sacred stone, tree, well, and priest--not
an element of the original cult of the dead is lacking. Numerous
pilgrimages are made to these koubbas by the devout: and on Friday
evenings the little courtyards are almost invariably thronged by a crowd
of eager and devoted worshippers. Within, the bones of the holy man
lie preserved in a frame hung about with rosaries, pictures, and other
oblations of his ardent disciples, exactly as in the case of Roman
Catholic chapels. The saint, in fact, is quite as much an institution of
monotheistic Islam as of any other religion with which I am practically
acquainted.
These two peculiarities of the cult of Islam strike a stranger
immediately on the most casual visit. When he comes to look at the
matter more closely, however, he finds also that most of the larger
mosques in the principal towns are themselves similarly built to contain
and enshrine the bones of saintly personages, more or less revered in
their immediate neighbourhood. Some of these are indeed so holy that
their bones have been duplicated exactly like the wood of the true
cross, and two tombs have been built in separate places where the whole
or a portion of the supposed remains are said to be buried. I will only
specify as instances of such holy tombs the sacred city of Kerouan in
Tunisia, which ranks second to Mecca and Medina alone in the opinion of
all devout western Mohammedans. Here, the most revered building is
the shrine of “The Companion of the Prophet,” who lies within a
catafalque covered with palls of black velvet and silver--as funereal a
monument as is known to me anywhere. Close by stands the catafalque of
an Indian saint while {414}other holy tomb-mosques abound in the city.
In Algiers town, the holiest place is similarly the mosque-tomb of Sidi
Abd-er-Rahman, which contains the shrine and body of that saint, who
died in 1471. Around him, so as to share his sacred burial-place (like
the Egyptians who wished to be interred with Osiris), lie the bodies
of several Deys and Pashas. Lights are kept constantly burning at the
saint’s tomb, which is hung with variously-coloured drapery, after the
old Semitic fashion, while banners and ostrich-eggs, the gifts of the
faithful, dangle ostentatiously round it from the decorated ceiling.
Still more sacred in its way is the venerable shrine of Sidi Okba near
Biskra, one of the most ancient places of worship in the Mahommedan
world. The tomb of the great saint stands in a chantry, screened off
from the noble mosque which forms the ante-chamber, and is hung round
with silk and other dainty offerings. On the front an inscription in
very early Cufic characters informs us that “This is the tomb of Okba,
son of Nafa: May Allah have mercy upon him.” The mosque is a famous
place of pilgrimage, and a belief obtains that when the Sidi is rightly
invoked, a certain minaret in its front will nod in acceptance of the
chosen worshipper. I could multiply instances indefinitely, but refrain
on purpose. All the chief mosques at Tlemçen, Constantine, and the
other leading North African towns similarly gather over the bodies of
saints or _marabouts_, who are invoked in prayer, and to whom every act
of worship is offered.
All over Islam we get such holy grave-mosques. The tomb of the Prophet
at Medina heads the list: with the equally holy tomb of his daughter
Fatima. Among the Shiahs, Ali’s grave at Nejef and Hoseyn’s grave at
Kerbela are as sacred as that of the Prophet at Medina. The shrines of
the Imams are much adored in Persia. The graves of the peers in India,
the Ziarets of the fakeers in Afghanistan, show the same tendency. In
Palestine, says Major {415}Conder, worship at the tombs of local saints
“represents the real religion of the peasant.”
I had originally intended, indeed, to include in this work a special
chapter on these survivals in Islam, a vast number of which I have
collected in various places; but my book has already swelled to so much
larger dimensions than I had originally contemplated that I am compelled
reluctantly to forego this disquisition.
One word, however, must be given to Egypt, where the cult of the dead
was always so marked a feature in the developed religion, and where
neither Christianity nor Islam has been able to obscure this primitive
tendency. Nothing is more noticeable in the Nile Valley than the
extraordinary way in which the habits and ideas as to burial and the
preservation of the dead have survived in spite of the double and rapid
alteration in religious theory. At Sak-karah and Thebes, one is familiar
with the streets and houses of tombs, regularly laid out so as to form
in the strictest sense a true Necropolis, or city of the dead. Just
outside Cairo, on the edge of the desert, a precisely similar modern
Necropolis exists to this day, regularly planned in streets and
quarters, with the tomb of each family standing in its own courtyard or
enclosure, and often very closely resembling the common round-roofed or
domed Egyptian houses. In this town of dead bodies, every distinction of
rank and wealth may now be observed. The rich are buried under splendid
mausolea of great architectural pretensions; the poor occupy humble
tombs just raised above the surface of the desert, and marked at head
and foot with rough and simple Egyptian tombstones. Still, the entire
aspect of such a cemetery is the aspect of a town. In northern climates,
the dead sleep their last sleep under grassy little tumuli, wholly
unlike the streets of a city: in Egypt, to this day, the dead occupy, as
in life, whole lanes and alleys of eternal houses. Even the spirit
which produced the Pyramids and the Tombs of the Kings is conspicuous in
modern or mediaeval Cairo in {416}the taste which begot those vast
domed mosques known as the Tombs of the Khalifs and the Tombs of the
Mamelooks. Whatever is biggest in the neighbourhood of ancient Memphis
turns out on examination to be the last resting-place of a Dead Man, and
a place of worship.
Almost every one of the great mosques of Cairo is either a tomb built
for himself by a ruler--and this is the more frequent case--or else
the holy shrine of some saint of Islam. It is characteristic of Egypt,
however, where king and god have always been so closely combined, that
while elsewhere the mosque is usually the prayer-tomb of a holy man,
in Cairo it is usually the memorial-temple of a Sultan, an Emeer, a
viceroy, or a Khedive. It is interesting to find, too, after all we have
seen as to the special sanctity of the oracular head, that perhaps the
holiest of all these mosques contains the head of Hoseyn, the grandson
of the Prophet. A ceremonial washing is particularly mentioned in the
story of its translation. The mosque of Sultan Hassan, with its splendid
mausolem, is a peculiarly fine example of the temple-tombs of Cairo.
I will not linger any longer, however, in the precincts of Islam,
further than to mention the significant fact that the great central
object of worship for the Mahommedan world is the Kaaba at Mecca, which
itself, as Mr. William Simpson long ago pointed out, bears obvious
traces of being at once a tomb and a sacred altar-stone. Sir Richard
Burton’s original sketch of this mystic object shows it as a square
and undecorated temple-tomb, covered throughout with a tasselled black
pall--a most funereal object--the so-called “sacred carpet.” It is,
in point of fact, a simple catafalque. As the Kaaba was adopted direct
by Mohammad from the early Semitic heathenism of Arabia, and as it must
always have been treated with the same respect, I do not think we
can avoid the obvious conclusion that this very ancient tomb has
been funereally draped in the self-same manner, like those of Biskra,
Algiers, and Kerouan, from the time of its first erection. {417}This
case thus throws light on the draping of the _ashera_, as do also the
many-coloured draperies and hangings of saints’ catafalques in Algeria
and Tunis.
Nor can I resist a passing mention of the Moharram festival, which is
said to be the commemoration of the death of Hoseyn, the son of Ali
(whose holy head is preserved at Cairo). This is a rude piece of acting,
in which the events supposed to be connected with the death of Hoseyn
are graphically represented; and it ends with a sacred Adonis-like or
Osiris-like procession, in which the body of the saint is carried
and mourned over. The funeral is the grand part of the performance;
catafalques are constructed for the holy corpse, covered with green and
gold tinsel--the green being obviously a last reminiscence of the god of
vegetation. In Bombay, after the dead body and shrine have been carried
through the streets amid weeping and wailing, they are finally thrown
into the sea, like King Carnival. I think we need hardly doubt that here
we have an evanescent relic of the rites of the corn-god, ending in a
rain-charm, and very closely resembling those of Adonis and Osiris.
But if in Islam the great objects of worship are the Kaaba tomb at Mecca
and the Tomb of the Prophet at Medina, so the most holy spot in the
world for Christendom is--the Holy Sepulchre. It was for possession
of that most sacred place of pilgrimage that Christians fought Moslems
through the middle ages; and it is there that while faith in the human
Christ was strong and vigorous the vast majority of the most meritorious
pilgrimages continued to be directed. To worship at the tomb of the
risen Redeemer was the highest hope of the devout mediæval Christian.
Imitations of the Holy Sepulchre occur in abundance all over Europe: one
exists at S. Stefano in Bologna; another, due to the genius of Alberti,
is well known in the Ruccellai chapel at Florence. I need hardly recall
the Sacro Monte at Varallo.
For the most part, however, in Christendom, and especially {418}in those
parts of Christendom remote from Palestine, men contented themselves
with nearer and more domestic saints. From a very early date we see in
the catacombs the growth of this practice of offering up prayer by (or
to) the bodies of the Dead who slept in Christ. A chapel or _capella_,
as Dean Burgon has pointed out, meant originally an arched sepulchre in
the walls of the catacombs, at which prayer was afterwards habitually
made: and above-ground chapels were modelled, later on, upon the pattern
of these ancient underground shrines. I have alluded briefly in my
second chapter to the probable origin of the cruciform church from two
galleries of the catacombs crossing one another at right angles; the
High Altar stands there over the body or relics of a Dead Saint; and the
chapels represent other minor tombs grouped like niches in the catacombs
around it. A chapel is thus, as Mr. Herbert Spencer phrases it, “a
tomb within a tomb”; and a great cathedral is a serried set of such
cumulative tombs, one built beside the other. Sometimes the chapels
are actual graves, sometimes they are cenotaphs; but the connexion with
death is always equally evident. On this subject, I would refer the
reader again to Mr. Spencer’s pages.
So long as Christianity was proscribed at Rome and throughout the
empire, the worship of the dead must have gone on only silently, and
must have centred in the catacombs or by the graves of saints and
martyrs--the last-named being practically mere Christian successors of
the willing victims of earlier religions. “To be counted worthy to
suffer” was the heart’s desire of every earnest Christian--as it
still is among fresh and living sects like the Salvation Army; and
the creed of self-sacrifice, whose very name betrays its human-victim
origin, was all but universal. When Christianity had triumphed, however,
and gained not only official recognition but official honour, the cult
of the martyrs and the other faithful dead became with Christian Rome a
perfect passion. The Holy Innocents, {419}St. Stephen Protomartyr, the
nameless martyrs of the Ten Persecutions, together with Poly carp, Vivia
Perpétua, Félicitas, Ignatius and all the rest, came to receive from
the church a form of veneration which only the nice distinctions of the
theological mind could enable us to discriminate from actual worship.
The great procession of the slain for Christ in the mosaics of Sant’
Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna gives a good comprehensive list of the more
important of these earliest saints (at least for Aryan worshippers)
headed by St. Martin, St. Clement, St. Justin, St. Lawrence, and St.
Hippolytus. Later on came the more mythical and poetic figures, derived
apparently from heathen gods--St. Catharine, St. Barbara, St. George,
St. Christopher. These form as they go a perfect new pantheon, circling
round the figures of Christ himself, and his mother the Madonna, who
grows quickly in turn, by absorption of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, into
the Queen of Heaven.
The love-feasts or _agapœ_ of the early Christians were usually
held, in the catacombs or elsewhere, above the bodies of the martyrs.
Subsequently, the remains of the sainted dead were transferred to lordly
churches without, like Sant’ Agnese and San Paolo, where they were
deposited under the altar or sacred stone thus consecrated, from whose
top the body and blood of Christ was distributed in the Eucharist. As
early as the fourth century, we know that no church was complete without
some such relic; and the passion for martyrs spread so greatly from that
period onward that at one time no less than 2300 corpses of holy men
together were buried at S. Prassede. It is only in Rome itself that
the full importance of this martyr-worship can now be sufficiently
understood, or the large part which it played in the development of
Christianity adequately recognised. Perhaps the easiest way for the
Protestant reader to put himself in touch with this side of the subject
is to peruse the very interesting and graphic {420}account given in the
second volume of Mrs. Jameson’s _Sacred and Legendary Art_.
I have room for a few illustrative examples only.
When St. Ambrose founded his new church at Milan, he wished to
consecrate it with some holy relics. In a vision, he beheld two young
men in shining clothes, and it was revealed to him that these were holy
martyrs whose bodies lay near the spot where he lived in the city. He
dug for them, accordingly, and found two bodies, which proved to be
those of two saints, Gervasius and Protasius, who had suffered for the
faith in the reign of Nero. They were installed in the new basilica
Ambrose had built at Milan. Churches in their honour now exist all over
Christendom, the best known being those at Venice and Paris.
The body of St. Agnes, saint and martyr, who is always represented
with that familiar emblem, the lamb which she duplicates, lies in a
sarcophagus under the High Altar of Sant’ Agnese beyond the Porta Pia,
where a basilica was erected over the remains by Constantine the Great,
only a few years after the martyrdom of the saint. The body of St.
Cecilia lies similarly in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. In
this last-named case, the original house where Cecilia was put to death
is said to have been consecrated as a place of worship, after the very
early savage fashion, the room where she suffered possessing especial
sanctity. Pope Symmachus held a council there in the year 500. This
earliest church having fallen into ruins during the troubles of the
barbarians, Pope Paschal I., the great patron of relic-hunting, built
a new one in honour of the saint in the ninth century. While engaged in
the work, he had a dream (of a common pattern), when Cecilia appeared to
him and showed him the place in which she lay buried. Search was made,
and the body was found in the catacombs of St. Calixtus, wrapped in a
shroud of gold tissue, while at her feet lay a linen cloth dipped in the
sacred blood of her martyrdom. Near her were deposited the remains of
Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus, {421}all of whom are more or less
mixed up in her legend. The body was removed to the existing church,
the little room where the saint died being preserved as a chapel. In the
sixteenth century, the sacred building was again repaired and restored
in the atrocious taste of the time; and the sarcophagus was opened
before the eyes of several prelates, including Cardinal Baronius. The
body was found entire, and was then replaced in the silver shrine in
which it still reposes. Almost every church in Rome has thus its entire
body of a patron saint, oftenest a martyr of the early persecutions.
In many similar cases, immense importance is attached to the fact that
the body remains, as the phrase goes, “uncorrupted”; and I may
mention in this connexion that in the frequent representations of the
Raising of Lazarus, which occur as “emblems of the resurrection”
in the catacombs, the body of Lazarus is represented as a mummy,
often enclosed in what seems to be a mummy-case. Indeed, it is most
reminiscent of the Egyptian Osiris images.
I pass on to other and more interesting instances of survival in
corpse-worship.
The great central temple of the Catholic Church is St. Peter’s at
Rome. The very body of the crucified saint lies enshrined under the high
altar, in a sarcophagus brought from the catacomb near S. Sebastiano.
Upon this Rock, St. Peter’s and the Catholic Church are founded.
Ana-cletus, the successor of Clement, built a monument over the bones of
the blessed Peter; and if Peter be a historical person at all, I see no
reason to doubt that his veritable body actually lies there. St. Paul
shares with him in the same shrine; but only half the two corpses
now repose within the stately Confessio in the Sacristy of the papal
basilica: the other portion of St. Peter consecrates the Lateran; the
other portion of St. Paul gives sanctity to San Paolo fuori le Mura.
Other much venerated bodies at Rome are those of the Quattro Coronati,
in the church of that name; S. Praxedis {422}and St. Pudentiana in
their respective churches; St. Cosmo and St. Damian; and many more too
numerous to mention. Several of the Roman churches, like San Clemente,
stand upon the site of the house of the saint to whom they are
dedicated, or whose body they preserve, thus recalling the early New
Guinea practice. Others occupy the site of his alleged martyrdom, or
enclose the pillar to which he was fastened. The legends of all these
Roman saints are full of significant echoes of paganism. The visitor
to Rome who goes the round of the churches and catacombs with an
unprejudiced mind must be astonished to find how sites, myths, and
ceremonies recall at every step familiar heathen holy places or stories.
In the single church of San Zaccaria at Venice, again, I found the
bodies of St. Zacharias (father of John the Baptist), St. Sabina, St.
Tarasius, Sts. Nereus and Achilles, and many other saints too numerous
to mention.
How great importance was attached to the possession of the actual corpse
or mummy of a saint we see exceptionally well indeed in this case of
Venice. The bringing of the corpse or mummy of St. Mark from Alexandria
to the lagoons was long considered the most important event in the
history of the Republic; the church in which it was housed is the
noblest in Christendom, and contains an endless series of records of the
connexion of St. Mark with the city and people that so royally received
him. The soul, as one may see in Tintoret’s famous picture, flitted
over sea with the body to Venice, warned the sailors of danger by
the way, and ever after protected the hospitable Republic in all its
enterprises. One must have lived long in the city of the Lagoons and
drunk in its very spirit in order to know how absolutely it identified
itself with the Evangelist its patron. “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista
metis,” is the motto on its buildings. The lion of St. Mark stood
high in the Piazzetta to be seen of all; he recurs in every detail of
sculpture or painting in the Doges’ Palace and the public edifices
of the city. The body that lay {423}under the pall of gold in the great
church of the Piazza was a veritable Palladium, a very present help in
time of trouble. It was no mere sentiment or fancy to the Venetians;
they knew that they possessed in their own soil, and under their own
church domes, the body and soul of the second of the evangelists.
Nor was that the only important helper that Venice could boast. She
contained also the body of St. George at San Giorgio Maggiore, and the
body of St. Nicholas at San Niccolo di Lido. The beautiful legend of
the Doge and the Fisherman (immortalised for us by the pencil of Paris
Bordone in one of the noblest pictures the world has ever seen) tells
us how the three great guardian saints, St. Mark, St. George, and St.
Nicholas, took a gondola one day from their respective churches, and
rowed out to sea amid a raging storm to circumvent the demons who were
coming in a tempest to overwhelm Venice. A fourth saint, of far later
date, whom the Venetians also carried off by guile, was St. Roch of
Montpelier. This holy man was a very great sanitary precaution against
the plague, to which the city was much exposed through its eastern
commerce. So the men of Venice simply stole the body by fraud from
Montpelier, and built in its honour the exquisite church and Scuola di
San Rocco, the great museum of the art of Tintoret. The fact that mere
possession of the holy body counts in itself for much could not be
better shown than by these forcible abductions.
The corpse of St. Nicholas, who was a highly revered bishop of Myra in
Lycia, lies, as I said, under the high altar of San Niccolo di Lido at
Venice. But another and more authentic body of the same great saint, the
patron of sailors and likewise of schoolboys, lies also under the high
altar of the magnificent basilica of San Nicola at Bari, from which
circumstance the holy bishop is generally known as St. Nicolas of Bari.
A miraculous fluid, the Manna di Bari, highly prized by the pious,
exudes from the remains. A gorgeous cathedral rises over the sepulchre.
{424}Such emulous duplication of bodies and relics is extremely common,
both in Christendom and in Islam.
I have made a point of visiting the shrines of a vast number of leading
saints in various parts of Italy; and could devote a volume to their
points of interest. The corpse of St. Augustine, for example, lies
at Pavia in a glorious ark, one of the most sumptuous monuments ever
erected by the skill of man, as well as one of the loveliest. Padua
similarly boasts the body of St. Antony of Padua, locally known as “il
Santo,” and far more important in his own town than all the rest of
the Christian pantheon put together. The many-domed church erected over
his remains is considerably larger than St. Mark’s at Venice; and
the actual body of the saint itself is enclosed in an exquisite marble
chapel, designed by Sansovino, and enriched with all the noblest art of
the Renaissance. Dominican monks and nuns make pilgrimages to Bologna,
in order to venerate the body of St. Dominic, who died in that city,
and whose corpse is enclosed in a magnificent sarcophagus in the church
dedicated to him, and adorned with exquisite sculpture by various hands
from the time of Niccolo Pisano to that of Michael Angelo. Siena has for
its special glory St. Catherine the second--the first was the mythical
princess of Alexandria; and the house of that ecstatic nun is still
preserved intact as an oratory for the prayers of the pious. Her head,
laid by in a silver shrine or casket, decorates the altar of her chapel
in San Domenico, where the famous frescoes of Sodoma too often usurp the
entire attention of northern visitors. Compare the holy head of Hoseyn
at Cairo. The great Franciscan church at Assisi, once more, enshrines
the remains of the founder of the Franciscans, which formerly reposed
under the high altar; the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli below it
encloses the little hut which was the first narrow home of the nascent
order. I could go on multiplying such instances without number; I hope
these few will suffice to make the Protestant reader feel how real is
the reverence {425}still paid to the very corpses and houses of the
saints in Italy. If ever he was present at Milan on the festa of San
Carlo Borromeo, and saw the peasants from neighbouring villages flock
in hundreds to kiss the relics of the holy man, as I have seen them, he
would not hesitate to connect much current Christianity with the most
primitive forms of corpse-worship and mummy-worship.
North of the Alps, again, I cannot refrain from mentioning a few salient
instances, which help to enforce principles already enunciated. At
Paris, the two great local saints are St. Denis and Ste. Geneviève. St.
Denis was the first bishop of Lutetia and of the Parish: he is said
to have been beheaded with his two companions at Montmartre,--Mons
Martyrum. He afterwards walked with his head in his hands from that
point (now covered by the little church of St. Pierre, next door to the
new basilica of the Sacre Cœur), to the spot where he piously desired
to be buried. A holy woman named Catulla (note that last echo) performed
the final rites for him at the place where the stately abbey-church of
St. Denis now preserves his memory. The first cathedral on the spot was
erected before the Frankish invasion; the second, built by Dagobert, was
consecrated (as a vision showed) by Christ himself, who descended for
the purpose from heaven, surrounded by apostles, angels, and St. Denis.
The actual head or skull of the saint was long preserved in the basilica
in a splendid reliquary of solid silver, the gift of Marguérite de
France, just as Hoseyn’s head is still preserved at Cairo, and as
so many other miraculous or oracular heads are kept by savages or
barbarians elsewhere. Indeed, the anthropological enquirer may be
inclined to suppose that the severance of thé head from the body and
its preservation above ground, after the common fashion, gave rise later
to the peculiar but by no means unique legend. Compare the bear’s
head in the Aino superstition, as well as the oracular German and
Scandinavian Nithstangs.
As for {426}Ste. Geneviève, she rested first in the church dedicated
to her on the site now occupied by the Pantheon, which still in part,
though secularised, preserves her memory. Her body (or what remains of
it) lies at present in the neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont,
where every lover of Paris surely pays his devotion to the shrine in the
most picturesque and original building which the city holds, whenever he
passes through the domain of Ste. Geneviève. How real the devotion of
the people still is may be seen on any morning of the working week, and
still more during the octave of the saint’s fete-day.
As in many other cases, however, the remains of the virgin patroness
of Paris have been more than once removed from place to place for safe
custody. The body was originally buried in the crypt of the old abbey
church of the Holy Apostles on the Ile de la Cité. When the Normans
overran the country, the monks carried it away with them in a wooden
box to a place of safety. As soon as peace was once more restored, the
corpse was enshrined in a splendid _châsse_; while the empty tomb was
still treated with the utmost reverence. At the Revolution, the actual
bones, it is said, were destroyed; but the sarcophagus or cenotaph
survived the storm, and was transferred to St. Etienne. Throughout
the Neuvaine, thousands of the faithful still flock to worship it. The
sarcophagus is believed even now to contain some holy portions of the
saint’s body, saved from the wreck by pious adherents.
Other familiar examples will occur to every one, such as the bones of
the Magi or Three Kings, preserved in a reliquary in the Cathedral
at Cologne; those of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins; those of St.
Stephen and St. Lawrence at Rome; those of St. Hubert, disinterred and
found uncorrupted, at the town of the same name in the Ardennes; and
those of St. Longinus in his chapel at Mantua. All these relics and
bodies perform astounding miracles, and {427}all have been the centres
of important cults for a considerable period.
In Britain, from the first stages of Christianity, the reverence paid to
the bodies of saints was most marked, and the story of their wanderings
forms an important part of our early annals. Indeed, I dwell so long
upon this point because few northerners of the present day can fully
appreciate the large part which the Dead Body plays and has played for
many centuries in Christian worship. Only those who, like me, have lived
long in thoroughly Catholic countries, have made pilgrimages to numerous
famous shrines, and have waded through reams of Anglo-Saxon and other
early mediaeval documents, can really understand this phase of Christian
hagiology. To such people it is abundantly clear that the actual Dead
Body of some sainted man or woman has been in many places the
chief object of reverence for millions of Christians in successive
generations. A good British instance is found in the case of St.
Cuthbert’s corpse. The tale of its wanderings is too long to be
given here in full; it should be read in any good history of Durham. I
epitomize briefly. The body of the devoted missionary of the north was
first kept for some time at Lindisfarne. When, at the end of eleven
years, the saint’s tomb was opened, his outer form was found still
incorrupt; and so for more than 800 years it was believed to remain.
It rested at Lindisfarne till 875, when the piratical Danes invaded
Northumbria. The monks, regarding St. Cuthbert as their greatest
treasure, fled inland, carrying the holy body with them on their own
shoulders. Such translations of sacred corpses are common in Christian
and heathen history. After many wanderings, during which it was treated
with the utmost care and devotion, the hallowed body found an asylum
for a while at Chester-le-Street in 883. In 995, it was transferred to
Ripon, where it sanctified the minster by even so short a sojourn; but
in the same year it went forth again, on its way north to Lindisfarne.
On the way, however, it miraculously {428}signified (by stubborn refusal
to move) its desire to rest for ever at Durham--a town whose strong
natural position and capacity for defence does honour to the saint’s
military judgment. Here, enclosed in a costly shrine, it remained
working daily miracles till the Reformation. The later grave was opened
in 1826, when the coffin was found to enclose another, made in 1104:
and this again contained a third, which answered the description of the
sarcophagus made in 698, when the saint was raised from his first
grave. The innermost case contained, not indeed the uncorrupted body
of Cuthbert, but a skeleton, still entire, and wrapped in fine robes
of embroidered silk. No story known to me casts more light on
corpse-worship than does this one when read with all the graphic details
of the original authorities.
But everywhere in Britain we get similar local saints, whose bodies or
bones performed marvellous miracles and were zealously guarded against
sacrilegious intruders. Bede himself is already full of such holy
corpses: and in later days they increased by the hundred. St. Alban at
St. Alban’s, the protomartyr of Britain; the “white hand” of
St. Oswald, that when all else perished remained white and uncorrupted
because blessed by Aidan; St. Etheldreda at Ely, another remarkable
and illustrative instance; Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey;
these are but a few out of hundreds of examples which will at once occur
to students of our history. And I will add that sometimes the legends
of these saints link us on unexpectedly to far earlier types of heathen
worship; as when we read concerning St. Edmund of East Anglia, the
patron of Bury St. Edmund’s, that Ingvar the viking took him by force,
bound him to a tree, scourged him cruelly, made him a target for the
arrows of the pagan Danes, and finally beheaded him. Either, I say,
a god-making sacrifice of the northern heathens; or, failing that, a
reminiscence, like St. Sebastian, of such god-making rites as preserved
{429}in the legends of ancient martyrs. Compare here, once more, the
Aino bear-sacrifice.
But during the later middle ages, the sacred Body of Britain, above all
others, was undoubtedly that of Thomas A’Becket at Canterbury. Hither,
as we know, all England went on pilgrimage; and nothing could more fully
show the rapidity of canonisation in such cases than the fact that even
the mighty Henry II. had to prostrate himself before his old enemy’s
body and submit to a public scourging at the shrine of the new-made
martyr. For several hundred years after his death there can be no doubt
at all that the cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury was much the most real
and living worship throughout the whole of England; its only serious
rivals in popular favour being the cult of St. Cuthbert to the north of
Humber, and that of St. Etheldreda in the Eastern Counties.
Holy heads in particular were common in Britain before the Reformation.
A familiar Scottish case is that of the head of St. Fergus, the apostle
of Banff and the Pictish Highlands, transferred to and preserved at
the royal seat of Scone. “By Sanct Fergus heid at Scone” was the
favourite oath of the Scotch monarchs, as “Par Sainct Denys” was
that of their French contemporaries.
In almost all these cases, again, and down to the present day, popular
appreciation goes long before official Roman canonisation. Miracles are
first performed at the tomb, and prayers are answered; an irregular cult
precedes the formal one. Even in our own day, only a few weeks after
Cardinal Manning’s death, advertisements appeared in Catholic papers
in London, giving thanks for spiritual and temporal blessings received
through the intervention of Our Lady, the saints, “and our beloved
Cardinal.”
This popular canonisation has often far outrun the regular official
acceptance, as in the case of Joan of Arc in France at the present day,
or of “Maister John Schorn, that blessed man born,” in the Kent
of the middle ages. Thus countries like Wales and Cornwall are full of
local and {430}patriotic saints, often of doubtful Catholicity, like St.
Cadoc, St. Padern, St. Petrock, St. Piran, St. Ruan, and St. Illtyd, not
to mention more accepted cases, like St. Asaph and St. David. The fact
is, men have everywhere felt the natural desire for a near, a familiar,
a recent, and a present god or saint; they have worshipped rather the
dead whom they loved and revered themselves than the elder gods and
the remoter martyrs who have no body among them, no personal shrine, no
local associations, no living memories. “I have seen in Brittany,”
says a French correspondent of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, “the tomb of a
pious and charitable priest covered with garlands: people flocked to
it by hundreds to pray of him that he would procure them restoration
to health, and guard over their children.” There, with the Christian
addition of the supreme God, we get once more the root-idea of religion.
I should like to add that beyond such actual veneration of the bodies
of saints and martyrs, there has always existed a definite theory in the
Roman church that no altar can exist without a relic. The altar, being
itself a monumental stone, needs a body or part of a body to justify
and consecrate it. Dr. Rock, a high authority, says in his _Hierurgia_,
“By the regulations of the Church it is ordained that the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass be offered upon an altar which contains a stone
consecrated by a Bishop, enclosing the relics of some saint or martyr;
and be covered with three linen cloths that have been blessed for that
purpose with an appropriate form of benediction.” The consecration of
the altar, indeed, is considered even more serious than the consecration
of the church itself; for without the stone and its relic, the ceremony
of the Mass cannot be performed at all. Even when Mass has to be said
in a private house, the priest brings a consecrated stone and its relic
along with him; and other such stones were carried in the _retables_ or
portable altars so common in military expeditions of the middle ages.
The church is thus {431}a tomb, with chapel tombs around it; it contains
a stone monument covering a dead body or part of a body; and in it is
made and exhibited the Body of Christ, in the form of the consecrated
and transmuted wafer.
Not only, however, is the altar in this manner a reduced or symbolical
tomb, and not only is it often placed above the body of a saint, as at
St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s, but it also sometimes consists itself of
a stone sarcophagus. One such sarcophagus exists in the Cathedral at
St. Malo; I have seen other coffin-shaped altars in the monastery of La
Trappe near Algiers and elsewhere. When, however, the altar stands, like
that at St. Peter’s, above the actual body of a saint, it does not
require to contain a relic; otherwise it does. That is to say, it must
be either a real or else an attenuated and symbolical sarcophagus.
In the eastern church, a sort of relic-bag, called an Antimins, is
necessary for the proper performance of the Holy Eucharist. It consists
of a square cloth, laid on the altar or wrapped up in its coverings, and
figured with a picture representing the burial of Christ by Joseph of
Arimathea and the Holy Women. This brings it very near to the Adonis and
Hoseyn ceremonies. But it must necessarily contain some saintly relic.
Apart from corpse-worship and relic-worship in the case of saints,
Catholic Christendom has long possessed an annual Commemoration of the
Dead, the _Jour des Morts_, which links itself on directly to earlier
ancestor-worship. It is true, this commemoration is stated officially,
and no doubt correctly, to owe its origin (in its recognised form) to a
particular historical person, Adam de Saint Victor: but when we consider
how universal such commemorations and annual dead-feasts have been in
all times and places, we can hardly doubt that the church did but adopt
and sanctify a practice which, though perhaps accounted heathenish, had
never died out at all among the mass of believers. The very desire to
be buried in a church or churchyard, and all that it implies, link on
Christian usage here {432}once more to primitive corpse-worship. Compare
with the dead who sleep with Osiris. In the middle ages, many people
were buried in chapels containing the body (or a relic) of their patron
saint.
_In short, from first to last, religion never gets far away from
these its earliest and profoundest associations. “God and
immortality,”--those two are its key-notes. And those two are one;
for the god in the last resort is nothing more than the immortal ghost,
etherealised and extended._
On the other hand, whenever religion travels too far afield from its
emotional and primal base in the cult of the nearer dead, it must either
be constantly renewed by fresh and familiar objects of worship, or it
tends to dissipate itself into mere vague pantheism. A new god, a new
saint, a “revival of religion,” is continually necessary. _The
Sacrifice of the Mass is wisely repeated at frequent intervals; but
that alone does not suffice; men want the assurance of a nearer, a
more familiar deity._ In our own time, and especially in Protestant and
sceptical England and America, this need has made itself felt in the
rise of spiritualism and kindred beliefs, which are but the doctrine
of the ghost or shade in its purified form, apart, as a rule, from the
higher conception of a supreme ruler. ~And what is Positivism itself
save the veneration of the mighty dead, just tinged with vague ethical
yearnings after the abstract service of living humanity? I have known
many men of intellect, suffering under a severe bereavement--the loss
of a wife or a dearly-loved child--take refuge for a time either in
spiritualism or Catholicism. The former seems to give them the practical
assurance of actual bodily intercourse with the dead, through mediums
or table-turning; the latter supplies them with a theory of death
which makes reunion a probable future for them. This desire for direct
converse with the dead we saw exemplified in a very early or primitive
stage in the case of the Mandan wives who talk lovingly to their
husbands’ skulls; it probably forms the basis for the common habit of
keeping the head {433}while burying the body, whose widespread results
we have so frequently noticed. I have known two instances of modern
spiritualists who similarly had their wives’ bodies embalmed, in order
that the spirit might return and inhabit them.
_Thus the Cult of the Dead, which is the earliest origin of all
religion, in the sense of worship, is also the last relic of the
religious spirit which survives the gradual decay of faith due to
modern scepticism. To this cause I refer on the whole the spiritualistic
utterances of so many among our leaders of modern science. They have
rejected religion, but they cannot reject the inherited and ingrained
religious emotions._