Saint’s bones and some gorgeous relics of the past

The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe: Images, Objects and Practices

ed. by Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan & Laura Katrine Skinnebach (Four Courts Press, €29.95)

At one time we used to hear older people complaining that the changes brought about by Vatican II had brought an end to many of the devotional pictures which many Victorian churches contained, to so many liturgical vessels and objects of great beauty, and to processions and elaborate devotions.

Nowadays the emphasis has moved on towards spirituality and communal devotions of a different kind. There has been a great benefit in this. But many a young person is unacquainted with the wonders of the expression of the Catholic faith in the Middle Ages, an expression which, in a much attenuated form, was what their grandmothers still longed for as the 21st Century opened.

This book, which is a deeply learned one, is provided as well with pages of gorgeous illustrations which give an astonishing insight into just what was painted, done, made and practised in the Middle Ages.

Among the images are several of reliquaries in the form of a platter with the head of John the Baptist. In Amiens Cathedral there was preserved what was said to be the actual skull of the Baptist.

I was struck by the perhaps irrelevant thought that these must be in some way connected with the Holy Grail. The word ‘greal’ originally meant, not a chalice, which is how we conceive of the Holy Grail today, but a serving dish, exactly like those in these reliquaries. Can there be some connection, in that an image of Christ as the Eucharist was substituted for an image of the Baptist?

The learned essay by two Scandinavia scholars discussing these Johannesschusselen does not allude to the Holy Grail. But their conclusion makes an important point.

To the medieval mind the poor bones of the saint or the relics might not seem so valuable if laid bare before the pious with no crust of precious stones or golden casket.

But the importance to faith of the relic lay in what it contained. “In the end the material of the reliquary did not matter, if you just believed in the efficacy of the container’s contents.

“No matter what their function or purpose is today, we should look further than the glamorous exteriors of the containers. It is not because non-precious reliquaries do not glitter that they are worth our time and attention.”

In other words, for the Christians it is not the Holy Grail that is important, but the Eucharist it carries.

This is a most interesting book, opening up the ways in which an earlier age approached the non-material through the material. The papers are filled with interesting ideas beyond the scope of a short review to discuss, but this is a book which will open the eyes of many to lost beauties of Christian art.

And yet in the end what concerns all Christians most deeply does not reside in man-made objects, but in God’s creation and the things of the spirit.