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, 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 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 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. Such emulous duplication of bodies and relics is extremely common, both in Christendom and in Islam.