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 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 Cour), 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 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 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 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 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.”