What Is a Relic? Physical Remains and the Trade in Them
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A tooth, a fragment of bone, a piece of cloth, a splinter of wood. The conviction that holiness attaches to physical objects connected with a holy person, and that proximity to them brings benefit, is found across religions and produced in medieval Europe an economy of extraordinary scale: churches built to house them, pilgrim routes organised around them, thefts conducted as pious acts, and a supply of fragments that exceeded any plausible original many times over.
The categories and the logic
Catholic practice distinguishes three classes and the ranking explains the market:
- •First-class relics, the physical remains of a saint, meaning bone, hair or tissue, which are the most valued
- •Second-class relics, objects the saint owned or used, including clothing and tools
- •Third-class relics, objects that have touched a first-class relic, which can be produced indefinitely and are consequently given away freely
- •Instruments of the Passion form their own category, including fragments claimed as the True Cross, nails and the crown of thorns
- •The theological justification rests on the incarnation, on biblical passages in which a cloth touched by Paul heals and a corpse revives on contact with Elisha's bones, and on the argument that the body of a saint will be resurrected and is therefore already holy
- •Veneration is formally distinguished from worship, which is reserved to God, a distinction that critics have always regarded as too fine to survive contact with practice
The economy they created
From the fourth century onward relics became the foundation of Christian sacred geography. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 required that every consecrated altar contain a relic, which created permanent institutional demand: every new church needed one, and the number of churches was growing rapidly. Pilgrimage followed, and the routes to Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem carried enormous traffic that supported inns, guides, moneychangers and the sale of badges and souvenirs, making a major shrine the economic engine of its town. Cathedral building was financed by pilgrim offerings, which is why the architecture of a pilgrimage church includes an ambulatory allowing crowds to circulate past the shrine without interrupting services. Competition between shrines was commercial, and the acquisition of a significant relic could transform a town's fortunes, which is why several are recorded as having been stolen deliberately, a practice with its own literary genre of accounts explaining that the saint had wished to be moved.
The supply problem
The demand produced fraud on a scale that contemporaries noticed and mocked. Erasmus observed that the fragments of the True Cross would build a ship, Calvin wrote a treatise cataloguing the duplications, and Chaucer's Pardoner sells pig bones as saints' relics and explains his method to the reader. Several bodies had multiple heads distributed between churches. The medieval response was not straightforwardly credulous: authentication procedures existed, documents of provenance accompanied transfers, and bishops adjudicated competing claims, though the incentives ran strongly one way. Modern testing has produced mixed results, with radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 giving a medieval date that supporters dispute on grounds of sample contamination, and with several other items dated to periods long after the person they are attributed to. Some have proved consistent with their claims, and the Catholic Church's current position discourages the sale of relics entirely, which has not prevented an active online trade that the Church has repeatedly condemned.
Other traditions
The practice is not distinctively Christian. Buddhism has an extensive relic tradition beginning with the distribution of the Buddha's cremated remains among eight kingdoms, which were enshrined in stupas, and a tooth held at Kandy in Sri Lanka has been a focus of veneration and of political legitimacy for centuries, since possession of it was associated with the right to rule. Stupas across Asia are built as reliquaries, and the practice of enshrining remains of revered teachers continues. Islam generally discourages relic veneration and nonetheless preserves objects associated with the Prophet in Istanbul and elsewhere, and the tombs of saints are visited across much of the Muslim world, which is the practice reformist movements object to most strongly. Judaism venerates the graves of righteous figures without a comparable tradition of divided remains. Secular equivalents are easy to identify, including the preservation of political leaders' bodies, the market in objects owned by celebrities, and the display of historical artefacts in museums under conditions of controlled access and reverence that are structurally very similar.
The takeaway
Relics are classified as bodily remains, objects a saint used, and objects that touched the first kind, and the requirement from 787 that every altar contain one created permanent institutional demand. That demand built pilgrimage routes, financed cathedrals whose ambulatories were designed to circulate crowds, and produced fraud on a scale that Erasmus and Chaucer both mocked. The practice appears independently in Buddhism, where possession of a tooth relic conferred political legitimacy, and it has recognisable secular equivalents in museums and celebrity markets.