What Is a Relic? Physical Remains Treated as Continuing Presence

Traditions that maintain the practice generally distinguish grades. The primary category is the physical remains of the person, which is to say bone, hair, teeth or preserved tissue, and these are the most valued and the most restricted. The second category is objects the person used or wore, which are held to have acquired something through contact. A third category is objects that have touched a relic of either higher grade, which extends the supply indefinitely and is how the practice scales to many locations. Buddhist traditions organise their material comparably, with bodily remains, objects of use, and representations forming a graded set, and the distribution of remains after a cremation into many portions for enshrinement is a foundational story in that tradition. Islamic and Jewish practice includes objects and sites associated with prophets and figures with varying degrees of official approval.

The functions were practical as well as devotional and they reinforced each other:

• •Consecration, since altars were required to contain relics, which made their acquisition a condition of building a church
• •Healing, with cures sought at shrines and recorded in collections of accounts that themselves attracted further visitors
• •Oaths, sworn on relics because breaking such an oath carried consequences beyond the legal
• •Protection, with relics carried in procession against plague, drought and invasion, and into battle
• •Legitimacy, since possession connected a place or a ruler to the figure concerned
• •Revenue, since pilgrims required food, lodging, transport and offerings, which sustained entire towns

The medieval European trade in these objects was substantial and its consequences are still visible. Major shrines attracted pilgrims in numbers that required infrastructure, and roads, hospices, bridges and whole towns developed along the established routes, several of which are still walked. Cathedrals were rebuilt at enormous expense to accommodate visitor flow, with ambulatories and radiating chapels designed to move crowds past the shrine, so that the architecture itself records the practice. Competition between institutions was intense, and acquisition by purchase, gift and outright theft is documented, with accounts of successful thefts written approvingly on the reasoning that the saint would not have permitted a removal they opposed. Authentication was a persistent problem, since demand vastly exceeded any plausible supply, and the resulting proliferation of implausible items was mocked by contemporaries long before it became a standard criticism at the Reformation.

Criticism of the practice came from inside the traditions as often as from outside. Theological objections argued that honour paid to matter risks becoming worship of it, that the value of a person lies in their teaching rather than their remains, and that the economic apparatus around shrines corrupted the institutions maintaining them. Practical objections pointed at the evident impossibility of the supply, since the quantity of material attributed to individual figures exceeded what any body could provide many times over, and at a trade that was demonstrably fraudulent in parts. Reformers in sixteenth-century Europe acted on both, dismantling shrines, dispersing collections and ending the pilgrimage economy across large regions, which was a substantial economic disruption as well as a religious one. Traditions that retained the practice responded with authentication procedures and documentation requirements, which addressed the fraud without touching the theological question.

The underlying impulse is not confined to religion, which is worth noticing before dismissing it. Objects associated with significant people are valued far above equivalent objects without that association, and auction prices for items owned by musicians, politicians and athletes demonstrate that the premium is enormous and that the physical object is doing something a copy cannot. Sites of historical events are visited by people who could read about them instead. Personal keepsakes belonging to the dead are kept by people with no religious framework for doing so, and their loss is experienced as a distinct kind of loss. Psychological work on essentialism suggests people intuitively treat contact as transferring something, which appears early in development and operates independently of any belief system. The religious practice therefore formalises an intuition that is general rather than creating one that is peculiar.

Traditions grade these objects, from bodily remains through things used to things that touched either, which lets the supply extend indefinitely. They consecrated altars, secured oaths, protected cities and generated revenue, and the routes, towns and cathedral floor plans built around pilgrimage survive. The intuition that contact transfers something appears early in development and operates outside religion entirely.