Title: Holy Bones, Holy Dust
Author: Charles Freeman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publishing Date: 2011
Pgs: 306 pages
Dewey: 235.2 FRE
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
Reliquary and Saint cults began growing almost from Jesus' sacrifice at Calvary, though the foundation of the Church in Rome expanded and strengthened the growth. Relics were omnipresent in the medieval world. Bones, teeth, hair, blood, milk, clothes, things they touched, and items, such as the Crown of Thorns...objects to bring the believer closer to the Saints and allow the Saints to intercede on the penitent’s behalf with God. This is a history of the rise of the relic cults in Europe. The Dark Ages, political upheaval, disease, and the threat of hellfire, amid this, relics were venerated and generated a trade and financial aspect on top of the religious motif; traded, collected, lost, stolen, sold, duplicated, destroyed, bargained with, fought wars with and over, and propaganda.
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Genre:
History
Religion
Religious Antiquities and Archaeology
Antiquities
Archaeology
Saints and Sainthood
Christianity
Chrisitan Church History


Why this book:
Wanted stories of the Saints, I got an education in the “miracles” and reliquary cults that falls within my cynical purview.
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Favorite Concept:
And finally, someone I agree with. I find myself in agreement with Basil of Caesarea. “As the sun does not need the lamp light, so, also, the Church and the congregation can do without the remains of Martyrs. It is sufficient to venerate the name of Christ for the church...redeemed by his blood.”

Hmm Moments:
The martyrdoms and the Saints and what's done with their bodies; bits of bone, dust, hair, etc sounds a lot like Wild West Medicine Show bushwa, just in a BC/Medieval European setting instead of the Old West.

So the Cross as a weapon of victory is an Anglo-Saxon pastiche, probably based on the reliquary cults of Roman Empire and Medieval Christianity

King Oswald of Northumbria seems very Arthur-like.

An incorruptible body laid long in the tomb...isn't that a vampire not a Saint?

So, the incorruptible bodies of the Saints may have been a function of the anointing of the body with spices, post-death, in effect, embalming the body, per Bede. And, at least, in the case of Cuthbert, bodies were so anointed that their shrouds and burial clothes were glued to their body. Well, of course, they appear uncorrupted. Effectively, they’ve been lacquered.

If all the fragments of the True Cross that are, supposedly, in all the church and all the reliquaries, all over the whole of Europe, were actual parts of the True Cross than the True Cross must have been three or four stories tall.

As the heavenly indulgences to lessen a soul’s time in purgatory became commonplace and the reliquary cults became more financial institutions and tourist traps than holy shrines, it was only a matter of time before someone like Martin Luther was going to come along.

WTF Moments:
St. Bernard was a freak. Holy milk from a statue of the Virgin Mary. Blaugh. How many of these people drinking from the breast of a statue or making tea from the dust or fragments of Saints gave themselves horribly diseases later in life? ...it is to vomit.

The idea that the sickly sweet smell coming from corpses is divine is disgusting. The very thought of what people were doing with these decomposing bodies is gross and horrific. No wonder the plague kept trying to kill all of them.

John of Damascus saying that fragrant oils burst forth from the corpses of saints. Amazing they didn't all die sooner. It’s not like those people were embalmed back then.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
What I wanted to read was something of the lives of the saints. I expected spiritualism, maybe some wisdom, maybe some owners manual for the human soul kind of stuff. Instead this took me through a history of fairy tale polytheism dressed up as Christian thought about guys asking to be turned over on the spit like Lawrence in Rome in the midst of his martyrdom. Cause you gotta be done on both sides for Jesus, right?

With all this mixing dust with water or splinters with water and drinking it, I'm surprised more of these people didn't die from their saintly cures.

Pope Gregory the 7th declaring that all of his predecessors were saints and that it should be assumed for all popes unless proved otherwise. … ...considering the political juxtaposition that seep into these elections being more powerful than the ecclesiastical. C’mon, man.

The Sigh:
Ambrose of Milan creating his own Christian Martyrs out of whole cloth and promulgating them to Sainthood is a paradigm that became a self-fulfilling prophecy repeated over and over as charlatans and conmen either in priest’s robes or preying on gullible priests created relic after relic in Middle Ages Europe.

And, so, Ambrose of Milan, ever the politician, began trading relics and bits and pieces with others building a power network that had little or nothing to do with Christ or the wider church. Effectively he created a collector network based on martyrs and Saints who may or may not have been genuine. And created numerous new shrines as a circumstance. Shrines = $$$ and power.

I understand the masses being the gullible, but were the people in power this gullible or were they using fraud and counterfeit relics to put one over on the people; both for power and for money. Creating a tourist trap industry for pilgrimages and such.

There are so many moments where I almost put this book down. I mean the milk of the Virgin Mary, a thousand years after Christ.

Wisdom:
Augustine, a 4th century theologian, took Matthew 13:38, where it's saying that the save would be separated from the unsaved and those rejected would burn eternally and used it as a precept a precept that was bought into by the church and the people in general I submit that the modern Church revels in the difference between the saved and the unsaved where is the blood of Christ was for everybody plus my disillusionment.

Juxtaposition:
A bishop in 5th century Constantinople asked God to clear his mind of secular learning. He wanted God to open him instead to the reception of divine words. If that's not a description of modern American religious fanatics, I don't know what is. They are open to the words of religious charlatans clothed as priests, but closed to the voice of God.

And when they run out of pagans to Lord it over, they start playing my Saints better than your Saint in a grab for more power and $$$.

There is a dangerous belief that a victory however nasty and brutal confirms the justification of a war in the eyes of God. Man isn't that a piece of the Middle Ages that still impacts daily life. That’s what right wing clerics told their flocks after Trump’s inauguration in 2016 to glowing Fox News reviews.

The Catholic Church and the reliquary cults seem to have failed to read the part about Moses, the Children of Israel, The Ten Commandments, and the Golden Calf.

Get Off My Lawn:
Why do I doubt the chronicles of Ignatius of Antioch that he said “let me be ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ” instead of accepting help that could have kept him from martyrdom?

This is reinforcing all of my cynicism. The idea that they found the manger where Christ was born...800 years after the fact, and moved it to Rome under Pope Hadrian. Color me skeptical. I just don't know about all that.

Predictability/Non-Predictability:
Pope Pascal I building a shrine at San Prassede, where he brought 2,300 saints that he had collected from the Catacombs of Rome. ...so does that mean that all the bodies in the Catacombs of Rome were Saints?

I am trying not to let my cynicism and thoughts about modern holy men impact the way that I view this. But you can see the roots of the behaviors and the actions, the justifications of the way they act today, juxtaposed in the way the priests, clerics, popes, and courtiers of the king acted and abused the power of relics and Saints to get what they wanted in the secular world, over and over. To the degree that they created their own Saints and jacked up the miraculous powers of the saints, to the degree that those who may have actually been good and holy personages were lost, hidden, or covered over in the deluge.
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Last Page Sound:
Wasn't what I was expecting. My protestant leanings are more fully represented in the later chapters. Though I do normally expect history to be about money and power, so...
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This is a riveting story of a forgotten practice. Throughout the history of Christianity there has been an odd reverence for the bones of dead saints. This tradition has been largely maintained to this day in the Catholic Church.
Holy Bones traces the history of relic keeping, finding, presenting and verifying along with the ancillary disciplines of pronouncing saintliness (as opposed to beatification as it is now), marketing pilgrimages and preserving bodies. The story goes from macabre leap of faith to obtuse theological arguments to denial of the practice to the semiotics of power. It is heady stuff, and thoroughly researched.
The book is let down, oddly enough particularly in the early chapters by odd, almost weak, editing. I would have expected more from a university press, especially such a hallowed institute. This goes from spelling; "monks who went a round..." to grammar; "the laws by which the natural world operate"; to difficult to decipher sentence structure (of which this is my own example).