On this page I've posted a few extracts of my thesis as I keep writing it; it is very much work in progress, rough and ready and still evolving. You may find it interesting, perhaps it will prompt questions or criticisms of your own. I believe it is good practice to demystify the academic process a bit and to give the people who provide opinions, data and experiences some insight into where their input is ending up.
Extracts from Bones of ContentionEarly on a fine Sunday afternoon I am sitting in the café of the Bramante Cloisters, just round the corner from Piazza Navona. Quiet during the week, except for lunchtime, it is fairly busy on weekends, though frequented mostly by Romans and a few ex-pats, too hidden for the tourist crowds.
In front of me on my table I have a reliquary, properly speaking a theca, a relic locket. On eBay it would be advertised as a "multi-relic theca". A bit smaller than half my palm, the usual oval shape, made of brass that has darkened over time. What time? Judging by its style I would date it between 1800 and 1850. It is my latest acquisition, bought forty minutes earlier in Porta Portese, Rome's largest and busiest street market. It cost a bit more than I really feel comfortable with – is this where postgraduate funding is supposed to go? - , but at the same time I knew I was getting a good deal. I would have cost twice as much if I had bought it on eBay. Just a pity that the silk threads which are supposed to fasten the relic have come apart, so there is a chance that the relics have been tampered with – or giving me the possibility to tamper with them, which I certainly will not do. Still, the wax seal is intact – a nice, clear strike, showing a bishop's coat of arms: six tassels on each side decorate the galero, the flat, wide-brimmed ecclesiastical hat that is part of the heraldry of Roman-Catholic prelates. The shield has the shape of a horse's face armour, often used by Italian clergy; it is underlaid by a Maltese cross, indicating that the bishop was also a Knight of Malta or had otherwise received an award within the order. The shield shows an eagle or falcon looking right. Since the threads are broken, the card-board, covered with the usual red silk, on which the relics sit, is a bit wobbly in the theca, so someone has bolstered it with some bits of paper. It looks yellow, very thin and brittle – a good sign, if it is as old as it appears: if the theca has been interfered with it happened a long time ago, bestowing its own historical value on a case of fakery or a simple mishap. But then, threads can also wear out naturally, scraped by the rim of the cap if the back of the relic is opened frequently. At any rate, the relics look fine to me, no loose bits as far as I can see – if it is possible to say very much about them at all. There are 18 of them in the locket, no less; the most tiny specks of matter, barely identifiable – some, I can tell, are particles of fabric, others may be stone or bone, dust or ashes, partly merging with the dots of glue that hold them in place. Of two or three I am not sure whether I actually see them at all or whether it is simply the drop of glue that I am looking at. As a specimen of craftsmanship the theca is a bit botched. I could say craftswomanship, given that many convents had a line in reliquary-making – "nuns' work", as it is sometimes called, or "schöne Arbeiten" in German, literally meaning "beautiful works". But somehow the wonkiness of the design does not quite suggest the infinitely patient, meticulous hand of a female religious. Sister at Santa Lucia in Selci showed me some of the pieces she recently created – just the ordinary, mass-produced thecas that one finds in the shops around Borgo Pio and Via Cestari, but skilfully embellished by her, the cedulae laser-printed (a bit prosaic perhaps, but far more legible), carefully cut out and carefully pasted, minute ornaments of metal foil, sequins and gold wire arranged around the relic.
Still, in its own way the piece in front of me is rather a fine one. Eighteen relics, quite an exceptional number, axial symmetrically arranged (if a bit askew), eight in the centre, five on each side set in a slight arc. The cedulae are handwritten, the black ink still unfaded, but the letters are a bit scrawled. Some pieces that I have seen were miniature calligraphies, but not these ones. And as the lengths of the individual cedulae vary the general impression is quite untidy and crowded. Yet the top one reads "Ex Spina Cor D.N.J.C." – one of the usual abbreviations that halfway decent antiques dealers and the enthusiasts on eBay spot from a mile away: "From the Thorn of the Crown of Our Lord Jesus Christ". Quite a catch, this one – great cities have been pillaged, innocent people been butchered for it, to lay their hands on this relic kings have spent the fortunes of their realms; I got it in flea market – quite a catch, indeed, even if it is just a minute speck rather than a recognizable shape[1]. "Ex Sepul. B.V.M." – "From the Tomb of the Blessed Virgin Mary". Not bad either. Other relics are of St Joseph, St Anne, St John the Baptist, Saints Peter and Paul. The nuclear Holy Family in the palm of my hand, together with the foundational figures of the early Church. A few martyrs – St Blaise, St Emygdius (yet another relic of him; and I used to think he was really obscure). The great monastic founders St Benedict (with his disciple St Maur), St Francis and St Dominic. Some medieval favourites – St Anthony of Paduaand St Rock. Two protagonists of the Catholic Reformation – St Cajetan, founder of the Theatine clerks regular, and his follower St Andrew Avellino. And finally some St Vincent whom I cannot fully identify as there are several saints of that name and the scrawl is only partly legible.
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[1] In 1204, Venetian influence diverted the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople. The city, immensely rich in relics (as well as other treasures) was ruthlessly pillaged and subsequently became the capital of the short-lived Latin Empire. The sack of Constantinople resulted in a veritable flood of relics into the West over the following years. King Louis IX of France acquired the Crown of Thorns from the Latin Emperor Baldwin II in 1239 for the vast sum of 177,000 livres, housing it in a purpose-built shrine at Paris, the Sainte Chapelle. Single thorns were occasionally given away, precious gifts to cathedral chapters and monasteries or to high-ranking nobles and ecclesiastics.
It is necessary to understand the context in which American Catholics, as the most active users of eBay, live their religious lives. In particular it is necessary to position them and the Catholic Church in North Americawithin the historical developments of the past 40 years, that is to say within the developments of the post-conciliar period.
" When asked how the Catholic imagination differs from the Protestant …, I reply that we have angels and saints and souls in purgatory and statues and stations of the cross and votive candles and religious medals and crucifixes and rosaries and Mary the Mother of Jesus and First Communions and Candlemas and Ash Wednesday and May crownings and Midnight Masses and pilgrimages and relics and they don't. These days I realize that we don't have most of those things anymore either" (Greeley2005: 135).
What Greely describes is a Catholicism that once embraced leadership and laity alike within an intense sacramentalism or, as Orsi (2005) terms it, devotionalism – in the most general sense the acknowledgement that God is in some form present in, or at least reveals him-/herself through objects, events and practices. Technically, the term "sacramentals" refers to a fairly open and heterogeneous group of objects and practices that are akin to, yet of lesser importance than and carefully distinguished from the sacraments. Sacramentals comprise, for example, benedictions (of humans, cattle, plants etc.), holy water, the sign of the cross, the saying of grace, rosaries, scapulars, and relics. Conceptually, the idea of sacramentals developed out of early scholastic teaching on the sacraments by Hugh of St.-Victor (d. 1142) and Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160), organising a wide array of common liturgical acts and objects into a hierarchy, that distinguished between those that effect and those that merely signify salvation. Sacraments are thus both, inherently effective (ex opere operato) and necessary for salvation, while sacramentals work through the intercession of the Church and the inner participation of the faithful (ex opere operantis ecclesiae); as such they can aid salvation, but are not necessary to it. Despite this relatively clear conceptual distinction, actual religious practice as to which acts and objects belonged in which category remained fairly flexible for a good deal longer. The fixation of seven sacraments, while already enumerated by Peter Lombard (other authors list as many as 30), was formally defined only by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), while the actual term "sacramental" first appears even later, in papal document of 1682 (see Kürzeder 2005: 58-64). This practical ambiguity is certainly suggestive, as it indicates the difficulty of defining the clear boundaries between signification and causation, sign and presence – a fundamental question that for many faithful still hovers inescapably in the background when reflecting on their use of or attitude towards relics. It also opens a space for objects, practices and words not clearly (or not always clearly) sanctioned by either official authority or popular custom, which may contribute to the awkward position of Church officials who often seem to revere and to disown relics simultaneously.
Yet this sacramentalism, while perhaps not (yet) completely relegated to the past, has certainly ceased to be the universal and unquestioned idiom of Catholic piety – an effect, if arguably an unintended one, of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965): "American Catholicism in the latter third of the twentieth century offers a case study of the confusion, at least, but also the anger and despair that may be provoked by conflict over media of presence" (Orsi 2005: 51). Theological periodicals of the time give ample evidence of the impetus provided by the Council to rid the Catholic Church (and churches) of what now came to be seen as remnants of the pre-modern, the superstitious and the immature. It could be argued that the Catholic leadership, at a time when the modernist paradigm was already past its prime and set for internal deconstruction, embarked on a large-scale programme to finally bring its Church into the modern age.
Both Greeley (2005) and Orsi (2005) give sensitive accounts of this period in the US, cautiously questioning the wisdom of the liturgical reforms that led to a widespread emptying out of sacred space and a fading of many devotional practices during the 1960s and 1970s. Both are broadly sympathetic to these forms of Catholic sacramentalism on the wane that came under, although from somewhat different, perhaps even opposite sides of the spectrum. The one, as a sociologist but also a priest and member of the Jesuit order, is primarily concerned with pastoral issues, with the role of liturgy and material religion for community coherence. From Greeley's perspective, a healthy degree of sacramentalism is in the own best interest of his Church, although exactly what degree should be deemed "healthy" is very much determined on the institutional level. In contrast, Orsi, as a historian of religion, assumes a grass-roots perspective, charting the individual and group experiences of (Italo-)Catholic (immigrant) communities, their transition from a position at the margins into the mainstream of US society and their, sometimes fraught, incorporation into a secular modernity. Normative prescriptions of orthodoxy versus superstition are of interest only in so far as many of his informants have to work through these concepts in the practice and development of their religious lives. Yet sacramentalism – or the notion of presence that sacramentalism implies – remains a troubling concept even with ostensibly sympathetic commentators such as Greeley. For as he reminds us,
"[t]he problem then is not to rid ourselves of statues and crucifixes and medals and angels and saints and holy water and the poor souls and Mary. The problem rather is how to reinterpret and rearticulate some of our stories so they represent the authentic story and do not degenerate into superstition, folk religion, and magic" (2005: 140).
In the final instance, then, things – even when welcome – have to be secured by hedging them with words as degeneration always looms threateningly in the background should they be left to their own devices. What appears to be lacking in Greeley's approach to material religion is a willingness to let its objects speak and act for themselves, respectively to allow free interaction between them and their human counterparts. That this should be so can hardly surprise. Theology, as a hierarchical system of doctrines, as a centralised discursive practice, cannot by definition tolerate such interaction. Any free and unguided interaction must question its claim to undivided instructive authority and give rise to heterodoxies and heresies – or rather, in the very process, undermine orthodoxy even as a meaningful concept. This holds true, obviously, of all organised religion, not just Catholicism. Secondly, to the extent that fetishistic attraction – and I deliberately use the term "fetishistic" here for its loadedness – works on a pre- or a-linguistic level, it undermines any claim to linguistic closure; in fact, it shows discourse to be just one rather than the only possible mode of grasping reality. "It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality", as Benjamin approvingly described the unsettling effect of Dadaist art and its dispensation with intellectual detachment (1999 [1937]: 231).
Such a view is routinely rejected by theology (or theologies) as it reduces objects to signs and perceives signs merely as the "garb of meaning" (Keane 2005). "Recovering and rearticulating our symbols is part of the task of religious maturation…" (Greeley 2005: 143: emphasis mine). Yet what is actually recovered in this process and, more to the point, what is lost? Personally, I am suspicious of the rhetoric of "maturation" as it recasts the practitioners of certain religious devotions in the image of the childish savages that 20th century anthropology struggled hard to discard. It is eerily reminiscent of a Frazerian intellectualism with its rigid distinction between magic, religion and science and its assumption that people clung (and cling) to the first simply because mental deficiency did (and does) not allow them to recognise the errors of a reasoning based on resemblance rather than cause and effect, respectively to move from flawed attempts of coercing the supernatural to a more suitable attitude of propitiation.
"Sacramentals are not instruments of magic that control God and by the use of which we can manipulate God into doing what we want Him to do", Greeleyreminds his readers (2005: 142). Yet looking at my informants' statements I wonder how many, if any, of them would actually try to use a sacremental, a relic in this way. While there is certainly evidence that at least a fair number of them regard relics as conjuring or carrying some sort of presence (what exactly this presence is, often remains ambiguous), this does not imply a belief that this presence can be commanded in an easy way (or any way at all). And yet "manipulation" is a term I should like to salvage. That the saints (and even God) may be open to manipulation may no longer seem so outlandish or immature if we give up the naïve understanding – at any rate more commonly ascribed to the faithful by scholars, theologians and educators than actually held by them – that manipulation means coercion with a guarantee of success. Instead, I would submit that we need to understand "manipulation" as negotiation, discussion, haggling with all the implied possibilities of failure and disappointment. You may bring your problems and pains to St Rita, patroness of impossible causes, relics of whom are fairly easy to come by, usually in the form of prayer cards with a bit of dust from the rock on which she used to pray or occasionally petals from the rose bush which she miraculously caused to flower. Perhaps the saint will answer the prayer, perhaps she will not. Perhaps you are unable to hear. You may find your situation as dire and your mental state as depressed after the prayer as before. Or you may not, whatever be the case. Yet if objects can have a presence, that is to say: any form of agency, then we must admit the chance of its manipulation, located on both sides of the relationship.