Medieval Worship of Relics

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer studies the veneration of relics in medieval Christendom. The writer first explains that the veneration of relics derives from Roman ancestor worship. The writer then describes how Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire and that, culturally speaking, it is a transformation rather than an imposition. The writer explains the Christian innovation of putting the saint in the place of the patriarch, so that the Christian community become the new family with the patron saint as the father figure guiding the community. The paper also explains how this gave rise to the ecclesiastical order of Christian society built around the church which contained relics of the saints. The writer introduces the debate between the purists and the apologists of relic worship. The writer also describes how the Protestant Reformation becomes the definite revolt against the icon and relic worship of Catholicism and explains how a transcendent faith came to replace immanence.

From the Paper:

"Pilgrimage to the shrines of the saints became more and more common as the Christian era advanced. Following the ninth century discovery of the relics of St James in Compostella in Spain, the site began to attract pilgrims on a large scale. Christian pilgrimage began in earnest after the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Once pilgrimage to the Holy Land was made secure, other alternative sites sprang up where pilgrims began to flock. Canterbury Cathedral in England was one such site, whose patron saint was Thomas Beckett, famously embroiled with King Henry II, and murdered in the Cathedral, a martyr to the cause of ecclesiastical self-determination. Pilgrimage to Canterbury in April was a time honored event by the time by the time Geoffrey Chaucer came to compose the famous Canterbury Tales, a collection of tales in rhymes, purportedly told by the pilgrims to amuse themselves while on the road. Chaucer's poem paints a picture of buoyant intimacy between the pilgrims, who came from almost every walk of life."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990.
• Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library.
• Bede, Judith McClure, Roger Collins. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Translated by Bertram Colgrave, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Edwards, Paul. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1967.
• Eire, Carlos M. War against the Idols: the Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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