In some ways, the timing of my visit to St. Anthony's Chapel was perfect. Dr. Hildebrand had just touched on relics in my Historical Foundations course. He compared the modern Catholic view of relics to the medieval mindset. Well, mostly he presented the medieval mindset with a brief "and we're not so intense now" summary of the modern mindset.
A brief definition, for anyone unfamiliar: a relic is an object made holy by being or being close to a holy person. Mostly, they are pieces of the bodies of saints (hair, bones, etc.) or pieces of saints' clothing, although relics comes in a great variety of forms.
In the Middle Ages, relics were a huge deal. To the modern mind, the body and soul are separate and the true self resides with the soul. Really, there is no such split, and an awareness of this caused medieval devotion to relics to flourish. Because relics are a part of a saint, something of their great sanctity was thought to cling to the person's body after death. And everyone wanted a piece of that holiness. This lead to some crazy stuff and is why you can find some saints with different body parts (hands, feet, tongues, heads) in different places.
It might sound crazy, but in some ways it reflects an understanding of who we are as people. We are not bodies that happen to contain souls or souls that happen to be trapped in bodies. We are a composite of body and soul, created and complete only with the two together. When God wanted to become like us, He took on a human body and a human soul. When, at the end of time, we (God willing) receive eternal life, we will have glorified bodies. Or rather, we will receive back our bodies, glorified.
While the medievals may have taken relic-devotion to the extreme, they didn't have it all wrong. And they didn't fall victim to the false body-soul dichotomy that affects our world. But that is another topic, for another day, should I figure out how to do it well without ranting.
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