What do we make of relics?

Recently, the skull of Thomas Aquinas (1225‒1274), one of the most significant theologians of the medieval era, was on tour throughout the United States in a brand-new reliquary. Those who promoted this tour were convinced that viewing a relic like this one helps to draw you closer to God.

The origin of such a conviction goes back to the millennium that we commonly denote as the Middle Ages. So important and so powerful were such relics – usually reputed body parts of those regarded to have lived exemplary holy lives, ‘the saints’ – during this era that it has been aptly described as a thousand years of the veneration of these objects.

Taking its rise from the pagan Roman idea of numen in late Antiquity – the idea that holiness and divine power inheres and can be infused into physical objects – the life of a saint came to be seen as a process of accumulating numen, and after death, the relics of the saint became a vehicle for the transmission of this holiness. By the fifth and sixth centuries Christian churches had begun to accumulate bodily bits of the saints – from fingers, arms, and hair to entire heads – as well as other holy objects, such as supposed pieces of the cross on which Christ died. Even Agustine, the great theologian of sovereign grace wrote approvingly of relics – see his Confessions 9.16.