I haven't spoken of relics, but others have recently. The cross pictured above hangs in the Roman Catholic church to which the school that my grandchildren attend is attached. At the Grandparents Day mass there a couple of weeks ago, the pastor of the church pointed out the cross, which dates to the mid-19th century, I believe, and said that inside the spot where the two pieces of wood intersect is a relic of the True Cross, the cross on which Jesus died.
St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, is said to have been present at excavations in Jerusalem in the 4th century, when three crosses were allegedly discovered at Calvary. Through a miracle, the cross of Jesus was distinguished from the crosses of the two thieves crucified with him.
In the Catholic Encyclopedia is long account of the history of the veneration of the cross and the discovery of the True Cross. Wiki has a shorter, but similar account.
I report. You decide.
My mother, a medieval art historian, to me that if another piece of wood was touched to the true cross, it too became a part of the true cross. I have no idea if what St. Helena found was, in fact, the true cross, however. I read a book a few years ago called "The Search for Alexander", which discussed what had become of Alexander the Great's body at the end of antiquity (it had been venerated in a very similar fashion to saints' relics were later). One theory asserted that Alexander had been impersonating St. Mark in
ReplyDeleteVenice for the last 1200 years.
--Metella
...said to me
ReplyDelete...to how saints'
--Metella (who really ought to preview first!)
Metella, that's quite a theory about Alexander/St. Mark.
ReplyDeleteCrucifixion was a common practice in Roman Jerusalem. Sometimes there were long lines of crucifixions stretched out. Helena found the cross some 300 years after Jesus died. It seems unlikely to me that the group found the cross on which Jesus died. Of course, I could be wrong.
I had not heard the story of any piece of wood touching the true cross becoming part of the cross. I wonder if the expression "touch wood" has a connection with that story.
Maybe it is where "touch wood" came from! I think the Alexander/St. Mark theory fits the category of "fun to think about, but unlikely". Te author of the book thought so too.
ReplyDelete--Metella
It is humorously alleged that there are enough fragments of "the true cross" to build a church the size of St Peter's in Rome. Possibly so.
ReplyDeleteIf we treat them all as vehicles of devotion without buying into literal understandings, I have no problem venerating any of them (somewhat agnostically). But, having abandoned literalism, I expose myself for a post-critical naivete sort and don't make a very good "true believer."
I too have always wondered just how big a cross we'd get if we put all those relics of The True Cross back together.
ReplyDeleteI never heard the one about Alexander the Great perhaps resting under the altar of St. Mark's in Venice. It's plausible. The Venetian sailors who stole the saint's body in the dead of night out of Alexandria could have stolen the wrong cadaver.
"I too have always wondered just how big a cross we'd get if we put all those relics of The True Cross back together."
ReplyDeleteIt's my understanding that they have in fact been measured, and that the sum of their volumes produces a fairly modest figure well within expectations.
That, of course, is far from establishing that the piece produced by St. Helena was the true cross. But it's an old canard that's been put to rest for anyone who actually cares. You can get a lot of toothpics from a large beam.
Rick, who is "they"? Was the cross in my town counted? Have the experts truly measured and counted all the alleged relics of the True Cross? I doubt that.
ReplyDeleteMimi, since you asked I looked at Wikipedia, which has the following:
ReplyDelete"By the end of the Middle Ages so many churches claimed to possess a piece of the True Cross, that John Calvin is famously said to have remarked that there was enough wood in them to fill a ship:
"There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poictiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it."
— Calvin, Traité Des Reliques.
Conflicting with this is the finding of Rohault de Fleury, who, in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion 1870 made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four meters in height, with transverse branch of two meters wide, proportions not at all abnormal. He calculated: supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood (based on his microscopic analysis of the fragments) and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilograms, we find the original volume of the cross to be .178 cubic meters. The total known volume of known relics of the True Cross, according to his catalogue, amounts to approximately .004 cubic meters (more specifically 3,942,000 cubic milimeters), leaving a volume of .174 cubic meters lost, destroyed, or otherwise unaccounted for."
More matters for trivia than for devotion at this point. And Wikipedia is not always and immaculate source.
But Calvin's opinion has, by and large, prevailed with the public, on this and many other matters.
And Wikipedia is not always and immaculate source.
ReplyDeleteRick, as Sybil would say, "I know; I know". Thanks for further elucidation on the subject.
I've seen other references to the study cited by Rick and they seem convincing, Mimi. Calvin had an axe to grind. There are relatively few "large" Cross relics - won't bore you with examples, tho' many of the Western ones seem to have been looted during the Crusader sack of Constantinople (1200) - and even these are pretty small. Most HC relics consist of a couple of tiny crossed splinters, less than 1mm in length. I have a couple of these, superimposed on a wax "Agnus Dei" (if you're interested, save my time & look it up) of Pius VII (the one Napoleon imprisoned), that came as a bonus from an eBay buyer who didn't know what he was selling. I value it, not as a relic of the Crucifixion - which I don't believe it is - but as a true fragment of something that has been venerated for 1800 years by emperors, kings and popes; captured by "Saracens" at the fall of Jerusalem - think where it HAS been.
ReplyDeleteSack of Constantinople 1204. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteMimi, I used to attend the Shrine of the True Cross, an RC parish in Dickenson, TX. We also had a relic of he True Cross which we vererated on Sept. 14th and on Good Friday. If we put together all the pieces from the true cross that Rome has advanced as relics, it would create a cross 80' high. It is one of things that one does go Hmmmmm about.
ReplyDeleteI am not telling anyone what to believe, think, or feel about the True Cross. I am skeptical.
ReplyDelete