Treasures of Heaven at the British Museum

Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe

This is really about the exhibition more than the book - although the book is lavishly illustrated and at 250+ large format pages justifies the price tag.

Relics are one of those things within Christianity which became a bête noire for reformers and within Catholic circles remain a bit of a sore spot - while the Church still teaches their validity most Catholic would rather talk about something else.  And so it is interesting that the British Museum decided to put on such an exhibition, in step with the National Gallery's The Sacred Made Real a year or so ago, - is it a token of our secularisation that we can now look upon these relics and objectively consider their historical importance as we do the Museum's Eypgtian Mummies and Witch-Doctors Masks. 


Most of the Reliquaries were empty but a significant number were not and this means that the experience of the exhibition had two distinct layers for me. For the most part those reliquaries that were empty just sparked the usual thoughts of craftsmanship, or the changing fashions, all the things 'art' is meant to do for you. But those where the relic was in place triggered a different set of responses - the first and most challenging was about whether one thought the relic real.  Most of the reliquaries contained a part of the True Cross, but the ubiquity of fragments of the True Cross in Medieval Europe was one of the great scandals that brought down the whole culture of relics. If I was in the presence of a part of the True Cross then it could not be anything other than profound but if I was in the presence of a fabrication then I would hardly bear to look upon it.  The trouble is that there is not, at least as a Catholic, a straight line between the genuine and the fake.  You never knowingly buy a fake and in the context of a faith that believes Sunday by Sunday that bread and wine are transformed one should not dismiss the possibility that generations of sincere devotion and prayer could turn a sliver of old tea chest into the 'True Cross'. And so I looked upon the tiny scrap of wood, knowing that specialists would tell me the tree it comes from could never grow in Jerusalem and this tree in particular grew a thousand plus year after Christ had died, and couldn't help but be humbled because in every way that mattered it was the tree on which my Lord had died for me. 

This is why many Catholics would rather change the subject than be drawn to take a position, not because  they disagree with the Church's claim of validity nor that they disagree with Science's evidence of impossibility, but because they understand that it is only by first believing that holding these two views simultaneously becomes even remotely plausible.  And all our mission action plans tell us that we have to come up with something better than remote plausibility.