Robert Hughes’ Rome (4)

Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the tenth such post, and is four of five about Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History.

“In a culture which drew no very distinct line between the natural and the supernatural, relics were a powerful instrument of societal control, striking awe into the skeptical and impious. … At the height of the relic mania, the custom arose of lowering long strips of cloth into a saintly grave; if a piece touched the remains, it became a relic in itself, by holy contagion.”

– except from Chapter 5: Medieval Rome and Avignon of Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

A part of me wants to laugh, to mock, the idea of pilgrims traveling hundreds of miles to see the “Holy Foreskin” (mentioned by Hughes later in chapter, the only ‘earthly’ remnant of Jesus’ body). I want to think that this is behavior that, as s society, we’ve moved beyond.

I can’t, though, because we really haven’t changed. The thousands of people every year who make Graceland pilgrimages, autograph seekers, memorabilia and commemorative plate makers, and the people who to this day travel across the Old World and visit relic sites, not as locations of historical curiosity, but because they believe in holy handkerchiefs blessed because they once two thousand years ago, wiped the saviors brow.

Decade old grilled cheese sandwich with St. Marys face on it, sold for $28,000. Image from the BBC website.

I have never understood religion, or the fascination modern culture has with celebrity, and I often have a hard time recognizing the difference between the two. They have both always seemed crazily, desperately, escapist to me, focusing their adherents (or crazed fans) thoughts upon what might be someday, what someone else might be doing, rather than on what is happening in their own lives or in their own futures.

But of all of the things I understand about religion, the impulse to own, or pray, at the fingerbones or foreskin or stair steps a saint once might have walked upon is the part that I understand the least.