I have a pair of gaudy cufflinks, with large cut “stones” set in “silver.” They are fashion jewellery, and cost practically nothing, but they often stimulate a curious question, especially from children: “Are they real?”
What, I wonder, is the answer? I often reply, “No, they’re imaginary,” but that is, of course, not what was meant. But is the answer, “Yes”? What do people mean by ‘real’ – or, in the case of the Shroud, ‘authentic’? On those other occasions when I reply, “Yes, they are real,” the answer is usually met with frank disbelief. It turns out that a person of my apparent wealth and position in society could not, surely, be the possessor of such rare and valuable cufflinks as these would be if they were ‘real,’ which presumably means solid silver, enclosing 25 carat smoky diamonds. On the other hand, if I were, say, a flamboyant oil magnate or a weathy playboy, their ‘authenticity’ would be accepted without question.
Reality, it turns out, is relative. Authentic is as authentic does, not where it originates. In the case of relics, it is a descriptor of the present, not of the past. A thousand years ago there was very little concept of ‘the past’ as we know it anyway. We can look back on an endless succession of preceeding centuries, and have some idea of the gap between, say, one and ten thousand years ago, or a million, but to the people of the middle ages, the past was literally just ‘another country,’ where ‘they do things differently.’
And not necessarily all that differently. Medieval illustrations of Old Testment events, invariably show people dressed in the costume, and living in the architecture, of the time they were drawn, not the time when they occurred.
A relic was clearly authentic if it was encased in an elaborate reliquary, placed in its own chapel in a large church, visited by pilgrims from far away, and the subject of sporadic special devotion, prayers and ceremonies. Sometimes you couldn’t actually see the relic itself; its context was literally all that was required. This helps us to understand Pope Clement’s insistence in 1390 that when the Shroud was displayed, “no capes, surplices, albs, copes or any other kind of ecclesiastical garments or accoutrements are to be worn, nor any of the solemnities usual to the ostentation of relics performed, nor be accompanied by extra light, ornamentation or ritual.” Such things were not just appropriate to the authenticity of a relic, they actually constituted it. For five hundred years or so, the authenticity of the Shroud was no different from any of the thousands of other relics cluttering the chapels of churches all over Europe. It was what they said it was, and its context proved it
However, we may ask ourselves, how was this contextual authenticity established? Unless it was an out-and-out fraud, a relic was origially a fragment of bone, shred of cloth, splinter of wood or chunk of stone, brought from the Holy Land, or the home of a saint, and did not, originally have any other context at all. In that case, it needed provenance, the guarantee of senior clerical authority, at least a bishop, and in the case of a biblical relic, biblical justification. In the middle of the 14th century the Shroud had none of these, so it is no wonder that, after a very short abortive attempt to pass it off as authentic, for a hundred years it was advertised and displayed as no more than a representation. No doubt the celebrity of Geoffrey de Charny gave it a certain local cachet, but it needed adoption by the immensely influential Duchy of Savoy finally to give it the full trappings of authenticity.
The bigger the relic, the more elaborate the trappings needed to give it authenticity. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner carries around “a gobet of the seyl, that Seint Peter hadde, whan that he went upon the see … and in a glas he hadde pigges bones.” To Chaucer, these were obviously transparent fakes, but to some of the Pardoner’s followers (one might say victims), no doubt they were the actual sail and saints’ bones that he pretended they were, provided, as no doubt they were, they had the guarantee of a bishop to authenticate them.
This is exactly analogous to the shreds of fabric still toted about today. Although selling relics is strictly forbidden by the Catholic Church, eBay, the Russian Store in Boston, and a quack site called vatican.com all maintain a lively trade in “De Sindone D.N.J.C.”. Fortunately for the vendors, It is well-nigh impossible to demonstrate whether any particular fragment of bone, wood or cloth is what it is purported to be, although, ironically, pieces of the Shroud, whose distinctive herringbone weave would be easily discernible under magnification, are a notable exception. The weave of the fakes is never herringbone, as the following recent examples of the Shroud on sale illustrate.
They are, as can be seen, about two to three inches high, retail at around £5000 to £8000, and represent a tiny fraction of the relic market, which is clearly thriving. These fragments are not only not pieces of Christ’s burial cloths, they are not even pieces of the Shroud of Turin, so at least two steps removed from any claim to sanctity. Nevertheless, they, and a great many less demonstrably obvious fakes, are still thought of as ‘authentic’ in a medieval sense, based hardly at all on the relic itself, and mostly on the reliquary, the accompanying provenance, and the price paid for it.
Provenance is the most important. The back of the reliquary is usually sealed with red wax, stamped with the arms of a bishop, and it may be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, also signed add sealed by a bishop. The arms below, from different relics of the Shroud, both unquestionably fake, are those of “Fr. Enrique Laso de la Vega (†1729) Titular Bishop of Thaumacus (1728-1729)” and Stanislaw Dziwisz, Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow.
Laso de la Vega’s seal appears on several other reliquaries, but of his brief 18th century bishopric little can be discovered. Cardinal Dziwisz, on the other hand, is very much alive, and a prominent Catholic prelate. Although he is nearly ninety now, he was a close confidant of Pope John-Paul II, his principal private secretary for 27 years, with him when he died, and one of the few people mentioned in his will. He has no business to be endorsing fake relics, although he has been an enthusiastic supplier of mementos of St John-Paul to numerous churches around the world, notoriously a vial of his blood, drawn shortly before he died for medical reasons, which has been divided into several small glass phials, and hundreds of tiny drops on pieces of cloth enclosed in reliquaries. Although there may be no reason to doubt that this particular collection of relics is genuine, their presentation, documentation, and current context, and no doubt, occasionally, the price paid for them, all play an important role in their authentication.
In the last hundred years or so, a new player in the authenticity stakes has appeared on the scene – Science. The crown of thorns, of irreproachable provenance, set in a jewelled reliquary and housed in France’s pre-eminent cathedral of Notre Dame, is now known to be made of a twisted circlet of Juncus balticus, an aquatic rush from the Atlantic and Arctic seaboard, used for basket making and thatching roofs. And the Shroud, until recently in its silver casket in its dedicated chapel in the Royal Palace of the Kings of Italy, has been radiocarbon dated to the fourteenth century. Those who would fight for authenticity no longer fight over provenance or display, but scientific analysis.
But why does scientific authenticity matter? People used not to care that the wood of the cross was from half a dozen different species, or that their crucifixion nail, or shroud, or skull of John the Baptist, was only one of several scattered in churches all over Europe. They didn’t even mind if their ‘miraculous’ image was obviously painted – after all, it could have been painted by God. Andrew Casper explores this in his book, ‘An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy.’ In it, he declines the question of whether the Should is actually the burial cloth of Christ or not as irrelevant to a study of its ‘genuineness,’ as perceived by the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter Two is entitled ‘Made Not Begotten: The Shroud as Divine Artefact,’ and considers what observers meant when they described the image as “ombra (shadow), primo bozzo (preliminary sketch), (Agostino Cusano, 1575), macchiato (stain) and zbozzatura (artistic sketch)(Carlo Bascapè, 1582).” Although they are metaphorical, they are not, thinks Casper, metaphors for bodily emanations, or some kind of spontaneous miraculous appearance, but for divine artistry, as if God himself had drawn or shaded in the picture. One commenter has shown that God could sometimes even be thought of as working through a human artist, so that Michelangelo’s Pietà could be considered miraculously wrought, even though its human originator was unquestioned. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thinks Casper, the observation of ‘artifice’ was attributed to human hands and was a designator of fraud; in the next two centuries it was attributed to God’s hand and a designator of authenticity, even though the actual observation hadn’t changed.
For most of those who mentioned it, the ‘pigment’ from which the image was made was Christ’s blood, carefully controlled and shaped by his divine hand so that instead of pouring all over and soaking the Shroud it resulted in the precise and delicate image we see today. This calls to mind Walter McCrone’s observation that both body image and bloodstains were made of the same colourant, namely red ochre, although he later modified this to add vermilion to the actual ‘blood.’
But why does authenticity matter at all?
I have, along my possessions, a small piece of the planet Mars. It cost about £20, came from a shop called Finest Fossils, and I found it on eBay. It looks like this:
It’s a tiny piece of grit and looks just like any other tiny bit of grit, but I believe it is a fragment of one of those relatively scarce meteorites (fewer than 500 discovered and verified) which derive from material ejected from Mars when that planet was itself struck by a much larger meteorite millions of years ago. NWA 4766 landed in Morocco in 2007, was found by a dealer, sold, analysed, classified and then sold to someone who chopped it into tiny pieces and put them in presentation boxes. The meteorite is well attested, and had a mass of 290g. The fragments on eBay are about 60mg. That’s nearly 5000 fragments. That sounds reasonable, although the person who chopped it up could have used a lump of gravel from the road for all we really know.
But I think it’s a real piece of Mars, and it was important to me that I could take the lid off the little box (about 8cm long) and tip the rock onto my hand, making personal, direct contact with the red planet, as if I was shaking hands with Elvis, or standing on the very planks where Lord Nelson died (not that that is now possible, as so much of HMS Victory has been restored – and almost all the original wood has been replaced). It’s an atavistic impulse, the urge to make bodily contact with something, as if the witness of our eyes needs to be confirmed by physical contact. Perhaps it is related to the habit babies have of putting everything in their mouths; our first response to any new object is to check if it’s edible!
Some years ago I visited the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, in Regina, Sask., which has a magnificent collection of dinosaur fossils. Unusually, most of them were displayed in the open, and able to be touched and felt. Although it was beautifully laid out and very instructive, for me the romance which I originally felt as I walked into the gallery was largely dissipated when I realised that all the fossils were replicas, even though they were indistinguishable from the real thing. Fortunately I hadn’t invested that much emotional commitment, and the disappointment was minor.
So there is a way in which sheer physical proximity, to a fragment of Mars, a dinosaur bone or the Taj Mahal, even if you only saw it covered in scaffolding through monsoon rain, can give emotional proximity, and an authentic relic of Christ would give us such a powerful emotional connection to him that it’s no wonder people still cling to the Shroud’s authenticity, even as the evidence stacks increasing against it.