body, and may perhaps begin to understand what can be meant when it is said:54 "That I should be able to hold my pen because I wish to do it, is ultimately just as great a mystery as that I should develop stigmata from medi- tating on the Crucifixion." To do them justice, there were not wanting Catholic writers before the days of this new experimentation who had more than a glimpse of the pro- ducing cause of the stigmata. Francesco Petrarch felt no doubt that Francis' stigmata were from God, but neither had he any doubt— he says so himself, when writing, be it observed, to a physician— that they were actually produced by the forces of his own mind working on his body. "Be- yond all doubt, the stigmata of St. Francis," he writes,55 "had the following origin: he attached himself to the death of Christ with such strong meditations that he reproduced it in his mind, saw himself crucified with his Master, and finished by actualizing in his body the pious representations of his soul." Even Francis de Sales, though of course ab- solutely sure that the ultimate account of Francis' stig- mata is that they represented "that admirable communica- tion which the sweet Jesus made him, of His loving and precious pains," yet works out the actual mechanism of their production in elaborate but healthful naturalism. "This soul, then," he says,56 "so mollified, softened, and almost melted away in this loving pain, was thereby ex- tremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of its sovereign Lover; for the memory was quite steeped in the remembrance of this divine love, the imagination strongly applied to represent to itself the wounds and bruises which the eyes there beheld so per- fectly expressed in the image before them, the understand- ing received the intensely vivid images which the imagina- tion furnished it with; and finally, love employed all the forces of the will to enter into and conform itself to the passion of the Well-Beloved; whence no doubt the soul found itself transformed into a second crucifixion. Now
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the soul, as form and mistress of the body, making use of its power over it, imprinted the pains of the wounds by which it was wounded in the parts corresponding to those in which its God had endured them." 57
With all its three hundred and more examples, however, it is, after all, a small place which stigmatization takes in the wonder-life of the church of Rome. The centre about which this life revolves lies, rather, in the veneration of relics, which was in a very definite sense a derivation from heathenism. Hippolyte Delehaye, it is true, puts in a protest here. "The cult of the saints," says he,58 "did not issue from the cult of the heroes, but from the cult of the martyrs; and the honors paid to them from the beginning and by the first Christian generations which had known the baptism of blood, are a direct consequence of the eminent dignity of the witnesses of Christ which Christ himself pro- claimed. From the respect with which their mortal re- mains were surrounded, and from the confidence of Chris- tians in their intercession, there proceeded the cult of relics with all its manifestations, with its exaggerations, alas! only too natural, and, why should we not say it? with its excesses, which have sometimes compromised the memory which it was wished to honor." These remarks, however, do not quite reach the point. What is asserted is not that the Christians took the heathen heroes over into their worship, though there were heathen heroes whom the Christians did take over into their worship. Neither is it that they continued unbrokenly at the tombs of these heroes the heathen rites which they were accustomed to celebrate there, only substituting another name as the object venerated. It is that under the influence of these old habits of thought and action they created for them- selves a new set of heroes, Christian heroes, called saints, and developed with respect to their relics a set of super- stitious practices which reproduced in all their essential traits those to which they had been accustomed with re-
HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN RELICS 93
spect to the relics of the heathen heroes. There is cer- tainly a true sense in which the saints are the successors of the gods,59 and the whole body of superstitious practices which cluster around the cult of relics is a development in Christian circles of usages which parallel very closely those of the old heathenism.60 The very things which Delehaye enumerates as the sources of the later cult of the saints and the veneration of their relics — the cult of the martyrs, the honor rendered to their remains, the confidence of Chris- tians in their intercession — are themselves already abuses due to the projection into the Christian church of heathen habitudes and the natural imitation of heathen example.