Recently, the skull of Thomas Aquinas (1225‒1274), one of the most significant theologians of the medieval era, was on tour throughout the United States in a brand-new reliquary. Those who promoted this tour were convinced that viewing a relic like this one helps to draw you closer to God.
The origin of such a conviction goes back to the millennium that we commonly denote as the Middle Ages. So important and so powerful were such relics – usually reputed body parts of those regarded to have lived exemplary holy lives, ‘the saints’ – during this era that it has been aptly described as a thousand years of the veneration of these objects.
Taking its rise from the pagan Roman idea of numen in late Antiquity – the idea that holiness and divine power inheres and can be infused into physical objects – the life of a saint came to be seen as a process of accumulating numen, and after death, the relics of the saint became a vehicle for the transmission of this holiness. By the fifth and sixth centuries Christian churches had begun to accumulate bodily bits of the saints – from fingers, arms, and hair to entire heads – as well as other holy objects, such as supposed pieces of the cross on which Christ died. Even Agustine, the great theologian of sovereign grace wrote approvingly of relics – see his Confessions 9.16.
