Those saints who had been venerated “from time immemorial” were still very much the objects of devotion. There were no retroactive acts of canonization. Many of those saints are central figures in the liturgical and theological life of the church, like the saints invoked in the Eucharistic canon of the Roman liturgy. Their liturgical recognition functioned in its own way as a form of informal canonization. This ancient tradition of honoring the saints, their burial places, and their relics, of course, deeply embedded in the popular piety and the liturgical life of the church, was also open to abuse.
Dissatisfaction with the abuses and excesses associated with the cult of the saints, their relics, and pilgrimages to their shrines, it is clear, was not a product of the Protestant Reformation. As early as 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council, one of a series of reforming councils held in Rome’s Lateran Cathedral, had to intervene about the abuses connected to the selling of relics or showing them by alms collectors without proper documentation. That such a cry for reform was not an idle one is clear from the description of the Pardoner, in the prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, whose knapsack contained, among other things, “a brass cross set with pebble stones and a glass reliquary of pig’s bones” which he would use to gull country priests with his “double talk and tricks.” Chaucer was writing three generations after the Fourth Lateran Council had ended. While Chaucer derided the excesses attached to relics, his near contemporaries (for example, the Lollards) were active in calling the whole issue of the cult of the saints into question. Indeed, abuses connected to the (mis)use of relics was so common in medieval literature that it would be otiose to cite specific instances.
Voices in the late medieval church also raised their objections to the too easy slide from veneration into superstition, the spurious multiplication of relics and trafficking in them, and the degeneration of healing into forms of popular magic. One hears Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ chiding those who love to go on pilgrimage but find little satisfaction in a quiet cell meditating on the Word of God. Respected scholars like the fifteenth-century theologian and spiritual writer John Gerson, known as the “Most Christian Doctor” (Doctor Christianissimus), and his older contemporary Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, inveighed against such abuses. Erasmus of Rotterdam, as we have noted, turned his vitriolic pen against the cult of the saints in works like The Praise of Folly.
What Erasmus most objected to was the reduction of the cult of the saints into a superstitious tic so that “if anyone addresses a statue of Saint Barbara in the set formula he will return from battle unhurt . . . in [Saint] George they found another Hercules. They piously deck out his horse with trappings and amulets and practically worship it . . .” He concludes his diatribe: “The saint will protect you if you will try to imitate his life – if, I repeat, your wise man starts blurting out these uncomfortable truths, you can see how he will soon destroy the world’s peace of mind and plunge it into confusion!”
What was seen by such critics was the vast rift between a devotion that was object centered (on this relic or that shrine) and any sense of going beyond the object. It was precisely the loss of this “going beyond” that made it possible for devotion to slide easily into a form of magic. The same critics realized that the deeper truths of the Christian faith were compromised as credulous people manipulated objects as objects. Excesses concerning the cult of relics, in effect, had mechanized religion. In other words, excesses derived from the veneration of the saints and their relics detached such practices from the mainstream of the Christian faith, creating, for some, a parallel form of degraded religion deracinated from the central claims of Christianity.
The Age of Alliances: Persia and Great European Powers
