For the final chapter of my book project, I have been doing a fairly deep dive on late sixth-seventh century Thessalonike. Specifically, I’ve been researching a lot of the city’s archaeology to contextualize a famous address in honor of Mary’s Dormition by the sitting bishop, Ioannes.
At risk of severe understatement, the seventh century was an eventful time for the East Roman empire. Thessalonike itself was right in the thick of this, surviving several sieges, experiencing at least one outbreak of Y. pestis, and suffering earthquakes that destroyed most of the civic infrastructure, including its churches. These events were, I suspect, a major factor in the institution of the Dormition festival, which implicitly tied Thessalonike closer to Constantinople and the imperial center.
The Theotokos, you see, was the saint of the empire by this time, and she had clearly absorbed the symbolism, iconography, and ideological function of Constantinople’s old civic goddesses, especially the tyche Anthousa who was the city’s tutelary spirit, as it were. The same thing also occurred at Athens, where Mary essentially replaced Athena, including in the very Parthenon itself, which became a church in her honor (and they were able to keep the building’s name, too, since one Virgin was replacing the other).
Alongside the material culture, I have also been poking around in the Miracles of Demetrios, the main literary production from Thessalonike at this time. In one chapter, we learn that the emperor Marikios had once tried to collect the remains of Demetrios to make him into an “ally” (summachos). To summarize much too briefly, stewardship over relics in late antiquity was a mark of authority and prestige, as a relic was supposed to radiate supernatural power and (by extension) to signal the saint’s approval of said steward. (Here, I am reminded of my boyhood playing the classic Age of Empires II, usually as the Byzantines no less, where the owner of relics acquires a steady stream of gold. Alas, while sometimes there may also have been such material benefits for the possessors of relics, this was not their primary virtue.)
According to the bishop Ioannes, who wrote both the Miracles of Demetrios and performed the oration for the Dormition, his immediate predecessor had written back a somewhat terse response to the court that begins as follows:
The flock of God-loved Thessalonike, O emperor, is not so accustomed—even if it may very well be the case in other places—to put the bodies of the holy martyrs on open display, that it would aesthetically and continually rouse the souls toward piety through the spectacle of and contact with these things. Quite the opposite: having established the faith in their own hearts through the mind (νοερῶς), and fearing the perceptible spectacle of these things [i.e., the saintly remains] due to an exceeding reverence, the simplicity of faith customarily suffices for them with respect to godliness. But they deemed it fit to hide the remains of the martyrs, so that the place of each would be known to no one, except those who themselves participated in the holy burial.[1]
The former bishop’s letter goes on from here to tell how the saint himself had forbidden the collection of his remains decades ago by signs and portents. But the passage caught my attention because I erroneously assumed that the open display of saints’ remains would be completely accepted practice by this point in time. Notice also the not-subtle-shade the bishop throws on “those other places” where the practice is maintained (i.e., Constantinople in particular).
Certainly, practices around relics could be a touchy subject in early Christianity. None other than Athanasius and (allegedly) St. Anthony had themselves decried the exhumation of saints in the fourth century. In their eyes, it was a form of magical/superstitious sacrilege practiced by Egyptian sectarians, one that diverged from biblical precedents. Apparently, a form of that sensibility was still around in Thessalonike at the turn of the seventh century.
My clunky translation of Miracle 5 in Collectio I: Οὐχ οὕτως, ὦ βασιλεῦ, τῆς θεοφιλοῦς Θεσσαλονίκης τὰ θρέμματα, καθάπερ ἀμέλει κἀν ταῖς ἄλλαις χώραις, εἰώθασι τῶν μαρτυρούντων ἁγίων ἀναφανδὸν τιθέναι τὰ σώματα, ὡς ἂν αἰσθητῶς καὶ συνεχῶς τῇ θέᾳ τούτων καὶ τῇ ἁφῇ πρὸς εὐσέβειαν τὰς ψυχὰς διεγείρωσιν. Ἐκ δὲ τοὐναντίου, τὴν πίστιν νοερῶς ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν καρδίαις ἱδρύσαντες, καὶ τὴν αἰσθητὴν τῶν τοιούτων θέαν δι’ ὑπερβάλλουσαν εὐλάβειαν ὀρρωδοῦντες, ἀρκεῖν μὲν αὐτοῖς εἰς θεαρέσκειαν τὸ εἰλικρινὲς ἐνομίσθη τῆς πίστεως, τὰ δὲ τῶν μαρτύρων λείψανα κατακρύψαι δεῖν ᾠήθησαν, οὕτως ὡς μηδενὶ τῶν πάντων τὸν τόπον γινώσκεσθαι, πλὴν ἐκείνων αὐτῶν τῶν τῆς ἁγίας κοινωνησάντων ταφῆς. ↑