A heavenly treasure beyond all price
The British Museum’s new exhibition on medieval relics and devotion opens this week. Here in a new series about the exhibits, its director comments on the Holy Thorn Reliquary of the fourteenth-century French royal magnate Jean, duc de Berry.
“It was appropriately made of thorns, because by them he removes the thorns of sin, which pain us through remorse of conscience … these thorns also take away the thorns of punishment which burden us.” St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on St John, chapter 19, verse 2.
As a student in Paris when, in the late 1240s, King Louis IX of France built the Sainte- Chapelle to house the Crown of Thorns, the Angelic Doctor cannot fail to have been impressed by the presence of this most holy relic of Christ’s Passion in a city that was coming to be seen as a new Jerusalem – in partial compensation for the capture of the actual city by Saladin in 1187. St Louis paid 120,000 livres, three times the cost of the Sainte-Chapelle, to acquire the Crown from the Venetians by paying off a debt incurred to them by Baldwin, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, who had pawned it to raise some cash – a sign both of the commerce that often accompanied the acquisition and circulation of relics in the Middle Ages, and of the high value placed on them, and this one in particular, by medieval Christians in both East and West. Relics were divisible, even replicable, with
each fragment, be it of bone from the body of a saint, cloth from the Virgin’s veil or girdle, or wood from the True Cross, containing and conveying the salvific, curative power of the original. So with the Crown of Thorns: each
and redo all its translations by starting from scratch. But, in fact, it contained only minor changes, such as the addition of new feasts for some of the saints that had been created in John Paul’s pontificate. The collects and order of the Mass remained almost unchanged. The revisions were so minor that Icel could have accommodated them within a year or so. But the ruse had already succeeded and, as one observer said wryly, “Many busy and blissfully ignorant bishops fell for this.” In March 2001 the CDW issued a fifth
instruction on translating liturgical texts, Liturgiam Authenticam. In a break from the previous four instructions, it unveiled a new set of translating principles. From now on – the document said – translators were to apply “formal equivalence”, carefully assuring that every word in the Latin text was replicated in the vernacular. The instruction, which is still in force, also directs that the vocabulary, syntax, punctuation and capitalisation pat- terns found in the Latin must be reproduced as much as possible. And, of course, the doc- ument took aim at inclusive language. An overriding concern of the document was that
single thorn had the power and efficacy of the whole. Individual spines plucked from the Crown became the gift par excellence of French kings to their especially favoured subjects and allies. In the late fourteenth century, one was given to Jean, duc de Berry, royal magnate and noted collector of relics. Around 1370, that outstanding patron of the Parisian gold- smith’s art (he also commissioned the Royal Gold Cup, another medieval treasure of the British Museum collection) had created for him what was clearly intended to be a recep- tacle of incomparable magnificence for this most precious relic in his entire collection. The object itself is a one-foot-high theatre made of solid gold and encrusted with jewels. In it we watch the terrifying drama of the end of the world, the day on which we, along with all the other dead, will be raised and will face judgement. This is a drama in which one day every spectator will be a participant. It’s in three acts. At the bottom, as angels blow their trumpets at the Earth’s imagined corners, graves open on an enamel hillside of vivid green. Four figures – two men, two women, naked in white enamel and still in their coffins, look up and raise their hands in supplication. Far above them, at the top of the reliquary, sits God the Father enthroned in judgement, among radiant gold and precious gems and flanked by the 12 apostles. And in between is the focus and cause of the whole thing, a
translations employed what it called a “sacral vernacular” that was different from ordinary speech. Liturgiam Authenticam also drove a stake into the heart of the well-established ecumenical efforts at composing common texts. “Great caution is to be taken to avoid a wording or style that the Catholic faithful would confuse with the manner of speech of non-Catholic ecclesial communities or of other religions, so that such a factor will not cause them confusion or discomfort,” it said. The CDW instruction was fiercely criticised.
Leaders of the Catholic Biblical Association of America said some parts of it were so “ill- advised as to be the likely occasion of embarrassment to the Church”. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who would later emerge as one of the key players in the CDW’s “takeover” of the translation, said: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating. When you get an actual translation, then you’ll see if it’s acceptable or not.” And yet even the cardinal claimed that the members of the CDW, of which he was one, were not consulted over the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam. If 2001 spelled doom for Icel, then 2002
Holy Thorn Reliquary, 1390-97. British
Museum, London
thorn from the crown of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as the label written in black enamel declares, mounted on a rock crystal in front of Christ in judgement with the Virgin and St John the Baptist kneeling before him, and it. It is a piece whose beauty and artistic qual-
ity, and therefore the religious response it was intended to evoke can only be fully expe- rienced close up and was clearly designed for private devotional use. Now, in the current British Museum exhibition, “Treasures of Heaven”, it revisits its original sacred identity as a reliquary. And, among the gold, jewels and enamelling, stands what for the medieval Christian was a physical witness to the saving sufferings of Christ whose agonies, as Thomas Aquinas wrote, freed humanity from the painful thorns of sin and remorse – a heav- enly treasure beyond all price.
■Neil MacGregor is director of the British Museum. The exhibition ‘Treasures of Heaven: saints, relics and devotion in medievalEurope’ is at the British Museum, London, 23 June-9 October.
will be remembered as the year that Cardinal Medina delivered his crushing blow to that episcopal power and authority over the liturgy that the young Fr Ratzinger spoke about dur- ing Vatican II. On 16 March, the CDW formally rejected the 1998 English Sacramentary, four years after the 11 English- speaking conferences of Icel had approved it and submitted it to Rome. Its rejection came just one week before the new Missale Romanum editio typica (2000) was finally promulgated. Cardinal Medina added a scathing point-by-point criticism of the trans- lation in a letter accompanying the Holy See’s rejection notice. Then, in April 2002, the CDW announced the establishment of Vox Clara, a committee of 12 senior English-speak- ing bishops appointed by the Vatican to help it oversee the translations. The Vatican finally had a mechanism for asserting more control over the conferences and Icel. Six months later, Cardinal Medina retired.
The third and final part of Robert Mickens’ account of the path to the new English trans- lation of the Missal will appear next week.
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