Transcription
In this short video, I just want to share with you, uh, how medieval Christians used to treat the bodies of their most revered saints, uh, and greatest teachers of Christianity.
Um, and I'm reminded of what they did by this book, which I just had delivered, actually. It's, uh, Thomas Aquinas's selective writings and, uh, St. Thomas Aquinas, as he's called in the Catholic Church. He's a great Catholic saint, was a theologian, a philosopher. Uh, his dates are 1225 to 1274. And as it says on the unique on the back cover, uh, he forged a unique synthesis of ancient Greek philosophy, mainly Aristotle, and, uh, medieval Christian theology. And, uh, he's hugely influential over the centuries. It's called a doctrine of the church.
But I'm just going to focus in this short video on, uh, just a few words about what happened to his body, uh, when he died because I was reading the introduction to this book and that's all it spoke about for the first two pages and I was quite shocked because of what happened to him. I'm just going to read to you what it says and it's pretty disgusting. So this is kind of like, you know, be warned if you're under 18, you might find this really disturbing.
So shortly after Thomas Aquinas died, the book says, uh, in the, he died in the Cistercian Abbey in, uh, Fossanova on the 7th of March 1274. A message came from the theology faculty at the University of Paris asking that the body of the saintly theologian be sent to Paris for burial and veneration. That was pretty normal then, as it is still now. Although that request wasn't granted, the body did eventually come to rest in France. Actually, when I was a Catholic, I had my photograph taken in front of it in Toulouse, where his body now is, and you can see that at the end of the video.
Thomas was buried for the first time before the high altar of the church of the Cistercian Abbey. Cistercians, by the way, are our particularly austere, uh, order of monks. Uh, so he was buried before the high altar in which he had died after a funeral mass attended by members of his family, as well as by, uh, fellow Dominicans and other non-Cistercians because the sub-prior at Fossanova was cured of blindness when he touched Thomas's body and soon other miracles occurred. The Cistercians began to fear that the remains would be stolen and taken off by a Dominican, or taken off to a Dominican resting place. There's real anxiety here that this amazing, you know, miracle-working dead body, as they thought, uh, would be nicked and stolen by other people.
So, as a result of this fear, the book says the body was disinterred, other words, taken out and reinterred, reinterred at Fossanova several times during the next two years. So poor old Thomas here was, uh, taken out of his grave and put back in several times. Jealous of their treasure, the monks took took macabre precautions. This is where it gets, where it gets pretty unpleasant. They exhumed the corpse of Brother Thomas from its resting place, cut off the head, and placed it in a hiding place in a corner of the chapel. The idea was that even if the corpse was stolen by other Christians, the head would be theirs, that had the precious head of Thomas. I don't know what they were thinking. Uh, his sister was given a hand. How delightful. What if she asked that? Can I have a hand, please? A finger of which was to describe a grizzly trajectory of its own.
Now the author of this introduction doesn't say what happened there, but anyway, this story of reverent mutilations is a long one. By the time the canonization process began in 1318, 1319 rather, because he was made into a saint, the corpse had been reduced to bones from which the flesh had been removed by boiling. So the guy's flesh was removed by boiling, but in water, in 1368. The bones were then removed to the Dominican monastery at Toulouse. Too, a big city in the south of France, where they remained until the French Revolution. They were then removed to the church of, uh, St. Sernin, Sernin in the same city. And in 1974, the seventh centenary of the death of Thomas Aquinas, his remains were returned to the Dominican church in Salou, where they have rested to this day. End of, uh, quote.
So that is where, by chance, I didn't realize that his, uh, the great St. Augustine, uh, St. Thomas Aquinas, rather, was actually found his final resting place in Toulouse in the south of France, but that's where he is, and you can see a photo, uh, at the end of the video.
Now, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us about the macabre interest. This is the book, by the way, I just read from, selected writings, pretty fat volume. The pretty, the great macabre interest that the Catholic Church has always had in the dead bodies of its saints. If you go to Westminster Cathedral, uh, in London, not far from, from here, you, you'll see dead bodies of saints, uh, in, in glass tombs where you can venerate them. Um, but cutting off bits of hands and limbs and all sorts of things was quite normal, uh, in the medieval Christian era. Uh, so the, the, uh, the pious, the faithful could, uh, get healings from them. It's a very kind of superstitious thing, uh, and pray to them because they were treasures or, you know, holy people, as they put it. So, you know, it, it was quite, quite a cult of the relics of, of dead saints.
But what happened to poor Thomas Aquinas was really quite exceptional where bits of his body parts were distributed to various places. Um, but anyway, as I say, he ended up in Toulouse. Um, and the contrast to contrast with the way, uh, Muslims and Orthodox Jews treat, uh, their dead, it couldn't be stronger. Obviously, in Islam, we bury, uh, the deceased, uh, within, within a day. Basically, you can't linger on and rebury it and cut off bits of body parts. This would be seen as a terrible, terrible violation of the sanctity of the, of the deceased. It is simply not allowed to violate the body, and the same in Orthodox Judaism as well. But in Catholicism, it's a bit different.
So I just want to share that with you. It's a bit odd, really, uh, having looked at this book and only sharing with you what happened to his body rather than the body of his work. Pun intended. Uh, but maybe we'll do that in another video, inshallah. So till next time.