Peter Manseau: fake relics are true, precisely because they are frauds

April 13th, 2009 by Menachem Wecker

Holy relics have the power of “the tantalizing possibility of concrete proof of that belief, setting up a battle between reason and devotion,” argues Peter Manseau in his WSJ article “Faith, Proof and Relics,” which asks why relics, which are after all physical objects, carry “such enduring spiritual fascination.”

Manseau is on the right track to point out that some of the conspiracy theories involving the relics are “coming soon to a Dan Brown knock-off near you,” and he cites research that dates the Shroud that allegedly bears Jesus’ facial imprint twelve to thirteen hundred years too young. But then his argument gets a bit mystical when he tries to account for the objects’ endurance by separating them from their stories:

Belief — any belief, whether in God, the Resurrection, even the Force — requires a partial abandonment of the rational … there are some things that can be explained only through acknowledgment that proof is not always the highest good.

And therefore:

There is no rational need to write a poem or to paint a picture, and there is no rational need to believe, which is to search for something meaningful in the enigmatic markings that define our lives.

Manseau makes the math seem simple. Irrational (art) + irrational (belief/faith) = irrational (relics). That Jesus rose from the dead is certain, because it is impossible, Christian author Tertullian would have us believe, and Manseau cites his apologetic argument in support of the claim that “Faith fashions itself as a challenge to our assumptions, our expectations — and relics are an embodiment of that challenge.”

Image: A false relic from Indiana Jones (site).

The Shroud then is about a paradox between belief and science (”the need for proof”), and Manseau suggests this tension is what “the Shroud is really about: our divine aspirations bound up with our mortal concerns.” Therefore it shouldn’t bother us that many relics masquerade themselves as the Shroud, since they are just examples of “a religious economy” wherein relics were an easily counterfeited currency.

Manseau concludes with the broad argument that

the mystery of the man remains. Divine or not, he is drawn on our collective imagination. Whether the image was made through the first-century equivalent of photography or the 14th-century equivalent of Photoshop is of lesser importance than the fact that it is a testament to the individual struggle with death and its meaning. No matter our level of belief or unbelief, it is an image that insists we not look away.

This argument is quite right (despite some very petty comments responding to the article), but an insistence that we not look away is not enough, I think. The relics are either true or not true, they are not both true and not true. Sure some believe in them, while others do not. I think they have probably endured not because of the tension between belief and non-belief that surround them, but because many believe them to be authentic and actively keep their memory alive.

The struggle of the relics interests me far less than the face that many consider them holy items that touched the body of Jesus. That is enough for me to keep my eyes glued to them, though of course Manseau is well within his rights to be drawn to another aspect of the relics.

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