More Relics Under the Altar

This kind of relative hierarchy also informs our interpretation of the complicated sacred topography of sites that housed multiple loci of saints’ presence within a single structure by incorporating a saint’s presumed tomb site and relics under the altar. In these cases, the architectural arrangements crafted a spatial and visual relationship not only between two different kinds of ritual focal points - of saint veneration and eucharistic liturgy - but also between two distinct manifestations of saintly presence. The link between them was important, but so too were their distinctive roles in supporting an architecturally inscribed system of ecclesiastical authority.

Of the complexes discussed here, the sanctuaries of St. Demetrios and St. Felix both offer evidence for multiple locales of saintly presence within the ecclesiastical complex. Returning to St. Demetrios’s basilica in Thessaloniki, we recall that the saint’s ciborium in the nave provided one venue for appealing to and encountering the saint. The ciborium, however, was not the only place in the late antique church which drew on the power of saintly presence. At the east end of the nave the altar stood atop a reliquary deposit covered by a marble plaque and once accessible (presumably only to clergy) by a narrow set of three stairs at the altar’s southern side (Fig. 9.6) .® 3 At the center of the small chamber at the bottom of the steps, set within a conical masonry support, early-twentieth-century archaeological investigations unearthed a small marble box. Inside the box the excavators discovered an intact glass vial whose dark contents they identified as dried blood.) 4 These relics so carefully installed at the site under the altar no longer preserve an identification, though the church’s patron saint Demetrios has been presumed.55 Comparison with the evidence from Paulinus’s church at Cimitile, however, reminds us that such an identification is not a given. It attests to the possibility that an altar deposit could bring to the site a different set of sacred associations altogether, with relics distinct from the church’s patron saint.

The arrangement Paulinus effected with his ambitious building program at Cimitile both glorified Felix’s tomb and also put it into explicit relationship with the new liturgical altar located in the choir of the Basilica Nova (see Fig. 9.9). This new altar was in its own right a spiritually, architecturally, and politically critical element in the transformation of the sanctuary’s sacred topography. It not only formed the axial linchpin of the longitudinal basilica’s plan and center stage of the eucharistic drama but also contained a valuable collection of newly acquired holy relics that connected Nola to a larger Christian world. Paulinus trumpeted the deposition of this new cache of relics under the Basilica Nova’s altar in a description of the church composed on the occasion of St. Felix’s feast day in 403, as construction on the Basilica Nova was nearing completion:

For the ashes even of apostles have been set beneath that table of heaven, and consecrated amongst other holy offerings they emit a fragrance pleasing to Christ from their living dust. Here is father Andrew, the fisherman sent to Argos. . . and who later by shedding his blood brought condemnation to Thessalian Patras. Here, too, is John, who both preceded and baptized the Lord, who is both the holy gateway to the Gospel and the finishing point of the Law. . . . Nearby lies

The doubter Thomas____Here lies Luke, a physician first by profession

And later by preaching. . . . Joined with these apostles in devotion and faith, power and honor, are the martyrs Agricola and Vitalis together with Proculus, and Euphemia who as martyr in the area of Chalcedon

Marks and consecrates that shore with her virgin’s blood____Here too

Is the martyr Nazarius, whom I received in humility of heart as a gift of faith from the noble Ambrose____56

This roster of apostles and martyrs is extraordinary both in terms of the saints’ importance as individuals and in terms of the great number of diverse figures whose bodily remains Paulinus managed to assemble into a single collection.

Paulinus also visually advertised the presence of these impressive relics in a monumental inscription on the wall behind the altar, the text of which he spelled out in a letter to Sulpicius Severus:

This titulus indicates the holy of holies which has been deposited under the altar:

‘ Here is the piety, here nourishing faith, here the glory of Christ; here is the cross joined with its own martyrs.

For a little piece of the wood of the cross is a great pledge, and the whole power of the cross is present in (even) a small piece of it. This greatest good brought to Nola by the gift of Saint Melania came from the city ofJerusalem.

The holy altar veils a double honor to God:

It brings together the ashes of Apostles with the cross.

How well are the bones of the pious joined to the wood of the cross, so that those who were killed for the cross, find rest on the cross.’57

This monumental text informed its readers of the sacred treasures covered by the altar, and it advertised Paulinus’s pride in Nola’s possession of both a fragment of the True Cross as well as the relics of numerous apostles and saints. Like the passage from the feast-day poem quoted in the previous paragraph, the inscription’s language stressed the place-ness of the these precious relics reiterating through the fourfold repetition of the deictic “hic” that they are “right here” in a single deposit under the altar before viewers as they stand in the newly constructed basilica.

The inscription, moreover, did not merely indicate the presence of relics, but put forth claims about their pedigree, provenance, and programmatic rationale. Conspicuously, it elaborated the Cross fragment’s Holy Land point of origin and its relocation to Cimitile-Nola thanks to the actions of Melania the Elder.58 Melania herself was not only a formidable holy figure whose asceticism made her, as one scholar has recently written, “a legend in her own lifetime,” she was also a well-connected aristocrat who, upon returning from her twenty-seven-year sojourn in the Holy Land, visited Nola with a whole entourage of wealthy and influential relatives in tow.59 Indirectly the apse inscription, and the letter in which it was transcribed, thus also highlighted Paulinus’s role as patron whose connections to the likes of Melania made such an exchange of rare and precious sacred property possible.

In addition to stressing his community’s benefit thanks to his own close relationships with other aristocratic and ascetic elites, Paulinus elsewhere emphasized that the collection of relics under the new basilica’s altar placed Nola squarely within a larger network of cities blessed by God with saintly remains. In Carmen 19, composed in honor of St. Felix’s feast day in 405, Paulinus explains the theological justification for the translation of relics: “Since the faith had initially not been spread through the whole world alike, many areas of the earth were without martyrs. This I think is why Christ has both inspired princes. . . and acquainted His servants with His most generous decision to summon martyrs from their earlier homes and translate them to fresh lodgings on earth.”60 His poem goes on to cite the historical precedents of Bishop Ambrose’s translation of martyrs in Milan and the emperor Constantine’s relocation of the bodies of apostles Andrew and Timothy to Constantinople.61 Moreover, Paulinus casts Constantine’s actions as a divinely inspired strategy for elevating the new capital to the status of Rome: “. . . so Constantinople now stands with twin towers, vying to match the hegemony of great Rome, and more genuinely rivaling the walls of Rome through the eminence that God bestowed on her, for He counterbalanced Peter and Paul with a protection as great since

Constantinople gained the disciple of Paul and the brother of Peter.”62 When therefore Paulinus’s verse then turns to praise Nola for its own collection of apostles’ relics, it is in clear comparison with the preeminent centers of Milan, Rome, and Constantinople hailed in the immediately preceding section of the poem. Likening the particles of saints’ bodies to dewdrops from which fountains of holy grace spring, he writes, “From this source Christ’s abundance, so rich in its tiniest forms, has fallen on us also; for we too have received, in the form of a fragment of dust, the sacred tokens of the apostles’ flesh. . .”63 In other words, Paulinus publicly cast the acquisition of fragments of apostles, martyrs, and the True Cross as a development that placed Nola in the company of the most politically and religiously powerful cities of his day.

The promotion of the sacred relics that Paulinus deposited under the altar of the Basilica Nova throws into relief the embellishment of St. Felix’s tomb at the west end of the Basilica Vetus. While St. Felix’s cult site became increasingly monumentalized and glorified by Paulinus’s interventions at Cimitile, in some way its status as holy center was also mediated by the new relation into which it was put with the relic-rich liturgical altar of the Basilica Nova. The altar, as site of the performance of the liturgy, was the place at which the clergy’s status was most architecturally and ritually manifest. The altar relics and the monumental inscription that promoted them both served as a backdrop to the clergy’s own ritual performance and declared the sanctuary’s (and its ecclesiastical patron’s) elevated position within a larger sacred and political topography. In this way the altar relics presented a global counterpart to Felix’s claims to local, home-grown sanctity at Cimitile.