Dr. Crockett writes:
>if i may, it seems to me that the baby teeth of St. Apollonius really
aren't
>in the same class as suchlike as "the head of John the Baptist as
>a young boy" or "La Cabeza de Pancho Villa como Nino," a very much
>different level of credulity being involved in the serious veneration of
the
>latter.
>
Technically true, granted; but it seems that while they may not fly equally
forcefully in the face of logic, they arise from a similar poetic
sensibility and (in the case of certain saint relics) a similar spiritual
longing.
As I understand it, Middle Ageians were encouraged to view the holy powers -
the saints, Mary, and Christ - as flesh, blood and spirit; to think on them
(daily) as being present, in a very real way. An institution's ability to
present concrete objects - bones, clothing, bodily fluids (well, maybe
that's not technically concrete, but anyway), hair, instruments of torture,
and the like - which related to these very important and (for the believers)
very real events enhanced the religious experience and served to increase
the power of the devotion.
The central poetic improbability of Apollonius' baby teeth, or, say, the hay
that the ox and ass refrained from eating in the manger, is not whether they
ever existed - - if Apollonius ever lived, or if the manger scene, in some
form, actually occurred, so then did the hay and the baby teeth - - but,
rather, whether anyone would have thought to preserve them at the moment of
the original event. With all the things going on the night of Christ's
birth, who had the presence of mind to say, "Don't forget to wrap all this
hay up, and keep it somewhere where it won't get lost"? And yet, for
thousands of believers over the centuries, someone had to have done so, to
allow St. Helen to find it. And, as I once posted to this group, Gerard
David painted a triptych, now at the Met, which shows the hay on the floor
of the manger, all wrapped up and ready for the taking. Nor would it be
hard to compose a preface to the St. Apollonius legend, in which her mother,
in the light of some infantile miracle or anglic advice, seeks to preserve
her daughter's baby teeth, as a premonition of her eventual torture.
Where is it in the Golden Legend that Jacobus tells us that one can still
see (or, to be fair, 800 years ago one still could see) the footprints in
the earth where Christ stood before ascending to heaven, (or was it the
Transfiguration?), as though seeing thousand-year old footprints in dirt
might make the story more believable.
In each case it appears that we are moving backwards, from a contemporary
belief in a miraculous story, to extrapolate the existence of concrete
"evidence" that the miracle occurred, or the existence of a spiritual
souvenir that helps move the believer into a meditative/devotional state.
The related idea is the simultaneous existence of different ages of the holy
powers. Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe, for example, appeared to Juan Diego,
so the story goes, with the countenance of a young woman/girl of about
fourteen or fifteen. In one of my favorite passages in Miguel Cabrera's
account of the sacred image, he assures us that this is perfectly natural
for, had she appeared much older to Juan Diego, she would surely have held
the Christ Child in her arms. Thus we have the quite "logical" appearance
in 1531 of a 14 year-old Virgin Mary/Guadalupe, some 1500 years after she
would have become an elderly woman and posed for all those "Dormition of the
Virgin" paintings.
Similarly, Jesus make his appearance, dressed up as a Santiago de Compostela
pilgrim, but as a four or five year-old boy, in thousands of retablos and
ex-votos of the Santo Nino de Atocha.
No doubt there are other examples I am not aware of, of Christ or Mary or,
what do i know, one of the saints appearing to someone at a younger age
than their legend leads us to believe/assume they attained before exiting
our realm.
In the end, if the holy powers can reappear to the faithful at any age they
please; and leave us an image imprinted in a staggering array of objects; or
if they can make blood coagulate and statues shed tears; and come out of
their graves and scold old women for crying so long and so loud; or do any
of the zillion marvelous things that the Esteemed Magister Limericarum daily
informs us that they are alleged most gravely to have done; then it seems to
me rather niggardly to deprive them of the gift of leaving us a souvenir of
what they looked like as a child, even if we elect not to believe it
possible, purely on the basis of something so relatively immaterial and
irrelevant as logic.
jmichael
ps - Perhaps I should mention that the good folks at La Pasita do not really
expect their patrons to grant the veracity of their 'relic' - although they
would doubtless welcome any attempt to drink enough to believe it)
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