The priest is made powerful because of the Eucharist. That explains him. It is what he does, what makes him what he is. No one else can do this—consecrate the Eucharist. But what exactly is the Eucharist? The miracle of changing bread to Jesus is so staggering that many people through the ages have felt they had to explain it, or show its importance, with secondary miracles—like seeing the Host bleed, or an image of Jesus on or above the Host or in the chalice. In legend after legend, people gave the Host visible powers (like levitation). The validity of such Eucharistic miracles was endorsed by theologians during the eleventh-century controversy over the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They said that if Christ were not really present in the Host, how could it work such miracles?1
Thomas Aquinas saw some danger in these miracles. He felt he had to explain them in such a way that they would not detract from the authenticity of the main miracle, the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He noted that some see a spectral Jesus on or over the Host when no one else does, or only in glimpses. Or only an innocent child sees the priest lifting the baby Jesus in his hands, not the Host.2 He called this a fleeting and subjective visual effect (immutatio oculorum), not affecting the Eucharistic presence. But when a whole group sees a continuing vision of the Lord, he says this is a spectral indication of what is properly present only in the Eucharist—and in that sense to be welcomed, as confirming rather than challenging faith (ST 3.76 a8r).
Thomas did not try to persuade people that the visions were not there, simply that they did not replace the reality of Jesus, who is present physically only in heaven, or sacramentally only in the Host and chalice. He must have known there was no way to stop people from supplementing what they believe about the Eucharist with what they could see, or think they see. There are thousands of such ancillary miracle stories around the Eucharist.3 Sometimes the Host flies from the hand of an unworthy recipient. Sometimes it comes unscathed through fire—like the “miraculous Hosts” of Wilsnack, which made that town in Germany the fourth most popular goal of fifteenth-century pilgrims (after Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela).4 Or the Host floats, rather than becomes saturated, in water. Or it paralyzes the tongue of an unworthy recipient.5 Or a child who has had pagan food in its mouth before receiving the Host has to spit it out.6 Or it turns to ashes when carried off by someone trying to desecrate it.7 Or it heals a sick person with its touch. Or, carried in procession, it wards off an enemy attack. Or it was carried out to the fields to cause fertility.8 It even raised the dead.9
Perhaps the most famous story is “the miracle of Bolsena.” In 1263, it is claimed, a priest in Bolsena, Italy, who did not believe in the real presence, broke the large Host held in his hands and the sacred blood ran down onto the corporal (the white linen cloth on which the paten and chalice are placed during Mass). The stained corporal became a prized relic and was installed in a special monstrance at a special altar in the nearby Orvieto cathedral, where it has been worshiped by pilgrims ever since. Still on display, it has been visited by popes. The miracle was commemorated in many paintings, the most famous of which, by Raphael, fills one wall in the Vatican’s Room of Heliodorus.10 Many red-stained corporals became holy items after that.11
The second most famous Eucharistic miracle, and one of the oldest devotions in Italy, is the miracle of Lanciano, dating from about 700 CE. Again a priest who doubted the real presence of Jesus found himself holding a piece of the flesh of Jesus and looking into a chalice with five globules of his blood. The flesh, looked at with a little imagination, is roughly shaped like a heart. It and the five globules of blood are still displayed, in a monstrance for the flesh and a tear-shaped crystal vessel for the drops of blood, to be venerated close up by pilgrims who climb stairs behind the altar in Lanciano.12 This was so well known an event that Aquinas referred to it in his discourse on secondary miracles, singling out the appearance of “flesh or blood [of Jesus],” caro aut sanguis (ST 3.76 a8r). He says these cannot be part of the glorified body of Jesus (propria species Christi), which exists only in heaven. If these were bits of Jesus in his earthly state, putting them in a ciborium or tabernacle would be putting the glorified Jesus in prison instead of heaven! Since these apparitions are neither the heavenly nor the sacramental body, they are not a really present Jesus, says Aquinas, though they are rightly reverenced as aids to piety.13
The appearances of Jesus in connection with the Eucharist, appearances that Thomas honored while saying that they should not replace the reverence for the Host, were encouraged by the very process of making the Host. Hot plates pressed the Host, in its baking stage, into a form with a raised image of the crucified Christ on it. One example of these baking plates, from the seventeenth century, was on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. The catalogue of the exhibit explained the widespread use of such Hosts:
The embossed imagery…may have been responsible for some of the Host-related visions documented throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, as consecrated wafers were much more likely to be seen to emit blood if they already bore the raised image of Christ’s death on the cross.14
Despite the strictures of people like Thomas Aquinas, a sight of the Host and chalice seemed to stimulate rather than suppress the longing for more visualizable forms of the body and blood of Jesus.
The many relics of the true cross were considered “first-class relics” because they were thought to have traces of Jesus’ blood on them, or simply to have touched the body of Jesus while he lived on earth. Such relics were the pillar to which he was bound while scourged, the chains binding him there, thorns from his crown of thorns, nails used to fasten him on the cross.15 There were several pillars kept as relics.16 It applied to the ropes that supposedly bound Jesus, or the sponge that was lifted up to him on the cross.17 The lance that stabbed Jesus’ side, shedding his salvific blood, was discovered in Antioch by troops on the First Crusade and helped the bearers of this relic take Jerusalem.18 It was even true of the Holy Stairs in the Lateran, which Jesus is supposed to have climbed toward his trial by Pontius Pilate after he had been scourged. The hope that Jesus left traces of his blood and sweat from the Passion animated the cult of “Veronica’s veil” used to wipe his face as he went to the cross, or the shroud of Turin used to wrap his body as it came from the cross.19 If Jesus could leave bits of his blood on the instruments of his torture, why could not some of the blood itself have been preserved? Many pilgrimage sites claimed to have quantities of Holy Blood, saved from the Crucifixion by Mary Magdalene or the converted soldier Longinus, or saved after the Crucifixion by Nicodemus and/or Joseph of Arimathea, the men who buried Jesus.20
Two recent books have shown how the blood was fetishized in waves of hysterical devotion.21 Nicholas Vincent prints maps showing the distribution of shrines claiming to possess the Holy Blood.22 Caroline Walker Bynum lists the shrines that were given ecclesiastical sanction in the form of indulgences.
Authentic indulgences indicate that something called blood was shown for veneration at Beelitz, Wasserleben, Bernstein, Cismar, Braunschweig, Schwerin, Marienfliess, Krakow am See, and Guestrow in the hundred years before Wilsnack. Gottsbueren had a lively pilgrimage at least fifty years before, and in Mark Brandenburg itself, the three Cistercian convents of Zehdenick, Marienfliess, and Heiligengrabe offered competing blood cults (with very different kinds of holy objects) in the years around 1300. There were plenty of examples to inspire Johannes Kabuz [the priest-impresario of pilgrimages to Wilsnack], just as the success of his enterprise encouraged subsequent efforts at Zehdenick and Sternberg, Heiligengrabe, and Berlin.23
Blood from the Passion led to theological debate over the authenticity of liquid as opposed to dried blood (since divine blood should not decompose).24 Thomas Aquinas denied that blood from the Passion could be left behind on earth, since the integrity of the risen body (veritas corporis) made Jesus whole in both his forms, heavenly and Eucharistic (ST 3.54 a3). But Franciscan defenders of traditional relics said that a superficial amount of blood—like Jesus’ sweat, spit (sputum), or other effusions—could have been left on earth, while the essential blood was retained in the veritas corporis. The idea of the disposable sweat of Jesus was used to defend the authenticity of Veronica’s veil and the shroud of Turin—and if traces of Jesus’ sweat remain, why not of his blood as well?
Franciscans…with their stress on the event of Christ’s death, could theorize Eucharistic wonders or bodily relics as revelations of God’s substance in the wafer, as miracles created by God, or as remnants—inessential but real—of the body cared for long ago by Mary Magdalen, Longinus, or Joseph of Arimathea. If the blood pointed to the death on the cross, its presence was of utmost utility in arousing and sustaining devotion. Visible manifestations were important because they point beyond.25
Bynum shows that by the fifteenth century, “theological arguments concerning bleeding Hosts and those concerning blood relics have fused into the question whether there can be Blut Christi on earth.”26
Lucrative pilgrimages like that of Wilsnack made theologians hesitant about denying the validity of these blood miracles. Thomas Aquinas was firm that the blood was not that of Jesus, but the miracles were valid, since God provided some substitutes (similia) for the authentic blood, to confirm the reality of transubstantiation.27 In the Summa Theologiae he says: “The blood recognized in certain churches as relics did not flow from the side of Christ, but is said miraculously to have spurted from some penetrated image of Christ,” miraculose dicitur effluxisse de quadam imagine Christi percussa (ST 3.54 a3 ad3). He seems to be thinking of blood from stabbed crucifixes or Hosts, blood which would proliferate in the coming centuries. As Caroline Walker Bynum writes: “The status of blood, both as integral to (integer) and as separated from (effusus) Christ is central to the theology of the fifteenth century.”28
The idea that superficial bits of Christ’s body could be shed and left behind on earth buttressed the claim of some shrines to have a baby tooth of Jesus, lost forever from the mouth that replaced it with a grown-up tooth, saved by Mary and passed on to early disciples.29 Only the adult teeth rose with Jesus at the Resurrection, so the baby teeth could continue to be revered in reliquaries. Guibert of Nogent wrote a savage attack on a rival monastery that drew pilgrims to its tooth relic.30 The same monastery he was attacking claimed to have a bit of the umbilical cord from Jesus’ birth (a double relic, of both Jesus and Mary).31
Even more popular were the many sites that proclaimed they had the holy prepuce cut away when Jesus was circumcised. A famous example of this was preserved in the pope’s own treasury of relics in the Sancta Sanctorum of Rome.32 Saint Catherine of Siena was often painted with Jesus putting a ring on her finger in a “mystical marriage,” but she said in letter after letter that the true marriage with Jesus was sealed with the ring of his circumcised flesh on the spouse’s fingers.33 If these “disposable” parts of Jesus could exist apart from his risen body, why not deciduous parts of his blood?
The common element in devotion to the Host, to relics, and to holy objects was a belief that Jesus was physically present, and even harmable, in all of them. A stabbed crucifix could bleed, just like a stabbed Host. Bloody corporals were common after Bolsena.34 The concern over this continuing physicality of Jesus on earth went along with an obsession over his mistreatment. The idea of a Host detached from its Mass context led to a new series of reported miracles, like those wherein a mad or disaffected person gets hold of a Host and tries to desecrate it by making Jesus suffer again—after which the malefactor is punished in some spectacular way. The normal villains in these were Jews, and the supposed desecration led to very real persecutions, like the famous German ones in Sternberg (1492) and Berlin (1510). Both events left extensive trial records and led to worship of Hosts allegedly attacked by Jews.
In Sternberg, a priest named Peter Dean was convicted of trading some Hosts to get back an iron pot he had pawned with some Jews. The Jews stabbed the Hosts and tried to drown them. When they would not sink, they buried them. When some clergymen found the Hosts, sixty-five Jews were arrested and tortured. After their trial, twenty-seven were executed by burning. So was the priest. The church at Sternberg displayed the miraculous Hosts, along with the table where they had been stabbed, and the stabbing instruments, and the pot the priest had pawned.35
Think for a moment what this meant. The persecutors seemed to reason (if at all) in terms like these: Jews, who were accused of being Christ killers in the first place, were trying to repeat their crime; but this time they were caught and they were the ones killed. In other words: If they could have apprehended the first Jews who turned Jesus over to Pontius Pilate, they would have caught and killed Annas and Caiaphas—even though Jesus told Peter not to resist the soldiers arresting him. In a kind of delayed bloodthirstiness, Jews were killed en masse for trying to harm Jesus—though the Host seemed perfectly able to care for itself, in the telling of the very men trying to avenge it. This attempt to amend history, or redress it, defied Jesus’ own submission to suffering as the Father’s will. The whole exercise was so illogical as to make its Christian perpetrators the truly diabolic actors, not the Jews. Yet such mass murders were repeated again and again.
In Berlin, a man stole a pyx with consecrated Hosts in it. Caught and tortured, he claimed to have sold one Host to a Jew in Spandau. When the Jew was brought to Berlin and tortured, he confessed that he had tried to defile the Host, but it spontaneously parted into three segments. He distributed these to other Jews in other towns for further desecration. When these Jews were rounded up and tried, thirty-nine were burnt and two were beheaded. The man who stole the monstrance was torn apart with fiery tongs. Later anti-Jewish propaganda embroidered this tale. It said that one of the parted Host segments had been ground into a red powder, but the Host vindicated itself when the powder healed a possessed woman.36 The tale was as undying as the Hosts.
We should not let ourselves think of Eucharistic superstitions as quaint, as so many folktales or remnants of the Middle Ages. The Host could be, and was, a bringer of death across the years.
1. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 200–201.
2. Guibert of Nogent, Monodies and On the Relics of the Saints, translated by Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubenstein (Penguin Books, 2011), p. 199.
3. They are still being counted online by the Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association.
4. Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 2011), p. 192.
5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Zone Books, 2011), p. 142. A holy person, according to the twelfth-century abbot Guibert of Nogent, saw angels putting hot coals on the tongues of sinners who took the sacrament; see Guibert, On Relics, p. 239.
6. Guibert, On Relics, p. 234.
7. Ibid.
8. Freeman, op. cit., p. 196.
9. Pelikan, op. cit., p. 201.
10. Ingrid Rowland, “The Vatican Stanze,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 112–13.
11. Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 143–44.
12. In 1887, Pope Leo XIII granted an indulgence to those worshiping at the altar of the miracle; see “Lanciano, 700’s A.D.,” on the Web site of the Miracle of the Rosary Mission.
13. Ibid.
14. Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 69–71.
15. Guibert, On Relics, pp. 87, 150.
16. One of the famous scourging posts is in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice. Another is in the baldachino over the altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
17. Pelikan, op. cit., pp. 183–84.
18. Guibert of Nogent, The Deeds of God Through the Franks (Echo Library, 2008), pp. 91–92, 97. Part of the lance itself is supposed to be contained in the reliquary above Bernini’s huge statue Saint Longinus (three times life-size and made of four huge marble blocks) at the sanctuary crossing of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
19. The “veil” with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus on his way to the cross was revered in Rome, put on display at special events, and was contained in the reliquary above the huge statue of Veronica—planned by Bernini but executed by Francesco Mochi—in the sanctuary crossing of Saint Peter’s. Dante marked the exposure of “our Veronica” (Veronica nostra) in the Holy Year of 1300 (Paradiso 31.103–8), where the onlooker’s rapt look is compared with Dante’s own awe in the presence of Saint Bernard in Paradise. Mochi makes the “veil” of his statue as big and rippling as a tablecloth—which led to a toreador’s pass with the full cape being named “the veronica.”
20. Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–89, 115; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 129, 309.
21. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, and Vincent, Holy Blood.
22. Vincent, op. cit., pp. 52, 68.
23. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, pp. 75–76.
24. Freeman, op. cit., pp. 193–94; Bynum, Wonderful Blood, pp. 124, 147–48.
25. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, p. 129.
26. Ibid., p. 109.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, book 4, distinction 10, question 1, article 4c.
28. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, p. 111.
29. Guibert, Monodies, p. 268.
30. Ibid., p. 251. Guibert mocked the notion that Jesus “littered the earth with particles of his own body, like some trail of leftovers, and took the rest to heaven.”
31. Ibid., pp. 253, 257. Relics of Mary’s body were harder to come by than those of her son, since she was thought to have been assumed bodily at her death, and there were no convincing protectors of her childhood teeth, etc. But samples of her milk were displayed—why did it not curdle, Guibert asked (Monodies, p. 162), and bits of her clothing were treasured. The most precious relic at Chartres Cathedral was Mary’s veil. Mark Twain mocked the milk relics in Innocents Abroad, chapter 55 (Oxford edition, 1996), pp. 601–2.
32. Treasures of Heaven, edited by Martina Bagnoli et al. (British Museum Press, 2010), p. 71. For other sites possessing the foreskin, see Vincent, op. cit., pp. 85–86, 103, and Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 138, 155–56, 210, 240, 245, 345, and Wonderful Blood, p. 122.
33. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (University of California Press, 1987), pp. 174–75, 376–77. Other women with a devotion to the holy prepuce were Bridget of Sweden and Agnes Blannbekin of Vienna (ibid.).
34. Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 15–16, 144.
35. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, pp. 69–70.
36. Bynum, Christian Materiality, p. 211.