1. Blood-stained Impressions.— We shall begin with these because, to speak the truth, they are the only ones of which we can imagine the formation in a way that is both certain and complete. As a Christian will have guessed, this almost raises the question of the circumstances of the Resurrection, which are a mystery. Even the hypercritics will not demand that I should supply them with a scientific explanation.
The marks of blood on the shroud are not graphic pictures, as are the bodily impressions. I do not say photographic, for as we do not know the way in which these latter were formed, we do not know if light played a part; anyway, as we have seen, they are very like photographic negatives. The blood-stained impressions are not pictures; they are counter-drawings and they are made by blood. But in what form? Liquid or congealed blood? Are they from clots which had dried already or recently formed clots, which were still exuding their serum?
We may start by dispelling a false idea, which is expressed in words that I have too often heard used by one of the oldest and firmest defenders of the shroud: “A flow of clots.” Although I knew what to expect, I could not help giving a start each time. No! A clot which has been formed on the skin sticks to it and dries.
Another point: a clot is never formed in the body, or more exactly in the veins, in which the blood always remains liquid. The “thrombus” which appears in veins afflicted with phlebitis is an entirely different thing anatomically, and it is only to be found in unhealthy veins, with which we are not concerned here.
Blood remains liquid in corpses; we shall return to this when dealing with the wound of the heart. It becomes concentrated in the veins; at death the arteries empty themselves into the capillaries and into the veins, owing to the final contraction of the ventricles and to their own elasticity. It remains liquid in the veins for a very long time, usually till putrefaction sets in. It even remains alive for several hours and is capable of being transfused into a living man.
When blood leaves the veins owing to a wound, if collected in a receptacle it can be seen coagulating rapidly, that is to say it becomes a sort of red jelly, which we call a clot. This clot is formed by the transformation of a substance which is dissolved in the blood, fibrinogen, into another solid substance, fibrin; this latter contains within its meshes red blood cells, whence its red colour. Coagulation takes place in a very short time, never longer than a few minutes. Secondly, the clot grows smaller, and exudes its liquid content, the serum. It then gradually dries.
Thus, if blood should issue from a dead or a living body through a wound in the skin, a considerable amount of this will flow in liquid form along the skin, and, by reason of its weight, can fall to the ground. A part, by reason of its viscosity, will adhere to the skin (in larger quantities if this should be horizontal), and it will there coagulate rapidly. If the flow of blood continues, fresh levels of liquid blood will spread over the previous ones, and in their turn will coagulate. If the blood meets with an obstacle during its downward flow, it accumulates above it; the clot at this point will thus be thicker.
The clot grows smaller on the skin as in a receptacle, owing to the expulsion of the serum and the drying process which follows. But, when the surface is broad and shallow, this drying up will clearly take place more rapidly.
It will be understood that I am only giving these elementary explanations for those who are not doctors. They seem to me to be indispensable, for I have so often come across serious misunderstandings even among highly cultivated people. We thus see that the shroud may have been stained, either by liquid blood, or by clots which were still fresh and moist, or by dried clots. We also see that around the clot, if this was still fresh, it could be stained by the serum which had been exuded. To which category do our blood-marks belong?
Liquid blood is an exception and almost unique. I can only find traces of the blood which flowed from the holes in the feet, on the way to and within the tomb, in the direction of the heels. The greater part coagulated elsewhere on the soles of the feet, and these clots left their traces on the shroud when they were still fresh. One part, however, flowed beyond the feet into the folds, crossing these folds from one side to the other, forming symmetrical images which we shall meet with again.
Some of the clots must still have been fresh enough to remain moist. One of these may be the large original clot of the heart wound, by reason of its thickness. The clots of the large flow of blood across the back of the body certainly form part of this group (cf. C. VIII), clots which were formed in the hollow of a sheet twisted beneath the loins into a band for the purpose of bearing the body to the tomb. The greater part of this abundant flow of blood, which issued from the inferior vena cava, and found its way out through the gaping wound of the heart, must have fallen to the ground on the way. Only a small part of it, which was able to reach the skin between the folds of the band and to adhere to it on account of its viscosity, became coagulated in the form of numberless windings, such as are characteristic of the flow of blood at the back. These clots were clearly quite fresh, when the body was laid down on the shroud; they left their trace very easily, with an abundance of serum around the marks.
Most of the clots were more or less dry at the time of the burial. How were they also able to leave their trace? We must understand that once the corpse had been installed, it was hermetically enclosed in a shroud and in linen cloths, all of which were impregnated with thirty kilograms of myrrh and of aloes; its wrappings would be practically impervious. We must also remember that the corpse would continue to give out moisture for some time. One tends to forget that all the cells of a corpse continue to live, each one on its own, those of the skin like the others, and that they die individually after different lengths of time. If the higher-grade and the nervous cells are the most fragile, yet the others last for some time; total death only sets in with putrefaction. Now our Faith tells us that Jesus never knew corruption; and every part of the shroud confirms us in this certainty. On the other hand all the wounds, all the abrasions with which the body was covered continued to exude a more or less infected lymph as when it was still alive, but in liquid form.
The result of all this was that the body was bathed in a watery atmosphere, which made all the clots on the skin and in the various wounds damp once more. And this brings us back once again to the fresh clots, apart from the serum.
Now, by this I do not mean that the fibrin became liquid again, which would be something quite different. Vignon, who was completely imbued with his aloeticoammoniacal theory of vaporographic impressions (a theory which he, however, found much less satisfactory from 1938 onwards) thought that it was ammonia which had again dissolved the fibrin and had liquefied the clots. He made an experiment by placing some clots on a substance which had been soaked in a solution of ammonia. In any case it would no longer have been normal, living blood, but a coloured liquid, susceptible of flowing, incapable of recoagulating. Such flows, taking place in a horizontal position in the tomb, would have been disastrous for our blood-stained images; in fact, there is no coloured flow on the shroud; there are only counter-drawings of clots.
Vignon’s hypothesis is thus unable to account for our blood-stained images; on the contrary, it only makes for confusion. More than that, it has no basis in fact, nor has his theory of ammoniacal browning by the aloes. It is true that the fibrin will dissolve in a solution of ammonia; but I find no signs of ammonia on the shroud.
There is certainly a little urea, which may have been left by the sweat drying on the skin; there is also some in the blood and in the lymph which was exuded by the wounds. In no case would the amount of urea be considerable. But anyway, this urea has none of the properties of ammonia. It would need to be transformed into carbamate, and then into carbonate of ammonia. Now a transformation such as this would take a long time, much longer than the length of the period spent in the tomb. The presence of a special microorganism, the micrococcus ureae, would also be needed. There is no reason why this should have existed on the surface of the body. My friend, Volckringer, who was pharmacist at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph, experimented by placing some urea on the skin of an animal; the vapours of ammonia did not appear for twenty hours. The reaction is delayed and even held up by all antiseptics, even mild ones, such as aloes for example! There is thus scanty encouragement for Vignon’s hypothesis.
The two necessary conditions for the formation of ammonia, time and ferment, are absent, and for this reason I have always remained sceptical about this theory.
On the other hand it seems to me quite possible that clots which had become more or less dry, would, without liquefying the fibrin, in a damp atmosphere become sufficiently moistened to form a fairly soft kind of paste. Thus transformed they would be well able to impregnate the linen with which they came in contact and to leave counter-drawings on it with fairly definite outlines, which would reproduce the shape of the clots.
The colour of these counter-drawings would vary in intensity according to the thickness of the clots. Vignon saw clearly that when a drop of congealed blood grows smaller, its thickness is greater in the circumference than in the centre. And that is why many of these counter-drawings are highly coloured at the circumference and have in their centre a zone of milder colour.
And this is how, in my opinion, almost all the blood-stained images were formed—but I must return to the images produced by the flow of liquid blood, and to the possibilities which this blood would have offered an ingenious forger. Everyone who has had any experience knows that the stain made by blood on linen does not remain always the same, in particular if the linen has not been specially prepared. On a compress, when used in an operation, a drop of blood can be seen diffusing itself rapidly, the stain enlarges as it spreads into the tissue, but it does so with more speed in certain directions, following the threads of the material. If, for instance, it consists of plain twill, as is usually the case, around a central zone which is more or less round, one can see four little prolongations following the threads of the warp and the woof, which thus forms a little cross.
The phenomenon is even more striking if, instead of blood, one uses a few drops of some more volatile liquid, such as tincture of iodine; the material becomes spangled with little brown crosses. This irregular and guided diffusion is all the more noticeable in proportion as the thread is capable of absorbing liquid. Now, as we have seen, the thread from which the linen of the shroud was woven, which is coarsely spun from unbleached fibre, is an excellent absorbent.
It is in fact noticeable that the edges of the two liquid flows which are on the shroud on the outside of the soles of the feet, instead of having the clear outline of the clots on the hands or the forehead, for example, are irregular and inverted. It would be interesting to have a photograph which had been directly enlarged in order to compare it with the one which Enrie made of the wrist. In the latter one can see that the coloration of the blood-stained imprint is solely the result of each thread being impregnated, each of which preserves its form and its separate existence. There is no clogging, not the slightest thickness of colouring matter between the threads of the material.
By reason of this detail a forger would have had the greatest difficulty in imitating blood-stained imprints, if he used blood as his colouring matter. Never would he have succeeded in producing those stains with clearly marked edges, which with such outstanding truthfulness reproduce the shape of the clots as they were formed naturally on the skin. May I say, in parenthesis, that this demolishes beforehand certain theories which will be put forward by opponents of the shroud, on the day when the physical examination, which would have taken place long ago were it not for the inertia of the proprietors, will perhaps have demonstrated scientifically that the stains were made by blood.
As I lacked the chance of making such decisive experiments, it was precisely the study of these pictures of the clots which led me to the conclusion that they really were counter-drawings of congealed blood. I shall describe these at greater length, for instance in connection with the crowning with thorns (see C. IV, D). But I could repeat the same demonstration in connection with all the blood-stained pictures. In the eyes of a surgeon they possess a most striking realism, which I have never yet seen in any painting.
All painters, apart from those who portray wounds that have no relation to reality, paint flows of blood with more or less parallel edges, and are well content as long as they follow the laws of gravity, as for example, in making them flow from the hand towards the elbow. But these are flows of liquid blood, of blood which is not clotted. And they imagine that they are thus being realistic.
There is no flow of blood on the shroud; there are only the counter-drawings of clots; these clots represent that part of the blood which has congealed on the skin, while flowing over it. If I sometimes refer to flows of blood, when describing the shroud, it is because these clots tell us of the past when that blood flowed on the skin: in the same way beautiful writing, though now motionless, evokes the movement of the pen by which it was traced.
Actually, those pictures which are meant to be the most realistic are the ones which contain the most blatant physiological errors. We shall find that this is specially the case in regard to marks of blood. When a crucifix is designed to stir our emotions by displaying to us the atrocious nature of the torture, so much the further is it from the truth. I know I shall be attacked for this, but still, it has to be said; if from the artistic standpoint I am able to appreciate the pictorial values of a Grünewald, the contorted way in which he paints the Crucified seems to me purely grotesque. I can assure you that the Passion was both more simple and infinitely more tragic than that.
After the exposition of 1933 I wrote les Cinq Plaies. {6} I already knew, after studying the marks of blood, that it really was blood which had formed these images of clots. I had recognised them, just as one recognises the image of a familiar face. I had a mistaken conviction that these marks were of the same colour as the remainder, and I had actually seen monochrome images on the linen by electric light. And suddenly, by the light of day, I saw that they had this carmine colour, which added one more note to the conviction which I had already formed. I thus had the right to state, without abandoning any scientific precision, that “the surgeon understood, without any shadow of doubt, that it was blood by which the linen was impregnated, and that this blood was the Blood of Christ.” In this I was certainly being more scientific than those who refuse to look at the shroud.
And have we finished with this study of clots? Alas! We are far from this and there will always be immense difficulties to be resolved. Spectroscopy, photography in all the zones of the spectrum, infra-red in particular, radiography, and everything else that we could imagine—since it seems impossible to achieve a chemical examination, all this research will perhaps tell us one day that a corpse covered with wounds lay for some hours in this shroud. Nothing will explain to us how it left it , while leaving on the shroud a fine and unblemished impression of the body and the marks of its bleeding. A man would not be able to remove the body of another, without destroying them.
It is certain that this Body, in its glorious Resurrection, could leave the shroud with the same ease as when it entered the cenacle januis clausis —“when the doors were shut.” This final difficulty brings us to what is, humanly speaking, more or less a physical impossibility. Science at this point can do no more than keep silence, for it is outside its domain. But the man of learning at least has a glimpse that here is a palpable proof of the Resurrection.
When I had published the first edition of les Cinq Plaies , I went to the École pratique to read it to my old friend, Professor Hovelacque. He was devoted to the subject of anatomy, which he taught to the faculty in Paris, but he was far from being a believer. He approved of my experiments and conclusions with growing enthusiasm. When he had finished reading he put down my booklet, and he remained silent for a short while in a state of meditation. Then he suddenly burst out with that fine frankness on which our friendship had been built up, and exclaimed: “But then, my friend…Jesus Christ did rise again!” Rarely in my life have I known such deep and happy emotion as at this reaction of an unbeliever when faced with a purely scientific work, from which he was drawing incalculable consequences. He died a few months later, and I dare to hope that God has rewarded him.
2. The Bodily Impressions .—May we say at once, that if we know full well what these impressions are not, we have no precise idea of how they came to appear. To this we may add that we do not know when they appeared. One is reminded of that negative knowledge of God, which has been so well expounded by St. Bonaventure.
What exactly are they not? Either a forgery, a piece of trickery, or the work of human hands—this, I think, can no longer be affirmed. If this were a painting, it would have been done at the latest in the 14th century, when the shroud reappeared at Lirey. Need one go over again all the impossibilities underlying this hypothesis? Such a painting would contain a negative image, an unimaginable conception before the invention of photography. And nobody need say that the shroud was reversed by the Poor Clares of Chambéry; the Lierre copy, which dates from before their day, already shows the wound of the heart on the left. This negative presents so much difficulty that all the ancient copyists tried to interpret it in a positive image, which misrepresented all the details. Even modern artists, such as Reffo and Cussetti, who have copied the shroud having full knowledge of the subject, have not succeeded; their copies, which seem to bear a resemblance to the original, show on photographic plates positive images very different from those on the shroud. This is because the lights and shades on the shroud, when reproduced negatively, have an absolute perfection such as no painter can achieve, and which one only finds in nature or in objective photography.
There is not a trace of painting to be seen, even in Enrie’s highly enlarged direct photographs. (To make this clear, one should explain that this is not just a matter of enlarging a photograph, but of an apparatus which produces on the plate an image enlarged seven times, such as a magnifying glass of the same power would supply to the eye.) These images, as shown by Viale, the director of the civic museums in Turin, have no style of their own; they are impersonal. They have nothing in common with any medieval French or Piedmontese style.
How could an artist, who was painting a shroud destined for public exposition, have dared to do an unheard-of thing, that of portraying a Christ who was entirely naked? How would he have come to contradict the traditional iconography, with a nail in the wrist, with a thumb hidden in the palm of the hand (which has often been repeated by those who have copied the shroud), with a Crucified Being who only shows one pierced hand and one pierced foot, with that curious flow across the back? How could he, while knowing nothing of the physiology of the blood, conceive of clots so true to life and how was he able to paint them on linen which had not been specially prepared? All artists have painted flows of blood for us; not one of them has thought of painting clots.
I will waste no time on the objection that the painting became negative owing to the weakening of the colours; this has been disposed of in a learned manner by Enrie. The darkest parts of the plate are those which correspond to the parts of the shroud which consist of bare linen; a colour which does not exist cannot be reversed. I have furthermore on twenty occasions seen the Assisi Cimabue; this is quite different from a negative like that of the shroud.
We can say, then, that there was no painting. Images of clots such as those on the shroud could not be produced with any colouring matter. But there are still some disappointments and uncertainties ahead of us. A corpse must have lain in that shroud—why should it have been that of Christ and not of some other man? Let us deal quickly with an objection which I have often heard brought forward. This body bore all the stigmata of the Passion. All those, I shall be asked, which one would find on a crucified man? Yes, in fact including those of the scourging and of the wound in the heart from the lance. (The body would in this case have been returned to the family, as we shall see, Chapter II, c, 6°.) But only one crucified man was, to our knowledge, crowned with thorns, and that was Our Saviour. And then, if this was not the shroud of Christ, why was it so faithfully preserved? Finally, what man condemned to death could show in his face such nobility and such divine majesty? I will not insist on this last point; let the reader decide for himself when he has in all humility contemplated the face.
According to Vignon’s theory, which is the oldest, the markings are due to a browning of the aloes which was spread over the linen, owing to the exhalation of ammonia by the body. These vapours would act in inverse ratio to the distance between the outlines of the body and the surface of the shroud. (The future will perhaps tell us whether there is any truth in this last phrase; I certainly do not see how it can apply to the image produced beneath the corpse; but let us pass on!) These vapours would be due to the decomposition of the urea (formed by the sweat and blood which had accumulated on the surface of the corpse?) At this point I refuse to follow him. We have recently seen, in regard to the cloths which are supposed to have been liquefied by dissolving fibrin, how this transformation of urea into carbonate of ammonia was both problematic and a slow process. Vignon’s theory, which seems so attractive at first sight, raises yet further difficulties; its foundations especially seem to be unsound. Vignon himself during his last years, and from 1938 onwards, does not seem to have had the same confidence in it.
My good friend Don Scotti, a Salesian, is a doctor of medicine and also an excellent chemist. He has made considerable researches in aloes since 1931, in regard to its components and its derivatives, of which I am not in a position to give a clear resume. For example, aloetine , when it comes into contact with water or with alkaline, takes on a dark brown colour, as it becomes transformed into aloeresinotannol. Linen, which has been plunged for a few minutes in a solution of aloine, of which the chief colouring matter is aloemodine , as a result of simple contact with the air will in the space of two months take on a colour of rose carmine. The subsequent action of the light of the sun will make these colours yet more vivid. We can thus already see the possibility of a slow and progressive disclosure of the marks on the linen.
Judica and Romanese have, since 1939, obtained markings from corpses. What brings them together and also connects them with Scotti, is that they rule out ammonia. Both of them work by light contact. But Judica obtains his markings by spreading blood on the body and impregnating the linen with oil and with essence of terebinth. The images are brought out by exposition to steam. Romanese merely sprinkles the body with powdered physiological serum (solution of chloride of sodium) and sprinkles the linen with powdered aloes. The images obtained by these two processes are, it must be owned, far from the perfection of the face on the shroud. But they are something quite new, which should greatly encourage further researches along these lines.
I would now end up with an extremely stimulating work, which was published in 1942 by my friend Volckringer, the chief apothecary in the Hôpital Saint-Joseph, whose experiments with urea we have already considered. He has also made researches into the formation of colours, much on the lines of those made by Scotti. In this work (Le problème des empreintes devant la science —Librairie du Carmel, 27 Rue Madame, Paris, 6°), he has produced something quite original, combined with a fine collection of pictures, the only ones which can be said to approach the perfection of those on the shroud. It is a fact that these were also formed naturally and, as we shall see, without ammonia, without aloes, and some of them without direct contact. He is not dealing, it is true, with animal tissues; he is dealing with vegetable tissues; but they are living tissues, and one knows the analogies that there are between the two kingdoms. One can for instance say that urea, uric acid, allantoine and allantoic acid are to be found in plants. Desgrez has even shown how vegetable chlorophyl and animal hӕmatoporphyrin will, under the action of ultraviolet rays, become transformed into the same urobiline.
By examining old herbals Volckringer has established the presence on the paper of quite special types of images, representing the plants which have been preserved. Once it was well and truly dried, the plant would soon lose most of its external characteristics. Being fixed, as it is, on a sheet of paper between two other sheets, we frequently find one upper and two lower images, the second being formed on the enveloping sheet, through the sheet supporting the plant. The presence or absence of chlorophyl was noticeable, and similar images were produced by the roots.
None of these images were to be found in recent herbals. They were, for instance, very clear in a herbal of 1836, while there were scarcely any markings in a herbal of 1908, which at the time was 34 years old.
These images seemed to resist all reagents, except ammonia; this latter greatly weakened the colouring, which it threw back in a brown circle on the edge of the area to which it was applied.
These images were “like a light design in sepia, perfect in continuity: examination under a magnifying glass revealed no fine lines, but a collection of stains without clearly defined boundaries.” They would seem to be like the impressions on the shroud, and this is not all. “One could distinguish on the impression, which is sepia in colour, the veins of the leaves, in their smallest ramifications, and where the stalk had been cut…the folds and the reciprocal positions of the various parts of the plant, thanks to the comparison of the upper and the lower impressions…. The whole plant is faithfully reproduced in the two images.”
And now we come to the most interesting point. Volckringer photographed these impressions and he found that on the photographic plate “in the reversed image the most prominent part of the plant came out light, while the more distant parts came out dark.” The whole image gives an extraordinary effect of relief, and stands out naturally against a black background.
The plate thus gives us a normal, positive image of the plant which was formerly placed between those sheets of paper. Now, this plant has been reduced to the condition of a corpse, “a uniform and more or less crumpled mass,” brown or blackish in colour; all relief has more or less disappeared, the veins are scarcely visible and the details have been greatly weakened. The negative of this corpse gives the same crumpled effect, the same absence of relief.” And this plant already had this appearance , a long time before the first marks of this excellent impression appeared , an impression which resembles that on the shroud.
Volckringer ends by apologising that he has provided another problem for solution, instead of a solution for the problem of the shroud. However, this fresh fact makes it possible for us to say with some confidence how the impressions on the shroud were formed, and this is most important; we know we are dealing with a natural phenomenon, nature having spontaneously furnished us with a similar example.
Furthermore, may we not infer from this that the shroud, when found in the tomb, perhaps only bore marks of blood? Is it not possible that the bodily impressions only appeared gradually, after long years? This hypothesis, which was first derived from a French photographer, M. Desgranges, was already being pointed out in 1929 by Noguier de Malijay.
As can be seen, much still remains to be done to elucidate the question of the impressions on the shroud. We are always being asked why we have not carried out such-and-such researches or experiments—this would end by being rather irritating, were it not at the same time rather ridiculous. We did not wait for those who oppose the shroud’s authenticity to suggest that we should ask for permission to make scientific experiments. We asked for these before they did; indeed, we asked for more. May I state once and for all: had the shroud been our property, this would all have been done at least seventeen years ago, for a programme had already been completed by 1933, and since then we have merely been trying to perfect it.
While waiting for that happy day one may perhaps conclude with the words of an obstinate opponent of its authenticity, Father Braun, in his article in the Nouvelle Revue de Théologie (November–December, 1930, p. 1041). The italics are mine and it is with joy that I have underlined the words, for all roads lead to Rome: “Certainly the striking impression which has been left on the venerable strip of linen of Turin , its astonishing realism, its impersonal and almost sculptural character, which is certainly something quite foreign to medieval painting, remain a mystery.”
And to complete my thought, I would add, in company with our Holy Father Pope Pius XI: “There is still much mystery surrounding this sacred object; but it is certainly sacred as perhaps no other thing is sacred: and assuredly (one can say this is an acknowledged fact, even apart from all ideas of faith or of Christian piety), it is certainly not a human work—certo non é opera umana. ” (September 6th , 1936.)