Saints for Supper

Some time​ in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where frescoes of the Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian had been painted on the wall. ‘Leaning on her faith as upon a stick’, she dug her fingernails into the plaster, then dissolved the scrapings in water and drank the resulting brew. Her pain abated immediately. As Jérémie Koering puts it in his new book, ‘the woman was healed by eating an image.’

From frescoes and printed devotional images to incised amulets, moulded gingerbread and the stamped Eucharistic host, a wide variety of images has, at various moments in Western history, seemed worthy of ingestion. Koering calls the people who ingest images ‘iconophages’ – that is, image eaters. What did iconophages think they were doing, he asks, and what can we learn from them about the properties that have been ascribed to images? To answer these questions, he draws on examples from the ancient Mediterranean, Byzantine and Western medieval Christianity, and early modern Catholicism. Building on the work of Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Véronique Dasen, George Galavaris and Aden Kumler, he takes in not only objects of devotion and theological works but also lives of saints, ephemeral printed matter, even culinary implements.

The premodern cosmos was structured by mysterious correspondences which modern scholars have called sympathies, interconnections between things that shared particular characteristics. Items with such similarities could operate on one another even at a distance. In ancient Greece, for example, it was believed that a bloodstone amulet could cure diseases of the blood. According to this account of the universe, it was plausible that a depiction might be vested with the properties of the thing depicted. And if wearing an amulet conferred power, how much more power might be gained by consuming it. Incised amulets from ancient Greece show signs of scraping, which may indicate that the powder produced was mixed with liquid and drunk. Christianity inherited the sympathetic view of the cosmos, as well as the connection between physical healing and blessing. In the sixth century, a man was cured of his intestinal worms after drinking an infusion of the hair of Simeon Stylites the Younger, an ascetic who lived on top of a pillar, with ‘dust of his blessing’. The word ‘blessing’ (eulogia) in this account may refer to a terracotta disc bearing the image of Simeon, of the kind that pilgrims would have acquired at his tomb near Antioch. To ingest something was to assimilate it; in the Hebrew Bible, Ezekiel is given prophetic knowledge after eating a scroll on the instruction of a heavenly voice. He claims to find the scroll as sweet as honey. Medieval illuminators eagerly depicted this act of bibliophagy, a literalisation of the reception of the divine word.

Yet in spite of Koering’s emphasis on the power of images, premodern thinkers did not mistake them for the things they represented, nor were they thought to have powers in their own right. The presence of an engraved image may have helped make a gemstone an amulet, but the image was not consumed as an image. Simeon Stylites’s miracle occurred not because of the image on the token, but because the objects had come into contact with the holy man himself. Even Koering’s formulation about the woman of Constantinople – that she was ‘healed by the image’ – is, he admits, misleading. As the anonymous Byzantine Greek writer who recorded the incident is at pains to specify, the woman was not made whole by the frescoed wall, but by the saints whom the painting represented. The woman herself, the writer insists, understood that God was working on her behalf through the good offices of His helpers.

Even so, Koering recovers rich traces of a fundamental human quest: the effort to make contact with the divine. Whether pagan, Byzantine or Western Christian, believers all pursued healing of the body and the spirit, and sought proximity to the sacred as best they could. It wasn’t so much that the ‘image’s power was fragile, relative and mysterious’, in Koering’s words, but that the workings of the godhead were inscrutable. If seeing is believing, then touching was receiving, and grinding up and drinking holy things the ultimate assimilation.

Medicine offered a naturalistic account of healing through ingestion: Galen, whose school of medical science predominated from antiquity until the 17th century, prescribed the intake of specific liquids or solids to balance out the bodily humours. For Christians, however, accounting for the way sacred power (virtus) was transmitted through objects such as holy icons remained a problem. Medieval theologians struggled to rationalise ingestive practices, redolent of paganism as they were. It was clear to any Christian scholar that painted images didn’t heal; God did. For the less educated, however, this distinction was less obvious.

The question of ingestion became particularly contentious during the Iconoclastic Controversy, the violent struggle between Iconoclasts and image venerators in the eighth and ninth-century Byzantine Empire. Iconoclasts viewed the worship of images as a form of idolatry, and accused the image venerators of consuming scrapings of painted icons as if they were equivalent to the Eucharistic bread and wine. The idea was later revived by Protestant reformers: in 1524 a pamphleteer from Zurich claimed that throughout the German lands people were ‘gnawing away at images as if they wished to devour their feet’. Two centuries later, William Hogarth’s disturbing etching Enthusiasm Delineated, produced between 1760 and 1762, shows parishioners with simian features devouring statuettes of Christ. Hogarth, a deist, was attacking both icon worship and the sacrament of the Eucharist, tarring Christians as idolaters and cannibals.

The Eucharist, Christianity’s most important ingestion, had reduced the broad sacrificial menu of Egypt, Greece and pagan Rome to a single main offering: bread. In Eastern Christendom, the leavened Eucharistic bread was marked with a cruciform seal bearing the letters ‘IC XC NI KA’ to signify Jesus Christ victorious. In the West, the unleavened host was also impressed, but decoration wasn’t standardised. Iron host presses made from the 12th century onwards bear witness to the varied design of the Eucharist, from Christ on the Cross and the Christogram ‘IHS’ (from the Greek name for Jesus, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ) to more literal statements such as ‘Qui mi mangara la benedicio de Deu aura’ (he who eats me will have the blessing of God).

If the host became the body of Christ, as the Fourth Lateran Council decreed in 1215, why did it need to be stamped? No liturgical rule required it. Rather, the images reinforced the meaning of the sacrament, serving as an ‘imaginative support’, in Koering’s words. Other such supports included paintings depicting the apparition of Christ at the altar in the Mass of Saint Gregory, and monstrances, ornate containers for the host displayed during the festival of Corpus Christi (itself established to raise awareness of the Eucharistic miracle). Mass production of the stamped host made it a material instantiation of the Christian principle of ‘the many in the One’. Koering borrows from Georges Didi-Huberman the paradox of the stamp: ‘the seal certifies and authenticates, even as it is reproduced ad infinitum.’ Perhaps this isn’t a paradox, but instead points to the particular qualities of impression as a technology of reproduction. Whether on a wax seal or a stamped host, the impressed image makes visible the matrix that shaped it – an apt metaphor for the word made flesh. The faithful who took the communion wafer did not just consume the same body of Christ, but quite literally the same image.

The earliest​ surviving printed document in human history is a scrap of a miniature scroll printed using woodblock between 650 and 670, during the Tang dynasty. It was found in a tomb in Xi’an in 1974 and bears a Sanskrit text, the ‘great spell of unsullied pure light’. Similar printed spells have been recovered in Korea and Japan; their purpose was both to ward off evil and to earn spiritual merit for those who produced them. From the very beginning, printing seemed like a way to spread holiness in the world, a new solution to an old problem. The first documented use of block printing in 15th-century Europe was to create devotional souvenirs that could be displayed in the home. These prints could even serve as stand-ins for the icons they depicted: in 1485, Mona Lisabetta, a 26-year-old from Pisa, regained her use of speech when a paper image of Santa Maria delle Carceri of Prato was placed over her lips.

Even before the advent of printing, however, the cult of relics had posed questions about reproducibility. Relics were pieces of saints or objects that had belonged to them; they proclaimed their status in various ways, from their ability to withstand decomposition to the miracles they performed. Pilgrims flocked to relic shrines such as Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk or Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to experience these material manifestations of holiness as intimately as possible. They wanted not just to see the relics but to touch them and kiss them, and they hoped to take home something more than, say, the scallop shells that were the traditional souvenir of a visit to Compostela. This cupidity alarmed the custodians of the relics. Montaigne writes of a sign hung at the Holy House of Loreto warning that ‘if it were permitted to take anything away, there would not be enough to last three days.’ The wardens of Loreto gave away the dust swept from the Holy House in the hope of preventing pilgrims from taking anything more valuable. The pilgrims made the dust into a beverage and drank it.

Some stewards of relics may have been victims of their own success. As the art historian Christopher Wood has shown, German monasteries in the late 15th century took advantage of the introduction of movable type to publicise their collections. St Ulrich’s and St Afra’s Abbey in Augsburg, for example, printed cheap broadsheets depicting all of its 61 reliquaries arranged in tidy rows. The little woodcuts were simplified representations of each reliquary, an assortment of crosses, altar panels, arm-shaped receptacles, chests, tabernacles and other decorative containers (each figure was furnished with an explanation of what it contained). Ecclesiastical authorities soon published illustrated books of relics in Vienna, Bamberg, Wittenberg and Halle. The relic had entered the age of mechanical reproduction.

This transition was not untroubled. What was the relationship of representation to original? Could a woodcut image really stand in for a physical icon? Touch offered a kind of solution. Contact transmitted holiness; placing things on the bodily remains of a saint, or on items they had touched in their lifetime, created a new class of objects, which historians call contact relics (or third-class relics). This made possible the creation of enough relics to satisfy, in principle, an infinite number of believers. The woodcut that restored Mona Lisabetta’s speech in Pisa was a contact relic. Its holiness derived from the fact that the sheet had touched the original icon in Prato. Print represented the Madonna of Prato, but touch guaranteed her presence.

Printed images​ or texts could also serve as a kind of warranty. Stamping things as a guarantee of provenance had long preceded woodblock printing. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘the Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping.’ Since antiquity small tokens of terra sigillata (unglazed terracotta) had been consumed as medical remedies. The images pressed into them did not themselves possess healing powers, but they indicated provenance, much like the words ‘Parmigiano Reggiano’ punched into the rinds of Emilian cheese wheels today. In the 11th century the papacy created the Agnus Dei, a small wax disc stamped with the figure of a lamb, produced in batches of hundreds of thousands. As late as 1690, two Franciscan nuns in the Veneto from the Order of the Poor Clares were healed of their fever and toothache by nibbling on an Agnus Dei. Yet the very technology meant to guarantee holiness was at risk of undermining it. How to tell authentic sacral object from worthless counterfeit? Mass production sapped the ‘aura’, to use Benjamin’s term, of holiness. But a compensatory ritual, benediction, helped restore it. It was benediction that made tokens of wax into Christian amulets. As Koering writes, ‘it was only with the serial production of images … that the blessing of images was to become more generally adopted by the Church of Rome.’ This gave the Church a commercial advantage in ‘the devotional print market by rendering unblessed objects null and void’.

Schabmadonnen, terracotta statuettes of the Virgin Mary that represented a particular miracle, were popular in the Catholic German-speaking lands from the 17th century. They were fashioned from clay that had been in contact with the statue or relic on which they were based and could be scraped like a hunk of hard cheese, the flakes mixed with water or wine to make a healing drink. Unsurprisingly, forgeries abounded: as an anonymous 18th-century writer recounted, ‘shiftless people, always on the lookout for a sordid profit’ gathered near the shrine of the Madonna of Einsiedeln, outside Zurich, to sell fake versions of what the Benedictines gave away for free at the abbey doors.

In one section of the book, Koering describes the pastries, such as German gingerbread and Italian ricotta cakes, that were made with technologies of replication: bread stamps, wafering irons, marzipan and gingerbread moulds. Convents sold or gave away figurative waffles on feast days, adorning them with seasonal images: the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel for the Annunciation, the Virgin nursing the Christ child for the Nativity. The Poor Clares of Monteluce in Perugia lent out their wafering irons to extend their charity even when they weren’t making the wafers themselves. Such customs survive today in Catania, where ‘minne di Sant’Agata’ – individual portions of cassata – are prepared for the feast of Agatha of Sicily, the city’s patron saint. Each is shaped like one of her breasts, which were removed with tongs during her martyrdom.

German gingerbread, known as Lebkuchen, was moulded in the shape of images from the Bible. For one 16th-century preacher from Strasbourg, baking gingerbread provided an extended metaphor for the Passion: ‘just like [the son in relation to] the father, our gingerbread was formed and made with its own mould.’ Baking on a large scale had secular applications too. In 1466, Giovanni Rucellai of Florence ordered four thousand cialde (wafers) for his son’s marriage to the daughter of Piero de’ Medici. Koering reads this as an almost sacramental injunction that wedding guests ‘take into [their] own body a symbolic image of the hereditary blood’. But Renaissance nobles put their coats of arms on all sorts of things; at a banquet, it would have appeared on the dishware and cutlery. Armorial wafers served as a brand extension. Did eating them make guests ‘a member of the family’, or were the biscuits simply a heavy-handed show of largesse?

Rucellai’s wafers are a relatively sober example. From the Renaissance onwards, food sculptures presented allegories at festivities whose ephemerality they shared. Form and function met in edible allegories of charity or liberality. The fashion for large sugar trionfi (‘triumphs’) decorating princely tables depended on the sugar made available by the expanding Atlantic plantation economy. The viewers who ate these creations with their eyes more than their mouths weren’t healed or transformed through the act of ingestion, of course; they merely bore witness to princely splendour.

More emblematic of Koering’s concerns are the German Schluckbildchen (‘images for swallowing’), printed sheets of woodcut pictures of saints that were produced cheaply in great numbers until the middle of the 20th century. Descendants of the early experiments with printing images of relics, Schluckbildchen could be chopped up and pasted onto a cake, or ground up and drunk. Before that, however, they had to be placed in contact with the icons they represented. How this was done is not clear, since a sheet could contain as many as 130 figures; presumably the faithful did not have to travel to all of the original shrines. Perhaps one holy icon could bless a whole printed leaf – the many in the One.

Not all of Koering’s iconophages are equally interesting. Despite the presence of an 18th-century Austrian wooden sculpture of the lactating Virgin, designed to spray water or milk at parishioners, the pages on ingestion as image or figure of speech are less successful than those on ingestion as healing; metaphor pales before miracle. Besides, for my money the imagery of ingestion has never been better used than in the Upanishads (not quoted by Koering), where eating explains the interconnection of the entire universe. As the Taittiriya Upanishad puts it, ‘I am food! I am food! I am food!/I eat food! I eat food! I eat food!’