Shrine with relic of St. Dimitry of Rostov in Spaso-Yakovlevsky abbey in Rostov. Source: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress). Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday in First Things’ daily “On the Square” column, Matthew Cantirino highlighted Sergius Bulgakov’s theology of relics, recently translated by Boris Jakim.
Cantirino writes,
Even today, it must be admitted, the subject of relics is an often-overlooked one in theology, and especially in popular apologetics. To the minds of many the topic remains a curio—a mild embarrassment better left to old ladies’ devotionals, or the pages of Chaucer. Yet, for Bulgakov, this awkward intrusion of the physical is precisely what religion needs in modernity…. As he sees it, all relics take part in (and, in some sense, become) aspects [of] the greatest of all “relics,” the bread of the Eucharist. And it is for this reason, he notes, that altars include… relics at their core. Like the Eucharist, saints’ relics “are not corpses; rather, they are bodies of resurrection; and saints do not die.”
Read more on Sergius Bulgakov’s “Religious Materialism” and Spiritual Hope…
