He Is Not Here

Place, writes Robert Pogue Harrison (The Dominion of the Dead), is established by a hic jacet: “here lies” the body of my ancestors. To this the gospel poses a direction challenge: When the women show up at the tomb of Jesus, angels tell them hic non est, He is not here. The empty tomb “points away from hic jacet; that is, from a site marked by its resident dead” (110). As a result, “theologically speaking, the whole earth becomes, for the person of faith, the empty tomb of Easter morning—a place rendered sacred not because it is swollen with the bones of those who have died, but because its law of death has been overturned by Christ during his residence in the tomb. . . . Filled with the promise of a new life, the earth as a whole becomes not a conglomerate of places but one new place: the place of Easter morning” (110-11). Insofar as burial founds civilization, the resurrection undoes civilization as it had been known.

Harrison knows, though, that the history of Christianity doesn’t follow the apparent trajectory of Easter: “On the one hand Christian faith marks a repudiation and transcendence of sepulchral foundationalism; on the other hand, its institutional history shows very clearly that its church retrieved or fell back upon precisely such foundationalism. Rome became its hic. . . . not only the Basilica of Saint Peter, but every consecrated Holy Roman church contains the tombs, relics, or bones of dead saints” (111). Tombs of martyrs became sites of Eucharistic celebration, and a church was only consecrated over the relics of a saint.

Harrison wonders, “Are we dealing here with a contradiction or instead, a transformation of the meaning of the sepulcher?” (111), and he opts for the latter interpretation. Against Vigilantius, who argued that the cult of relics was a reversion to paganism and idolatry, “Jerome argued that by adoring the martyrs’ relics Christians were in fact adoring the Lord on whose behalf they were martyred. Augustine, who saw in the Christ even a radical break with all forms of paganism, went even further an declared the saints’ bodies to be the limbs of the Holy Spirit.” By the Second Council of Nicea (787), opposition to the cult of relics had been overcome: “only churches that possessed them could be consecrated. These relics were and still are often enclosed in the ‘altar stones’ of Roman Catholic churches. When the priest kisses the mensa at the beginning of the Mass he is in effect acknowledging the presence of the dead in the altar stone” (117).

Thus the tension of the gospel and the cult of the dead is “resolved only if one conceives of the saints’ bodies as somehow ‘alive’ with expectation and animated by futurity.” The tombs of martyrs and saints aren’t like pagan tombs but rather resemble the empty tomb of Jesus, “no more than a sign of what escaped their grasp. The tombs held their relics, to be sure, yet the relics were adored as the evidence of things unseen, namely the promise of resurrection. The saints’ dead bones were the skeletal preludes to a glorified body. This transformation of death into life . . . made of the martyr’s tomb a monument of projective hope.” Of the martyrs too it may be said “seek not the living among the dead” (117-8). Commemoration of the dead took a new form, not mournful but expectant: “For the commentators the dead already belonged to the ever-present futurity of the Kingdom, and so too did the souls of the believers in the moment of commemoration. Just as the martyrs’ deaths repeated the Crucifixion, so too those who stayed behind repeated, or petitioned again, the Kingdom to come” (118-9).

All this may seem marginal to the big theological issues of Christian history, but that’s a misperception. At least in the West, it has been a sometimes subterranean dividing point between Protestants (who take it that the resurrection overthrows all cults of the dead) and Catholics (who take it that the resurrection transforms the cult of the dead into a cult of the living). Instincts about sacred space, veneration of relics, the purpose and shape of the liturgy are all interwoven with different views of the import of Hic non est.