Athanasius on not honoring relics

[RamistThomist]

This is neat on several accounts. For one, the leading defender of icons and relics in antiquity, John of Damascus. And he is speaking, admitting, of the greatest of all fathers, Athanasius.

Damascus says in Part 1 of On Holy Images,

“we know that blessed Athanasius objected to the bodies of saints being put into chests, and that he preferred their burial in the ground, wishing to set at nought the strange custom of the Egyptians, who did not bury their dead under ground, but set them upon beds and couches.”

 

[Pergamum]

I highly recommend the book, "
Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe" by Charles Freeman.

Linked here: https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Bones-D...8&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=holy+bones+holly+dust

It tells how Ambrose Bishop of Milan pushed for the greater practice of venerating relics and bringing relics into the church. Very strangely, Ambrose interviewed two demon-possessed men so that the demons could testify to the identity of the bones as being those of two early martyrs and then, based upon that interview of demons, brought in the bones to the church. Thus, relics grew as a practice directly due to interactions with demons.

"He pushed forward some victims of demonic possession, and a devil, confronted by the awesome power of saintly remains, cried out from one of them that the bodies were indeed those of martyrs. It names them as Gervasius and Protasius. Some old men were then produced to claim that they recognized these names as those of martyred Christians from many decades before. The bodies were loaded up into a cart and the procession then set off back into the city with its sacred cargo." (Location 484 in the Kindle edition).

Doctrines verified by demons...