Paris 2: The Chapel of St. Vincent DePaul

"Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man's body into Elisha's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet" (2 Kings 13:21, New International Version).

Relic veneration was present in popular religions of the Middle Ages, and indeed has been a part of Christianity since the early Church. The now distinctly Catholic practice takes cues from the Council of Trent, and is further developed in the "Roman Catechism," based on the belief that the bodies of deceased saints are to be regarded as former temples of the Holy Spirit. Augustine wrote that a man's body "belongs to his very nature." It is no surprise that this practice has become essential to Catholicism, in all of its corporeal, visceral sensibilities. Catholicism is a bodily tradition; in Catholic churches, the body of God hangs on the wall, above the altar. It is the utmost and ultimate focus and the salvation of the Catholic, through first the Incarnation, and then the Passion, the death. And still, the body remains. From those traditions come, quite logically, an interest in and veneration of other things somehow both holy and corporeal. Some relics recognized and authenticated by the Roman Catholic Church include: Jesus' baby blanket, Jesus' foreskin, Jesus' loin cloth worn on the cross, St. Augustine's elbow, the rest of St. Augustine's body (in churches in Algeria and Italy, repsectively), and the body of St. Theresa of Avila. There is a relic of some sort in every consecrated Catholic church.

Not the least incredible among this tradition was that, I was told a few years ago, the Chapel of St. Vincent DePaul in Paris, in fact held and displayed, as its obligatory relic, the body of St. Vincent DePaul and not, I was told, a few hairs or a fragment of bone, and not held in a sealed, opaque box, but, in the true spirit of Catholic corporeality, upon the path cut by God in His body, by a theology of atonement and by that body, despite the Ascension, still nailed bleeding to the walls of every Catholic church in the world, St. Vincent was displayed, preserved, in a glass box, for true Catholic corporeal reflection and devotion. Relatively anonymous, the chapel stands not separate from the block, only slightly marked, only moderately sized. But all sense of Catholic grandeur is upheld within its walls, ornate, variously wood and gold, all along the knave of the chapel, a different martyr stands, one in each window, down from their crosses, St. Alban holding his own decapitated head, marking the path to the body contained therein. The arrangement is striking, majestic; St. Vincent, in repose, in glass, high above and slightly behind the altar, dressed in bright light like stage lighting, reflected in an angled mirror just above, smaller, holy figures surrounding him. To visit the body, one walks up an enclosed staircase on the right side of the knave, at the front of the chapel, which emerges onto the tiny stage, there with the relic, nearly at the chapel’s ceiling, in the center of the universe of the Chapel of St. Vincent DePaul. Those few praying below are likely not concerned with those giving devotion to or merely viewing St. Vincent, but one would merely need to open one’s eyes, or perhaps shift them slightly upward, depending on one’s placement in the chapel, to see the arched back of a pilgrim, as prominent as a priest upon the altar and more conspicuous for his elevation.

The body of St. Vincent DePaul, like a body in an open casket at an endless and ongoing wake, only vaguely resembles a human being, either alive or dead. That is, like the recently deceased who lays in an open casket at a wake, he is waxy and perfect, paradoxically both shrunken and expanded, bloated. In the living and the dead, there is both growth and decay, and neither cease in either state. The relic that is St. Vincent DePaul is neither growing nor decaying and so is really neither dead nor alive and uncannily appears as such. Because I am told that this figure is the body of a dead man, I look at it and try to imagine that such is the case, but in truth, it is likely a wax casting, a wax figure in fact just like those in the wax museums of tourist towns, if one that contains, within its materials, elements of the man’s body that it represents. And I must admit that I was, in fact, expecting something other than a monument shaped like a man, that I was expecting a corpus, something that seemed as though it would inspire prayer by acting first on the viscus of the pilgrim, and yet, I think, it must do that. Here is not a name in stone, the chapel can boast, but that to which the name in stone would refer. And whether or not it seems to me that there is still another reference put into play by the figure’s waxiness, by the unnaturalness, as dead or alive, it is, in that glass box, a body as a shell, as a body is, or so it might be. It is without animation, without animism, without âme; it has not path, itself, no voie, and it does not see, voir.