Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews Read Online Free PDF

Mom would tell us the legend of the enchantress whose song lured boatmen onto the rocks. Passing the giant statue of Bismarck on a mountaintop, Mom would call it "the Watch on the Rhine," and we would joke that it was another of the clocks she'd taken to collecting. "Look at that!" she'd say, but what she meant was "Look at us!" If only the headset girls she had supervised at the phone company in the Loop could see her now!
    Our visits to Cologne, perhaps four hours down the Rhine, were emblematic of all that was at stake for us. That city was living proof both of the savagery of which an unleashed America was capable—by 1945, 90 percent of Cologne's city center was reduced to rubble—and of our nation's sensitivity, for our skilled bombardiers had spared the great Cologne Cathedral, whose twin steeples, before the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889, had been the tallest structures in the world. I would not realize it until years later, but one reason we drove all that way to Cologne, while almost never crossing into nearby Mainz, was that the even more sacred cathedral of Mainz had been half leveled by the same Allied bombers that spared Cologne's Dom. Even in 1959, a decade and a half after the destruction, the holy center of Mainz was not fully restored. We spared ourselves that refutation of American humaneness by pretending it was not there.
    The other thing that took us to Cologne were the relics of the Three Kings, the Magi. Their bones were, and still are, enshrined in a triple pyramid of gold caskets on the high altar of the cathedral. How did the dust of Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar come to rest in that far city of Europe and not in Arabia, Mesopotamia, or Babylon? The answer hinges on the medieval politics of relics. Seeking to strengthen his hold on the northern realm, Frederick Barbarossa brought the remains of the Wise Men to Cologne in 1164. The subsequent influx of pilgrims, requiring the building of the new cathedral, lent prestige to the imperial center, solidifying its market and helping it to compete with Mainz and Trier. But where, twelve hundred years after the Epiphany, had Barbarossa obtained such relics? He found them in Milan, the imperial center to which they had been brought in the fourth century.
    Around that time, the bones of saints and martyrs, and other relics, had become central to the religious imagination of the Church. Things believed to be remnants of an earlier age, and associated with its heroes, enabled the faithful to feel connected to the sacred past, even to invoke its magical power. When Constantine was buried, twelve empty coffins were placed around his, one for each of the apostles. By the time his son died, the bones of several apostles had been "discovered" and brought to the imperial mausoleum. 1 Coffins no longer had to be empty. The Christian hunger for the Incarnate God spawned a hunger for nearly unlimited incarnations of holiness.
    I remember a young American priest explaining about the bones of the Three Kings to my mother and me on our tour of the cathedral. What jolted me, and what ties the memory of my mother to the knot of this story, was that he credited the relics to the mother of Constantine, Saint Helena, a woman I had heard my mother speak of as the discoverer of the True Cross. Saint Helena had brought the bones of the Magi to Milan, the priest said, and her name made it seem true. As the priest walked us around that sanctuary, speaking of her—Helena was a general's wife, like my mother—I felt the bond with my mother as something new.
    The triple sarcophagus is large enough for adult corpses. It is elaborately gilded, bejeweled, and embossed with bas-relief biblical scenes. The crest of the city of Cologne bears three crowns, for this. How does an uncertain teenage boy dismiss such accumulated piety? There is a hint of the genius of the Catholic aesthetic in the tradition of reverence for relics, a manifestation of the deep sacredness of the flesh, a