Busillis
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I'm reading a book called Extra Virginity, which is a history of olive oil. The snippets below concern olive oil
and the Church. Anybody see anything false here?
I've never heard that Christ's foreskin and umbilical cord were relics.
Here's some snippets:
| Quote: | COOKBOOKS, LIKE HISTORIES, are written by the victors. When
the Germanic tribes of northern and eastern Europe overran the Roman
Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they revolutionized its culinary
fashions and brought the revenge of animal fat on imperial oil. These
woodland hunters and pastoralists, who dressed in skins and furs instead of
linen togas and silken tunics, introduced a Germanic nouvelle cuisine based
not on the Greco-Roman triad of bread, wine, and olive oil but on meat,
beer, and animal fat. The tastes of the new masters of empire soon caught
on. Pork was included together with oil in the annona, the distribution of
free food made to Roman citizens living in the capital. Forests came to be
measured not in hectares but in hogs—the space that a pig grazed in a day.
On illustrated calendars, December scenes of the olive harvest familiar to
the Greeks and Romans gave way to pigs battening on woodland acorns,
and the hog slaughter. Classical authors, who had formerly described the
barbarian predilection for animal fat with bewilderment or disgust, now
celebrated it: Anthimus, a learned philosopher and physician at the court of
Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, described the wondrous
qualities of lard, which he said the northlanders used as a dressing for
vegetables and every other sort of food, and even ate raw as a kind of cureall:
“For them it is such a remedy that they have no need for other
medicines.”
In the sea of barbarian beer, butter, and lard that washed over the
ancient empire, Christian monasteries and cathedrals formed isolated
islands of old-fashioned oil expertise. Olive oil remained a vital ingredient
in the worship, economy, health, and daily diet of the Christian
clergy, and through them, in the lives of the faithful. To make their holy
oils and light their churches, monks and priests needed steady supplies of
olive oil. To this end, church councils decreed the protection of olive
groves, sometimes prohibiting the cutting of even a single tree. Olive oil
was often used as an alternative currency, and commanded a premium
price: in high medieval contracts, three to five liters of oil had the same
value as a fat hog. Monk-agronomists tended the olive groves and made oil
on their communal lands according to the advice of Cato, Columella, and
other classical authorities, whose tracts they could consult in their monastic
libraries. As the Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, their national
diets entered into tension with the dictates of the Church, especially during
fast days, when Christians were forbidden to eat meat and animal fat. For
100 to 150 days each year—Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and a range of
other holidays and vigils that were determined by local custom—good
Christians used olive oil instead of suet or lard to cook and season their
food.
Making olive oil required some old-time Greco-Roman skill, which
the barbarians often lacked. In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great tells a
story from the life of Sanctulus of Norcia, a sixth-century priest who lived
in what is now Umbria shortly after the area was conquered by Lombard
war bands. Sanctulus arrived at an olive mill one day and asked its pagan
Lombard owners to fill his oilskin. These rough men, who had struggled all
day at their press without obtaining so much as a drop of oil, thought
Sanctulus was mocking them and cursed him loudly. The imperturbable
saint merely smiled and said cheerfully, “Is this how you pray for me?
Come, fill my skin and I will leave you.” As the Lombards renewed their
insults, Sanctulus glanced at the press and saw that no oil was coming out.
He asked for a bucket of water, blessed it, and then, with all eyes on him,
threw it over the press. “And such an abundance of oil ran forth,” the
hagiographer concludes, “that the Lombards, who before had long labored
in vain, now had enough oil to fill not only their own vessels, but also his
skin. Their hearts were filled with gratitude, because the holy man, who
had come to them begging for oil, was now,through his blessings, supplying
in great abundance that which he himself had come to find.”
Sanctulus’s help was probably more technical than celestial:
experienced millers commonly threw hot water on their presses to increase
yields, especially during the second pressing, when they coaxed a few last
drops of oil from the nearly spent pomace. (The expressions “first pressed”
and “cold pressed” once distinguished high-quality oil extracted from fresh
olives from oil made with the overheated dregs. Nowadays these terms are
largely obsolete, because all true extra virgin oil is made from fresh olives
milled at low temperatures, and most of it isn’t pressed at all, but
centrifuged.)
Olive oil was also an essential fuel in churches, burning in lamps at
altars and saintly shrines. Some large churches consumed huge quantities:
in the Lateran basilica during the fifth century, 8,730 oil lamps burned
around the clock, all year long. Olive oil was preferred to other fuels
because it was long-lasting, gave off a clear, brilliant light, and was
odorless—the pork fat customarily burned in the lanterns at the ninthcentury
abbey of Fulda smelled so foul that its studious abbot Rabanus
Maurus, who certainly burned much midnight fat himself, begged the
Carolingian king Louis the Pious for an olive grove in Italy, to light his
church in a more seemly and fragrant way. No doubt agreeing with
Rabanus, well-to-do worshippers throughout Europe willed money gifts or
supplies of oil to churches, to fuel lamps that would burn perpetually for
the salvation of their souls. Sailors and traders who arrived in the port of
Venice, following an ancient tradition, left money or oil to fuel the altar
lamps of the Basilica of San Marco. Elsewhere the faithful bequeathed
olive trees or entire groves to a church, to supply oil for its lamps. When a
group of knights rode through Puglia in 1147 on their way to the Holy Land
during the Second Crusade, they stopped at the Bari cathedral to pay their
respects to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the city, to whom they deeded
the oil of forty olive trees in perpetuity, on the condition that a lamp with
their oil be kept burning continuously until their safe return. Such bequests
often stipulated that the gift be void if oil were used that had not come
from the deeded groves—evidence of a brisk trade in ersatz lamp oil, perhaps
cut with liquefied pork fat.
While in the Bari cathedral, the knights no doubt collected some oil as
well, to preserve them during their upcoming ordeal in the Holy Land. The
bones of Saint Nicholas, which had been transferred there from Turkey
sixty years earlier, were celebrated throughout Europe for the miraculous
oil they exuded, said to cure countless diseases. Nicholas’s grave was one
of many sites in Europe and the Middle East where the relics of a saint
gave off a holy oil, as sweet-smelling as the flowers of Paradise, which
might spring up like a holy gusher at the anniversary of the saint’s death.
Even the oil that burned in the lamps beside saintly shrines frequently had
sacred power. Perhaps because of olive oil’s well-known tendency to
absorb tastes and fragrances, as well as its time-honored associations with
divinity, lamp oil was believed to soak up the sanctity of the shrines where
it burned, becoming the essence of holiness. Medieval pilgrims eagerly
collected this substance, known as “the oil of the saints” or “the oil of
prayer,” at holy places across the Christian world, and brought it home in
small bottles of silver, lead, or terra-cotta known as ampullae, which are
still found in the treasuries of many European churches, some containing
traces of holy oil. This oil also made the ideal preservative for saintly
relics; in eleventh century Rome, Christ’s foreskin and umbilical cord
(which He evidently left behind when He ascended bodily to heaven) were
reverently stored under oil in the pope’s private chapel. Saintly lamp oil
was held in such regard that some Monophysite heretics drank it during the
Mass instead of communion wine.
To this day, the bones of Saint Nicholas are still believed to exude a
holy, healing oil, which the cathedral clergy collects each year in a solemn
May ceremony. After the crypt in Bari was renovated in the 1990s,
however, the quantity of liquid has dropped off sharply; today the priests
only manage to sponge up a few precious glassfuls, which they dilute with
several gallons of holy water and distribute to the faithful. Cutting
Nicholas’s holy oil doesn’t seem to trouble the Catholic Church, which is
less concerned about oil purity than in former times: Pope Paul VI ruled in
1973 that vegetable oil could be used instead of olive oil in the
sacramental anointing of the sick.
Even in the Middle Ages, for all its holy resonance, olive oil remained
a slippery substance, semantically and symbolically, and it was possible to
have too much of a good thing. Because it had been widely used in Greco-
Roman baths, gymnasia, amphitheaters, and temples, where it was a vital
active ingredient in athletics, hedonism, flashy sexuality, and religious
sacrifice, olive oil retained a whiff of paganism that Christians sometimes
found offputting, even threatening. The Church attempted to coopt some of
these symbolic valences, applying chrism and other holy oils to the bodies
of the faithful at baptism, confirmation, exorcism, and extreme unction,
which theologians were quick to point out made them athletes of Christ in
the contest against sin and evil. However, uneasy memories remained
trapped in olive oil, and the strict regulation of its use as a skin lotion in
early monastic communities suggests its lasting heathen appeal. A monastic
rule of the fifth century prescribes severe punishments for monks who
cover themselves in oil after a bath, and enjoins, “Do not permit anyone to
spread your body with oil, except in cases of grave illness.” Ascetics like
Saint Anthony, the formidable desert hermit, demonstrated their superiority
to paganism and the wiles of the flesh by renouncing a well-oiled body
forever: Anthony ostentatiously refrained from applying any oil to his
limbs, much to the amazement of his contemporaries.
........
At any rate, the sacred role of olive oil in hagiography tracked the
widespread popular use of olive oil to cure a range of maladies. Medieval
pharmacists and apothecaries, following the advice of Hippocrates,
prescribed olive oil against numerous ailments, from skin disease to
digestive disorders to gynecological complaints, and used it as a base for
numerous philters and unguents; medieval formularies mention oil-based
extracts of scorpion, viper, stork, bat, fox, and other medicinal creatures.
Some authorities prescribed a hot bath followed by a full-body rubdown
with olive oil to cure kidney stones and seizures, and recommended
submerging the lower half of the body in oil as an antidote against certain
poisons. Olive oil, taken internally, was considered an effective cure for
many ailments, including intestinal worms, snakebite, and even insanity,
though one medical writer cautioned that oil not be given to people of a
choleric disposition. Monastic cellarers believed olives and oil to be
effective in reestablishing a proper balance among bodily humors, and
sometimes prescribed olive oil to control violent impulses or sexual urges,
which were thought to result from an excess of hot and moist humors in the
blood. Doctors and holy men alike used oil against leprosy, blindness,
and demonic possession, wives fed it to their husbands to free them from
the wiles and incantations of prostitutes. Occasionally, holy oil and oil of
the saints could even resuscitate the dead.
Yet olive oil was also employed in evil spells and incantations. The
Church issued frequent bans against the use of consecrated holy oils by
sorcerers and magicians; in the year 810, for example, the chapter of the
cathedral of Tours ordered priests to guard the holy chrism vigilantly,
because of the widespread belief that any criminal who managed to anoint
himself with it could never be brought to trial. And there was a fine line
between holy oil and snake oil. In the 430s, a monk appeared in Carthage
carrying a martyr’s bone steeped in oil. Sick people and cripples that he
dosed with the oil seemed to recover, at least as long as the monk was with
them, but after he left they invariably relapsed. The citizens of Carthage
eventually decided that his supposed cures were the result of demonic
hallucinations rather than divine healing, and the monkish grifter skipped
town. |
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| Posted Feb 27, 2012, 10:06 am |
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