Relics: A question of significance for the Renaissance

What function do relics serve within the religious worldview?  Is the opal ring of Mary meant to establish some kind of religious pilgrimage destination?  Does the preserved arm of Karl Der Grosse lead to the forgiveness of sins?  Marco, our Assisi guide, established several of the functional norms for a Christian relic and reliquary in the mindset of the past.  To them, the relics contain some of the holiness of the saint that the bone fragments or significant item pertained to.  As a result, the city to which the relic belongs is seen as protected and guarded especially by the spirit, store house of merit, and prayers of the respective saint.  This protection met the likelihood of pestilence, war and destruction and dismantled it outright.  The product instilled faith, courage, and hope in the general masses.  The Perugians took great pride in their possession of the grandiose marriage ring of Mary in their possession.  As did the inhabitants of Assisi to possess the habit, hair, prayer chords and various other paraphernalia of the early 13^th century saints, Francesco and Chiara.  But with the increasing secularization and understanding of reality’s containment within this plain of becoming as opposed to the Platonic interpretation of the Christian God’s possession of all true forms in his presence, we must ask, what function have the relics continued to serve?  At some point it seems obvious that as people begin to understand the human body better, recognizing, as did Leonardo da Vinci, the true intricacies of its build as well as its pathways to ailments, the people were much less likely to receive items of the past saints to provide protection.  I care to argue that this led to the product that can be witnessed in today’s society: no longer does the relic serve the same purpose it once did.  Now perhaps more than the past, it is simply an item intended for devotion towards the figure and a reminder of what their function was in relation to Christianity.  What then, though can I say is to blame, the main cause for this shift in understanding something as significant as a relic?  What between the modern age and the Medieval period is to blame for such an occurrence? Perhaps the secularism of the Renaissance played a heavy part in the shifting sands thereof.  It seems in all likely hood that a different understanding of the way the world functions and the direction towards which all things point would engender this difference in comprehension of relics!  The secularism of the Renaissance would perhaps recognize that people are not stricken ill from the wrath of God but perhaps is the result of something more earthly bound.  Therefore the necessity of relics in the protection of a state is largely mitigated by this turn of events.  Similarly the growing belief in humanity’s capabilities, the greater understanding of the design and operation of the human body, would evince a sort of humanism playing a hand in the significance of relics.  This also may explain a different sort of understanding of the function of saints in general.  Whereas sainthood seemed entirely aimed at the ethereal before the Renaissance, the painting of the Renaissance evinces a sort of ethereal grounding of those peoples, so that no longer are people considering saints as something entirely of another plain, but perhaps their function has shifted to an importance of comprehension of this time and space instead.  Thus the secularist and humanist tendencies of the Renaissance provide the fulcrum to redirect the attention and significance of the relics.  Today, relics serve a different purpose than that which they first inhabited.  Perhaps it is my Baptist understanding of the nature of idolatry and iconography, but I can distinctly recall earlier this trip commenting to one of my professors the idolatrous nature of some of the reliquaries in the Medici chapel in Firenze.  Though I was frustrated with being chastised at the time, I have naught but shear joy at the corrections I received therein, for the lessons I learned have utterly shifted my view of relics.  By no means would I confess any sort medieval comprehension of the sort of mystical prowess of relics (the absence thereof likely evincing the sort of soft rationalism so oft related to Renaissance thinking) but the religious significance they contain for me goes without limit.  These religious items deserve and warrant not only my utmost respect, but conjure in me some sort of religious appreciation and devotion sparked a-new in the effective hands of the saints now bygone.  The result is an un-protestant view of these “idols” turned icons, though perhaps more Renaissance inspired appreciation as opposed to that sported by the medieval period.