A relic proved false

Why does a venerated object lose its power the moment it is shown to be a forgery, though nothing about the object itself has changed?

A splinter of wood has been kissed by pilgrims for four hundred years. A laboratory dates it to two centuries after the event it is supposed to come from. Nothing about the splinter alters — not a fibre, not a gram, not its appearance in the reliquary. Yet something that everyone agreed was there yesterday is not there today.

The tempting first thought is that this is the same phenomenon as an art forgery unmasked, where the picture is unchanged and the price collapses. It is not quite. A forged painting loses a market value, and what it lost was its link to a particular hand. A relic's claim is different in kind: not "this was made by him" but "this touched him", and what is venerated is not the object at all. So what exactly evaporated?

Rule out the money first. Devotion falls too, in people with no financial interest, who would never have sold the thing and did not know its worth. Whatever collapsed was not a price.

Rule out aesthetic presence next. That has some purchase for paintings — the aura of an original object, in Walter Benjamin's sense — but relics defeat it. A relic is often a bone chip, a rag, a nail: nothing to look at, and no one claims otherwise. Its whole significance is imported.

So consider what a relic is actually asserted to be. It is a terminus of a causal chain. This wood was that cross; this cloth was pressed to that tomb — the practice even had a formal category for the second case, cloths touched to a holy grave and held thereby to acquire the power of what they touched (brandea, recalled). The claim is entirely historical, and everything the object is for depends on it.

Now notice what follows, and I think it is the crux. Because the property that mattered was a history rather than a feature, it is not readable off the object at all. Two splinters can be identical in every physical respect and differ in the only respect anyone cared about. That is why the debunking can change everything while changing nothing: it does not alter the object, it alters what the object is the end of.

And once the chain is cut, the veneration has no target left. The devotee was never venerating this wood — she would say so herself, indignantly, if you suggested it. She was venerating a person, through the wood. A pointer with no referent does not point at something else. It points at nothing.

That last clause is the strongest objection to everything above, and it is not hypothetical. The Shroud of Turin was radiocarbon dated in 1988 by three independent laboratories to a range in the fourteenth century, roughly 1260-1390. The result is disputed — proposals that the sampled corner was a later repair, or contaminated, are seriously argued and seriously contested — but veneration did not collapse in the way the pointer account predicts. Note also that the Catholic Church has never declared the cloth authentic, presenting it as an object of devotion rather than a proven relic.

The best reply is that a relic carries two values rather than one, and the debunking reaches only the first. There is contact value, which is the chain, and there is accumulated value — the history of what has happened at this object: the pilgrimages, the prayers, the healings claimed, the identity a community built around it. That second history is itself a genuine provenance, and no dating touches it. The account then predicts the split we actually observe: cults collapse where the object was never anything but a claim, and persist where centuries of practice have deposited a second history on top of the first.

Here the honesty has to get sharper, because there is a reversal that unsettles the whole framing. In medieval practice, authentication frequently ran the other way round: a relic was credited because miracles occurred at it, not believed to work because its papers were in order. Patrick Geary's study of relic theft describes translations legitimated by the saint's evident consent — had the saint objected, he would not have permitted the move (recalled). If efficacy certifies the chain rather than the chain licensing efficacy, then a modern laboratory is attacking a link the practice never leaned on. Whether efficacy claims were ever essential to relic devotion, or whether that is a rationalist framing imported later, is genuinely open among historians of religion, and a good deal turns on it: on one reading debunking should work, on the other there is no reason to expect it to.

Two smaller notes. The traditions knew about forgery from the inside — the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 restricted veneration of newly discovered relics and their sale (recalled) — so the problem was not imported by scepticism. And some theologians held that God may honour sincere faith regardless of an object's pedigree, which makes "nothing about the object changed" cut in the opposite direction from the one the question assumes.

• How a community decides that a devotional object has become a memorial rather than a relic, and who is entitled to say so.
• Whether the same two-value structure explains why some restored buildings feel authentic and others do not.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.