Madigan describes the understanding of the relationship of the physical body and the spiritual body to be inversely proportional, meaning that the more aged and physically weak you are, the more spiritual power or closeness with God you attain. This related to the writings Guibert made me think more about how after death, when a person or a saint is closest to spiritual presence, sins of the time can still be performed around them, which sounds very simple, and that’s partially because it is, at least at the concept phase. It’s the idea of whther or not there is a holy place or not, thieves and swindlers and people afflicted by greed. It also makes me think that in this case the power Madigan describes and talks about corrupts and this is what Guibert is talking about. When somebody hears of the ways that a saint has performed the miracles of healing and well being, somebody gets corrupt ideas about it and finds a way to serve themselves with that power, or at least that powers influence.

The passage helps demonstrate the obsession with relics by offering a viewpoint of how easily swayed people are by that idea, the idea of something on earth having in part the power of God. In a way, it’s the same kind of idea as the messiah coming down. This idea led some to worship the venerated saints, some to prayer, and some to take a step back from the ideas that the relics could do anything and figure out how to play the populace as their pawns. The bishops could not keep track of every relic around or every venerated saint’s body, so this led to a big difficulty of keeping everything honest and therefore led more and more people to fake a relic or capitalize on the relics they had. Since it was such a loose system this was much more easily done than some other cons, which drew more and more people to it.

Guibert’s solution is to simply take those recently alive and instead of giving them a fancy coffin or a coffin of any kind, just to put them into an allotted grave and keep them there so it would be easily known if there was any tampering with them and church officials would not have to worry about people asking God for healing through any non venerated non saint body. I believe the populace of the church would be split on this decision actually. Some would be for it because it would take away the possible acts of sin in the way of greed. However, others might be against it because of how much they benefit from the relics and pilgrimage. Some might see that seeing and touching the relics is the main draw to any pilgrimage and taking them away in a sense would therefore distort the value of a pilgrimage and make less and less take part in them, leading less and less away from God slowly.