Madigan speaks to the relationship between the physical body and the spiritual power of saints and he comes to the conclusion that people in the medieval period believed that as a saint got closer to death their spiritual powers were amplified. This idea was the main catalyst behind the idea of pilgrimages to the burial sites of certain saints or the sites of relics related to them.

Guibert’s passage highlights Madigan’s point about the power of relics by recounting how many relics were forged in order to gain wealth because the people will go wherever you say the relics are because that’s where they believed they can be healed or saved. So I shows the power that relics have not in their spiritual nature but as idols that the masses would blindly flock to because of the power they were told lied there by the corrupted clergy.

Guibert shows his hand pretty early when it comes to how he feels about the saints in his time, he’s sick of how many saints are praised and he calls for only certain saints to be turned to, those whose,” certitude of faith holds up.” He’s also disgusted at the church for succumbing to lying to the people just to make money as in the case of the head of John the Baptist, because they know that people will blindly follow because they truly believe that these relics are their only hope. This presents a plethora of theological problems, one being deceit on the part of the church which is fairly evident in most time periods, but also that these common people had put these saints on pedestals so that they were being worshipped instead of God who worked through the saints. This harkens back to the problems faced by the believers in Corinth in the book of I Corinthians, when they claimed to be believers in the teachings certain apostles instead of claiming to follow God.

In response to these problems Guibert proposes that the bodies of saints not be moved and that if shrines are to be built they should be at the place where the body is buried and the body should never be disturbed. I can imagine that the people in the church who were participating in the sacrilege of selling and buying fake or stolen relics for profit would probably have a problem with what Guibert is saying but, in a time with very sparse communications across long distances and the lack of dissemination of news I feel that this paper probably didn’t affect that many people. Since the clergy could jus claim that theirs was the true relic it would take months or years for a dispute to arise from somewhere else and even longer for it to be settled I don’t think the clergy was too affected but I hope for their sake they felt some conviction to right the wrongs they had committed to the people and the saints they defiled.