THE VERONICA LEGEND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3016, 3 January 1912, Page 70

THE VERONICA LEGEND.

Bx Jessie Mackat.

Dr Paul Cams publishes an interesting article on the Veronica legend in the Open Court. He takes for granted that his readers know the monkish tale of the noble Jewish lady, who, seeing the Saviour bowed and fainting under the cross on His way to Calvary, wiped His face with a linen, kerchief, on which a picture of His features was afterwards seen to be iniprinted. The Greek words Vera Icon {true picture) at first applied to the likeness, soon became transferred to its owner, whom the Latin Church, which had originated the tale, styled henceforth St. Veronica. Dr Cams notices the impossibility of a real, or even genuinely traditional, presentment of Christ ever having been in the possession of the early Church. Ihe Jews had deeply engrained in their religious consciousness an aversion to all images aa a possible incentive to idolatry. This aversion remained among the Apostles and their Jewish converts, who alone could have preserved any real memory of the appearance of Christ. Not till the second century did anv section of the Church think of any such presentment. By the beginning of the second century the powerful Gnostic heresy had come to a head. Signs of it had appeared even in St. Paul’s time, for there is clear evidence of the bitter division between the. Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christiana in the records of the Apostles ; and Paul’s Greek learning and psychic temperament marked him out for the jealous hostility of the harrower sect that owned Peter for their leader. The Gnostics interpreted the Scriptures after their own mystic sought much to ancient shrines of the occult, and incorporated the hidden doctrines of Egypt and Greece into their new' faith. The Gnostic authors are quoted with much respect by many modern mystics, who are •willing to interpret Christian doctrine in the fantastic fasltion of Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophist leaders. Irenseus wrote of them in the second century, describing them as believers in the transmigration cf souls and reincarnation, and makes plain his view on their love of image—a nrediliaction, as we have seen, abhorrent to the Jew, unto whom the second commandment had been so sedulously instilled: —“They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted and others formed from other kinds of material ; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at the time when Jesus lived among men. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers cf the world—that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato and Cristolle, and the rest They have also other modes of honouring these images after the same manner as the Gentiles.”

The luxuriant Gnostic imagination did not long slop at the picture supposed to have been painted of Christ by order of Pila to. It was probably about the end of the second century when the Eastern, and doubtless |he earliest, version of what wo Know as the Veronica legend was invented. Their insistent demand for symbolism caused pictures of be made, for which they accounted in stories of supernatural agency. The Greek Church eagerly treasured these mystic pictures, and vied with the Syrian and Egyptian Churches in manufacturing legends that invested them with peculiar sanctity. None was more famous than the relic known as the Edessenne, treasured as Edessa in Mesapotamia. It is about this picture that the story of the Abgar correspondence arose—a story narrated at length by the credulous Christian historian, Eusebius, in the fourth century. King Abgar of Edessa, the eighth of his lino and name, is said to have written a letter to Christ, asking Him to came and heal him of a sore sickness, and promising Rim protection from Jewish enemies. The sunnosed rcplv of Christ to the Edessan King is also preserved in full. He refused to leave Palestine, but promised that a •disciple should he sent, after His Ascension, to the assistance of Abgar. Then follows the tale of the woman who brought Edessa the kerchief with the miraculously imprinted likeness of tho suffering Lord. From the first the Vera Icon was charged with the idea of healing; the Edesseum, as the precious relic was called, was deemed possessed of the most wonderful curativo virtues, as well as the power cf conferring spiritual blessings on the devout. The Western, or Latin, Church also lost tho severe purity of apostolic days, and was by this time constructing the Veronica legend so familiar to lately times. Mediaeval art delighted to portray St. Veronica and the miraculous picture, while the Sudarlum, purporting to be the original, was kept in state, like its Oriental prototype the Edesseum. Dr Cams goes on to relate a curious Buddhist legend from the boundaries of Tibet, in which the essential features of the Veronica story are remarkably reproduced. In the old age of tho Buddha, 'Ajasatru, an Eastern king, became his disciple. While Buddha was preparing for his end, the king fell grievously ill. A friend, who was a disciple of yet higher Sanctity, who knew by infallible signs that Buddha was no longer alive, but feared the shock of the news would kill the king, commanded, therefore, that a Brahmin firtist should paint a series of events to llustrato the spiritual victory of Buddha pvor evil and death. He then prepared the king to hear the tidings of Buddha’s Separture, arranging that at the moment pf imparting them the pictures should be Bnfolded before his eyes. This was done, ind the sick king recovered by his faith in the events which the picture commemorated. Needless to say, the picture continued to work healing miracles. This analogy is but one of the thousands which show how closely interknit are iSae minds of men when it comes to the lioat fundamental necessities of theft