Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto

veneration of relics meant more than the mere honoring of a great person but less than worship. It was a deep meditation on the physical being of humans and on the body as a “temple of the Holy Ghost.” We are used to thinking of Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife and its view of the body as sinful, but Catholic tradition in the early modern period emphasized the physical. Bodily remains were keys to the deepest of mysteries, links in the chain between life and death, and, as the Council of Trent said, the bones of prophets, saints, and others “now living with Christ . . . are to be venerated by the faithful.” In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker—the inventor of analytic geometry, no less—a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.
    The priests granted the request; the chevalier was allowed to take the finger. He must have kept it until his death in 1690—he certainly didn’t give it to Anne of Austria, who had died earlier that year—perhaps keeping it on his person as he traveled the next ten years between Paris and Copenhagen. On his death he was required to bequeath his property to his order, the Knights of St. John. The inventory of the order contains no artifacts from Terlon and no index finger labeled as Descartes’. Terlon’s branch of the order, based in Toulouse, was, like many other Catholicholy places, pillaged during the French Revolution. Perhaps the finger bone of Descartes—we might call it the first modern relic—slipped through the fingers of a sans culotte, into the dirt and out of history.
    The verb
to translate
has a particular meaning in a Catholic context. In the year 787, the Second Council of Nicaea ruled that the new churches that were proliferating across Europe should each be anchored in sanctity by a holy relic. This ruling created an official market in bones, as priests and bishops sought portions of prominent or relevant saints for their new churches. The transfer of relics from, say, a tomb in Sicily to a church in Lombardy was referred to as a translation, and throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period holy bones in translation—housed in boxes of precious metal, adorned with drapes and candles—were part of the traffic on the highways of Europe.
    Terlon’s translation party left Stockholm in June 1666. The remains were loaded onto a ship and placed under the care of two members of Terlon’s staff, the sieur de l’Epine and the sieur du Rocher. There was a fuss at the port when the sailors learned that human remains were part of the cargo, which in their lore spelled bad luck, but Terlon managed to quell the uproar, perhaps by showing them the small copper box and convincing them that they weren’t so much shipping a dead body as translating relics.
    Terlon was anxious about theft. Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer, Adrien Baillet, wrote that the fear was that “this precious cargo would fall into the hands of the English, among whom Descartes had an infinity of worshippers . . . and who would build a magnificent mausoleum in their country, under the pretext of erecting a temple to Philosophy.” Before the ship left, Terlon wrote to Louis XIV informing the king of the steps he had taken with regard to Descartes’ bones and reminding His Majesty of the illustriousness of the deceased. Louis wrote back