Burgundy he gave entire ribs; to the prelates one bone to divide between them, which they proceeded to do after the meal.
It may well be that this too corporeal and familiar aspect, this too clearly outlined shape, of the saints has been the very reason why they occupy so little space in the sphere of visions and supernatural experience. The whole domain of ghost-seeing, signs, spectres and apparitions, so crowded in the Middle Ages, lies mainly apart from the veneration of the saints. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Saint Michael, Saint Katherine and Saint Margaret appearing to Joan of Arc; and other instances might be added. But, generally speaking, popular phantasmagoria is full of angels, devils, shades of the dead, white women, but not of saints. Stories of apparitions of particular saints are, as a rule, suspect of having already undergone some ecclesiastical or literary interpretation. To the agitated beholder a phantom has no name and hardly a shape. In the famous vision of Frankenthal, in 1446, the young shepherd sees fourteen cherubim, all alike, who tell him they are the fourteen “Holy Martyrs,” to whom Christian iconography attributed such distinct and marked appearances. Where a primitive superstition does attach to the veneration of some saint, it retains something of the vague and formless character that is essential to superstition, as in the case of Saint Bertulph at Ghent, who can be heard rapping the sides of his coffin in S. Peter’s abbey “moult dru et moult fort” (very frequently and very loudly) as a warning of impending calamity.
The saint, with his clearly outlined figure, his well-known attributes and features as they were painted or carved in the churches, was wholly lacking in mystery. He did not inspire terror as do vague phantoms and the haunting unknown. The dread of the supernatural is due to the undefined character of its phenomena. As soon as they assume a clear-cut shape they are no longer horrible. The familiar figures of the saints produced the same sort of reassuring effect as the sight of a policeman in a foreign city. The complex of ideas connected with the saints constituted, so to say, a neutral zone of calm and domestic piety, between the ecstasy of contemplation and of the love of Christ on the one hand, and the horrors of demonomania on the other. It is perhaps not too bold to assert that the
