Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 620-621:

And there are other cases of saints being used to replace earlier pagan natural sacral sites as part of a conscious policy. Bishop Wigbert of Merseburg (1004–9), for example, sought to wean his Slav parishioners away from their sacred trees in this way:

By diligent preaching he recalled his flock from the empty superstition of their error and uprooted the grove called Zutibure [swiety bor, "holy grove"] which the local inhabitants honoured as a god and which, from ancient times, had never been violated, constructing there a church dedicated to the holy martyr Romanus.⁶⁰

The pagan worshippers of Greece and Rome and of medieval eastern and northern Europe had their public and communal ceremonies and sites, but they could also approach the holy in the shade of a grove of tall trees or down the steps leading to underground caves and pools. For medieval Christians, the official sacred place was the indoor and man-made space of the church. And within their churches, the most holy spots were the altars, which contained relics and might display them, and the shrines of the saints. Human remains within a consecrated building, not trees or pools, evoked awe and reverence.

⁶⁰ Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon 6.37, p. 282.

The date of the grove's destruction was 1009. Here is the Latin:

Praedicatione assidua commissos a vana superstitione erroris reduxit lucumque Zutibure dictum, ab accolis ut Deum in omnibus honoratum et ab aevo antiquo numquam violatum, radicitus eruens sancto martiri Romano in eo ecclesiam construxit.

18th century church in Schkeitbar, built over the ruins of the older one constructed by Wigbert:


Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who noted, "The trees seem to have made a come-back."

Labels: arboricide