The fact that the Shroud has survived for more than nearly two
millennia is virtually inexplicable. In the course of those millennia on many
occasions it survived dire circumstances, narrowly escaping destruction.
The empty Shroud was first noted in the tomb by Peter and from
that moment on we have conflicting reports of its location. The Shroud had to
be kept a secret initially because as a relic of the crucified Christ it would
be a prime object for seizure by both Roman and Jewish authorities. Later,
iconoclastic movements would have made short work of it. It appears to have
been hidden in the city of Edessa Edessa
In 944, it was wrested from Muslim control by a Byzantine Army
and brought to Constantinople . An eye witness
account recorded its weekly exposition in Constantinople and its disappearance
when French knights looted Constantinople of
its treasures in 1204 CE.
Its disappearance from Constantinople was fortuitous because Constantinople would eventually fall to the Muslims. By
that time the enmity between Christians and Muslims had become so severe that Sultan Bayazid I boasted that he would conquer Rome and feed his horses oats on
the altar of St. Peters.
The Shroud was openly displayed in Lirey, a small French
provincial town, in 1355 by the Geoffrey de Charny a French knight who claimed
ownership of the Shroud. Neither he nor his descendants ever satisfactorily explained
how he came into possession of the Shroud. In 1453, it was transferred by de
Charny's granddaughter to Duke Louis I of the House of Savoy. Eventually, it
found a permanent home in Turin under the
protection of the Savoy Turin
two events that swept through much of Europe
were leading to the destruction of many Catholic relics. One was the Protestant
Reformation. John Calvin was particularly disturbed by the Catholic veneration
of the Shroud. He never got his hands on it.
The second event was the French Revolution of the late
eighteenth century. When it was operating at full throttle, many Catholic
relics and icons were fed to revolutionary bonfires.
Another narrow escape for the Shroud occurred in World War II.
The Vatican Turin to Rome province
of Avellino , northeast of Naples
In 1532 at Chambray, October 1972 in Turin ,
and a second time in Turin
The late John Heller who along with Alan Adler was responsible
for the analysis of the blood stains on the Shroud noted that throughout the
STURP testing of the Shroud: "The role of 'coincidence' was awesome."
(Heller, Dr. John H., p. 221 Report on the Shroud of Turin Houghton
Mifflin, 1983)
Divine Providence
But was the survival of the Shroud merely luck and were
"coincidences" just happenstance ‑ or were they evidence of the
intervention of Divine Providence?
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, providence may be
defined as the practical reason,
adapting means to an end. As applied to God, Divine Providence is God Himself considered in that act by which in His
wisdom He so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be
realized. (Providence
The hypothesis this I advance is that the accumulation of
circumstances and events concerning the Shroud and its escapes from destruction
may be attributable to divine intervention.
Teilhard placed Divine Providence at the center of creation:
"In the centre, so glaring as to
be disconcerting, is the uncompromising affirmation of a personal God: God
as providence, directing the universe with loving, watchful care; and God
the revealer, communicating himself to man on the level of and through the ways
of intelligence." (de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard (2011-06-21). The
Phenomenon Of Man (Kindle Locations 5383-5387). Evergreen Books.
Kindle Edition. Paperback Edition, pp 292-293 First Harper Colophon
However, when it came to a specific intervention Divine
Providence (such as we hypothesize for the survival of the Shroud) Teilhard is
circumspect:
"Yet, whatever inner evidence we
may have on this matter (and such evidence is perhaps much more certain than
any reasoning), we cannot but recognize that the objectivity of such special or
general interventions by Providence
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
Providence and Probability
Science never stands still. Teilhard passed away in 1955. In the
past 60 years science has expanded its reach into areas that in the past were
beyond investigation by the scientific method. One of those the nature of
consciousness in general, and among other things the nature of intuition which
has been defined as "sub-conscious reasoning." The computer is a good
vehicle for explaining the difference between consciousness reasoning and
sub-conscious reasoning. Conscious reasoning is akin to information on a
physical hard drive that must be called-up from the hard dive by the processor.
Subconscious reasoning is like random access memory which can process
information at blinding speed because there is no physical interaction
necessary.
Intuition is a process which is pure thought and there is no need
to access the conscious brain. Information is considered and utilized at
blinding speed and appears to be instantaneous. Two recent works that discuss
this phenomenon are Blink. The Power of Thinking Without
Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Feelings: The
Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer
There is one item that all of us factor into our intuition: the
law of probability. That doesn't mean we are always right because our sense of
the probabilities may be askew. Yet, it is possible to analyze the
probabilities of a particular situation and arrive at a mathematical solution.
Our subconscious does that intuitively.
In 2009 there was an election in Iran
See The God of Probabilities: How voting fraud in Iran
What the digits revealed is human intervention in the recording
of the results that skewed them.
Given all the crisis visited on the Shroud, what are the odds
that it would have survived? Our intuition is that Providence
That is of course only a hypothesis – for now.
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