Back History, With Occasional Explosions
Who was St. Remedius?
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The Official Story
In the early days of the Catholic Church, the criteria for individuals achieving sainthood were considerably more flexible than today, and many early saints currently in registry today either didn’t exist, being created out of whole cloth either to make a point or for a laugh, or they were real people with tales of celestial abilities and interventions added centuries after their deaths, also for a laugh. Officially, Saint Remedius is known as a bishop living in the French Alps in the Sixth Century Anno Domini, a successor to St. Tigides, both of whom are otherwise completely unknown. The Church has no records of St. Remedius’s life, no list of the miracles he allegedly performed to justify his sainthood, and no other information on his life or that of his contemporaries. Officially, no image of St. Remedius exists: various sculptures survive, but all obviously of St. Francis with the two first fingers on the right hand removed. His feast day and that of Saint Tigides falls on February 3, and thus end the chronicles.
The Real Story
Born Childeric, named after the Frank monarch and father of Clovis, the future St. Remedius was known as an exceedingly precocious child from a very early age. He willingly joined a monastery solely to have access to reading material, changing his name to Remedius, and he enthusiastically moved up the ranks more to learn everything he could than out of especial religious dedication. By his death in 572, Remedius had a reputation as a competent administrator, a careful judicator, and a thoroughly likeable individual among the Church and the common people alike. Had these been his only qualifications, he might have received canonization about a century later just from congregants and underlings wanting to give him one final reward for being a fundamentally nice person who deserved something more than a typical bishop’s funeral.
However, one must remember that the early definition of “miracle” applied more to unexplainable phenomena than to anything specifically of divine origin, and were he to be more contemporary, Remedius would most likely be considered the patron saint of mysteries and the unknown. The few known statues of St. Remedius known are absolutely accurate in their missing fingers: it is unclear whether Remedius lost them from frostbite while investigating the notorious Mount Maudit and reports of the region’s curse, lost them while fighting someone or something at Mount Maudit (he was also known for his skills at swordplay when necessary to deal with wolves, bandits and other predators), or trying to coax a kitten that had no interest whatsoever in being held. A prevailing assumption involved his interest in what would later be called alchemy, not for riches or fame but simply what happened when mixing various substances, and he lost his fingers from a single unfortunate compounding of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. Either way, when he died, he left a voluminous library, an equally impressive collection of personal papers, mostly involving warnings about materials containing cinnabar and galena, and a small but very dedicated group of priests determined to learn about the universe as quietly as possible. They weren’t worried about inquisitions and persecutions for forbidden knowledge: they were more much worried about not having the additional funds to continue researches into the world around them.
For a thousand years, the Order of St. Remedius was a poor but honest group of scholars in search of new knowledge, and then they were no longer poor. A priest working from St. Remedius’s notes on mercury inadvertently started the boom, no pun intended, on the use of mercury fulminate for percussion caps in firearms in 1630. Instead of keeping the formula secret and only manufactured through the order, the order gladly licensed its use in exchange for massive contributions to charitable associations and one percent of all sales returning to the order. This became the standard practice for the order, accelerating through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, lending either final products or the concepts behind them to others, thus being behind everything from high explosives to atomic energy to geosynchronous satellites to quantum theory, and so many more. Were it not for researchers within the order, for instance, integrated circuits would have been made from germanium instead of silicon for another fifty years, thus leaving integrated circuits as a minor curiosity and thereby preventing the computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
Until its mysterious destruction and/or disappearance, St. Remedius continued the work started by that very singular French bishop, with a top-tier medical school seeking treatments for all of man’s ailments as a side-business to what it was really trying to accomplish, this time with a very secular team working under the same prerogative as the original medieval order. As it turns out, St. Remedius lost his fingers to a nightmare on Mount Maudit AND to a kitten that didn’t want to be picked up, both involving the same batch of explosives, and the college was just continuing the tradition. Every February 3, the school remembered St. Remedius with a massive party on his feast day, usually set off by watching the shade of a Twentieth Century musician rise from his crematory urn, look down at his shadow, and realize that he had to wait six more weeks until spring, not knowing that a similar tradition had existed with the Order of St. Remedius since its beginning. The musician’s shade was the same back then, too, which adds to St. Remedius’s mystique.
But enough of that. The Order of St. Tigides, now, THAT’s a saga.
Notes
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