Piety: Places and Things

Conques, Pilgrimage Destination and burial site of the relics of St. Foi.

Copyright EOP

Trying to walk longish distances daily in the esthetically depressing slurbs of northern Virginia, for diversion I have taken to listening to podcasts while walking. The number and variety of such audio materials presently available is truly awesome, and more than a few of them are of excellent quality. In addition to doing 30-40 minutes of Spanish language review with "Coffee Break Spanish," and its advanced cousin "Show Time Spanish," I became enamored of the "History of Rome" series done by a young man who, sadly for those of us addicted to his telling of the chronicle of the Roman Empire, recently announced he is discontinuing that engrossing history from earliest times to about 500 A.D. His termination has prompted a search for other podcasts, and one I found awhile ago and started listening to in earnest a couple of weeks ago is particularly fascinating for the vast array of topics it covers, "In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg," distributed by the BBC which broadcasts the programme weekly on BBC4. (all of the podcasts noted above are available gratis and can be downloaded on iPods and related devices from the iTunes store).

Today I listened to a broadcast of "In Our Time" from 12 February with the Netherlandish savant Erasmus as the topic. Two professors of church history, one from Cambridge and another from Oxford joined the Warburg Institute librarian and Melvyn Bragg the interviewer for an overview of the life, work and influences of the great humanist. I knew that Erasmus was an opponent of pilgrimage, suggesting that the blessings bought to Christians by visiting distant shrines like Rome or Santiago de Compostela could be as readily found in the local parish church if only the piety of the believer was turned inward. In the introduction, the commentator (I believe it was by Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University) stated that in the medieval era piety was firmly rooted in places and things, a statement that gave me a shock of realization. After struggling with the question of why pilgrimages are made, I realized that is a good explanation of why pilgrimage was so central to Christianity in the late Middle Ages. Places, sites of important events including burials, and things, relics such as the bones of saints interred or brought to those places, were venerated. Only by visiting the places, it was believed, could one be blessed. The decline of pilgrimage, in its turn, was in some measure a consequence of the humanist ideals espoused by Erasmus and forcefully injected into the Reformation churches following Luther. Needless to say it is time to do some deeper investigation of Erasmus, humanism and pilgrimage.