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.

St James in London

Statue of Peregrino atop Clock

St. James Garlickhythe, City of London

© EOP

London
5 September 2010


It has been a little difficult to find time to write a blog while on holiday here, but I have found a few things worthy of mention. As all know, London is a city rich in museums and especially rich in collections relating to the Middle Ages. There are worthwhile images of St. James in the medieval collections of the Victoria & Albert and in the National Gallery. A fascinating little gem is the small Wren Church of St. James Garlickhythe. It is a little difficult to locate and even more difficult to access since one of its walls faces on a busy street without a pedestrian footpath. The short walk to the Church is well worthwhile, for the still active parish church includes all kinds of St. James symbols as part of its decoration.

The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, A Case Study

Sculpture of Santiago Peregrino, Plateria facade, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

eop 2001

In the last session we listened to some samples of music related to pilgrimage and looked at pictures of various works of architecture, sculpture and painting deriving from or otherwise related to pilgrimage. More than a few of those works were ones linked to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in far northwestern Spain, in Galicia, España Verde (Green Spain). One of the three major Roman Catholic Pilgrimages in the Great age of pilgrimage, Santiago de Compostela, not far from Fisterra (Finisterre in Castellano) or “the end of the earth” and the westernmost point in Continental Europe, has been attracting Christian pilgrims for more than 1000 years. Those pilgrims are attracted to the purported tomb of the Apostle James the Greater, Santiago, in the crypt of the Cathedral. The cathedral itself is a masterpiece of the Romanesque now inside a Baroque facade. Leading to Santiago is a well trodden route called the Camino Frances, one of a number of Spanish trails leading to Santiago. I have been privileged to walk the Camino Frances twice, and I am using this session as an opportunity to examine in a bit of detail one of the world’s major pilgrimages and, inevitably, to recount some personal experiences.

Session VII begins with the story of the apostle St. James the Major after the events recounted in the gospels. The story includes his suffering as the first Christian martyr, the translocation of his corpse from Palestine to Galicia, and the rediscovery of the purported grave after many centuries. Shortly after the rediscovery, an event closely linked to the Reconquista and the reclaiming of Spain for Christianity, the pilgrimage began, and with a century of two it had become a major force in Western Christianity. Thousands of pilgrims made their way to Santiago de Compostela, and in that pilgrimage generated a rich folklore. Along with a little of the history of the pilgrimage itself, we shall examine some of the symbols of the pilgrimage and two of the legends out of that folklore. The session will conclude with commentary and pictures on a present day walk along the main route, the Camino Frances, from the French-Spanish border to Santiago and beyond to Fisterra.

I. The story of St. James the Greater (also called St. James the Major), Santiago in Castellano.

A. Disciple of Christ

B. Evangelist in Iberia?

C. Martyrdom

D. Translocation and burial

II. The evolution of the pilgrimage

A. "Rediscovery" of the tomb

B. Reconquista

1. Santiago Peregrino

2. Santiago Matamoros

C. Resettlement of the wastes

1.The Benedictines and the route

2. Villafrancas

III. The folklore of the pilgrimage

A. Symbols of the pilgrimage

B. Origins of "Compostela"

C. The legends of Santo Domingo de la Calzada

IV. The Camino today

A. Marking the route

B. Fr. Elias Valina Sampedro

C. Revival of pilgrimage and tourism

V. Walking the Camino - slide show with commentary

Museo de los Caminos in Astorga

Interior of Museo do los Caminos, Astorga, Spain (photo from Ayuntamiento de Astorga website)

On Tuesday I showed a couple of pictures of the exterior of the Museo de los Caminos located in the Archiepiscopal palace in Astorga and briefly commented on that fantastical structure mostly designed by the famed Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. At the end of the session a question was asked about small pilgrimage trinkets and icons. A good collection of badges from early pilgrims on the Camino Santiago is included in the museum. Unfortunately I have not been able to locate much material in English other than simple tourist guide information, a brief description along with location and opening hours. I have had only marginally better results searching in Castellano and French. The museum is small and probably too poorly funded to afford a web page illustrating its collections. And much as I would like to locate a web page showing examples of pilgrim badges, I have not yet been able to find one. As time allows, I shall continue the search for I am sure one or more such pages exist.

Anyone interested in the building itself and able to read Castellano (Spanish) is likely to find the site Gaudi e el Modernismo worthwhile, though some of its information is rather specialized. The page includes a number of photographs of the building and links to other sites, also in Castellano, about it. Architectural pilgrims, especially those who love the works of Gaudi, will certainly find a visit to the lovely small city of Astorga worthwhile.

Relics, Miracles and Pilgrimages

The altar above the purported tomb tomb of Paul in the Basicilica San Paulo fuori la Mura just outside Rome, photo EOP January 2009.

"Relics, especially the integral skeletons of widely-known saints, emitted a kind of holy radioactivity which bombarded everything in the area..." Finucane, Ronald C. 1977. Miracles and Pilgrims, p. 26.

As with images, I rather took for granted the role of relics in the creation of Christian pilgrimages, thus pilgrims ventured to Santiago to venerate the purported tomb of St. James the Greater (Santiago) or to Rome where Saints Peter and Paul are presumably buried. In fact the early Christian cult of relics went far beyond prompting visits to the remains, real or imagined of the apostles and others who were closely related to the Christ. Of course there were also things related to Christ and Mary, vials of her milk or pieces of the true cross, for example, but in addition there were the skeletons of literally hundreds of saints of the early church. Many of those were local, martyrs and others who served the church as it was gaining adherents in late Roman and early medieval Europe.

While the relics themselves were presumably of interest to early Christians, even those who had no immediate problems for which they were seeking relief, they were especially important for those who wanted relief from the myriad problems suffered by people. Many of the problems were medical, and visits to the sites of the relics allowed the sufferer of a disease or infirmity to be irradiated with the "holy radioactivity" the relics were thought to emit. Miracles were sought and, if the records are to be believed, a major theme in Finucane's book, sometimes occurred. Those miracles were blieved to be especially likely in places where the whole skeleton of one or another saints lay in repose.

Over time the whole skeletons were dispersed as individual bones, or even fragments of bones were moved to other churches and shrines. Not infrequently bits of skeletons were given to visiting dignitaries to take home. The hand of St, James from Compostela was given to an early English pilgrim and found a new shrine in the Abbey of St. James in Reading just west of London. Other remains were stolen and translocated to a shrine somewhere else. The remains of St. Foi, an early Christian martyr in France, for example, were stolen from a shrine in the Rhone Valley and relocated to Conques on the southern edge of the Massif Central. The post-reformation dissolution of the monastic establishments in England and the French Revolution respectively led to the loss of the bones of the apostle and the martyr, though both the ruins of the abbey in Reading and the lovely romanesque church and the rich treasury at Conques remain pilgrimage destinations.

Of course pilgrimage seeking after miracles was not limited to the medieval era, for many Christian pilgrims travel today to Lourdes, Fatima, Guadeloupe, and numerous other shrines in hopes of cures for disease and other problems of living. And it is not limited to Christians, as among almost countless possible examples, Buddhist pilgrims travel to see the tooth of the Buddha in Kandy, Sri Lanka or Shia Muslims go to the tomb of Hussein in Karbalah, Iraq. Relics in the form of skeletal remains and other physical things associated with particular saints, and the miracles they can create, however, have lost some of their importance over time. Now numerous pilgrimages are to images, and relatively few Christian pilgrimage sites created since the Middle Ages are devoted to minor saints. More on that later.