on the Way of Santiago
Tomorrow night in the Princeton
University Chapel the celebrated singing group “Tenebrae” will perform the
“Path of Miracles” by the English composer Joby Talbot, an extraordinary choral
sequence inspired by the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The head of the sponsoring body, the
Princeton University Concerts, has asked me and Joan to give a brief
introductory talk. Joan has some real
credentials. In addition to being a
musician, she actually walked the roughly thousand miles from Le-Puy-en-Velay
to Compostela. Such knowledge as I have
is more professorial, but I have welcomed the opportunity to think about the
subject and the many happy memories with which it is associated.
Tenebrae singers
Pilgrimage, or travel undertaken at least
ostensibly to satisfy spiritual obligation or desire, characterizes all the
world’s leading religions. Pilgrimage
played a particularly important role in pre-Reformation European Christianity. Statistics show that it is by no means a
spent force even today. 280,000 pilgrims
picked up their certificate of completion at the Compostela Pilgrims Office in
2016. Many more visited pilgrimage sites
in Israel and Italy. The Holy Land and
Rome, indeed, as the ancient sites of the earthly ministry and Passion of Jesus
Christ and the founding martyrs of the Roman church, had been the principal
goals of the medieval pilgrims. It was interference with the pilgrims’ routes that was the presenting cause of
the first Crusade. By the year 1300
there were hundreds of small, local pilgrimage sites and dozens of larger ones,
including Cologne, Canterbury, Paris, Mont Saint-Michel, Monte Gargano in
Apuleia, and Trondheim in Norway.
Pilgrims came to Compostela by sea and by at least four major land
routes or viae, “ways”, including the
famous one from Paris that began in the Latin Quarter on the rue Saint
Jacques—Saint James Street.
Pilgrimage was often enough a
taxing and even dangerous undertaking. The
word journey means the distance a
healthy walker could cover in a day (un
jour). In the English word travel we see the French travail, work or labor, the direct
reflex of which, “travail” is used mainly of the pains of childbirth. Canon law required that long-distance
pilgrims prepare their testamentary wills before departure, as there was a
significant chance they would not return.
Illness, accident, local food scarcities, military activity, highway
robbers—the potential dangers were many.
The remarkable music of Joby Talbot, a modern artistic response to pilgrimage, has many artistic antecedents. For forty years I had the pleasure of
teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
at Princeton. I never tired of the task,
nor ever felt I had exhausted the richness of a text that remains uniquely
informative in its incidental testimony concerning medieval pilgrimage. The poet instinctively grasped the almost
natural allegory that forced comparison between the journey of a life’s course
and that of a slog along a dusty road.
But he captured much more, especially a sense of the extraordinary
diversity of pilgrims and their motivations that is no less striking in the
twenty-first century than in the fourteenth.
In any random pilgrim band, all ostensibly bound by the same vow, one
might find mixed together the deeply devout, the curious, the adventurous, and
those who simply had to get out of town for reasons best unmentioned. One might be traveling with a criminal whose
pilgrimage had been court-ordered.
Chaucer’s Pardoner is one of the greatest con-men in world
literature. His Wife of Bath would
better described as cruising than as traveling. Like so much in Christianity, a deeply
sacramental system in which the material and the visible betokened unseen
spiritual reality, the truth of any pilgrim heart could be known by God alone.
Santiago Matamoros
The Compostela pilgrimage was
fabulous in its origins and uniquely bellicose in its historical
development. All pilgrimage sites
cherished their relics, but he gold standard for sacred corpses was the body of
one of the Twelve Apostles. By the ninth
century, they had practically all been claimed by major basilicas throughout
Europe, but Saint James the Greater (son of Zebedee and brother of John the
Beloved) was still surprisingly available.
He is the only Apostle whose martyrdom is recorded in the Bible. In the ninth century his remains washed up in
a stone boat, or perhaps a stone coffin, on the rugged Galician headlands; and
almost immediately the saint was seen on horseback and in full armor traversing
the night sky at the head of a Christian army on his way to a place called
Clavijo, where he aided in the defeat of a large Saracen army and began the
slow southward progress generally known as the “Reconquest,” which finally
culminated in 1492 with the total defeat of Muslim power on the Iberian
peninsula. In Spanish the bright part of
the galaxy we call the Milky Way is called the Camino de Santiago, and the
saint himself is known by the terrifying name of Matamoros, “Moor-slayer”. The peculiar tenor of militant Spanish
Catholicism, which in the Americas would have some unhappy results, was encouraged
by the military order of Saint James.
The saint’s more pacific doppelgänger, the horseless pilgrim with
walking staff, gourd water-bottle, and above all the scallop-shell or “cockle”
hat—that is, the saint on his way to his own shrine--is more familiar and more
reassuring, or perhaps more haunting.
Recall the “mad song” of Ophelia in Hamlet:
How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.
Santiago peregrinus
