To Be a Pilgrim

 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.

Santiago peregrinus

Ultreia

Pilgrims' joy

            The somewhat obscure battle cry of medieval French warriors was Montjoie, a shortened version of the more expansive Montjoie Saint-Denis.  As we know from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Montjoy could also be a personal name.   For pilgrims, the joyful aspects of mountains, if there are any, must be retrospective.  Dante’s vision of Purgatory is that of a steep and steeply ramped mountain.  It feels really good when you quit climbing, and the whole mountain quivers in joy when a soul finally completes the task. 

            Even though our pilgrimage was Camino light and mainly diesel-powered I was accordingly happy, and perhaps even joyous, to arrive at the Monte do Gozo a few kilometers above Santiago.  That means the Mount of Pleasure, roughly speaking, the pleasure being that in earlier, more deforested centuries a pilgrim could from this steep place catch the first sight of the distant towers of the cathedral that had been the object of such long and arduous toil.  The experience was pleasing to me not only in spiritual but also in linguistic terms.   Having recently finished writing a book about an old Portuguese poem, I reacted favorably to the Galician form of the preposition.  It appears that Galician and Portuguese are the closest of cousins.  However I later made the mistake of asking our Galician guide Diego a question about the current state of the Gallegan “dialect”.  Diego is a cheerful and irenic chap, in addition to being witty and knowledgeable, but he rather bristled at the implied slur in the word dialect.  Galician, he assured me, is a language.

            Things are a good deal quieter in Santiago than they were when I was last here.  There is a thinner stream of pilgrims than there will be a few weeks hence, let alone in the height of summer, but the place is still pretty much of a madhouse.  No aspect of the medieval pilgrimage has been more perfectly preserved than its often-impenetrable ambiguity, the rich mélange of naïve spirituality, manifest commercialism, and utterly irreligious high-jinks.  I suppose it is precisely because of the grave difficulty we have in cleanly separating flesh and spirit that the Apostle must remind us that we have our treasures in earthen vessels.

            On our final full day in Compostela we were determined to take in the noontime service arranged especially for pilgrims, a group from many lands, speaking many tongues.  One special part of the Pilgrim’s Mass, a justly famous one, is the censing of the congregants gathered in the Cathedral’s two transepts.  The cathedral chapter has a gigantic thurible—and I mean gigantic--called the botafumeiro.  It works on an elaborate pulley and suspension system requiring several strong and skilled bell-ringers to operate.  The censing of the medieval pilgrims probably had a practical as well as a symbolic motive.  Tramping for weeks on end along dusty roads and through muddy bogs is a considerable challenge to personal hygiene.  I was sitting in the very first row of the south transept, and next to the aisle separating the transept seating into two halves.  It is over that aisle that the heavy thurible swung in its awesome pendulum stroke, swishing and fuming, the bright fire of the coals clearly visible through the ventilations in the silver.  I suppose that one is allowed to ask God for almost anything in a pilgrimage church, but I still felt a little awkward entertaining a mental petition to be kept safe from what seemed to be an all-too-real threat of liturgical decapitation.  My prayer was answered.  Thus passed the only sure chance I shall ever have of exiting this vale of tears in the odor of sanctity, guaranteed.

            It would not be easy to identify a single “high point” of a journey so enjoyable in so many ways.  We saw mile upon mile of varied and beautiful countryside in its spring glory.  Each day we feasted our eyes on architectural and artistic treasures.  We dined liked monarchs.  But near the top, surely, I would have to place the peculiar form of companionship and camaraderie—Chaucer used the word felawschipe—that so swiftly binds together a disparate band of pilgrims briefly and fortuitously thrown together.  I shall not soon forget the fully occupied glazed poultry coop kept in the church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada in testimony to one of James’s more extravagant miracles—the only known example of the sacral de-fricasseeing of a chicken.  But no sooner will I forget the pleasures born of new and unexpected friendship, and of the companionship born of intensely shared experience.

            On Monday night most of us had taken advantage of our coach to drive to Finisterre, the “end of the earth” as it was known in the Middle Ages to such as Chaucer’s Shipman.  That day had begun with bad news.  One of our fellow pilgrims had just learned of a sudden death in his family that would require him to set off for home as soon as possible.  The fleeting nature of human life no less than its preciousness is one of the great themes of pilgrimage.  The art and architecture of the pilgrimage roads to which we had devoted much of the last ten days is largely funereal and memorial.  Our absent friend was very much in our hearts as most of the rest of us gathered on the rude rocks surrounding the Fisterra lighthouse to sip a glass of champagne and congratulate ourselves on journey’s end as we watched a huge sun set beneath the western sea.  How many others, in legend or in history, had seen such a sight?—among them Dante’s Ulysses at the Pillars of Hercules, Henry the Navigator at his wind-swept maritime academy on Cape Saint Vincent, Columbus as he pressed toward the Azores.  But we knew something they could not yet have known, that beyond that setting sun lay our own homeland and our own homes.  There we would now return and, however greatly enriched by our journey, return eagerly.  Perhaps no pilgrimage is really done until all is done.  I thought of the strange old Romance word shouted out by medieval pilgrims to encourage themselves and their fellows not to flag, to keep on moving faster and further: Ultreia!

Paean to the Pilgrims

Joanna Peregrina

It has been facetiously remarked of long-married couples that the partners become so used to putting up with each other through compromise and accommodation that in time they approach near identity even in physical appearance. Approaching my current physical appearance is not a fate I would wish upon most enemies, let alone my life partner, so I was delighted to discover that even after being married for forty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-five days I could discover an entirely new and unprecedented reason for admiring my wife. As Shakespeare’s Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:
             Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
             Her infinite variety….
Fortunately, the context in which I recalled the lines was much more propitious than that in which Shakespeare had placed them in his play. It was last Friday, about 11:15 in the morning (local time) near the entrance to the south transept of the medieval cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. In a miracle nearly as astounding as any of those performed of old by the ferocious apostle himself, we actually successfully met up as planned with our pilgrims—two moving needles in a large and chaotic moving haystack of ambulatory humanity. Though the calculation is not yet absolutely final, Joan and her friend Susan had walked just under a thousand miles to get there.

 Susan & Joan / Compostela 27 v 2011  What a feat!  Also, what feet!

Five years ago, Joan’s friend and fellow Dante student Susan—twenty years Joan’s junior--was facing her fiftieth birthday. She suggested that a good way to mark the event would be to walk upwards of two thousand kilometers through southern France and northern Spain. You or I might think of a less strenuous way to be festive, but as the old saying goes, Different strides for different brides.

There were literally hundreds of pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe, but the three greatest were Jerusalem, Rome, and Compostela, the legendary home of the relics of Saint James “the Greater”, the brother of Jesus. I use the word "legendary" with some temerity, as Spaniards of the Middle Ages and Renaissance entertained no doubts whatsoever. Saint James, Santiago (i.e. San Yago or San Diego), became their national patron saint, and in his martial role as Matamoros (“the Moor-slayer”) an emblem of their ferocious ethnic cleansing in the fifteenth century and their imperial expansion in the sixteenth.

Any reader of Chaucer will know that medieval pilgrims undertook their travels out of many motives; but a long pilgrimage was always a serious business. The original meaning of the English word "travel" is preserved in the French travail—work—a form preserved in our tongue only for the agonies of childbirth. Travel was in fact so difficult, dangerous, and painful that it was appropriately undertaken as expiation for serious crimes. Canon law required those preparing for a “major” pilgrimage to leave behind their properly executed wills. The chances that they would die en route were significant.

The Compostela pilgrimage drew Christians from all parts of Europe, and it has left its memorial traces in many surprising places. (The rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin quarter of Paris, for example, takes its name from its original destination.) The scallop-shell emblem, originally an attribute of the saint himself, has become the more or less universal emblem of pilgrimage. “How should I your true love know from another one?” sings Ophelia in Hamlet. “By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.” In recent years, the Compostela pilgrimage has enjoyed a remarkable rebirth of popularity. The percentage of seriously “religious” pilgrims is not large, but probably not proportionately much different from in Chaucer’s day—about three twenty-ninths in my calculation. There are also many young outdoors types, and lots of life transitions and inner searches. The mode of a few would appear, perhaps, to be that of the Wife of Bath: better described as cruising than journeying.  Of course the theory of medieval asceticism always linked the voluntary embrace of self-abnegation with material ministration to a needy world.  Joan and Susan called their undertaking "a pilgrimage with a purpose"--one external part of which was to raise a significant amount of money in aid of an imaginative international charity--the Worldwide Orphans Foundation.

 The Apostle's Reliquary

But what an adventure! What an engine of companionship! Chaucer’s pilgrims started out in a pretty fancy hotel where they were “esed atte beste.” Joan and Susan, like the huge numbers of today’s Compostela pilgrims, had to content themselves with modest commercial or monastic hostels. So far as I can tell the most typical activity of pilgrims is the nightly hand-washing of intimate items of apparel! You can trace the four stages of our pilgrims’ progress on the map below.

Their plan evolved.  Originally, they had plotted the pilgrimage for three stages in three succeeding years.  The demands of what we laughingly call "real life," however, soon showed that they could not devote more than seventeen or eighteen days of walking to a stage.  This meant it would require four stages.  Though circumstances made them miss one year, they kept to their revised design: four stages of almost 250 miles each, averaging fifteen miles of serious hiking a day.   Stage 1: from Le Puy en Velay in south-central France to the old medieval city of Cahors. Stage 2: Cahors to Saint-Jean Pied de Port, the traditional crossing place across the Pyrenees into Spain. Stage 3: Saint-Jean to Sahagún between Burgos and León. Stage 4: Sahagún to Compostela. The other pilgrim spouse (also a John) and I have thought of ourselves as a kind of technical “support team”—sort of like the guys who used to accompany Channel-swimmers in a motor launch, ever ready to beat off shark attacks. Pilgrimage turns out to be much easier if aided by the Wizard of Avis. But no cross, no crown. We didn’t get a diploma, the way the ladies did.

The purpose of this blog post is to salute my remarkable wife on a remarkable accomplishment. To gain their certification, pilgrims must register a few vital statistics with the peregrine officials. Joan did note that she was the sole septuagenarian on the large ledger sheet she signed. I doubt there were many on other pages either.
We know that life is a pilgrimage, and so also no doubt is marriage. There are other metaphors as well. We stumbled upon one quite by accident. We spent a most pleasant day in Compostela, before moving on to Madrid for some tapas and Velasquez, and thence back home. Old Compostela has many attractions, quite apart from Santiago and his golden shrines, and we hope one day to return. In the old Dominican monastery, now the regional museum of Galicia, there is a fascinating triplex helicoidal staircase, the work of the seventeenth-century Compostelan architect Domingo Antonio de Andrade. Three soaring sets of steps, each seemingly unsupported and each interlacing but never touching its fellows, rise from the old cloister level to the several stories of the old monastic buildings.

We started up separate flights and for a while circled each other, now coming closer, now drifting away. But by chance the flight I had chosen stopped one floor short of the top, and I was left looking up in admiration at my spouse’s greater ascension. Looking up, perhaps, as the poet Dante once did—
              E quasi peregrin, che si ricrea
              nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
              e spera già ridir com’ ello stea…(Par. xxxi, 43-45)
And, as a pilgrim, in the temple of his vow / content within himself, looks lovingly about / and expects to tell his tale when he gets home.