REVIEW OF BOOKS
J. Enoch Powell on
folk who go on pilgrimages
Anyone who sets out by supposing that the pilgrim ,and the pilgrimage were some distinct but minor feature of the Christian middle ages will soon find himself sharply undeceived.
From the fourth century right through to the Reformation there is hardly an aspect of the life and belief of Christendom which does not claim the attention of the historian of pilgrimage. It touched religion at almOst every point. Vows; miracles; relics; intercession, purgatory and indulgence; the worship and invocation of saints; monasticism and ascetism; the crusades — every one of these subjects, a major branch of study and research in itself, demands to be explored before the phenomenon of the pilgrimage can be properly understood. Confronted with the profound religious implications of the rise and development of medieval pilgrimage, the widespread notions of a primitive form of the package tour soon dissolve.
Perhaps we in England are at a disadvantage in appreciating adequately the importance of pilgrimage in Western Europe — partly because the picture which Chaucer has stamped on our folk-memory belongs to a period when even the Canterbury pilgrimage was decadent and no longer characteristic, and partly because in our insular situation, despite the importance of Thomas Becket, we lay both mentally and physically 'off the track' of the great pilgrimages. In this, as in so much else that is European, one has the impression that England and the English of the Middle Ages were in it rather than of it, marginal and somewhat detached, despite distinguished individual pilgrims and an evidently considerable crossChannel flow.
The great pilgrim nations were the French and the Germans; the great pilgrimages were Rome, Jerusalem and Compostella, and after that came sites in Southern France, like Rocamadour, Conques, St Gilles.
Jonathan Sumption, a fellow of Magdalen, evidently had the same experience as the readers of his book*. He found that a subject which he took up supposing it limited and tractable, exploded in his hands and led him into every highway and most of the by-ways of twelve centuries of Christendom. The result is an accumulatioin of fascinating data, from which can be derived a series of enlightening glimpses into the realities of pilgrimage at various points across the centuries and which the reader avidly takes up and lays down. He shares, however, in two respects what is probably the author's own dissatisfaction with the outcome.
All history demands chronology; and the attempt to trace such a phenomenon as pilgrimage across more than a millenium aspect by aspect rather than stage by stage is almost certain to conceal rather than expose those broad lines of evolution — in this case, of Western Chrstianity itself — which history at its best ought to illuminate. Neither of the alternative analyses of a long historical epoch — the analysis by subject and the analysis by date — can ever be wholly satisfactory; but it is nearly always better to have to chop up the subjects chronologically than to chop up the chronology by subjects. In particular, the explanatory value of simultaneity or succession in time is thereby lost. The fact that Mr Sumption has organised his material by matter • —relics, saints, medicine, penitence, crusades, the journey, the sanctuary, Rome, etc. — places a severe demand of .reassemblage upon the attentive reader.
The second unsatisfactory result of the overwhelming variety and number of the aspects of religious life which pilgrimage touches is that none of them can be treated, in a book of ordinary size, upon a scale which the reader feels to be adequate. The history of pilgrimage from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries is also the history.of relics; yet such a study cannot be a by-product of tracing the pilgrimages which they motivated. For instance, Mr Sumption notes how crucial to the manufacture and dispersion of relics were the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth .Crusade in 1204 and the financial necessities of the Eastern emperors; but one searches text and index in vain for perhaps the greatest relic of them all, the `Turin Shroud', which significantly made its appearance after the Fourth Crusade and about which the scientifically established facts suggest the horrifying conclusion that it was produced by the use of a victim actually tortured to death in accordance with a check-list of the crucifixion details from all four gospels.
An even larger theme, inseparable from the motification of pilgrimage, is that of pardon, or "indulgence", linked in turn with the rise and development of the doctrine of purgatory. Scattered through Mr Sumption's book is a good deal of material, and much suggestive discussion, of the evolution of the principles and practice of indulgence; but without a firmly established chronological framework of that evolution the reader remains at a loss to relate to it the successive forms which medieval pilgrimage assumed. It is a fair defence that to attempt such a chronology would far exceed the bounds of a book on pilgrimage; but that is just to restate the nature of the unsolved problem of subject matter and presentation which gets the better of both the author and his readers.
In the former nunnery church at Hatfield Broak Oak in Essex lies the late thirteenth century effigy of the third Earl of Oxford (died 1221). The wording on the plinth declares that "whoso prayeth for his soul, shall have 40 days pardon'. Thus, by that date, not merely was the doctrine established that specific periods could be knocked off purgatory by appropriate works, but that those works could include prayer for the benefit of a deceased person's soul. Who gave the certificate of this pardon, and for whose benefit and at whose expense? The implication is an investment by the deceased or his heirs which benefited no fewer than four persons: 1) whichever ecclesiastical authority was paid for the "indulgence"; 2) the nunnery, which benefited by the "pilgrims" to the tomb;
3) the pilgrims themselves, who got their purgatory 4) the' d er ce edaus ce ed ;who ensured prayers for his soul ctien pt he r s eitnugi teyn.
ious transaction, so highly developed well before 1300, to illustrate how complex were the ramifications of the doctrine and how close were the mutual connections of pardon and pilgrimage — in this case, a pilgrimage devoid of saint or relic. We are all at once in the middle of a world still little explored or mapped.
No book which traverses twelve centuries can escape occasional blunders. It is a little matter that the scribes and pharisees did not carry their phyalacteries "in their robes" (page 25) and Brithnod was not "bishop" of Ely (page 52), nor was the Arch of Titus called the 'seven-branched candlestick' "because tlie Frangipani family had covered it with fortifications", (page 223) but because it depicted the Menora looted from Jerusalem; but I grieve to say that the author's Latin is not impeccable. Not only are individual words mistranslated ("inane" revelations; "insipid" conclusions; "fatuous" miracles; "affluence" of pilgrims; and even "skin raised like a mouse"t) but whole sentences are mistranslated: quarn magma fueris integra, fracta doces does not mean "your ruins themselves speak louder than your former greatness"; and John of Trittenheim's "common people" were not "always chasing after novelties" but "inclined to rebellion" (rerum novarum cupidi), as the context proves. However, these are the minor pitfalls of polymathy,' and no one should take them amiss,
Musculus, little mouse, muscle.
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