A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  For centuries, some clerics followed Paul’s example, while others married or had lovers. When mandatory celibacy came up for discussion before the Council of Nicaea—convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 as conclave to settle doctrinal questions—it was rejected. But the abstemious would not let it rest. And there was always a heavy overlay of hypocrisy among the leaders. Thus Charlemagne, crowned by the pope as the highest ruler of Western Europe in the year 800, married four times—but forbade his daughters from marrying at all.

  The two most influential early philosophers in the history of Christianity, Saints Jerome and Augustine, contemporaries and correspondents, busied themselves with a body of work that demonized sex. Their words became doctrine, and heavily influenced the accepted version of Scripture. But both had experience, much more than the average man, by their own accounts. Jerome, born around 347, chased women with abandon while studying in Rome. He was fussy, ranting against men with trimmed beards and women who wore perfume. He himself was long-bearded, elegantly robed, and fragrance-free. After entering the monastery, he could not contain his carnal urges. “I often imagined myself among bevies of girls . . . my mind burned with desire, the fires of lust leapt up before me.” His was a typical monastic musing for a young man, but Jerome considered such desire to be a moral crime of the highest order. And then he went even further. “Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication,” he wrote.

  And why should the tortured nocturnal fantasies of an ancient theologian matter? For one, Jerome was the biggest early promoter and defender of the idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity—and sexual purity in general. He did this while possibly pursuing an affair with a well-off widow, Paula. More important to generations of Christians, he also wrote the Bible. His translations from Greek text, based in part on Aramaic and Hebrew oral traditions, to Latin eventually became the accepted Word of God for almost a thousand years. “There is no other person who has had a greater influence on the way Catholics read the Bible than St. Jerome,” wrote Leslie J. Hoppe, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union. Translations never produce precise copies; they are filters. If someone like Lucretius, the Roman poet who celebrated the good life, had been tasked with turning Scripture into the language of the time, the Bible might be lighter on the condemnation and heavier on the delights of this earth.

  Like Jerome, Augustine loved sex before he hated it. As a boy growing up in North Africa, he said, “our real pleasures consisted of doing something that was forbidden.” For him, that was sex. “I was inflamed with desire for a surfeit of hell’s pleasures,” he wrote. “Love and lust together seethed within me.” He “fell in with a set of sensualists.” This pattern held after he moved to Rome, and his renown as a first-rate philosopher grew. He took many lovers. Through one mistress, a longtime girlfriend, he had a child out of wedlock. And then he turned against himself, lamenting “the abominable things I did in those days, the sins of the flesh which defiled my soul.” Although he said, “I could not possibly endure the life of a celibate,” he tried to do just that—but not before pining for one last fling. “Give me chastity and continence but not just yet,” he prayed. This was a very confused man.

  In his struggles with the most human of urges, nature usually won. Observing that his penis had a mind of its own—“sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against his will!”—led Augustine to theorize that we were born flawed. Looking for pleasure, for beauty, for sensuality, could be selfish and sinful, and may doom a person to everlasting lockup. It’s worth repeating that this philosophy came not from Christ, but from one mortal man—and became a foundation of the faith. Augustine, brilliant in so many ways, the thinking person’s Catholic, the accessible writer, is a dreary scold on lovemaking. Guided by Augustine, what could have been a religion of healthy physical joy became a bulwark against human nature. The monks who took up the Rule of Saint Augustine were forbidden from “fixing your gaze upon any woman” or wearing an article of clothing that might attract attention. Lust, love, the outer dimensions of passion—they were banished.

  But “if god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts,” as Christopher Hitchens notes in his polemic against religion, “he should have taken more care to invent a different species.” Precisely.

  What if Augustine had been happily married to the mistress who bore him a child? What if he was delighted by sex with this life partner, rather than tormented by it? What if he learned to love sexual intimacy, rather than bemoaning it as a guilt-soaked side duty—the drab job of procreation for grim-faced Christians? The what-ifs matter, because Augustine, like Jerome, mattered. “There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past 1,500 years,” wrote Stephen Greenblatt in a profile in The New Yorker on the invention of sex as a modern construct of Western civilization.

  Benedict, the founder of the monastic order that colonized much of the Western world, was of the same mind, and hugely influential, at about the same time. The Italian monk feared sex so much that whenever he was aroused he threw himself into a patch of nettles or a bed of thorns. Better to be bloodied and skin-torn than visited by an erection. Legions of good men followed him into abbeys for lives of prayer, contemplation, and benevolent deeds. Their celibacy was a mark of discipline and principle. But so, too, did men who developed a sick obsession with young boys. For these monsters of the cloth, monasteries and parishes were a place to prey.

  As for Mary Magdalene, her loss of stature is largely the fault of one pontiff who was influenced by Augustine, Jerome, and Benedict. Magdalene was a relatively benign figure until Pope Gregory took it upon himself to ruin her reputation in 591, with a single homily. The Gospels tell of an unnamed woman washing the feet of Christ with ointment. “It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts,” Gregory wrote. With this proclamation, the mystery foot-cleaner was no better than a whore. But Gregory went further, calling her out by name. In identifying the woman at Christ’s feet as Mary Magdalene, and implying that she had taken many lovers, this pope single-handedly, and without new evidence, redefined one of the most prominent early Christians. But why, for argument’s sake, could this helpful, loving, radiant woman not be reinvented as Our Lady of Perpetual Promiscuity? Because sex was bad. The only good Mary was the sainted virgin. And so it followed that the women in Christianity’s hall of fame were, invariably, women who never made love to another person.

  The early church was a strong draw for women. If not quite exalted, they held a higher place in the faith’s structure than they did throughout the secular part of the Roman Empire. But that soon changed. And within two hundred years of the founding of the faith, women were banned from the ministry. Outside the walls of orthodoxy, it was a different story. In Ireland, the legend of the sixth-century Brigid of Kildare reveals an independent woman of faith, and a beautiful one at that. She founded a monastery for women, but also for men. She took the words of Christ regarding the hungry and desolate to heart, and stood up to a king who did not. Later mythic tales of Brigid had her praying for ugliness to ward off suitors. As the Roman church co-opted her, she was made to be a virgin for life. Orders of nuns, committed to prayer and reflection, and sisters, who established schools and hospitals and worked like Brigid to comfort the afflicted, spread far and wide. Though given little say in shaping Christianity, women own a big part of the story of why this faith has prevailed—from the dual Marys at the time of Jesus up to present-day nuns willing to put their health at risk to aid the sick in the poorest parts of the world.

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  JOAN OF ARC FITS the mold, but also complicates it. It’s easy to be enthralled by her story. Mark Twain spent more than a decade obsessing about her for a fictional retelling of Joan’s life. He fell hard for the holy avatar. “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced,” he wrote. While the
child Joan was pulling weeds in a hamlet in modern-day Lorraine, France was without a true king, and under occupation. The English, more than halfway through the Hundred Years War, held much of the country, aided by an alliance with Burgundy. At thirteen, Joan started hearing voices telling her to liberate her country. At seventeen, she began pestering the captain of a nearby castle, insisting that she be allowed to see the young man who would be king, Charles the Dauphin. The audacity. Not only was she a peasant girl, unschooled and clueless in the ways of power, class, and theology, but she claimed God as the source of her mission. She was ignorant of military strategy, weaponry, the mechanics of a siege, but was determined to go into battle.

  What she had was courage. Meeting with Charles, she convinced him of her calling. On horseback, with a banner lifted high, dressed as a man armored for war, she inspired numerous charges against the English who had held the city of Orléans in a death grip for six months. Though wounded by an arrow in the neck, she attacked the enemy—known as les goddams, for their foul mouths—until the city was freed. The legend, tied to historical fact, was born: an ignorant country girl had whipped the occupiers—the Miracle of Orléans. Another major victory followed at Patay. After that, it was on to occupied Reims, the traditional site for coronation of French kings. As Joan approached, Reims and nearby Laon gave up rather than try to blunt the momentum of men inspired by the Maid. On July 17, 1429, Charles the Dauphin became King Charles VII at the cathedral of Reims. Five days later, he and Joan spent the night in Corbény.

  Charles ruled for thirty-two years. Joan lasted less than two more. Captured by the Burgundians, she tried to escape by jumping from a tower; the impact left her nearly crippled. She was sold to the English, and prosecuted by their state-assisted Catholic Church. Under one flag, the protectors of the faith had embraced Joan; under another, they sought to destroy her. She was poked, slapped, spit on, insulted, interrogated ceaselessly. Confined to a dungeon in Rouen, with a diet that weakened her into sickness, she was tried as a witch. The main charge against her was that she claimed to have heard voices from God’s representatives, the angels and saints. Many a child who had heard a voice or seen an apparition has been elevated to sainthood by that same church. Schizophrenic delusions were venerated. They still are. But Joan’s problem was that she did not dress as a woman, an appalling offense. She wore pants and a man’s breastplate, cut her hair short, and refused to put on a proper dress. She was a young woman with true power, an even bigger threat to the forty-two male clerics who judged her. Just before they killed her, Joan’s executioners made her wear a cap inscribed with the words: “Heretic, relapsed. Apostate. Idolater.”

  Joan’s love life, or lack thereof, continues to fascinate. Voltaire was convinced Joan was not a virgin, citing her zest for wine and celebration in the heady days of the coronation in Reims. One cover of his outlawed poem, The Maid of Orléans, showed a naked Joan in full frolic. Modern authors suggest that she had taken several female lovers. But the one fact that the revisionist takes have in common is Joan’s faith—she never wavered. And so, as her legend grew, the church was forced to come around. Still, when a second, posthumous trial, and later Vatican examinations of her life, reversed the earlier condemnation, church authorities played down her guts in battle and played up her virginity—as if abstinence made the warrior. It should not have mattered. Joan was a visionary. She smashed class barriers and sexual barriers and English-fortified town barriers on the way to a remarkable series of triumphs. For good reason, she was a heroine to French Resistance fighters trying to break the hold of Nazi tyranny in their homeland five hundred years after her death. As well, she is the only person ever condemned to death for heresy by the same faith that made her a saint—evidence of the deep bewilderment about women in a church run by men.

  I don’t know why so many of the church elite were afraid of women with power, and why so many still are. The elevation of one sex does not have to be the diminishment of another. This attitude is certainly not unique to Roman Catholicism. And when the Reformation led, eventually, to the founding of Christian churches with female ministers, female deacons, female bishops, the world did not fall apart. Nor has Reform Judaism crumbled with female rabbis. The desire among women to be a guiding part of this faith is great. Today, as it has been for some time, there are 50 percent more nuns and sisters in the world than priests.

  Sex got stuck, just like those clerics who were never able to move beyond the boyhood trauma of arousal. The best women—Mary the mother of God, Joan the Maid, and Brigid of Ireland—were virgins. The best men— Augustine, Jerome, and Benedict—renounced sex. Pope Gregory VII issued a decree against clerical marriage in the eleventh century, a rule that was formally established in 1563 at the Council of Trent. At the time of that earlier edict, up to half of all clerics had “wives” or mistresses. The Reformation hero Martin Luther thought celibacy led to masturbation. “Nature never lets up,” he said. “If it doesn’t go into a woman, it goes into your shirt.” He should know, as a formerly celibate monk with some strange ideas about marriage, insisting that a witness watch him have sex on his wedding night, per the local custom.

  Pope Francis could turn the clock forward. The Vatican encyclical against birth control, written in 1968, is almost universally ignored by Western Catholics—and has little basis in the philosophy of Christ. Priestly celibacy is not one of the “infallible” truths, and also has no links to the words of Jesus. As a seminarian, the young man who would become Pope Francis struggled for days after running into a woman he knew and liked at a wedding. Had he married, he would never have been pope, yes, but he might have been a Christian with a different understanding of the human condition. He said in 2016 that women could not be priests because Jesus chose only men as his apostles. This logic is flawed, and a good Jesuit mind should know better. For Jesus also chose fellow Jews as his original twelve disciples, and you don’t see a lot of Jews entering the Roman Catholic priesthood.

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  I FIND A SIMPLE ROOM in a simple hotel in the quiet embrace of the Chemin des Dames. The heat has not lifted. At dusk, waiting for the stars to appear overhead, I imagine Joan and the king sharing this view on a similar evening. How far she had come in so little time, and how little time she had left. She was dead at nineteen. The years have not diminished her. Joan is with us still, her gilded bronze statue prominent in Paris, her life immortalized on the screen by Ingrid Bergman, among others, and renewed on a New York stage in 2018, but not because of her virginity. Joan is a hero to any teenage girl whose ambition is ridiculed, a hero to someone who is told she is no one, a hero to a woman who is called a witch, a hero to a loner who follows a mystical path. Her faith was real. “She was not flesh,” Twain wrote. “She was spirit.” Perhaps God used her to liberate France from the English, as legend has it. More likely, the French used her, and needed her, and still do.

  TEN

  WHEN GOD ANOINTED KINGS

  On the road to Reims, I wish I had a companion. It’s lonely on the Via Francigena at this hour, at this mark on the map, more than two hundred miles from Canterbury, a few weeks into my camino but many days until the Alps appear in the distance. Young Joan had a king and an army to accompany her, plus the voices from God. All I’ve got is a horrible song lodged in my head. My son is supposed to join me in Switzerland, a break from graduate school. I could use some banter with him now. The sun rose at 5:44 this morning, and I was out the door an hour later. On another day when the heat is my worst enemy, an early start is the only way to get through the nineteen miles from Corbény. The forecast is for a high of nearly 90. Most of the weight on my back is water: a plastic bladder of two liters with a long suction tube, and two large neoprene bottles. Medieval pèlerins traveled with little more than gourds filled with fluids, and those fluids were often wine. Bread was their main source of carbohydrates. And the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables, particularly in the cold months, could lead
to scurvy and crippling muscle cramps. I can’t count on finding water along the trail; I’ve yet to see a point d’eau. Carlo, the Brit traveling ahead of me, was so desperate he banged on the doors of farmhouses until someone took his empty bottle. The drink he was given was rancid, he reported later—filled with horse piss, in Carlo’s guess. “The problem with the French,” he said, “is that they hate everybody.” Well, he’s English.

  I considered following a quicker route, a straight shot on D1044—under six hours of walking time and five kilometers shorter. But the road has no shoulder. I’d be hiking against faceless cars, constantly ducking into the ditch to avoid the texting and gabbing motorists of the Marne. And I have a history of taking shortcuts that become disasters. The guidebook route is varied by surface—part road, part gravel path, part field—and scenery. Clean rectangular farms give way to compacted forests enclosed in squares. Here’s a canal. There’s a castle. And, best of all—vineyards. I’m at the edge of Champagne, the terroir of the most celebrated vines in the world. These rumpled rows of grapes are such a lift. In the first light of day, it’s like walking through a painting by early Impressionists.

  At Saint-Thierry, a village of 572 people, I’m ready to call it quits at four in the afternoon. The town has an intriguing history: William of Saint-Thierry wrote On the Nature and Dignity of Love here in the twelfth century. How does it hold up? A bit dense, but provocative still. The highest form of love is charity. Wisdom is being close to God; the more intimate you are with the divine, the smarter. And humans “have a natural bent by which the spirit tends toward higher things.” He was a much sunnier monk than his contemporary, the jihad-provoking Bernard of Clairvaux. The monastery where William of Saint-Thierry did his heavy thinking is gone, seized by French revolutionaries in the 1790s after twelve centuries of existence, and then razed. A new house of contemplation, run by Benedictine nuns, has beds for pilgrims. I looked them up earlier. To judge from their website pictures, they seem cheerful—happily shelling peas and singing with a guitar-playing sister who doesn’t look anything like Julie Andrews. I walk up to the edge of the gate outside their quarters, stare blankly at the impressive Georgian entrance, but can’t take another step. The guitars. The peas. Those memories of pugilistic penguins slapping me around in third grade at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Reims, the city of kings, with nearly a quarter million people in the metro area, is ten kilometers in the distance—six miles. It’s too tempting not to suck it up and finish.