by Timothy Egan
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THOUGH THERE ARE countless things to do in Reims, I’m here for the Holy Ampulla. The widest triumphal arch of the Roman Empire stands strong, not far from the train station. That would be the Porte de Mars, named for the god of war, carved with near-naked and mythic characters across its 105-foot length. The champagne houses—Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart, Taittinger, among the better known—beckon with come-ons to their gilded maisons here in the Vatican of sparkling wine. An evening stroller can wander along wide boulevards and pedestrian-only side streets, eat pink cookies made daily since the seventeenth century, or try a blood sausage without the blood. This is a real city, sparking at all hours. But I want to see the Holy Ampulla, the tiny glass vial that holds the sacred oil used to anoint nearly every king of France. Reims is where church became state, the birthplace of this nation’s creation myth.
The tourist office is bustling; for the first time my trail is full of pilgrims. Since Calais, I’ve seen no more than six people walking to Rome. But here at the crossroads of the V.F. and a route leading to the Camino de Santiago, the place is crawling with holy hikers—Brits, Germans, Russians, Dutch, Italians. Most people are going south to Spain, through a network of trails that ultimately lead to the tomb of Saint James. The pilgrimage, they say, begins wherever the pilgrim does, which makes it fairly easy. They have traditional scallop shells draped around their necks, which also served as a medieval eating tool in the pre-cutlery age. And they exude a sense of superiority. When I explain to a sunbaked Scandinavian that I’m taking the camino less traveled, he gives me a dismissive eye roll, as if I’m on an inferior road to revelation.
The office finds me a hotel named for the conspiratorial Knights Templar, the monastic order founded in violence. They had wealthy donors, and worked in the shadows, assassinating rivals, hoarding sacred relics. The Templars came to their inevitable end when fifty-four of their leaders were tortured and executed in 1310 by a church that had once relied on them, but then turned against them. That said, the Grand Hôtel des Templiers is a fine tribute, a nineteenth-century home built around a peaceful courtyard, with a tub in my room for soaking sore muscles. My legs have started to cramp at day’s end, from a combination of heat and strain. I’m a long way from Rome. I’ll need heavy maintenance to make it. I decide to stay for a few days to wait out the hot weather. The front desk clerk even helps me with my French. Reims is pronounced Rahns.
Catching up on correspondence, I light up at an email from the pope. Francis—it’s about time! Actually, it’s the pope’s spokesman, Greg Burke, director of the Holy See Press Office, who was forwarded my request through the Vatican pouch of the Jesuits. He’s encouraging on the pilgrimage, calling it “brilliant” for an American to get away from our screens and see the ancient Christian world on foot. This alone makes me pause and cherish the word “brilliant” and, before reading further, allow my hopes to rise. But then, just as quickly—deflation. Regarding my interview with the Vicar of Christ, he can’t promise anything. “Longshot,” he writes, “but will pass it on.” I’m also still working the Jesuit back channel, and send another note to Father Steve.
The papal representative suggests picking up Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome, which I’ve already read. Belloc was a French-born Anglophile, educated at Oxford, who stirred a million philosophical pots during a long career through the first half of the twentieth century. In 1901, he followed the same route that I’m on, walking through France, Switzerland, and Italy. It was overgrown and not marked, but he found his way. “I vowed a vow to go to Rome on a pilgrimage to see all of Europe which the Christian faith has saved,” he wrote. Belloc was an uncompromising Catholic, an apologist for the Crusades, someone who would have been welcomed by the Templars at one of their heretic roasts. “The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith,” he wrote. Certainly that was true of his age, when the crucifix could be seen in nearly every corner of the Continent. It’s not hard to guess what he’d think of the Europe of today—“a heathen continent with a Christian residue,” in the estimation of the German American evangelist Dietrich Schindler. Less imperiously, Belloc noted: “Wherever the Catholic sun does shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine.” His faith seemed genuine and deeply rooted, but the modern mind chafes at his casual anti-Semitism. Nor did he anticipate the beast that would rise from the nation to my east. “A great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music,” he said of Germans at the dawn of the century in which they would nearly destroy the world. I give him credit for his physical stamina. Belloc says he walked thirty miles a day.
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WELL SLEPT, I’m up and outside just as the first steaming cup of café au lait is produced in the courtyard. Then I hit the ampulla trail, strolling to the place where the oil that baptized Clovis has long been stored, the Saint Rémi basilica and abbey, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The large sculpture out front depicts a very ripped-looking Clovis, naked but for a loincloth, getting anointed by Bishop Remigius on Christmas Day in 496. With this sacred sealing, the King of the Franks was linked to the kings of Israel, back to David. The story is that a dove of the Holy Spirit descended from the heavens bearing a vial of oil. It’s been called the Baptism of France. At the time, there were plenty of Christians living among the ruins of the northern Roman Empire. The faith had spread through peaceful means. And the church, with its new network of bishops, deacons, priests, and monks, with its monastic centers and increasingly large property holdings, held many communities together after the fall of Rome. What Clovis did was unite the tribal Franks under the banner of one rule—a kingdom blessed by the highest Christian authority. The anointment sealed God to crown. The Divine Right of Kings, the idea that monarchs get their authority from the creator, can be traced in part to the union of the militant Clovis to the mostly pacifistic Christians scattered on this side of the Alps. Clovis is considered by many to be the founder of France.
But the conversion of Clovis, we shouldn’t forget, was purely mercenary—conditioned on victory over one of his enemies. While waging pagan-on-pagan war, Clovis was persuaded by his Christian wife, Clotilde, to give her god a try—just as Bertha had talked Ethelbert into her faith in Canterbury. When it worked, Clovis switched. Though, as a fresh-minted Catholic, the King of the Franks ignored a central tenet of his new religion and killed off most members of his family. To be related to him by blood was to know your days were numbered. “After each murder, Clovis built a church,” wrote the novelist Maurice Druon.
This wasn’t the first time a ruler had tied his realm to religion in Europe. That occurred nearly two hundred years earlier. The Roman Empire had been mostly tolerant of other faiths through the years, with the exception of some binges of gaudy violence against Christians by sociopaths like Nero. By one scholarly estimate, the total number of Christians martyred by Romans was fewer than a thousand. As a convert to the words of Jesus, Emperor Constantine continued the open-worship tradition. His Edict of Milan promised that “every man may have complete toleration in the practice of whatever worship he has chosen.” But it would not last. After the Romans made Christianity the state religion, the persecuted became the persecutors. By the end of the fourth century, under Theodosius, Christianity was cemented as the Empire’s official faith. And within a generation’s time, more Christians were killed by other Christians—orthodox believers versus “heretics”—than all those slain during three hundred years of Roman mistreatment. In addition, classical statues, temples, and libraries holding the collected wisdom of Greek thinkers were destroyed as pagan artifacts. Communal Christian gathering places gave way to great concentrations of wealth and power. A papal saying was coined: Roma locuta est, causa finita est. Rome has spoken, the case is closed.
It was a breathtaking transition, almost unfathomable: the Roman Empire adopting the religion of a small creed that had no armed legions, no great royal families,
its followers making up barely 5 percent of the population. Christianity had spread by word of mouth, not organizational muscle. The Word was powerful, a gospel of humility and love of fellow humans. A slave could be a Christian. But while this union of Empire and God aided the rapid expansion of Christianity, it might have been the Original Sin of the church. With power came intolerance, secular control, and organized killing. After Constantine, every Roman emperor but one was Christian. The exception, Julian, converted back to paganism in 361. “You keep adding corpses newly dead to the corpses of long ago,” he complained about Catholic proclivity to sanctify the deceased. “You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchers.” The old religions were doomed.
And so, too, was Christian Rome. The Empire grew sickly, feeble, unable to defend itself. After being split in two by Constantine, the eastern half, Byzantium, became the stronger sphere. The city of Rome gradually emptied out. No emperor after Constantine would live there. The capital was moved to Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, leaving behind a graveyard of saints and a haunt of imperial slogans on chipped marble. Soon, sheep would graze on the Seven Hills, or such was the prediction. The wonder is that it lasted so many centuries. “It’s easier to explain Rome’s fall,” wrote Will Durant, “than to account for her long survival.” He was seconding the point made by Edward Gibbon, whose six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared about the same time that Thomas Jefferson penned a declaration that would give rise to another great power.
The last emperor of the West was a fifteen-year-old boy, a puppet and usurper. He took the name Romulus Augustulus. The imperial power that had stretched from Hadrian’s Wall in the far reaches of England to the River Euphrates in Iran, from the North Sea to North Africa, ruled by giants—by gods—ended on the soft shoulders of this child with a high-pitched voice. Within a year he was forced to abdicate, in 476. The West was gradually dissolved, its parts subsumed by the Eastern Empire, by fresh waves of soldiers for hire, by Germanic Lombards and Goths, Vandals and Huns. The Eastern Empire lasted another thousand years, though it lost territory to Persians, as well as to Arabs waging holy war in the name of Allah.
Gibbon famously blamed Christians for the fall—terrible at war, worse at diplomacy, too chaste by half. “The active virtues of society were discouraged, and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister,” he wrote. The emperor lost much of his authority when he was no longer a god; he had no clothes. What came after Rome’s fall, in Gibbon’s view, were loathsome clerics and ignoble lords overseeing primitive peasants. The sun stopped shining. In the Dark Ages, living well for the present gave way to living piously for heaven, or trying to game your way in. Riches and estates were given to those who could grant eternal life, the entity that filled the power vacuum—Pontifex Maximus, soon the largest landowner in Europe.
The church issued waves of edicts against other faiths and subversive theologies. Charlemagne, not long after being crowned by the pope as the first Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800, gave Saxon rebels north of Italy a choice between conversion to Christianity or death; almost 5,000 were beheaded on his orders. Jews were marginalized, attacked—in places prohibited from sharing a meal with Christians or holding minor offices. It would get worse. In 1180, King Philip Augustus of France expelled the Jews from Paris and took their property. A decade later, he had sixty Jews burned at the stake. In 1215, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews must be “publicly distinguished from other people by their dress”—an order with lineage all the way to the Nazi mandate to wear Star of David armbands. In Spain, at the same time that Columbus was getting his patronage to sail the open Atlantic, the Crown ordered all Jews to give up their faith. Those who refused were tortured, executed, or banished. Up to 60,000 Jews were run out of the country. In Portugal, 4,000 were slain on a single night.
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THE BASILICA OF SAINT RÉMI is cavernously dark, and at the moment I’m the only visitor. I actually get lost for a time, and have trouble finding an open door that would lead back to light and fresh air. For such a big place, it feels claustrophobic. I wander around in the pre-Gothic gloom looking for a singular treasure. After Clovis was baptized, the holy oil disappeared for centuries. Then it reappeared, in its original one-and-a-half-inch glass vial, the all-powerful Holy Ampulla, and was kept in a vault somewhere in this high Christian compound. Whenever a new king of France was crowned, the oil was carried in a procession to the majestic Reims Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and rubbed on the skin of the sovereign. He took an oath to defend the faith and “extirpate heretics.” From 1027 onward, all but two of the kings of France were crowned in Reims and dabbed with oil brought to earth by God’s winged carrier. Some very odd men were sealed in this way. Charles VI was anointed in Reims at the age of eleven. He was insane, or more precisely, schizophrenic. He went weeks without changing his clothes. He sat for days at a time, frozen in place, saying he was made of glass and that any movement would shatter him. The Divine Right of Kings certainly had its privileges.
The Clovis tale is mostly mythic—that is, the dove and the oil, the moment that gave birth to France. Nobody in this city can say for sure exactly where Clovis was baptized, when, or how. The oil was likely conjured up in the early eleventh century, scholars now believe. But it’s not crucial whether the story is true or not. What’s important is that people believed it to be true, and still do. For centuries, wars were waged, dissidents killed, land seized, edicts issued, entitlements justified (need I mention droit du seigneur, the right of a Christian lord to rape a peasant bride on her wedding night), all in the name of monarchs with the imprimatur of God. While the state-backed Inquisition was terrorizing Spain, Catholics with a conscience looked the other way. “The most ardent defenders of justice here consider that it is better for an innocent man to be condemned than for the Inquisition to suffer disgrace,” wrote a group of official observers that included three future popes.
In 1793, newly secular rulers in Paris sent Philippe Rühl to Reims with a mission to eliminate the symbol at the center of Christian France. He seized the Holy Ampulla, placed it on a pedestal in a public square, and smashed it with a hammer. But he couldn’t kill the legend. Some of the oil had been put aside beforehand, and that, along with shards of the broken glass covered with balm, was rescued. It was to Reims that Pope John Paul II came in 1996—exactly fifteen hundred years after Clovis was oil-rubbed—to recall the story of the bird and the vial and the first conversion of a monarch in Western Europe. More than 200,000 people turned out to hear the creation myth retold.
I’m told by an old man at Saint Rémi that I can find the restored vial at Reims Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Off to the big house of worship it is, then. This is another architectural wonder, originating in the thirteenth century, the model of Gothic symmetry and beauty. In the place where kings got their crowns, everything is designed to project power. You can imagine feathered and silk-robed nobles gathered up front, peasants and pilgrims in the cheap seats. General Eisenhower chose this cathedral to receive Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945. And it was here, a few years later, that a reconciliation ceremony was held between France and Germany—heralding the European Union.
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WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, my first church was a modest, ranch-style building plopped down amid the tumbleweeds and ponderosa pines off Indian Trail Road in Spokane, but with a cathedral-like distance between pastor and flock. Father Ralph Schwemin was Gothic, his cassock stretching nearly the full length of his six-foot-four-inch frame, the high altar of his immense forehead gleaming under fluorescent lights, his gloomy scowl. At Mass, in the days after I’d just lost my two front teeth and before Vatican II changes had arrived in our distant province of Catholicism, this priest would mumble in Latin for fifteen minutes, his back turned to us. Then silence but for the squeak of his size 13 shoes on linoleum tile. He slowly ascended to a podium with a sermon designed to mak
e us feel small. He looked like a man on stilts. The theme was always the same. “God is up there,” said Schwemin, unfolding one-half of his condor-length wingspan over his head, “man is down here.” Way, way, way down here, as my mother would soon learn.
We trembled with fear whenever Father Schwemin came near. I tried to avoid all eye contact. Or I hid. But he knew me, because our house was across the street from the parish compound. He was building a physical church at the dusty fringe of north Spokane, not a human parish. Nothing else mattered to him. When someone stepped on a newly installed flower bed, Schwemin went into a squall of rage. He got on the school intercom, in his deepest, most child-withering tone. “I want to know which one of you miserable little kids did this!” he thundered. It was a red-alert emergency, broadcast to all eight grades. “I’ll find out. And I will punish you.” We expected the school to go into lockdown until somebody snitched on the culprit.