Afterlives of the Saints

by Colin Dickey

  Saints are defined by their relationship to physical pain. There are those who bear it with humility and grace. Those who are miraculously impervious to it. Saints who relieve it in the bodies of the faithful, and saints who seek it out.

  Radegund sought it out. She may have had other relationships with pain, but this one would define her. Born a Thuringian princess, Radegund was forced to marry the Frankish king Clothar; she lived with him for twenty years before he finally let her retire to a convent in Saix. Later she would found the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. Her biographer, Venantius Fortunatus, tells us that as a child, "she would often converse with other children about her desire to be a martyr if the chance came in her time." It did not, but there were other means of self-annihilation. As an adult, she wore hair shirts and starved herself, and when this wasn't enough, Fortunatus writes, she "ordered a brass plate made, shaped in the sign of Christ. She heated it up in her cell and pressed it upon her body most deeply in two spots so that her flesh was roasted through. Thus, with her spirit flaming, she caused her very limbs to burn."

  Contemporary scholars have noted that while many saints mortified their flesh, Radegund's self-inflicted torment appears to be unique in its scope and its variety; no other saint during this time invented so many different ways to punish herself. The wounds from the brass cross not yet healed, Radegund "forced her tender limbs, already suppurating and scraped raw by the hard bristles of a hair cloth, to carry a water basin full of burning coals. Then, isolated from the rest, though her limbs were quivering, her soul was steeled for the pain. She drew it to herself, so that she might be a martyr though it was not an age of persecution."

  Even her charity was conceived as a form of personal torment; when lepers came to her abbey, she disguised herself to serve them. "Not shrinking from the scurf, scabs, lice or pus, she plucked off the worms and scrubbed away the putrid flesh," Fortunatus writes. "Seizing some of the leprous women in her embrace, her heart full of love, she kissed their faces. Then, while they were seated at table, she washed their faces and hands with warm water and treated their sores with fresh unguents and fed each one."

  Leprosy was thought contagious; a touch was all it took. After she had kissed the lepers, her servant asked her, "Most holy lady, when you have embraced lepers, who will kiss you?" Radegund told her, " Really, if you won't kiss me, it's no concern of mine."

  In his unflinching portrayal of her unflinching torment, Fortunatus sees this as Radegund's subservience to Christ—"Thus did a woman willingly suffer such bitterness for the sweetness of Christ!" But is this only about Christ? Behind piety lie other roots of Radegund's desire for a mortal pain to rival death, the result of a life that was an endless litany of savage misery. Born in 525 to a Thuringian king, she grew up, like Hamlet, in a household dominated by an uncle who had murdered her father and married her mother. Her uncle had a shaky truce with the Franks that he repeatedly violated, often violently, and in 531 the Frankish king Theuderic could take it no longer. He summoned his brother Clothar and pushed for war against the Thuringians. "You have every reason to be furious," he told Clothar, "both because of the injury done to me and for the slaughter of your own relations." The catalog of barbarisms attributed to the Thuringians, and so to Radegund's uncle, was long:

  They attacked our fellow-countrymen and stole their possessions. They hung our young men up to die in the trees by the muscles of their thighs. They put more than two hundred of our young women to death in the most barbarous way: they tied their arms round the necks of their horses, stampeded these animals in all directions by prodding them with goads, and so tore the girls to pieces; or else they stretched them out over the ruts of their roads, attached their arms and legs to the ground with stakes, and then drove heavily-laden carts over them again and again, until their bones were all broken and their bodies could be thrown out for the dogs and birds to feed on.

  Clothar agreed, and the two brothers launched what became known as the Thuringian War against Radegund's uncle. The ven geance of the Franks was swift and complete; Gregory of Tours later described how "such a massacre of the Thuringians took place here that the bed of the river was piled high with their corpses and that the Franks crossed over them to the other side as if they were walking on a bridge." During the carnage, nearly all of Radegund's family was killed; only her young brother and she survived.

  After the war came the spoils. The victorious brothers were so smitten with this child Radegund that they nearly killed one another fighting to have her. Finally they decided to gamble for her; Clothar won. In this desolation, Radegund found her new home. She was six years old.

  The memories of those times would never leave her. Thirty years later, an abbess in Poitiers, she composed a long poem, "The Thuringian War," describing those savage times:

  Oh, sad state of war, malevolent destiny, That fells proud kingdoms in a sudden slide.

  The roofs that stood so long in happiness are broken To lie fallen beneath the vast charred ruin.

  The palace courts, where art once flourished Are vaulted now with sad, glowing ashes.

  Towers artfully gilded, then shone golden-red, Now drifting ashes blur the glitter to pallor.

  There is nothing quite like this poem, in the medieval world or really anywhere short of the modern age. Euripedes may have written about the Trojan women, but nowhere else have I ever heard of such an ancient firsthand account of war from the perspective of defeated women. Women who had not even the comfort that the heroes of Troy had, who could not go to heroic death like Hektor. Women who saw that before them lay only slavery and rape.

  Slavery and rape lay in store for Radegund, though her husband, Clothar, had the decency to wait until she was in her early teens before consummating their marriage. When Hekabe says, "I am dead before death, from pressure of evil," it is Radegund who comes to my mind. Fortunatus tells us how at night,

  when she lay with her prince she would ask leave to rise and leave the chamber to relieve nature. Then she would prostrate herself in prayer under a hair cloak by the privy so long that the cold pierced her through and through and only her spirit was warm. Her whole flesh prematurely dead, indifferent to her body's torment, she kept her mind intent on Paradise and counted her suffering trivial.

  After Clothar murdered her last surviving brother in 550, she begged him to let her go; finally he allowed her to retire to a villa in Saix. There she lived in relative peace, burning her flesh and tending to lepers and never for a moment forgetting what she had seen and lived through, the pain of her memories only barely replaced by the physical pain of loving Christ. In 558, Clothar was nearing the end of his life and sent for Radegund; he was, according to her second biographer, "grieving over the grave loss he had suffered in letting so great and good a queen leave his side and that within himself he had no wish to live unless he could get her back again." But Radegund by then understood that her spiritual husband was preferable to her earthly one: According to legend, as Clothar came searching, Radegund fled to an oat field where the grain miraculously grew suddenly high around her, hiding her from view.

  Reality was a bit more mundane; Radegund had likely recognized that, after a lifetime of bloody deeds, Clothar was looking for absolution through charitable works. And she was shrewd enough to extort money from him to found the abbey and guarantee that she would be left in peace.

  She desired only to be left in peace and to be out of sight. Once, when lepers came to the abbey, "she laid a table with dishes, spoons, little knives, cups and goblets, and wine and she went in herself secretly that none might see her." After the coals burned her so deeply that her arms bled, she covered the wounds lest anyone notice: "Silently, she concealed the holes, but the putrefying blood betrayed the pain that her voice did not reveal." She wanted invisibility, but her miracles and her biographers made this impossible, and her quiet piety was made plain for all to see. As Fortunatus put it, "What she did secretly was to become known to all people."

  For
tunatus and those who came later wanted to make a symbol of her, a visible image of the blessings of Christ's love. A bea con of faith in a turbulent world, burning for all to see. But it is not clear at all that this was something she wanted for herself. She wanted to be left alone with her sisters at Poitiers.

  In the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, she wrote "The Thuringian War," recounting the miseries of her life, at the poem's heart a plea to her last remaining kinsman, Adelmarth, a cousin who had not responded to her repeated letters. And it was here in the abbey of Poitiers, that many of Radegund's miracles occurred as she brought health and remedy to those around her. Among the stories recounted by Fortunatus is that of the nun Aminia, who "suffered so with dropsical swelling that she seemed to have reached her end." As the sisters waited for her death, Aminia had a vision in which

  it seemed to her that the most venerable blessed Radegund ordered her to descend nude into a bath with no water in it. Then, with her own hand, the blessed one seemed to pour oil on the sick woman's head and cover her with a new garment. After this strange ritual, when she awakened from her sleep, all trace of the disease had disappeared. She had not even sweated it away for the water was consumed from within. As a result of this new miracle, no vestige of disease was left in her belly.

  This is the arc of Radegund's life: from the endurance of pain to the miraculous cessation of the pain of others, her self-inflicted pain an axis around which the other two poles tilt. This is the touch of Radegund's hand, a touch that brings peace to others even as it does violence to herself.

  Radegund describes herself in her poem as "I, the barbarian woman." To the Franks, the Thuringians were indeed barbarians— the word derived from the Greek, meaning simply "anyone not Greek." It is onomatopoeic, the bar bar meant to invoke the gibberish of the foreign tongue. To be a barbarian is to have only gibberish for language, to speak without sense.

  There is no gibberish in Radegund's words, but there is a wordless wail of grief that rends its way through her poetry:

  Nor could the captive press a kiss on the threshold Nor cast one backward glance toward what was lost. A wife's naked feet trod in her husband 's blood And the tender sister stepped over the fallen brother. The boy torn from his mother's embrace, his funeral plaint Hung on her lips, with all her tears unshed.

  So to lose the life of a child is not the heaviest lot, Gasping, the mother lost even her pious tears.

  Radegund's poetic technique is to layer image upon image; a horror is borne first by captives, then by wives and husbands, then by sisters and brothers, then by mothers, children. Each grief named in turn, all gathered up by her lone remaining voice until the words themselves buckle and break under her repetition, and lament— pure lament— spills forth:

  I, the barbarian woman, seek not to count these tears, Nor to keep afloat in the melancholy lake of all those drops.

  Each one had her own tears; I alone have them all, Anguish is private and public both to me.

  Fate was kind to those whom the enemy struck down. I, the sole survivor, must weep for them all.

  Not only must I mourn the near ones who died: I also grieve for those still blessed with life.

  My face often moistened, my eyes are blurred, My murmurs are secret but my care unstilled.

  Unstilled cares finally broke Hekabe, turning her wailing, according to legend, into the bark of a dog. Her human voice, no longer able to contain all that misery, went beyond gibberish and senselessness into the nonhuman. Radegund wrote poetry because she could not send a wordless wail to Adelmarth, because she could not call him to her with the barking of a dog.

  She was still living with Clothar when he had her brother murdered, and Radegund could do nothing but sit in mute silence as the reports of her husband's brutality came in. Her brother's death went unmourned, as had those of the hundreds of Thuringians killed decades earlier. Fortunatus saw this as a good thing because it was this outrage that finally broke their marriage and allowed Radegund to retire to Saix, where her sainted life could begin: "If divinity fosters it," he tells us, "misfortune often leads to salvation. Thus her innocent brother was murdered so that she might come to live in religion." But if Fortunatus could gloss over this horror, Radegund could not.

  The youth was struck down while in his first downy beard, Nor did I, his absent sister, attend the dire funeral. I lost him and could not even close his pious eyes Nor lie across the corpse in final farewell,

  My hot tears could not warm his freezing bowels. I placed no kiss upon his dying flesh,

  No embrace in my misery. I could not hang weeping on his neck

  Nor sighing, warm the unlucky corpse in my bosom.

  In this, too, Radegund is barbaric, one mark of the barbarian being a lack of proper reverence for the dead— this being a thing that separates the barbarians from those excellent Greeks. In Euripides' play, Odysseus tells Hekabe,

  You barbarians don't know how to treat your friends as friends,

  how to venerate men who die beautiful deaths.

  Maybe so, but barbarism is always relative: Odysseus has just told Hekabe that her last remaining daughter is to be sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles, the man who dragged the corpse of her son Hektor through the dirt. Hekabe— who once saved Odysseus's life— now strikes him as barbaric for not honoring the world-killer Achilles with her daughter and with the gratitude for the existence of heroic men like him.

  Perhaps barbarism is only this wordless, mute wail of the defeated, of women who cannot even mourn their kindred dead. A lament without end that strikes the ears of victorious brutes as pure gibberish, like the sound of a barking dog.

  At its heart, "The Thuringian War" is just this: a plea to one of her last surviving kin, a longing for contact, for a word of friendship in a life of pain and death. Radegund lived in a time without pity, a time when the only refuge for a woman without means was to be found in religion. Radegund, a princess who lost everything, turned to Christ for solace. But for Fortunatus to say that her masochism came from religious fervor and not from the desolation of her life and the annihilation of her family may not be entirely accurate. Bound within the walls of the convent, Radegund thinks not of Christ but of her cousin:

  If the monastery's sacred cloister did not keep me back, I'd come unheralded to the region where you bide. Swift would I pass by ship through tempest-tossed waves Racing gladly through the gales of wintry water.

  For love of you, would I press more strongly through

  the shifting tides;

  What sailors dread would never make me quake.

  If the wave broke the keel in the perilous waters, I would still seek you rowing on the surface of the sea. If by unlucky chance, the planks refused to bear me, I would come to you exhausted from swimming.

  At sight of you, I would deny the journey's perils For that would sweetly take the sorrow from the wreck Yes, if fate had ripped from me at last my doleful life, I would have you bear me to a sandy tomb.

  I would come to you a sightless corpse if your pious eyes Would turn at last to carry out my funeral rites. Surely you, who spurn my living tears, would weep at

  my burial.

  Surely you, who deny me a word now, would mourn.

  In the two hundred lines of the poem, Radegund barely mentions Christ. Instead she recalls in graphic detail horrors forty years old and makes a desperate plea for a word from a beloved cousin. Reading it alongside Fortunatus's biography is jarring; he makes almost no mention of her suffering except as opportunities to enrich her faith and her love of Christ. Radegund lived in a time when only two kinds of suffering were worth noting: the blessed suffering of Christ or the senseless suffering of the barbarian. Between these worlds, Radegund crafts a poem that men tions Christ and barbarians but is about neither, a poem that is a lament so pure that it has a physical presence, a body and a smell of its own.

  Radegund eventually got her wish and has gradually faded

  from sight. There are still churches dedicat
ed to her, but she has little of the cult following she once had. The convent dedicated to her in Cambridge became Jesus College, Cambridge, and while she remains its patron saint, the nearby street Radegund Lane was long ago renamed Jesus Lane. The oat fields have once again grown up around her, and she has disappeared again from searching eyes. But the smell of that lament still remains, an echo on the high breeze.

  ·five·

  Quixote's Madness: Teresa of Avila

  Lost in the limitless labyrinth of books is Teresa. Born in March 1515 in Avila, she was born for reading and as a young girl read incessantly: "I do not believe I was ever happy if I had not a new book," she writes in the opening of her autobiography. She learned this love from her mother, who was fond of chivalric romances and always made time for her children to read. Teresa's father disapproved, thought it a waste of time, a corrupting of his children's minds. Teresa and her siblings had to keep the reading a secret— she began to call it "an addiction," her "little fault." She read in the quiet of dark spaces, much like the young Marcel Proust, who centuries later described seeking out the "dim coolness" of his room to evade his family and read in secret.