by Tom Bissell
I.
I had been there only a few hours, but I could tell already there was a lot to admire about Toulouse, also known as the Pink City, the Cape Canaveral of the European space program, and, long ago, the finest city in all of medieval Gaul. Then I began talking to Gérard, a native son determined to tell me all the things about Toulouse I was supposed to hate. Gérard first noticed me writing in my notebook while I stood across the street from Saint Sernin’s, Toulouse’s central basilica, which held the relics of the apostles Simon the Cananaean and Thaddaeus. It was eleven o’clock on a misty Saturday night in late May: above us, all around us, summer air was humidly annexing the spring.
Gérard began by detailing his problems with the Muslims, moved on to the blacks, proceeded on to the Asians, shifted over to the Africans, drifted back to the Muslims, and ended, forcefully, with the Muslims. The nutshell version of his argument was that none of these people were French. Hundreds of years ago, he told me, not terribly far from where we stood, at Pamiers, the Muslim horde was once pushed back by spear and sword. Once, he said, they came as warriors, carrying banners and weapons. Now Muslims came pregnant, carrying visas.
Gérard apparently believed I was a student and with flashing troublemaker eyes kept indicating my notebook and telling me to “include” this or that bit in my “research.” When he started in on the Muslims again, I stopped pretending to take notes. Five five in his amply heeled shoes, Gérard wore a thin blue sport coat and tie whose fat paisley knot was loose and miscentered. Suddenly I could see the small, shabby apartment to which he had no wish to stumble home: the stale sandy crumbs in the bread dish on the plain wooden table, the stained coffee cup he rarely washed, the photograph of the wife long dead, the phone that no longer rang. His hands were palsied with something like Parkinson’s or alcoholism or both.
It had not rained enough to leave any puddles, but the streets and sidewalks gleamed like black rubber. Not many people were out walking tonight. In a café across the street, a few youngish French drank and chatted. On the corner nearest to us, a street musician played his accordion, though its sad, strangled sound suggested something traumatic had happened to its bellows. A young Frenchman hurried into view on the opposite street, carrying a bottle of wine and delicately cradling a light brown torpedo of fresh bread. An archetypal French sight, but for his dreadlocks and iPod earbuds. Gérard watched him without expression.
I told Gérard I had to be going. He nodded in a way that seemed to recognize that he had taken one or two (or twelve) unnecessarily alienating rhetorical steps. We headed off in separate directions, him to his lonely apartment, me to my lonely hotel room. Once Gérard disappeared around the corner, though, I doubled back and walked around Saint Sernin’s Basilica a second time. This took several minutes. A large Romanesque cross-shaped church—the largest such church in Europe, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site—Saint Sernin’s was snugly enclosed within an ovular huddle of distinctively pink Toulouse buildings, which meant it was virtually impossible to see the basilica from a distance. On approach, you caught glimpses of it, looming between the cracks of narrow streets, almost as though you were stalking an elephant through thick jungle, but to really see Saint Sernin’s, you had to get close. Only its six-story octagonal slit-windowed stone belfry could be seen from a distance.
Saint Sernin’s was built on the supposed remains of a shrine devoted to Saint Saturninus, who is known in French as Sernin. According to legend, Sernin was the first bishop of Toulouse, leading its small community of Christians in the first half of the third century. In 249, however, the Roman emperor Decius issued a decree that affected nearly every living Christian in the empire. Rome’s fortunes had declined, Decius believed, because not enough Roman citizens were making the necessary sacrifices to the gods. Thus, he demanded that every Roman citizen (males were allowed to sacrifice on behalf of their households) make a sacrifice. Once this sacrifice was enacted before an imperially recognized witness, Romans were given a certificate. Those who refused to sacrifice and were not granted their certificate were vulnerable to punishment and, sometimes, execution. Decius’s order was at least partially directed at the empire’s Christians, most of whom obeyed and sacrificed. One feels for these ancient Christians: on this particular issue, their scripture offered little guidance, containing, as it did, as many recommendations to kowtow to earthly authority as it did to reject pagan idols.
The damage done to Christianity by Decius’s decree was considerable, and the persecution helped generate a copious amount of martyr literature in which Christians depicted themselves as the always-resistant victims of continuous pagan harassment. This literature was fanciful in two ways: most Christians did not resist, and most persecutions were minor (though Decius’s eventual successor, Valerian, was rougher on Christians). There is no question that some Christians resisted Decius’s decree; most, however, were community leaders, such as Sernin, whose supposed end came when he refused to sacrifice and was arrested in front of Toulouse’s pagan temple and tied to a sacrificial bull. The bull was then goaded until it went berserk; it charged through town with an increasingly mutilated Sernin in tow. (As The Golden Legend has it, “Thus Saturninus, with his skull shattered and his brains spilled out, happily consummated his martyrdom.”) Sernin’s broken body was secreted away by his followers and buried. At some point in the following century, a local bishop “found” Sernin’s relics and body and ordered the construction of a small wooden shrine over them, though no archaeological remains of this structure have ever been found.
There seem to have been a few early Christian bishops named Saturninus (an African name), all of whom were gruesomely martyred. This, along with the fact that Sernin was said to have been a member of the Seventy Disciples, which is temporally impossible given the century of his death, indicates a high likelihood that Sernin of Toulouse is a purely legendary figure. Either way, by the fourth century Sernin was the center of an active cult. With Christianity triumphant throughout the empire, a basilica was built in his honor over or around his Toulouse shrine, though its layout and size are, once again, unknown. In the eleventh century, Toulouse’s Christian community laid the cornerstones of a new and grander Saint Sernin’s Basilica, work on which continued for several hundred years. Despite the town’s efforts, ancient and modern, on behalf of Saint Sernin’s, certain structural elements were never completed, such as the two intended towers on the basilica’s western front. Many of its ornamental exterior carvings have today eroded beyond any hope of restoration.
By medieval times, Saint Sernin’s had become an important stop on the Camino de Santiago, Europe’s greatest Christian pilgrimage walking route, which terminates at the tomb of James son of Zebedee in Santiago, Spain. Scholars have debated where the European Christian impulse toward peregrinative piety—which has no basis in scripture—derives from, but it may have something to do with Cluny, a village in France’s Burgundy region, which was founded in the early tenth century. Today, Cluny is a mere village, but its vibrant determination to promote itself and its millennial vision changed European Christianity for good and ill. Although Cluny’s monks built many spectacular buildings within Cluny itself, including one of the largest churches in Europe—many of the town’s devotional structures were destroyed by mobs during the French Revolution—they reserved their greatest propagandistic efforts on behalf of James son of Zebedee’s then-hard-to-reach shrine in distant Santiago, Spain.
It is unknown whether the monks and abbots of Cluny were the first to propose walking hundreds of miles to Santiago or simply seized on the fact that Christians were already doing so. What is known is that from the eleventh century on the Christians of Cluny built and promoted numerous way-station churches, sanctuaries, and monasteries along the pilgrimage path, including Saint Sernin’s, which was concocted as a tourist church and today remains primarily a tourist church.
Saint Sernin’s Basilica was not a magnificent or overpowering building. It had a lovely, comforting homeli
ness to it, almost as though it were a brick cassoulet. Perhaps the most striking exterior aspect of Saint Sernin’s was the pair of gargantuan wood double doors that opened onto its transept crossings. Adjacent to the door were cornices and modillions festooned with carvings of biblical scenes, along with some figures whose meaning was not easily surmised. Two of the better preserved modillion carvings, above what is called the Miègeville Door, show a mysterious man’s and woman’s faces. Other bits of ornamental art were stranger yet: human figures imprisoned within scrolls, an angel-flanked Peter holding out cruciform wafers, two women riding lions.*1 Nearby were relics of Toulouse’s paleo-Christian community, including an ancient funereal niche filled with large marble coffins that probably dated from the eleventh or twelfth century. These were in grievous condition, appearing to have been periodically hosed down with sulfuric acid.
I had stood before and within the churches of many cultures: Indian, Roman, Palestinian, Byzantine, Vietnamese, American, Greek, German, Russian, and Tanzanian, to name but a few. I knew this: no other culture’s churches were as strangely distancing—even alienating—as those of medieval Europe. I thought of Kingsley Amis’s famous line: “Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they’d been in the Middle Ages?” Never before had such intellectually hermetic, helplessly superstitious people endeavored to build more utterly astonishing things across such a wide sweep of lands and cultures. The Christians of medieval Europe had no computers or machines. They had only their brute strength and cruel mastery over various beasts of burden. From this: Notre Dame, Chartres, Saint Sernin’s, Santiago de Compostela. How was this possible? How on earth did they complete these structures that would challenge the finest architects and engineers of the twenty-first century?
But they were not building churches or basilicas so much as universes in miniature. Every portal sculpture, every modillion, every stone face above every capital—this was their philosophy, their theodicy, their genome of brick and mortar. It was faith literalized and semiotized, for all eternity. Put aside thoughts of the colossal waste of such buildings being constructed in a time of poverty and social deprivation: architectural historians will tell you that the vast majority of medieval churches were subsidized by their communities with pride-fattened hearts. Medieval churches occupy the highest points within their cities for a reason. The medieval architects and craftsmen on the church-building circuit were the Hollywood film crews of their time, traveling widely (and almost always by foot), exchanging techniques, and feasting on the celebratory banquets of their wealthy benefactors. The peasants who lived in the shadows of these costly, otherworldly churches must have accepted all this as reasonable, just as we somehow accept that earning tens of millions of dollars for pretending to be Iron Man is reasonable.
When I rounded the final corner of Saint Sernin’s, I found two teenagers sitting in the jamb of the western door amid a small palisade of empty Kronenbourg beer bottles. Both watched me mutely, and I realized quickly they were sitting there to make out. “Bonsoir,” I said, and asked if they spoke English. “A little,” the young man said. “She speaks more than me.” His spotty beard made his face seem as though it were wearing an old moth-eaten sweater. She just looked at me: short black hair, small face, the dejected eyes and mouth of a goth girl with no makeup. I asked them if they knew anything about the church. The young man looked to the young woman. “It’s a very old church,” she said. “A lot of tourists come here.” Did she know about any of the relics inside? She did not. Neither did he. “Have you,” I asked her, “ever heard of Simon the Cananaean or Thaddaeus, the apostles?” These names were utterly unknown to her. Her boyfriend asked what the hell we were talking about. When she translated for him, he laughed at the outrageous notion of his caring about such things.
I wished them a good night and walked around Saint Sernin’s a third time. The next time I passed the doorjamb, they were gone.
II.
Simon the Cananaean and Thaddaeus are probably the most obscure members of the Twelve. They are also the only members of the Twelve traditionally imagined to have met their martyrdoms together. Simon is primarily notable for being regarded as something he was not, and Thaddaeus is primarily notable for being regarded as someone he was not. Even their placement in the New Testament’s apostolic lists establishes the lack of interest they generated among the evangelists. In Mark and Matthew, “Simon the Cananaean” holds down the Twelve’s eleventh position, followed only by Judas; Luke, however, promotes the apostle he calls “Simon, who was called the Zealot” to the tenth position. In Mark and Matthew, meanwhile, Thaddaeus occupies the tenth position; in Luke, an apostle literally referred to as “Judas of James” is listed eleventh, before Judas. What these traded places and swapped names actually amounts to cannot be known, especially when neither Simon nor Thaddaeus is mentioned within the New Testament beyond the lists of the Twelve,*2 though John’s gospel mentions one “Judas (not Iscariot),” who some commentators have argued must be the same person as Luke’s “Judas of James.”
Another mystery is why the gospels disagree on the names of these two apostles. Possibly Luke was aware of traditions that provided Simon with a different epithet and Thaddaeus a different name. Most scholars agree that the apostle Mark and Matthew deem “Simon the Cananaean”—Simon “ho Kananaois,” which is to say, Simon from Cana or Simon the Canaanite—is the result of a transliteration error. “Cananaean” is not a place-of-origin epithet but a derivation of qan’ana, the Aramaic word for “zealous.” Luke, who otherwise shows little interest in Aramaic words, apparently recognized Mark’s and Matthew’s mistake and provided a presumably more accurate Greek rendering of the epithet: Simon zelotes, or “Simon, who was called the Zealot.”
Thaddaeus (in Greek, Thaddaios) is a diminutive of a few Greek names, including Theodosios and Theodoros; the Semitic version of Thaddaeus was rendered as Taddai or, possibly, Addai. It was not a common name in first-century Palestine; there are only a handful of other confirmed instances of its use. Christian tradition has generally evolved to regard Thaddaeus as the nickname of Luke’s “Judas of James” and John’s “Judas (not Iscariot).” No one, after all, would have wanted to go by the name of the apostle who betrayed Jesus. This consequently gave rise to a tradition of referring to the apostle Jude Thaddaeus, who, as Saint Jude, is perhaps best known to modern Christians as the patron saint of lost causes. However, there is nothing in the New Testament to indicate the existence of Jude Thaddaeus.
A few early Matthew manuscripts give Thaddaeus’s name as “Lebbaeus” (Greek: Lebaios) or “Lebbaeus surnamed Thaddaeus,” which complicates things further. In the Vulgate Bible, Jerome referred to Thaddaeus as “Trinomius,” or “the man with three names,” but he is actually Quadrinomius: Judas of James, Thaddaeus, Jude Thaddaeus, and, simply, Jude. The confusion surrounding Thaddaeus’s name makes him a significant apostle historically, if only because it suggests that by the time the gospels were written, the individual identities of the Twelve were no longer regarded as important to Christians. If they were, the gospels’ earliest copyists would surely have done more to harmonize the apostolic lists’ discrepancies. That they generally did not establishes the low-priority nature of the issue.
Another minor mystery pertains to whether Luke meant “Judas of James” to mean “Judas the son of James” or “Judas the brother of James.” In standard first-century Greek usage, “of” formulations usually indicated a father-son relationship. That appears not to be the case here, or so tradition has assumed. But which James is Jude “of”? James the brother of Jesus, James the brother of John, James son of Alphaeus, or some other, historically insignificant James? Arguments on behalf of all these candidates have been waged. Because James the brother of Jesus had a brother named Judas, and because Judas eventually became a prominent figure in Jewish Christianity (the canonical Letter of Jude’s author self-identifies as “Judas
the brother of James”), one traditional understanding is that “Judas of James” was the brother of James son of Alphaeus (which is actually James the brother of Jesus but, in the Catholic mind, becomes James the cousin of Jesus). In the early second century, the Christian writer Papias wrote of his understanding that Simon and Jude were brothers to James “the bishop,” meaning, probably, James the brother of Jesus. Origen, in the third century, identified Jude as the brother of Jesus and James but not Simon. The mid-fourth-century Christian Ephraem the Syrian wrote a commentary on Acts that connected “Simon the Zealot” and “Judas of James” with Jesus’s brothers Simon and Jude, but few later commentators have chosen to explore this path, due to the gospels’ insinuation that Jesus’s brothers were not members of the Twelve. Others have proposed that Judas of James is the son of James son of Zebedee and thus nephew to the apostle John.
Many ancient legends conflate Simon the apostle with Simon the brother of Jesus and Simeon the second bishop of Jerusalem, as in this introductory processional to a Coptic legend: “The preaching of the blessed Saint Simon, the son of Cleopas, who was surnamed Judas, which is interpreted Nathaniel, who became bishop of Jerusalem after James, the brother of our Lord.” (Actually, Simon has been confused with three different men here: Simon the brother of Jesus, Judas of James, and Nathanael the disciple.) Attempts to zero in (even generally) on Jude/Thaddaeus’s identity are equally hopeless. Someone called “Judas the Zealot” appears in a few early New Testament manuscripts and Christian legends, and in the fourth century Eusebius wrote of the Syriac Christian legend in which “Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, was moved by inspiration to send Thaddaeus, himself in the list of Christ’s seventy disciples, to Edessa as preacher and evangelist of the teaching about Christ.” While in Edessa, the legend holds, Thaddaeus met King Abgar and later muled letters back and forth between Jesus and the king; in the meantime, Thaddaeus “amazed all [Edessa’s] inhabitants [with] his wonderful miracles.” Despite Eusebius’s testimony that this particular Thaddaeus was a member of the Seventy Disciples, the actual Syriac legend, which Eusebius also quoted, refers to Thaddaeus both as “an apostle” and as “one of the Seventy.” Even more confusing is the Syriac legend’s attestation that “Judas, also known as Thomas,” sent Thaddaeus on his way. This leaves us with an apostle saddled with the alternate name of Judas being dispatched by a different apostle saddled with the alternate name of Judas. The traditions of Syriac Christianity regard the “apostle” Addai as the faith’s co-founder with Judas Thomas, the supposed twin brother of Jesus. Addai, in all likelihood, is Thaddaeus from the gospels transplanted. Manichaeism, the great enemy faith of early Christianity, which incorporated many crypto-Christian elements and directly competed with Syriac Christianity in some areas, contains a tradition that its founder, Mani, had two great disciples named Addai and Thomas. These legends are probably connected in some way.