Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Notes

  1 Saints punish mockers: Gerald, Itin. Cambriae, I. 2, vol. vi, p. 27.

  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, V. 275, pp. 438–9. Orderic, Hist. Eccl., VI. 10, ed. Chibnall, vol. iii, p. 318 (St. Evroul). Mirac. S. Emmerammi, II. 20, Aa. Ss. Sept., vol. vi, p. 500. Loomis, pp. 98–100 (woman displays posterior, and other examples).

  2 Iconoclasm in the west: Claudius of Turin, Adv. Theulmirum Abbatem, PL. cv. 462; Ep. XII, in MGH. Epp. iv. 611; Hefele, vol. iv, pp. 43–9. See Séjourné, cols. 2353, 2355.

  Eastern heretics in Spain: ES. x. 525–32, xv. 12–15. Cf. Cone. Seville (An. 619), canon XII, in MC. x. 556.

  Guibert: See Lefranc, p. 298, for comparison with Calvin etc. But there are more sensible assessments in J. Chaurand, ‘La conception de l’ histoire de Guibert de Nogent’, Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale, viii (1965), pp. 381–95; and in Morris.

  3 His pamphlet: De Pignoribus, esp. I. 3, II. 1–6, III. 3, 5, cols. 624–5, 629–50, 659–60, 662–3. On the relics of Nogent, De Vita Sua, II. 1, p. 105. On the Holy Lance, Gesta Dei der Francos, VII. 34, p. 252. Accepts cult of genuine relics, De Pignoribus, I. 3, col. 625; but demands higher standard of proof, ibid., I. 3–4, cols. 623–4, 627–8.

  4 Guibert and the inner life: see his Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat, PL. clvi. 27; De Pignoribus, I.2, IV. 8, cols. 619, 678–9. In general, Morris, pp. 59–60.

  ‘Crystallized into images’: Huizinga, p. 136. But the tendency was not, of course, peculiar to the later middle ages.

  Eucharistic images: Early examples in Vita S. Basilii, VII, PL. lxxiii. 301–2; and Vitae Patrum, V. 18, PL. lxxiii. 979. Vita S. Gregorii, IV. 19, Aa. Ss. March, vol. ii, p. 134: the passage is a late interpolation, see H. Grisar, ‘Die Gregorbiographie des Paulus Diakonus in ihrer ursprunglichen Gestalt’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, xi (1887), p. 160. Later examples: Guibert, De Pignoribus, I. 2, cols. 616–17; Peter the Venerable, De Mirac., I.1, col. 852; Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, CCLXX, p. 113. Coulton, vol. i, pp. 109–10 (priests’ manuals). On late mediaeval Netherlands, see J. Wils, Het Sakrament van Mirakel berustende in Sint Jakobs te Leuwen, Louvain, 1905. ‘Extracts from Lincoln episcopal visitations’, ed. E. Peacock, Archaeologia, xlviii (1885), pp. 252–3 (George Carter).

  5 Immaculate conception and Trinity literally portrayed: Inventory of 1420 in L. E. de Laborde, Les Dues de Bourgogne, vol. ii, Paris, 1851, p. 264. Gerson, Sermon: Puer Natus, ed. Glorieux, vol. vii, p. 963. J. Sarrète, ‘Vierges ouvertes, Vierges ouvrantes, et la Vierge ouvrante de Palau del Vidre’, Ruscino, Revue d’Histoire et d’Archéologie du Roussillon, ii (1912), pp. 5–59, 449–57.

  Theological scruples on relics of Christ: Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, q. liv, a. 2, vol. xi, pp. 509–10. Innocent III, De Sacro Altaris Mys terio, IV. 30, PL. ccxvii. 876–7.

  Relics of Christ at Rome: John the Deacon, Descriptio, XIII, pp. 356–7; Innocent III, loc. cit. Bridget, Rev., VI. 112, p. 525. Aa. Ss. Jan., vol. i, pp. 4–6.

  6 Foreskin at Charroux: Montsabert (ed.), Chartes; see also Vigneras. At a diocesan synod in 1862, Mgr. Pie asserted that there could be ‘no legitimate doubt about the authenticity of this quite unique relic’, see P. Saintyves, Les réliques et les images légendaires, Paris, 1912, pp. 181–4. Other foreskins: GC. viii (Instr.), p. 389 (Coulombs). Denifle, vol. i, p. 167n. (Boulogne). Aa. Ss. Jan., vol. i, pp. 6–8 (Antwerp).

  Blood of Christ at Mantua: Annales Regni Francorum, p. 119. Herman of Reichenau, Chron., MGH. SS. v. 127.

  7 Bleeding images in Netherlands: L-J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het Katholicisme in Noord-Nederland, vol. i, Amsterdam, 1945, p. 82; cf. Moreau, vol. iv, pp. 368–71.

  Other bleeding images: Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, q. liv, a. 2, vol. xi, pp. 509–10. Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and A. Chatellain, vol. iv, Paris, 1897, pp. 682–3 (no. 2634), on blood at La Rochelle. On bleeding images reported in Naples in 1972, see The Times, 22 August, 1972, p. 5.

  Blood defended by Grosseteste: Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. vi, pp. 138–44. and by Franciscans: Wadding, An. 1351 (nos. 16, 18, 21), An. 1462 (nos. 1–18), An. 1463 (nos. 1–4), An. 1464 (nos. 1–6), vol. viii, pp. 59–62, vol. xiii, pp. 206–16, 264–6, 340–3. N. Glassberger, Chron., Analecta Franciscana, ii (1887), pp. 393–5.

  8 Bruges processions: Toussaert, pp. 259–66.

  Hus on blood of Christ: De Sanguini Christi, XI. 38, pp. 28–9.

  Monstrances and tabernacles: M. Andrieu, ‘Réliquaires et monstrances eucharistiques’, An. Boll. lxviii (1950), p. 398. Delaruelle et al., pp. 749–52. Fécamp: Baudri de Deuil in Neustria Pia, ed. A. du Monstier, Rouen, 1663, p. 232. Poème sur le Précieux Sang, 11. 12–15, in Kajava (ed.), Etudes, p. 95.

  9 Pecock on relics: Repressor, II. 4, 8, pp. 155, 182.

  Miracles at Bobbio: Mirac. S. Columbani Bobbiensis, I, p. 998.

  Hair of B. V. M. at Coutances: John of Coutances, Mirac. Eccl. Con stantiensis, XXII, p. 378. Some brandea, usually of eastern origin, are found earlier, see Beissel (2), pp. 296–7.

  Other hair of B. V. M.: Herman, Mirac. S. Mariae Laudunensis, II. 1, col. 973 (Laon). On the hair at Astorga and Boulogne, Mabillon (ed.), Vet. Anal., p. 433; Lambert of Ardres, Chron. Comitum Ghisnensium, MGH. SS. xxiv. 577; Gaiffier (2), p. 79. On hair in Germany, Beissel (2), p. 293n.2.

  Tunics of B.V.M.: Mirac. S. Mariae Carnotensis, I, p. 509. Gesta Episcoporum Virdunensium, XVIII, MGH. SS. iv. 44. Others are known from dedication records, MGH. SS. XV. 1073, 1095, 1097, I098, I270. Relics of S. Maria Maggiore: John the Deacon, Descriptio, XIV, p. 359. Milk of B.V.M.: M. Gomez-Moreno, ‘El Arca Santa de Oviedo documentada’, Archivio Espanol de Arte, xviii (1945), p. 129. Notae Sweigo-Monasterienses, MGH. SS. xv. 1073. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, III. 285, p. 341 (Chartres).

  10 B.V.M. ‘localized’: Mirac. S. Mariae Carnotensis, XVIII, pp. 537–8. Miracles de Rocamadour, praefat., p. 63. John of Coutances, Mirac. Eccl. Constantiensis, VI, pp. 370–2. More, Dyalogue, fol. 22. For similar attitudes in modern Italy, see E. C. Banfield, The moral basis of a backward society, Glencoe, Illinois, 1958, pp. 130–1n.

  11 Saint present in his shrine: Mirac. S. Benedicti, II. 19, pp. 123–5. Mirac. S. Columbani, XXII, p. 1008. On the Canterbury glass, Rackham, p. 91 and colour pl. XII.

  Relics on altar: E. Bishop, Liturgica Historica, Oxford, 1918, pp. 25–6. Statue-reliquaries: Mirac. S. Fidis, I. 13, 28, 30, II. 4, pp. 46–7, 71–3, 75–6, 100–1. P. Deschamps, ‘Etude sur la Renaissance de la sculpture en France à l’époque romane’, Bulletin Monumentale, lxxxiv (1925), pp. 33–5. Mâle, p. 203.

  12 Artistic representations of saints influence popular imagination: Guibert, De Vita Sua, I. 16, p. 61. Mirac. S. Fidis, I. 1, pp. 9–10. Chron. Mon. Casinensis, II. 34, p. 650 (‘illa nimirum specie qua depingi a pictoribus consuevit’). On St. Foy and the blind, Mirac. S. Fidis, I. 1–2, 29, II. 1, 3, III. 6, 9, 11–12, 14, IV. 15, pp. 6–21, 73, 90–3, 98–9, 137–8, 144–5, 147–50, 152–3, 200–1.

  13 Influence of popular piety: it will be seen that I differ on this point from G. Duby, ‘The diffusion of cultural patterns in feudal society’, Past and Present, no. 39 (1968), pp. 3–5.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE PURSUIT OF THE MIRACULOUS

  Until relatively recent times the overwhelming majority of men have believed in modern miracles. Mediaeval men in particular had no doubt that miraculous events occurred not occasionally but with such continuous regularity as to be almost part of the natural operation of the universe. Some of them indeed, intelligent and experienced men, not only described miracles of which they had heard but claimed to have witnessed them with their own eyes. Moreover the belief in the miraculous, although predominantly a characteristic of the mediaeval Church, is found in the ancient world as it is in the modern. Few mediaeval saints had as many miracles attributed to them as the Quaker leader George Fox who died at the end of the seventeenth century, leaving behind him a Book of Miracles recounting more than a hundred and fifty marvellous fe
ats for the edification of his followers.

  The phenomenon poses serious evidential problems which have, on the whole, exercised the minds of philosophers more than historians. More than two centuries ago David Hume disturbed the fat slumbers of the eighteenth-century Church by declaring in his Essay on Miracles

  ‘A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined…. The plain consequence is … that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.’

  Hume’s argument turned on his definition of a miracle as a ‘violation of the law of nature’, a question-begging phrase which is open to legitimate theological objections. But the historian, limited by the evidence at his disposal, can only work on the basis that miracles have never happened, though the descriptions of them which contemporaries have left may provide valuable evidence of the attitudes of those who wrote them.

  Hume was inclined to believe that the evidence for miracles was fabricated, either for missionary purposes or else for reasons of self-interest and greed. Self-interest and greed were, indeed, the principal explanations offered by the Protestant tradition for the phenomenon of mediaeval miracles. The view propagated by the Reformers was that miracles were concocted by a conspiracy of clergymen in order to induce simple men, who knew no better, to part with their money. This was the opinion of Thomas Cromwell, whose injunctions to the English clergy in 1536 require them to desist from such activities in future.

  On the eve of the Reformation there was considerable evidence to support such a view, and the Church’s critics made full use of it. In his diatribe against the pilgrimage to Wilsnack, John Hus alleged that the clergy paid handsome sums to beggars to wander from town to town announcing that they had been cured or exorcized at Wilsnack. Hus had himself sat on a tribunal convened by the archbishop of Prague to examine those citizens of Prague who asserted that they had been cured there. These included a boy whose deformed foot was found to be worse than ever, and two women who were said to have recovered their sight ‘but who, on clear investigation, were found never to have been blind.’ One witness testified that after three days and nights of fruitless vigils at Wilsnack he was suddenly seized by a priest who cried out ‘A miracle! A miracle! Come and see this citizen of Prague whose withered hand has been healed.’ ‘O priest, why do you lie thus’, the man exclaimed with unusual presence of mind, ‘see my hand is as withered as ever.’ On the eve of the Reformation many orthodox Catholics were found who made similar allegations. Thomas More’s imaginary heretic gave it as his opinion that all miracles were based on fraud, and More himself was constrained to admit that this was sometimes true:

  ‘Some priest, to bring up a pilgrimage in his parish, may devise some false fellow feigning himself to come and seek a saint in his church and there suddenly say that he hath gotten his sight. Then ye shall have bells rung for a miracle, and the fond folk of the country soon made fools. Then women coming thither with their candles. And the parson buying of some lame beggars three or four pair of their old crutches, with twelve pence spent in men and women of wax thrust through divers places some with arrows and some with rusty knives, will make his offerings for one seven year worth twice his tithes.’

  The commissioners for the dissolution of the English monasteries found some evidence that miracles were simulated by various histrionic contraptions. Such was the notorious rood of grace at Boxley, a life-size figure of Christ which rolled its eyes, shed tears, and foamed at the mouth and which was found to have ‘certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back of the same’. John Hoker wrote to the Swiss reformer Bullinger exulting over the public destruction of a similar device from Kent which nodded its head, winked its eyes, and bowed at the waist to receive the prayers of pilgrims.

  The rapid expansion of popular pilgrimages in the fifteenth century undoubtedly encouraged frauds, particularly in the smaller and less well-established shrines. The disappearance of all restraints on popular religious enthusiasm in the later middle ages deserves a chapter of its own. But to make an assessment of mediaeval religion solely on the basis of the last hundred and fifty years of its history is a seriously misleading procedure which, moreover, avoids the principal historical problem. For most of the period under consideration miracles were proclaimed without the assistance of elaborate mechanical devices and without obvious fraud. Moreover, the evidence for them was accepted by intelligent men who made some attempt to ascertain the truth. Evidently they were deluded, but the basis of their delusion is worth examining.

  The Missionary Church

  The missionaries who converted northern Europe were dealing with people whose religion was fundamentally pantheistic. To them it seemed that the entire natural world was inhabited and controlled by unseen powers; every tree had its own spirit, every pool its devil, every mountain its god. This being so, there was no distinction drawn between the laws of nature and those of God, and the suspension of the one by the other did not arise. In so far as pagans embraced Christianity they did so because they believed Christ to be a more powerful God than their own, and missionaries would endeavour to prove this, for example by felling the holy oak of Thor at Geismar and remaining unscathed. The converts expected the new God to intervene as often and as powerfully in nature as the old, and if He failed to do so they would frequently revert to their old beliefs. Thus, when plague attacked the region of Melrose in the time of St. Cuthbert the people ‘forgot the sacrament of the Gospel which they had received and returned to the delusive cures of idolatory’. It was quite common for new converts to Christianity to continue to worship pagan gods, like Redwald king of the East Saxons, who used the same temple to worship Christ and offer sacrifices to devils. Such people insisted on miracles, and the Church was not willing to endanger the success of the missions by denying them. Gregory the Great recommended to Augustine that the cult of the saints and martyrs be presented to the English as the equivalent of pagan pantheism, ‘for one cannot efface everything at once from their obstinate hearts. He who would climb the highest peaks must ascend by steps and not by leaps.’

  Thus the first thing that was required of missionaries was the performance of miracles, and we are told that Augustine proved the truth of Christianity to king Ethelbert of Kent by working miracles daily, on which pope Gregory congratulated him: ‘Rejoice that the souls of the English are drawn by outward miracles to inward grace.’ No less decisive was the role of miracles in the conversion of Gaul. The only resurrection from the dead performed by St. Martin in his lifetime had the effect of converting a large body of pagans, and even the posthumous miracles of St. Martin were believed to have convinced heretics as well as pagans of the truth of the Catholic religion. According to St. Nizier, Clovis was brought nearer to the faith by an early visit to St. Martin’s basilica at Tours, and it was after seeing evidence of the miracles performed there that he promised to be baptized. In a letter of about 565, addressed to Clovis’ granddaughter, St. Nizier observed that ‘such miracles never occur in Asian churches thus proving that God and his saints do not reside in them.’ In this context the numerous exorcizings of demons were particularly important for ‘no demon can survive in the habitation of the saints whence it follows that God resides in places where demons are exorcized.’

  It was broadly recognized that miracles were necessary to assist the propagation of the faith, and that when the faith was established they would cease. Consequently each new missionary enterprise, every threat to the orthodox faith, convinced the Church that the age of miracles was not yet past, a process which can be clearly seen, for example, in the mind of Augustine of Hippo. In his treatise On the true faith written in 390, Augustine asserted that the apostles had enjoyed power to work miracles in order to
assist the foundation and expansion of the Church in the most vulnerable period of its history. ‘But now that the Church is established across the whole world, miracles no longer occur.’ However, in the face of powerful assaults on the orthodox creed by the Donatists and Pelagians, Augustine changed his mind, and in the last two decades of his life he made good use of the miracles of St. Stephen at Uzalis and Hippo, in support of Catholicism. Moreover, in describing these miracles Augustine was avowedly bidding for the support of precisely those popular elements in the Church which he had once despised. The problem of the cessation of miracles continued to perplex later generations. Gregory the Great compared miracles to the watering of plants. We water plants when we plant them but as soon as they have taken root we stop watering them. Similarly, now that Christianity has taken root in men’s minds, we no longer have need of miracles. Yet Gregory’s Dialogues are largely devoted to miracle stories, often of the most improbable kind. It is clear that in Gregory’s mind there were two divergent tendencies, the theological (that there are no modern miracles) and the hagiographical (that for didactic purposes miracles continue). This dichotomy was very common amongst Gregory’s contemporaries and while it survived no actual theory of miracles was possible.

  In later generations the received view was that miracles would continue for as long as there were holy men alive. The age of miracles, thought Bede, had ended, but some men, by their extraordinary holiness had recovered the power of working miracles which others had lost. In an unspeakably wicked age miracles would cease altogether. Orderic Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, took this proposition for granted. In his view his own age was one of unparalleled wickedness, and he asserted that miracles had indeed ceased.