Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  The true explanation of the continuance of miracles is that the plant of Christianity never took root as firmly as Gregory had hoped. At a popular level pantheistic notions survived throughout the mediaeval period, and constant efforts utterly failed to eradicate them. It is perhaps true, in the broadest possible sense, to speak of the middle ages as an ‘age of faith’, but it was an age of extremely varied and heterodox faith, in which the missionary aspect of the Church’s work was kept alive by ignorance and heresy. With it survived those missionary attitudes which are so characteristic of the Church’s teaching on miracles. Gregory of Tours once described a dispute on some doctrinal issue between an Arian preacher and a Catholic priest. When all argument had failed the priest ordered a cauldron of boiling water to be brought forward and said: ‘enough of these futile arguments. Let works speak louder than words. Let us heat up a cauldron of boiling water and throw this ring into it. Whoever first takes the ring out with his bare hands will be proved right.’ A theological argument in these circumstances took on the character of a trial by ordeal, and orthodoxy is said to have triumphed in such ordeals not only against Arians but later against Albigensians, Hussites, Protestants and even Moslems. Conflicts between rival magicians are frequently recorded in connection with the Albigensian heresy at the end of the twelfth century. Two heretics at Besançon, for example, attempted to impress their doctrines on the inhabitants by walking on flour without leaving footprints, jumping on burning coals, and standing on the surface of water all of which, we are told, they achieved by means of elaborate stunts. The officials of the bishop of Besançon were obliged to work their own miracles in order to expose these frauds. St. Dominic, in very similar circumstances, claimed to have demonstrated the truth of the orthodox doctrine by a process akin to the testing of relics by fire. At a formal disputation, so he told the historian Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, he had cast a written statement of his beliefs into the fire and watched it jump out unconsumed. A hundred and fifty Albigensians are said to have been converted on this occasion, and the memory of the miracle was potent enough, two centuries later, to inspire a painting by Fra Angelico.

  The serious threat posed to the Church in the twelfth century by heresy and by Islam undoubtedly contributed to striking expansion of the cult of the miraculous. The miracles of St. Thomas Becket, for example, by frequently transmuting water into milk are alleged to have confirmed in the minds of the onlookers the doctrine of the real presence. Frequent revivals of the dead provided graphic confirmation of the doctrine of the resurrection amongst the ignorant and faithless. The bishop of Evreux knew of a rich Moslem merchant of Palermo who was converted to Christianity by the stories of St. Thomas’s miracles.

  It was axiomatic that no heretic or unbeliever could perform a miracle, and reports that any such had done so invariably provoked the authorities to displays of indignation and alarm. In the case of the Albigensians of Besançon the bishop had retorted that it was ‘impossible that God should work miracles through men of impure doctrine’. Nevertheless a community of heretics at Moncoul in southern France claimed to have a miraculous statue of the Virgin, and orthodox writers such as Lucas of Tuy were most anxious to discredit it. In 1440, miracles were alleged to have occurred at the grave of Richard Wyche, a Lollard executed in London some weeks earlier; a royal writ complained that certain of the King’s subjects openly averred that Wyche had been a holy man and that miracles had been performed by him which they had not. Such claims, irritating enough when made by heretics, posed a serious intellectual problem when uttered by Moslems. In the late middle ages scholars became aware of the fact that the Koran attributes many miracles to Mohammed, and that in parts of the Islamic world holy men still claimed to have performed them. Ricoldo of Monte Croce, a thirteenth-century Italian Dominican who lived for many years in Baghdad, studying Islamic religion, indignantly denied the Arab assertion that God worked miracles amongst them just as he did amongst Christians. Miracle-workers in Baghdad, ‘sons of perdition every one of them’, were constantly deceiving large audiences in this way. The occurrence of miracles in the Latin west remained, to Christian minds, a conclusive argument against Islamic theology. Thus in the fifteenth century Denis the Carthusian not only denied that Mohammed or his latter-day followers had worked miracles, but cited the miracles of Christian saints as proof of the Christian faith. In his imaginary dialogue with a Moslem he argued that ‘no one who denies the divinity of Christ can work miracles.’ Christians on the other hand have always worked miracles. The dead have been raised, the deaf, the dumb, the blind and the lame have been healed. No one who has read the miracles of St. Martin, St. Nicholas, St. Servatius, St. Germanus, St. Bernard, or St. Francis can possibly doubt the reality of the God they worshipped.

  That the need for miracles was as strong on the eve of the Reformation as it had ever been, is clear from the career of John of Capistrano, vicar-general of the Observant Franciscans and a preacher of remarkable powers. During his mission to the Hussites (1452–6) he drew audiences which contemporaries reckoned at 120,000 and which, even allowing for exaggeration, must have been unusually large. In his sermons he would condemn heresy with fierce fanaticism and would perform astonishing miracles, all of which were immediately recorded at his direction, together with the names and depositions of witnesses. One of these stories is typical enough. At Breslau some Hussites advanced through a crowd during a sermon, bearing a coffin in which there was a Hussite feigning death. They demanded that John resuscitate him and he refused. Thereupon one of the heretics announced that he would bring him back to life, but there was no response, for the unfortunate youth was found to be really dead. A contemporary who followed John of Capistrano through central Europe recalled that he sometimes performed thirty miracles or more in the course of a sermon, most of them miraculous cures, and that these exhibitions were usually followed by large-scale conversions from among the audience.

  The mediaeval Church never formally abandoned the notion that miracles were the milk-teeth of the Church, superfluous after the earliest years of its life. But during the bitter schisms of the fourth and fifth centuries miracles became bound up with the moral teaching of the Church, and thus the ambivalent attitudes of Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great survived as long as the belief in the supernatural itself. Not only were miracles presented to the faithful as evidence of the truth of the Church’s teaching at times when that teaching was questioned, but they were constantly used as exempla or illustrations of the spiritual life. This is plainly true of preachers like Jacques de Vitry or teachers like Caesarius of Heisterbach, whose collections were avowedly made for this purpose. But it is no less true of historians such as Bede or Gregory of Tours, addressing a limited audience and not professing to preach a sermon. For they, like all mediaeval historians, wrote in accordance with the prevailing belief that history should be written for the edification of its readers by showing them the perpetual action of God in the physical world. Their purpose was not to inform posterity but to teach their contemporaries. It was essentially didactic, though that is not to say that they did not believe everything that they wrote to the letter. ‘For all chroniclers’, as a twelfth-century author thought, ‘have a single purpose: to relate noteworthy matters so that the invisible power of God may clearly be seen in the march of events, and men may, by stories of reward and punishment, be made more zealous in the fear of God and the pursuit of justice.’

  Miraculous Tales and their Audience

  The authors of mediaeval miracle stories were not completely unconcerned with truth, nor were their readers invariably simpletons who believed all that they were told. It is clear from the terms in which some of the miracles were couched that there was a considerable body of opinion which looked on miracles with a jaundiced eye and which may even have rejected the possibility of modern miracles altogether. Gregory of Tours found it ‘impossible to pass over in silence the tale of what happens to those heretics and unbelievers who doubt the miracles which God has w
rought on earth to reinforce the faith of his people.’ The author of The Miracles of St. John of Beverley knew that some men regarded his work as the delusion of a simple mind and so many old wives’ tales, but he confidently anticipated that they would suffer the fate of all blasphemers. Nicholas of Clun laughed aloud when it was suggested that he should go and witness the miracles of St. Wulfstan at Worcester. At least one parish priest of Worcestershire did not believe in St. Wulfstan’s miracles, and used to recommend herbs and blood-lettings when his parishioners were sick. The chronicler who described this aberration remarked that the man was ‘of a frivolous turn of mind … and quite unlike other men’, but in fact we have no evidence on which to decide what proportion of mediaeval men did not believe in modern miracles. Those who appear in the sources are almost invariably those who repented or suffered punishment for their scepticism, but there must have been many who did neither.

  Exalted and educated persons were probably more inclined to doubt marvellous stories than their inferiors. Robert II, count of Namur (d. 1031), protested against the miracles of St. Gengulph of Florennes on the grounds that that saint had been a pagan. The courtiers of William Rufus declined to believe that the body of St. Edmund had been found incorrupt by the monks of Bury in 1094. The revelation that St. Cuthbert had been found incorrupt at Durham at the beginning of the twelfth century provoked similar suspicions and amongst those who demanded to see the body were Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, Ralph, abbot of Seez, and Alexander, brother of the king of Scotland. Two bishops (they are not named) refused to believe the miracles attributed to Ailred of Rievaulx in Walter Daniel’s Life. Wise men would not believe in miracles until they had seen the evidence. When king William of Scotland heard that a knight had been miraculously saved from drowning in the Tweed, he sent the bishop and archdeacon of Glasgow to question the man. A ducal official in Périgord in the time of Henry II would never believe tales of miraculous cures until he had seen the sufferer with his own eyes.

  At the opposite extreme a surfeit of miracles might be accepted at the expense of its significance. So many miracles were performed by St. Swithin of Winchester on the occasion of his translation at the end of the tenth century, that the monks began to find them wearisome. William of Canterbury complained that so many exaggerated stories were told in the twelfth century that interest in them was waning at the very time that he was composing his massive collection of the miracles of St. Thomas. ‘It is well-known’, Thomas of Monmouth declared, ‘that the occasional reading of miracle stories is a valuable stimulus to devotion. But as each miracle follows the last and the astonishing is succeeded by the spectacular, I must take care to restrain my enthusiasm, or else the piety of my readers will be dampened by the tedium of reading so many marvels.’

  The churches which suffered most from public scepticism were those which used their relics for the purposes of self-aggrandisement. Churches with the patronage of a great saint were always enriched by offerings, many of which consisted of land, and vigorous efforts were made by the monks to acquire intervening holdings which would consolidate their estates. The miracles of the saint and the acquisitions of his monastery were intimately connected. A lady of Brabant, for example, presented the title deeds of her estates at the altar of the abbey of Lierre near Malines, in gratitude for a miraculous cure. But the document adhered to her fingers for it was improperly made out; she had kept some of her possessions to herself. ‘And St. Gummarus delivered her from her physical bonds once he had acquired full legal rights over her. As for her, she was reinforced in faith and her worldly goods multiplied exceedingly.’ Many miracle collections, notably the Miracles of St. Benedict, are largely concerned with showing how the saint had miraculously intervened to defend the estates of his abbey. The acquisitiveness of houses such as St.-Denis or Fleury made them many local enemies, who regarded the miracle stories as so many fabrications designed to justify the encroachments of the abbey. Thus we learn that many ill-disposed persons doubted the miracles of St. Denis in the ninth century and the same complaint is made in the eleventh. Some of them went as far as to reject ‘all such modern miracles’. The growing wealth of the abbey of Conques can be traced in the four books of the miracles of St. Foy. We have already seen how the statue-reliquary was carried through the valleys of the Auvergne when the abbey’s lands were threatened. It is clear that the relics of St. Foy were the means by which the monastery acquired enormous landed wealth in the Rouergue as well as psychological control over the minds of the inhabitants. Consequently, as Bernard of Angers, the author of the miracle stories, admits, the saint had many detractors and it was a source of quiet satisfaction to the monks that many of them met untimely ends. A group of scholars from Angers once encountered a man of the Rouergue on the road to Le Puy. ‘You must know that man Bernard who left Conques this year’, he said; ‘how many lies has he written about St. Foy this time? Does he expect me to believe all that nonsense about eyes gouged out and then restored, dead animals brought back to life, and other absurdities?’ ‘Truly’, Bernard observes in relating these words, ‘this man was a son of Satan, an enemy of truth, and a minister of Antichrist.’

  When the consequences of a miracle were of more than local importance, the temptation to doubt it was correspondingly greater. The miracles of Thomas Becket, for example, were an important political phenomenon. Not only were they regarded as vindicating Becket’s case against Henry II, but they were also believed to have justified the claims of Alexander III against the anti-pope. Many interested parties, including Richard de Lucy and Joscelyn, bishop of Salisbury, publicly proclaimed their disbelief, and some asserted that the monks had brought about the miracles by dabbling in the black arts with the assistance of the Devil.

  Faced with an increasingly astute public, the clergy of the pilgrimage churches began to examine miracles more carefully before publicizing them. There is no doubt that the miracles reported in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are less fantastically improbable than those of earlier periods, while some writers show an interest in names, dates, places, and witnesses which is altogether absent in their predecessors. At the beginning of the eleventh century the monks of Fleury held an investigation before accepting that miracles had occurred in one of their Burgundian cells; two women who claimed to have been healed there were interrogated at length and the findings were given the greatest possible publicity. When miracles occurred at St. Frideswide’s, Oxford, in the twelfth century, a formal enquiry was always held, followed by a solemn announcement of the details. Correspondents who wrote to the monks of Christ Church Canterbury, describing the more distant miracles of St. Thomas, were careful to enclose the depositions of witnesses and testimonials as to their good character. When pilgrims came to Canterbury and told of marvellous happenings in their home villages, the monks would normally write to the local bishop or civic authorities asking them to investigate it. How detailed these investigations were is not usually revealed, and no doubt some churches made more strenuous efforts than others to discover the truth. At Worcester in the thirteenth century witnesses seem to have been required before any miracle was inscribed in the record. When a boy of Droitwich was miraculously saved from drowning he was brought to Worcester by his mother, together with several local worthies who attested the absolute truth of his story. Another boy was shortly afterwards revived from the dead at Petton in Shropshire but the bishop refused to allow premature exhibitions of jubilation until the villagers had been summoned to give evidence in the cathedral and the boy’s parents had solemnly sworn an affidavit on the tomb of St. Wulfstan.

  In the course of time these enquiries became more thorough and a higher proportion of alleged miracles were rejected as spurious. This was chiefly due to the stricter rules imposed by Rome before permitting the canonization of a saint. After the twelfth century, miracles were usually collected with a view to canonization, and in many cases they were no longer recorded after the process of canonization had been brought to a successful conclusi
on. In the cases of Thomas Becket and Gilbert of Sempringham, whose miracles were recorded for some years after their canonizations, it is noticeable that those which occurred after canonization are much more fantastic than the earlier ones, and the intrusion of hearsay evidence becomes more common. The commissioners who investigated miracles during a process of canonization performed their work with rigour. The instructions issued to the commissioners in the process of Gilbert of Sempringham, who was canonized in 1202, required them to interrogate all those who claimed to have been miraculously healed. How long had they been ill? What was the nature of their illness? Had their cure been complete? Were there any trustworthy witnesses? In reputable pilgrimage churches the same questions were asked even when no process of canonization was pending. At Mont-St.-Michel, those who alleged that they had been healed by the Almighty were sometimes interrogated for three days. Humble people who indiscriminately boasted of the miracles from which they had benefited frequently found themselves facing an imposing judicial tribunal. Thus ten inquisitors with a staff of clerks and notaries were appointed to examine one Moriset de Ranton who asserted that St. Louis had healed his wounded leg.

  The Evidence

  If the majority of educated men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries accepted the evidence for miracles, it was not because they were unduly credulous or irrational, still less because they cared nothing for the truth. It was rather because in assessing the evidence they applied criteria very different from those of David Hume. They may often have been misled by lying witnesses, but the fundamental cause of their error was that they considered a miracle to be a normal, though nonetheless remarkable, incident of life. It was the natural consequence of that combination of humanity and omnipotence which they ascribed to the saints. Thus they did not require the same high standard of proof as the eighteenth-century philosopher, and indeed they were inclined to attribute events to the intervention of the Almighty which could quite easily have been explained without. Men accepted the evidence for particular miracles because they passionately desired to believe in miracles in general. Their beliefs on this subject become intelligible when we consider them in relation to their other beliefs, as part of a system of thought which, although quite unlike our own, is nevertheless based on perfectly rational deductions from a number of faulty premises.