Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  ‘We speak of a miracle’, thought Caesarius of Heisterbach, ‘whenever anything is done contrary to the normal course of nature, at which we marvel.’ Few mediaeval men would have quarrelled with that definition, but their understanding of the ‘normal course of nature’ was limited. Their ignorance of the causes of the simplest natural processes evidently made them more inclined to proclaim a miracle. The doubts of intelligent men when considering the physical world were reflected in the sensitive mind of St. Augustine. Augustine was fascinated by the sight of the two halves of a centipede wriggling across a writing desk, and the behaviour of a magnet seemed to him to be little less than miraculous. In his attack on the ‘rationalism’ of Julian of Eclanum, he listed several observable natural phenomena, such as the grafting of olive branches, which appeared to have no natural explanation. Augustine was profoundly aware of the limits of human knowledge, and he argued that in the existing state of man’s knowledge, rational criticism of the evidence for miracles was misguided. ‘Where in all the variety of created things is there anything that is not wonderful, even if our familiarity with them has reduced our amazement. How many common things are trodden underfoot when, if we stopped to pick them up, we might be astonished. Take, for example, the seeds that grow into plants: does anyone really understand … the secret power which makes them evolve from such small beginnings into such great things?’ Why then, he concludes, should we look for rational explanations of the resurrection or the miracles of the saints and martyrs?

  Underlying Augustine’s arguments was the belief in a ‘higher law of nature’ which was synonymous with God. ‘God does nothing against nature…. When we say that he does so, we mean that he does something against nature as we know it…. But he no more acts against the highest laws of nature than he acts against himself.’ Looked at in this way the ‘laws of nature’ became mere conventions of God. God controlled the entire natural world from moment to moment. Everything that happened was his doing, from the most sublime to the most insignificant. Although human beings might, in their ignorance, accustom themselves to the fact that God normally worked in a particular way, there was no reason why He should not behave quite differently if the circumstances of the moment seemed to call for it. Thus the true significance of a miracle was not its rarity but its usefulness as a means of discerning the will of God. ‘These things are indeed marvellous’, wrote abbot Samson after describing the miracles of St. Edmund‚ ‘but only to those who consider the ordinary laws of matter instead of the nature of the Creator. For if He created the laws of matter in accordance with His whim, why should He not alter them whenever he chooses?’

  This characteristically mediaeval view of causation suggests why it was that perfectly natural explanations of events were constantly discarded in favour of supernatural ones. Amongst the ‘miracles’ collected by Gregory of Tours are included the author’s recovery from headaches, eyesores, pimples, and even indigestion; ‘truly‚ I cannot count how often the miraculous power of God has healed my headaches‚ fevers, blocked ears, tiredness in the eyes and pains in my limbs’, the bishop confessed. The monk of Fécamp did not hesitate to proclaim as a miracle the story of a child whose throat was blocked by a large piece of meat until he drank a glass of water in the abbey of Fécamp. William of Canterbury saw the hand of God in the tale of a knight who lost his horse while riding in the forest of Ponthieu. After invoking the aid of St. Thomas and walking through the forest for the rest of the day‚ he found his horse in a clearing and hurried away to announce the miracle to the local clergy. These events prompted in William some rare reflections on the problem of causation:

  ‘Some would say that the finding of the horse was due to chance‚ that it had no cause at all. Others would argue that if it had a cause then that cause was directed towards some other end, and the recovery of the horse was merely an incidental consequence. There are others who would hold that it was a combination of causes…. But the truth is that not a leaf falls from a branch without cause‚ for to admit the power of chance in the physical world is to detract from the power of the Creator. The Creator has ordained the laws of matter such that nothing can happen in His creation save in accordance with His just ordinance whether good or bad. If we are to seek the cause of things‚ we must look for the original cause, which is not itself caused by something else. And the original cause (that is‚ God) is the true cause of the miracle I have just described.’

  This argument is‚ of course‚ a licence to find miraculous explanations in everything that occurs, however trivial. It was readily accepted because it was more flattering for a man who had recovered his horse to believe that God had intervened on his behalf, than to admit that a chance encounter in a forest clearing had brought the beast back into his possession. Indeed a very high proportion of surviving miracle stories, especially after the eleventh century‚ can be explained without recourse to the supernatural. A particularly striking example is the story of the prisoner whose escape was assisted by a miracle. Such tales were legion, especially in the twelfth century‚ when most of the beneficiaries were crusaders in the hands of the infidel, either in Spain or in the Middle East. St. Foy seems to have been the first saint to specialize in the release of prisoners‚ and at the beginning of the eleventh century she was already ‘famous above all others for releasing prisoners who invoke her‚ casting aside their chains and ordering them to hurry thankfully to Conques’. Crusaders were frequently released by St. Gilles, St. James, or St. Leonard. Similarly‚ during the Hundred Years War‚ St. Martial acquired a reputation for releasing prisoners of war on both sides. These miracles followed no discernible pattern, for although most of the captives were deserving prisoners of war‚ some were less deserving criminals‚ such as the various cattle thieves released by St. Gilles and the convicted murderer who owed his freedom to St. Mary Magdalene. In almost every case the escape was entirely due to the cleverness of the escaper or the carelessness of his jailors, but the escaper preferred to attribute it to the intervention of the Almighty. The release of Bohemond prince of Antioch from a Turkish prison in 1103 was universally attributed to St. Leonard‚ notwithstanding the fact that his friends had paid a ransom of 100,000 besants to the Danishmend emir. Bohemond himself certainly encouraged the legend, for he swore to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Leonard and actually did so some years afterwards. There seems to have been a presumption‚ at any rate amongst the authors of miracle stories‚ that any release from captivity was miraculous. Hence the twelfth-century legend of Gregory bishop of Tarsus who, on being released from the custody of a middle eastern slave-owner, travelled to all the principal shrines of Europe in an attempt to discover which saint was responsible. Stories of this sort were still popular in the fifteenth century when John Hus acidly pointed out their illogicality:

  ‘Peter Layman is a thief and a murderer‚ justly imprisoned for life. He vows to go to the Holy Blood of Wilsnack if he is freed. He breaks his chains and escapes by brute force, and everyone exclaims that the blood of Wilsnack has freed him. Henry‚ out of sinful pride‚ challenges Frederick to a duel and promises to go to Wilsnack if he wins. He slays Frederick in armed combat and then invites us to believe that this was the work of the Holy Blood of Christ.’

  Yet the explanation was not‚ as Hus thought‚ the lies spread about by the clergy‚ but the desire of Peter Layman and Henry to be considered the beneficiaries of a miracle. As Guibert of Nogent judiciously observed‚ ‘many miracles owe more to the vanity of men than to the power of the saints.’ Those who visited distant shrines not only desired but expected that their prayers would be answered. When‚ for example‚ a Welsh girl failed to recover her sight at the shrine of St. Wulfstan‚ her mother went away vowing angrily that she would never pray to St. Wulfstan again, for such’‚ commented the chronicler‚ ‘is the nature of that simple-minded and bad-tempered race.’ At Montserrat, the celebrated Marial shrine in Catalonia‚ pilgrims were exhorted ‘not to lose their tempers if they failed to ob
tain a miraculous answer to their prayers … for God‚ from whom all benefits proceed, knows better than we do what is right and fitting for our souls.’ Indeed some unsuccessful pilgrims became objects of derision at home, especially if they lived far from the shrine in places where the achievements of the saint had been exaggerated by much repeating. Two blind women returning from Canterbury were openly laughed at as they passed through the streets of Leicester. On the other hand those who returned with visible proof of a miraculous cure were treated as heroes and were flattered by the obvious implication that God had thought it worth intervening on their behalf. Pilgrims who believed that they had witnessed or experienced a miracle were usually most anxious that the fact should be recorded. The monks of Christ Church Canterbury received a constant stream of letters informing them of astonishing occurrences‚ not all of which were believed. When Samson of Bury was writing his book on the miracles of St. Edmund, he was visited by three Londoners who demanded to be mentioned in it on the ground that St. Edmund had once sent them a fair wind when sailing to St.-Gilles.

  Evidently the wish was frequently father of the thought. The combination of a pilgrim who had convinced himself that he had experienced a miracle, and a public which was overwhelmingly anxious to believe him‚ was impossible for the clergy to resist‚ even if they wished to. Many miracles were proclaimed‚ without any supporting evidence, in circumstances which ruled out the possibility of a cool and judicious examination of the facts. Thus, a knight who had come to believe that St. Gilles had released him from the Moors, repaired to the saint’s Provencal shrine and there ‘before the altar of the saint, and in the presence of a great crowd of people, publicly recited the facts, praising God and St. Gilles.’ Another knight died in battle and was raised from the dead by St. Mary Magdalene; a friend of his, who had witnessed the miracle, rushed to Vezelay where he announced it to a jubilant crowd of pilgrims. Every major shrine was perpetually besieged by a motley crowd of pilgrims‚ hawkers, musicians, beggars and idlers whose appetite for new wonders was insatiable. Amid the scenes of collective euphoria that followed each announcement‚ no churchman could publicly voice his doubts without doing serious damage to the prestige of his church. An increase in demand could, in this way, stimulate a corresponding increase in supply. A striking instance of this economic law at work occurred at Fleury in the late eleventh century. A mason working on the roof of the new basilica fell from the scaffolding and was gravely injured. The monks took him into the monastery and attended to him, praying fervently for his recovery because, they averred,

  ‘we were afraid that if he died the whole building programme would be interrupted as a result of a sudden fall in contributions to the building fund. For the vulgar mob is very fickle and bends like a reed whatever way the wind blows it. If the mason had died they might have murmured that St. Benedict did not care about his own monastery or the troubles that befell it.’

  It must be admitted that this is an unusually blatant example of the invention of miracles for self-interested purposes, but the same dilemma must have presented itself whenever the clergy at a shrine were informed of a miracle and asked to take note of it.

  Their position was particularly delicate because the mediaeval notion of sanctity was inextricably linked with the performance of miracles, not only in the popular mind but also in canon law. In the bull of canonization of St. Cunegonde, Innocent III stated that ‘merit without miracles and miracles without merit are both equally insufficient if a saint is to be venerated by the Church Militant.’ But long before the Church had made them a prerequisite for canonization, the populace had shown that it would not venerate a saint who performed no miracles. Their attitude was grounded in the proposition that since God’s will was expounded to men by means of miracles, the only certain proof that He had designated a particular saint for their veneration was the occurrence of miracles at his shrine. To deny these miracles was therefore tantamount to denying the sanctity of the person venerated. Similarly, if miracles were reliably attributed to a man after his death, then he was to be venerated, be his reputation in life never so black. Thomas Becket, for example, was a man who aroused bitter controversy both before and after his death. The parish priest of Nantes spoke for many of his contemporaries when he declared that Becket was a ‘traitor against his lord the king, and the King of Kings will no more glorify him than he will that dog over there’. This situation was, however, transformed by the frequent miracles, skilfully publicized, which made the hysterical and somewhat unattractive archbishop into the ‘holy blissful martyr’ of later days. Joscelyn, bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Foliot, and Richard de Lucy, all of them prominent opponents of Becket in his lifetime, all confessed themselves converted to his merits by the news of his miracles, though Richard tartly expressed his astonishment that a man who, as chancellor, had been so harsh on the Church, should become its foremost miracle-worker. Two obstinate canons of St. Frideswide’s, Oxford, would not be convinced of Becket’s sanctity till one of their colleagues was miraculously relieved of his constipation. ‘I shall never believe that St. Thomas is a saint’, declared the sacristan of St. Remy at Rheims, ‘until he returns my lost service-book.’ Indeed in a debate in the University of Paris the miracles were held to be conclusive evidence that his life was pleasing to God, notwithstanding all arguments to the contrary. Master Roger, we are told,

  ‘swore that he had deserved to die (though not to die in such a manner), and judged the constancy of the blessed saint to be mere obstinacy. Master Peter on the other hand asserted that he was a worthy martyr of Christ, since he had died for the liberty of the Church. But the Saviour himself resolved their debate when he glorified him with many wonderful miracles.’

  This definition of sanctity gave rise to the most perverse conclusions, on account of the popular tendency to proclaim miracles in unpredictable circumstances. Abbot Odo of Cluny protested against the universal prejudice of his contemporaries who, like doubting Thomas, refused to believe anything which they could not see with their own eyes. The cult of a saint ceased with his miracles. Guibert of Nogent argued that it encouraged the populace to proclaim bogus saints and firmly declared that God had been known to work miracles through evil men as well as good. Indeed Guibert had himself seen Louis VI, no saint he, touching for the king’s evil. This feeling gained in force in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the consequences of unrestrained popular enthusiasm manifested themselves. Wyclif’s comments on miracles are substantially the same as Guibert’s. Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris and an indefatigable critic of popular religion, pointed out that St. Jerome and Gregory the Great performed no miracles though no one had ventured to doubt their sanctity. But these were the parting shots of a brilliant, though ineffective, rearguard. The miracle remained the decisive test of sanctity as far as ordinary people were concerned, and no pilgrimages succeeded without them. As the Lollard William Thorpe complained, ‘both men and women delight now more for to hear and know miracles than they do to know God’s word.’

  Every pilgrimage church faced, on a smaller scale, the same missionary problem as the Church as a whole. They could not convey their message, in this case the virtues of their patron saint, without adducing supernatural arguments. They took an indulgent view of the aberrations of the faithful, partly because they were powerless to do otherwise, and partly, no doubt, because they felt that even misdirected faith was better than no faith at all. As Chaucer’s parson remarked of charm-healing, ‘it may be peradventure that God suffereth it for (that) folk sholden geve the more faith and reverence to His name.’

  The initiative for the proclamation of miracles almost invariably came from the laity, and those who fabricated the evidence for miracles were more often the pilgrims themselves than the clergy of the shrine. Every popular cult drew its share of charlatans. The growing reputation of St. Thomas of Canterbury attracted so many that the authors of his miracles had difficulty in distinguishing true miracles from false. Geoffrey
Musard, a knight of Gloucestershire, pretended to be blind and asked for miracle-working water to be smeared over his eyelids. A woman of Lichfield asserted that her son had been crushed to death beneath a mill-stone and then revived by St. Thomas, but she was unable to find witnesses to corroborate her story. A noble lady who claimed to have been raised from the dead did indeed produce witnesses, but they were found to be ‘mendacious sluts’. Many pilgrims were evasive and obstructive when questioned about the miraculous cures that they had experienced, and one of them, a pauper from Woodstock, lost her temper when Benedict refused to inscribe her name in the book of miracles. The miracles of St. Thomas were probably more closely scrutinized than any other miracles of the twelfth century. Even so the authors could do no more than eliminate the more obvious liars, while those who had convinced themselves that they were speaking the truth went undetected. At other, less scrupulous shrines, both classes were indiscriminately recorded and thus achieved a brief moment of celebrity before the crowd passed on to more recent wonders and consigned them once again to oblivion.