Book Review - Pilgrimage by Jonathan Sumption

Pilgrimage : an image of mediaeval religion by Jonathan Sumption

London : Faber and Faber, 1975 (2002)        ISBN 057121293X


A well written and interesting book, Pilgrimage gives us a view of the medieval Church that is as eye-opening as it is informative. It is worth quoting Sumption from early in this work - "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...".  Indeed based on current life, and even current Church practice, medieval religious practices seem bizarre and almost fraudulent at times. Based on the logic of the times though, they begin to make sense.

Sumption uses the early part of his work to explore and discuss the base that the Medieval Church was working from, which drove the huge pilgrimage activity of the times. He first talks about relics - how changes in the laws of the church in the early Middle Ages, which decreed that every Church had to have a relic in order to be consecrated, and that allowed relics to be "parted out" - whole bodies of Saints could be dismembered into parts - created the conditions for fraudulent relics to be peddled, and for Churches to compete with each other for the "best" or "authentic" relics which would put them higher in the pecking order for pilgrimages. Sumption also notes that many ecclesiastics were well aware of the problems in the requirement for and trade of relics, but felt that the tangible and human face that Saints and relics brought to the liturgy was worth the risk. The tangible nature of relics, and the enthusiastic espousal of the miracles they brought about, helped the Church keep and gather believers in what was an age of completely uneducated masses.  The miracles for which they were responsible were also quite different from today, although it could be argued they had the same basis - some unexplained benefit to the recipient. Before the Renaissance there was much that was unexplained and unknown about the World, so that many things that were then portrayed as miracles can now be explained as natural, with our increased knowledge. Sumption points out that even things such as diet led to miracles being declared, with malnutrition common in Winter, which a pilgrimage to a shrine that might have more food, or even waiting until Spring would alleviate, with the result being laid at the feet of the appropriate Saint. Even the more sophisticated people of the time who could reason out some of these things still could go along with a miraculous explanation, as philosophically everyone believed that all things came from God, therefore all good things were down to him, and not natural or man-made forces.

Pilgrimage was also used in the Middle Ages as a punishment, both self-inflicted and imposed. Many people who had sinned believed that they could only be freed from sin by visiting a pilgrimage site, and in fact sometimes visited many until they got it right. France in particular had a history of sending offenders on a pilgrimage in payment for their crimes, although this morphed over time into something that could be avoided by payment of a fine.

What of the sites of pilgrimage? Sumption counters what might be our modern interpretation of why a Church or Abbey sought to be a site of pilgrimage - there actually wasn't a lot of money in it initially. Elaborately be-jewelled reliquaries were often melted down, as the Church used the gold and jewels as its "savings account" and often had to access it to pay ransoms or debts. The Churches requirement to look after pilgrims often meant that perversely the more pilgrims, the bigger the cost - the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury actually lost more money in jubilee years than other years. Even the ability to issue indulgences didn't help much, as Rome took a lot of that revenue. Why do it then? - in a word, prestige. Churches moved up the hierarchy of importance depending on the "power" of their relics and the number of pilgrims and miracles they had. Sumption point out that Santiago became a Metropolitan Church purely on the basis of its power as the resting place of St. James.

In what might be the medieval equivalent of Flash Mobs, many sites of pilgrimage bloomed, flowered all to briefly and died - some only lasted a matter of weeks. Even major shrines such as that of Thomas at Canterbury saw large ebbs and flows in the number of pilgrims attending the shrine. Sometimes the decline of a pilgrimage site had little to do with the Church itself - St. Gilles in Provence declined once pilgrims, owing to war and banditry, no longer passed it on the way to the larger pilgrimage destination of Santiago.

Sumption explains the journey that pilgrims undertook, where they were routinely fleeced of their gold and sometimes lost their life, and how saintliness and sobriety were not necessarily in the front of pilgrim's minds. The business that grew out of pilgrimage gathered speed up until the 1300s, which was the great age of pilgrims. Venetian entrepreneurs organised fleets to take pilgrims to the Holy Land, which sometimes ended in ruin for the organisers, owing to the changing nature of taxation in the Middle East. Rome, the other bastion of early Christianity, did its best to usurp Jerusalem's place as the centre of pilgrimage, with an ever increasing array of indulgences to be gained by visiting the Eternal City and the appropriate Churches. The claims for the powers of various Churches grew and grew, and these were often driven by forces external to the hierarchy of the Church, as each place tried to grab a piece of what (by the 1300s) was become a more lucrative pie.

The final section of the book moves into the corruption of the ideal of pilgrimage - the actual journey became almost a touristic event, and the explosion of indulgences offered turned pilgrims into people who were ticking off locations and events to increase their stocks in Heaven, rather than making a true penitential journey. As successive Popes used the power of granting indulgences to make money, the pilgrimage moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, with thousands of years of remission available to the astute pilgrim. This was the beginning of the end for the great era of pilgrimage, as the next logical step was the ability to purchase the indulgence without going on the journey. Combined with the increasingly fragile political situation in both Europe and the Middle East, the great pilgrimages became a less attractive option.

This led to the great explosion in Marian pilgrimages, an upwelling driven by the poorer sections of society. These people, who couldn't afford to go to a major shrine, would travel locally to a miraculous statue of Mary. Many of these local shrines were frowned on by the Church, but that didn't stop their popularity.

The Reformation dealt a death blow to the pilgrimage in Northern Europe, which lasted until a revival in the seventeenth century, which is beyond this book's scope.

Pilgrimage is a fascinating insight into Medieval society and the Church - well worth a read if you're interested in that sort of stuff.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A time to keep silence  by Patrick Leigh Fermor

New York, New York Review Books, 2007                   ISBN 9781590172445


Patrick Leigh Fermor, even if he never wrote a word, would still be known for his daring wartime work with the Special Operations Executive, where he played a vital part in the daring kidnap of a German General, Heinrich Kreipe on the island of Crete in 1944.

Fortunately for us he did write, and write beautifully. Known as a travel writer, he was far more - his works are full of not only travel, but history, philosophy, art and an overflowing evanescence of language.

A time to keep silence is a collection of three - should we call them essays? - perhaps meditations might be a more exact term - written by Fermor in response to sojourns at two Abbeys in France, and a journey to the deserted cathedrals and cells for the Basilian monks in Cappadocia.

The work is sourced mainly from letters Fermor wrote at the time to his future wife, worked up for publication. In his introduction he points out that he is in no way an expert on religion or monasticism, and in fact not really fit to describe the monastic life in any complex way. And yet the book is a fascinating account of the life and times of the great Abbeys. The first 'meditation', written from the Abbey of St. Wandrille De Fontanelle, is Fermor's first introduction to such an institution - he has travelled to the Abbey as he thinks the peace and seclusion of the location will help him with his writing.

At first Fermor has an aversion to everything in the Abbey: the monks seem cadaverous, the location grim, and the solitude lead-heavy, like being "by mistake locked up in a catacomb". After a few days however, he begins to fall into the rhythm of the Abbey, and feels wonderfully refreshed. He writes "The two ways of life [monastic and secular] do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, light, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse."

He gives a history of the Abbey, which, far from being a millenium-long island of peace, coped with many periods of dis-estabilishment, despoilation and despair; in fact as recently as 1901 the monastry was dispersed, and passed to a new owner who roller-skated down the cloisters followed by his various hounds! The power of the life of prayer for those who chose to follow it is wonderfully evoked by describing all the hurdles these communities have overcome to just be able to devote their lives to their Lord.

As he delves further into the life and belief of the monks who share this space with him, he realises "the dominating factor of monastic existance is a belief in the necessity and efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle - a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought - to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism." Fermor directly asked one of the monks ..."how he could sum up, in a couple of words, his way of life. He paused a moment and said, 'Have you ever been in love?' I said 'Yes.' A larger Fernandel smile spread across his face. 'Eh bien,' he said, 'c'est exactement pariel...'".

From the contemplative surroundings of St. Wandrille De Fontanelle, Fermor then moves, with a quick detour via Solesmes, to La Grande Trappe, the headquarters of The Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.S.C.O.), or Trappists. Fermor quickly describes the much stricter rules of this house (no separate cells for monks, no talking at all, very vigorous daily labour, prayers beginning at about 2am after a mere five hours sleep), and then proceeds to try to understand why these monks would submit to such a labour. The following quote is long, but neatly encapsulates the way of Trappist thought - "To understand these Cisterican rigours, we must dismiss modern accomodations and rationalistaions and seek to return to the uncompromising literalness of the early Christians. Prayer for the redemption of mankind is the basis of Benedictine monasticism; and in the Cisterican branch of the Benedictine family the principle of prayer has been supplemented by the idea of vicarious penance........A Cistercian Cloister is a workshop of intercession and a bitter cactus-land of expiation for the mountains of sin which have accumulated since the Fall. A Trappist career is a long-drawn-out atonement, a protracted imitation of the Wilderness, the Passion, the Agony in the Garden, the Way of the Cross, and the final sacrifice of Golgotha. By fierce asceticism, cloistered incarceration, sleeping on straw and rising in the darkness after a few hours' sleep, by abstinence, fasting, humiliation, the hair shirt, the scourge, the extremes of heat and cold, and the unbroken cycle of contemplation, prayer and back-breaking toil, they seek, by taking the sins of others on to their own shoulders, to lighten the burden of mankind."

Fermor is allowed no contact with the monks at La Grande Trappe, which frees him for his writing, but leaves him wondering how a person can chose this life; he falls back on conversations with someone who has left the order to try and gain insights into the psychology of a Trappist, a problem he grapples with in this section of the book.

The final section is a description of a trip taken by Fermor and a friend to Urgub, in Cappadocia. These few pages are mostly given to marvellous descriptions of the cells and churches cut into the living rock, with a wonderful evocation of the life that must have once been lived there, centuries ago, and, when Fermor was there, all but forgotten by the modern world.

A short postscript describes the growing monastic movement in Fermor's home country England.

At 96 pages, this is a book that is short in length, but long in what it gives the reader - highly recommended for those who are interested in finding out more about the monastic life without too much religion thrown into the mix, or those who love magnificent evocative writing - it has encouraged this reviewer to read more of Fermor.

The New York Review edition of this book is wonderfully presented, with an interesting introduction by Karen Armstrong. You can purchase it directly from their website, online at Amazon, or borrow it from your local library if they have it.

 Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell