A Philosophy of Walking (13 page)

As well as demonstrating faith and expiating sins, pilgrimages were undertaken to ask for intercession. If a close relation or friend was sick, or if you yourself had a serious illness, you might seek the help of a saint by visiting their
grave, on the assumption that a simple prayer wouldn't be as effective as a personal visit, when you can utter your prayer aloud within earshot of the tomb. But that in turn assumes a long walk to get there, so that one would approach the holy shrine purified by pain and effort. For fatigue purifies, destroys pride, and renders prayer more transparent.

And having arrived at the holy place, you would put in your prayer for intercession with the greatest humility, underlined by your battered feet and dusty apparel. If you yourself were the afflicted individual, you would try to touch the tomb, to cling to it as long as possible, with as much contact as you could manage between your ailing body and its surface, then lie down and spend a night nearby to ensure the best chance of absorbing regenerative strength from the healing relics within.

Finally, the faithful might use pilgrimage to give thanks to God for a specific favour – a saved life, a gift allowed, a restoration of health. Thus, Descartes, having been enlightened with his method, made a pilgrimage to the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris. Thousands of more modest believers, whose prayers seeking help for themselves or their families had been answered, took to the road and headed for the nearest holy place to show their gratitude.

We should try, however, to tone down some of the archetypal imagery. The pilgrim is often represented in legendary style as a lone walker, staff in hand, dressed in a simple homespun robe, striding through sheets of rain, thunder muttering in the distance. As night descends, he knocks on the immense door of a towering stone monastery,
illuminated by flashes of lightning. In reality, pilgrimages were usually made in small groups, for reasons of security, and often on horseback, especially when the distances were great.

But that did not exempt anyone from setting their feet on the ground as soon as the destination became visible, when they could see the church spire or cathedral tower in the distance. It was necessary to arrive on foot, an obligation that combined several lessons. The first was a reminder of Christ's poverty and humility, the walker being poor among the poor. The only wealth of a poor man is his body. The walker is a son of the soil. Every step is an acceptance of gravity, every step underlines the connection and beats on the earth as a promised, final grave. But walking was also arduous, demanding sustained effort. One could only make a proper approach to a holy shrine after being purified by suffering, and walking required an endlessly repeated effort.

The first main routes for Christians led to Rome or Jerusalem. From the third century, Jerusalem became the ultimate pilgrimage for Christians, an immersion in the presence of Christ: treading the very soil on which he had walked (
in loco ubi steterunt pedes eius
, in the words of the Psalm), following the path of Calvary, touching the wood from the True Cross, gazing into the cave where he had spoken to his disciples. But widespread social and political unrest made
the journey increasingly difficult, and soon Rome became a safer, more reliable destination.

The resting place of the leading apostles, Peter and Paul, Rome was the hub and centre of the established Catholic Church. Thus to perform the
peregrinatio romana
was a perfect act of submission, expressing profound loyalty to the Church in fulfilment of its historic mission. Then, after 1300, great jubilee years were decreed, during which going to Rome and following a specific route inside that city from sanctuary to sanctuary (St Peter's, St John Lateran, St Paul Outside the Walls …) would earn a full remission of all the pilgrim's sins. Rome was a place to testify, but also to seek salvation.

Compostela was the last of these major destinations. It is said of St James – one of Christ's three favourites, and the first martyred apostle, decapitated by order of King Herod – that his own disciples loaded his remains onto a ship which was then wrecked on the shores of Galicia. The heavy marble casket was carried ashore, and there forgotten – until the famous moment when a hermit called Pelagius dreamed that angels had shown him the exact location of the tomb, whose direction was being indicated every night by a row of stars. A sanctuary was built over the rediscovered sepulchre, then a church, and finally a cathedral. Santiago de Compostela became one of the most famous sites of pilgrimage, soon taking its place beside Rome and Jerusalem.

The explanation for the very rapid development of this destination, after its late start, has much to do with reasons of convenience. Of course it is the tomb of a major saint,
but one that was perhaps easier to reach (lower passes, more peaceable regions) than those of Peter and Paul – although the distance from northern Europe was much the same – and in any case nearer than Jerusalem.

Rome and Jerusalem are both cities of such mystical intensity that the road to get there can only be a long succession of uninteresting landmarks and mediations. The radiance of the place itself shrivels the singularity of the stages leading up to it. Especially when, there at last, a new progression is required. In Rome, the itinerary goes from the basilica of St Peter via St John Lateran and St Paul Outside the Walls to St Mary Major; from the Holy Cross of Jerusalem to St Lawrence Outside the Walls. There was a visit to the catacombs, long subterranean corridors lined with the coffins of early martyrs. So, after an unending linear road, the real path of devotion is paced out in the Eternal City.

Jerusalem is something else again: Christians must complete the Stations of the Cross. After gathering in the sanctuary of the Holy Sepulchre, they follow the Via Dolorosa; they climb, in the east of the city, the Mount of Olives where the Agony occurred; they walk in the Garden of Gethsemane, the scene of Christ's last night, and reach the chamber where the Last Supper took place, behind the ramparts on the Hill of Zion, at whose foot a church marks the spot where Peter denied Christ three times. And beyond that, one can push on to Bethlehem, two hours' walk, and further still, well to the north, reach the banks of Lake Tiberias, where Christ played as a child; and seek in Nazareth the Grotto of the Annunciation. Thus in Jerusalem
as in Rome, the authentic pilgrimage only starts when you arrive.

At Santiago there is just one cathedral, shining in solitary splendour, unique as the sun and the end of the road. It can be spied from the last cairn, eliciting cries of happiness from the weary pilgrim of yore, who immediately set foot on the ground if mounted, and took off his shoes if on foot, because he had to arrive in a posture of humility. Arriving at Santiago really is arriving
at the end
. And might not its geographical position have contributed to the magic of Compostela? Situated at Europe's westernmost point (walking, Thoreau wrote, means going West), at the world's end (
finis terrae
: beyond it extends an ocean that for aeons appeared definitive). To go towards Santiago one had to move steadily along with the sun.

People don't talk about the road to Rome or to Jerusalem in the same way that they speak of the roads to Santiago. The mystical intensity of the tomb is not so powerful, so glaring that it overshadows the long trek to reach it. On the contrary, it illuminates the journey. Compostela completes it, but does not cancel it out. The success of Santiago owed as much to the journey as to the final destination. The mystical grandeur of the Galician pilgrimage resides in the sacralization of the route along with the sanctuary. The route, or rather the
routes
. What road should one take, which adventure?

The great invention of Compostela was the establishment of defined roads, with defined stages, and obligatory visits en route: four main routes, with innumerable secondary
variations. When you started from Vézelay, after gathering at the shrine of Mary Magdalene – after shedding tears for the one who bathed Christ's feet in her own tears – you went on to Noblat, to the sepulchre of St Leonard, ‘deliverer of those who sit in darkness'; leaving from Tours, where the body of St Martin lies, you stopped at Angély where rests the venerable head (
venerandum caput
) of St John the Baptist, then at Saintes where you could gather near the body of St Eutropius, put to death by 150 butchers; from Sainte-Marie-du-Puy (the Via Podiensis), you went to venerate the body of St Faith, virgin and martyr, at Conques; starting from the tomb of St Giles, you would visit the body of St Sernin in Toulouse …

Thus the ‘Guide for the Pilgrim to Compostela', a thirteenth-century text included in the Codex Calixtinus, sets out various itineraries leading from one saint's body to another, all thaumaturges, healers; from tomb to tomb, every one enclosing the author of spectacular miracles. And that repetition of holy presence was architecturally underlined by the resemblance between the great churches on the way, sisters on the road to Compostela. Roads therefore supplied with many sanctuaries all alike, but also with monasteries to give pilgrims a night's shelter, and hospices to care for those exhausted, and sometimes give them the last rites; but roads too that were perhaps so many chapters of a great book.

Joseph Bédier, a historian of mediaeval literature, wrote: ‘In the beginning was the road.' The beginning, he meant, of the narrative, the novel, the epic poem. At the beginning
of our literature, we would have found pilgrims' roads. Bédier's view is that early epic poems were born there, in the dust of the roads to Compostela. The pilgrimage was long. People stopped for the night, talked until late, reciting an epic version heard elsewhere on some other night. They mixed in other episodes, juxtaposed sequences, until in the end a single vast poem had been assembled, which would then be fixed in writing. That is the true miracle of Compostela: to have completed the miracle of the major saint (
primus ex apostolis
, says the marching canticle) with the miracle of the road.

Regeneration and Presence
 

B
ehind every pilgrimage we find a utopia and a myth: the myth of regeneration and the utopia of presence. I like to think that St James embodies the virtues of pilgrimage so well because he is identified as the first witness to the Transfiguration of Christ. Internal transformation remains the pilgrim's mystical ideal: he hopes to be absolutely
altered
on his return. That transformation is still expressed in the vocabulary of regeneration: very often there is a spring, stream or river close to holy places, the lustral element in which pilgrims can immerse themselves, to emerge purified, as it were cleansed of themselves. A well-known instance is the annual Hindu festival in the upper Ganges.

As an example of this utopia of rebirth through walking, I would cite the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a splendidly solitary mountain, a dome of ice sitting on an immense plateau, and regarded by many Oriental religions as a holy place: the centre of the universe. Pilgrims depart from the great plains of India. There follows a journey of several hundred kilometres across the Himalayan ranges, freezing passes alternating with deep, stifling valleys. The road is exhausting and includes all the trials and risks of mountain country: steep paths, vertical cliffs. Little by little you lose your identity and memories along the way, until you are nothing but an endlessly walking body.

Crossing a pass, one arrives at last in the Puyrang valley. Suddenly you are in a different landscape, a shining, transparent minerality. No more heaped dark rocks topped with snowy peaks, no more forests of black pines wreathed in whitish fogs. Nothing but the simple and pure contrast of earth and sky. A landscape from the world's beginnings, a desert of grey, green and buff. The pilgrim, emptied of his past, trudging through that arid transparency, can already see in the distance another range of mountains, symmetrical and glittering. Then he is truly nothing, and the slow winding between black lakes and gilded hillsides over a leaden earth is his Lesson in the Shades.