Theology Today - Vol 35, No. 4 - January 1979 - CRITIC'S CORNER

480 - The Pilgrim's Way

PILGRIMS and strangers we are on this earth, whether we admit it or not, and such we will remain until the end of time. As the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, we have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come, a city which has firm foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 13:14, and 11:10). If we find our home in this world, and guide our lives solely by its standards, we shall doom ourselves to the frenzied pursuit of small goals, or to lives of purposeless wandering. As Chaucer put it in his "Truth: Balade de Bon Conseyl," with slight modernization in the spelling:

The wrastling for this world asketh a fall.
Here is not home, here is but wilderness;
Forth, pilgrim, forth: forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Know thy country, look up, thank God of all.

Persons of deep faith know this, and are determined to live by it, but it is all too easy to lose a long-range goal, the sense of ultimate objective, under the pressures and lesser demands of the moment. The annual journey of the biblical Hebrews to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and the many pilgrimages available to medieval Christians to the shrines of saints and martyrs, helped to keep before the eyes of believers their ultimate destination, in the City of God.

As John Adair tells us in The Pilgrims' Way, there was and is a. sublime analogy between such definite journeys and an individual's journey through life" (p. 204). Adair has, written a splendid account of the pilgrim routes and the pilgrim shrines of the, British Isles, of the saints whose sites attracted the pilgrims, of the founders of the shrines, of their development and influence, and of the. thousands of men and women of all classes and levels of society who came there over the centuries for healing of the spirit or the body. All of the sites are illustrated by the superb photographs of Peter Chéze-Brown, to the total of a hundred and ninety-nine, twenty in color finely reproduced. This is a book for many readers, for the history buff as well as for the historian, for literate travelers who wish to explore Britain with more than a superficial knowledge of what they see, for those devoted to art and beauty, and for all who find in the Christian past humbling-and productive lessons for the present. It is primarily as a reflection in the latter mold that this review is cast.

Roland Mushat Frye is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, and the author of several works on English literature the most recent of which is Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton University Press, 1978). This essay is a review of The Pilgrim's Way: Shrines and Saints in Britain and Ireland, by John Adair (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1978, Photographs by Peter Chéze-Brown. 208 pp., $ 16.95.

481 - The Pilgrim's Way

One great advantage of the medieval pilgrimage was that it was faith pitched in the language of action" (p. 14), rather than in the language of abstract theology. It could be undertaken, done, accomplished, by the simple as well as by the sophisticated intellectual. But, like every other human institution or practice, it too was subject to abuse, and abuses set in. As early as the year 400 A.D., Saint Augustine of Hippo was offended by "the hawking about of the limbs of martyrs," and many wise and holy writers have expressed similar misgivings. A dangerous precedent was introduced in 1095 when Pope Urban II promised the first plenary indulgence, remitting all pains in Purgatory for sin, to those armed pilgrims who "took the Cross" along with the sword in the first Crusade to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems. In 1300, another pope granted another plenary indulgence for those pilgrims who in that jubilee year made the journey to Rome. Thereafter, it became the custom for the wealthy to pay for substitute pilgrimages, wherein a hired pilgrim would take the hazards of a journey, with the spiritual benefits supposedly returning to the employer as a kind of spiritual usury. And there was a gradual development of a substitution of money payments in the purchase of indulgences as an acceptable alternative to making a pilgrimage oneself or to paying a substitute.

482 - The Pilgrim's Way

One of the most memorable passages in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is his satire of the despicable Pardoner, who hawked such cheap grace to the loss of his own soul, and the peril of the souls of his dupes. It was not merely the pre-Protestant, heretics such as the Lollards who objected to these abuses, but faithful and loyal Catholics such as the great Erasmus and John Colet, one of the last of the great Roman Catholic deans of Saint Paul's Cathedral.

Erasmus was certainly not given to following popular fetishes and fads, being neither an idolator nor an iconoclast.In 1512, he visited the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, where he commented that "the church is neat and elegant, but the Virgin dwells not in it." Even so, Erasmus went on to see the reliquary which contained what was claimed to be the milk of the Virgin Mary, in a crystal phial on the high altar. Without accepting that claim, Erasmus nonetheless knelt and prayed that he might grow in Christ, fed on "the true milk of the gospel" (pp. 118, 120). There we see the true and beneficial aspects of pilgrimage, however abused and debased they had become elsewhere. All of this Adair makes clear and also interesting.

A reaction against those abuses was probably inevitable, whenever the next great wave of reform was to sweep through Christendom. When that wave proved to be the Protestant Reformation, Protestant leaders of all stripes abandoned the shrines, forbade the reliance upon relics, and by dismantling or even desecrating the shrines destroyed the medieval system of pilgrimage. In a work which combines the finest of Renaissance wit and satire with the intense conviction of the devout Protestant theologian, Calvin's An Inventory of Relics ridicules the whole range of abuses, in one of the most amusing treatises of the sixteenth century.

The cerebral assaults of a Calvin were effective among large segments of the educated classes, but if the centuries-old practice was to be ended, more was necessary. For generations stretching long before the living memory of people in sixteen-century England, Oxford had been the center for pilgrimage and homage to the relics of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon nun and prioress, Saint-Frideswide. What had been the medieval priory church of Saint Frideswide had become Christ Church, later Christ Church College in Oxford, and eventually the seat of the Bishop of Oxford. Even after the Reformation, popular devotion continued to be paid at the tomb of-the saint, despite the strictures of authority and the appeals of persuasion. Even after the saint's bones were removed, the veneration continued, until a bright stratagem occurred to some old faculty operator at Oxford.

The eminently Protestant wife of the eminent Protestant theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University, died, and her remains were interred in the empty tomb-which bad the anticipated effect: no devout Catholic could possibly pay homage to a tomb which had once held the bones of a saint, but which now held

483 - The Pilgrim's Way

the last mortal remains of a former nun who was not only converted to Protestantism but to marrying one of the most famous spokesmen for the Protestant Reformation. The problem, therefore, appeared to have been settled until the death of Edward VI- when his zealously Roman Catholic sister Mary ascended the throne. Under Mary, the remains of Mrs. Peter Martyr were removed to a grave near the dean's stables, while those of Saint Frideswide were restored to their former place, and the veneration began again, as though never interrupted. But Mary's restoration of Catholicism lasted only a few years, cut short by her death and the succession of her Protestant sister Elizabeth.

The question then arose as to what should be done to settle the conflicting claims of the Anglo-Saxon saint and the late lamented Mrs. Peter Martyr. Far back in my historical studies, I remember the conclusion of the story, but cannot now recover the documentation for it. As I recall, the moot question was submitted eventually to Queen Elizabeth herself, and somewhere there is preserved her response, laconically expressed in the Latin phrase "permixta et confusa," signed with the firm monarchial hand, Elizabeth Regina-in other words, mix and confuse the relics, and put both into the tomb. That, at all events, is what happened, although John Adair ascribes the decision only to an "Episcopal Commission of Inquiry" and not to the Queen herself, thereby surely missing a fine story, and also if my memory is correct an historically verifiable paradigm for the whole Elizabethan compromise of the Church of England. At all events, the results were effective: the "Catholic" tradition was preserved, the veneration was stopped, and the Protestant minister's wife was honored-all at the same time. Perhaps Adair misses the climactic incident of a fine and valid story here, but there are few others that he does miss.

Perhaps we can see, in the account of that holy island, Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, a presaging of the best of the Christian past joined with the best of the future. It was here that Columba, the Irish Prince and priest of the Celtic church, came with his twelve followers in the late sixth century, in his mission to convert Scotland from paganism. It was Saint Columba who gave the formal benediction to King Aidan, ruler of the Scots, in what was the earliest Christian coronation in British history, and it was here that that noble old saint died on the night of June 8, 597 A.D. His influence and that of his followers continued, however, and Iona remained a spiritual symbol, even when it was not the spiritual capitol, of Scotland, until the late eleventh century, when King Malcolm and his Queen, Saint Margaret, brought Scotland for the first time under allegiance to the Bishop of Rome-the last of the major western European Christian countries to accept the primacy of the pope.

Some five centuries later, Scotland was to become one of the most deeply committed of all Protestant nations. Later still by almost four centuries, the Church of Scotland in 1938 founded the Iona Com-

484 - The Pilgrim's Way

Iona. St. Oran's Chapel stands in the foreground, and part of the ancient cemetery of Reilig Odhrain can be seen around it, although the oldest tombstones have been removed to the site museum. In the background is the abbey later a cathedral, built about 1200 and restored by the community who have resettled the abbey since 1938. Photograph © Copyright 1978 by Peter Chéze-Brown.

munity, a religious community including both lay and clerical members, at once Catholic and Protestant, which rebuilt the ancient structures as a center for Christian worship, study, work, and service.

The year 1978 marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the first edition of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, a work impeccably

485 - The Pilgrim's Way

Protestant, yet ecumenical enough to attract admirers from all segments of divided Christendom. In his versified introduction to that book, Bunyan wrote:

This book will make a traveler of thee,
If by its counsel thou wilt ruled be;
It will direct thee to the Holy-Land,
If thou wilt its directions understand.

John Adair makes no such claims for The Pilgrim's Way, but surely his work at least points in the same direction.