Pilgrim's Road

heaven.
    And along with them would go the rogues, the cut-purses, the sellers of fake relics, women of easy virtue, acrobats, jugglers, troubadours, and the bevy of itinerant workers — stone masons, carpenters and others — who thronged the medieval roads of Europe trying to make a living by one means or another. The true pilgrim was further identified by his passport, which was both his official permission to make the journey and his guarantee of food and lodging at the monasteries along the route.
    Although huge crowds still gather in Vézelay at Easter, Pentecost and on the feast day of St Mary Magdalene, two days after Easter the village was empty, and the only breakfast to be had was what we could put together ourselves with the aid of my small camping stove. We walked around the outside of the church, expecting it to be closed at that hour, but found a side door open, and so were able to visit it together before Peter had to leave on his long slow return to England with the Red Toad.
    Apart from its vast size, the exterior of La Madeleine seen close to is not particularly impressive, but as on the previous evening, we found the first glimpse of its magnificent interior dazzling. Built at the height of medieval artistry with the unashamed intention of impressing, it more than succeeds. After the passage of nine centuries and with all the battering it sustained during the Wars of Religion, it is still overwhelming. It would have been worth a very long journey for the beauty and magnificence of the stone carvings alone, particularly the glorious narthex tympanum depicting the Risen Christ bestowing his power upon his apostles. Even the loss of one outstretched hand does little to rob this work of its extraordinary sense of presence. Many authorities consider it to be the most moving and profound of all the Romanesque carvings in Burgundy, and certainly it is one of the most poignant portrayals of Christ Enthroned that I have ever seen. Despite the triumphal nature of the subject, this is a Christ wholly involved in the world’s suffering. The wonderfully carved face is full of sorrow, and the tremendous tension in the lines of the thin body and in the gesture of stretching out his elongated arms and hands beyond the disciples, as though to the whole creation, speak more of crucifixion than the joys of heaven. It seemed a strange and tragic anomaly that Christian knights should have ridden forth from such a doorway to slaughter infidels in the Holy Land in the name of this same gentle and sorrowing Christ.
    But the great soaring edifice of Vézelay is also a shrine in its own right, built to house the relics of Mary Magdalene — a woman so unjustly dubbed ‘fallen’ by the early church on the flimsiest of New Testament evidence. Of course she would not have been half so interesting had she not been thought of as an adulteress; nor would her mortal remains have been half so valuable to Mother Church. But as a sinner, redeemed by Our Lord in person, she enjoyed star status. In the medieval world where even a splinter or two of bone from the ribs of a top-ranking saint were worth infinitely more than their weight in gold, and made the richest of gifts for a king, the worth of a complete corpse of such a mega-saint was incalculable.
    Many of the objects of medieval veneration, such as phials containing drops of the Virgin’s milk, Christ’s blood, tears of holy martyrs, and so forth, were clearly spurious, and the wealth of fragments of the True Cross that abounded throughout Christendom would have furnished a small forest. In order to get hold of the whole or major part of a really important saint, however, shameful acts of theft were committed by clergy and laity alike, and even so, claims and counter claims were made about the whereabouts of innumerable relics, so the devout could often venerate the same saint in a choice of locations.
    The relics of Mary Magdalene could certainly not be claimed to have arrived at Vézelay by altogether honest means. But the monk who was sent to get them from Aix justified his removal of the bones from their marble sarcophagus by the usual saint-inspired dream. It was generally accepted that a saint’s relics had the power both to resist removal and to dictate the place of their final interment; keeping became, in a sense, proof of rightful ownership. Although Mary Magdalene’s bones appeared to be happy to be translated to Vézelay, they refused to be carried into the