The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

the highway up which Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is called Salvation. Up this therefore did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below in the bottom a Sepulchre. So I'saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.’

    In spite of the ancient warning Qui multum peregrinantur raro sanctificantur, in spite of the slim feasting smile of Erasmus the sceptic, the boisterous derisive laugh of Rabelais, and the condemnation by scores of pessimistic modern writers, pilgrimages possess even more significance today than they did in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Today in the age of easy and rapid globe-trotting we are apt to forget that pilgrimages in the religious sense sprang from a primitive instinct of mankind, which expressed itself in journeys to the shrine of an Egyptian god or a Greek or Roman goddess, or in an annual excursion to the Temple at Jerusalem. In Chaucer’s day the pilgrimage to Canterbury, as described by Chaucer, took place when the sweet showers of April fell and the small birds began to make melody, for then people longed to visit foreign lands and sanctuaries of far-off saints. The desire for holiday travel, genial companionship, knowledge of different people and places inspired not only the monk who loved hunting and had many a horse in his stable, the merry friar and the buxom redfaced Wife of Bath in her scarlet hose, ‘who thryes hadde been at Jerusalem, in Galice at Seint Jame and at Coloigne’, but also the Prioress who was all sentiment and tender heart, whose greatest oath was only “by St. Loy”.
    Nevertheless, my own experiences in pilgrimages to Rome, Lourdes and Fatima have convinced me that modern enterprise, by facilitating rapid mass travel and eliminating dangers, discomforts and delays on the way to the shrines of the saints, has created the cult of ‘pilgrimages without tears’ for the million, which is in complete antithesis to the original idea of pilgrimage transmitted by the saints to the Middle Ages. The mediaeval pilgrimage was not only an act of grace bringing the believer into close contact with the saints and martyrs of his religion, but also an act of atonement for his past sins.
    Pilgrims today are even more gregarious in spirit and more robotlike than they were in my younger days, thirty years ago, and such attention has been paid to their personal fads and fancies by the confraternities who supervise their prayers and the tourist companies who plan their journeys that no unforeseen adventure happens to the pampered pilgrims of today while they are on their travels. So watertight, in fact, are the arrangements and the supervision, that at the end of their conducted tour to the tomb of the Apostle every one of them feels justified in claiming in return for his inclusive ticket the sum total of spiritual grace winch used in the past to be granted only to the forlorn footsore pilgrim, who prayed like the repentant Tannhauser that his pilgrim staff would sprout leaves on his arrival in the Eternal City.
    Nevertheless, even today, there are still in every country a number of lonely pilgrims who forsake the rapid-moving supervised pilgrimages and make the long journey guided solely by the myriads of wandering souls in the star-dust of the Milky Way—that galaxy which, as Dante tells us, the common people call ‘the Way of St. James’.
    When, however, those lonely waifs and strays turn their faces homeward after praying at the tomb in Compostella and reaching the misty land of the Dark Star where the ebbing and flowing tide murmurs at the foot of the World’s End, their mental plight resembles that of the monk in ancient times who lingered in the wood listening entranced to the divine song of the bird in the tree. When the bird ceased, he heard the monastery bell calling him to prayer, but all the world had changed and none of the monks recognized him, for the bird’s entrancing song had lasted a hundred years.

INDEX
Abderrahman I, Caliph, 19 Abderrahman II, Caliph, 23 Abderrahman III, Caliph, 19, 24 Aben Jot, 144 Accous, 125
    Adelelmus, St. (Lesmes),