The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

heresies. It was eminently suited to the temperament of a leisured and contemplative peasantry, of sufficient education to regard with scepticism the faith that was adopted by the bloodthirsty counts and lords, who ruled Provence under their kingly or imperial overlords. *
    The un-Christian creed of the Albigensians began to spread through Europe soon after the year 1,000, but it was very old, for it represented one of the two fundamentally different ways of looking at life. Its central idea was that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods or two principles of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil.
    Once the doctrine of the Albigensians was proclaimed it spread like wildfire through all Provence: Nimes, Arles, Narbonne, and finally Avignon went Albigensian, and their doctrines penetrated even to Burgundy and the Alps, as far as the Canton of Vaud, where later on the peasants became the highly ascetic and schismatic Christian Waldensians, whose persecution in the seventeenth century inspired the noblest of Milton’s sonnets:

    ‘Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints.’

    The persecution and destruction of the Albigeois has always excited the indignation of those who passionately defend lost causes, and modern agnostics forget that one of man’s deepest instincts has always been to defend that which he holds sacred, and to a man possessed of religion, nothing is so sacred as his gods. *
    Even the Athenians put Socrates to death, because he taught the people not to believe in the gods of the city. The Romans, it is true, were tolerant, and, owing to the necessity of having to rule many races, accepted the gods of the strangers, exacting only a nominal oath of allegiance to the godhead of the Emperor. But when any religion or religious practice appeared to the Romans to threaten the State then the magistrates condemned those who rebelled against the law, as in the case of Christians, who were persecuted by order of the Emperors because they refused to take the oath to the godhead of the Emperor.
    When the Church triumphed in Europe she felt bound to carry on the teaching of her historical Founder and maintain her faith and practice as the essence of human life. Above all she had to be forever vigilant against the enemy from within, the heretic who would disfigure the faith by which she lives. For this reason, even the early fathers, such as St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, approved of the death penalty afflicted upon heretics by the State, and even Alcuin, the teacher of Charlemagne, claimed that the study of philosophy was of the greatest benefit, because through it ‘the holy doctors and defenders of the Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs’. *
    It is very difficult for us today to recapture the spirit of the Middle Ages, though as pilgrims, following the road of St. James we are forever reminded by the churches, the shrines, the hermitages, of mediaeval man and his faith in God and the Church. ‘History’, as Michelet said, ‘should be a resurrection of the flesh’, and we may be completely antagonistic to the philosophy of the thirteenth century, but we must fully understand it and realize that those who directed its human affairs were men fundamentally the same as ourselves. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or indeed the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first he appears fully developed upon the earth. In Western Europe, as Belloc tells us, during the Middle Ages, we are dealing with men who are of our own very stock, wholly from particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. In those ancestors we should take our greatest pride, for never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more faithfully itself than in the years between the First Crusade and the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three lifetimes were the very summit of the European story. *

ST. GILLES AND HIS PILGRIMAGE

    The first stage on my journey after leaving les Alyscamps was St. Gilles, which is nineteen kilometres from Arles. After crossing the Rhône I called, in the suburb of Trinquetaille, upon various old friends, whom I had known during my pilgrimages to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer. From there on I left the main road and walked through that strange land silted up at the mouth of the Rhone, haunted by wild animals, and rare birds with its patches of wilderness full of tamarisks and junipers. I thought of my favourite refuge, the Church