Pilgrimage to Vezelay
Baldwin, Charles Sears
PILGRIMAGE TO VEZELAY By CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN HARDLY known to this present world, Vezelay is the prophetic city, set on a hill, that cannot be hidden from pilgrims. The forgotten village that was...
...Were the voices of the saints dulled...
...Legend combined less readily with this unified conception of the devoted penitent that other prophecy arising from her sitting at the Lord's feet while her sister was oppressed with household cares...
...If Vezelay is more than a noble archaism, is it less than a vision...
...They added themselves to his congregation of the faithful...
...The Vezelay Benedictines treasured her relic among the others with which the Count Girard had endowed them...
...Often she is also the devoted minister and the harbinger of the Resurrection...
...Life, why does it still stir above, basking on sunny terraces, looking from ancient windows on change after change...
...His restoration would have been truer...
...Yet the great church that it conceived and built at the opening of the twelfth century made the abbey subsidiary...
...and none more beckons those who love to walk...
...On his own Pacific mountain an astronomer remembers this mountain of vision...
...Thus embodied, temptation and sin, redemption and glory, while they make theology live in personal experience, in turn enhance the characterization of the Magdalen...
...sculptors pushed the art of the capitals from symbolism and other pattern into lines of action...
...In these aspects pilgrimage, which is both ancient and modern, is characteristically mediaeval, the vivid focus of mediaeval life...
...and he himself went on foot to Vezelay, to hang the chains before her shrine in token of dedication...
...In learning from Easter how to realize personally the harbinger of the Resurrection it opened a way toward Corpus Christi...
...For though modern traffic can go around its hill, the main road up over it has become a route nationale...
...legend is not always consistent...
...But before the Huguenots broke the sculpture of the portal and rifled the shrine, the monastery, in spite of the continuance of the pilgrimage, had been secularized...
...and the fine epic Girard de Roussillon took for its hero that Carolingian count who had endowed Vezelay...
...Wherever their homes, wherever the places of their deliverance, the captives pay their vows there...
...Immemorial farms still, indeed, center here in simple shops and little fairs...
...Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done shall be told for a memorial of her...
...This aspect of Mary seems to have developed separately...
...Until the thirteenth century, when they added an apse in the new Gothic, the monks had made shift with a comparatively small choir...
...While the Church has thus continued to explore history, literary criticism has sought to derive the Vezelay pilgrimage from the imagination of monks promoting their abbey...
...Saint Bernard found their ornament elaborate and wayward...
...Not pilgrims, these most various visitors are not tourists...
...Dijon, its metropolis in later centuries, having no direct road across the hills, sends its pilgrims first up the highway or the railway to the junction at Les Laumes...
...Since I belong," said he, "to an anticlerical ministry, I will march in this procession...
...The later history of Vezelay has another significance...
...but it can define the significance of a mountain of vision...
...The restored fabric might suffice for instruction as well as for imaginative expansion...
...Its earlier architecture, still experimental, asked more light, more height, than had been yielded by the Romanesque tradition...
...In 1893 the eminent historian of the early Church, Monseigneur Duchesne, denouncing the Provencal relic, found that the Magdalen legend had come from Vezelay...
...Otherwise, as many another French street, this one presents a rather blank face...
...In the eleventh century July 22 became her feast...
...It is more than subjective...
...Pilgrims went to shrines not only to be delivered, but because they had been delivered...
...it was habitual turning to a friend...
...A pilgrimage to Canterbury enhanced the realization of a martyrdom by gazing on the very scene...
...Anointing, watch by cross and tomb, "touch me not- yet," "go tell the apostles"-all these scenes are not only more popular and more poignant...
...Its hill country of wine and wheat is even more a country of woods...
...Even the highways have long solitary stretches through the trees...
...There also, at Sermi-zelles, pilgrims from Paris leave train for road...
...Above all a nave, the Vezelay church of the Magdalen was built at the opening of the twelfth century for long processions and great congregations...
...It is in that borderland of Burgundy which touches ancient Gaul and the caves before history, keeps the shadows of Roman roads and camps, and has not yet relinquished all its epic lore of the Carolingians...
...and pilgrimage sprang naturally from this familiarity...
...Thereupon, in 1876, the archbishop of Sens brought back to Vezelay that part of it which had been given to his cathedral 600 years before, and solemnly reestablished the pilgrimage...
...But those who still use their legs may leave this at Asquins, pause a moment on the bridge over the Cure, and moving them a jog westward, take the old road straight up the flank of the hill...
...and our diverse histories opened toward that divine continuity announced by the Magdalen and held by the communion of the saints...
...From such a reign of horror was Mary delivered...
...The westward way leads to the high cluster of Semur, crosses the plateau past Montreal to Avallon, and winds down a gorge to the valley of the Cure...
...but to fulminate against his king he came to Vezelay, and soon his martyrdom made of Canterbury another pilgrim city...
...The office hymns for the new feast, shorter and simpler, present her always as the great penitent, usually with some reference to the scene of the anointing...
...That gap is yet to be bridged by further study not only of documents and legend, but of hymns and imagery...
...it answers every height...
...The Hundred Years' War, appalling title of a chapter in handy manuals, showed feudalism disintegrating...
...Mary hath chosen the best part which shall not be taken away from her...
...This broader stretch is legendary Vaubeton, field of the epic battle between King Charles and that Count Girard who in the ninth century endowed the monastery of Vezelay...
...The walls of Vezelay have not merely crumbled...
...Meantime all expressions of the Middle Age, sculpture and glass, poetry and record, above all architecture and ornament, have been widely recovered and even reconstituted...
...The addition of it to the lives of the Magdalen may even be felt to break the sequence of characterization...
...Our United States are already dotted with mediaeval buildings dedicated to purposes unmediaeval or even antimediaeval, as if beauty of expression were separable from function...
...tunnels and galleries against old sieges lead to forgotten posterns choked with rubbish and brambles...
...Expression opens the other way, windows and courts looking over terraced gardens above the ramparts up and down the valley...
...In what is historical we may read more confidently what is historic...
...Vezelay is a city of pilgrimage...
...There, before following the avenue of trees to the inn, they will turn to look back northward through the lovely vista of the valley along the pilgrim way...
...Holding directly from the Holy See, the monks so dominated their situation as to thwart feudal control...
...She passed, he says, through the slippery haunts of Babylon, rejoicing in proscribed oriental cult and pagan school, where lurk demons, where centaurs and winged dragons sport with monstrous birds, and sirens raise lugubrious antiphons...
...but what does it mean...
...Invocation was not exceptional recourse to a vague influence...
...The powerful devils, the nightmare beasts and birds of the Vezelay capitals are so like Hermann's embodiment of evil dreams that poetry and sculpture together constitute the best of initiations into the mediaeval visions of sin as perversion...
...While the Cistercian reformers had moved farther from the world, Vezelay had been turning its monastery chapel into a pilgrim church...
...The Vezelay pilgrimage has withstood more vicissitudes, perhaps, than have beset any other shrine...
...It survived the later vogue of the Magdalen cult in the Provence, even the dwindling and final extinction of the Vezelay abbey...
...and the liturgical additions proper to its observance advanced the characterization...
...A more immediate impulse might be gratitude...
...If Saint Bernard rebuked the architectural ornament designed rather for pilgrims than for monks, he came nevertheless in 1146 to preach the second crusade, great preacher of the Middle Age at one of its great moments...
...That Vezelay was the centre of the Magdalen cult in the twelfth century is indubitable...
...No, the hypothesis that the Magdalen relic at Vezelay was a literary invention is at best insufficient, at worst a glib and impatient avoidance of a gap in the documentary evidence for a tenacious tradition...
...The seventeenth century, culmination of humanism, had the complacency to rewrite the mediaeval hymns...
...The intervening development of her cult had begun in the identifying of the penitent who anointed the Christ with the woman out of whom he cast seven devils and with the sister of Martha and Lazarus...
...The poetry of the Church made the great penitent more and more personally distinct as the devoted servant of her Lord's human body...
...Mediaeval loyalties were dislocated by gentleman brigands, and sapped by political theory...
...Besides the pilgrimages for which its church was built, Vezelay in latter years has called from their various worlds a file of painters, scholars, soldiers, students from the ends of the earth...
...I saw the tomb of the living, The glory of Christ arising and giving, The angels who guarded The grave-clothes discarded...
...Thus they follow countless footsteps past an iron cross and a stone asking prayers for the faithful departed, past the great wooden cross on the slope where Saint Bernard preached crusade, up and up under the ramparts to a fine fortified gate...
...The bare summary is startling- as if nothing could keep the Magdalen from Vezelay...
...and poetry will go on to bring her personality home...
...At least they were not heard when the eighteenth century talked of Gothic night, and the manufactured cult of the Goddess of Reason opened the Age of Reason...
...In the twelfth it had made the city of the Magdalen one of the great centres of Christendom...
...Hisses the basilisk, and the horned toad is lord...
...No church offers a surer vista...
...Thither came kings and even Popes...
...Even in the ninth century an Easter hymn by Rabanus Maurus gives but one line to her recognition of the risen Lord's voice...
...Would these Benedictines give themselves to fiction for the sake of capturing a trade that they seem to have had already...
...Duchesne has been answered at length by Sicard...
...He would not have dared to prop the Romanesque walls of the great nave with Gothic buttresses...
...Not Saint Michael's Mount was such a beacon...
...The sixteenth-century House of the Dove has a Gothic hall below...
...but they did not put her forward as a patron saint until the eleventh century...
...He rose, my hope...
...The growth of her characterization and of her cult may be followed from century to century in the hymns...
...He came to me...
...they were broken...
...The pilgrim church grew from the chapel of a monastery...
...it is not only my exaltation, but God's gift...
...In a word, the popular appeal of the Magdalen, latent in the gospels, was brought out by the dramatic dialogue of the Easter sequences, and carried forward in the hymns for her own feast...
...From the patterns of those who despised the Middle Age we have turned back to mediaeval patterns...
...Pilgrims were the typical audiences of the chansons de geste...
...To kneel with one's candle at the shrine was both to implore and to enlist...
...Not the great church crowning the steep of Orvieto, not near Pontigny, shrine of Saint Edme, refuge of Langton and Becket, has had such power to draw...
...As we all marched down the pilgrim nave and the pilgrim street, singing the great hymns of Aquinas, we felt together...
...How had the relic come...
...In the tenth and eleventh centuries she is brought into personal prominence by the development of antiphonal sequences in the liturgy...
...In the sequences for Easter her meeting with the angels, with the Lord in the garden, with the apostles, is rendered in dialogue...
...The art of Vezelay is not the monastic harmony of Pontigny or Fontenay...
...As a monastery, therefore, Vezelay was in constant danger of too much business...
...Passing from the alleluias of saints to the deliverance of Mary from her seven devils, he expands on the spirits of evil in the imagery seized afterward by the sculptors of Vezelay...
...The fortune that began for a mediaeval city in the mere lodging of pilgrims was extended in fairs...
...but they remain tourists...
...The commonest statue of the Magdalen, that of Vezelay, is a gracious woman holding the vase that symbolizes her characteristic devotion...
...The forgotten village that was once a great city focuses the ravines feeding its own valley of the Cure...
...Chatel Censoir, whose lord took the cross from Saint Bernard at Vezelay, has kept that older architecture which gives its little nave a prospect both up to the high altar and down to the tomb of the ancient martyrs...
...For the western Church this was one and the same Mary, the devoted servant of her Lord's human body...
...Ignorant of these proud forgotten names, the pilgrim questing southward today up the valley of the Cure finds his own answer in the long nave against the sky...
...After loving little, impulsively, passionately, and amiss, she became the type of utter devotion...
...The best part was interpreted by the Middle Age as the monastic way of perfection...
...So Montmarte and Montjoie look to it westward, and eastward the heights above Chatel Censoir...
...Daring further, architects found a better structural solution in the pilgrim narthex...
...The castle above Domecy looks to it northward over the ruins of Pierre Perthuis: from purple field to green, from silver wheat to gold, from vines to deep woods, over hill to higher hill and highest...
...A bishop of Autun put the pilgrimage under interdict...
...In spite of critical question within the Church, of war, iconoclasm and theft from without, Vezelay after 900 years is yet the city of the Magdalen...
...and Vezelay has given them more than they sought...
...Forgotten saints, as well as breached ramparts and violated church, bespeak broken currents of faith...
...First, says the church of the Magdalen, behold a shrine of communal devotion, the tabernacle of God with men...
...No other mediaeval concourse is more dramatically central...
...Yet the saint who was to make Vezelay historic had not emerged when the monastery was founded in the ninth century...
...The sequence goes on to a contrasted vision of the heavenly Jerusalem...
...His chains fell away...
...it was discredited 300 years later by the Sulpitian Faillon, historian of the Provencal cult...
...Hardly, when Vezelay was rather a goal than a stage...
...Satyrs dance while a lamia suckles her whelps, and ibis and raven croak discords...
...The Magdalen's devotion becomes personally distinct...
...He will go on after Becket to Vezelay...
...If there is none beyond the accounts of the bringing of the relic, the argument runs in a circle...
...The earlier hymns speak of the faithful women at the cross and at the tomb without even naming the Magdalen...
...but what summons from afar is the church of the Magdalen...
...She hath loved much...
...Among the forests are villages, even towns, with forgotten names...
...But we do not yet know whether the Vezelay devotion was a result of that popularity or a cause...
...Vezelay is the great boss on the shield stretching eastward from Clamecy to Avallon, southward from Auxerre up to the mountains of the Morvan...
...Thus the Transfiguration is more than the mood of the three apostles...
...A knight captive in chains beyond hope of ransom daily begged intercession of the Magdalen...
...Between the lines of the railway fork to Autun and to Nevers, as if remembering its historic difficulties with both, Vezelay has no station...
...From the Seine and the Yonne they have come to the Cure by the old route of the valleys...
...The eye is led calmly from Romanesque pier to pier to the commanding light of the Gothic apse...
...What the old shrines were facing in the sixteenth century was discerned by Sir Thomas More as the tragic fading of the mediaeval vision of unity...
...The genius of the sculptured capitals cannot yet hold attention...
...The devout heart knew its friends among the saints from long habit and homely familiarity...
...but it sought more...
...The saints appear at every turn...
...At least this Provengal Magdalen is not quite harmonized with the prevalent imagery...
...Ogives of substructure have long been relieved of their load...
...Patterns of what...
...The special devotion to the Magdalen spreading in the eleventh century centered at Vezelay...
...The useless fortifications of the fourteenth century crack and lapse down the steep, stone by stone...
...for here is the way of the pilgrims, and there on high is their goal...
...They are patrons of guilds, guides of travelers, inspirers of fine arts and of common affairs...
...The street mounting to the church of the Magdalen is a walk through the Renaissance back to the Middle Age...
...What processions demanded this scope ? Even a village festival today moving from the high altar to the west portal reveals the mediaeval constructive imagination...
...a Palm Sunday processional, one stanza to her anointing...
...But below the sharp skyline of the nave the dwindling pile of house-walls and gables, the crumbling ramparts and towers, the poor remains of the abbey, are dim and mellow...
...they are also insistently unified...
...When the sacristan has opened the reverberating doors of the narthex, the nave at its full length catches the breath...
...Having learned to restore walls as they were, not as some enthusiast wishes that they had been, shall our mediaeval revival always remain stultifyingly content with the sentimental archaism of the pre-Raphaelites...
...Thou sawest Aught in thy watch to guide us...
...he was overruled and rebuked by the Pope...
...A pretty Renaissance stair-tower, similarly founded, looks over the way to a plain house quietly inscribed MCCCLII...
...Though July 22 was marked in the martyrologies as the day of her death, the Magdalen had no feast...
...Mediaeval history, known as never before in detail, may be more widely and surely interpreted...
...It is not mere rustic survival, the French roots in the soil...
...Finally, why should they have selected the Magdalen...
...What evidence is there of this promotion...
...Northeast of it, behind the Roman road, hardly touched by time in its hiddenvalley, stands the abbey of Fontenay...
...Because her legend was popular...
...Those who dream in the church of the Magdalen as over dead symbols have their reward...
...What Chaucer revealed of the way to Canterbury in the late fourteenth century had begun at Vezelay in the eleventh...
...The opposite hills toward Avallon rise roundly and smoothly with vineyard and field, wood and castle...
...But what they see is opened wide to the traveler from the terrace around the apse...
...his captor dismissed him in peace...
...There on legendary Mount Auxois is the statue of Vercingetorix...
...The pride of the great dukes of Burgundy in Vezelay, the continuance of papal sanction, could hardly suffice...
...This is the inner meaning of Chaucer's "to Canterbury with ful devout corage...
...The relic was not only burnt by the Huguenots...
...Just this side of the square a tablet in the wall marks the legendary lodging of Saint Bernard and his crusading king...
...In 1898 the restored relic was stolen, abandoned, recovered, reau-thenticated by due process of civil law, and reestablished by the Church...
...Must the impulse have arisen from the situation of Vezelay on one of the minor pilgrimage routes to Compostella...
...The faith animating mediaeval pilgrimages was in the value of enhancing personal contacts with saints...
...Under the steep the graceful Gothic spire of Saint Pere beckons up the valley to the gorge of Pierre Perthuis...
...the restored relic and pilgrimage ask a truer realization of mediaeval poetry...
...The poetry of the Magdalen's personal giving became intimately associated with the procession of palms, the institution of the great sacrament, the cross, the tomb, the resurrection-with every stage of the Passion...
...Vezelay, they are stimulated to realize, meant this and this...
...Architecture reveals history in layers, or old arches break through modern plaster...
...What she had, she hath done...
...Thus knowing her Lord, she is the harbinger of His continued human presence...
...Reconstitution today, whether by excavation, measurement, comparative scrutiny, or by paleography, has achieved scientific method...
...Young women from the Ecole Normale de Sevres swarm the church and the street on an expedition into French history...
...Anointing, entombment, personal message of the Resurrection-all these recur in sculpture, glass, and hymn throughout mediaeval imagery...
...This is clearly implied in those earlier legends of deliverance from chains on invocation of her help...
...Through the martyr it sought divine friendship...
...Even houses built of stone upon the rock have loosened as their families dispersed and faded, as the fairs asked less merchandise and less...
...It would have guided and stayed the rash hand of Viollet le Duc at Vezelay...
...and it revealed the communion of the saints as a progressive personal experience...
...The map is dotted with the names of feudal forests and intricate with wood roads...
...Now, in these motor days, it is past needing one...
...and Pissier, latest historian of the Vezelay cult, has reconciled north and south...
...The appeal of the Magdalen to pilgrims gave the monks a special ministry to the world...
...It is a focus of mediaeval history...
...But what further...
...No countryside is more typical of the French cherishing of trees...
...Research cannot enhance a hill of dreams...
...The Count of Nevers could harass, but never prevail, even when he abetted the insurrection that sought to make the city a commune...
...Chaucer's summary is the common formula: "the holy blisful martir for to seke that hem hath holpen...
...The contemplative hermit is much rarer and generally later...
...History has yielded little evidence...
...One of the earliest records of her intercession, this is typically mediaeval...
...He begins to know what he divined as he followed the exile of Thomas of Canterbury from the cathedral of Sens to the chapel of Pontigny, or as he questioned the dim frescoes in the ancient crypt of Auxerre...
...Daily life was full of saints...
...As it draws the eye from afar, it guides the mind...
...Vision, this faith knew further, has not only its times, but its places...
...The legend of the contemplative hermit of the Provence, of her supernatural nourishment, and of the elevations by angels figured in the grandiose reredos of the Paris Madeleine, has a fragrance different from that of her precious ointment...
...Thus focused, the most picturesque of gospel narratives opened the gates of both thought and emotion to the kingdom of heaven...
...and the transcending of their grasp is what firmly fixed their faith...
...Throughout its mediaeval history Vezelay remained an abbey and its dependencies...
...Having received little stress in the time of the great throngs at Vezelay, it became dominant later in the Provengal cult...
...An American won his place in the salon with an etching of the facade...
...He goeth before you to Galilee...
...He helped them by his prayers without their going to his violated altar and his tomb...
...Hermann, the scholar cripple of Reichenau, wrote for it a sequence that is one of the triumphs of mediaeval poetry, "Rise, chorus of heavenly harpers...
...but his help led them to seek his fellowship...
...or Martha and Mary were contrasted as types of the active life and the contemplative...
...Speak, Mary...
...An undersecretary of finance, on vacation at Corpus Christi, watched the children in festival frocks going up with their baskets of rose petals...
...Many other houses rebuilt above of old stones are older and older below...
...immemorial woods still send their great trunks...
...Becket, ascetic too, chose Pontigny for his retreat...
...What one can leave the far prospect soon, or lift his heart in vain when he turns within...
...It is good for us," says this abiding faith, "to be here...
...A saint's personal efficiency, prolonged beyond his earthly life, was enhanced by personal association with his physical ambience: the place of his abode, the things that he had used, the mortal tabernacle of his immortality...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 16
