Off the Road (11 page)

In a corner of the yard amid
a thicket of bushes and weeds, I find a tidy private corner, somewhat hidden
from view. I would guess that I am standing in what might have been a kitchen
nook. The sun is blazing hot. Sweat is streaming down my face and arms. Decorum
and nature battle mightily here. Decorum, needless to say, surrenders. From a
window, Ramon’s silhouette passes by several times. He and his friend are
hooting now. And the hilarity won’t end. She tells a joke and he honks with
laughter. He speaks and a witch’s cackle explodes. There’s something
disconcerting about these sounds, but I can’t quite finger it. Suddenly weird
howls of hysteria fill the air.

As I prepare to leave for my
late afternoon walk, Ramón appears downstairs and again offers the only real
thing he has: water. He would be pleased if I would let him ink my passport
with his very own “Ramón” stamp. He walks me down the street and sends me on my
way. Saying good-bye to the miracle of Ramón, I am suddenly awakened by a
revelation that would have been obvious long ago to someone not suffering early
onset of sunstroke. Ramón and his girlfriend had different voices but came from
the same source. There is no friend. The Amazing Ramón seems gently,
benevolently, but, in the end, completely insane.

Most of the recorded
miracles that took place on this road aren’t all that different from finding
Ramon’s address in my pocket or feeling the magical breeze in his foyer. They
are often modest stories, such as the tale of the five knights, that show good
pilgrims being rewarded or evil innkeepers being punished.

The most famous miracle of
the road happened at a spot three days’ walk from El Ramón in the town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. The town is named for a monk who devoted his life to building
pilgrim roads and means, literally, Saint Dominick of the Highway.

The miracle of this area
occurred in the fourteenth century. One day, a pilgrim family—father, mother,
and son—arrived in Santo Domingo. At the inn where they stayed, the owner’s
daughter developed a crush on the boy or, in the words of the sixteenth-century
Englishman Andrew Boorde, “for ther was a wenche the whych wolde haue had hym
to medyll with her carnally.” But the boy’s virtue could not be compromised
while he walked. (Which is a miracle itself; one of the oldest sayings of the
road
—Ir romero y volver ramera
—translates “Start out a pilgrim, return a
whore.”) Angry at being scorned, the girl slipped a silver cup in the boy’s
rucksack. When the family was leaving town, she informed the local authorities
of the theft. Chased down, the boy proclaimed his innocence, but he was
sentenced to death and hanged from a tree at the edge of town.

The grieving parents walked
on to Santiago to fulfill their pledge. On their return trip, as they approached
Santo Domingo, they could still see the silhouette of their son’s body
dangling from a branch. (In some parts of Europe, the indignity of a death
sentence was rounded out by leaving the body to rot out of the rope.) As they
neared the tree, though, they could see their son moving. He spoke right up,
explaining that their dutiful journey to Santiago had won James’s heart. The
saint had returned the boy’s life and then held him up by the arms until their
return. To us, perhaps, a pretty serious miracle. But in the Middle Ages,
various states of unconsciousness were thought to be “death,” so resurrection
was actually common. The story continues.

The parents ran to the town
mayor and insisted that he come and see what had happened. The mayor, always
depicted in paintings as a portly, well-fed bureaucrat, was seated at his
dinner table, ready to cut into two hot roasted chickens. He dismissed the
parents as insane and complained that their crying was interrupting his meal.
Annoyed at their persistence, he finally shouted, “Your boy can no more be
alive than these chickens could get up and crow!”

Immediately, the main course
stirred. The roasters kicked away the garnishes and vegetables. They stretched
their plucked brown wings. They squawked and danced across the table. The boy
was cut down and the miracle proclaimed. The story of resurrected chickens had
a profound tug on the medieval mind. Hundreds of versions of the miracle—dead
and dancing fowl— can be found throughout Europe, and paintings of Santo Domingo’s
chickens can been seen as far east as Überlingen and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

We moderns have a hard time
enjoying miracles. Whenever a miracle makes a public splash nowadays, it
suffers from a comical absence of gravitas. Just before I left America, crowds were gathering near an Atlanta franchise of Jiffy Lube, where a Pizza Hut billboard
depicted an uplifted forkful of spaghetti and meat sauce. Some said the
mouthful of spaghetti looked like the postcard image of Jesus.

The miracles of the road are
simple tales in which pilgrims best those out to harm them. The meaning of the
story of the dancing chickens is not difficult to figure out. Another miracle
tells of a pilgrim who asks a woman if he can share her bread which was baking
beneath a hot stone. She lies and says there isn’t any, and after the pilgrim
departs, she upends the stone to find that her loaf has disappeared. The
miracles of the early history of the road and those that predated the
pilgrimage throughout Europe are charming tales of what we might call
coincidence, like the constant appearance of the stranger on the road who gives
me directions. Miracles were those occasions when circumstances conspired to
shatter one’s preconceptions. They were times of joyful surprise, moments of
pleasure. The word
miracle
comes from the Latin
mirari,
which
means to look upon in wonder. In its etymology lies the warmer meaning of this
word.
Mirari
also came into English as “smile.”

The earliest understanding
of miracles was quite simple. St. Augustine, writing five hundred years before
the pilgrimage, said there was only one miracle—creation. Every other
extraordinary occurrence we encounter is merely a ripple emanating from this
original miracle. At times, Augustine’s thinking sounds modern. “All natural things
are filled with the miraculous,” he once wrote. His commentary would make
excellent poster copy for contemporary environmentalists: “For consider changes
of day and night, the very constant order of heavenly bodies, the fourfold
change of the seasons, the fall of leaves and their return to the trees the
following spring, the infinite power in seeds, the beauty of light, and the
varieties of colors, sounds, smells, and tastes; and then give me a man who
sees and experiences these things for the first time, with whom we can still
talk—he is amazed and overwhelmed at these miracles.”

Miracles were small
epiphanies that confounded our expectation of nature and creation. Augustine
lists dozens of them: there is the magnet that “by some insensible power of suction
attracts iron, though it will not stir a straw.” Isn’t that a miracle? How
about fire, which burns a stone white yet blackens almost everything else? Or
the chaff of grain that, when piled on something cold such as snow, keeps it
cold yet also holds in warmth?

Augustine tries to convince
his readers that miracles are delightful, even humorous, moments of surprise
that open up a new way of looking at things. His account of the miracle healing
of Innocentius, the modern reader suspects, is written as much for laughs as
for awe.

Innocentius was a well-off
man in Carthage, Augustine explains, who “was under treatment for fistulas [a
kind of abscess], having a number of them intertwined in the rectum, and others
more deep-seated.” The doctors had already performed “surgery”—a word whose
exact meaning in fourth-century North Africa I am not sure can even be
imagined. The doctors said that they hadn’t cut out all the fistulas and would
have to return with the knife. Innocentius called together all the holy men of
the area, including the bishop of Hippo, for a prayer meeting. In deadpan
prose, St. Augustine reports the occasion:

Then we betook ourselves to prayers; and when we knelt
down, in the usual way, and bent toward the ground, Innocentius hurled himself
forward, as if someone had pushed him flat on his face; and he began to pray.
It is beyond the power of words to express the manner of his prayer, his
passion, his agitation, his flood of tears, his groans, and the sobs which
shook his whole frame and almost stifled his breath. Whether the others were
praying, whether they could take their attention from him, I could not tell;
for my part, I was utterly unable to utter a prayer, all I could do was to say
this brief sentence in my heart, “Lord, what prayers of your people do you
hear, if you do not hear these?”

When the doctors examined
the patient before cutting, the fistulas had miraculously disappeared. There
were celebrations all around.

Augustine’s broad, even
sentimental view of miracles makes sense if you
don’t
think about it too
much. Strict analysis of miracles leads to difficult questions. What about the
miracles in the Bible? Those were not gentle surprises or moments of
serendipity. They were specific actions conjured up by holy men. Augustine explained
these better than average miracles by arguing that they were intended to get
people’s attention in the early days. When pressed on one occasion, Augustine
replied, almost with irritation: “Why, you ask, do such things not occur now?
Because they would not move people, unless they were miraculous, and, if they
were customary, they would not be miraculous.”

So Augustine identified the
contradiction of imposing too much meaning on simple coincidence. He strove to
keep wonders and signs from being so burdened. He worried about those who
became too enthusiastic over miracles. “They worship every bit of dust from the
Holy Land,” he sneered. But miracles had the power to excite the public mind.
If they were meaningful actions by the divine, then they conveniently confirmed
a worldview that was powerfully different from the pagan’s. Life was not just a
whirlwind of chaos in which the best hope was to appease the anger of the gods.
Rather, the world was a harmony, with a just god at the center dispensing miracles
as gifts to the good.

The public desperately
believed in miracles. But once you’ve leapt to the belief that miracles are
intentional acts meant to convey a specific meaning, it is not difficult to
pass on to an assumption with more serious implications: miracles did not
happen spontaneously, they could be
summoned
by those on really good
terms with the divine. This belief gradually overtook everyone, even Augustine.

One day a sick man
approached the bishop of Hippo and begged for a touch to heal some serious
ailments. Augustine demurred with a joke. “If I had the gift you say I have,”
he said, “I would be the first to try it on myself.” But when the man failed to
laugh, Augustine could no longer refuse. He laid his hands upon the old man.

Perhaps that moment was a
turning point. If better than average miracles helped found the church during
the earliest days, Augustine now reasoned, then maybe miracles in his day were
meant to
expand
the numbers of the faithful. What he had once tenderly
described as a private joy, an intimate delight between a believer and nature,
became a public affair. As it happened, this shift occurred just at the time
the organized church was pondering a different problem.

Before the Roman emperor
Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, it was easy to
identify a saint. They were martyrs—the ones who bravely proclaimed their faith
when they knew it meant suicide. Obviously these were special people. After Constantine converted, though, the imposition of death on Christians was lifted.
Martyrdoms declined precipitously. Without hideous suffering and death as the
sign of a saint, what would become the standard? This vacuum appeared at
practically the same time that miracles were becoming more public and more
accepted as purposeful signs. The two trends merged perfectly, the one becoming
the measure of the other. Did the potential saint have a special relationship
with the divine? Well, could he perform miracles?

At first, this ad hoc
solution seemed tidy. But the dynamic caused problems. Originally there were no
rules. Miracles just happened—they were spontaneous events at the local level.
Yet for precisely that reason, they presented a problem to a centralized
organization. In Rome, the task of controlling the outbreak of miracles and
streamlining their meaning became a thousand-year nightmare.

The central authorities
tried several remedies. They appointed the local bishops to take responsibility
for affirming the authenticity of miracles. Over time, this system grew more
strict. Several papal initiatives eventually pushed the final authority all the
way to the top. In 993, Pope John XV declared Ulric of Augsburg the first papal
saint.

Clearly, this process was
going to require a lot more work. Miracles would have to be reported in certain
ways. There would need to be witnesses who would have to be interviewed by
proper authorities. Depositions would have to be consistent. Paperwork and
clerks were needed in Rome. Reports of miracles assumed the tone of legal
briefs. The confirmation of miracles became an official proceeding. A devil’s
advocate was appointed to make the opposing case. Committees screened at the
local level, and loftier commissions in Rome screened the committee’s work,
until the confirmation of miracles meant the pope had to sit down before a file
of position papers. This institutionalization began to resemble any human
bureaucracy, and thus the formality of adding someone to the list or canon of
saints became a process, still called to this day by its bureaucratic name:
canonization.