“Go thou to Everyman,
And show him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bring with him a sure reckoning
Without delay or any tarrying.”
____ Anonymous, Everyman[i]
Over the río Tirón
and on to Tosantos
Through Espinosa del Camino
On the Way: Belorado to Villafranca
Richard and I walked out of Belorado sometime before five in the morning. It was cool and overcast. The air seemed thick and heavy, and breathing took effort. When we talked to the bartender the night before, he predicted rain. The cloudy sky suggested he had a good chance of being right. In the dark, we approached another river, the Retuerto. We followed it toward the village of Tosantos, a contraction of “Todos los Santos,” or All Saints. Some good people built a bridge there over the río Palomar, a subsiduary to the río Retuerto, and that bridge took us over the river and out of Tosantos. The town had a pleasant, simple church of stone white, with mortar gray, and clay tile roofs of brown. Its simple bell cote held one bell, which rings, I’m sure, every Sunday, and has for many a year. May it do so for many more. Ad multos annos. It was silent when we passed it, as it was yet dark.
We continued parallel to the río Retuerto from Tosantos to the town of Villambistía. At Villambistía there was a chapel dedicated to St. Roch, a pilgrim saint of the 14th century. St. Roch, or San Roque as he is known in Spain, was born in Montpellier in France. His parents died of the plague, and he well-nigh did as well. He survived the disease, largely because of the services of good dog, which brought him bread in the forest where he had taken quarantine. The money he inherited from his parents he gave to the poor, and he undertook a pilgrimage to far-off Rome though his legs were scarred by disease. He spent his life there taking care of those sick and dying of the plague. His life is encapsulated in his iconography, for he is shown as a pilgrim, with a dog, pointing to the wounds of the plague on his leg. The church was an old Romanesque church, with semi-circular apse, and one square tower.
Through San Felices by the ruins of the monastery of San Félix de Oca
From Villambistía we traveled to Espinosa del Camino, a town inhabited but with much of its structures in ruin. Out of Villambistía was a pleasant road between walls and rows of elm trees. Rain appeared imminent, and the dark clouds loomed over us with their depressing load, for rain is very hard on a pilgrim. Richard went at a faster pace, and shortly after Villambistía, I lost him as a companion.
Shortly after Espinosa, the Retuerto River faded away. I traveled by the ruins of St. Felix of Oca. All that is left is the remains of an old apse, part of a Mozarabic monastery church founded in the 9th century. It is said that somewhere here rest the remains of Diego Rodríguez Porcelos, founder of the town of Burgos. If so, it is a pity there is no one to tend to his grave. But the Lord knows where it is, and the Lord shall be able to find it, and indeed shall find it, on the day of the Resurrection of the Dead.
From the ruins of San Felices I walked by the río Oja to the town of Villafranca Montes de Oca, whence I ultimately crossed the river into the town. At Villafranca I stopped at the first open café as I came into the town and I rested my feet. I sat in a stale corner, among the smoking Spaniards and the clutter and chatter of other pilgrims. Alone and melancholy, I had a breakfast of stale sweetbreads and café con leche, staples of the pilgrim in Spain, and fortified myself for the climb up the Montes de Oca, for these steep hills lay just to the west of town.
It is hereabouts that Aymeric Picaud tells us we enter the “land of the Spaniards, that is to say, Castilla and Campos.”[ii] This country is “full of treasures, of gold and silver; it abounds in fodder and in vigorous horses, and it has plenty of bread, wine, meat, fish, milk, and honey. On the other hand, it is poor in wood and full of evil and vicious people.”[iii] The only thing I worried about did not seem to concern Picaud, and that was the hills that lay before me.
I I I
Franca-villa
Over the río Oca
Into Villa-
franca de Montes de Oca
M
Eremita de la Virgen de Oca
k
Iglesia de Santiago
On the Way: Villafranca de Montes de Oca
Villafranca de Montes de Oca is located on the northwest slopes of the Montes de Oca. Like many of these towns, it also marked for a time the original boundary between Castille and Navarre, as the Castillian armies progressed from river to river inexorably, it seems, eastwards to Logroño and beyond almost to Viana. The town has ancient origins, Visigothic at least, but perhaps earlier. The town claims to be the seat of a bishop almost from the times apostolic. Its first bishop was St. Indaletius, said to be, along with Sts. Torquetus, Ctesiphon, Secundus, Caccilius, Hesychius, and Euphrasius, the first bishops in Spain. St. Indaletius is said to have been a disciple and direct ordinand of St. James the Greater. He was bishop here and at Almería.
Like his teacher, St. Indaletius suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel, and spilt his blood here on the ground, which brought forth a spring from the ground, marked—so the popular story goes—by the red stones. His memory may be recalled at the Ermita de la Virgen de Oca, found at the bottom of the gorge of La Hoz. In 1075, the see of Auca (Oca) was transferred to Burgos. Though the location of the see changed, the memories of the old bishop St. Indaletius stayed behind. His relics, however, have found their resting place at the city of Jaca, on the Camino aragonés, where they may be found in a silver urn by the main altar of the Cathedral, so the story goes, for I have not seen it.
I I I
Nemus Oque
Entonçe era Castylla un pequenno rrincon, era de castella-nos Montes d’Oca mojon.
Depart Villa-
franca
On the Way: Villafranca to San Juan de Ortega
Having finished breakfast, I left Villafranca Montes de Oca for what I hoped would be a pleasant—if long and initially steep—walk through the oak forest of the Montes de Oca. In days of yore the pilgrims did not know what evil lurked ahead in the forest before them. This thick forest of oak was haven to the brigand and the workplace of the bandit. Woe to the foolish pilgrim who journeyed here in the dark of night, for there was danger enough during the light of day.
“Nemus Oque” of Picaud
Cross the Montes de Oca through the Puerto de La Pedraja and a forest of Oaks, Pine, and Fir
(1130 m.)
Memorial for the dead
Descent to Pedroja brook
Quickly I left the land of wheat and farms into the land of sheep. Then the path became covered by oaks, whose dark barks were feathered with soft and green lichen. The soil changed to a deep red, and as I topped the hill, the oak gave way to tall pines. The air was cool, wet, and finely scented; the birds sang continuously. The scene at the top of the hill was lovely, and it gave a great excuse to rest my sore feet.
I sat on a wall surrounding a memorial for the fallen of the Guerra Civil, the sanguinary civil war of 1936-1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. I talked briefly to a Spanish pilgrim, who was munching on an apple, when another two pilgrims came by. I recognized them at once as Americans and I hailed them. I learned that they were called David and Alysa. He was a gifted trumpet player, and she was a singer and Fulbright Scholar studying the medieval Arabic music of Spain. They wore sandals, and they told me that they had run into a “Mountain Man,” who told them that they were fools to wear boots, and that they ought to wear their sandals. I was to learn that the Mountain Man’s advice to them to become semi-discalced pilgrims was good, for you shall see that I also took his advice from Sahagún onwards.
As I walked down from the monument, I recalled that somewhere along this path one of the miracles of St. James as related in the Codex Calixtinus occured. Through the intercession of St. James, the wife of a French man conceived a son. They named him James, and when he neared fifteen they traveled to Compostela on pilgrimage. Here, before the forests of Oca, the boy grew sick and died. The mother was despondent to the point of suicide, when St. James answered her prayer. The son, restored to life, finished the pilgrimage with his parents, and, we may assume lived a good life to the glory of his patron saint.
I I I
Matris natum jam defunct-um ad vita restituit
Si quieres robar, véte a los Montes de Oca
The lost Laffi ate
Wild Mush-
Rooms here
Through Valde-fuentes to San Juan de Ortega via the San Juan de Ortega route
Oh how long was the walk to San Juan, and what pleasure was it to get there! The small town of San Juan de Ortega is set in a small clearing in the forest in a valley. Adapting the words of the poet Berceo, I thought:
Yo, Peregrino Andres nomnado,
Iendo en romeria, caeci en un prado
Verde e bien sencido, de flores bien poblado,
Logar cobdiciaduero pora ome cansado.
I, Pilgrim Andrew by name,
Going on pilgrimage, happened upon a meadow,
Green and simple, and well fraught with flowers;
A pleasant place for a tired man.
The town of San Juan is essentially composed of a church, a hostel, and some homes. This town was both founded and funded by Juan de Quintaortuño pio amore Dei et apostoli Jacobi, who spent his family fortune developing the place. Quintaortuño refers to the birth place of the saint, a town by the village of Vivar-del-Cid, which is situated north of Burgos. This Juan is not generally known by that unwieldy name, but known as San Juan de Ortega or St. John of the Nettles.
Die ac nocte jacobi-petas interfi-cientes et multos expo-liantes
In 1477 Queen Isabel came on pilgrimage here and prayed before his shrine, St. John of the Nettles patron of barren women seeking a child. This curious patronage stems from the fact that Juan was an only child, whose conception was sought by his mother’s 20 years of insistent and importunate prayer, something at which mothers seem to be good. Queen Isabel’s prayers, like those of San Juan’s mother, were answered, not once but thrice, San Juan seeing to it that she bore three children. But Isabel should have prayed for more, or she should have prayed also to others—perhaps also Sts. Genevieve, Dymphna, and Gengulph—for three children she received, but each of them unhappy. Don Juan, died young of fever shortly after his marriage, Juana la Loca, suffered from deep melancholia and mental imbalance, and the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon, was the unfortunate spouse of Henry VIII, the king and cad of England, who spent her last years cloistered in tower prisons.
St. John was a disciple of St. Dominic of the Causeway, and he learned his trade well from his master, palpably well, for he designed the town and—most impressively—the church and monastery. The town was founded by him in charity for the benefit of the pilgrims. It was founded here to help curb the assaults on the pilgrims by the bandits of the highway. Here the seed of the Gospel took root in a man’s heart and caused a town of sanctuary to be built among a den of thieves.
k
San Nicolás
Georgiana Goddard King presents a delightful, romantic portrait of the simple saint who lived here, worked here, and whose bones lie here.
He spent his best days working in the sun and directing other workmen, but he ended them here, in a grassy dell, on a stone bench under whispering trees. He would get up when a pilgrim came around the turn, meet him, and ask the news as they reached a quiet room, swept and scrubbed, deep-windowed and strong of door, cool in midsummer, warmed in snow-time; and from the hearth where the white ash always winked and lisped, fetch warm water and if needful wash a man’s feet; he would dish up a stew, tasting of meat, and savory, out of the little blackened pot that simmered there, and fill a horn cup from the bloated wine-skin in the shed, and lastly show a bed, warm, well-shaken up, and clean. He slept usually on the floor himself. He would had given orders so long would hand out a little joke with the piece of bread for breakfast; he would answer questions and remember news and report the state of the roads and the run of the weather to outgoing travellers. He whose advice kings had requested would serve the meanest, and tend the foulest, and wait upon the lustiest,—a tiny trotting old man, white headed and white handed with age, with tanned and shrivelled face. In 1080 he was born; he died in 1163.[iv]
I I I
I dropped off my machila, or pack, by the refugio entrance, and went into the Church of St. Nicholas. I admired the ornate 15th century Isabelline gothic cenotaph, under a baldachino of carved stone and intricate nettle-like tracery in the gothic arches all about it. The base of this monument is carved with scenes, mainly miraculous, of St. John’s life. I looked and saw there bas reliefs of the healing of a man run over by a cart when he fell asleep at the roadside. I saw another of the return of robbers who stole the saint’s cows and wandered all night in fog to find themselves back at the convent door in the morning. Yet another I saw tells the story of how the saint’s own eye (wounded with a needle) was healed when visited by his bishop. The shrine bore the inscription Spes lumen splendor, which translated means “Hope the light of splendor.”
I found the way to the crypt, but the stairwell that led to it was dark. There was no light switch. Providentially, I had kept a flashlight in my pocket from that morning when I needed it in the early morning hours, and I used it to descend into the crypt. There, in the middle of the crypt was the sarcophagus of stone. It was rudimentarily carved. The faithful had left offerings of flowers, and spent candles sat upon it. The flowers were dry, and the candles cold. The crypt was dark and damp, and smelled of moist earth and wet stone. I switched off my flashlight, and in the cool, dark mystery of the pitch-black crypt, I sat before the relics of St. John, and venerated the remains of this simple saint who did so much for pilgrims. I solicited his help for my feet. I figured St. John would be partial to this problem. I do not know how long I remained there, alone and in the quiet, when I heard:
Iohannes: Peregrine, veni foras! Come out!
Peregrinus: Must I then leave?
Iohannes: Rise and unbind your feet!
Peregrinus: I do not understand.
But in response there was only silence. I walked up the stairs to the light, I felt like Lazarus risen from the dead, and over the several days I finally learned what it was St. John had intended to tell me. I had been told to rid myself of my boots, which I finally did at Sahagún.
I I I
urtica inter spinas
Spes lumen splendor
I met Richard and Randi, both of whom were resting by the refugio. All three of us were hungry. I had a bocadillo of ham and cheese, some coffee, and some zumo de piña at the café in San Juan. I rested a bit and Richard, Randi and I discussed whether we should stay or continue. In light of the cool weather, we decided it head to Atapuerca.
The three kilometers or so from San Juan to the town of Agés was done on a pleasant road, which followed a shallow descent through woods of pine and oak. Past an abandoned railway construction project, the road opened up into open meadows as it passed the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Rebollo, where King García Sanchez of Navarre who died in war nearby is buried. Eventually, the road reached Agés. From the town of Agés we crossed a single-arched medieval bridge built by San Juan de Ortega over a tributary of the río Vena. The landscape began to change noticeably as we approached the Sierra de Atapuerca. In the late afternoon, as we walked through Agés, rain clouds began to threaten and the wind began to blow.
Through Agés and into Ata-puerca.
From Agés, we walked on the carretera to the town of Atapuerca. Here nearby, in 1054, brothers met in war. Fernando I Sánchez of Castile, was heir of Castile by last will and testament of his father, King Sancho el Mayor. Fernando’s elder brother, García III Sanchéz of Navarre, was heir though bequest by the same will of the same father of the kingdom of Navarre and some lands west of it. Both brothers unhappy with their lot, joined arms in Atapuerca to decide their fortune through fickle war. Fernando I of Castile emerged the clear victor; Don García of Navarre lost the battle, his kingdom, his land, and his life. Both the tragedy of Don García Sánchez and the victory of Don Fernando Sánchez are marked with a simple stone marker, called appropriately and ambiguously the fin del Rey, or “King’s end.” There it stood, right before the entry into the town.
Now you and I may not have known about Atapuerca, but any paleoanthropologist worth his salt does. In 1994, ancient fossils of early (Lower Pleistocene) hominids, called the Gran Dolina fossils, were discovered in the Sierra de Atapuerca. The paleoanthropologists here estimate the fossils are earlier than 780,000 years of age, and suggest these fossils are those of a new species, a pre-neanderthalic Homo antecessor, common antecessor to Homo heidelbergensis (which developed into Homo neanderthalensis) and to Homo sapiens.[v] I’ll let the paleoanthropologists in their ivory towers and their dirty digs figure this out. As an outsider, it seems to me, however, that some of their conclusions may be more tenuous than those that relate to Santiago’s predicatio and translatio.
I I I
Altaporca
About the Way: On Relics & Bones
The town of Atapuerca is proud of its Gran Dolina fossils. Going past Atapuerca we passed a small white building which promoted the paleontological finds at Atapuerca. I thought why it was that man has a love affair with bones. In the age of pilgrimage, man sought bones for miracles. The bones had life. He called them relics. In the age of science, man seeks bones for knowledge. The bones are dead. He calls them fossils. Both ages have suffered from frauds and their abuse, and the Protestant and modern scoffers have made the most of the frauds of the earlier age for their cause. But Cardinal Newman pointed out quite sensibly (referring to a Latin maxim) that the abuse of a thing does not supersede its use.
Relics have received bad press since the Reformation. For those of us who have inherited such notions, we must try to shuck off some of that prejudice to enjoy the Way of St. James. For part of the wonders of the Way include the bones of Saints, especially the bones of St. James, and we will miss much of the message if we exclude the thaumaturgical in the Saints’ bones. The renegade monk Martin Luther attacked the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. He had to, just like Henry VIII had to destroy the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The Camino was too tied to the Catholic Thing. In the Smalcald Articles (1537), Luther described pilgrimages as “unecessary, uncertain, pernicious will-o-the-wisps of the devil.” He advocated that it be preached “that such pilgrimages are not necessary, but dangerous.” He pontificated specifically against Compostela.[vi] The sum total of his theological reasons: avoid Compostela because one does not know whether St. James, or a dead dog, or a dead horse, lies there. This was reformationist agitprop. We know from modern digs the grave holds the bones neither of a dog or a horse, but of a man. Luther was wrong as to two counts, and should not be trusted as to the other. I given much dispassionate thought about Luther over the years—that fat, lascivious German, that rebellious and irresponsible monk, that renegade and crude priest, and theological Napoleon—, and I have successfully synthesized my opinion of him in one word, a onomatepoeic and brashly unecumenical neologism: “phhhrrrt!”
Lector: What kind of writing is this?
Auctor: You disapprove of it?
Lector: Of course. This is vulgar and childish. In a word, Rabelaisian. The thought behind it is unecumenical and triumphalistic.
Auctor: I’ll grant you unecumenical and triumphalistic. But I’m on Catholic pilgrimage. There is no room for Luther on this Way. Why should I deign to treat as friend and enemy of St. James and his pilgrim path? As to vulgar, recall the many scatalogical words of Luther himself? As to childish, you should note the word begins with a “ph,” which suggests a Greek and highly sophisticate origin, and the Greek philosophers, especially Protagoras, who argued about beans . . . .
Lector: Ahhh. There is no reasoning with the likes of you.
Auctor: Back, then, to my theme.
Medieval man was no more subject to fraud and superstition than modern man. Being human, scientists are equally susceptible to fraud, manipulation, and gullibility akin to the most excessive religious superstition—even with bones. A case in point is the Piltdown Man. These bones of a prehistoric man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) were “discovered” in the Piltdown gravel pits in Sussex between 1908 and 1912. Immediately hailed as an anthropological breakthrough and incontrovertible evidence of the ape-origins of man, doubt crept in only decades later. Now, it is quite established that the remains of the Piltdown man were planted by Sir Arthur Keith, and the jawbone is the jawbone not of a man, but of an orangutang.[vii] And such fraud and concomitant gullibility still happens. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a bird-like fossil with a meat-eater’s tail, hailed as a missing link connecting dinosaurs to birds was displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., and published to the world in the November 1999 issue. This time the scientists were taken in by a simple Chinese farmer.[viii]
Are we to throw away all the wonders of archaeology and paleontology because of a few abuses? Should we be so eager to throw away all the wonders of relics for the same? Maybe it is worth a listen and a change of heart. The pilgrim must let the bones of the Saints work their wonder on the Way of St. James.
And hence we learn with reverence to esteem
Of these frail houses, though the grave confines;
Sophist may urge his cunning tests, and deem
That they are earth;--but they are heavenly shrines. [ix]
The yells of the materialist and Protestant notwithstanding, I cannot shake it: there is something holy in praying before the bones of a saint.
I I I
Wie er Hispaniam kommen is gen Compostel da die groß walfahrt hin is, da haben wir nu nichts gewiß vo dem . . . . Darumb laß man sy ligen und lauff nit dahin, dann man waißt nit ob sant Jakob oder ain todter hund oder ain todst roß da liegt
---Martin Luther
We stopped at Atapuerca, though the refugio appeared full. I was hungry and had no will to go onward. Neither Randi nor Richard disagreed. After dinner, I spent some time alone at the Romanesque Church atop the hill. The church itself was locked. But the view it commanded was marvelous, and I could see fields of wheat, corn, and other crops blanket the valleys with an organic quiltwork. We visited with the Brazilian pilgrims that we had met on our first day out of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. After dinner and a walk about the town, we tried to sleep at the refugio, although a very loud-snoring Spanish pilgrim ruined our and every other pilgrims’ plans to do the same.
k
[i] Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A. C. Cawley, ed., p. 201.
[ii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iv] King, I. 432-33
[v] J. M Bermúdez de Castro, J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, A. Rosas, I. Martínez, M. Mosquera, A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans, Science 1997 May 30: 276: 1392-1395.
[vi] Kaufman/Lozano, p. 54; Benesch, Kurt, Santiago de Compostela, Knecht, Frankfut am Main 1998), p. 101.
[vii] Jaki, Newman's Challenge, p. 270 (cites F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London :Oxford University Pres, 1990).
[viii] http://usnews.com/usnews/issue/000214/fossil.htm. (Mary Lord, The Piltdown Chicken, 2/14/00)
[ix] Relics of the Saints, from Newman, Verses, at 138. “Go thou to Everyman,
And show him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bring with him a sure reckoning
Without delay or any tarrying.”
____ Anonymous, Everyman[i]
Over the río Tirón
and on to Tosantos
Through Espinosa del Camino
On the Way: Belorado to Villafranca
Richard and I walked out of Belorado sometime before five in the morning. It was cool and overcast. The air seemed thick and heavy, and breathing took effort. When we talked to the bartender the night before, he predicted rain. The cloudy sky suggested he had a good chance of being right. In the dark, we approached another river, the Retuerto. We followed it toward the village of Tosantos, a contraction of “Todos los Santos,” or All Saints. Some good people built a bridge there over the río Palomar, a subsiduary to the río Retuerto, and that bridge took us over the river and out of Tosantos. The town had a pleasant, simple church of stone white, with mortar gray, and clay tile roofs of brown. Its simple bell cote held one bell, which rings, I’m sure, every Sunday, and has for many a year. May it do so for many more. Ad multos annos. It was silent when we passed it, as it was yet dark.
We continued parallel to the río Retuerto from Tosantos to the town of Villambistía. At Villambistía there was a chapel dedicated to St. Roch, a pilgrim saint of the 14th century. St. Roch, or San Roque as he is known in Spain, was born in Montpellier in France. His parents died of the plague, and he well-nigh did as well. He survived the disease, largely because of the services of good dog, which brought him bread in the forest where he had taken quarantine. The money he inherited from his parents he gave to the poor, and he undertook a pilgrimage to far-off Rome though his legs were scarred by disease. He spent his life there taking care of those sick and dying of the plague. His life is encapsulated in his iconography, for he is shown as a pilgrim, with a dog, pointing to the wounds of the plague on his leg. The church was an old Romanesque church, with semi-circular apse, and one square tower.
Through San Felices by the ruins of the monastery of San Félix de Oca
From Villambistía we traveled to Espinosa del Camino, a town inhabited but with much of its structures in ruin. Out of Villambistía was a pleasant road between walls and rows of elm trees. Rain appeared imminent, and the dark clouds loomed over us with their depressing load, for rain is very hard on a pilgrim. Richard went at a faster pace, and shortly after Villambistía, I lost him as a companion.
Shortly after Espinosa, the Retuerto River faded away. I traveled by the ruins of St. Felix of Oca. All that is left is the remains of an old apse, part of a Mozarabic monastery church founded in the 9th century. It is said that somewhere here rest the remains of Diego Rodríguez Porcelos, founder of the town of Burgos. If so, it is a pity there is no one to tend to his grave. But the Lord knows where it is, and the Lord shall be able to find it, and indeed shall find it, on the day of the Resurrection of the Dead.
From the ruins of San Felices I walked by the río Oja to the town of Villafranca Montes de Oca, whence I ultimately crossed the river into the town. At Villafranca I stopped at the first open café as I came into the town and I rested my feet. I sat in a stale corner, among the smoking Spaniards and the clutter and chatter of other pilgrims. Alone and melancholy, I had a breakfast of stale sweetbreads and café con leche, staples of the pilgrim in Spain, and fortified myself for the climb up the Montes de Oca, for these steep hills lay just to the west of town.
It is hereabouts that Aymeric Picaud tells us we enter the “land of the Spaniards, that is to say, Castilla and Campos.”[ii] This country is “full of treasures, of gold and silver; it abounds in fodder and in vigorous horses, and it has plenty of bread, wine, meat, fish, milk, and honey. On the other hand, it is poor in wood and full of evil and vicious people.”[iii] The only thing I worried about did not seem to concern Picaud, and that was the hills that lay before me.
I I I
Franca-villa
Over the río Oca
Into Villa-
franca de Montes de Oca
M
Eremita de la Virgen de Oca
k
Iglesia de Santiago
On the Way: Villafranca de Montes de Oca
Villafranca de Montes de Oca is located on the northwest slopes of the Montes de Oca. Like many of these towns, it also marked for a time the original boundary between Castille and Navarre, as the Castillian armies progressed from river to river inexorably, it seems, eastwards to Logroño and beyond almost to Viana. The town has ancient origins, Visigothic at least, but perhaps earlier. The town claims to be the seat of a bishop almost from the times apostolic. Its first bishop was St. Indaletius, said to be, along with Sts. Torquetus, Ctesiphon, Secundus, Caccilius, Hesychius, and Euphrasius, the first bishops in Spain. St. Indaletius is said to have been a disciple and direct ordinand of St. James the Greater. He was bishop here and at Almería.
Like his teacher, St. Indaletius suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel, and spilt his blood here on the ground, which brought forth a spring from the ground, marked—so the popular story goes—by the red stones. His memory may be recalled at the Ermita de la Virgen de Oca, found at the bottom of the gorge of La Hoz. In 1075, the see of Auca (Oca) was transferred to Burgos. Though the location of the see changed, the memories of the old bishop St. Indaletius stayed behind. His relics, however, have found their resting place at the city of Jaca, on the Camino aragonés, where they may be found in a silver urn by the main altar of the Cathedral, so the story goes, for I have not seen it.
I I I
Nemus Oque
Entonçe era Castylla un pequenno rrincon, era de castella-nos Montes d’Oca mojon.
Depart Villa-
franca
On the Way: Villafranca to San Juan de Ortega
Having finished breakfast, I left Villafranca Montes de Oca for what I hoped would be a pleasant—if long and initially steep—walk through the oak forest of the Montes de Oca. In days of yore the pilgrims did not know what evil lurked ahead in the forest before them. This thick forest of oak was haven to the brigand and the workplace of the bandit. Woe to the foolish pilgrim who journeyed here in the dark of night, for there was danger enough during the light of day.
“Nemus Oque” of Picaud
Cross the Montes de Oca through the Puerto de La Pedraja and a forest of Oaks, Pine, and Fir
(1130 m.)
Memorial for the dead
Descent to Pedroja brook
Quickly I left the land of wheat and farms into the land of sheep. Then the path became covered by oaks, whose dark barks were feathered with soft and green lichen. The soil changed to a deep red, and as I topped the hill, the oak gave way to tall pines. The air was cool, wet, and finely scented; the birds sang continuously. The scene at the top of the hill was lovely, and it gave a great excuse to rest my sore feet.
I sat on a wall surrounding a memorial for the fallen of the Guerra Civil, the sanguinary civil war of 1936-1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. I talked briefly to a Spanish pilgrim, who was munching on an apple, when another two pilgrims came by. I recognized them at once as Americans and I hailed them. I learned that they were called David and Alysa. He was a gifted trumpet player, and she was a singer and Fulbright Scholar studying the medieval Arabic music of Spain. They wore sandals, and they told me that they had run into a “Mountain Man,” who told them that they were fools to wear boots, and that they ought to wear their sandals. I was to learn that the Mountain Man’s advice to them to become semi-discalced pilgrims was good, for you shall see that I also took his advice from Sahagún onwards.
As I walked down from the monument, I recalled that somewhere along this path one of the miracles of St. James as related in the Codex Calixtinus occured. Through the intercession of St. James, the wife of a French man conceived a son. They named him James, and when he neared fifteen they traveled to Compostela on pilgrimage. Here, before the forests of Oca, the boy grew sick and died. The mother was despondent to the point of suicide, when St. James answered her prayer. The son, restored to life, finished the pilgrimage with his parents, and, we may assume lived a good life to the glory of his patron saint.
I I I
Matris natum jam defunct-um ad vita restituit
Si quieres robar, véte a los Montes de Oca
The lost Laffi ate
Wild Mush-
Rooms here
Through Valde-fuentes to San Juan de Ortega via the San Juan de Ortega route
Oh how long was the walk to San Juan, and what pleasure was it to get there! The small town of San Juan de Ortega is set in a small clearing in the forest in a valley. Adapting the words of the poet Berceo, I thought:
Yo, Peregrino Andres nomnado,
Iendo en romeria, caeci en un prado
Verde e bien sencido, de flores bien poblado,
Logar cobdiciaduero pora ome cansado.
I, Pilgrim Andrew by name,
Going on pilgrimage, happened upon a meadow,
Green and simple, and well fraught with flowers;
A pleasant place for a tired man.
The town of San Juan is essentially composed of a church, a hostel, and some homes. This town was both founded and funded by Juan de Quintaortuño pio amore Dei et apostoli Jacobi, who spent his family fortune developing the place. Quintaortuño refers to the birth place of the saint, a town by the village of Vivar-del-Cid, which is situated north of Burgos. This Juan is not generally known by that unwieldy name, but known as San Juan de Ortega or St. John of the Nettles.
Die ac nocte jacobi-petas interfi-cientes et multos expo-liantes
In 1477 Queen Isabel came on pilgrimage here and prayed before his shrine, St. John of the Nettles patron of barren women seeking a child. This curious patronage stems from the fact that Juan was an only child, whose conception was sought by his mother’s 20 years of insistent and importunate prayer, something at which mothers seem to be good. Queen Isabel’s prayers, like those of San Juan’s mother, were answered, not once but thrice, San Juan seeing to it that she bore three children. But Isabel should have prayed for more, or she should have prayed also to others—perhaps also Sts. Genevieve, Dymphna, and Gengulph—for three children she received, but each of them unhappy. Don Juan, died young of fever shortly after his marriage, Juana la Loca, suffered from deep melancholia and mental imbalance, and the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon, was the unfortunate spouse of Henry VIII, the king and cad of England, who spent her last years cloistered in tower prisons.
St. John was a disciple of St. Dominic of the Causeway, and he learned his trade well from his master, palpably well, for he designed the town and—most impressively—the church and monastery. The town was founded by him in charity for the benefit of the pilgrims. It was founded here to help curb the assaults on the pilgrims by the bandits of the highway. Here the seed of the Gospel took root in a man’s heart and caused a town of sanctuary to be built among a den of thieves.
k
San Nicolás
Georgiana Goddard King presents a delightful, romantic portrait of the simple saint who lived here, worked here, and whose bones lie here.
He spent his best days working in the sun and directing other workmen, but he ended them here, in a grassy dell, on a stone bench under whispering trees. He would get up when a pilgrim came around the turn, meet him, and ask the news as they reached a quiet room, swept and scrubbed, deep-windowed and strong of door, cool in midsummer, warmed in snow-time; and from the hearth where the white ash always winked and lisped, fetch warm water and if needful wash a man’s feet; he would dish up a stew, tasting of meat, and savory, out of the little blackened pot that simmered there, and fill a horn cup from the bloated wine-skin in the shed, and lastly show a bed, warm, well-shaken up, and clean. He slept usually on the floor himself. He would had given orders so long would hand out a little joke with the piece of bread for breakfast; he would answer questions and remember news and report the state of the roads and the run of the weather to outgoing travellers. He whose advice kings had requested would serve the meanest, and tend the foulest, and wait upon the lustiest,—a tiny trotting old man, white headed and white handed with age, with tanned and shrivelled face. In 1080 he was born; he died in 1163.[iv]
I I I
I dropped off my machila, or pack, by the refugio entrance, and went into the Church of St. Nicholas. I admired the ornate 15th century Isabelline gothic cenotaph, under a baldachino of carved stone and intricate nettle-like tracery in the gothic arches all about it. The base of this monument is carved with scenes, mainly miraculous, of St. John’s life. I looked and saw there bas reliefs of the healing of a man run over by a cart when he fell asleep at the roadside. I saw another of the return of robbers who stole the saint’s cows and wandered all night in fog to find themselves back at the convent door in the morning. Yet another I saw tells the story of how the saint’s own eye (wounded with a needle) was healed when visited by his bishop. The shrine bore the inscription Spes lumen splendor, which translated means “Hope the light of splendor.”
I found the way to the crypt, but the stairwell that led to it was dark. There was no light switch. Providentially, I had kept a flashlight in my pocket from that morning when I needed it in the early morning hours, and I used it to descend into the crypt. There, in the middle of the crypt was the sarcophagus of stone. It was rudimentarily carved. The faithful had left offerings of flowers, and spent candles sat upon it. The flowers were dry, and the candles cold. The crypt was dark and damp, and smelled of moist earth and wet stone. I switched off my flashlight, and in the cool, dark mystery of the pitch-black crypt, I sat before the relics of St. John, and venerated the remains of this simple saint who did so much for pilgrims. I solicited his help for my feet. I figured St. John would be partial to this problem. I do not know how long I remained there, alone and in the quiet, when I heard:
Iohannes: Peregrine, veni foras! Come out!
Peregrinus: Must I then leave?
Iohannes: Rise and unbind your feet!
Peregrinus: I do not understand.
But in response there was only silence. I walked up the stairs to the light, I felt like Lazarus risen from the dead, and over the several days I finally learned what it was St. John had intended to tell me. I had been told to rid myself of my boots, which I finally did at Sahagún.
I I I
urtica inter spinas
Spes lumen splendor
I met Richard and Randi, both of whom were resting by the refugio. All three of us were hungry. I had a bocadillo of ham and cheese, some coffee, and some zumo de piña at the café in San Juan. I rested a bit and Richard, Randi and I discussed whether we should stay or continue. In light of the cool weather, we decided it head to Atapuerca.
The three kilometers or so from San Juan to the town of Agés was done on a pleasant road, which followed a shallow descent through woods of pine and oak. Past an abandoned railway construction project, the road opened up into open meadows as it passed the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Rebollo, where King García Sanchez of Navarre who died in war nearby is buried. Eventually, the road reached Agés. From the town of Agés we crossed a single-arched medieval bridge built by San Juan de Ortega over a tributary of the río Vena. The landscape began to change noticeably as we approached the Sierra de Atapuerca. In the late afternoon, as we walked through Agés, rain clouds began to threaten and the wind began to blow.
Through Agés and into Ata-puerca.
From Agés, we walked on the carretera to the town of Atapuerca. Here nearby, in 1054, brothers met in war. Fernando I Sánchez of Castile, was heir of Castile by last will and testament of his father, King Sancho el Mayor. Fernando’s elder brother, García III Sanchéz of Navarre, was heir though bequest by the same will of the same father of the kingdom of Navarre and some lands west of it. Both brothers unhappy with their lot, joined arms in Atapuerca to decide their fortune through fickle war. Fernando I of Castile emerged the clear victor; Don García of Navarre lost the battle, his kingdom, his land, and his life. Both the tragedy of Don García Sánchez and the victory of Don Fernando Sánchez are marked with a simple stone marker, called appropriately and ambiguously the fin del Rey, or “King’s end.” There it stood, right before the entry into the town.
Now you and I may not have known about Atapuerca, but any paleoanthropologist worth his salt does. In 1994, ancient fossils of early (Lower Pleistocene) hominids, called the Gran Dolina fossils, were discovered in the Sierra de Atapuerca. The paleoanthropologists here estimate the fossils are earlier than 780,000 years of age, and suggest these fossils are those of a new species, a pre-neanderthalic Homo antecessor, common antecessor to Homo heidelbergensis (which developed into Homo neanderthalensis) and to Homo sapiens.[v] I’ll let the paleoanthropologists in their ivory towers and their dirty digs figure this out. As an outsider, it seems to me, however, that some of their conclusions may be more tenuous than those that relate to Santiago’s predicatio and translatio.
I I I
Altaporca
About the Way: On Relics & Bones
The town of Atapuerca is proud of its Gran Dolina fossils. Going past Atapuerca we passed a small white building which promoted the paleontological finds at Atapuerca. I thought why it was that man has a love affair with bones. In the age of pilgrimage, man sought bones for miracles. The bones had life. He called them relics. In the age of science, man seeks bones for knowledge. The bones are dead. He calls them fossils. Both ages have suffered from frauds and their abuse, and the Protestant and modern scoffers have made the most of the frauds of the earlier age for their cause. But Cardinal Newman pointed out quite sensibly (referring to a Latin maxim) that the abuse of a thing does not supersede its use.
Relics have received bad press since the Reformation. For those of us who have inherited such notions, we must try to shuck off some of that prejudice to enjoy the Way of St. James. For part of the wonders of the Way include the bones of Saints, especially the bones of St. James, and we will miss much of the message if we exclude the thaumaturgical in the Saints’ bones. The renegade monk Martin Luther attacked the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. He had to, just like Henry VIII had to destroy the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The Camino was too tied to the Catholic Thing. In the Smalcald Articles (1537), Luther described pilgrimages as “unecessary, uncertain, pernicious will-o-the-wisps of the devil.” He advocated that it be preached “that such pilgrimages are not necessary, but dangerous.” He pontificated specifically against Compostela.[vi] The sum total of his theological reasons: avoid Compostela because one does not know whether St. James, or a dead dog, or a dead horse, lies there. This was reformationist agitprop. We know from modern digs the grave holds the bones neither of a dog or a horse, but of a man. Luther was wrong as to two counts, and should not be trusted as to the other. I given much dispassionate thought about Luther over the years—that fat, lascivious German, that rebellious and irresponsible monk, that renegade and crude priest, and theological Napoleon—, and I have successfully synthesized my opinion of him in one word, a onomatepoeic and brashly unecumenical neologism: “phhhrrrt!”
Lector: What kind of writing is this?
Auctor: You disapprove of it?
Lector: Of course. This is vulgar and childish. In a word, Rabelaisian. The thought behind it is unecumenical and triumphalistic.
Auctor: I’ll grant you unecumenical and triumphalistic. But I’m on Catholic pilgrimage. There is no room for Luther on this Way. Why should I deign to treat as friend and enemy of St. James and his pilgrim path? As to vulgar, recall the many scatalogical words of Luther himself? As to childish, you should note the word begins with a “ph,” which suggests a Greek and highly sophisticate origin, and the Greek philosophers, especially Protagoras, who argued about beans . . . .
Lector: Ahhh. There is no reasoning with the likes of you.
Auctor: Back, then, to my theme.
Medieval man was no more subject to fraud and superstition than modern man. Being human, scientists are equally susceptible to fraud, manipulation, and gullibility akin to the most excessive religious superstition—even with bones. A case in point is the Piltdown Man. These bones of a prehistoric man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) were “discovered” in the Piltdown gravel pits in Sussex between 1908 and 1912. Immediately hailed as an anthropological breakthrough and incontrovertible evidence of the ape-origins of man, doubt crept in only decades later. Now, it is quite established that the remains of the Piltdown man were planted by Sir Arthur Keith, and the jawbone is the jawbone not of a man, but of an orangutang.[vii] And such fraud and concomitant gullibility still happens. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a bird-like fossil with a meat-eater’s tail, hailed as a missing link connecting dinosaurs to birds was displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., and published to the world in the November 1999 issue. This time the scientists were taken in by a simple Chinese farmer.[viii]
Are we to throw away all the wonders of archaeology and paleontology because of a few abuses? Should we be so eager to throw away all the wonders of relics for the same? Maybe it is worth a listen and a change of heart. The pilgrim must let the bones of the Saints work their wonder on the Way of St. James.
And hence we learn with reverence to esteem
Of these frail houses, though the grave confines;
Sophist may urge his cunning tests, and deem
That they are earth;--but they are heavenly shrines. [ix]
The yells of the materialist and Protestant notwithstanding, I cannot shake it: there is something holy in praying before the bones of a saint.
I I I
Wie er Hispaniam kommen is gen Compostel da die groß walfahrt hin is, da haben wir nu nichts gewiß vo dem . . . . Darumb laß man sy ligen und lauff nit dahin, dann man waißt nit ob sant Jakob oder ain todter hund oder ain todst roß da liegt
---Martin Luther
We stopped at Atapuerca, though the refugio appeared full. I was hungry and had no will to go onward. Neither Randi nor Richard disagreed. After dinner, I spent some time alone at the Romanesque Church atop the hill. The church itself was locked. But the view it commanded was marvelous, and I could see fields of wheat, corn, and other crops blanket the valleys with an organic quiltwork. We visited with the Brazilian pilgrims that we had met on our first day out of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. After dinner and a walk about the town, we tried to sleep at the refugio, although a very loud-snoring Spanish pilgrim ruined our and every other pilgrims’ plans to do the same.
k
[i] Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A. C. Cawley, ed., p. 201.
[ii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iv] King, I. 432-33
[v] J. M Bermúdez de Castro, J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, A. Rosas, I. Martínez, M. Mosquera, A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans, Science 1997 May 30: 276: 1392-1395.
[vi] Kaufman/Lozano, p. 54; Benesch, Kurt, Santiago de Compostela, Knecht, Frankfut am Main 1998), p. 101.
[vii] Jaki, Newman's Challenge, p. 270 (cites F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London :Oxford University Pres, 1990).
[viii] http://usnews.com/usnews/issue/000214/fossil.htm. (Mary Lord, The Piltdown Chicken, 2/14/00)
[ix] Relics of the Saints, from Newman, Verses, at 138.
And show him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bring with him a sure reckoning
Without delay or any tarrying.”
____ Anonymous, Everyman[i]
Over the río Tirón
and on to Tosantos
Through Espinosa del Camino
On the Way: Belorado to Villafranca
Richard and I walked out of Belorado sometime before five in the morning. It was cool and overcast. The air seemed thick and heavy, and breathing took effort. When we talked to the bartender the night before, he predicted rain. The cloudy sky suggested he had a good chance of being right. In the dark, we approached another river, the Retuerto. We followed it toward the village of Tosantos, a contraction of “Todos los Santos,” or All Saints. Some good people built a bridge there over the río Palomar, a subsiduary to the río Retuerto, and that bridge took us over the river and out of Tosantos. The town had a pleasant, simple church of stone white, with mortar gray, and clay tile roofs of brown. Its simple bell cote held one bell, which rings, I’m sure, every Sunday, and has for many a year. May it do so for many more. Ad multos annos. It was silent when we passed it, as it was yet dark.
We continued parallel to the río Retuerto from Tosantos to the town of Villambistía. At Villambistía there was a chapel dedicated to St. Roch, a pilgrim saint of the 14th century. St. Roch, or San Roque as he is known in Spain, was born in Montpellier in France. His parents died of the plague, and he well-nigh did as well. He survived the disease, largely because of the services of good dog, which brought him bread in the forest where he had taken quarantine. The money he inherited from his parents he gave to the poor, and he undertook a pilgrimage to far-off Rome though his legs were scarred by disease. He spent his life there taking care of those sick and dying of the plague. His life is encapsulated in his iconography, for he is shown as a pilgrim, with a dog, pointing to the wounds of the plague on his leg. The church was an old Romanesque church, with semi-circular apse, and one square tower.
Through San Felices by the ruins of the monastery of San Félix de Oca
From Villambistía we traveled to Espinosa del Camino, a town inhabited but with much of its structures in ruin. Out of Villambistía was a pleasant road between walls and rows of elm trees. Rain appeared imminent, and the dark clouds loomed over us with their depressing load, for rain is very hard on a pilgrim. Richard went at a faster pace, and shortly after Villambistía, I lost him as a companion.
Shortly after Espinosa, the Retuerto River faded away. I traveled by the ruins of St. Felix of Oca. All that is left is the remains of an old apse, part of a Mozarabic monastery church founded in the 9th century. It is said that somewhere here rest the remains of Diego Rodríguez Porcelos, founder of the town of Burgos. If so, it is a pity there is no one to tend to his grave. But the Lord knows where it is, and the Lord shall be able to find it, and indeed shall find it, on the day of the Resurrection of the Dead.
From the ruins of San Felices I walked by the río Oja to the town of Villafranca Montes de Oca, whence I ultimately crossed the river into the town. At Villafranca I stopped at the first open café as I came into the town and I rested my feet. I sat in a stale corner, among the smoking Spaniards and the clutter and chatter of other pilgrims. Alone and melancholy, I had a breakfast of stale sweetbreads and café con leche, staples of the pilgrim in Spain, and fortified myself for the climb up the Montes de Oca, for these steep hills lay just to the west of town.
It is hereabouts that Aymeric Picaud tells us we enter the “land of the Spaniards, that is to say, Castilla and Campos.”[ii] This country is “full of treasures, of gold and silver; it abounds in fodder and in vigorous horses, and it has plenty of bread, wine, meat, fish, milk, and honey. On the other hand, it is poor in wood and full of evil and vicious people.”[iii] The only thing I worried about did not seem to concern Picaud, and that was the hills that lay before me.
I I I
Franca-villa
Over the río Oca
Into Villa-
franca de Montes de Oca
M
Eremita de la Virgen de Oca
k
Iglesia de Santiago
On the Way: Villafranca de Montes de Oca
Villafranca de Montes de Oca is located on the northwest slopes of the Montes de Oca. Like many of these towns, it also marked for a time the original boundary between Castille and Navarre, as the Castillian armies progressed from river to river inexorably, it seems, eastwards to Logroño and beyond almost to Viana. The town has ancient origins, Visigothic at least, but perhaps earlier. The town claims to be the seat of a bishop almost from the times apostolic. Its first bishop was St. Indaletius, said to be, along with Sts. Torquetus, Ctesiphon, Secundus, Caccilius, Hesychius, and Euphrasius, the first bishops in Spain. St. Indaletius is said to have been a disciple and direct ordinand of St. James the Greater. He was bishop here and at Almería.
Like his teacher, St. Indaletius suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel, and spilt his blood here on the ground, which brought forth a spring from the ground, marked—so the popular story goes—by the red stones. His memory may be recalled at the Ermita de la Virgen de Oca, found at the bottom of the gorge of La Hoz. In 1075, the see of Auca (Oca) was transferred to Burgos. Though the location of the see changed, the memories of the old bishop St. Indaletius stayed behind. His relics, however, have found their resting place at the city of Jaca, on the Camino aragonés, where they may be found in a silver urn by the main altar of the Cathedral, so the story goes, for I have not seen it.
I I I
Nemus Oque
Entonçe era Castylla un pequenno rrincon, era de castella-nos Montes d’Oca mojon.
Depart Villa-
franca
On the Way: Villafranca to San Juan de Ortega
Having finished breakfast, I left Villafranca Montes de Oca for what I hoped would be a pleasant—if long and initially steep—walk through the oak forest of the Montes de Oca. In days of yore the pilgrims did not know what evil lurked ahead in the forest before them. This thick forest of oak was haven to the brigand and the workplace of the bandit. Woe to the foolish pilgrim who journeyed here in the dark of night, for there was danger enough during the light of day.
“Nemus Oque” of Picaud
Cross the Montes de Oca through the Puerto de La Pedraja and a forest of Oaks, Pine, and Fir
(1130 m.)
Memorial for the dead
Descent to Pedroja brook
Quickly I left the land of wheat and farms into the land of sheep. Then the path became covered by oaks, whose dark barks were feathered with soft and green lichen. The soil changed to a deep red, and as I topped the hill, the oak gave way to tall pines. The air was cool, wet, and finely scented; the birds sang continuously. The scene at the top of the hill was lovely, and it gave a great excuse to rest my sore feet.
I sat on a wall surrounding a memorial for the fallen of the Guerra Civil, the sanguinary civil war of 1936-1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. I talked briefly to a Spanish pilgrim, who was munching on an apple, when another two pilgrims came by. I recognized them at once as Americans and I hailed them. I learned that they were called David and Alysa. He was a gifted trumpet player, and she was a singer and Fulbright Scholar studying the medieval Arabic music of Spain. They wore sandals, and they told me that they had run into a “Mountain Man,” who told them that they were fools to wear boots, and that they ought to wear their sandals. I was to learn that the Mountain Man’s advice to them to become semi-discalced pilgrims was good, for you shall see that I also took his advice from Sahagún onwards.
As I walked down from the monument, I recalled that somewhere along this path one of the miracles of St. James as related in the Codex Calixtinus occured. Through the intercession of St. James, the wife of a French man conceived a son. They named him James, and when he neared fifteen they traveled to Compostela on pilgrimage. Here, before the forests of Oca, the boy grew sick and died. The mother was despondent to the point of suicide, when St. James answered her prayer. The son, restored to life, finished the pilgrimage with his parents, and, we may assume lived a good life to the glory of his patron saint.
I I I
Matris natum jam defunct-um ad vita restituit
Si quieres robar, véte a los Montes de Oca
The lost Laffi ate
Wild Mush-
Rooms here
Through Valde-fuentes to San Juan de Ortega via the San Juan de Ortega route
Oh how long was the walk to San Juan, and what pleasure was it to get there! The small town of San Juan de Ortega is set in a small clearing in the forest in a valley. Adapting the words of the poet Berceo, I thought:
Yo, Peregrino Andres nomnado,
Iendo en romeria, caeci en un prado
Verde e bien sencido, de flores bien poblado,
Logar cobdiciaduero pora ome cansado.
I, Pilgrim Andrew by name,
Going on pilgrimage, happened upon a meadow,
Green and simple, and well fraught with flowers;
A pleasant place for a tired man.
The town of San Juan is essentially composed of a church, a hostel, and some homes. This town was both founded and funded by Juan de Quintaortuño pio amore Dei et apostoli Jacobi, who spent his family fortune developing the place. Quintaortuño refers to the birth place of the saint, a town by the village of Vivar-del-Cid, which is situated north of Burgos. This Juan is not generally known by that unwieldy name, but known as San Juan de Ortega or St. John of the Nettles.
Die ac nocte jacobi-petas interfi-cientes et multos expo-liantes
In 1477 Queen Isabel came on pilgrimage here and prayed before his shrine, St. John of the Nettles patron of barren women seeking a child. This curious patronage stems from the fact that Juan was an only child, whose conception was sought by his mother’s 20 years of insistent and importunate prayer, something at which mothers seem to be good. Queen Isabel’s prayers, like those of San Juan’s mother, were answered, not once but thrice, San Juan seeing to it that she bore three children. But Isabel should have prayed for more, or she should have prayed also to others—perhaps also Sts. Genevieve, Dymphna, and Gengulph—for three children she received, but each of them unhappy. Don Juan, died young of fever shortly after his marriage, Juana la Loca, suffered from deep melancholia and mental imbalance, and the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon, was the unfortunate spouse of Henry VIII, the king and cad of England, who spent her last years cloistered in tower prisons.
St. John was a disciple of St. Dominic of the Causeway, and he learned his trade well from his master, palpably well, for he designed the town and—most impressively—the church and monastery. The town was founded by him in charity for the benefit of the pilgrims. It was founded here to help curb the assaults on the pilgrims by the bandits of the highway. Here the seed of the Gospel took root in a man’s heart and caused a town of sanctuary to be built among a den of thieves.
k
San Nicolás
Georgiana Goddard King presents a delightful, romantic portrait of the simple saint who lived here, worked here, and whose bones lie here.
He spent his best days working in the sun and directing other workmen, but he ended them here, in a grassy dell, on a stone bench under whispering trees. He would get up when a pilgrim came around the turn, meet him, and ask the news as they reached a quiet room, swept and scrubbed, deep-windowed and strong of door, cool in midsummer, warmed in snow-time; and from the hearth where the white ash always winked and lisped, fetch warm water and if needful wash a man’s feet; he would dish up a stew, tasting of meat, and savory, out of the little blackened pot that simmered there, and fill a horn cup from the bloated wine-skin in the shed, and lastly show a bed, warm, well-shaken up, and clean. He slept usually on the floor himself. He would had given orders so long would hand out a little joke with the piece of bread for breakfast; he would answer questions and remember news and report the state of the roads and the run of the weather to outgoing travellers. He whose advice kings had requested would serve the meanest, and tend the foulest, and wait upon the lustiest,—a tiny trotting old man, white headed and white handed with age, with tanned and shrivelled face. In 1080 he was born; he died in 1163.[iv]
I I I
I dropped off my machila, or pack, by the refugio entrance, and went into the Church of St. Nicholas. I admired the ornate 15th century Isabelline gothic cenotaph, under a baldachino of carved stone and intricate nettle-like tracery in the gothic arches all about it. The base of this monument is carved with scenes, mainly miraculous, of St. John’s life. I looked and saw there bas reliefs of the healing of a man run over by a cart when he fell asleep at the roadside. I saw another of the return of robbers who stole the saint’s cows and wandered all night in fog to find themselves back at the convent door in the morning. Yet another I saw tells the story of how the saint’s own eye (wounded with a needle) was healed when visited by his bishop. The shrine bore the inscription Spes lumen splendor, which translated means “Hope the light of splendor.”
I found the way to the crypt, but the stairwell that led to it was dark. There was no light switch. Providentially, I had kept a flashlight in my pocket from that morning when I needed it in the early morning hours, and I used it to descend into the crypt. There, in the middle of the crypt was the sarcophagus of stone. It was rudimentarily carved. The faithful had left offerings of flowers, and spent candles sat upon it. The flowers were dry, and the candles cold. The crypt was dark and damp, and smelled of moist earth and wet stone. I switched off my flashlight, and in the cool, dark mystery of the pitch-black crypt, I sat before the relics of St. John, and venerated the remains of this simple saint who did so much for pilgrims. I solicited his help for my feet. I figured St. John would be partial to this problem. I do not know how long I remained there, alone and in the quiet, when I heard:
Iohannes: Peregrine, veni foras! Come out!
Peregrinus: Must I then leave?
Iohannes: Rise and unbind your feet!
Peregrinus: I do not understand.
But in response there was only silence. I walked up the stairs to the light, I felt like Lazarus risen from the dead, and over the several days I finally learned what it was St. John had intended to tell me. I had been told to rid myself of my boots, which I finally did at Sahagún.
I I I
urtica inter spinas
Spes lumen splendor
I met Richard and Randi, both of whom were resting by the refugio. All three of us were hungry. I had a bocadillo of ham and cheese, some coffee, and some zumo de piña at the café in San Juan. I rested a bit and Richard, Randi and I discussed whether we should stay or continue. In light of the cool weather, we decided it head to Atapuerca.
The three kilometers or so from San Juan to the town of Agés was done on a pleasant road, which followed a shallow descent through woods of pine and oak. Past an abandoned railway construction project, the road opened up into open meadows as it passed the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Rebollo, where King García Sanchez of Navarre who died in war nearby is buried. Eventually, the road reached Agés. From the town of Agés we crossed a single-arched medieval bridge built by San Juan de Ortega over a tributary of the río Vena. The landscape began to change noticeably as we approached the Sierra de Atapuerca. In the late afternoon, as we walked through Agés, rain clouds began to threaten and the wind began to blow.
Through Agés and into Ata-puerca.
From Agés, we walked on the carretera to the town of Atapuerca. Here nearby, in 1054, brothers met in war. Fernando I Sánchez of Castile, was heir of Castile by last will and testament of his father, King Sancho el Mayor. Fernando’s elder brother, García III Sanchéz of Navarre, was heir though bequest by the same will of the same father of the kingdom of Navarre and some lands west of it. Both brothers unhappy with their lot, joined arms in Atapuerca to decide their fortune through fickle war. Fernando I of Castile emerged the clear victor; Don García of Navarre lost the battle, his kingdom, his land, and his life. Both the tragedy of Don García Sánchez and the victory of Don Fernando Sánchez are marked with a simple stone marker, called appropriately and ambiguously the fin del Rey, or “King’s end.” There it stood, right before the entry into the town.
Now you and I may not have known about Atapuerca, but any paleoanthropologist worth his salt does. In 1994, ancient fossils of early (Lower Pleistocene) hominids, called the Gran Dolina fossils, were discovered in the Sierra de Atapuerca. The paleoanthropologists here estimate the fossils are earlier than 780,000 years of age, and suggest these fossils are those of a new species, a pre-neanderthalic Homo antecessor, common antecessor to Homo heidelbergensis (which developed into Homo neanderthalensis) and to Homo sapiens.[v] I’ll let the paleoanthropologists in their ivory towers and their dirty digs figure this out. As an outsider, it seems to me, however, that some of their conclusions may be more tenuous than those that relate to Santiago’s predicatio and translatio.
I I I
Altaporca
About the Way: On Relics & Bones
The town of Atapuerca is proud of its Gran Dolina fossils. Going past Atapuerca we passed a small white building which promoted the paleontological finds at Atapuerca. I thought why it was that man has a love affair with bones. In the age of pilgrimage, man sought bones for miracles. The bones had life. He called them relics. In the age of science, man seeks bones for knowledge. The bones are dead. He calls them fossils. Both ages have suffered from frauds and their abuse, and the Protestant and modern scoffers have made the most of the frauds of the earlier age for their cause. But Cardinal Newman pointed out quite sensibly (referring to a Latin maxim) that the abuse of a thing does not supersede its use.
Relics have received bad press since the Reformation. For those of us who have inherited such notions, we must try to shuck off some of that prejudice to enjoy the Way of St. James. For part of the wonders of the Way include the bones of Saints, especially the bones of St. James, and we will miss much of the message if we exclude the thaumaturgical in the Saints’ bones. The renegade monk Martin Luther attacked the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. He had to, just like Henry VIII had to destroy the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The Camino was too tied to the Catholic Thing. In the Smalcald Articles (1537), Luther described pilgrimages as “unecessary, uncertain, pernicious will-o-the-wisps of the devil.” He advocated that it be preached “that such pilgrimages are not necessary, but dangerous.” He pontificated specifically against Compostela.[vi] The sum total of his theological reasons: avoid Compostela because one does not know whether St. James, or a dead dog, or a dead horse, lies there. This was reformationist agitprop. We know from modern digs the grave holds the bones neither of a dog or a horse, but of a man. Luther was wrong as to two counts, and should not be trusted as to the other. I given much dispassionate thought about Luther over the years—that fat, lascivious German, that rebellious and irresponsible monk, that renegade and crude priest, and theological Napoleon—, and I have successfully synthesized my opinion of him in one word, a onomatepoeic and brashly unecumenical neologism: “phhhrrrt!”
Lector: What kind of writing is this?
Auctor: You disapprove of it?
Lector: Of course. This is vulgar and childish. In a word, Rabelaisian. The thought behind it is unecumenical and triumphalistic.
Auctor: I’ll grant you unecumenical and triumphalistic. But I’m on Catholic pilgrimage. There is no room for Luther on this Way. Why should I deign to treat as friend and enemy of St. James and his pilgrim path? As to vulgar, recall the many scatalogical words of Luther himself? As to childish, you should note the word begins with a “ph,” which suggests a Greek and highly sophisticate origin, and the Greek philosophers, especially Protagoras, who argued about beans . . . .
Lector: Ahhh. There is no reasoning with the likes of you.
Auctor: Back, then, to my theme.
Medieval man was no more subject to fraud and superstition than modern man. Being human, scientists are equally susceptible to fraud, manipulation, and gullibility akin to the most excessive religious superstition—even with bones. A case in point is the Piltdown Man. These bones of a prehistoric man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) were “discovered” in the Piltdown gravel pits in Sussex between 1908 and 1912. Immediately hailed as an anthropological breakthrough and incontrovertible evidence of the ape-origins of man, doubt crept in only decades later. Now, it is quite established that the remains of the Piltdown man were planted by Sir Arthur Keith, and the jawbone is the jawbone not of a man, but of an orangutang.[vii] And such fraud and concomitant gullibility still happens. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a bird-like fossil with a meat-eater’s tail, hailed as a missing link connecting dinosaurs to birds was displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., and published to the world in the November 1999 issue. This time the scientists were taken in by a simple Chinese farmer.[viii]
Are we to throw away all the wonders of archaeology and paleontology because of a few abuses? Should we be so eager to throw away all the wonders of relics for the same? Maybe it is worth a listen and a change of heart. The pilgrim must let the bones of the Saints work their wonder on the Way of St. James.
And hence we learn with reverence to esteem
Of these frail houses, though the grave confines;
Sophist may urge his cunning tests, and deem
That they are earth;--but they are heavenly shrines. [ix]
The yells of the materialist and Protestant notwithstanding, I cannot shake it: there is something holy in praying before the bones of a saint.
I I I
Wie er Hispaniam kommen is gen Compostel da die groß walfahrt hin is, da haben wir nu nichts gewiß vo dem . . . . Darumb laß man sy ligen und lauff nit dahin, dann man waißt nit ob sant Jakob oder ain todter hund oder ain todst roß da liegt
---Martin Luther
We stopped at Atapuerca, though the refugio appeared full. I was hungry and had no will to go onward. Neither Randi nor Richard disagreed. After dinner, I spent some time alone at the Romanesque Church atop the hill. The church itself was locked. But the view it commanded was marvelous, and I could see fields of wheat, corn, and other crops blanket the valleys with an organic quiltwork. We visited with the Brazilian pilgrims that we had met on our first day out of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. After dinner and a walk about the town, we tried to sleep at the refugio, although a very loud-snoring Spanish pilgrim ruined our and every other pilgrims’ plans to do the same.
k
[i] Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A. C. Cawley, ed., p. 201.
[ii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iv] King, I. 432-33
[v] J. M Bermúdez de Castro, J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, A. Rosas, I. Martínez, M. Mosquera, A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans, Science 1997 May 30: 276: 1392-1395.
[vi] Kaufman/Lozano, p. 54; Benesch, Kurt, Santiago de Compostela, Knecht, Frankfut am Main 1998), p. 101.
[vii] Jaki, Newman's Challenge, p. 270 (cites F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London :Oxford University Pres, 1990).
[viii] http://usnews.com/usnews/issue/000214/fossil.htm. (Mary Lord, The Piltdown Chicken, 2/14/00)
[ix] Relics of the Saints, from Newman, Verses, at 138. “Go thou to Everyman,
And show him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bring with him a sure reckoning
Without delay or any tarrying.”
____ Anonymous, Everyman[i]
Over the río Tirón
and on to Tosantos
Through Espinosa del Camino
On the Way: Belorado to Villafranca
Richard and I walked out of Belorado sometime before five in the morning. It was cool and overcast. The air seemed thick and heavy, and breathing took effort. When we talked to the bartender the night before, he predicted rain. The cloudy sky suggested he had a good chance of being right. In the dark, we approached another river, the Retuerto. We followed it toward the village of Tosantos, a contraction of “Todos los Santos,” or All Saints. Some good people built a bridge there over the río Palomar, a subsiduary to the río Retuerto, and that bridge took us over the river and out of Tosantos. The town had a pleasant, simple church of stone white, with mortar gray, and clay tile roofs of brown. Its simple bell cote held one bell, which rings, I’m sure, every Sunday, and has for many a year. May it do so for many more. Ad multos annos. It was silent when we passed it, as it was yet dark.
We continued parallel to the río Retuerto from Tosantos to the town of Villambistía. At Villambistía there was a chapel dedicated to St. Roch, a pilgrim saint of the 14th century. St. Roch, or San Roque as he is known in Spain, was born in Montpellier in France. His parents died of the plague, and he well-nigh did as well. He survived the disease, largely because of the services of good dog, which brought him bread in the forest where he had taken quarantine. The money he inherited from his parents he gave to the poor, and he undertook a pilgrimage to far-off Rome though his legs were scarred by disease. He spent his life there taking care of those sick and dying of the plague. His life is encapsulated in his iconography, for he is shown as a pilgrim, with a dog, pointing to the wounds of the plague on his leg. The church was an old Romanesque church, with semi-circular apse, and one square tower.
Through San Felices by the ruins of the monastery of San Félix de Oca
From Villambistía we traveled to Espinosa del Camino, a town inhabited but with much of its structures in ruin. Out of Villambistía was a pleasant road between walls and rows of elm trees. Rain appeared imminent, and the dark clouds loomed over us with their depressing load, for rain is very hard on a pilgrim. Richard went at a faster pace, and shortly after Villambistía, I lost him as a companion.
Shortly after Espinosa, the Retuerto River faded away. I traveled by the ruins of St. Felix of Oca. All that is left is the remains of an old apse, part of a Mozarabic monastery church founded in the 9th century. It is said that somewhere here rest the remains of Diego Rodríguez Porcelos, founder of the town of Burgos. If so, it is a pity there is no one to tend to his grave. But the Lord knows where it is, and the Lord shall be able to find it, and indeed shall find it, on the day of the Resurrection of the Dead.
From the ruins of San Felices I walked by the río Oja to the town of Villafranca Montes de Oca, whence I ultimately crossed the river into the town. At Villafranca I stopped at the first open café as I came into the town and I rested my feet. I sat in a stale corner, among the smoking Spaniards and the clutter and chatter of other pilgrims. Alone and melancholy, I had a breakfast of stale sweetbreads and café con leche, staples of the pilgrim in Spain, and fortified myself for the climb up the Montes de Oca, for these steep hills lay just to the west of town.
It is hereabouts that Aymeric Picaud tells us we enter the “land of the Spaniards, that is to say, Castilla and Campos.”[ii] This country is “full of treasures, of gold and silver; it abounds in fodder and in vigorous horses, and it has plenty of bread, wine, meat, fish, milk, and honey. On the other hand, it is poor in wood and full of evil and vicious people.”[iii] The only thing I worried about did not seem to concern Picaud, and that was the hills that lay before me.
I I I
Franca-villa
Over the río Oca
Into Villa-
franca de Montes de Oca
M
Eremita de la Virgen de Oca
k
Iglesia de Santiago
On the Way: Villafranca de Montes de Oca
Villafranca de Montes de Oca is located on the northwest slopes of the Montes de Oca. Like many of these towns, it also marked for a time the original boundary between Castille and Navarre, as the Castillian armies progressed from river to river inexorably, it seems, eastwards to Logroño and beyond almost to Viana. The town has ancient origins, Visigothic at least, but perhaps earlier. The town claims to be the seat of a bishop almost from the times apostolic. Its first bishop was St. Indaletius, said to be, along with Sts. Torquetus, Ctesiphon, Secundus, Caccilius, Hesychius, and Euphrasius, the first bishops in Spain. St. Indaletius is said to have been a disciple and direct ordinand of St. James the Greater. He was bishop here and at Almería.
Like his teacher, St. Indaletius suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel, and spilt his blood here on the ground, which brought forth a spring from the ground, marked—so the popular story goes—by the red stones. His memory may be recalled at the Ermita de la Virgen de Oca, found at the bottom of the gorge of La Hoz. In 1075, the see of Auca (Oca) was transferred to Burgos. Though the location of the see changed, the memories of the old bishop St. Indaletius stayed behind. His relics, however, have found their resting place at the city of Jaca, on the Camino aragonés, where they may be found in a silver urn by the main altar of the Cathedral, so the story goes, for I have not seen it.
I I I
Nemus Oque
Entonçe era Castylla un pequenno rrincon, era de castella-nos Montes d’Oca mojon.
Depart Villa-
franca
On the Way: Villafranca to San Juan de Ortega
Having finished breakfast, I left Villafranca Montes de Oca for what I hoped would be a pleasant—if long and initially steep—walk through the oak forest of the Montes de Oca. In days of yore the pilgrims did not know what evil lurked ahead in the forest before them. This thick forest of oak was haven to the brigand and the workplace of the bandit. Woe to the foolish pilgrim who journeyed here in the dark of night, for there was danger enough during the light of day.
“Nemus Oque” of Picaud
Cross the Montes de Oca through the Puerto de La Pedraja and a forest of Oaks, Pine, and Fir
(1130 m.)
Memorial for the dead
Descent to Pedroja brook
Quickly I left the land of wheat and farms into the land of sheep. Then the path became covered by oaks, whose dark barks were feathered with soft and green lichen. The soil changed to a deep red, and as I topped the hill, the oak gave way to tall pines. The air was cool, wet, and finely scented; the birds sang continuously. The scene at the top of the hill was lovely, and it gave a great excuse to rest my sore feet.
I sat on a wall surrounding a memorial for the fallen of the Guerra Civil, the sanguinary civil war of 1936-1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. I talked briefly to a Spanish pilgrim, who was munching on an apple, when another two pilgrims came by. I recognized them at once as Americans and I hailed them. I learned that they were called David and Alysa. He was a gifted trumpet player, and she was a singer and Fulbright Scholar studying the medieval Arabic music of Spain. They wore sandals, and they told me that they had run into a “Mountain Man,” who told them that they were fools to wear boots, and that they ought to wear their sandals. I was to learn that the Mountain Man’s advice to them to become semi-discalced pilgrims was good, for you shall see that I also took his advice from Sahagún onwards.
As I walked down from the monument, I recalled that somewhere along this path one of the miracles of St. James as related in the Codex Calixtinus occured. Through the intercession of St. James, the wife of a French man conceived a son. They named him James, and when he neared fifteen they traveled to Compostela on pilgrimage. Here, before the forests of Oca, the boy grew sick and died. The mother was despondent to the point of suicide, when St. James answered her prayer. The son, restored to life, finished the pilgrimage with his parents, and, we may assume lived a good life to the glory of his patron saint.
I I I
Matris natum jam defunct-um ad vita restituit
Si quieres robar, véte a los Montes de Oca
The lost Laffi ate
Wild Mush-
Rooms here
Through Valde-fuentes to San Juan de Ortega via the San Juan de Ortega route
Oh how long was the walk to San Juan, and what pleasure was it to get there! The small town of San Juan de Ortega is set in a small clearing in the forest in a valley. Adapting the words of the poet Berceo, I thought:
Yo, Peregrino Andres nomnado,
Iendo en romeria, caeci en un prado
Verde e bien sencido, de flores bien poblado,
Logar cobdiciaduero pora ome cansado.
I, Pilgrim Andrew by name,
Going on pilgrimage, happened upon a meadow,
Green and simple, and well fraught with flowers;
A pleasant place for a tired man.
The town of San Juan is essentially composed of a church, a hostel, and some homes. This town was both founded and funded by Juan de Quintaortuño pio amore Dei et apostoli Jacobi, who spent his family fortune developing the place. Quintaortuño refers to the birth place of the saint, a town by the village of Vivar-del-Cid, which is situated north of Burgos. This Juan is not generally known by that unwieldy name, but known as San Juan de Ortega or St. John of the Nettles.
Die ac nocte jacobi-petas interfi-cientes et multos expo-liantes
In 1477 Queen Isabel came on pilgrimage here and prayed before his shrine, St. John of the Nettles patron of barren women seeking a child. This curious patronage stems from the fact that Juan was an only child, whose conception was sought by his mother’s 20 years of insistent and importunate prayer, something at which mothers seem to be good. Queen Isabel’s prayers, like those of San Juan’s mother, were answered, not once but thrice, San Juan seeing to it that she bore three children. But Isabel should have prayed for more, or she should have prayed also to others—perhaps also Sts. Genevieve, Dymphna, and Gengulph—for three children she received, but each of them unhappy. Don Juan, died young of fever shortly after his marriage, Juana la Loca, suffered from deep melancholia and mental imbalance, and the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon, was the unfortunate spouse of Henry VIII, the king and cad of England, who spent her last years cloistered in tower prisons.
St. John was a disciple of St. Dominic of the Causeway, and he learned his trade well from his master, palpably well, for he designed the town and—most impressively—the church and monastery. The town was founded by him in charity for the benefit of the pilgrims. It was founded here to help curb the assaults on the pilgrims by the bandits of the highway. Here the seed of the Gospel took root in a man’s heart and caused a town of sanctuary to be built among a den of thieves.
k
San Nicolás
Georgiana Goddard King presents a delightful, romantic portrait of the simple saint who lived here, worked here, and whose bones lie here.
He spent his best days working in the sun and directing other workmen, but he ended them here, in a grassy dell, on a stone bench under whispering trees. He would get up when a pilgrim came around the turn, meet him, and ask the news as they reached a quiet room, swept and scrubbed, deep-windowed and strong of door, cool in midsummer, warmed in snow-time; and from the hearth where the white ash always winked and lisped, fetch warm water and if needful wash a man’s feet; he would dish up a stew, tasting of meat, and savory, out of the little blackened pot that simmered there, and fill a horn cup from the bloated wine-skin in the shed, and lastly show a bed, warm, well-shaken up, and clean. He slept usually on the floor himself. He would had given orders so long would hand out a little joke with the piece of bread for breakfast; he would answer questions and remember news and report the state of the roads and the run of the weather to outgoing travellers. He whose advice kings had requested would serve the meanest, and tend the foulest, and wait upon the lustiest,—a tiny trotting old man, white headed and white handed with age, with tanned and shrivelled face. In 1080 he was born; he died in 1163.[iv]
I I I
I dropped off my machila, or pack, by the refugio entrance, and went into the Church of St. Nicholas. I admired the ornate 15th century Isabelline gothic cenotaph, under a baldachino of carved stone and intricate nettle-like tracery in the gothic arches all about it. The base of this monument is carved with scenes, mainly miraculous, of St. John’s life. I looked and saw there bas reliefs of the healing of a man run over by a cart when he fell asleep at the roadside. I saw another of the return of robbers who stole the saint’s cows and wandered all night in fog to find themselves back at the convent door in the morning. Yet another I saw tells the story of how the saint’s own eye (wounded with a needle) was healed when visited by his bishop. The shrine bore the inscription Spes lumen splendor, which translated means “Hope the light of splendor.”
I found the way to the crypt, but the stairwell that led to it was dark. There was no light switch. Providentially, I had kept a flashlight in my pocket from that morning when I needed it in the early morning hours, and I used it to descend into the crypt. There, in the middle of the crypt was the sarcophagus of stone. It was rudimentarily carved. The faithful had left offerings of flowers, and spent candles sat upon it. The flowers were dry, and the candles cold. The crypt was dark and damp, and smelled of moist earth and wet stone. I switched off my flashlight, and in the cool, dark mystery of the pitch-black crypt, I sat before the relics of St. John, and venerated the remains of this simple saint who did so much for pilgrims. I solicited his help for my feet. I figured St. John would be partial to this problem. I do not know how long I remained there, alone and in the quiet, when I heard:
Iohannes: Peregrine, veni foras! Come out!
Peregrinus: Must I then leave?
Iohannes: Rise and unbind your feet!
Peregrinus: I do not understand.
But in response there was only silence. I walked up the stairs to the light, I felt like Lazarus risen from the dead, and over the several days I finally learned what it was St. John had intended to tell me. I had been told to rid myself of my boots, which I finally did at Sahagún.
I I I
urtica inter spinas
Spes lumen splendor
I met Richard and Randi, both of whom were resting by the refugio. All three of us were hungry. I had a bocadillo of ham and cheese, some coffee, and some zumo de piña at the café in San Juan. I rested a bit and Richard, Randi and I discussed whether we should stay or continue. In light of the cool weather, we decided it head to Atapuerca.
The three kilometers or so from San Juan to the town of Agés was done on a pleasant road, which followed a shallow descent through woods of pine and oak. Past an abandoned railway construction project, the road opened up into open meadows as it passed the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Rebollo, where King García Sanchez of Navarre who died in war nearby is buried. Eventually, the road reached Agés. From the town of Agés we crossed a single-arched medieval bridge built by San Juan de Ortega over a tributary of the río Vena. The landscape began to change noticeably as we approached the Sierra de Atapuerca. In the late afternoon, as we walked through Agés, rain clouds began to threaten and the wind began to blow.
Through Agés and into Ata-puerca.
From Agés, we walked on the carretera to the town of Atapuerca. Here nearby, in 1054, brothers met in war. Fernando I Sánchez of Castile, was heir of Castile by last will and testament of his father, King Sancho el Mayor. Fernando’s elder brother, García III Sanchéz of Navarre, was heir though bequest by the same will of the same father of the kingdom of Navarre and some lands west of it. Both brothers unhappy with their lot, joined arms in Atapuerca to decide their fortune through fickle war. Fernando I of Castile emerged the clear victor; Don García of Navarre lost the battle, his kingdom, his land, and his life. Both the tragedy of Don García Sánchez and the victory of Don Fernando Sánchez are marked with a simple stone marker, called appropriately and ambiguously the fin del Rey, or “King’s end.” There it stood, right before the entry into the town.
Now you and I may not have known about Atapuerca, but any paleoanthropologist worth his salt does. In 1994, ancient fossils of early (Lower Pleistocene) hominids, called the Gran Dolina fossils, were discovered in the Sierra de Atapuerca. The paleoanthropologists here estimate the fossils are earlier than 780,000 years of age, and suggest these fossils are those of a new species, a pre-neanderthalic Homo antecessor, common antecessor to Homo heidelbergensis (which developed into Homo neanderthalensis) and to Homo sapiens.[v] I’ll let the paleoanthropologists in their ivory towers and their dirty digs figure this out. As an outsider, it seems to me, however, that some of their conclusions may be more tenuous than those that relate to Santiago’s predicatio and translatio.
I I I
Altaporca
About the Way: On Relics & Bones
The town of Atapuerca is proud of its Gran Dolina fossils. Going past Atapuerca we passed a small white building which promoted the paleontological finds at Atapuerca. I thought why it was that man has a love affair with bones. In the age of pilgrimage, man sought bones for miracles. The bones had life. He called them relics. In the age of science, man seeks bones for knowledge. The bones are dead. He calls them fossils. Both ages have suffered from frauds and their abuse, and the Protestant and modern scoffers have made the most of the frauds of the earlier age for their cause. But Cardinal Newman pointed out quite sensibly (referring to a Latin maxim) that the abuse of a thing does not supersede its use.
Relics have received bad press since the Reformation. For those of us who have inherited such notions, we must try to shuck off some of that prejudice to enjoy the Way of St. James. For part of the wonders of the Way include the bones of Saints, especially the bones of St. James, and we will miss much of the message if we exclude the thaumaturgical in the Saints’ bones. The renegade monk Martin Luther attacked the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. He had to, just like Henry VIII had to destroy the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The Camino was too tied to the Catholic Thing. In the Smalcald Articles (1537), Luther described pilgrimages as “unecessary, uncertain, pernicious will-o-the-wisps of the devil.” He advocated that it be preached “that such pilgrimages are not necessary, but dangerous.” He pontificated specifically against Compostela.[vi] The sum total of his theological reasons: avoid Compostela because one does not know whether St. James, or a dead dog, or a dead horse, lies there. This was reformationist agitprop. We know from modern digs the grave holds the bones neither of a dog or a horse, but of a man. Luther was wrong as to two counts, and should not be trusted as to the other. I given much dispassionate thought about Luther over the years—that fat, lascivious German, that rebellious and irresponsible monk, that renegade and crude priest, and theological Napoleon—, and I have successfully synthesized my opinion of him in one word, a onomatepoeic and brashly unecumenical neologism: “phhhrrrt!”
Lector: What kind of writing is this?
Auctor: You disapprove of it?
Lector: Of course. This is vulgar and childish. In a word, Rabelaisian. The thought behind it is unecumenical and triumphalistic.
Auctor: I’ll grant you unecumenical and triumphalistic. But I’m on Catholic pilgrimage. There is no room for Luther on this Way. Why should I deign to treat as friend and enemy of St. James and his pilgrim path? As to vulgar, recall the many scatalogical words of Luther himself? As to childish, you should note the word begins with a “ph,” which suggests a Greek and highly sophisticate origin, and the Greek philosophers, especially Protagoras, who argued about beans . . . .
Lector: Ahhh. There is no reasoning with the likes of you.
Auctor: Back, then, to my theme.
Medieval man was no more subject to fraud and superstition than modern man. Being human, scientists are equally susceptible to fraud, manipulation, and gullibility akin to the most excessive religious superstition—even with bones. A case in point is the Piltdown Man. These bones of a prehistoric man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) were “discovered” in the Piltdown gravel pits in Sussex between 1908 and 1912. Immediately hailed as an anthropological breakthrough and incontrovertible evidence of the ape-origins of man, doubt crept in only decades later. Now, it is quite established that the remains of the Piltdown man were planted by Sir Arthur Keith, and the jawbone is the jawbone not of a man, but of an orangutang.[vii] And such fraud and concomitant gullibility still happens. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a bird-like fossil with a meat-eater’s tail, hailed as a missing link connecting dinosaurs to birds was displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., and published to the world in the November 1999 issue. This time the scientists were taken in by a simple Chinese farmer.[viii]
Are we to throw away all the wonders of archaeology and paleontology because of a few abuses? Should we be so eager to throw away all the wonders of relics for the same? Maybe it is worth a listen and a change of heart. The pilgrim must let the bones of the Saints work their wonder on the Way of St. James.
And hence we learn with reverence to esteem
Of these frail houses, though the grave confines;
Sophist may urge his cunning tests, and deem
That they are earth;--but they are heavenly shrines. [ix]
The yells of the materialist and Protestant notwithstanding, I cannot shake it: there is something holy in praying before the bones of a saint.
I I I
Wie er Hispaniam kommen is gen Compostel da die groß walfahrt hin is, da haben wir nu nichts gewiß vo dem . . . . Darumb laß man sy ligen und lauff nit dahin, dann man waißt nit ob sant Jakob oder ain todter hund oder ain todst roß da liegt
---Martin Luther
We stopped at Atapuerca, though the refugio appeared full. I was hungry and had no will to go onward. Neither Randi nor Richard disagreed. After dinner, I spent some time alone at the Romanesque Church atop the hill. The church itself was locked. But the view it commanded was marvelous, and I could see fields of wheat, corn, and other crops blanket the valleys with an organic quiltwork. We visited with the Brazilian pilgrims that we had met on our first day out of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. After dinner and a walk about the town, we tried to sleep at the refugio, although a very loud-snoring Spanish pilgrim ruined our and every other pilgrims’ plans to do the same.
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[i] Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A. C. Cawley, ed., p. 201.
[ii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 96.
[iv] King, I. 432-33
[v] J. M Bermúdez de Castro, J. L. Arsuaga, E. Carbonell, A. Rosas, I. Martínez, M. Mosquera, A Hominid from the Lower Pleistocene of Atapuerca, Spain: Possible Ancestor to Neandertals and Modern Humans, Science 1997 May 30: 276: 1392-1395.
[vi] Kaufman/Lozano, p. 54; Benesch, Kurt, Santiago de Compostela, Knecht, Frankfut am Main 1998), p. 101.
[vii] Jaki, Newman's Challenge, p. 270 (cites F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London :Oxford University Pres, 1990).
[viii] http://usnews.com/usnews/issue/000214/fossil.htm. (Mary Lord, The Piltdown Chicken, 2/14/00)
[ix] Relics of the Saints, from Newman, Verses, at 138.
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