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II.
Gathering Flowers in Jerusalem
Gathering Flowers in Jerusalem
“In Christ there is no east or west;
in him no north or south.”
Untitled Methodist Hymnal #548
I.
About Matthew Paris as a person almost nothing is known. It is thought he was born sometime around 1200, having dated his admission to St Albans Abbey to January, 1217, and that he died there, as old as the century and still at work, in June, 1259. An illustration in the Chronica majora shows Matthew reposed in his death-bed, the Liber Chronicorum still open beside him: “Hic Obit Matheus Parisiensis”—here lies Matthew Paris.
Beyond this hardly a fact of life remains. Some contend his last name, “Parisiensis,” denotes a birthplace (“Matthew of Paris”); others, the place of his schooling; others that it is a simple patronymic. The little known with confidence is taken from his own writing (a journey to Norway in X; a journey to paint the elephant of Henry III in London), though he, too, is an unreliable witness. Often he treats his manuscripts with the carelessness of private documents: entries are misspelled, misdated, miscopied—in the Chronica majora one entry is repeated six times in the annal for 1257 alone; elsewhere an event changes dates several dates within in a single paragraph. Although his work brought him “in remote parts where he had never been,” as Thomas Walsingham eulogized, he remains to use a cipher. Until 1826, Matthew himself was even conflated with one so-called Matthew of Westminster, “a phantom who never existed,” a ghost of a chronicler, sometimes called Florilegus, the “flower-gatherer.”
Matthew’s role as the premier ‘flower-gatherer’ at St Albans began in 1235, when he attempted to copy out the Flores historiarum of his predecessor with “blundering attempts at correction.” Up is what; the next is what. Over the next twenty-four years he continued to add to the chronicle, expanding it year by year, annal by annal, into a “universal history,” from the time of Creation until his own death, in 1259. The result is Matthew’s magnum opus: an enormous, complex, kaleidescopic window onto life in the 13th Century, its massive swirling in masssive, overwhelming constellation. It has been what--reprinted, passed down.
Whereas his predecessor, Sir Roger Wendover, had covered those years from Creation until 1235, however, Matthew spent the majority of his efforts and more than 300,000 words on the years of his own life: 1235 to 1259. In this regard, the great Chronica majora tends to resemble a personal notebook more than a grand chronicle. Matthew is an anecdotalist; his account is less a historical narrative than a miscellany, stringing together short, digressive vignettes on the simple phrase “about the same time.” “On the 29th of May in this year,” he writes in one section, “died Robert of Lexington,” and “About the same time, too,” he begins the next, “the most gratifying reports, although unfounded, became frequent, of the capture of Cairo and Babylon…” Alongside such world-historical events as these, Matthew also includes countless anecdotes about the weather (“An immoderate fall of rain,” “Of the heat and drought during the summer”) and other local sundries, like a flock of crossbills in the Abbey orchard (“Of the appearance of some remarkable birds in England”). As Suzanne Lewis puts it: to Matthew the “downfall of a great king must compete for attention with the birth of a two-headed calf.”
To this end, the grand “universe” of Matthew’s ostensible “universal history” represents above all the provincial world of his own self-interest. The scholar Richard Vaughan observes curtly that “Matthew was a bigot: he not only allows his own opinions to colour his historical writings, but introduces them on every possible occasion.” He is concerned with sums of money and tallying them, with the Church, the Pope, and the King; the writing is coarse and crude and narrow, his Latin restricted and repetitive. His manuscripts reuse the same metaphors again and again—like “birds in a net,” “sand without lime,” a “thorn in the eye”--including a recurrent xenophobic strain: the French are envious—the Greeks insolent—the Poitevins traitorous—and the Flemings “filthy” and “ignoble,” while England stands as an “inexhaustible well.” In Vaughan’s words, the great Chronica majora represents the “rough, unpolished, downright writing of a man of limited intelligence and fixed ideas.”
In conclusion Vaughan tries on countless adjectives. Matthew Paris was, he writes, “crusty,” “embittered,” “sour,” “unreasonable,” “prejudiced,” “mercenary,” “vicious,” and “spiteful”; but also “down to earth,” “kindly,” “human,” “sympathetic,” “humorous,” and “inquisitive.” He was a person, in other words: this at least we know.
II.
In 1250, after fifteen years of writing, Matthew Paris divided his Chronica majora into two separate volumes: vol II. (CCCC Ms. 26), containing the years from Creation to 1188, and vol I. (CCCC Ms. 16), from 1189 to 1253. To each he appended a dossier of prefatory materials, including a diagram of the winds, a genealogy of the English kings, an Easter chart, a calendar, and—of particular interest—an itinerary map showing the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem. There are four extant versions of Matthew’s pilgrimage itinerary, each in differing condition and stage of completion. The third iteration, attached to vol I. of the Chronica majora (CCCC Ms. 16), is the most complete and complex; it appears in the historical record almost without formal precedent, as though born of a sudden, forceful push for a new language to image the world.
“What strikes us first” about this new language, writes geographer John Kirtland Wright, is its “extraordinary inaccuracy.” Suzanne Lewis calls it “preposterous inaccuracy.” Richard Vaughan dismisses it as little more than “a list of names of towns in French, with the word ‘Jurnee’ written vertically between them”—and even within this limited grammar there are substantial errors. The scale is inconsistent and towns are misplaced: Wissant comes before Calais and Boulogne; Pisa before Lucca; Valence between Lyons and Vienne. The River Po is in the wrong place. Siena appears twice. In 1897, Friedrich Ludwig cut his analysis short, writing that the secondary routes seemed “so unreliable to me that we can refrain from going into them here.” The “bright colors, naïve legends, childlike but often skillfully drawn vignettes, and preposterous inaccuracy,” Wright patronizes, “take us back into the atmosphere of a credulous and uncritical age.”
Yet these excoriations are alike in assuming the map as a primarily rational, visual technology. As Derek Connolly observes, “Geographic accuracy is not the goal of the map: Jerusalem is.” Matthew Paris himself never made the pilgrimage; under the codified Rule of St Benedict, his vows asserted “that if ever, by the persuasion of the devil, he consent (which God forbid) to leave the Monastery, he may be stripped of his monastic habit and cast forth,” and this restriction demanded a solution. His solution lay in crafting a map that was not an image but a machine, a “vehicle of imagined movements to Jerusalem.” The monks who read it were not being guided but moved. While using the itineraries, Derek Connolly suggests, the monastic audience did not just read the images but rehearse the routes in their bodies—imagining the heat in the air, the dust on the trails—pacing around the room on what he calls an “imagined pilgrimage.” Little is known about what this ritualized “imagined pilgrimage” entailed; it is supposed the meditant may have ambulated around the book, reading one day’s journey at a time, in order to create a “mimetic experience of travel.” The route takes 50 days through Jerusalem, moving “about the room, re-spatializing and emplotting that familiar space with the imported topographies.”
Along these lines, some of the itineraries’ radical innovations can be explicated. The word “Jurnee” which represents the road, and at which Richard Vaughan takes umbrage, for example, represents a novel calligraphic strategy, almost a concrete poem, designed to collapse the distance between sign and signified. Rather than illustrate the road as an image, Matthew uses the text itself as a mark, making the literal act of reading coterminous with the symbolic act of walking: as the meditant reads the word Jurnee up the page, he is at the same time travelling out of himself and into the world. On longer and more arduous lengths, such as between Provins, Troyes, and Bar, Matthew even extends the invocational “jurnee” to make the labor of reading commensurate with the referent, writing “Ju—r-r-r—nn—ee” or “Jur—nee.” This simple calligraphic device forms the backbone of the visual language, tracing the route through London and the three southern gates—Cripplegate, Ludgate, and Newgate—to Rochester, Kent, and Canterbury, across the English Channel, France, and Apulia, to Palestine. Along the way, Matthew also provides alternative routes with smaller, sometimes unnamed stops, allowing personal itineraries to be made within the larger program. These are the “scenic routes” which Ludwig deemed so unreliable as to disqualify concern. One detour at Chalons-sur-Marne, for example, Matthew describes as “a road to the left towards the east, which can rejoin the other, which is more to the right, but this road is closer to Germany.” Others seem to avoid political centers and indulge religious sites, such as the road which departs at Rochester to Faversham Abbey, “leaving the specifics of which routes” to the user. In this sense, the reader is “invited to join the map” in an “active, cooperative role,” Connolly writes, participating in creating its meaning “the somatic enoucnter that they help to construct as a realization of the intensely felt monastic desire to travel to the holy land.”
The same logic informs Matthew’s novel exploitation of the codex-structure. In certain instances, for example, the reader encounters gaps in the road produced by turning the page: in one case, on fol. 2r, the path which ends at Mont Cenis resumes on the next folio in Susa, with no corresponding diegetic representation of the crossing. The apparent omission is in fact a unique systematic feature of the cartographic language: twice Matthew employs these caesura to span topographical barriers—the Mediterranean and the Alps—and once more to pass over the plains from Beauvois to Beaumont. In each case, the missing segment is represented by the map rather than on the map: it is in turning the page that the reader consumes the distance and completes the jurnee, creating an indelible, architectural link between form and content. This principle reaches its apogee when the itinerary arrives in Apulia on fol. 3r. There, the established folio structure undergoes a radical shift: to the upper and righthand margins, Matthew has attached large flaps that open to expand the cartographic area. The first panel takes the shape of an additional column the height of the page, opening to depict Rome and its history; the second panel, a small triangular patch attached to the top, shows Sicily surrounded by the Meditteranean Sea. As with the detours and caesura, it remains to the reader to decide how and in what order to navigate the panels and satisfy the material engagement the map demands of them. Rather than represent the crude state of Medieval knowledge, in other words, the itineraries are a codex carefully choreographed to produce a mimetic performance by and within the reader. It was a “conjoining of the maps and monk.” The question is not how to produce knowledge but how to make that knowledge felt. “The modified map reaches out, as if with a prosthetic limb,” writes Michael Gaudio, “in order to grasp just a little bit more of a world otherwise beyond its reach.”
III.
As we know, Matthew Paris never made the journey to Jerusalem. Around the time he began drafting his itineraries, in the mid-13thC., the labors of the overland route to Palestine had become insurmountable. In the annal for 1244 in the Chronica majora, Matthew quotes a “mournful letter” from the Bishop of Beyrout describing the Khwarazmian siege which had wrested Jerusalem from Christian control, massacring the population and sacking the churches, leaving the old pilgrim-trails to bandits, warbands, and deterioration. The Christians who persisted despite faced tremendous personal risk and what. Yet for its absence Jerusalem burned all the brighter in the Christian heart. “Distance is the soul of the beautiful,” Simone Weil reminds us: it was in Jerusalem that Christ had made his sacrifice, had been both buried and resurrected, and to Jerusalem that he would return, King and Judge. Through nowhere. In Gravity and Grace she this principle: “This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.” This was the monastic paradox that Matthew braced cartography to address: the problematic of an experiential knowledge. At the very advent of the monastic tradition, in the 6th-C., Cassiodorus Senator instructed the students at his Vivarium, “located in one spot, as is seemly for monks,” to traverse in their “minds that which the travel of others has assembled with very great labor,” and in so doing enrich themselves spiritually, experiencing those labors as their own. This image of vicarious knowledge-production was symptomatic of the seclusion, isolation, and stability demanded by the development of monastic life. “By staying in one place,” Connolly writes, “the monk was able, through the labor of others, to travel to all places.” Abbott Daniel made this purpose explicit in his 1108 pilgrimage travelogue: “I have written this for the faithful,” he wrote, “so that, in hearing the description of the holy places, they might be mentally transported to them, from the depths of their souls, and thus obtain from God the same reward as those who visited them.” In 1400 Jean Gerson made the even clearer in its terms, publishing a travelogue titled A way, so to speak, in which those who, for certain reasons, are not able to go to Rome might in the Jubilee Year make the same pilgrimage spiritually.
Through the same imaginative, embodied logic, Connolly argues, Matthew’s itineraries allowed the monks at St Albans to travel to Jerusalem without leaving the monastery to which they were cloistered. This “translocative thinking,” as he calls it, shares a logic with the “Imitative Magic” James George Frazer famously described in The Golden Bough. Through the power of likeness, Frazer claimed, animist magicians used mimetic figures such as totems and effigies to gain control over the real—destroying “an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him”—and the same “sympathetic laws” haunt even the most sanctified ritual representations. One such example, as Suzanne Lewis notes, was Matthew’s own: on occasion, she notes, Medieval cartographers called their maps “effigies”—the same term which Frazer uses to denote the mimetic totem. Along the same lines, Matthew’s talismanic itineraries belonged to a ritual whose intention was to import “into their abbey church the landscape of the Holy Land” using the power of likeness. Central to the distinction at stake is that the ‘translocative’ performance in question was not a simple imaginative excercise but a “somatic,” actual encounter. As Abbot Daniel suggested in his travelogue, the perfomance of an imaginary pilgrimage could “obtain from God the same reward” as the ‘real thing.’
The spiritual currency through which this reward was issued was called the indulgence. Between Heaven and Hell, it was decided, stood an intermediate station wherein the punitive debt owed on past sins was to be paid as a purgatorial sentence. Some spent years there, others minutes, however long was needed to recompense. In order to reduce this purgatorial sentence, however, one could earn temporal remissions through penitential works on Earth. These remissions were meted out mathematically depending on the work performed. Among the most popular works, of course, was pilgrimage. It was to the Crusader “pilgrims” of 1095 that Pope Urban II offered the first total remission. Under Pope Alexander III, indulgences were tallied corresponding to distance: pilgrims to Rome from Sweden earned three years; from England, two years; locals, one. A Middle Dutch guide to the Church of the Holy Cross reported indulgences of “1200 years on every Wednesday and Sunday, 700 years on all other days of the week…”; a church in Glastonbury posted a “menu” listing available indulgences tallying 64 years and 197 days.
As this indulgence system continued to elaborate, pilgrims turned to inventories called libri indulgentarium in order to navigate what had become an intricate and avaricious economy. There were “limited time offers” and one-time deals, sales and discounts, and it was into this prolific marketplace that the ‘proxy pilgrim’ emerged as a profession. The docks at Lübeck teemed with men who could be hired out by penitents unable (or unwilling) to endure the journey themselves, and to whom the spiritual rewards of the “vicarious pilgrimage” would return. Although the practice began with sponsors old and ill, it came, as do all things in time, to privilege the wealthy, who left allowances in their wills that a vicarious pilgrim might travel in their name. In 1269 William de Beauchamp left two hundred marks to his younger son Walter; in 1433, Thomas Poulton left enough “for a clergyman of good repute, chosen by my executors, to travel in my name to Rome and there to remain for two years continuously doing the stations regularly, visiting all the holy shrines and relics, and celebrating masses in those places on my behalf.” In 1556, the medical student Felix Platter met a man named Caspar Fry “who had only one arm and had already been five times to Saint James of Compostela. He made these pilgrimages,” Felix noted, “as a proxy for others.” Although it was the one-armed Fry who suffered the journey, it was to his employer that the spitirual rewards of his labor would return.
By the High Middle Ages, “vicarious pilgrimage” had assumed such a popular critical status that even Erasmus ridiculed them: “I walk about my house. I go to my study. I check on my daughter’s chastity. Then I go to my shop and see what my servants are doing. Then into the kitchen to make sure that nothing is amiss there… These are my Roman stations,” he wrote. The proxy pilgrimages of the sort conducted by Caspar Fry, however, remain orthodox in that their penitential character, at least, remains commensurate to the body—some body—coming into contact with the consecrated site. Matthew’s “imaginary pilgrimages,” on the other hand, were taken only ‘in spirit”: no material body came into contact with any site whatsoever. It was an excercise in “intensely felt monastic desire,” in collapsing the distances of the heart. As Abbot Daniel suggested in 1108, it is also the magic of writing. “You can make anything by writing,” C.S. Lewis wrote; each word is a picture, a spell, through which some glint of the world takes up life in the mind. In the Chronica majora, Matthew cast that spell to rescue the flowers of history from the threat of “age and oblivion,” capturing his life in the oblique, nonpictorial mimesis of language so that it might be “made again” inside the reader, but there are some tasks to which the faculties of language seem inadequate. As Connolly notes, the written Medieval accounts betray “a clear concern, even a certain anxiety, over the failure of words to capture experience…”
In his 1185 Concise Description of Holy Places, the pilgrim John Phocus attempts, as best he can, “to paint a picture, using words on our canvas.” Yet “if the object of speaking is to represent what was seen, and if no representation is ever equal to the original experience,” he laments, “I shall clearly provide less delight than is to be gained by seeing.” Thus it was that Matthew turned to the map; his great object, in so doing: Jerusalem.
IV.
Sometime in the late 1240’s—it is not known just when—Matthew became convinced that the world was soon to end. Numerological augury pinpointed the close of the year 1250—exactly 25 “half-centuries” since Christ was born and the first 50th year (or Jubilee year) in which Easter landed “in its proper place.” As the fated year drew to a close that December, Matthew used his final two entries to voice his eschatological convictions.
It has been a half-century filled with auguries and marvels, he writes: nothing in the 1250th year resembles what came before, “and even worse events than these were now expected with fear.” With paranoiac urgency he then relays a three-page litany “Of the wonderful events of this last half century”: deaths, wars, disasters; invasions, omens. Pope Innocent III was deposed; Frederick II passed; Jerusalem was seized, and the whole Christian Army “cut to pieces in Egypt.” Christ appeared in the sky over Germany and the Tartars invaded eastern Europe “with the cruelty of wild beasts.”
Added to these human miseries were still more portentous climatological changes: earthquakes, eclipses, falling stars for which “no evident reason could be found” save Christ’s threat “impending over men.” Indeed, Matthew reports that the natural world has been crazed down to its most basic elements—earth, wind, water, and fire. It is “not without its signification,” he writes, “that in the last year all the elements suffered unusual and irregular detriment; fire, because on the night of Christmas past it shone forth in a terrible way, contrary to the usual course of nature; the air, because, in the diocese of Norwich and the neighboring districts far and wide, it was covered with mist and disturbed by unnatural and unseasonable thunder for a length of time, and obscured by thick clouds; nor had there for a long time been heard such dreadful thunder or such lightning seen even in the summer; the sea, because it transgressed its usual bounds and devastated the places adjacent to it; and the land, because it quaked in England…”
With this final doomful testimony issued on December 16th, 1250, Matthew sets down his quill and ends the Chronica majora. “Here ends the chronicles of Brother Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, which he has committed to writing for the benefit of posterity, for the love of God and in honour of the blessed Alban, protomartyr of the English, lest the memory of present-day events be destroyed by age or oblivion.” At last history has been written to its end: there are no more flowers to gather, nothing left to be said. So it is that with what little time remains him, Matthew casts his gaze elsewhere.
Matthew, here your toils are o’er,
Stop your pen and toil no more:
Seek not what the future brings;
Another age has other things.
V.
Premiere among Matthew’s prophetic influences was the Calabrian exegete Joachim of Fiore. Although Matthew’s exact expectations for the Apocalypse remain unclear, the Chronica majora provides several references to Joachim and his theories for 1260, including a small drawing of the prophet’s crosier. After his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in 1159, Joachim of Fiore had been converted from the world and “endowed with a prophetic spirit,” as Dante wrote. His prophecies, since Marx. Joyce called him what; Columbus carried his predictions to the New World. “Abbot Joachim said, he who has to rebuild the house of Mount Zion must leave Spain,” Columbus wrote.
The heart of Joachimite prophecy was Scripture. Unlike the scholastic exegetes, Joachim sought to “break through the hard surface of the Letter to the Spirit within” (Reeves). In the Exposito in Apocalypsim Joachim describes one such breakthrough at Casamari concerning Revelation. “I experienced such great difficulty and mental constraint beyond the ordinary that it was like feeling the stone that closed the tomb opposed to me,” he writes. Frustrated, he set the text aside, until “suddenly,” more than a year later, “something of the fullness of this book and of the entire agreement of the Old and the New Testaments was perceived by a clarity of understanding in my mind’s eye” all at once. The hour, he notes, was midnight, the same time the lion of the tribe of Judah had risen from the dead.
The divine logic this and other visions revealed to him was an image of the Trinitarian structure of history. Time, Joachim saw, was divided into three fundamental, overlapping status, each constituting a distinctive historical character. The first status, corresponding to the Old Testament, had been “the Age of the Father,” in which the faithful, still as children, “were not yet able to attain the freedom of the Spirit.” The second era, the “Age of the Son,” was coterminous with Joachim’s own time, and corresponded to the New Testament, relating “with freedom in comparison to the past but not with freedom in comparison to the future.” In 1260, that future would arrive; there will be multiple antichrists and great struggle to usher in a utopian Third Age, ending the corruptions of the Church, and it was this thought that would ultimately wrest Christendom from the ballast of Augustinian continuity and its “never-ending present” and turn it toward progress.
The impending Third Age, Joachim claimed, was the “Age of the Holy Spirit,” when “there will be justice on earth and an abundance of peace,” belonging to a new gospel. This Eternal Gospel will no longer be “under the veil of the letter” but communicate unmediated into the hearts of man--a principle of universal love and contemplation beyond all language. Under its guidance “men will turn their swords into plough-shares, their spears into sickles,” Joachim wrote, and “one nation will not lift up the sword against another; there will be no more war.” The entire world will be a monastery under a new order of spiritual men and women: all this, he claimed, was imminent. Unlike Augustine, Joachim envisioned the future and the three status as interlocking, overlapping circles: the seeds of the Second Age germinated in the First, just as the utopian Third Age would grow from the seeds sown by the development of monastic life in the Second. God was known. In the Liber figurarum, he makes this metaphor literal in a series of diagrams which illustrate the ages as trees, branching and intertwining upwards through stages of twigs, leaves, and flowers, until they blossom into rich canopies which flower and fruictify the seeds of the past.
According to Ernst Bloch, the radical threat this flowering posed to the Church was “the spirit of revolutionary Christian social utopianism.” Joachim’s utopian “future,” it was seen, was neither static nor hierarchical but dynamically human, outmoding the religious clerical hierarchies. Joachim was “the first to set a date for the kingdom of God,” Bloch writes, “for the communist kingdom” that would overturn the religious order, and fifty years after his death, in 1263, his prophecies were condemned as heretical for the second time. Yet even censure could not suppress them, and in the 13th-C. they spread as “an incitement to subversive thought and action that was dangerously infectious.” Under their auspices “Joachite” sects of radical Franciscans proposed a new Bible and apostolic Dulcinians waged guerilla-war against Crusaders in the alps, burning churches at they went. When Fra Dolcino and his apostolic order were captured in 1307, they were torn to pieces with hot irons. The Joachite dream that had attracted them like so many others, Bloch claims, was a vision of “something Christlike that has become society. Happiness, freedom, order, the whole regnum hominis reverberates in it, in utopian use.”
As Matthew sits laboring over his work in 1250, retreating back through his closed books of the past, I would like to imagine I can detect something familiar in his expression: the comportment of a man struggling to muster the courage of faith in the future to be otherwise.
VI.
As 1250 comes and goes, and the world remains intact, the Apocalypse continues to burn inside Matthew undeterred. “We can see him clearly, in the last decade of his life, developing a sort of mania for writing, an itch to use the quill,” Richard Vaughan writes. “He becomes rather decrepit; he fiddles about with his material, rewriting, abridging, correcting, revising. He traverses the same ground over and over again” and “tries with little success to reduce his vast collection of historical material to some kind of literary coherence and order,” until at last he steps from beneath the veil of the letter, in 1253, and begins drawing his itineraries.
Like his contemporaries, Matthew connected the contemporaneous Tartar invasions ravaging Eastern Europe with the Biblical Gog and Magog. Revelation 20:8 warns that “Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle,” and in the eastern bloodshed Matthew saw this dark prophecy consummated. In the Chronica majora, he records the putative firsthand account of one “Archbishop Peter,” who reports that the demonic invaders “eat the flesh of horses, dogs, and other abominable meats” and “in times of necessity, even human flesh…” This is the world which he draws:
On the righthand margin of fol. 3r, depicting the jurnee from Pontremoli to Apulia, Matthew attaches a long rectangular flap illustrating the prophesied Gog and Magog behind the Caspian gates, which his caption warns “will issue forth before the Day of Judgement and openly massacre all manner of people.” Here, once again, Matthew emphasizes embodied knowledge: when the flap is open Rome is shown as it stands; but when closed Gog and Magog are “issued forth,” folding over Rome and extending their demonic conquest across Apulia. This is how the meditant first encounters the folio, with Apocalypse darkening over Christendom. Once the reader opens the panel, exposing Rome, he encounters another small, triangular apron tucked beneath. This flap, attached to the upper edge, depicts Sicily. In the center Mount Etna stands in flames; but the fires, Matthew notes, are not volcanic. The mouth of the volcano is the entrance to Hell: “This is the mountain which [is] always barren and they say that this is a mouth of Hell since the fire stinks.” It is through this mouth, perhaps, that Christ will condemn the damned when He returns to vanquish the demonic armies spreading across Earth. The End, in other words, was Now; where it had not arrived in 1250, he resorts to the itineraries to bring it to fruition.
When Matthew split his Chronica majora into two volumes, in 1250, he created two itineraries and two Jerusalems to preface them. The itinerary attached to CCCC Ms. 16 (covering the years 1189 to 1253), is an earlier iteration, torn and incomplete. Although it is almost identical in structure and content to the itinerary of CCCC Ms. 26, the Jerusalem in Ms. 16 contains one major iconographic change: inside the city walls burns a single flaming red star. In red ink Matthew captions the star Visio pacis—“city of peace”; then draws the same star hanging over Bethlehem. This second star he captions stella nativitatis Christi—the “star of the birth of Christ.” The Second Coming has already occurred, in other words—is here, now; Jerusalem “filled with Christ’s presence.”
Yet the Jerusalem in Ms. 26 does not retain the stella nativitatis Christi from Ms. 16. The later depiction has been emptied of His presence--“a staged vacancy,” Connolly writes, that creates “its own movement from presence to absence.” v
Between the representations, the experience can keep occurring. Pacing around the room, the monk, united in a dance between the physical and imaginal, the noetic and phenomenal, the Utopic and Apocalyptic; between hope and fear, desire and longing.
Matthew’s itineraries are a guide to Jerusalm but beyond the “hard surface of the Letter” to a place where what. They are a meditation on “closed door” and the “way through,” language. In Genesis tells us that Adam was once endowed with this unmediated language, but that he “abandoned immediacy,” as Walter Benjamin puts it, and carried it with him “into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication,” leaving us a language of omission. This is the condition that obsesses Matthew as he “fiddles about with his material.” Soon Chronos will cease, and the old time, filled with sorrow and pain, will burn away, so that a “new heaven and a new earth” can grow from the ashes to sustain Joachim’s vision of an eternal gospel no longer under the veil of the letter. “There will be no more delay!” the mighty angel calls to John in Revelation 10:6—at last Christ in his return will bring about the salvation Matthew desires: deliverance from mediation. It is a change Matthew felt in his bones--a new world coming. In the itineraries, he has drawn a map showing the way.
VII.
In Matthew’s lifetime, this transformation did not appear. It did not come in 1250, as he had predicted, nor in 1260, as Joachim had, but never did his faith waver. “Matthew, here your toils are o’er/Stop your pen and toil no more,” he concluded his annal for the year 1250.
But he could not. In a short time his pen resumed, and the Chronica stretched on until he died, almost a decade later, still at work, in June 1259. That March he adds a final page to the Liber Additamentorum, the Book of Additions, from his deathbed—a passage in the hand “of a person with failing powers.”
to a place where language retains its meaning, its honor, and men can communicate, their swords turned to plough-shares and spears into sickles.
There will be no more delay!
Holding in its hands, the monk, walking around the room, pacing, body and soul spirit, united, the noetic and the real, eidetic and the real, joined, to what: the future.
A staged tension between the Utopic and Apocalyptic, the noetic and phenomenal; between hope and fear, desire and longing
.
He is not depicting Jerusalem on Earth, nor the present-tense at all, but the Heavenly City described in Ezekiel 48:35. “The distance all around will be 18,000 cubits,” 4,500 cubits per side, “and the name of the city from that time on will be: The Lord is There.” Inside the walls Matthew writes that name in alternating blue and red letters like a neon sign: “JERUSALEM.”
“Working with the flaps and other parts of the map,” Connolly writes, “the monk moved himself toward his goal, a goal that was far away from his physical self, but growner nearer in his movements through the map.”
n the sprawling constellation of monasteries, chapels, and reliquaries in medieval Christendom, it was the Jerusalem that acted as the North Star around which the world was organized.
Yet whereas Augustine had conceived of the End as a new temporality, “supreme over time because it is a never-ending present,” Joachim saw the Third Age as dynamic and changing: a new what. With it, the rule of law would
Matthew exploits the performative possibilities represented in the codex form. The itineraries are not just an attempt to represent the world--not even to represent it as a map, in other words--but to represent it as a book.
Through this imaginative, embodied logic, Connolly argues, the itineraries “imported into their abbey church the landscape of the Holy Land,” bringing the meditant into real and true contact with Jerusalem through the noetic. The symbols, a transparent window through which one was not walking through the Abbey but through Jerusalem.
Through this imaginative, embodied logic, Connolly argues, the itineraries “imported into their abbey church the landscape of the Holy Land.”
For all intents and purposes the itineraries are not maps at all but teleportation: the real thing.