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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. There is almost no information pertaining to the life he lived excepting the reports of the rare excursion to interrupt his writing: in 1255, a trip to London to paint the elephant of Henry III; an unusual journey to visit the Benedictine Order in Norway in 1248; and a handful of visits to events at Gloucestershire, Canterbury, and Winchester, where his accounts “seem to be those of an eye-witness.” This can be trusted. Often, he seems to treat 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 the same event changes dates within a single paragraph. Until 1826, Matthew himself was even conflated with one so-called Matthew of Westminster, “a phantom who never existed,” called Florilegus, the “flower-gatherer.”
Matthew’s role as the ‘flower-gatherer’ of St Albans Abbey began in 1235, when he copied out the Flores historiarum of his predecessor with “blundering attempts at correction”--“not merely worthless,” wrote V.G. Galbraith, “but very misleading.” Over the next twenty-four years, Matthew continued his efforts, self-taught, to bring the manuscript up to the present, expanding it annal by annal, day by day, into a “universal history” from the time of Creation until his own death. The resultant corpus, the Chronica majora, is Matthew’s achievement: a massive, kaleidescopic window onto life in the 13th-C., its miracles and disasters, wars, omens, and advances; its largest events and smallest details. “Medeival history on this scale is unique,” Galbraith writes. The standard H.R. Luard Rolls Series edition of the Chronica majora reaches 1,689 pages, averaging 77 per annal; the closest chronicle to covering the same period in detail achieves 68 pages total. It is a monumental effort, a heroic and in scale and what. A euology in the Gesta Abbatum, written 130-years after Matthew’s death, calls him “an eloquent and famous man full of innumerable virtues; a magnificent historian and chronicler; an excellent author who frequently revolved in his heart the saying: ‘Laziness is the enemy of the soul.’”
Whereas Matthew’s predecessor, Sir Roger Wendover, had covered in his manuscript those years from Creation until 1235, 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 monumental Chronica majora tends to resemble a personal journal more than a historical document. Matthew is an anecdotalist: his history is less narrative than miscellany, stringing together short, chronological digressions with the simple phrase “about the same time.” “On the 29th of May in this year died Robert of Lexington,” he writes in one section, and begins the next with: “About the same time, too, the most gratifying reports, although unfounded, became frequent, of the capture of Cairo and Babylon…” Alongside such world-historical events as the Mongol invasions and Seventh Crusade, 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”). He has, Richard Vaughan writes, an unusual “interest in human beings and in the ordinary episodes of daily life.” In the annal for 1240, he reports on an “unusual battle amongst the fishes, beasts, and other monsters of the deep” reported to him by “sailors and old people.” 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 interest. Certain scholars call this his “humanity”; Richard Vaughan writes that “Matthew was a bigot” who “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; he self-aggrandizes and gossips, tampers with documents and fabricates evidence. He puts the same words in different mouths, something else. His writing is coarse and crude and narrow, his Latin restricted and repetitive, reusing the same metaphors over 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, of course, is as an “inexhaustible well.” In the account of his journey in 1248 to “instruct and advice” the Norwegian monks at St Benet Holm in financial matters, he exaggerates his mandate to cover the entire Benedictine Order. Indeed, Vaughaun claims, the great Chronica majora, that most renowned English chronicle, represents, in the end, the “rough, unpolished, downright writing of a man of limited intelligence and fixed ideas.”
Vaughan tries countless adjectives on its author. Matthew Paris was, he writes, “crusty,” “embittered,” “sour,” “unreasonable,” “prejudiced,” “mercenary,” “vicious,” and “spiteful”; 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 curiosity—an unusual itinerary map. Over seven folios the itinerary illustrates the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem like a road atlas, showing travel times, stops, and alternative routes, carving the world into the straight lines of something. 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 judgements are alike in assuming the map as a primarily rational, visual technology. As we know, Matthew Paris, never made the pilgrimage he describes. 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 neglect. The Christian who persisted faced a tremendous personal risk 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. As an object of extreme desire who contact in what. In Gravity and Grace, the the monastic tenet: “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.
Under the codified Rule of St Benedict, monastic order vowed “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 limited experiential horizon demanded a compensatory reality principle. 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, as though the labors were their own. This what vicarious knowledge-production is a central tenet of monastic withdrawal and seclusion: that “by staying in one place,” Derek Connolly writes, “the monk was able, through the labor of others, to travel to all places.” It is the power of the image over the imagination, the magic of the mind to produce its contents. As Abbot Daniel suggested in 1108, it is also the magic of writing: “I have written this for the faithful,” Abbott Daniel 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.”
“Journeys guided by art.” using formal strategies which invite the reader to “join the map” and participate in its representational logic, choreographing the “active, cooperative roles of both the meditant and the artwork” in creating a virtual experience of pilgrimage.
There are some tasks to which the faculties of language seem inadequate. As Connolly notes, the written Medieval spiritual-travelogues betray “a clear concern, even a certain anxiety, over the failure of words to capture experience…” In the Concise Description of Holy Places of 1185, pilgrim John Phocus attempts, he claims, “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.
This “translocative thinking,” as Derek Connolly 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 that animist magicians used totems and effigies to gain control over the real—destroying “an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him,” for example—and the same “sympathetic laws” haunt even the most sanctified ritual representations. One example, as Suzanne Lewis writes, was Matthew’s own production: on occasion, Lewis notes that Medieval cartographers would call their maps “effigies”—the same term which Frazer uses to denote the mimetic totem. In this light, the pilgrimage itineraries come into association as a kind of ritual object or totem with a nonsecular function superimposed over its rational, scientific form.
the monastic “desire to access Jerusalem,”
Rather than represent the crude state of Medieval geography, Matthew’s itineraries represent, as Connolly suggests, a vicarious alternative to actual pilgrimage, carefully designed to produce for the reader a mimetic experience of the travel otherwise foreclosed. While “using” the itineraries, Derek Connolly suggests, the monastic audience would not just read but rehearse the journey 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 performance entailed: perhaps the meditant (“not really of the armchair variety”) revolved around the book, consuming one segment at a time; perhaps the mimetic in--sound and feel of the pages turning, the what. Through these formal strategies, the itineraries actualize reproducie the knowledge of the pilgrimage not just as intellectual, geographic, information, but as an embodied feeling inside the meditant who performs it.
In light of this purpose, some of the itineraries’ more radical innovations can be explicated. The word “Jurnee” which represents the road, and at which Richard Vaughan takes umbrage, for example, demonstrates a novel calligraphic strategy almost like concrete poetry, collapsing the distance between signifier and signified. Rather than illustrate the road as an image, Matthew employs the word “jurnee” itself as the index, 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, on the map, travelling away from himself and into the world. Connolly translates “jurnee” to mean “one day,” overlapping the empirical index of one day’s-travel with the more incantatory of an “intensely felt monastic desire” to arrive—“one day.” On the longer and more arduous lengths, such as those between Provins, Troyes, and Bar, Matthew extends the word to make the labor of reading commensurate with its referent, spelling it “Ju—r-r-r—nn—ee” or “Jur—nee.” This is the simple calligraphic device that anchors the visual language, tracing the route across seven folios, through London and the three southern gates—Cripplegate, Ludgate, and Newgate—to Rochester, Kent, and Canterbury, across the English Channel, France, and Apulia, some 50-potential stops, to Palestine. Across the map 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 represents with the words “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.” Other routes, such as the road which departs at Rochester to visit Faversham Abbey, eschew political centers to indulge religious sites, “leaving the specifics of which routes” to the user.
The same principle informs Matthew’s instrumentalization of the codex structure into which the seven folios are bound. In certain instances, for example, the reader encounters gaps in the road produced by turning the page. In one case, on f. 2r, the path which ends at Mont Cenis resumes on the next page, f. 3v, in Susa, with no corresponding diegetic representation. The Alps have vanished. This 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 in 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 “embodied” reading experience is taken even farther when the itinerary arrives in Apulia on f. 3r, where the established codex 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 form of an additional column depicting Rome; the second, a small triangular patch attached to the top, shows Sicily. Aross these panels, details to get lost or alter the route: lore, what, what. “Working with the flaps and other parts of the map,” Connolly writes, “the monk moved himself towards his goal, a goal that was far away from his physical self, but growing nearer in his movements through the map.” It is an excercise in monastic desire, in collapsing the distances of the heart, “joining the map and monk.” Like the reader, the “map reaches out, as if with a prosthetic limb, in order to grasp just a little bit more of a world otherwise beyond its reach.”
IV.
Sometime in the late 1240’s—it is not known just when—Matthew became convinced that the world was soon to end. Biblical 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,” on april X. As December drew that fated year to a close, 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.” He 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,” he writes. At last, history has been written to its end: there are no more flowers to gather, nothing left to be said; and so it is that with what little time remains he turns his gaze to the past. splitting his Chronica majora into separate volumes, retreating into its pages with a warning: “When Six hundred years and fifty more/ Are gone since blessed Mary’s son was born/ Then, Antichrist shall come full of the devil.”
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.
Among Matthew’s apocalyptic influences was the Calabrian exegete Joachim of Fiore. After his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in 1159, Joachim of Fiore was converted from the world and “endowed with a prophetic spirit,” as Dante wrote, that produced the “most influential prophetic system known to Europe before the appearance of Marxism.” Joachim appears in W.B. Yeats, what, and Joyce; Christopher Columbus carried his prophecies to the New World. “Abbot Joachim said, he who has to rebuild the house of Mount Zion must leave Spain,” Columbus wrote. Although Matthew’s exact expectations remain unclear, and the scale of Joachim’s influence unknown, the Chronica majora provides several references to Joachimite thought, including a small drawing of the prophet’s crosier: “de Ioachim abbate.”
The heart of Joachimite prophecy, as Matthew outlines in his the what hearings, was Scriptural interpretation. Unlike the scholastic exegetes, who emphasized rational, dialectical commentary, Joachim sought to “break through the hard surface of the Letter to the Spirit within,” Marjorie Reeves writes. Joachim describes one such breakthrough in the Exposito in Apocalypsim 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 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.” It was this last idea which would wrest Christendom from the ballast of Augustinian continuity and its “never-ending present” and turn toward the sun. According to Joachim, the future would arrive in 1260 with a utopian Third Age, when “there will be justice on earth and an abundance of peace,” belonging to a new gospel.
This impending Third Age he called the “Age of the Holy Spirit.” This Eternal Gospel, he claimed, would 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 language. Under its guidance, “men will turn their swords into plough-shares, their spears into sickles.” “One nation will not lift up the sword against another,” he wrote, “there will be no more war.” The entire world will become a monastery under a new order of spiritual men and women: no longer would the old hierarchies prevail. It was not the end of time Augustine proffered but a dynamic and human reorganization. Unlike Augustine, Joachim envisioned this future and the three historical Status as interlocking, overlapping circles: the Second Age had sprouted from the First, just as the utopian Third Age would grow from the seeds sown by monastic life in the Second. It was a gathering of the flowers of human faith and effort. Joachim emphasized the metaphor in the Liber figurarum with a series of diagrams illustrating the Three Ages as trees, branching and intertwining upwards through stages of twigs, leaves, and flowers toward a blossoming canopy that fructifies 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” 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, lost in his closed books of the past, I would like to imagine I can see 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, at least somewhat, 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…” The End, in other words, was Now, and Matthew, through the itineraries, SOUGHT a language commensurate to the moment.
It is to this most apocalyptic portent, then, that Matthew dedicates the large flap attached to f. 3r. On the inverse Matthew depicts Rome, surrounded by accounts of lore, while on the obverse he depicts the prophesied Gog and Magog trapped behind the Caspian gates, which his caption warns “will issue forth before the Day of Judgement and openly massacre all manner of people.” This catastrophic event he animates using the hand of the reader: when the reader closes the panel, concealing Rome, Gog and Magog are, in effect, “issued forth,” extending their demonic conquest across Apulia, darkening over Christendom. When the reader opens the panel to abate the cloud, he encounters another flap: a small triangular patch attached to the upper margin, depicting Sicily. In the center of the panel, 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. Then He will reclaim the august throne of the Lord, Jerusalem.
The pilgrimage itinerary attached to Vol. I (CCCC Ms. 16), is an earlier iteration, torn and incomplete. Although almost identical in structure and content to the itinerary of CCCC Ms. 26, the Jerusalem of Ms. 16 contains one major iconographic change. Within the city walls, Matthew draws a single red star which he captions “Visio pacis,” city of peace. Outside the walls, in the desert, he places the same star over Bethlehem, and captions it “stella nativitatis Christi”—the star of the birth of Christ—idenfifying it as “an abstract form of Christ’s presence.” In the itineraries, the Second Coming has already occurred, in other words—is here, now; Jerusalem “filled with Christ’s presence.” The itinerary is not depicting Jerusalem on Earth but the Heavenly City of the apocalypse as described in Ezekiel 48:35, square-walled and top-down. “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.” Matthew writes that name in alternating blue and red letters like a neon sign: “JERUSALEM.”
The Jerusalem in Ms. 26 does not retain the same flaming star from CCCC Ms. 16. In Ms. 26, Matthew has emptied the city of His presence, “a staged vacancy,” Connolly writes, that collapses “past and future time” and transports the viewer to a “Jerusalem where these events both happened and will happen again.” It is a WHAT, a spell: the meditant who travels these pages performs, within, the “movement from presence to absence,” from phenomenal to noetic, eschatological to utopic, fearful to hopeful.
In this sense, Matthew’s itineraries plot a spiritual pilgrimage more expansive than the road to Jerusalem. The monks at St Albans, turning the pages, opening the flaps, and tracing the routes, were travelling through that “closed door” called language, and beyond the “hard surface of the letter.” There is no other way through, as Simone Weil writes. Genesis tells us that Adam was once endowed with an 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 deliverance from mediation: a world which can communicate.
“There will be no more delay!” the mighty angel calls to John in Revelation; men will “turn their swords into plough-shares, their spears into sickles.” It is a world Matthew Paris felt in his bones. In the itineraries, he has drawn us a map showing the way.
VII.
This transformation did not appear in Matthew’s lifetime. 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. Yet 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 added a final page to the Liber Additamentorum, the Book of Additions, from his deathbed—a passage, Vaughaun observes, in the hand “of a person with failing powers.”
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.
“The imaginary,” Andre Breton wrote, “is that which tends to become real.” There will be no more delay!
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 neglect. The Christians who persisted faced tremendous personal risk, 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 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.” Jean Gerson, in 1400, made it even clearer in the title of his spiritual travelogue: 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. 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 representations such as totems and effigies to gain control over the real—destroying “an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him,” for example—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.” Central to the distinction at stake is that the ‘translocative’ performance in question was not an imaginative excercise but a “somatic” encounter with material rammifications. 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 according to the work. Among the most popular 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…”; in Glastonbury a church posted a “menu” listing available indulgences of 64 years and 197 days.
As the indulgence system continued to elaborate, and what, 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 market 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 reward would return.
By the High Middle Ages, the “vicarious pilgrimage” had reached such abstraction 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 pilgrimages of the variety conducted by Caspar Fry, however, remain orthodox in that their penitential character remain commensurate to the body—some body—coming into contact with the object. Matthew’s “imaginary pilgrimages,” on the other hand, were taken only ‘in spirit”: no material body came into contact with any site whatever but through the imagination. 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 life in the oblique, nonpictorial mimesis of language so that it might be “made again” inside the reader.
Yet there are some tasks to which the faculties of language seem inadequate. As Connolly notes, the written Medieval travelogues betray “a clear concern, even a certain anxiety, over the failure of words to capture experience…” In the Concise Description of Holy Places of 1185, pilgrim John Phocus attempts, he claims, “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: WHAT?.
Through an imaginative, embodied logic, Derek Connolly argues, Matthew’s itineraries allowed the monks at St Albans to travel to Jerusalem without ever leaving the monastery. His formal strategies were designed to produce XYZ.
belonged to a ritual whose intention was to import “into their abbey church the landscape of the Holy Land.” Central to the distinction at stake is that the ‘translocative’ performance in question was not an imaginative excercise but a “somatic” encounter with material rammifications. As Abbot Daniel suggested in his travelogue, the perfomance of an imaginary pilgrimage could “obtain from God the same reward” as the ‘real thing.’
It was an excercise in monastic desire, in collapsing the distances of the heart, “joining the map and monk.”