THE CAMINO SEASON is on us, or in my case it is, with a group to lead early in September, ten or twelve days of hard walking – full pilgrim stages – but with art and architecture lectures, hotels instead of pilgrim albergues, and easy living generally, in that awkward interstice between cultural tourism and the real thing. If the past is anything to go by, for many of the walkers the experience will have surprisingly deep implications. I hope to get a chance to debate the issues at a conference in Santiago de Compostela later in the year.
Meanwhile, what better than to open the season with a salute to St Bridget of Sweden who made the pilgrimage in 1341 together with her husband Ulf Gudmarson, a great landowner. She herself had been close to the royal house as a young woman. Mother of eight children of whom six survived (almost a miraculous state of affairs at that time), she was the only woman to be canonized in the 14th century and founder of an Order, the Brigettines (its English branch, often in exile, has been in continuous existence since its foundation, the only branch of the order to have managed this).
In addition to all this, Bridget is undoubtedly the most important mystic to have made the trek to Santiago.
She later went to Jerusalem – where she lived for 23 years, railing against the sins of the church and causing a good deal of mayhem through high grade political meddling. In her old age she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, resulting in a vision in the church at Bethlehem which offered a startlingly new way to represent the Nativity in art.
Her life seems specially relevant today, considering the eternal debate about the merits of virginity and the place of sex within the Catholic church. Bridget knew all about sexual life, saw men as tempters much as men saw women in the misogynistic Middle Ages, and nevertheless made it to the company of saints.
We don’t know what route she and Ulf and their retinue took to Santiago – her own father had made the pilgrimage a generation earlier – and we know nothing of her visit to the shrine. We do know that on the return journey Ulf fell seriously ill in Arras. Bridget now had one of the visions that had been with her since childhood. St Dennis – Dionisio – appeared to tell her she had been chosen by God to do his will and the earnest of this would be Ulf’s survival. He did survive, for a further year or two, living at a Cistercian monastery in Sweden. The two had meantime made a vow of continence. After his death he appeared to her to tell her how he was faring in Purgatory and listing some of the scores in his favour. One was that while on pilgrimage – itself an important plus – he had taken no refreshment during the day between one lodging and the next, thus compensating,he hoped, for an inclination to over-eat. Such is the road to paradise.
In the years after Ulf’s death, Bridget saw visions more frequently than at any other time in her life. These were probably dictated, in Swedish – she wrote in a poor hand with many mistakes – and redacted into Latin by her confessors. (One was a Spaniard, Alfonso Pecha de Vadaterra, future bishop of Jaen.) They emerged as enormously influential manuscript volumes known as ‘Revelations’.
During Ulf’s lifetime, and despite the fact that the couple seemed to have had a happy and loving marriage, she had experienced a revelation about sex and personal greed with intensely visualized details disgusting even by 14th century standards. it is a genuine shocker. But her general view as expressed in the Revelations is that a virgin, an experienced married woman and a widow may all be equally virtuous.
There was a tremendous amount of nonsense associated with Bridget, for instance a set of prayers, all beginning with the word ‘O’, supposed to have been written by her (but possibly written in England, according to that great scholar Eamon Duffy) and featuring in many Books of Hours. These, if recited in the regulation manner, were believed to ensure release from purgatory for 15 members of the devotee’s family and to keep 15 living members in a state of grace. Not Bridget’s fault.
Her political meddling in Rome was her responsibility however – unless it was God’s – and a real pain, since she set about it inspired with a sense of her own rectitude through her Revelations. She also made a lot of prophecies. Pope John Paul II in his apostolic letter Spes Aedificandi of 1999, dealt with the embarrassment by saying that ‘there is no doubt that the Church which recognised Bridget’s holiness without ever pronouncing on her individual revelations, has accepted the overall authenticity of her interior experience’ and went on to name her one of the six patron saints of Europe, nem con so far as I know.
Her Revelation in the church at Bethlehem remains a part of general currency, however un-doctrinal. Bridget sees Mary’s full womb through a finely woven tunic. Joseph, who is written big in this story, fusses about, lights a cradle and retires. Something moves, visibly, in Mary’s womb and ‘in a twinkling’ the baby is born, so swiftly, indeed, that Bridget could not see through what part of her body the baby emerged. But Mary”s womb almost instantly returns to normal. She is fit and graceful and beautiful and well aware of the significance of the event. She lays the baby on the floor and from his body there shines forth a radiant light, ineffable, greater than that of the sun, overwhelming the light of Joseph’s poor candle. Mary kneels before the child, adoring him, with the words ‘Welcome my God, my lord, my son’.
The scene is called The Adoration of the Christ Child. Italian painters portrayed it very early on, even before Bridget was canonized in 1391. She herself is sometimes shown in the scene of which she was a witness.
There is a wonderful version in the national Museum of Polychrome Sculpture in Valladolid in Spain – not on the Camino, alas. And anyone living in London, or passing through, can find in the National Gallery the calm, lovely and humbly depicted version – quite without expensive paint or gold, instead all light and deep darkness – by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, painted later on in the 15th century.
Long live St Bridget and long may she be remembered on the Camino.
(The key text is an academic work: St Birgitta of Sweden, Bridget Morris, the Boydell Press, 1999, ‘Studies in Medieval Mysticism’ vol l.)