Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  And Saint Barbara? Should we believe in her? Jacobus certainly did when he included her in The Golden Legend. But like the word legend itself, the meaning of her story has evolved through the centuries. The word legend (from Latin, meaning "something to be read") first came into the English language through translations of The Golden Legend and in its original usage meant simply the life of a saint. When Geoffrey Chaucer published his collection of Greek and Roman lives, The Legende of Good Women, he broadened its meaning to any kind of story or history. But it was not until the seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that it came to mean "an unauthentic or non-historical story, especially one handed down by tradition from early times and popularly regarded as historical." Barbara's life, too, once assumed to be purely factual, is now generally seen as largely mythical.

  How does a saint's life become an unauthentic or nonhistorical story? Partly it has to do with the invention of the printing press, which sparked a newfound fascination with the objective truth of the written word. With the explosion of print, documents could be spread far wider and could be compared and evaluated beyond one's local community.

  In time, Barbara's life, and her very existence, fell victim to this spread of information. Multiple stories of Barbara's martyrdom gave the place of her death as Nicomedia, Heliopolis, Rome, or Antioch— when these stories were exchanged, the inconsistencies cast doubt on the truth of the underlying story. Ultimately, the lack of any concrete, verifiable detail doomed the saint. The 1907 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia was still willing to entertain the notion of Barbara as a real individual, though a year later, The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge began its entry for Saint Barbara with the line "A saint whose career belongs to the domain of legend."

  This skepticism toward Barbara put her sainthood at increasing risk through the latter half of the twentieth century. Among the reforms that came out of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 was the reform of the liturgical calendar, in which was agreed that, henceforth, "the accounts of martyrdom or the lives of the saints are to accord with the facts of history." Pulling the saints from myth into fact, the bishops of Vatican II set about putting an end to the saints of legend in favor of men and women whose existence could be verified. The process took years, but the liturgical calendar saw the disappearance of a number of prominent saints, among them Saint Christopher and Saint Barbara. The bishops, unable to find any historical proof for the existence of these saints, deemed them products of unsubstantiated legend.

  Those who revered the newly decanonized saints were naturally outraged, and the church immediately backpedaled, stressing that while the acts of the saints like Barbara could not be verified, the subsequent veneration of these saints was still very real. Thus, while removing them from the official liturgical calendar, the church left the veneration of these saints to local calendars.

  Sometimes what remains is not the saint but the belief in the saint. Sometimes what remains is not the fact but the belief in the fact.

  Sometimes, ashes.

  ·thirteen·

  Violent Joke and Stolen Bone : Foy

  Future readers, I warn you not to be thrown into confusion by the way this work is organized and not to look for a chronological sequence of events." So begins Bernard of Angers's chronicle of the miracles of Saint Foy. After all, how could one begin with Saint Foy? Not with her life, of which not much is known— only that she was a French virgin from Agen who was no more than a girl when she was martyred in the late third century. So few details of her life exist that many historians suggest she may in fact may have been fictitious. Her name, Foy, after all, simply means "faith"; while the name was not uncommon, Foy's story may have been meant as a metaphor for faith generally rather than as the life of a specific young girl.

  Nor can we begin with her death, since her story tends to repeat the same generic details one finds in so many virgin martyrs' deaths. Even if she was a real person, there's little to Foy's story that distinguishes her, and so, like Bernard of Angers, we must begin much later, not with her life or her death but over seven hundred years later, 120 miles from her home. There Foy found fame in the regions surrounding the monastery of Conques, where the strange list of miracles attributed to her relics begins.

  As a miraculous healer, Foy seemed most concerned with sight— in return for devotion, she regrew the once-gouged eyeballs of a man named Guibert: "At about midnight," Bernard tells us, "it seemed to Guibert that he saw two light-filled globes like berries, scarcely larger than the fruit of a laurel tree, which were sent from above and driven deeply into the sockets of his excised eyes." No word from Bernard on how an eyeless man saw those globes in the first place; nonetheless, when Guibert awoke the next morning, his eyes had returned. When a bandit similarly had his eyes gouged out after a robbery gone wrong, he wandered, suicidal, through the forest until a young girl appeared to him and drew two eyes from her cloak, which she thrust into his ruined sockets.

  Many miracles attributed to Foy are even more fantastic, including her fairly idiosyncratic talent for resurrecting animals. Her chroniclers list at least four occasions when Foy miraculously brought to life dead mules and horses. She also, true to form, repaired the eye of a knight's horse after it had been gouged out on a spike. Explaining these equine miracles, Bernard comments that "we maintain our hope of human resurrection with greater certainty if we see that animals, which are inferior to men, are sometimes raised from death."

  Foy's miracles were so common throughout the region of Conques, and so bizarre, that the nobility began referring to them as Foy's "jokes": There was the time, we're told, that she cured a woman of an "offensive blemish of warts"; there was her miracle baldness cure, when a knight prayed feverishly and was rewarded with a head of hair "so rosy red in color that people thought the whole top of his head was stained with fresh blood"; and there was the time that Foy miraculously conjured a hammer in order to free a peasant who'd been long imprisoned.

  An even greater hammer-related miracle took place in Auvergne when one bold warrior became inflicted with a hernia: "During periods between the old moon and the new," another chronicler explains, "a portion of his intestine left its proper place and ruptured into his scrotum with a great roaring of his bowels." Praying fervently to Saint Foy, the warrior was finally rewarded with a vision in which she said to him, "You should know that although I have cured serious ailments caused by many different diseases, I've never been called upon at all to treat the kind of problem you bring to me." But Foy, ever generous, offered this advice to the ailing warrior: He was to go to the nearest blacksmith, lay his scrotum out across the anvil, and have the blacksmith strike it with a hammer that has been heated until "it is glowing white." Half believing the saint was mocking him, the miserable knight nevertheless dragged his wounded scrotum to the blacksmith and instructed him to pound on it with a white-hot hammer. The blacksmith would have none of it, telling him, "Believe me, my lord, these weren't the words of a healer but of some joker. If you are naïve enough to follow this advice, you could be accused of your own murder. And I will never enact such an evil crime, for I am completely convinced that you will meet an instant death with this."

  The knight, though, would not be dissuaded. He promised the blacksmith that he would hold him blameless. As the chronicle then relates: "What more is there to say? His swollen scrotum was stretched out over the anvil and his diseased genitals were prepared for the blow. Soon the blacksmith flexed his muscular arms and swung the enormously heavy hammer high into the air. When the warrior saw what awaited him he was struck with incredible terror, slipped backward, and lay prostrate, as if all his bones had been broken in a fall to his death. And in this headlong fall, wondrous to report! All at once his herniated intestines were sucked back inside so completely that they never ruptured again for the rest of his life."

  So this is how one approaches Saint Foy, through odd stories in which she helps criminals, bald men, and horses wh
ile playing practical jokes on herniated knights. There's a lawlessness about Foy's work, a petty and churlish quality, as humorous as it is bizarre.

  But there's also a dark undercurrent in her jokes, one that frequently veers into the vindictive. Take, for example, the man whose roof collapsed on him shortly after he declared the monks of Conques to be "a pile of shit." Or the young nobleman Pons, who Bernard of Anger describes as having a "pallid face, rolling eyes, gnashing teeth, and flailing fists," and who set out to ambush Foy's monks after a taxation disagreement. On his way to attack, "a spherical cloud veiled the serene sky and, after a sudden horrifying and menacing rumble and a huge flash of fire, an arrow from heaven pierced the man's brain." Recounting this story as one more proof of Foy's miracles, Bernard triumphantly crows, "Your corpse can't even serve as food for wild animals and birds." Or, lastly, take the monk who blasphemously declared that Saint Foy had no need of wine before attempting to steal from the monks' cellars. "At that very moment," we're told, "his muscles lost their ability to move and stiffened completely; the wretch lay paralyzed on the ground, his arms and legs drawn up to his body. In addition, his mouth was stretched back to his ears and gaped obscenely, and the filth that streamed foully from his entrails manifestly revealed how harshly and distressingly he had been afflicted." With a flurry of redundancy, Bernard concludes, "So the wretch, tortured with wretched torture, scarcely extended his wretched life, wretchedly, for more than two days."

  Foy, for all her saintliness and miracles, is vengeful and violently protective of the monks who guard her relics. Perhaps this has something to do with how she arrived at Conques. The relics of a martyred saint, after all, were the most valuable possessions of the Conques monastery, and their importance cannot be underestimated. It was the relics of the saints and martyrs that, quite literally, put the whole ancient and medieval world in motion. These skulls, fingers, and other body parts created donations, made or broke cities, sent people traveling, launched wars. They comprised one of the main central economic engines of the premodern Christian world.

  For a long time, Conques did not have its own saint, which put it in a precarious economic position. The monastery was intended originally as a stop for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela, but in the ninth century, Pepin I of Aquitaine realized it was a bit too remote to serve that purpose adequately. He founded another monastery at Figeac, which was soon being called "the New Conques." Facing their impending obsolescence, the monks at the original Conques decided that they needed some important relics to increase their visibility and draw pilgrims back to their monastery.

  In 855, they sent a monk named Audaldus to Valencia to acquire— by whatever means necessary— the remains of Saint Vincent of Saragossa. Having dug up the saint's relics, Audaldus was on his way out when he was caught with the relics by the bishop, who tortured Audaldus, confiscated what was left of Saint Vincent, and sent the monk back to France. Returning home, he found that his fellow monks refused to believe him; having been savagely tortured on their behalf, he was in turn expelled from Conques by his less than forgiving brethren. Now homeless, Au daldus wandered until he arrived at another monastery, in Castres— which, it turns out, had more resources at its disposal. There Audaldus convinced his new brothers simply to buy the remains of Vincent of Saragossa outright, which is how they ended up in Castres rather than Conques.

  Conques, meanwhile, was still without its saint. Unable to get Vincent of Saragossa, they decided next to try to acquire Saint Vincent of Pompéjac— one Vincent being apparently as good as the next. For this, they sent another monk to Agen, where the second Vincent's remains were kept. More successful, Conques's new relic hunter passed himself off to the monks at Agen as a secular priest and was admitted into their order; according to one report, he spent ten years gaining the trust of the Agen monks before being appointed guardian of their relics. Only then could he break into the tomb of Saint Vincent of Pompéjac and steal his remains. He apparently decided, while he was at it, also to take the remains of Saint Foy.

  Around the same time, the monks at Figeac— Conques's rival monastery— liberated some relics in an attempt to further one-up Conques. A Figeac monk later wrote that his order was "always eager to acquire the bodies of saints by trickery or theft" and finally succeeded by taking advantage of the siege of a nearby city to carry off the remains of its patron saint, Saint Bibanus.

  Such actions were not considered thefts at all. The term for this process was translation, and, indeed, such translations were almost universally praised and considered acts of Christian virtue. The nameless Figeac monk's comment suggests that there was little attempt to cover up the illegality of these acts— for many, the theft of a saint's relics and their translation to a final resting place was seen as a necessary component of that saint's official story. The fact remained that most believed it was through God's intercession that such a theft could occur in the first place; thus, by implication, God sanctified these translations. It was the very fact that these monks were able to break the eighth commandment and get away with it that proved the holiness of their mission.

  No one proved this more fully than Foy herself. Her story begins in holy criminality, and so, too, were many of her miracles defined by a sacred lawlessness, her ability to reach down from heaven to wreak violence in order to protect her relics and the monastery that housed them. When a local bishop's nephew, a man named Hugh, was kidnapped, the bishop decided to steal Foy's bones and trade them for his nephew. He had stolen her remains and was on the way to Hugh's captors when Foy appeared to the bishop in a vision and proclaimed, "I come from Gourdon Castle, where I myself have just killed Hugh, the one whose ransom was to be paid today with my treasures."

  It's hard to reconcile tales like these with the story of a pure, virgin martyr. The story of the child who sacrificed herself rather than deny her faith, after all, is far more attractive, and it is the story that the people of Conques would prefer you to remember. It was this child saint whom the writer Hannah Green fell in love with when she came to Conques in the late 1970s, spending a good deal of the rest of her life working on a book about Foy. "Sainte Foy could be quite fierce," Green wrote in Little Saint, "and her fury could be final; she could be a warrior when she had to be, but for the most part she took on the character of a charming child, affectionate and loving and lovely, young lady, girl of almost thirteen, full of gaiety and humor, going after, for instance,

  F I G U R E 1 1 : Reliquary statue of Saint Foy (c. 980) CHURCH OF SAINT FOY, CONQUES, FRANCE/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  the jewels of special beauty that she wanted, as if it were to satisfy her feminine vanity. So she lived out in her miracles in the people's minds the rest of the young years she had denied herself."

  Maybe, but I'm not so sure. I also see the dark, dangerous side to Foy, the saint who embodies the kind of lawless vigilantism that is always popular in times of political and social upheaval. I see a patron to the nihilistic visions that seize us in times of uncertainty, and she offers no answers save her own power; she's chaotic, petty, and deadly, and the only consolation she can offer us is in the belief that she's on our side. In his justification of her violence and her jokes, Bernard of Angers advises us, "We shouldn't judge divine work with human reason; we should firmly believe that it was done." He tells us to trade reason for faith— for Foy— and submit ourselves to her jokes, or rather to submit ourselves to the holy men who claim her violence as their own; to submit ourselves to stories written after the fact, in which murder and violence are recorded as divine intercession. Of all the saints, the only one I truly fear is this young girl from southwestern France, the virgin martyr who restores your eyes even as she demands your blindness.

  ·fourteen·

  The Monstrous Saint: George

  Much of the actual life of George, like those of Barbara and Foy, is lost to history, if he was in fact a real person. He was, from the beginning, a fantastical saint, not one you could put much faith in—
a common euphemism for such saints is that their deeds are "known only to God." Even as early as the fifth century, skeptics had begun to cast doubt on his existence, including Pope Gelasius ( 492– 496), who complained that George's life appeared to have been written by a heretic designed as a "pretext for casual mockery" of the early church.

  Gelasius had a point. Early accounts of George's life were fanciful, straining all limits of credulity— particularly the story found in a document known as the Vienna Palimpsest, where the earliest account of George's martyrdom can be found. A Roman captain like Sebastian, George was well liked by the Emperor Datanius but was forced, like all other Christians, to sacrifice to pagan gods to prove his loyalty to the emperor and to renounce his faith. When George was unable to do this, the emperor had him tortured in all manner of ways. According to the Palimpsest, George was forced to wear iron boots into which nails had been hammered, his head was beaten with a hammer, a red-hot helmet was placed on his head, more nails were pounded into his head, his skin was pierced with iron hooks, he had molten lead poured into his mouth, he was placed inside a bronze bull lined with nails and spun around, and then he was set on fire.