The notion of a healing power emanating from a holy man is to be found in most societies. So-called faith-healers still abound in the West today. It is rare, however, to find it expressed quite so directly and powerfully as it is here. More normal is the healing by laying-on of hands and the uttering of a sacred formula, and indeed we find in the Gospels numerous accounts of Jesus touching the affected parts of the blind and the lame, giving them verbal encouragement and sending them on their way whole again. What is perhaps surprising is to discover that the faith in the touch of a sacred person as a cure for disease persisted in the West right through to the beginning of the eighteenth century, though by that time it was no longer the martyr or the bishop who was believed to have the power to heal, but the monarch.
The English reader is likely to have come across the phenomenon first in Shakespeare. In the third scene of Act IV of Macbeth Shakespeare shifts the action from Scotland to the English court of Edward the Confessor, and to a conversation between two of Edward's courtiers. One of them says:
There are a crew of wretched souls
That stay his cure. Their malady convinces
The great assay of art; but at his touch,
Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand,
They presently amend.
(141–5)
Most annotated editions of Macbeth will at this point inform one that the courtier is here talking about the king's evil or scrofula, which, it was believed, could be cured by the touch of the kings of France and England. They usually go on to inform one that the last well-known person to have been touched in this way was Samuel Johnson who, as a three-year-old, was brought to London to be touched by Queen Anne in 1711.
Marc Bloch, the great Jewish-French historian murdered by the Nazis, devoted a whole book to the phenomenon, Les Rois thaumaturges (1923). Bloch demonstrates here with his customary erudition and elegance how the idea first arose in France and England just at the moment when it had become vital to strengthen the legitimacy of the ruling dynasties, and how it was reinforced over the centuries by the need to establish the monarch as the equal in every respect of the religious leader, the bishop or archbishop.
The king, writes a courtier at the French court in 1493, ‘heals the sick simply by the contact of his hand’, and in the description of a stained-glass window in Mont S. Michel we read: ‘He touches them one after the other with his right hand, from forehead to chin and from one cheek to the other.’ The making of the sign of the cross was not, however, essential; what was essential was the laying-on of hands, for it is the touch of the hands that cures the disease: ad solum manus tactum certos infirmos sanare dicuntur.
Bloch shows how every time a new claim was made for the healing powers of the French king the English were quick to up their own claims. His book is thus essentially a study in medieval politics. It reveals the extent and power of the belief with which it deals but it does not really try to explain them. What it does make clear, however, is that the notion of a healing power emanating from a secular or religious leader is quite different from the complex set of expectations set up by the idea of pilgrimage. For though the healing of bodily ailments is obviously frequently one of the motives for pilgrimage, and is perhaps in the West today the only one, it was never the primary one. That, as Peter Brown has shown, was always the desire to go to a place to enter a holy presence. This is also central to the Hindu pilgrimage tradition, where it is called darshan: ‘To have the dar
ana of a saintly man, a temple, a holy river, an image of the deity, etc.’, writes the anthropologist E. A. Morinis, ‘is to acquire merit by virtue of simply having been in the presence of some form of radiance of the holy. This concept is important in all Hindu pilgrimage traditions as a sufficient motive for a pilgrim's pilgrimage.’ Thus it is in relation to pilgrimage rather than through the healing touch of a sacred being that we can best come to understand what lies behind our own modern and purely secular and instinctive need to touch whenever we travel to foreign lands.
11 The Therapy of Distance
To begin with we must understand what the displacement which pilgrimage entails did for the individual who undertook it. Peter Brown picks up a phrase used by Alphonse Dupront, who describes pilgrimage as ‘une thérapie par l'espace’, and comments: ‘The pilgrim committed himself or herself to the “therapy of distance” by recognising that what he or she wished for was not to be had in the immediate environment. Distance could symbolise needs unsatisfied, so that, as Dupront continues, “le pèlerinage demeure essentiellement départ”; pilgrimage remains essentially the act of leaving.’
This is what Chaucer evidently came to understand in the process of writing The Canterbury Tales. Originally he had planned the work so that his pilgrims would tell two tales on the way to St Thomas' shrine in Canterbury and two on the way back. That is the plan as announced in the General Prologue. But though the work as we have it is unfinished, we can see that in the course of writing he changed his mind and decided that he would deal only with the journey to Canterbury. Moreover — and this was one of his strokes of genius — he would end with the pilgrims still outside Canterbury, though within sight of it. The pilgrims are still shown going to Canterbury ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke’ (I.17 — note the implication here that he is a living presence, not long dead), and there is no sense by the time the Parson speaks his prologue within sight of Canterbury that their journey has been cut short. On the contrary, the Parson says:
I wol yow telle a myrie tale in prose
To knytte up all this feeste, and make an ende.
And Jhesu, for his grace, wit me sende
To shewe yow the wey, in this viage,
Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage
That highte Jerusalem celestial.
(X.46–51)
The act of pilgrimage rather than its goal is the focus of the work as we now have it, thereby enabling Chaucer not only to use his fiction as a metaphor for human life and human imagining, but also to remain true to the dynamics of pilgrimage as developed in early Christianity. For, as Brown goes on to show, if ‘the distance is there to be overcome’, if ‘the experience of pilgrimage activates a yearning for intimate closeness’, that overcoming is never achieved, that intimate closeness is always deferred. For the pilgrims who arrived after their long journeys
found themselves subjected to the same therapy [of distance] by the nature of the shrine itself. The effect of ‘inverted magnitudes’ sharpened the sense of distance and yearning by playing out the long delays of pilgrimage in miniature. For the art of the shrine in late antiquity is an art of closed surfaces. Behind these surfaces, the holy lay either totally hidden or glimpsed through narrow apertures. The opacity of the surfaces heightened an awareness of the ultimate unattainability in this life of the person they had travelled over such wide spaces to touch.
In his account of the pilgrim centre of Tarapith in West Bengal, Morinis, for his part, explains:
The image which the pilgrim sees when he is led into the temple sanctum is about three feet tall, made of metal and heavily covered in clothing. The face and posture are representative of the T
r known in conventional iconography — four-armed, tongue lolling, with a garland of skulls, etc. But it is emphasised by the priests of the temple that this is not the true image of Tr. Every evening, following the sandhyã ãrati, pilgrims are allowed to have a dar