…PIOUSLY…
Stage 55 / Saturday 20 June / From Azofra to Santo Domingo de la Calzada / 15 km
In many Spanish churches, the representations of the suffering of Christ or his mother are strikingly realistic. In fact the magnification of the pain, such as it is represented almost makes you retch. Thus, in the Middle-ages you didn’t need to see a scary film to give you goose-bumps: you went to the local church to see Jesus suffering from his crown of thorns and the Roman whip marks on his body. Or you looked at Mary his mother pierced by daggers of pain. What a morbid piety!
This pious magnification of suffering, uniquely personal to the Spanish character, became almost banal in this country where the Inquisition ruled so strong! This jurisdiction was originally instituted at the Council of Verona (1184) so that the Bishops dependant on Rome would maintain the “catholic” orthodoxy in the kingdoms. The “very Catholic” kings and queens of Spain (this was the adjective they wanted people to use concerning them) progressively used and abused this jurisdiction to track down Jews, Muslims and all those they had reason to believe dangerous to their authority.
The last person condemned for heresy was a schoolteacher, accused of being deist. He was hanged in Valencia in 1826. My ancestor Joseph de Maistre, in his Letters on the Inquisition of Spain (written in Moscow in 1815 as Lettre à un gentilhomme russe sur l’inquisition espagnole and translated from the French by T.J. O’Flaherty, S.E.C. – Boston, Patrick Donahoe bookseller – 1843) insisted on the fact that the condemnations came more from men in the service of a sovereign power than those serving the Pope, but it only prevented any others than ecclesiastics from deciding if a person was a “heretic” or not. Many innocent people were forced to make confessions, founded or not, and mounted to the gallows after the terrible torments had been inflicted on them … And besides, this was not only in Spain, let us remember the tortures inflicted onto the Vaudois (Waldensians), the Cathares, the Huguenots and many others in Europe!
So many excesses committed in the name of a certain view of God and used for more temporal than spiritual purposes! So many injustices committees by so-called Christian believers with material goals, out of greed or fearing the concurrence of other systems of thought! What a deformation imposed on an eastern faith initially introverted in asceticism and spread by the example of “See how they love one another!” (Tertullian, Apologeticum 39, 7) Then in becoming western, it became extravert in an effort to conquer and gain power at any cost … Even though Pope Jean-Paul II finally performed an act of repentance in the name of the Roman Catholic Church in the year 2000, one cannot easily erase the centuries during which the initial Christian message was distorted …
And what may be said about the influences of other religions on certain Biblical texts? The proportion of points in common between the Mesopotamian stories and those of Genesis is undeniable: warning of a catastrophe, construction of a refuge ship, the survival of a man and animals after the earth was engulfed, the episode of birds being used to find signs of the water lowering …
Certain Biblical events find echoes in the historic documentation of the Pharaonic era and myths about some of their gods. The book of Proverbs in the Bible presents numerous analogies with the aphorisms of Egyptian wisdom. It was believed that parallels could be seen between the story of Cain and Abel and the adventures of Osiris and Seth, and also between Horus and Jesus … Others believed they saw the influence of tales from beyond the Indus river. Myths or reality?
Whatever may be the case, these parallels indicate at least similarities in religious thought over time.
Certain points of ancient cultures have seen themselves re-appropriated by new ecclesiastical hierarchies promoting new orientations. One feels in the Old Testament the desire justify more and more the validity of monotheism. And then in the New Testament, there is progressive complication beginning with the evangelists and up to the letters of St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles: the delicate transition toward exposing a unique and more mysterious God, now manifested in the three persons of the Trinity! Unrealistic proposition or mystery? We haven’t stopped debating it for 2000 years.
Come on, pilgrim, will your poor little brain be able to resolve that on the path?
