So, it is not that my hand retains the feel now that my conscious memory has blotted out the event. This was no Proustian experience, to be re-activated later, when I would dip my hand into some other sea. And how could it be, for I was there only for a moment and all my actions were much too conscious and willed for them to be capable of any Proustian resurrection? No. All I am sure about is that this was something I felt driven to do and that now I know, in some obscure way, that I have been on the other side of the world and made contact with one of the world's great oceans. I would not, of course, have made any special effort to go all the way there only to dip my hand into the Pacific; as I was there, though, it felt right, even important, that I should do so. Why it should be important is a mystery to me, but there it is.
A friend who recently visited Rome for the first time since adolescence told me he had never been in a city where he had felt so great a desire simply to touch. When I asked him why he simply said: ‘I suppose it's because there's such a sense of antiquity about it. Everything there seems to stretch back so far.’ But why, I asked him, had he not been content merely to see, why had he felt the need to touch? ‘I really don't know’, he said, and then: ‘I suppose touching something confirms its presence.’
Its presence to you, but also your presence to it. The doubleness is crucial.
St John, in his Gospel, tells how, when the resurrected Jesus returned to his disciples,
Thomas, one of the Twelve, called Didymus, was not with them. … The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in their midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered, and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20:24–9)
Doubting Thomas, he has since been called. What he wants is to confirm for himself that it is indeed the Jesus who was crucified who is standing there before him, and only by touching Jesus' wounds will his doubts be resolved. His attitude to the thing touched, though, is quite different from mine that day in Los Angeles or my friend's in Rome, or indeed from that of the countless pilgrims throughout the ages who have visited the Holy City to touch the foot of the statue of St Peter. (That foot, so worn away by the touch of pilgrims over the centuries, was the one object my friend told me he felt no need to touch. Not that he felt it was any less ancient than the other monuments, but the sight of it already being touched by hordes of tourists with cameras slung round their necks put him off. The object had lost its aura.)
But Jesus' response too, in the Gospel account, drives too sharp a wedge between faith and the world. The desire that drove thousands of pilgrims to the shrines of holy men, as before that to the shrines of local heroes in Greece and Asia Minor, was quite different from the desire of Doubting Thomas for confirmation, and quite other than the failure of faith that Jesus imputes to Doubting Thomas here. Partly, as Peter Brown has beautifully shown, it was the desire to converse with a human intercessor: ‘The praesentia on which such heady enthusiasm focussed’, writes Brown in The Cult of the Saints, ‘was the presence of an invisible person. The devotees who flocked out of Rome to the shrine of St. Lawrence, to ask for his favour or to place their dead near his grave, were not merely going to a place; they were going to a place to meet a person — ad dominum Laurentium.’ And he goes on:
The fullness of the invisible person could be present at a mere fragment of his physical remains, and even at objects, such as the brandea [little cloths which the pilgrims lowered on to the tomb below and then drew up] of Saint Peter, that had merely made contact with these remains. As a result, the Christian world came to be covered with tiny fragments of original relics and with ‘contact relics’ held, as in the case of Saint Peter, to be as full of his praesentia as any physical remains.
Thomas was, in effect, a modern sceptic, unwilling to trust anything he could not himself see and touch; the pilgrims on the other hand never doubted that virtue lay in the objects that were the goal of their journey. Yet the crucial notion of ‘going to a place to meet a person’, which Brown is at pains to place at the forefront of his discussion of early pilgrimage, makes it clear that the site of pilgrimage was not just the site of holiness and power, but rather the site of an encounter. The practice of pilgrimage has too often, in our post-Reformation world, been dismissed as but one aspect of an essentially ‘magical’ world-view, common to all primitive peoples, but which we have, fortunately, grown out of. Recently, however, historians like Peter Brown, Richard Southern and Eamon Duffy, and anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas, have begun to unpack the word ‘magical’ and, by so doing, have shown up the nature of our own presuppositions while helping us to understand a little more about the workings of cultures not our own. At the same time what they have shown is that we should beware of making too sharp a distinction between cultures — what is ‘not our own’ may turn out to have more in common with what we do and think than we first imagined. Does Brown's concept of praesentia, after all, not help me to understand my own confused feelings that sunny day in Los Angeles?
True, I did not go down to the sea to meet a person, but I did not dip my hand in the water to test that it was really sea water either. Despite the enormous differences between the two experiences, Brown's discussion of early medieval pilgrimage may help us understand the nature of the mysterious impulse we all have to touch the world around us. But we need to follow him with care, and to start by distinguishing the matters he is dealing with from other, rather different attitudes to touching which we know to have existed in the Middle Ages.
10 The King's Touch
When Jesus began to perform his miracles of healing,
a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched his garment. For she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes? And his disciples said unto him, Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me? And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing. But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague. (Mark 5: 25–34)