A Philosophy of Tramping—Wonderings 2

Why are tramps demonised and hermits canonised?

San Frutos, Patron Saint of Segovia (642-715)

Having recently returned from six month in central Spain, where several of my essays on Victorian tramp writers were written, I want to discuss some thoughts prompted by a visit to the hermitage of San Frutos (Saint Fructos), patron saint of Segovia. The remote hermitage is set high on the side of the Duratón gorge where a horse-shoe bend in the river has left the hermitage guarded on three sides by cliffs, on the remaining narrow spur of land by a cleft in the rock, and from the air by the ever circling vultures.

Duratón vultures on the day of my visit

Many of the walks we took from our temporary home in a small village in the foothills of the Guadarrama mountain range north-west of Madrid, criss-crossed the Camino de San Frutos; a 77 kilometer footpath between Segovia and the isolated cave where San Frutos was to make his permanent home. My interest in hermit monks is discussed further in two essays on this site. But before considering in what ways the asceticism of the Christian hermit monk differs from, or shares, the asceticism of the tramp, I will continue with the story of Frutos, his brother Valentin and sister Engracia.

Children of a noble Segovian family, on the sudden and unexplained death of both their parents, when Frutos was only 15 (we are told that his brother and sister were younger), after an initial period of overindulgence brought on by boredom, Frutos proposed that the three embark on a life of asceticism. After giving away all their money and possessions to the poor, the three set out in search of a remote place in which to give themselves up to 'a life of solitude, prayer and penance for the sins of men', eventually arriving in the remote and magical surroundings of the Duratón gorge, some 15 kilometers west of the town of Sepúlveda. The three siblings sought out separate remote caves some distance apart, Frutos on the heights were the present hermitage stands, and there they commenced their lives in peace, solitude and devotion.

Details of the story are sketchy, with fact and legend mixed, some of which I translated (badly) from Manuel González Herroro's Crónica Imperfecta de la Vida, Muerte y Devoción del Bienaventurado Señor San Frutos Bendito, Patrón de Segovia, cross referenced with other accounts. Even then, there is little or no information on the intervening years—the ascetic lives of the three saints that would have been of most interest to me. Instead, the story focuses on the deaths of the three saints and the history of their mortal remains. What we do know, is that Frutos, Valentin and Engracia lived out their lives of solitude undisturbed in the Duratón gorge until the Moorish invasion of 711, when Frutos was already nearing his seventieth year.

Legend states that a group of Christian pilgrims from Sepúlveda, fleeing from the Moors, sought refuge with Frutos in his retreat. Frutos is said to have pleaded unsuccessfully with the Muslim soldiers to convert to Christianity. When they tried to seize Frutos, he drew a line in the earth with his staff commanding them not to cross it. When they advanced the rock split open swallowing some of the soldiers and their horses. Frutos would not be troubled again, dying from natural causes four years later.

La Cuchillada (cut or gash) of San Frutos, now spanned by a stone bridge

Other miracles attributed to Frutos include taming the Duratón vultures and some wild bulls, and a miracle credited to him after his death, when in 1225 a woman, pushed over the edge of the gorge by a jealous husband, suffered no harm from her fall. Following the death of Frutos, Valentin and Engracia buried his body near his hermitage and fled to another hermitage near the village of Caballar, some distance to the south. There they were decapitated and martyred by Saracen soldiers that same year. The skulls of Engracia and Valentin are preserved in the church in Caballar to this day. A local ritual performed in times of drought, involves dipping the skulls of Engracia and Valentin in a nearby fountain to precipitate rain.

Empty tombs of the three saints in Duratón—image 1

The building of the current hermitage and adjoining monastery by Benedictine monks, did not start until the 1070s, more than 350 years after Frutos' death. The relics of the three saints were re-interred in the tombs pictured above, located next to the hermitage, in 1125 after being moved there from their previous resting place in the Benedictine abbey of Santos Domingo de Silas, over 100 kilometers to the north. The final ignominy for the saints came in 1558, when the great and the good of the Catholic Church removed the remainder of the saints relics from their chosen resting place in the Duratón gorge, bringing them back to lie in Segovia's ostentatious gothic cathedral—some 900 years after the saints had renounced the materialism of that city to devote their lives to asceticism.

Segovia Cathedral

Consider then the philosophy and purpose of the hermit monk. The contrast between the lives of such hermits and those who uphold and promote the institution of the Church (including the wealth, power and privilege of many of its functionaries) is extreme and paradoxical. The hermit follows the original teachings of he whom Christianity claims as their founder—himself an ascetic—who, according to Mark, urged his followers: "Go sell all your possessions and give them to the poor." Fat bishops clad in ermine robes and gold chains strutting their cathedral palaces (never mind the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands, both during the Crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries, and the three centuries during the Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunts of Europe and America) are a perversion indeed of the original life and teachings of their messiah.

I have suggested in a previous post that Jesus may himself have been influenced by the Cynics, who in turn were influenced by Buddhist teachings based on the injunction that: if one desires nothing, one lacks nothing. Personal hardship and suffering provided the key to the elimination of physical and mental discomfort. The Buddha, the Cynics, Jesus, hermits, and many vagabond tramps, could all be said to subscribe to this view that contentment, or rather, as Nietzsche put it, ‘an independence in the middle of all kinds of outer nuisance’, is to be found by living a life in harmony with nature and free from the anxieties that material possessions inevitably bring. All are also self-exiles from institutionalised society, be it religious or secular institutions, that have corrupted their original principles and teachings to advance their own self-interests. Institutions made up, of course, by individuals desperate to secure power over those who serve those self-interests; be it the paedophile priest, the rogue banker, or even an abusive partner or relative in that most basic of institutions, 'the family'.

In the Western world today, with the collapse of free market economics, loss of faith in politicians, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism, it is a wonder that more people have not renounced materialism, as did the Cynic movement of ancient times or the tramp scare of late 19th century America? Perhaps it is because we are entering new and unpredictable territory, with no blueprint of how to respond to the new threats and fears that daily assault us. Having imagined that we were well into a new age of enlightenment and optimism for the future, we were not prepared for the events that have overtaken us since the turn of the millennia.

To return to our theme of religion, who could have imagined that in an increasingly secular world, we would be overtaken by a resurgence of religious fanaticism and holy wars, bringing in their wake acts of gross barbarism and inhumanity. But then perhaps what has come back to haunt us is entirely human. May not the whole human project have been flawed from the beginning? To quote Nietzsche again: “What? Is humanity just God’s mistake? Or God just a mistake of humanity?” Take the absurd example of Israel today. Surrounded on all sides by increasingly hostile and unpredictable neighbours, rather than employ their intelligence and advanced technology to create better lives for both Palestinians and Jews, Israelis drift ever closer to their own destruction. Half the Jews of Israel, mainly secular, are armed to the teeth and bursting with machismo, having achieved a spectacular makeover from, as Andrea Dworkin put it, the stereotype gentle Jewish Yid of the Holocaust era. Then there are the growing numbers of ultra-orthodox extremists—only males of course—studying in yeshiva; not only exempting themselves from military service but also subsidised by the state to exclusively study the Torah and hence avoid the broader education compulsory for those in the West—thereby ensuring a continuance of their medieval mindset.

Now this strange digression from hermit monks into Israeli politics may seem, on the face of it, like an argument against more asceticism in our lives: make military service and a secular education compulsory for all! The point I want to emphasise is: how tolerant, even encouraging, we are of people who wish to opt out of mainstream society for religious reasons (even when in the case of Israel, the nations very survival might be threatened by large numbers of the population doing just that) yet at the same time outlawing those who wish to adopt a similar lifestyle for non-religious reasons.

The Church establishment's way of dealing with rebellious hermit monks was to sanctify them and immortalise them as icons—in the same way was San Frutos brought back into the bosom of his Church, even though he had renounced that institution for his own version of Christianity. Secular societies way of dealing with its tramps and hermits is many and varied, including shutting them away in prisons and mental institutions. But rarely do we stop to consider what it is about our society that they rejected in the first place, nor what it is that they have set their faces towards. Why do we not celebrate tramps for their courage and tenacity, in the same way we celebrate monks—or, in the case of many of those featured in these pages, celebrate their literary works? It is the intention of this website to rescue tramping, as I attempted to rescue Cynicism in my book, from the dustbin of history and to address just these kind of omissions.

Footnote: the feast and procession of San Frutos, Santa Engracia and San Valentin, is celebrated each year on the 25th October.

Empty tombs of the three saints in Duratón—image 2

The Wandering Jew: an autobiographical detour

A return from one of many sojourns in the province of Segovia in central Spain, a place that we have adopted as a temporary home away from the responsibilities and demands of regular life. Not that Cardiff does not have its diversions. We live in the City centre and after work and at weekends take walks along the river through the park that opens up like a wedge of countryside from the castle near our house all the way out to the mountains to the north of the City. Many different routes are possible either side of the river, some formal others wild. But it is only total separation from home and work (especially leaving the Country), can I immerse myself in reading for pleasure. On this occasion I took with me George K. Anderson’s encyclopaedic investigation, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, covering, in just short of 500 pages, hundreds of obscure and better known versions of the tale: religious texts, folk tales, fictional chronicles, plays, philosophical treatise, etc.—transmutations of the legend for different audiences across the millennia from its gospel beginnings through to the present day; including a fascinating 18th century story of our hero wandering as far as the moon and other planets.

The core legend involves a jew on whose porch Jesus pauses to rest as he caries the cross to his crucifixion. Asked by the jew to move on, Jesus replies, 'I will, but you must walk forever until my return'. So we have countless versions of the jew perpetually wandering the earth until Judgement Day. He is variously only able to remain 3 days in one place, several weeks, or not being able to pause at all, even to take refreshment. He has learned all the major languages on his travels over the centuries, and is reported to have been been seen in a variety of guises and by different witnesses around the globe. In most cases, the motive for the tale is Christian propaganda, sometimes combined with anti-semitic sentiments. But one must fully immerse oneself in Anderson’s book to appreciate its immense scholarship, scope and lively narrative.

My only criticism of the book is that the author speaks in terms of ‘authentic’ and ‘corrupted’ versions of the legend, when it should be obvious that the gospels themselves are corruptions of earlier pre-biblical narratives, both Western and oriental—although Anderson does acknowledge Old Testament precursors of the tale. So why worry about historical accuracy when legend is at play? The pleasure of the text (providing well written) is precisely in its corruption and elabouration over time. It was not until the publication in 1835 of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (translated into English by the young George Elliot in 1845), that David Friedrich Strauss—at great personal risk—first challenged the notion of the gospels as historical truth, and publicly asserted his view that mythology applied ‘to the entire history of Jesus . . . in every portion’. But that is not to diminish the power of legend, including gospel tales. Myth can be an instructor of philosophic wisdom equal to that provided by history; perhaps even more equal if one takes the Cynic definition of history, best summed up by Nietzsche when he concluded that history was myth at best, lies at worst, and that science is simply a means of validating the myths and lies and calling them truths. Such is certainly the way in which I have treated the Cynic legends, and while seeds of historical fact may certainly be peppered throughout different versions of many legends, establishing ‘truth’ is a pointless exercise. This is as true of contemporary history, supported as it is by real-time audio and visual footage, as it is of ancient history. It is the human imagination itself that provides the rich and entertaining narrative of legend.

     For me, the relevance of the legend of the wandering jew is the entire history of the Jewish diaspora and its cosmopolitanising effects—not least on myself. My maternal grandfather fled the Galician region of Poland for Vienna where he married my grandmother, who herself had arrived there from Budapest. My mother was born in Vienna but eventually arrived in London on the Kindertransport following the Nazi occupation—her parents were transported to the Maly Trostenets concentration camp in Minsk where they were killed.  Born in the UK like myself, my father was a self-imposed exile. Born and brought up in rural Dorset, he lied about his age to join the army, which for those so inclined had its own cosmopolitanising effects. He was finally dischared 21 years later, having joined the Indian Communist Party while serving there as a Sergeant Major in the Royal Artillary—a pamphlet he wrote for the ex-servicemen’s branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament tells his story. 

     It is my own belief that Cynic’s are born not made, and, like my parents, I have always rejected anything so limiting as belonging to a ‘tribe’—whether based on religion, national identification or (unlike my parents) party political allegiance. And yet, I acknowledge that there is something strangely seductive and comforting about identifying with a particular culture, made more acute when one deliberately immerses oneself in an alien land and its people: the discomfort of standing out as foreign when wanting to blend in—easier to do in Spain that when I lived and worked in Africa and Latin America. Angela, on the other hand, acknowledges a real pleasure at not having to converse with anyone for two or three weeks, while at the same time enjoying the buzz and commotion of the foreign exchange around her. She feels more exiled at home where she does blend in, than abroad where the affirmation of her ‘difference’ makes her feel more ‘at home’.

Back to Segovia, and its own tangible remnants of cosmopolitan civilisation, whether under Roman, Moorish or later Christian occupation—although it was the Christian (least tolerant of the major religions) monarchs who made the decree in 1492 which saw the expulsion of the Jews from Segovia. Hypocritical that today there is so much sentimental touristic capital attached to the former Jewish quarter of that and other European cities. But Jewish heritage aside, iconic as the aqueduct, cathedral and royal palace may be, for me, the enduring images of Segovia are that of the chorizo factory next to the Eroski supermarket and Mountain of the Dead Woman (La Mujer Muerta) that dominates the city’s southern skyline.