by Timothy Egan
On this summer day in 1553 sits a fugitive, our man Servetus, in the pews of Saint-Pierre, packed with others who fled the intolerance of neighboring states. He’s on the run from the Inquisition in Spain and the Catholic high command in France. The response of the Roman church to the Reformation was to ratchet up the torture chambers. Servetus broke out of jail a few days ago, crossed the border on his way to southern Italy. He comes to Geneva because the City of Refuge took in all those earlier dissenters. Most famously, it took in John Calvin when he was also forced out of France, and lived for a time under several aliases. Calvin came from aristocratic parents and was trained as a lawyer. He consumed Luther’s writings, then went beyond the Reformer, traveling throughout Europe to promote his radical views. Scots, English, Dutch, Swiss, and many Germans were taken by him, starting religions that were exported to South Africa and America. Big pockets of New England would be colonized with Puritan thought that sprang from Calvin. When Calvin first came to Geneva he had a falling-out with other Protestants and fled. But upon his return in 1541, he found a tightly controlled community much more to his liking, and they fell under the spell of his busy mind. It was here that he put the underpinnings of his new brand of Christianity into practice.
Had Servetus just stuck with his profession, which was medicine, he would be a good-sized footnote in the history of health care. Dr. Servetus discovered that the blood of pulmonary circulation flows from the heart to the lungs—a very big deal, helping to pull medicine from the muck of medieval quackery. He also promoted the benefits of herbal tea and vitamins. All of those discussions, contained in Servetus’s theological writings, were among the words of his to be burned in France. His inquiring brain found another error, or so he believed, in the teaching of the Trinity. The Reformation had invited creative thinkers to the banquet of reexamination, and Servetus pulled up a chair. Jesus was the Son of God, yes, but not one of three divine manifestations, he wrote in On the Errors of the Trinity. Errors? His head would soon be on a spike, the French bishops proclaimed. This was also too much for Protestants. Still, after transcribing such thoughts to print, Servetus managed to live a productive underground life for nearly twenty years. He started a correspondence with Calvin. Though he criticized him for predestination, he assumed they were two reformers cut from the same cloth.
After the sermon in Saint-Pierre, Calvin has Servetus arrested. Arrested. Any hope that a fellow exile would protect him is now dashed. Calvin is a bully with a pulpit. Beyond the pulpit, he’s a strongman, “the bloodless figure of the dictator looming over all,” Manchester called him. He makes nice to the poor, expanding charity and education. Geneva is well run and prosperous, with many bankers, clockmakers, and merchants among the newly arrived. Everything works. Life is predictable, safe, godly, and clean—if you comply. But Calvin does not suffer a heretic like Servetus, even if he is an enemy of his enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. Calvin, remember, is a heretic in the eyes of that same faith, the one he left behind. The seizure of Servetus after he tried to find refuge in the holy place of Saint-Pierre is predestined, in its way, for Calvin had written a friend: “If he comes here, if my authority is worth anything, I will never allow him to depart alive.”
The trial is a sham. Servetus is denied a lawyer, after spending months in a lightless, rat-infested cell. He presents himself as a man of faith, a searcher; his crimes are ones of conscience, just like other giants of the Reformation. Can’t they see that? His life is in the hands of the Geneva town council, all Protestants, though only one man’s opinion matters. Calvin had already condemned Servetus in prosecutorial letters and notes around town. Servetus pleads with the council. He tells of his love of creation—how everything, even the devil, is God’s work. They find him guilty, guilty, guilty of unorthodox thought. The sentence is death by immolation. But Calvin intervenes. He wants to show some mercy. Instead of burning Servetus at the stake, he suggests executing him by sword, until he bleeds out like a fish on the deck of a boat. It would be a less barbaric way to kill a man, he says—one of the few arguments he loses in Geneva. Two years later, he is given absolute supremacy over the city-state. He has more power, in this Swiss refuge, than the popes of Rome that Luther had attacked. It took just a single generation for the new spiritual boss to become as despotic as the old boss.
On October 27, 1553, a disheveled and sickly Servetus is dragged from his cell and bound to a pole next to a pile of green oak, twigs, and leaves. This esteemed doctor, this man of learning and character, is covered with sulfur. One of his books is tied to him. He asks the mob to pray for him and the executioner to make it quick. Dry kindling is placed over his hair and face. The fire is lit. It’s slow to develop, the green wood hissing but not crackling to a clean flame. He shrieks in agony. More wood is put on the blaze. His screams are deafening. It takes thirty minutes to kill him. Across the border in France, Christian clerics of another kind burn his books and a scarecrow of him. “Michael Servetus has the singular distinction of being burned by the Catholics in effigy and the Protestants in actuality,” wrote his biographer, Roland H. Bainton.
So the Reformation takes hold, from revolts launched by Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. In Scotland, the Calvin-inspired clergyman John Knox starts a faith that becomes the Presbyterian Church. The Protestant movement puts down roots in half of Europe, the British colonies of North America, and the Dutch-controlled lands of southern Africa. One of its offshoots, Puritanism, was known as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” in H. L. Mencken’s lasting phrase. Geneva was the most censorious manifestation of that sentiment. Religion did what it often does once its members are no longer persecuted, once it’s fused to power. What had started as a desire to be close to God’s word, a movement to right the wrongs of a corrupt church, was now codified in a place where stray thoughts, expressed, could end in an executioner’s pyre. For what had Servetus done to deserve having his life taken from him in such a horrifying way? What were his crimes? Specifically, per the trial: denying the Trinity and the significance of baptism at birth.
Calvin is immortalized, along with three other founding fathers of Protestantism, in the Wall of the Reformers—a pink granite bas-relief within the old city walls, more than three hundred feet long. It’s impossible to miss. The figures at the center are fifteen feet high, imposing in the most dreadful way. Still, Geneva outgrew Calvin. It was long ago liberated from his theocracy. Today it is the diplomatic capital of the world, with its name lent to the accords that proscribe war crimes, with more professional peacemakers per capita than any other city on earth. It welcomed Victor Hugo, sheltered Voltaire, inspired Byron, Shelley, and Charlie Chaplin. Switzerland today has no state religion. The constitution grants full freedom of worship and specifically asserts a right to apostasy. In Geneva, Catholics outnumber Protestants by three to one. But the numbers of all Christians are declining, following the secular pull of Europe in general. One in four Swiss are “unaffiliated,” the fastest-growing segment of belief. Like Casey, most of the people in this group identify as agnostic.
And Servetus? Let us now tighten the laces on the real-time boots and hike up the hill to have a look. My leg has improved, but I still feel a strain where the tendon was torn and muscle shriveled. The roads are twisty, traffic bound, and I hop on a bus for part of the way. I walk along the blank side of a hospital, look up beyond overgrown brush to find a statue of a man seated in deep thought. Two empty beer cans are at his feet. At the pedestal are words identifying the figure as Michael Servetus, Spanish physician.
Here is someone I knew nothing about until a detour on the Via Francigena took me to the magnificent city that holds his ashes. The sculpture was erected in 1903, on the 350th anniversary of the execution of Servetus—a way to atone for the crimes of Calvin’s Geneva. As the commission that authorized the memorial explained, “We want to regret publicly this act and take advantage of this occasion to assert our unbreakable adhesion to freedom of co
nscience.” This monument, then, can be seen as a tribute to the motto of the Reformation: After Darkness, Light.
But not for some time.
TWENTY
THE PERMANENT PRAYER OF SAINT-MAURICE
The last morning in Lausanne is a struggle to get out of town. I’m clearly at cross-purposes with other visitors on the Swiss Riviera. They’re after music and sun, beer in crafted steins and watches that cost more than a year at an American private college. I’m looking for ghosts, and O.K., God. But I still can’t get myself to say that when people ask what brings me to Lake Geneva, because my explanation is too personal for strangers. Well, some strangers, the Swiss being among the more reticent. For all our mockery of ritzy Switzerland, some things are priceless. The lake air is free, as are the alpine views. Because this is a steeply vertical city, and the two rivers that flow through it are covered over, you have no idea where you are at any one time. We hop on the quiet and unassuming metro our final morning and get off somewhere in the center of the Old Town. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, in that the dimensions are hallucinatory, a maze of bridges and underpasses, stairways and dead ends.
I duck into the cathedral, towering five hundred feet over the lake, while Casey goes in search of chocolates for his girlfriend. All I want is a pilgrim stamp. Get in and get out, five minutes max. Alas, my capacity for wonder is not yet sufficiently sated, and I stroll around in renewed appreciation of twelfth-century construction skills. The Notre-Dame Cathedral of Lausanne is the biggest space devoted to God in Switzerland. It has some charming quirks. Every night between ten p.m. and two a.m. a watchman walks 153 steps to the upper reaches of the tower and announces the top of the hour—to the bewilderment of besotted visitors staggering out of bars and clubs.
I notice an absence of relic boxes and graphic depictions of mutilated saints. That’s because this is a Protestant cathedral, explains a woman named Anna who stamps my passport. It was taken over by Reformed Christians in 1536, nineteen years after Luther wrote his 95 theses, and they cleansed it of papist pigmentation. We chat for a while about pilgrims past and present. In the Middle Ages, the cathedral drew throngs of foreigners. Now, a small stream of V.F. sojourners trickle in. “They walk the Via Francigena because it’s an adventure,” says Anna. “And they want to get away from the material world.”
When I tell Anna that I’m hoping to meet the pope at the end of my trail, she lights up.
“Would you like to see something?”
She shows me a picture from inside the Vatican. Pope Francis is embracing a little boy, whose smile projects the sugar-high radiance of a kid on Christmas Day. The child is her son, who has “a slight mental disability,” she says. In Rome, she asked around, and with no inside connections or big names to drop, she and her boy were ushered in with a small audience to see the pope. She asked him to pray for her son.
“Can you see Francis’s eyes? They’re alive.” She is so happy as she tells me this, and it’s infectious. I’m not even jealous that she got in to see the pope while I’m still waiting for a reply. I’m just thrilled to be in the ripple of her joy.
* * *
—
ALMOST HALFWAY TO ROME. Since leaving Canterbury, I’ve covered 509 miles. St. Peter’s Square is another 672. Just ahead is the toughest part—75 miles to one of the highest crossings in the Alps, Great Saint Bernard Pass, more than 8,000 feet above sea level. I want to hike the hardest section, above timberline, passing glacier-gouged boulders and milky little streams. The route climbs steadily, following the Rhône above Lake Geneva, through a progression of ever smaller villages, and then turns away from the river and up a valley that narrows and tightens as the tallest mountains on the western continent close in. Napoleon had the audacity to think he could march 51,000 men and 10,750 beasts of burden dragging disassembled cannons, hay, wine, and nearly two tons of cheese up and over the pass in the late spring of 1800. There was no road over Great Saint Bernard until 1905. He had to follow the ancient alpine trail, walking single file, trying to do with an army what no general had done since Charlemagne—and before that, Hannibal and his elephants.
Napoleon sent several thousand troops ahead to cache supplies and scout the route. He would try to take his forces over a pass that can get upward of thirty feet of snow a year. My doubts today are the same as his: weather being the main concern. Great Saint Bernard is still somewhat snowbound, several feet in the north-facing portions of the V.F. I’ve heard from people who were turned back by freezing squalls and zero visibility. Some decided to call the whole thing off. The traveler is also exposed to sudden thunderstorms in the higher elevations, with no place for cover. Weather of a different sort is making life perilous for people on the other side of the divide. Italy, like most of France, is experiencing a severe heat wave. The forests are dry, fields are brown, rivers are shriveling. And now wildfires are breaking out.
Montreux is our next stop, after a quick, dreamy train ride along the eastern end of the lake, passing the terraced Lavaux vineyards. The trees are cypress and palm. All of it is lined with peak-blossoming flowers, elegantly maintained Belle Époque maisons, and a lake as smooth as a fresh-made bed. We wait our turn to get close to the shrine that draws more people than anything else on Montreux’s waterfront: the ten-foot-high statue of Freddie Mercury, the late front man of Queen, who had a home here. He has one hand pointing skyward, the other flinging his microphone. I’m trying to stay religiously meditative on this walk, but I’ve got a well-known lyric of Freddie’s lodged in my head:
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche . . .
Now we follow the Rhône, which comes to life in the melting drips of a glacier at 7,244 feet and flows through Lake Geneva to Lyon, Avignon, and Arles before emptying into the Mediterranean. Our segment to Saint-Maurice is just twenty miles, but what a change it brings. Here the mountains are bunched in tight, and hold the weather, snagging clouds trying to sneak over the Alps. The snow is no mere mantle, but a heavy cloak wrapped around the upper third of the peaks. In an opening between spires, I catch a glimpse of the 10,400-foot eastern summit of Dents du Midi Mountain—named for the sharp teeth of the massif. We cross a bridge over the river and walk a short distance to the Abbey of Saint-Maurice, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating monastery in Europe. I’ve been looking forward to this since the flatlands of Flanders, and not just because I always feel more at home in the mountains.
“Within these walls prayer has never stopped.”
That is the first astonishment of the abbey, which was founded in 515 by Sigismund, a Vandal king of Burgundy. A plea to God was started in Saint-Maurice fifteen hundred years ago; this single prayer has continued to this day—“a spiritual and cultural activity that is not found anywhere else in the Western Christian world,” as the Augustinians explain in a short history. For a long time, more than nine hundred monks were on hand, divided into nine choirs, so that the prayer would go on without intermission, the chants relayed from one group to the other.
Today, Saint-Maurice lacks medieval-level monk power, but the chain has not been broken; it continues every day and every night. The abbey compound has been crushed by massive rockslides, buried in avalanches, and scorched by fire. Napoleon billeted some of his troops here, and the Reformation that swept through Germany and Switzerland stopped just outside the gates of the monastery, a firewall of traditional Christianity. Roofs have collapsed and been restored. Catacombs unearthed and cleaned for observation. The one consistency has been the permanent prayer, laus perennis, recited day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, century after century, by a rotating band of monks known as the Sleepless Ones. Perhaps the permanent prayer gains force with the years, with each fresh rendition, like the Rhône gathering its tributaries. As we walk on floors built over the ruins of a shrine to the Roman god Mercury, I’m hoping to drop a request int
o the big river of prayer and see where it ends up.
When Sigismund set spiritual anchor here, he was fleeing an awful past. He killed his son; he had him strangled to death in 517 after the boy made fun of his father’s second wife. Overwhelmed by guilt, he vowed to spend his remaining years in prayer and penance, living the monastic life on the banks of the Rhône under the shadow of the Dents du Midi. But he couldn’t keep his violent side down for long, and soon took up arms against the advancing Franks. In defeat, he was found hiding in the abbey in a monk’s habit. The invaders took him to Orléans, where he was killed by a son of the newly Christian Clovis—his faith also doing nothing to tamp down homicidal urges. Sigismund is a saint, though I’m not sure why. I learned this while reading up on the village of Saint-Maurice, but I have yet to share it with Casey. A story about a saint who killed his boy is not likely to influence my own son’s agnosticism for the better.
The other astonishment, and a far more interesting-to-our-times figure, is the man who gave his name to this place. You can see a big portrait of him in the stairway of the residence of the monks who keep the prayer going. He’s got amazing abs, huge upper arms, a red Roman cape, with a gold halo over his head. And he’s black. Maurice is believed to be the “the first black saint,” the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote. But he was not recognized as a holy man of color until many centuries after his death.
His story: Maurice was born a mere two centuries plus after the death of Christ, in the Egyptian community of Thebes. He was Christian, and a soldier in the Roman army. He rose through the ranks to become commander of the Theban Legion, which had a reputation as disciplined killers of their fellow men, in service to the Empire. Maurice was summoned from North Africa across the Mediterranean by the Emperor Maximian to put down a revolt in a strategic valley of the Swiss Alps. Before the attack, Maurice’s men were told to pay tribute to Roman gods, per pagan tradition. They refused. And once word leaked out that their intended victims were a band of Christians, Maurice balked at the other command as well. He would not slaughter members of his faith, something that legions of Christians would do without blinking in the centuries that followed. Maurice is the conscience that was missing in so many other intra-Christian bloodbaths.
