Two pilgrimages, one Way: On Assisi and Santiago de Compostela

Can one commit pilgrimage “adultery”? In the months of planning leading up to my taking a group of pilgrims along a portion of La Via di Francesco—the Way of Saint Francis—to Assisi in Italy, I felt a strange sense of unease about how I might be engaged in a form of betrayal.

For my peregrino pilgrim credentials were well and truly forged in Spain on the famous Camino de Santiago. My first Camino back in 2017 was a life changing experience, and one that then again came to my rescue during the pandemic and lockdowns by offering me a way out of the madness. I owe a great deal to Saint James—in addition to him being my namesake—and to the Camino and to Spain.

By now I am so conditioned by my continual encounters with the Camino that I can spot a scallop shell—the symbol of Saint James and the Camino—from 100 yards away; the sight of a spray-painted yellow arrow on a concrete wall releases a shot of dopamine every time. Some people chant the Om mantra to connect to the Absolute Principle of existence—I just have to close my eyes and say the word Camino in my head or touch a backpack still covered in the dust of the day’s trail.

There are no yellow arrows or scallop shells on the Via di Francesco. It is marked by small yellow and blue striped patches—think mini-Ukraine flags, a somewhat incongruous coincidence given current tragic events—and by the Tau, the symbol of Saint Francis that looks like an elegant “T”. As our Via di Francesco group proceeded north from our starting point at Terni—about 70 kilometers north of Rome, and 108 kilometers of walking from Assisi—it was impossible not to compare and contrast the Way of Saint Francis and the Way of Saint James pilgrimages as we followed and got used to the different way markers.

That said, there is no genuine substance to the idea of a pilgrimage “standoff” between the two Ways—both pilgrimages are remarkable experiences taken in their entireties, each of which is worth doing. But in interrogating the differences between the two, the pilgrim is brought to a better and deeper understanding about his or her role in life, and about what both pilgrimages aim to reveal: the Tao, also known as the Way, amid the thickets and thorns of our contemporary world.

The Camino de Santiago is far more popular than the Via di Francesco: the former attracts around 300,000 pilgrims a year, while the latter is down around the tens of thousands. But as one of our Assisi pilgrims noted, the fact of the matter is that the Camino de Santiago is far less historically assured in comparison. Everything about the Way of Saint James is likely based on legend, with most scholars disputing that the apostle ever went to Spain. Whereas the Via di Francesco is unequivocally rooted in fact and concrete connections to Saint Francis and the region of Umbria that he called home and through which the route traverses.

It is also worth considering how, of the two saints, Saint Francis arguably speaks to our age more acutely. He was born at a time in the 13th century when “money was becoming more than simply a social convention, a medium of economic exchange,” Donald Spoto writes in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi. “People were beginning to pursue money as a primary goal, and the amount of money one acquired determined one’s status in the community.”

Conspicuous consumption had arrived, Spoto notes, alongside the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself, a process Francis dramatically turned his back on. In the courtyard of the Bishop’s Palace in Assisi and in front of an assembled crowd he stripped naked and handed his clothes with a bag of coins on top to his father, saying: “I give these back to you. From now on I have one father, the Father in Heaven.” Francis’ treatment of his parents is hard to reconcile and applaud. Less so his brave resistance to the pressures of an emerging social order that ruthlessly prioritized money making over taking care of the less fortunate. But those trends that Francis shunned have only accelerated and ensnared so much of the Western world and its mindset in subsequent centuries.

“Society in the 21st century, in fact, operates on the same tacit assumption that began in the 13th—namely, that money can indeed buy happiness, or at least rent it,” Spoto says. “Francis called into question the folly of relying on money, goods and material things for happiness.”

While Saint Francis would appear to have the edge in terms of relevance to the challenges posed by today’s consumerist and careerist societies, from a purely pilgrim perspective, Saint James and the Camino de Santiago is hard to beat when it comes to that moment of crescendo at pilgrimage end. It casts the entry into Assisi as a somewhat diminished experience in comparison.

“For anyone accustomed to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the process of arrival in Assisi and obtaining a certificate of pilgrimage—a testimonium—is anticlimactic,” says Russ Eanes in Pilgrim Paths to Assisi. “There are no crowds of cheering pilgrims falling on their knees in celebration of arrival…Walking through town with backpacks, we were unusual. Assisi is crowded with tourists and pilgrims who may have arrived via bus or car or train, but it is not crowded, like Santiago, with streams of pilgrims carrying backpacks.”

It was just like that when we arrived in Assisi. Our hiking gear and walking sticks were the exception among the hordes taking selfies and wolfing down ice cream. By the time we got to the Basilica di San Francesco it was bedlam when we entered its lower chamber that is blanketed in pre-Renaissance frescos considered one of the most precious collections in all of Italy. The Irish friar acting as our tour guide kept warning us to not block the aisles or else the ushers would be onto us. We crammed ourselves into the available pews as our radio headsets kept cutting out. It felt a long way from Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures prayer and “Sister Moon” and “the stars” that “in Heaven Thou hast formed them, shining, precious, fair.”

Though I’ve had similarly conflicted arrivals in Santiago—especially when having to wear a face mask to go into the cathedral! Whether having to deal with crowds or dehumanizing face masks, no end of pilgrimage can ever match the buildup of expectations. While the point of pilgrimage is just as much about the journey and transformative experience on the way, as it is about reaching your destination. The good news is that later on in the day in Assisi, once the coach loads of visitors have left, or early in the morning before they arrive, if you wander the narrow empty streets that wind along and up through its different levels, you encounter a more contemplative and holy place. And like Santiago de Compostela, there is something about the stone walls of Assisi that is reassuring, even meaningful.

“Stones are old, but they were themselves created by geologic action over millions of years,” writes Eanes, noting how stones “were once alive” having been created by “pressure and heat of the earth, the living power of its core”. It leaves him pondering how the “energy of the earth [and] rocks” might be transferred, and how this might have been one of the reasons Francis sought out caves and spaces hidden in the landscape to better connect with “Sister Mother Earth”.

While walking toward Assisi I can’t deny I missed my yellow arrows, though the Assisi way markers had the same desired effect and, most of the time, kept me on the straight and narrow. Regardless stylistic differences, we all need way markers, whether yellow arrows or Taus.

“If it weren’t for this, many times we wouldn’t know where to go,” notes a leaflet I picked up during a Camino that describes both the tangible and intangible benefits of the Camino’s ubiquitous yellow arrows. “Whenever we find [the arrow] again we are reassured that we are on the right track. How did we feel when we can’t find the arrows? [Unnerved would be the inference based on my experience!] What a huge help that someone came before us to mark the way!”

Amid all the confusion and distractions that blight our societies of secular progressive modern liberalism, has there ever been such a need for clarity and guidance along the Way? But where are those societal yellow arrows when you need them—many seem to be getting scrubbed out, while too many politicians don’t appear willing to speak out about that, resulting in people becoming unmoored as our democracies creak under the strain.

“The West lives under a single political regime, managerial liberalism, that integrates the interests of commercial and bureaucratic elites,” says James Kalb in The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. “Liberal modernity claims to be based on freedom and equality, but it attempts to turn social life into an industrial process under detailed expert supervision and control.”

This, he argues, leads to disruptive consequences for “local, non-market and nonbureaucratic institutions” and for the “traditional identities and patterns of life” that go with them. In turn, this suppresses “the things people actually live by, their ability to live in accordance with nature and reason, and even their understanding of who they are.”

Saint Francis is famous for his embrace of the natural world. But he also shines as a blistering repudiation to the inauthenticity of today’s emerging social order based on vapid pronouncements about inclusiveness, equity and open-ended self-definition to achieve your “best life” and fulfillment.

“His life and example—and not, let it be stressed, anything specific he said or wrote—had an integrity that challenges our presumptions about what constitutes a good life, not to say a respectable approach to religion,” Spoto says. “His life bears witness to the fact that holiness is not by necessity a denial of one’s humanity, or something added on to it. Holiness may in fact be the deepest achievement of what is authentically human. Here we are very close to the Christian mystery of the Incarnation.”

At the same time, Francis’ radical poverty and humility stands entirely at odds with the pursuit of power and wealth by our elites—not to mention too many of the general population—who “believe they are the most enlightened and well-informed people who ever lived,” Kalb says. “That is why they feel entitled, in spite of today’s democratic rhetoric, to make their aspirations the standard for all mankind.”

Both Saint Francis and Saint James were rebels who went against the status quo of their times and the places where they lived. Similarly, going on a pilgrimage today to the shrines of these holy counter-cultural icons increasingly feels like an act of rebellion against secular modern society. The sorts of free-wheeling open conversations and debates you have on the pilgrim trail are nigh on impossible in many contemporary settings and encounters, especially if a conversation dares take on the shibboleths of the modern world, such as gay marriage, transgenderism and abortion.

Ideas and views that during normal daily life you might rarely get to share—both through lack of opportunity or unwritten censure—when on pilgrimage you find yourself suddenly having a chance to develop increasingly “alternative” views through your fellow pilgrims. In addition to proving stimulating and educational, these sorts of conversations are uplifting and galvanizing too. Through rubbing shoulders with your fellow pilgrims—on whichever route you are following—you realize you are not going it alone, despite the impression created by mainstream media echo chambers and the shrinking parameters and moral relativism that characterize the public square now. Every step you take on pilgrimage becomes a physical declaration in defense of your beliefs, what you stand for and the sort of person you hope to be.

“In the end, from those paths bathed in the tranquility of a tired sun, the civilized world, society with its fears, its tinpot grandiloquence, its electric thrills, its furies, [they all seem] nothing more than one long-drawn-out disaster,” Frédéric Gross writes in A Philosophy of Walking. “You feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell—name, age, profession, CV—it all seems absolutely derisory, miniscule, insubstantial.”

Pilgrimage serves as a physical act of rebellion against the “exhausting artificial passions that rule the social world,” as Gross puts it, as well as against the sedentary desk- and laptop-bound lives in which we only communicate with people through screens and message boxes. During pilgrimage you are existing in the manner you were designed for—by boldly striding out and existing in harmony with your surroundings—while encountering strangers in the flesh, both within your pilgrimage group and all along the route in chance encounters with other pilgrims, often from all over the world, and with strangers.

“We need real experiences more than ever,” says Eanes. “During the pandemic I heard repeatedly that ‘virtual’ i.e., online experiences, were our future. Forget the office, forget the school, go online. I don’t agree. We need actual experiences with others—physical experiences. We need physical activity and social engagement with each other. Western society is addicted to screens, with the resultant negative consequences.”

This physical element relates to a theory I’ve increasingly pondered on pilgrimage: morphic resonance. Proposed by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, morphic resonance is the idea that “memory is inherent in nature” and that “self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems.” It’s one of the reasons that holy places “resonate” for people, Sheldrake argues—when we enter a holy place, we are exposed to the same stimuli as those who have been there before and by participating in the same rituals practiced across space and time, we “come into resonance” with previous generations and their actions.

The theory has its critics, who call is pseudoscience, but it strikes me as doing a decent job of accounting for much of what I experienced during Caminos when entering churches, holy sites, and also when simply walking along the route. So often there has been this unexplainable “sense” of tapping into an energy flow, a sort of intangible forcefield that one bonds with. Eanes describes it as “the connections of landscape, history, and culture to the sacred” and “the ambiance of history”.

Morphic resonance—or whatever is this strange sense of synchronicity—is more keenly felt on the Spanish Camino, in my experience. That is probably attributable to the fact that many more pilgrims have walked the route across the centuries, contributing to a more powerful “resonance”. Indeed, I have read reviews of the Assisi route by pilgrims that described how despite the endless beautiful landscapes, eventually the pilgrimage began to pale due to the lack of other pilgrims and encounters. I can sympathize. When I did my first Camino, the farther I walked, the more important became other pilgrims I had befriended and crossed paths with. Where were they? I fretted after I hadn’t seen them for some time. Would our paths cross at the next town where I’d be spending the evening? Would I ever even see them again? (No, in many cases; a short sharp lesson in how all too often we take people for granted.) Increasingly my pilgrimage wasn’t about a destination, self-discovery, or even religious affirmation: it was simply about the other pilgrims. Only connect, as the English novelist E.M. Forster famously wrote. That said, if you need a break from the maddening crowd, Assisi might well be preferable, certainly compared to the Camino de Frances, the most popular and busy Camino route.

Either way, on both pilgrimages I’ve been struck by how the experience enables you to escape what Kalb calls the “spiritual slavishness” that characterizes so many of the bureaucratized organizations that either run our societies or which people have to work for. Following these holy trails also allows you to have a break from the relentless “distraction and dissipation” of modern pop culture, enabling you to re-engage with and turn your mind back to “the heights and depths of human experience—love, loyalty, family, friendship, enmity, loss, defeat, aging, and death”, in the words of Kalb.

He describes the “deeply unsatisfying” bland landscape bequeathed by the politically correct and increasingly incoherent public culture of today. One in which “we are to rely on therapy, fast-food, day care, pop culture, social services, employee benefits, social media, and consumer choice” as our anchors. The result, he says, is a desperate need for something to “make life larger, more open-ended, and above all less boring.” Walking to Santiago de Compostela or to Assisi, you get a sense of what that something might be or where it might come from.

“[Francis] remains before us, across the centuries, as an example of what God can do—which is primarily to astonish, to alter radically the way we live and move,” Spoto says. “In the dramatic passages of his own life, and the remarkable ways in which a genial but rather shallow young playboy became a model of service to the world, he revealed that God is present in time and history. In other words, he has such credibility because he demonstrated that we are at our best when we dare to allow God into our lives.”

By following in the steps of Saint Francis or Saint James, whether literally or more figuratively, we are drawn away from the mirage of daily life and its “important” and “vital” tasks toward that dimension where space, time and love escape their perceived boundaries and fold together into a consciousness and Godhead most of us can barely dare to consider or confront. Such rare moments are similar to what the saints experienced, when a dream, vision or even a child’s whisper—in the case of Saint Augustine—changed the course of a life, and with it, Spoto says, “changed the world and revealed the intersection of the timeless with time, of this world with another.”

Each of our lives is like a pilgrimage; in fact, that may be entirely what a life is when set against the eternal. And during that quest, so often we feel lost and frustrated when we can’t find the right way or the signs to reassure and help guide us. But if you keep moving, looking and opening your heart, there is a good chance you will spot them.

“Everywhere the way of the pilgrim is twofold, the exterior and the interior, the simultaneous movement of the feet and the soul through time as well as space,” Phil Cousineau says in The Art of Pilgrimage.