Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

by Annette M. B. Meakin

Another remarkable traveller who started out from Galicia was a woman. “Jerome had been the leader,” says Montalembert, “of that permanent emigration which, during the last years of the fourth century, drew so many noble Romans and Christians of the West towards Palestine and Egypt.” “In proportion,” he adds, “as souls were more penetrated with the truths of the faith, and gave themselves to the practice of Christian virtues, they experienced an attraction more and more irresistible towards the countries which were at once the cradle of the Christian religion and of monastic life. Then were seen beginning those pilgrimages which ended in the Crusades.” The writer has given us an account of many Romans, both men and women, who undertook pilgrimages to Palestine in the fourth century, but the story of Etheria—the illustrious Spanish lady who travelled to the Holy Land from distant Galicia about 385 A.D.,[51] and who wrote a book about her journey, the original manuscript of which is still in existence, quite escaped his notice. Florez, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, believed that of this interesting lady no other record had been preserved than that which he found in the works of the Abbot Valerius, and which he published for the first time. Florez devoted several pages of his volume on Galicia to this plucky abbess, or nun, whichever she might be, because he felt sure that she was a native of that province. Long after his day the discovery of her own writings (in 1883), and the research of which she has since been the subject, has proved beyond all doubt that she was indeed a native of Galicia. Florez begins his account by a disquisition upon her name; he tells us that Morales spoke of her as Echeria, that Tamazo called her Eucheria, and that the Toledo manuscripts have her name as Egeria and Etheria. Florez had the same manuscript to go by as Morales had had two centuries earlier—that of the Cistercian Monastery of Carracedo in Bierzo, so he decided to adopt the name Echeria in writing of her. As, however, it is now agreed that her right name was Etheria, we will adopt that in preference.

A certain monk, Valerius, wrote a letter in Latin, in the second half of the seventh century, to the monks of the Bergidensis, telling them about the pilgrimage of Etheria, and holding her up to them as a model of fortitude and perseverance. He spoke of her as “the most blessed Etheria,” and related how, fired with religious enthusiasm, she had undertaken a perilous journey to the East, in order that she might see for herself the sacred land where her Saviour had lived and suffered for the redemption of the world. He told of the difficulties she had faced and the risks she had encountered in that long and fatiguing journey over sea and land, over river and mountain, to Palestine and Egypt. She felt that, like Abraham, she had received a call, and neither the weakness of her body nor the love of her home could hinder her from answering it, that is, from setting out on what, in those days, was, for a woman, an unheard-of journey. Etheria crossed seas and ascended mountains, no obstacle, no difficulty, no hardship could stop her till she reached at length that holy spot where Christ was born, suffered, and rose again. On her way Etheria visited the tombs of many martyrs and prayed beside them, often going considerably out of her way to do so. She carried with her as her guide both the Old and the New Testaments. To reach the places mentioned in the Bible, she boldly crossed the most dangerous deserts, and travelled by the most perilous roads; she visited many isolated monasteries, and conversed with the most inaccessible hermits in their cells.[52] She refreshed her soul, says Valerius, with the sweet teachings of these seraphic beings. She also studied with particular care the Book of Exodus, and followed the very road that the Children of Israel took when they set out for the Land of Promise. She reached at length the spot where Moses drew water from the rock, and there she refreshed herself with the Water of Life. She came to the desert, where the manna fell and where the foolish multitudes had sighed for the flesh-pots of Egypt, being weary of their celestial food; here she fed her spirit with the precious word of God. The pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which led the Israelites through the desert did not prevent them from remembering all that they had left behind them in Egypt. But Etheria had but one desire, to reach Mount Sinai. On arriving at the foot of that mountain, she mounted to its summit, and stood where Moses had stood to view the Promised Land, and then she fell upon her knees, offering up her heart in praise and fervent prayer. Thence she passed to Mount Tabor, whence Moses viewed the Promised Land, and the mountain on which Christ Himself had prayed.

Etheria took several years to accomplish this pilgrimage, and all the time she thought with longing of her far-off home. “It is marvellous,” cries Valerius, “how much she endured and how much she went through”; it is a story to confound the proud, a story to show how God chooses His weakest vessels, passing by the strong, to show what the human breast can endure when filled with the love of Christ. The world itself was the theatre of her undertaking; seas, rivers, and mountains were the steps she trod. “What,” he asks, “must have been the force of that love which so many waters failed to quench? with what firm hope did Etheria pass through all those different countries with their different races and different customs, and many of them barbarians! What must have been the faith that could have preserved her intrepid to the end!” “Usque in finem irrevocabili audacia procul dubio perpetravit.” This, according to Florez, was Etheria’s greatest triumph, and Valerius said in his day that, not desiring to have rest in this world, but rather to enter into eternity palm in hand, she even maltreated her own body that she might prepare her soul for heaven and make it spotless. She made herself “a pilgrim upon earth, that she might rest in heaven and stand with the choir of virgins round their glorious Queen.” Valerius does not say where she died, but he adds that she reached her house in safety. He related all this to the monks, that, at the thought of such heroic virtue on the part of one of the weaker sex, they might be ashamed of their own half-heartedness and shortcomings, and beware lest, at the coming of the Bridegroom, Etheria’s lamp might be found brightly trimmed and their own be extinguished for lack of oil.

Florez based his conjecture, as to Etheria having been a native of Galicia, on Valerius’s statement that she was a native of territory in the west bordering upon the Ocean. “Extremo occidui maris Oceani littore exorta.” But nearly a hundred years after the death of Florez, an Italian, M. Gamurrini,[53] made a very interesting discovery. He found in the year 1883, in an Arezzo manuscript, part of a long account of Etheria’s pilgrimage written by herself. Three years later he published it in book form under the title of Sanctae Silvae Acquitanae peregrinatio ad loca sancta. This manuscript, written in the second half of the fourth century, had till that moment remained unknown to any but a small circle of devotees to early Christian literature.

In 1888, M. Gamurrini published a second and more carefully prepared edition. A year later a translation of this appeared in Russian at St. Petersburg, accompanied by the Latin text. It was not till the year 1891, that the Palestine Pilgrims Tract Society published, in London, the original text, accompanied by an English version made by John H. Bernard, an introduction and notes. The English title was as follows, “The Pilgrimage of St. Silvia of Acquitaine to the Holy Places about 385 A.D.” In 1898 a learned edition was published at Vienna by Herr Paul Geyer.[54]

The manuscript of Arezzo is incomplete,—having neither beginning nor end, and it has no author’s name. Now the question that naturally arises in our minds is, How did M. Gamurrini know that the writer was Silvia of Acquitaine? What autobiographical details did the manuscript reveal? It certainly revealed that its author was a lady of distinction, and that she was a native of a western province of the Roman Empire, bordered by the ocean. After the discovery of the manuscript there was a great deal of discussion as to who could have been its author. Some thought she must be Silvia, sister of Rufinus; Kohler thought she was Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius;—it will be remembered that this emperor was born in Galicia; but now the date of the pilgrimage is known to have been much earlier than that of the birth of Theodosius, so that the pilgrim could not have been his daughter. In October 1903, Father Marius Férotin, a learned French monk of the Benedictine Order, published an article in the Revue des Questions Historiques, entitled “Le Véritable auteur de la Peregrinatio Silvae. La vierge Espagnole Etheria.”[55] This student says that the first sentence of the manuscript shows us the intrepid lady traveller already far from her native land—at the foot of Mount Sinai. “Dans un Latin vulgaire plein de simplicité, j’allais dire de bonhomie, mais qui ne manque pas de charme et où déborde à chaque page un saint enthusiasme pour les souvenirs bibliques.” She tells her readers that she is in haste to see everything. “Ego, ut satis curiosa” (satis is here used for valde), and the number of questions she asks prove that she has not exaggerated. When she came to where the city of Sodom once stood, she wrote: “The place where there was once an inscription about Lot’s wife was shown to us, which place we read of in the Scriptures. But, believe me, venerable ladies (the nuns of her convent in Galicia), the pillar itself is not visible, only the place is shown. The pillar is said to be covered up in the Dead Sea. We certainly saw the place, but we saw no pillar; I cannot deceive you about this matter. The bishop of the place, that is, of Segor, told us that it is now some years since the pillar was visible.”[56]

It is evident that it was Etheria’s own account of her journey which gave rise to Valerius’s letter to the monks. The date, as well as the departure and the various stages of the journey, all tally with those given by Valerius, and he even makes use at times of the identical expressions used by Etheria. As Father Férotin truly remarks, although history is known to repeat itself, it has never done so to such an extent as to give us two such women and two such journeys to Palestine! Greek names were rare in Spain in the fourth century. Etheria is the Greek equivalent for Céleste. The name of Etheria in its masculine form is found in Spain in the eighth century,—it was the name of a bishop—St. Etherius. “La liturgie wisegothique faisait grand usage de l’épéthète etheria.”[57] Férotin gives the whole of the Latin from the original manuscript, the Codex Escurialensis of Valerius’s letter to the monks, which ends with the exhortation: “Ideo fratres dilectissimi, cui non erubescimus, qui uribus corporis et integretate salutes consistimus, mulierem patriarchi Abrahe sanctum complesse exemplum, qui femineum fragile sexum,” etc., of which I have given Florez’s free translation above.

Férotin reminds his readers that the greater part of this interesting and important manuscript has yet to be discovered, but that we now know for certain the name, the native land, and the rank of this illustrious lady of Galicia, which a short time since were supposed to have been lost for ever. Father Férotin does not think, like Gamurrini, that she was an abbess, though the catalogue of Limoges gives her that title.

It has fallen, then, to the lot of a Frenchman to discover that the manuscript published by an Italian (Gamurrini) is the original from which the Spanish abbot Valerius drew the account of Etheria’s journey which he sent in his letter to the Bergidensian monks. But perhaps the most interesting point in connection with that discovery is the fact that in Lemberg another monk, of yet another nationality, made the same discovery at the very same time, and would have published it had not he accidentally learned that Férotin had anticipated him by a few days. Father Férotin tells us that while his article was in the press he received a letter from Father A. Lambert of Lemberg, dated 8th July 1903, in which the latter informed him that he too had made the same discovery, and had been on the point of publishing it when he saw that of Férotin announced in the Review in which it afterwards appeared; and he adds: “La découverte de la lettre de l’abbé Valerius ad monarchos Bergidenses m’avait amené sur l’origine de la Peregrinatio a une resultat identique, mais par une route differente.” “I found it,” he adds, “by noticing a sentence that occurs in three of the catalogues of the manuscripts of St. Martial, J. Limoges (thirteenth century). I found that mention was made of a journey made by the Abbess Etheria, Itinerarium Egeriae Abbatissae, the identification of which with that of the account above mentioned is beyond all doubt.” Father Férotin published the whole of the letter at the close of his article, that his readers might see for themselves how two persons quite unknown to one another had made the discovery simultaneously.

Etheria wrote, as we have seen, the story of her travels for the religious edification of the nuns of her convent. It was of quite a private nature, and this probably accounts for the fact that no other writer besides Valerius seems to have had his attention drawn to it.[58] The archives of Spain’s convents and churches teem with unread and unpublished manuscripts which await the student of the future. Among them may perhaps, some day, be discovered the lost part of Etheria’s Journey to Jerusalem, or possibly it may lie hidden in some dusty parchment roll at Florence, or in the Vatican.