Dateline: Avignon
I couldn't resist spending a day in Avignon – another delay on my way to Spain. Perhaps I'm trying to emulate Persiles' "dilatada perigrinación"?
Avignon hosted the papacy of the catholic church for most of the 14th century. The only place besides rome, historically, to have done so for an extended period. Hence the great landmark in the center of Avignon is the Palais des Papes. And thus, an ice cream shop up the street couldn't resist claiming to be "la glacerie des papes."
At the end of the 14th century, as the black death had swept through europe, there occurred the great schism – when there were popes in both rome and in avignon, competing for the allegiance of bishops throughout catholic europe. A prefigurement of the reformation? Perhaps. A replay of the catharist heresies of the 13th century? Perhaps that, too, although historians would probably be uncomfortable with that one. But it can hardly be accidental that the city of Avignon, seat of popes and anti-popes in the 1300's, had been near the center of one of the most widespread popular "heretical" movements in all of medieval europe only a hundred years earlier. Catharism was a resurgence of arianist (anti-trinitarian) and even gnostic ideas of christianity, that occured throughout languedoc in the 1200's, and has also been linked to such church-sanctioned thinkers such as Master Eckhart, that dominican apogee of medieval mysticism.
I figured out today why I like visiting french churches. They're almost always empty! A polish, an italian, a mexican church, be it spectacular or provincial, is also a working religious instition. Allegedly, so are the french. But the French don't seem to make much use of their churches… at least not on week-day mornings. I vividly remember my visits to Montmartre or even ND de Paris, twenty years ago during my studies there, when I was only one of three or four tourists in the entire church on a cold january morning. One could sit and contemplate in utter, desolate solitude. No such solitude to be found in churches in Mexico, DF or Krakow or Firenze. Does the devotion of others really make me that uncomfortable? It's definitely easy to feel like an impostor as a tourist in some historic church that people are actually trying to use. But in France, I guess they're all impostors? Hmm…
It's nice being able to go into restaurants and order something in the local language successfully. I haven't had that experience up to this point on this trip.
Somewhat tired of restauranting, however. So I went into a supermarket (called "shopi" – how cute) and bought some salami, cheese, yoghurt, bread, dried fruit, etc., to have a picnic in my hotel room. A change of pace, haven't done that since Warszawa. Watching French reality television is so compelling, after all…