A SCHOLARLY MIRACLE.

Lourdes
Body and Spirit in the
Secular Age
Ruth Harris
Viking, $34.95, 474 pp.

On a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in 1897, a French priest asked a stretcher- bearer to fill his glass, not with fresh water, but with water from the pool filled with the pus, blood, and scabs of the sick pilgrims. The priest made the sign of the cross over the full glass, drank it to the lees, and said with a smile: "The water of the good Mother of Heaven is always delicious."

The scene gives new meaning to Huysmans's famous description of Lourdes as "a hemorrhage of bad taste," and yet by the time you're done with Ruth Harris's book, you sympathize with the priest. Better, you have a feel for what he felt.

"I began thinking about Lourdes over fifteen years ago, when writing another work on French medicine towards the end of the nineteenth century," Harris explains her fascination with the pilgrimage site. "As I examined Parisian physicians' confident assertions that a new scientific age had dawned and that religious belief was to be swept away like cobwebs from a musty closet, I wondered how it was that Lourdes was living through its 'golden age' at the very same moment."

Thus does Harris, an Oxford Don, open her book. A few lines later she confides that "the passionate Marianism and concrete monumentalism of the shrine was repugnant to me....Lourdes seemed to represent little more than kitsch for the Catholic masses." Her journey became what research should be (among other things), but so seldom is, a journey into the self. The result is a remarkable work that evokes the best of several literary genres: travel, journalism, hagiography, history, memoir-and even "self-help," for the ways this book forces you to think about "what can I do to get what she done got."

Harris was not converted in the classical sense. She remains a (Jewish) agnostic, but she possesses an open-mindedness, a compassion, and a sympathetic capacity to appreciate and limn the "faith experience" that puts one in the mind of Henry Adams's Mont Saint Michel and Chartres or William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Consider, thus: "The unending commentary on [Bernadette's] body in ecstasy was an attempt to articulate what some acknowledged could not be expressed through language. Her physical gestures and expressions seemed to draw on that aspect of shared culture that went beyond words....Her extraordinary manifestation of religious experience fitted into a form of communication and understanding that was physical rather than verbal; it was not what she said, but the nature of her trance, the movement of her hands, and the quality of her tears that persuaded....Like the suave odor of the uncorrupted bodies of saints, Bernadette's physicality convinced them as much, if not more, than the verbal messages that she relayed."

Or take Harris's comparison of Bernadette with her only rival as France's great "young-girl saint" of the nineteenth century, Terase de Lisieux: "In contrast, Bernadette did not talk about the spirituality of childishness, for her childhood was hard, poor, riddled with illness, and had nothing of the sentimental about it. But in presentation she was the eternal child-inarticulate, simple, naive, occasionally mischievous."

There is hardly a key topic in nineteenth-century religious, cultural, social, scientific, literary, intellectual, and political history to which Harris does not deal a fresh or commanding blow. For just one example, she attributes a main reason for "the calls of feminism" going unheeded by women in nineteenth-century France (a familiar lament), not to the familiar accusation that "the church sought to block women's aspirations," but rather precisely because the church was "so effective at channeling them in spiritual and practical directions outside the republican mainstream."

Harris is particularly strong at portraying religion's powerful presence behind the hostile secular Third Republic: "They labored at Lourdes to be like Mary and Jesus, to succor the dying and heal the sick through elaborate rituals of touch, consolation, and care. The secular republic lacked the emotional and historical resources to challenge the power of this vision as effectively as it wished, hence, perhaps, its hurried efforts to build new traditions and elevate alternative heroes...."

Her own judgments are immensely more nuanced and refined than those of traditional French historians: "Even if divine intervention is rejected as a possibility, reducing such occurrences to the pejorative notion of suggestion is to misconceive the process of healing, and to stay within the analytical trap that Zola and his fellow fin-de-siacle protagonists created. Understanding what took place requires an imaginative sympathy for the psychic and physical world that pilgrimage generated, for the way intense prayer, unabating pain, and extreme humility were bolstered by the support of helpers and believers convinced of the ubiquity of miracles at Lourdes."

Harris makes the reader focus on her subject(s) more than on her book, which is saying a great deal. You make a pilgrimage in reading Lourdes: Body and Soul in the Secular Age, and you forget you are riding in a first-class carriage. What Harris convinced me of is that the central figures she treats-from the naive and illiterate, but appealing and quite stubborn Bernadette Soubirous, to her parish priest, the good Abbe Peryramale, to the Catholic physicians who honestly and fairly ran the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, to, well, perhaps to the Blessed Virgin herself-are all interesting, unusual, and worthy dramatis personae who bespeak individuality and depth, who break through the molds in which they are invariably cast.

These lives also bespeak mystery, and make an honest person, agnostic or believing, think-and more than that, wonder. Their stories might well make you wish to visit Lourdes, if not as a pilgrim seeking a miracle, or a social anthropologist seeking to study a phenomenon, or a journalist angling to get "the story," then as a human being hoping to know oneself and the human condition a little better, and sensing that this cannot happen unless suffering and illness, marginalization and stigma, faith and the supernatural, are considered.

This book is a work of scholarship and sympathy that, if I may close as I opened, drinks very deeply of its subject without remotely giving a bad taste.

Steven Englund, a frequent contributor, lives in Paris where he writes for unaids.