Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Bishop of Thetford’s eye: Herman, De Mirac. S. Eadmundi, XXVI, pp. 62–4.

  13 Broodiness taken for insanity: William, Mirac. S. Thomae, II. 43, p. 204. Psychologically induced illness: on hypochondria, see examples given in Divine Healing (SW), pp. 33–45 (nos. 7–10, 12–17, 20, 26); and the comments of R. A. Hunter and I. Macalpine, ‘Valentine Greatraks’, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, lx (1956), pp. 361–8. On the physiological effects of shock see the important article by W. B. Cannon, ‘Voodoo death’, American Anthropologist, N. S. xliv (1942), pp. 169–81; H. Webster, Taboo: a sociological study, Stanford, 1942; C. Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale, Paris, 1958, pp. 183–204. The examples in the text are from Mirac. S. Benedicti, VIII. 37, pp. 339–40 (Waldo); Benedict, Mirac. S. Thomae, III. 63, pp. 167–8 (Luciana Torel); Philip, Mirac. S. Frideswidae, XCVII, p. 586. William, op. cit., IV. 4, pp. 315–16 (Nicholas of Dover).

  14 Sickness aggravated by stress: William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, V. 272, pp. 434–5. Cf. similar case in Miracles de Rocamadour, II. 18, p. 210. On sickness and stress, J. D. Frank, Persuasion and healing. A comparative study of psychotherapy, London, 1961, pp. 38–9.

  ‘Hope invited …’: Thomas of Monmouth, Mirac. S. Willelmi, VI. 16, p. 254.

  ‘Faith-healing’: in general, Frank, op. cit., pp. 45–53, 64–74; J. Gillin, ‘Magical fright’, Psychiatry, ii (1948), pp. 389–94. On its role in modern clinical medicine, L. Lasagna et al., ‘A study of the placebo response’, American Journal of Medicine, xvi (1954), pp. 770–9.

  Placebos (false relics): Caesarius, Dial. Mirac., VIII. 70, vol. ii, p. 140. Benedict, Mirac. S. Thomae, IV. 47, p. 217; but such deceptions did not always work, see William, Mirac. S. Thomae, V. 14, pp. 384–5.

  15 Relapses: Benedict, op. cit., II. 49, IV. 3, 21, pp. 95, 183, 199–200. William, op. cit., II. 56, VI. 72, pp. 219, 471. Mirac. S. Gilberts II. 15, p. 66 (Sempringham). William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, V. 270, pp. 429–31.

  Six factors: Divine healing (SW), pp. 10–13. See the valuable discussions of seventeenth-century miracles in Thomas, pp. 204–11, and M. Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, Paris, 1924, pp. 420–9.

  CHAPTER VI

  ORIGINS AND IDEALS

  The Steps of the Master

  It is a striking paradox that the most celebrated tomb visited by pilgrims in the middle ages was empty, the tomb, once prepared for Joseph of Arimathea, in which the dead Christ had lain for three days and then risen from the dead. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem had a longer history than any other, and it remained throughout in a class of its own. Time brought to the Holy Places most of the abuses which popular enthusiasm had already created in the west, but the Jerusalem pilgrimage was nonetheless consistently the most spiritual pilgrimage of the middle ages.

  For the first three centuries after the death of Christ there was very little to see in Jerusalem. Most of the city which Christ bad known was utterly destroyed by Titus in A.D. 70. Christian travellers were chiefly interested in its remarkable library which made it, by the end of the second century, a meeting place for the foremost scholars of the first age of Christian philosophy. Melito, bishop of Sardis (d. c. 190), visited Palestine in order to copy out extracts from the Old Testament. At the beginning of the third century, bishop Alexander greatly expanded the library, which was visited by Origen and Fermillian of Caesarea. It was in this library that Eusebius gathered the materials for his great History.

  Few mediaeval pilgrims to the Holy Land were scholars, and yet they shared with these early travellers a desire to recreate in their imagination the scenes of Christ’s ministry and passion. Origen declared that he had come to ‘walk in the footsteps of the Master’. At the close of the fourth century Paulinus of Nola wrote:

  ‘No other sentiment draws men to Jerusalem than the desire to see and touch the places where Christ was physically present, and to be able to say from our very own experience “we have gone into his tabernacle and adored in the very places where his feet have stood” (Ps. CXXXIL. 7)…. Theirs is a truly spiritual desire to see the places where Christ suffered, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven…. The manger of His birth, the river of His baptism, the garden of His betrayal, the palace of His condemnation, the column of His scourging, the thorns of His crowning, the wood of His crucifixion, the stone of His burial: all these things recall God’s former presence on earth and demonstrate the ancient basis of our modern beliefs.’

  The deeds of the Old Testament prophets and the events of Christ’s life, so remote from the minds of men, took on a thrilling immediacy when they were recited on the very soil which they had trodden. It was a common practice amongst the early pilgrims to read out aloud passages from the Scriptures in the places to which they related. ‘Etheria’, the remarkable Spanish lady whose travels at the end of the fourth century took her as far afield as Sinai and Edessa, had read not only the Scriptures but the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius and the Acts of the more important Christian martyrs. Coming to the cave of Moses in the side of Mount Sinai she and her party paused to read out the passage of Exodus (33.22): ‘… and it shall come to pass… that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock and cover thee with my hand while I pass by.’ With the Old Testament in her hand she was able to follow, as she thought, the exact route of the Israelites in their flight out of Egypt. At the shrine of St. Thecla near Seleucia she had the acta of the saint read to her. It was a feeling for the Holy Places compounded of imagination and romanticism, an attempt not merely to read the Scriptures but to relive them in her own actions.

  The services held at Jerusalem during Holy Week were designed to reinforce this feeling. On each day of the week the congregation met at the site of the events which had occurred on that day in the first Holy Week. Most of these sites were now covered by churches and the crowds moved from one to the other while the relevant passages of the Gospels were recited to them. Thus on the Wednesday they met in the Garden of Gethsemane, where a deacon read from the Gospel of St. Matthew the account of the betrayal. On Good Friday, the climax of the pilgrim’s journey, the relics of the Passion were displayed and the account of the crucifixion read to the crowd, together with passages from the Old Testament foretelling it. When Etheria was there in c. 382 ‘every one present was overwhelmed by emotion and the strongest men there could not contain their tears.’

  St. Jerome, who lived at Bethlehem for the last thirty-five years of his life, was the foremost exponent of this scholarly attitude to the Holy Places. He could not conceal his contempt for those pilgrims who supposed that their souls would benefit by the mere fact that their bodies were in Jerusalem. In a famous and often quoted letter Jerome observed that a pilgrim should ‘not merely live in Jerusalem but live a holy life there’. It was at Bethlehem that Jerome made his great translation of the Bible, and in pungent letters to admirers in the west he asserted that only in Palestine was a true understanding of the Scriptures to be had. To study the Bible anywhere else was like learning Greek at Lilibaeum or Latin in Sicily. ‘One may only truly understand the Holy Scriptures after looking upon Judaea with one’s own eyes.‘Jerome himself lyrically described the emotions of his protégée Paula when she visited the Holy Places for the first time:

  ‘She threw herself down in adoration before the cross as if she could see the Lord himself hanging from it. And when she entered the tomb, she kissed the stone which the angel had rolled away…. What tears she shed there, what sighs of grief, all Jerusalem knows…. After this she came to Bethlehem and entered the cave where the Saviour was born; and when she looked upon the inn, the stall, and the crib … she cried out in my hearing that with the eyes of her soul she could see the infant Christ wrapped in swaddling clothes and crying in the manger.’

  Paula’s pilgrimage was a constant effort of imagination, a mystical experience as intense in its own way as that of St. Francis at La Verna. But before long this mystical adoration of the Holy Places had crystallized into a naïve and literal view which attached the great
est importance to the physical survival of relics of the Passion. The practice of collecting soil from the Holy Land, already common in the time of St. Augustine, was a popular echo of the words of the psalmist, ‘we have adored in the places where his feet have stood.’ Augustine’s contemporary, Paulinus of Nola, commended it on the ground that ‘we must not ignore the simple and literal sense of this passage, even though it may contain a deeper one as well.’ Indeed, Paulinus believed that the footprints of Christ were physically preserved in the ground at the point whence He had ascended into Heaven ‘so that we may adore the imprint of the divine feet in the very dust trodden by the Lord, and then we may truly say that “we have adored in the place where his feet have stood.”’ At the end of the seventh century the Gallic traveller Arculf observed these footprints exactly as Paulinus had described them, and reported that pilgrims took pinches of dust from them as souvenirs of their visit.

  The veneration of the Holy Places as a living and visible commentary on the Bible did not, of course, die with the generation of St. Jerome, any more than did the tradition of meditation on the Passion which these early pilgrims had. inaugurated. Arculf, for example, was described by a contemporary as ‘learned in scripture’. At Bethany he was able to follow in the synoptic Gospels the very path of Christ and the apostles. In later times, the mendicant orders, who ultimately acquired control of the Holy Places, encouraged meditation on the Scriptures, and on the Passion in particular. A Franciscan novice who visited the Holy Land in the middle of the thirteenth century remembered how, reading his Bible in the Holy Places, he had felt as if he was witnessing with his own eyes the tortures inflicted on Christ. At the end of the fifteenth century the Dominican Felix Faber remarked that experienced Biblical exegetes were regularly confounded by the arguments of those who had been to the Holy Land.

  The growing emphasis on the humanity of Christ in the spiritual literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries found its reflection in the behaviour of pilgrims in the Holy Land. The pilgrimage of Richard of St.-Vanne to the Holy Land in 1026–7 followed a prolonged period of meditation on the Passion and death of Christ. What the Holy Places meant to this man is indicated by his actions in Jerusalem in Holy Week:

  ‘It is not for me’, his biographer wrote, ‘to describe the anguished tears which he shed when at last he reached those venerable places. When he saw the pillar of Pilate in the Praetorium he witnessed in his mind’s eye the binding and scourging of the Saviour. He thought of the spitting, the smiting, the mocking, and the crown of thorns. Then, on the place of Calvary, he passed through his mind an image of the Saviour crucified, pierced with a lance, reviled and mocked by all around him, crying out with a loud voice, and yielding up his spirit. And meditating on these scenes, he could no longer hold back his tears, and surrendered to the agony which he felt.’

  Richard’s experience was not uncommon. St. Silvinus, according to his ninth-century biographer, stood on the mount of Calvary and ‘although he could not see God with his bodily eyes he could nevertheless see Him with his spiritual eyes, standing in the very place where He had saved humanity from the power of Satan by the shedding of His precious blood.’ The twelfth-century ascetic Rayner Pisani used to pray so fervently on Mount Tabor that he would actually see Christ with Moses and Elias, exactly as Peter, James and John had once seen Him.

  These ascetics and visionaries saw themselves as reliving the life of Christ. They often referred to their pilgrimage as an imitatio Christi. By re-enacting in their own lives the sufferings of Christ they felt that they were performing an act of personal redemption just as Christ, by His death, had made possible the salvation of all men. On Maundy Thursday 1027, Richard of St.-Vannes knelt down in the square in front of the Holy Sepulchre, and washed the feet of the poor. Rayner of Pisa fasted for forty days on Mount Tabor in remembrance of Christ’s forty days in the desert. All pilgrims who could baptized themselves in the Jordan at the point where John the Baptist was believed to have baptized Christ. Some, like St. Bona of Pisa (d. 1207), spent several months following the exact path of Christ’s ministry, beginning at the Jordan and ending at the place of Calvary. Others, like Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, flagellated themselves before the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the latter half of the twelfth century it was common for pilgrims to have themselves flagellated at the very pillar preserved in the church of Mount Sion. One contemporary went so far as to describe Henry II’s visit to Canterbury in July 1174 as an imitatio Christi for, like Christ, he allowed himself to be beaten with scourges; ‘save that Christ did this for the remission of our sins whereas Henry did it for the remission of his own.’

  At its highest level, the pilgrim’s life in Jerusalem was conceived as a continuously repeated drama of the life of Christ. The rituals which he performed, more than a mere passion play, had something of the regenerative qualities of the celebration of the Eucharist. In this idea lies the distant origin of the modern liturgical practice of the Roman Catholic Church known as the ‘stations of the Cross’. Already in 1231 the exact route which Christ was believed to have followed from Pilate’s prison to Calvary was marked out in the streets of Jerusalem. Some seventy years later Ricoldo of Monte Croce ‘followed the path which Christ ascended when he carried the Cross’, which took him past the house of Pilate, the place where Simon of Cyrene was made to help him, and thence to the Golgotha chapel in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. The sire d’ Ang-lure followed the same route in 1395 with a few stations added, ‘a thing which every pilgrim who makes this journey can and ought to do.’ The journey of the ideal pilgrim could be presented, as Franco Sacchetti presented it at the beginning of the fourteenth century, as an elaborate allegory of the life of Christ from the Nativity to the Resurrection. The pilgrim’s entry into a roadside hospice was likened to the incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. The dangers of the route found their counterpart in the Passion of the Lord. The pilgrim may be betrayed and killed by his companions as Christ was betrayed by Judas and killed by the Jews. He may be betrayed and killed by his host, as Christ was welcomed into Jerusalem by those same Jews who later killed him. Robbers may waylay and despoil him just as the soldiers divided Christ’s belongings amongst themselves. It is a naïve picture which must have been offered to countless groups of pilgrims departing to the Holy Land. Yet it conceals one of the profoundest sentiments of an age which reduced all spiritual ideas to images. At a popular level men sought to associate themselves with the life of the Saviour, to express literally their conviction that he had saved them by his death. They wished to tear down the barrier of remoteness that separated a man of the thirteenth century from the events of the first. At the highest levels of Christian mysticism they sought, like St. Francis, to ‘enter into the mind and body of the crucified Christ and take on Christ’s sufferings in their own persons’.

  The Rejection of the World

  Contempt for the society which they left behind was at least as important to the followers of St. Jerome as their longing for the promised land. His entourage at Bethlehem saw in their pilgrimage an act of self-denial, of voluntary exile whose object was to take them away from Rome and thus from the ‘damnation to which the rest of the world is destined’. Equally negative were the motives of the younger Melania, who left Rome in 410 allowing the wind to take her ship where it would; it took her not to Palestine but to north Africa, where she passed seven years before setting eyes on the Holy Places. ‘Depart from the midst of Babylon’, Jerome urged a friend who had stayed behind in Rome, ‘for it is the house of Satan, the stronghold of iniquity and sin.’

  The desire to renounce civilization as contemporaries knew it was a powerful spiritual impulse of the late classical period. Born in the deserts of Egypt in the third century, it remained until the twelfth a strong element of Christian piety. Its inspiration in Jerome’s day was the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius. The decisive moment of Augustine’s ‘conversion’ had come when he had heard of two ordinary soldiers who had abandon
ed the world to live as hermits after reading the Life of St. Anthony. Jerome’s friend Marcella had had a similar experience in Rome. During his three years in Rome between 382 and 385 Jerome gathered round him a self-conscious group of ascetics, most of them women, who felt that the Christian society of the city had compromised with paganism, come to terms with the world and the flesh. They saw themselves as an elite corps, besieged on every side by flabby worldliness, forced by the ordinary necessities of life to descend to the level of those around them. The true spirit of Christianity they saw in the communities of hermits in the Egyptian desert, and it was these communities, as much as the Holy Places, that drew western pilgrims to the east. Paula, who visited Egypt in Jerome’s company in 386, ‘threw herself at the feet of these holy men and seemed to see the Lord himself in every one of them.’ The elder Melania spent five years in Egypt in the 370s before proceeding to Jerusalem. Etheria would not return home until she had visited the Egyptian monasteries, and the younger Melania returned to Egypt after only a few weeks in the Holy Land ‘in order to learn about the perfect life from her spiritual superiors, the desert hermits.’

  Pilgrimage in the early Church was very often motivated by a purely negative rejection of urban values. Jerome spoke of himself as ‘forsaking the bustling cities of Antioch and Constantinople so as to draw down upon myself the mercy of Christ in the solitude of the country.’ It was a process of self-exile, of social and physical isolation. To Jerome, a pilgrim was not a vulgar tourist, an audience for the lying guides who plied their trade in the Holy City. He was a monk. His place of exile did not matter; how he lived was more important than where, and even the sites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection were of no intrinsic spiritual value unless the pilgrim was ready to carry the cross of the Lord and be resurrected with him. St. Anthony, whom Jerome intensely admired, had never seen Jerusalem.