The Stations of the Cross: The Placelessness of Medieval Christian Piety (Studia Traditionis Theologiae) 9782503565385, 2503565387

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STUDIA TRADITIONIS THEOLOGIAE Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology

Theology continually engages with its past: the people, experience, Scriptures, liturgy, learning and customs of Christians. The past is preserved, rejected, modified; but the legacy steadily evolves as Christians are never indifferent to history. Even when engaging the future, theology looks backwards: the next generation’s training includes inheriting a canon of Scripture, doctrine, and controversy; while adapting the past is central in every confrontation with a modernity. This is the dynamic realm of tradition, and this series’ focus. Whether examining people, texts, or periods, its volumes are concerned with how the past evolved in the past, and the interplay of theology, culture, and tradition.

STUDIA TRADITIONIS THEOLOGIAE Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology 22 Series Editor: Thomas O’Loughlin, Professor of Historical Theology in the University of Nottingham

EDITORIAL BOARD

Director Prof. Thomas O’Loughlin Board Members Dr Andreas Andreopoulos, Dr Nicholas Baker-Brian, Dr Augustine Casiday, Dr Mary B. Cunningham, Dr Juliette Day, Dr Johannes Hoff, Dr Paul Middleton, Dr Simon Oliver, Prof. Andrew Prescott, Dr Patricia Rumsey, Dr Jonathan Wooding, Dr Holger Zellentin

THE STATIONS OF THE CROSS The Placelessness of Medieval Christian Piety

Sarah E. Lenzi

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Cover illustration: Tabula Peutingeriana © ÖNB Vienna: Cod. 324, Segm. VIII + IX © 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2016/0095/125 ISBN 978-2-503-56538-5 e-ISBN 978-2-503-56902-4 DOI 10.1484/M.STT-EB.5.111010 Printed on acid-free paper

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

Prologue: The First Step. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 PART I: A EUROPEAN BIRTH Laying the Groundwork. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passion Devotion: Monastic and Mendicant. . . . . . . . . . . . . Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control. . . .

7 7 10 16

East and West. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Way of the Cross in the East. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Stations of the Cross in the West. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . East Meets West: Bernardino Amico and Eventual Mirroring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 27 37 44

Conclusion: Thurston’s and Storme’s Theory of Imitation . . . . . . 49 PART II: RELIGIOUS TRAVEL The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peregrinatio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 53 54 57

A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 The Earliest Pilgrims. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Before the Crusades. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

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Table of Contents



The Crusades and the High Middle Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The Late Medieval Period. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 PART III: RELIGIOUS IMITATION Meditation as ‘Imitation’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Religious Imitation in the Medieval World: Passion Devotion to New Heights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Imagination and Imitation: The Memory’s Construction of Space. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Before the Mendicants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Franciscans and Dominicans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Broader Fourteenth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Way to the Stations: Pascha, Adrichomius and Horn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 136 140 150 154

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 PART IV: PIETY AND PLACE Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Stational Liturgy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Study: Liturgy, Meditation and Passion in a Savonarolan Tractate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

165 165 169 178

The Placelessness of Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Epilogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Appendix. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Ancient and Medieval Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Modern Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CSCO CCCM CCSL JSAH MGH PG PL PPTS SC

Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium Corpus Christianorum (Continuatio Medievalis) Corpus Christianorum (Series Latina) The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Monumenta Cermaniae Historica Patrologia Graeca Patrologia Latina Palestinian Pilgrims’ Text Society Sources Chrétiennes

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No project is completed in isolation and there are, thus, many offerings of gratitude to make. First thank yous must go to the professors at the University of Pennsylvania who helped nurture this project from its inception: my stalwart advisor, E. Ann Matter; the inimitable Anthea Butler; Robert Ousterhout under whose direction the project was born; and the encouraging Rita Copeland. The University of Pennsylvania itself is owed a thank you for supporting the initial work. I thank, too, Hebrew University for hosting the “Visual Constructs of Jerusalem” conference in November of 2010, at which I was able to present my work, to receive much desired feedback, and to encounter for the first time the series editor of STT. The process to move from dissertation to book is long (or was in this case!). Many were central in that transition: friend, colleague, and general sounding board, Prof. Crystal Hall; cousin and assistant extraordinaire, John; family that go above and beyond in their unwavering support, Aunt Ann and Uncle Robert; the STT series editor Thomas O’Loughlin, with whom I randomly, but fortuitously, shared dinner at that conference in Jerusalem; Brepols editor Bart Janssens, whose patience must surely be legendary; and the congregation I serve, UUCHV, whose gracious yearly gift of study leave afforded the time to undertake this reworking. A final and most heartfelt note of thanks goes to my family: the boys for their inspiration; and to my parents, Susanna and Louis. Without their support, encouragement, cajoling, and excellent grand-parenting there would be no book.

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PROLOGUE: THE FIRST STEP Prologue: The First Step

The streets of the center of Jerusalem seemed narrow and crowded, dusty and loud. Despite being raised in New York City, I found Jerusalem more chaotic and alive than perhaps anywhere else I have ever lived or visited. I had never traveled to the Middle East before, so everything was new, from the desert landscape to the men vociferously encouraging tourists into their market stalls. As I walked along the route of the Via Dolorosa with a friend, snapping pictures of the small circular markers with roman numerals that indicate the places where Jesus fell, where he spoke to his mother, where he told the weeping women of Jerusalem not to cry for him, I found myself fascinated by how these plaques simply exist in the landscape. Just as I spent years immune to the majesty of the Big Apple’s skyline, the inhabitants of the city seemed unmoved and unconcerned by the fact that ostensibly the son of God trod these streets on the way to his death. Additional words or numbers are painted on some of the doors or the archways of the locations, and in some cases the stone of the wall bearing the marker is visibly worn away from generations of religious journeyers touching the white rock in the hopes of experiencing a closeness to Christ and of feeling some small measure of what he must have felt. Though not a believing Christian, I had academic knowledge of the Via Dolorosa when I set out on my journey to Israel. I had already begun research on the ritual of the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem and in the rest of Christendom. My research had assured me that under the guidance of the Franciscans of the Holy Land I would be able to experience the official Way of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa. The Stations would be the same as those found in innumerable churches and homes, and in countless artistic representations ranging from kitschy-looking ceramic

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Prologue: The First Step

figurines to accordion-style pocket Station image lists to elegant and minimalist wooden carvings. But I knew that though these days walking the Way of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa and making the Way of the Cross ‘back home’ were similar in terms of the events marked and the prayers recited, they were not always so equivalent. For much of the history of its development, the Stations of the Cross bore little relationship to what was occurring on the dusty streets of the Holy Land and to claim otherwise was not only to ignore the evidence but also to demote an independent ritual to a secondary place within religious practice. In a work from 1996, Victor Turner and Edith Turner theorize pilgrimage as a liminal experience, not unlike the liminal rites of passage identified by Victor Turner in his earlier work, The Ritual Process.1 In this account of pilgrimage, they write that ‘if mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism’.2 This claim suggests, to me, that we would be hard-pressed to claim primacy for either religious behavior, that one cannot be said to be the imitation of the other, or inferior to it. They write: By visiting the sites believed to be the scenes of [Jesus’] life and teaching mission, the pilgrim in imagination relives those events… pilgrimage may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage… for the former, concreteness and historicity dominate, for the latter, a phased interior process leads to a goal beyond conceptualization.3

Religious travel to the Holy Land and internal meditation about that Land and about Christ’s time there possess different characteristics in the medieval period. Journeying to a distant land requires a physical exertion and the acceptance of a certain danger to one’s person. But more than that, it is constrained by the realities of the world: geography, topography, political turmoil and the multi-faith nature of the sites of the Holy Land conspire to deeply affect the experience of a religious traveler, limiting and directing the literal route they might take. By contrast, the perils of internal meditation are few and, though the world may intrude in the form of sounds and smells, the content of one’s meditation is constrained only by the imagination or whatever text is being used as the basis for the meditation. As Turner and Turner claim, ‘historicity’ and Turner (1969). Turner and Turner (1996), 5. 3 Turner and Turner (1996), 33–34. 1 2

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Prologue: The First Step

‘concreteness’, physicality, we might say, define the religious traveler’s experience, while those who choose to undertake meditation often find their experience much more loosely defined. Yet, despite these distinctions, many have claimed religious travel (what is frequently called pilgrimage) as the basis for the development of the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. Though the ritual itself is largely discussed only in devotional circles, those academic works that do exist attempt to explain it as an imitation of pilgrimage, implying not only that ‘pilgrimage’ is a singular religious act to be esteemed, but also that the medieval world in which the Stations developed would have somehow understood internal meditation as imitative of or substitutional for an external behavior. This book pulls apart these two devotional acts, religious travel and the Stations of the Cross, with the hope of establishing the Stations as an independent ritual that participates in a larger complex of medieval religious behaviors that sought to unite a believer with God. The effort to do so will be aided by an exploration of how the manipulation of time and space are achieved through ritual. Christian religious behavior seeks to have an impact on notions of time and space and understanding this helps us to better understand are both independent of pilgrimage and interconnected with the broader landscape of religious behavior in the Christian medieval world. A landscape filled with activities the purpose of which was to step outside of time and space in order to reach God. Part  I reviews the (all too few) historical accounts of the development of the Stations, reexamining the evidence and reaffirming the notion that this ritual develops in Europe, rather than in Jerusalem itself, despite the continuing popular misconception that Franciscans created the Way of the Cross during the Crusades. I close part I with an account of the dominant interpretation of the ritual’s development as imitative of ‘pilgrimage’, which has led to the ritual being identified as ‘spiritual pilgrimage’. Parts  II and III work in concert to dismantle this interpretation. In part II, I investigate the notion of ‘pilgrimage’ as a desired activity, questioning not only the meaning of the term peregrinatio in the medieval period but also the prevailing views about religious travel over the course of Christian history. A primary source analysis of travel texts follows, attempting to understand how travelers understood the efficacy of their own journeys. Part III engages in a similar questioning of terminology, in this case with the notion of imitation. Imitation worked differently in the medieval world than it does in today’s world of factory,

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Prologue: The First Step

fabrication and print, and this chapter looks at concepts of replication in architecture, in religious behavior, and in memory techniques. This part closes with an analysis of devotional material that illustrates the medieval commitment to love of, and imitation of, Christ and with a close reading of the two ‘pilgrimage’ manuals that are understood to form the basis for the modern Way of the Cross. Part IV offers a different way of reading this ritual and of accounting for its development. By examining the Stational liturgy of early Jerusalem and modern theories on how liturgy operates on concepts of time and space in the Christian religion, I offer a different way of contextualizing the Stations of the Cross, first in the west as a very private devotion and then imported to the east as an act of public witness, that places it along a spectrum of religious behavior rather than as an imitation of another. To help illustrate this spectrum, the interconnections of behaviors thereon, and the ultimate time-eclipsing goal of Christian rituals I turn to a tractate, heretofore unpublished in English, by the late fifteenth-century reformer Savonarola. His work elegantly demonstrates the medieval Christian desire to achieve closeness with God and Christ through the enacting of ritual and internal meditation. This part closes with a step into the broader question of how ritual can create an experience that exists outside of time and space, providing the participant with a means to transcend their everyday life. There are many roads yet to be trod as we walk toward a deeper understanding of ritual in Christian history. This book is but one stop along the way.

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PART I: A EUROPEAN BIRTH

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Introduction To this day, every Friday afternoon in Jerusalem Franciscan friars lead groups of tourists and devoted religious persons along the itinerary known to Christians as the Via Dolorosa in performance of a ritual variably called the Way of the Cross or the Stations of the Cross. In its current twenty-first century form, this west to east walk that reaches its climax inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher involves prescribed prayer, meditation, and physical movement. The current uniformity and organization of this practice is very young and its growth is in fact quite complex. And yet the long history of the ritual of the Stations of the Cross is often simplistically presented. An article on the Catholic News Agency website expresses a common view: ‘The devotion, highly recommended by the Church, was developed during the Crusades when the knights and pilgrims began to follow the route of Christ’s way to Calvary. This devotion spread throughout Europe and was promulgated by the Franciscan friars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’.1 This description implies that as the Franciscans took over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem, they helped to spread an already popular Jerusalem practice back to a receptive European audience. This is, in fact, inaccurate. What limited research exists on the topic finds that rather than having their expected origin in the 1 www.catholicnewsagency.com/resource.php?n=1336 (Retrieved October 7, 2010). It is not only websites that advocate this distorted view. Though acknowledging its development in the west, Noonan (2007) writes that the Stations were a ‘Franciscan practice’, 122. Similarly, Fra Leone (1943) argues in his devotional text that the Stations are a Franciscan invention, 5.

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Laying the Groundwork

Holy Land, the Stations developed, more or less, in Europe over many centuries and were later overlaid onto Jerusalem and the Franciscan tours occurring there. Additionally, though Franciscans were certainly devoted to the Passion and did in time come to aid the spread of this ritual, members of this mendicant order were not among the first practitioners in the west and indeed in the east they fought against the conflation of the European practice with the traveler’s experience in the east. 2 A single definitive work exists on the Stations of the Cross. Herbert Thurston (1856–1939), an English Jesuit, published a work entitled The Stations of the Cross in 1914.3 Thurston originally published his material in a series of essays in a Catholic journal called The Month which was printed from 1864–1900. Despite its later publication for a wider audience, Thurston’s work intended originally to speak at least in part to a specialized, devotional audience. In his preface, Herbert Thurston writes that ‘although its purpose is mainly historical, [this study] will not… be found so devoid of edification as to be unsuitable for Lenten reading’.4 Though Thurston writes with an historical tone and with the intention of clearing up misconceptions about the development of this ritual, he also writes with the religious commitment of a Jesuit and with the lingering Victorian sensibility of an early twentieth-century medievalist: ‘That devotional attitude of mind on the part of our forefathers which is illustrated in the following pages may be full of naiveté and is sometimes even grotesque in its extreme literalness and credulity, but there is nothing in it which need scandalize the most sensitive.’5 In 1973, the French Franciscan Albert Storme restated Thurston’s work in his volume titled The Way of the Cross: An Historical Sketch. 2 Although the use of the terms ‘east’ and ‘west’ is fraught with difficulty, for the sake of convenience, they will here be used to refer to Europe (west) and Jeursalem itself (east). 3 Many purely devotional treatises exist on the Stations that instruct on meditation or on the setting up of the Stations themselves, see for example Fra Leone (1943) and Sleutjes (1909). But one does find other devotional works with sections addressing the historical development of the ritual, such as those of Sant’Elia a Pianisi (1950); Sticca (1993), 93–126; de Zedelgem (1949), 45–142; Picard (1953), 2575–2606; Bihl (1908), 50–61; and Kramer (1957). These works all, however, take Thurston as their major source or follow very much in his footsteps in terms of presenting the development and interpreting it. 4 Thurston (1914), v. 5 Thurston (1914), preface v.

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Introduction

Albert Storme also cannot seem to help interjecting devotional commentary. His preface states that: This monograph is not strictly to be classed as spiritual reading. We cannot forget however, that the literary and archaeological in-

formation gathered here, relate to a spiritual exercise which still prompts the devotion of many Christians to love of the suffering Christ, and to personal reflection and contrition. It is firstly and mainly for them that we have written this book. They will be pleased to see that the devotion of the Stations of the Cross has its own badge of nobility. For others, neglect or ignorance may obscure its true significance; for them we hope that, rising above the inevitable question marks of history and archaeology, they may find there Christ looking at them. After all that is what counts, being otherwise important than the most learned of studies.6 Storme, too, then, sees in his academic or historical work some sort of spiritual benefit. He hopes that in reading his text even those who have doubts or who question the authenticity of the ritual, as he does through his historical investigation, will find Christ. There could not be a clearer declaration of the double-nature of this work as scholarly and devotional. Strange though it may seem, these two works seem to be the only large-scale investigations into the history of the Stations in the last century. Articles and texts that address the contemporary spiritual significance of the ritual abound, but works that claim to be scholarly studies of the development of, or theoretical interpretations of, the Way of the Cross are essentially non-existent.7 It seems that scholars have been content to leave the study of this ritual to believers and religious leaders, and even the works by Thurston and Storme, though clearly researched and well-evidenced, have devotional undertones. When searching for material on the Stations of the Cross, one thus finds an extensive bibliography of devotional literature and very few academic works; the Stations Storme (1976), 15–16. Of course there exist various recapitulations throughout the twentieth century, such as Picard’s entry on the Stations of the Cross in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité of 1953. There is a recent scholarly article by Kirkland-Ives (2009), 249–70 that will be explored further in the final chapter. Additionally, a brief piece appeared in 1989 in Mediaevalia by Sticca that addresses historical, spiritual and devotional aspects of the ritual, though he seems to take his information largely from those works that similarly synthesize Thurston and Storme. 6 7

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have continued to remain largely within the sphere of devotional authors and as such their history and its interpretation has not been revisited with the benefit of new theories and evidence. And yet academics of all stripes continue to take Thurston as their reference for this ritual because his work is in fact a history of the Stations, despite its religious overtones, and a quite convincing one at that. In this chapter I will recapitulate Thurston’s and Storme’s historical arguments, a recapitulation I believe necessary when we consider the Catholic News Agency website as evidence of how little headway historical inquiry has made in dispelling legends about the origins of the Stations. This book however, is not a quest for origins, but rather an exploration of the development of this ritual with an eye to better understanding the role of devotion, public and private, in the medieval period. In order to make room for the Stations to enlighten us about medieval pietistic practice and the ways it effects experiences of space and time, we need to review and dismantle the regnant interpretation of its development.

Passion Devotion: Monastic and Mendicant Storme and Thurston both rightly note that the life of Christ had long been central to Christian devotion and that a turn began near the year 1000, particularly visible in art: where once devotion had centered on the triumphal power of the resurrected Christ, it now increasingly was focused on the sufferings of the human Jesus.8 Though they devote limited space to considering early passion devotion, I will later argue that this trend and its increasingly physical aspects form an important basis Cousins (1987), 375–91, provides a good overview of this shift to devotion to the Passion. Southern (1963) contends in his biography of Anselm that it was this archbishop of Canterbury who paved the way for future forms of Passion devotion, including the imitatio Christi, 47. See also Fulton (2002), in particular chapter three, ‘Praying to the Crucified Christ’. Fulton argues that perhaps Anselm was not as singular in achieving this transition to adoring the crucified Christ as Southern stated. She writes that ‘the transformation accomplished by Anselm was as much a matter of emphasis as it was of novel understanding… but it was, in the end, irreversible. No longer would medieval Christians look upon the crucified body of their Lord and see primarily an oportunity to pray for help… pious Christians would learn to think of their relationship to Christ in terms of an obligation to praise not simply the Godman but the man who had died in payment for their sins’, 190. It is also interesting to consider how this turn toward devotion to Jesus the man overlapped with a growing concern about the Islamic control of the Holy Land, a situation with which Christians had been largely unconcerned for centuries, see Bowman (1992), 158. 8

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Passion Devotion: Monastic and Mendicant

for the development of the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. As such, a fleshing out of this change and its early incarnations becomes necessary. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the Cistercian monastic who preached the failed Second Crusade, was particularly devoted to the five wounds of Christ, stating that ‘[his] philosophy [is] to know Jesus and him crucified’.9 Bernard’s work On Loving God, speaks to the growing importance of passion devotion: That is, he who meditates on my death and, following my example, mortifies his members which belong to this earth, has eternal life; meaning, if you share in my sufferings, you will partake of my glory… the faithful soul sighs deeply for his presence, rests peacefully when thinking of him, and must glory in the degradation of the Cross until it is capable of contemplating the glory of God’s revealed face.10

For Bernard, a focus on the passion of Christ leads to a better understanding of the glory of God.  Bernard wants his fellow monastics to contemplate the sufferings, to meditate on the wounds and to desire the presence of Christ crucified. He proposes here a spiritual practice of contemplation that one conducts in the isolation and quiet of a monastic institution, an interesting contrast to the very public nature of Christ’s bloody crucifixion. Passion devotion as an act pursued in the seclusion of a monastic cell or the quiet of an abbey church would be shaken up with the conversion of Francis of Assisi to the religious life and the exportation of that life beyond the cloister walls. Thus what began as an increasing focus on the physical, human nature of Christ seems in time to have created more physical responses to God and more physical expressions of faith. From the first, Francis himself engaged in a radical imitatio Christi defined by poverty and itinerancy and he stressed these qualities in the rules he came to craft for his brethren. Rather than simply urging his followers to contemplate Christ’s life, ministry and especially death, Francis wanted them all to embody Christ in their style of living. No longer was meditation sufficient, but a holistic mirroring of Christ’s 9 Storme (1976), 80; Bestul (1996), 38. Bestul points in particular to Bernard’s Sermons 20 and 43 from Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs (Cistercian Fathers Series, 4,7,31,40), translated in Walsh and Edmonds (1971–1980), vol. 7, 223. 10 Bernard of Clairvaux, De Diligendo Deo, IV, 11–12, 119–54, translated in Treatises II: The Steps of Humility and Pride and On Loving God (Cistercian Fathers Series, 13), IV, 128–29; [‘On Loving God’ translated by Walton] (Kalamazoo, 1980), IV:11–12, 103–05.

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Laying the Groundwork

human life became the ideal. Francis’ biographies are filled with very physical incidents that stress Francis’ devotion to Christ as well as Francis’ own likeness to the incarnate Word. Both Thomas of Celano, Francis’ first biographer, and Bonaventure, the mid-thirteenth-century Minister General of the order who wrote what he hoped would become the only biography of the saint (it did become standard but other accounts survived), detail the story of the invention of the act of devotion we now call the crèche: Three years before he died St. Francis decided to celebrate the memory of the birth of the child Jesus at Greccio, with the greatest possible solemnity. He asked and obtained the permission of the pope for the ceremony, so that he could not be accused of being an innovator, and then he had a crib prepared, with hay and an ox and an ass. The friars were all invited and the people came in crowds. The forest re-echoed with their voices and the night was lit up with a multitude of bright lights, while the beautiful music of God’s praises added to the solemnity. The saint stood before the crib and his heart overflowed with tender compassion; he was bathed in tears but overcome with joy. The Mass was sung there and Francis who was a deacon, sang the gospel. A knight called John from Greccio, a pious and truthful man who had abandoned his profession in the world for the love of Christ and was a great friend of St. Francis, claimed that he saw a beautiful child asleep in the crib, and that St. Francis took it in his arms and seemed to wake it up.11

Francis’ devotion to Christ was such that he wanted to recreate the scene of Jesus’ birth, rather than simply meditate on it. His biographers paint a picture of a beautiful night lit by stars and filled with voices raised in praise of the events taking place in the forest. The story describes Francis as overcome with joy, tearful and filled with compassion as he stands before the crib, singing the Gospel. Bonaventure makes clear Francis’ devotion and emotion, his absolute commitment to the scene he has created. We read that a knight of spotless reputation, John of Greccio, witnessed the events and claimed that he saw the baby come alive as Francis raised him up. Francis’ special feeling for and special relationship with Christ resulted in a miracle. In Francis’ arms the baby Jesus came to life. 11 Bonaventure, Leg.  Maior  S. Francisci Assisiensis et eiusdem Legenda Minor (editio minor), 10, 7, 87; translated in Habig (1973), 710. Bonaventure makes clear that Francis asks the pope for permission to create the crib scene, an addition from Thomas of Celano. This addition reflects Bonaventure’s commitment to maintaining and espousing the order’s absolute orthodoxy.

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Passion Devotion: Monastic and Mendicant

Just as Christ had taken a human body, so too a baby appeared in the reenactment that Francis constructed. Francis embodied his devotion and this in turn engendered an actual miracle in the unexpected appearance of a living body. Later in his life, Francis’ devotion to the suffering and humanity of Christ led to his reception of the Stigmata after having a vision of a crucified seraph: Still, he was filled with happiness and he rejoiced very greatly because of the kind and gracious look with which he saw himself regarded by the seraph, whose beauty was beyond estimation; but the fact that the seraph was fixed to a cross and the sharpness of his suffering filled Francis with fear. And so he arose, if I may so speak, sorrowful and joyful, and joy and grief were in him alternately. Solicitously he thought what this vision could mean, and his soul was in great anxiety to find its meaning. And while he was thus unable to come to any understanding of it and the strangeness of the vision perplexed his heart, the marks of the nails began to appear in his hands and feet, just as he had seen them a little before in the crucified man above him.12

Once again we see Francis overcome with diverse emotions: happiness and fear. The beauty of the seraph inspires joy, but the fact of its crucifixion inspires fear. Francis’ double responses in the case of his created nativity resulted from his knowledge of Jesus’ birth, a cause for unbridled joy, and Christ’s death, a source of sorrow. Here, the intense response comes from the glory of the seraph and the terror of its having been crucified; we can imagine that Francis believed equally in the beauty of Christ’s mission and the horror of the sacrifice that was required of him. The crucifixion of the seraph is highlighted and the result of this visionary experience is that Francis himself, the master of imitatio Christi, receives the final evidence of this imitative life, the marks of the nails on his hands and feet, the blood from the slash of the lance through his side. Francis’ passion for the Passion led to his Stigmata, but it also set the tone for the entire Franciscan movement—devotion to Christ’s humiliation and wounds became a central characteristic that impacted not only subjects of art and of meditation, but that also altered modes of devotion. As one scholar of Franciscan history writes, ‘Franciscan piety Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima S. Francisci Assisiensis, 2, 3; translated in Habig (1973), 309. 12

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Laying the Groundwork

affected subject matter by suggesting new and more emotional themes of great importance.’13 We can also argue that the physical nature of Francis’ devotion had long-lasting effects on Christian piety. To understand the impact of Francis’ commitment to Christ’s life and suffering, and this stress on emotional responses to Jesus’ humanity, one need only look at later Franciscan figures like Bonaventure (d. 1274) and Angela of Foligno (d. 1309). Bonaventure rose to be Minister General of the order and represents a more contemplative strain, while Angela was merely a female tertiary upon whom some friars looked askance due to her proclivity for hysterical, very physical, fits. And yet, they clearly share the inheritance of Francis’ commitment to Christ’s humanity and divinity on the cross. The works authentically authored by Bonaventure often focus on the death and Resurrection of Christ.14 In the prologue to The Soul’s Journey into God he wrote that ‘there is no other path but through the burning love of the Crucified’, a love that ‘also so absorbed the soul of Francis that his spirit shone through his flesh when for two years before his death he carried in his body the sacred Stigmata of the passion’.15 Though this text does not continue to stress Christ and his crucifixion so much as it does God with whom the believer can unite through contemplation of his creation, the entirety of the work is predicated on a love for the crucified Christ. In Bonaventure’s Lignum Vitae, however, we see a more clearly expressed devotion to Christ’s Passion.16 Again, the prologue informs the reader that the only way to reach God is through Christ and a love for 13 Iriarte (1983), 165; Hellmann (1987), 31–50, provides a good look at Francis, Clare, Bonaventure, Thomas of Celano, Angela and then the Spiritual and Conventual movements at large. 14 Bestul (1996), 43. Bestul cites multiple editions of Bonaventure’s work, see his bibliography. It is something of a trite argument to claim emotionality for the Franciscans, often in contrast to what is presented as the more intellectual Dominican order. I certainly do not want to be reinforcing that simplistic dichotomy here or to be suggesting that Franciscans were only emotional. But it is undeniably the case that many Franciscan figures engaged in and touted emotional responses to Christ. 15 Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (Bonaventure Opera omnia, volume 5), 295–316, prologue:3, 295; translated in Cousins (1978), 54–55. The Itinerarium is often categorized as an intellectual text, over and against Bonaventure’s more emotional/devotional works. The Itinerarium, though representing in some sense the more intellectual of Franciscan writings, still clearly shows the later Franciscan interest in the Passion of Christ. 16 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae (Bonaventure Opera omnia, volume 7) 68–87; translated in Cousins (1978), 119–75.

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Passion Devotion: Monastic and Mendicant

his willingness to suffer. But Bonaventure’s section ‘On the mystery of his passion’, comprised of the fifth through eighth ‘fruits’, truly represents the Passion devotion of the time. This section describes the last events of Christ’s death. Each part of these four fruits provides a description or recapitulation of the story at hand, followed by a prayer. The summary is just that, a brief and technical recitation of events. The subsequent prayer, however, provides details designed to elicit deep emotion as when describing Mary’s reaction at the foot of the cross: But with the eye of your mind you saw that divine soul filled with the gall of every form of bitterness, now groaning in spirit, now quaking with fear, now wearied, now in agony, now in anxiety, now in confusion, now oppressed by sadness and sorrow partly because of his most sensitive response to bodily pain, partly because of his most fervent zeal for the divine honor taken away by sin.17

While there is no exhortation to physical expression of one’s devotion, this text certainly encourages a visceral and emotional response to Christ’s death. Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), who became a tertiary Franciscan upon the death of her entire family, describes fits and spasms at the mere thought of Christ’s Passion in her highly emotive and decidedly physical writings: I was considering the nails, which, I had heard it said, had driven a little bit of the flesh of his hands and feet into the wood. And I desired to see at least that small amount of Christ’s flesh which the nails had driven into the wood. And then such was my sorrow over the pain that Christ had endured that I could no longer stand on my feet. I bent over and sat down; I stretched out my arms on the ground and inclined my head on them. Then Christ showed me his throat and arms. And then my former sorrow was transformed into a joy so intense that I can say nothing about it.18

Angela, not unlike Francis, expresses both joy and sorrow in response to thoughts or visions of the crucified Christ and, for Angela, these emotions have physical repercussions: her sorrow was so great that she could 17 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae,Seventh Fruit: 28, 79; translated in Cousins (1978), 152–53. 18 Angela of Foligno, ‘Memoriale’, chapter 3, 192–94; translated in LaChance (1993), 145–46; Storme (1976), 80.

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Laying the Groundwork

no longer stand and had to prostrate herself; her happiness was so intense that she became speechless. Angela’s ‘passionate love affair with “the suffering God-man,” the crucified Christ’ defined her spiritual journey, being both the cause of her conversion and the center around which her visions and her guidance orbited.19 Angela of Foligno is a wonderful example of internal Passion devotion that results in a physical expression, with her prodigious meditations on Christ’s crucified body and her visionary experiences.20 While these trends had begun long before, Francis and his followers, the friars, along with the second and third orders, were able to spread this devotion beyond the monastic walls, beyond the halls of the learned. They brought a focus on Christ crucified to the burgeoning urban centers of Europe; they encouraged among the masses of Christendom to whom they preached affective responses of joy and sorrow to Christ’s sacrifice, with varying degrees of physicality used to express their devotion.

Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control Though neither Thurston nor Storme goes into detail about the Franciscan takeover of the holy sites of Jerusalem, this mendicant order has found itself central to misconceptions about the Stations of the Cross, perhaps owing to its later involvement in perpetuating and popularizing the practice. Given the Franciscan commitment to Christ’s life and death, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Franciscans claim a special relationship to the land in which Jesus walked and lived. And yet, the initial connections between the Franciscans and the Holy Land had more to do with missionizing and spreading the reach of the Franciscan movement than they did with venerating the holy sites. Francis himself attempted a trip to the east multiple times during his life, according to his biographers. After aborted trips in 1212 and 1213–14, he eventually met with success in 1219–20.21 But even before Francis completed his journey, LaChance (1993), 85. In her ‘Memoriale’ Angela experiences mystical unions with God as the result of God’s grace, drawn by her endless and devout meditation and prayer. Angela, ‘Memoriale’, chapter 9. 21 Golubovich (1906), 2. Golubovich provides a vast array of sources for Francis’ desire to missionize and his attempts to go to Syria. Volume 1 focuses on thirteenthcentury accounts of Francis’ movements. For English translations of many of the texts on Francis’ life found in Golubovich see Habig (1973). This volume includes all the important early sources for the life of the Francis and the early movement, including Thomas of Celano’s Life, Bonaventure’s Life, and the Legend of the Three Companions. 19

20

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Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control

other Franciscan brothers had traveled to Jerusalem. Brother Giles’ trip of 1215, during which that friar must have gained disciples, necessitated new organization and the establishment of authority over the growing group of Franciscans in the east implemented in 1217.22 During the general chapter meeting of the friars that year it became clear that what had once been a small band of brothers was now a growing movement. As a result, an expansion project was envisioned that resulted in Brother Elias, one of Francis’ close associates, being appointed Minister Provincial of Syria.23 Elias’ appointment was one of many that created and established provinces beyond the bounds of Italy, even beyond the bounds of what could rightly be called Christendom, changing the complexion of the order as the expansion began to raise anew questions about the order’s ownership of property.24 Thus before Francis visited the Holy Land, the chapter meeting of 1217 established a province there to serve the converts and to encourage further conversion to the Franciscan way of life, as well as to ensure that Francis’ mission was being executed properly. But in 1219, just a few years after Elias’ move, Francis announced his intention to travel to ‘preach the faith of Christ to the Saracens’.25 In a footnote to his general study of the order, John Moorman cites what he calls ‘five more or less contemporary accounts of St. Francis’ visit to the sultan’.26 These include those by the earliest biographers. Thomas of Celano writes: But he was not able to rest without following even more fervently the impulse of his soul. Accordingly, in the thirteenth year of his converGolubovich’s work, however, spans many volumes and contains within it Italian translations of Latin sources (as in the case of the biographies of Francis) and Arabic sources that relate to the Franciscan presence in the Holy Land. Unless otherwise noted, the English translations within this text are my own from Golubovich’s Italian. See also Lemmens (1925) for a treatment of the Franciscan relationship to the Holy Land. 22 Moorman (1968), 227. 23 Iriarte (1983), 136. 24 Moorman (1968), 31. A multitude of histories of the Franciscan order exist and invariably address the question of expansion and radical poverty. 25 Moorman (1968), 28–29. What Moorman includes in a footnote constitutes the whole of Golubovich’s volume 1 (1906), excerpting passages from the most famous official biographies, as well as from Jacques de Vitry, Ernoul, the Eracles, and Julian of Speyer. Golubovich (1906) also provides (85–104) a chronology of Francis’ trip east. Tolan (2009) also examines the earliest accounts in order to attempt a reconstruction of Francis’ journey east. 26 Moorman (1968), 28–29.

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Laying the Groundwork

sion he set out for Syria, at a time when great and severe battles were raging daily between the Christians and the pagans; he took with him a companion, and he did not fear to present himself before the sultan of the Saracens. But who can narrate with what great steadfastness of mind he stood before him, with what strength of spirit he spoke to him, with what eloquence and confidence he replied to those who insulted the Christian law?27

Thomas describes a stirring in Francis’ soul that could not be squelched. He tells his readers that Francis feared nothing in making his trip to Syria, and later in the text even goes on to suggest that Francis was seeking martyrdom. In Thomas’ version, Francis encounters a sultan who welcomes him honorably and offers lavish gifts to him. The sultan recognizes Francis’ worth in his refusal of these presents. The sultan listens to Francis’ words and is impressed, though he refuses to be converted and Francis does not achieve his much desired martyrdom. According to Thomas, and to Bonaventure though his version highlights the sultan’s weakness and lack of true religiosity, 28 Francis returns home having not completed his mission. Though nearly all the earliest sources of Francis’ life tell this story of the saint’s desire to convert the Muslims and perhaps to be martyred himself, no independent contemporary attestation exists for this trip and as a result many versions have been invented and reinvented over the centuries.29 It bears repeating, however, that almost all these early stories focus on the conversion and martyrdom aspects; none of the sources stress Francis’ desire to see the land that Jesus walked.30 None of the earliest hagiographers characterize this as a journey to view religious sites but rather a missionary trip. Only nearly one hundred years later, around the time of the establishment of Franciscan control of the holy sites, do stories begin to circulate that speak of Francis visiting the holy sites. Angelo of Clareno’s 1326 account declares that the sultan, after hearing Francis speak, ordered that Francis prolong his visit and that the Holy Sepulcher be made accessible to him without the normal fees 27 Thomas of Celano, Vita Prima, part 1, chapter 20, 61; translated in Habig (1973), 276. 28 Bonaventure, Leg. Maior, 9:8–9, 79–82. 29 Tolan (2009), 5. 30 This is clear from an examination of the sources excerpted in Golubovich. Tolan also, however, provides a chronologically constructed analysis of the sources that reveals that the earliest evidence deals only with conversion and martyrdom. See also Habig (1973).

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Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control

western visitors were made to pay.31 Angelo introduces, before any other biographer/hagiographer, this detail of religious touring. As we will see shortly, the introduction of the notion that Francis visited Christ’s tomb arose during the decades in which western access to and custody of the holy Christian sites was being negotiated by the king and queen of Naples. Tales of special privileges granted by the sultan to Francis increased and from this grew the somewhat mythical origins of the custodial rights of the Franciscans which came to take precedence over those of any other Latin Christian group.32 Though Francis’ trip was, by all early accounts, not one focused on the veneration of holy sites and did not result in any sort of special relationship to the holy sites themselves, one can easily see how over time this missionizing journey was written and rewritten to create a commitment to the protection of the right of western Christians to celebrate in the Holy Land, as well as to promote a Franciscan commitment to protecting the sites themselves.33 Although Francis brought Elias back with him, Brother Luke was left in Elias’ stead and in 1221 Benedict of Arezzo replaced Luke, with other friars following through the thirteenth century.34 The Franciscans attempted, with small foundations at Bethlehem, Nazareth, Tyre and Sidon, among other locations, to maintain a presence in the Holy Land in spite of the difficult, post-crusade political climate.35 With the fall of Acre in 1291 the Franciscans were driven out, causing them to take up residence in Cyprus. With this expulsion, which resulted in the massacre of fourteen friars and a group of Clarissans, the Franciscan hold was, at least temporarily, cut.36 Despite the political climate we still encounter throughout the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a series of Franciscan and Dominican friars who describe celebrating mass at various sites.37 But it is in the early fourteenth century, however, Tolan (2009), 147. Angelo of Clareno, Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum ordinis minorum translated in Burr and Daniel (2005), prologue: 391–95, 164–75. 32 Tolan (2009) gives a very clear analysis of this. The idea of Francis’ early dealings with the sultan came to be used as a weapon whenever the rights to the sites were contested. 33 Iriarte (1983), 136. 34 Moorman (1968), 227. 35 Moorman (1968), 228; Golubovich (1923), 8, describes how the Latins were ‘expelled from Palestine and Judea after the battle of Gaza (October 18 1244)’ but were allowed back in as is clear from late thirteenth-century pilgrimage texts. 36 Golubovich (1913) includes a useful chronology of Franciscan leadership and presence in the east during the thirteenth century on pages 412–23. 37 Golubovich (1923), 8. 31

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Laying the Groundwork

that we see the Franciscans gain again an official presence in parts of Syria, though not as yet at the Holy Sepulcher. In a letter dated 1318, Pope  John  XXII gives Dominicans the right to establish themselves in Syria, as long as they remained ‘trenta canne a volo d’uccello’ (thirty rods as the bird flies) from the Franciscan convents already established in the area.38 In 1322, King James II of Aragon petitions the Sultan to allow some religious to take control of the Holy Sepulcher in order to reopen it for visitation. In 1323 twelve Dominicans set off for Jerusalem but they return quickly to Spain, for reasons that to this day remain unknown.39 Sometime shortly after the Dominicans return to Europe, and certainly sometime before 1327, Franciscans seem to have been substituted for the Dominicans.40 In this way, the Friars Minor came to be in control of the celebrations conducted at the Latin altar at the Holy Sepulcher. But these allowances granted by the sultan in the 1320’s were only the beginning of a relatively quick take-over of the holy sites by the Franciscan order. Roger Garin, a friar minor from Aquitaine, played an instrumental role in securing Franciscan control of the sites. He arrived in the east in 1332 on invitation from the Minister General to engage in missionary activity. Some chronicles indicate that Garin came into possession of the Cenacle at this time, though the friars did not yet begin to live on 38 Golubovich (1919) summarizes this letter that allows the Dominicans to set up shop only at a distance from existing Franciscans convents, 197. Letter in Eubel (1898), 150, with the following summary: ‘Fratribus Praedicatoribus in terras infidelium proficiscentibus easdem gratias et privilegia concedit, quae concedet fratribus Minoribus die 23 oct. 1321, inter quae continetur facultas, domos et loca quaecunque in illis partibus de novo recipiendi receptaque transferendi, dummodo loca seu domus huiusmodi, quae recipient in civitatibus, castris et villis partium earumdem, in quibus domus seu loca fraturm ord. Min. extiterint, ab eisdem per spatium triginta cannarum mensurandarum per aerem distare noscuntur’. 39 Moorman (1968), 436; Golubovich (1919), 309. 40 Golubovich (1919), 309, indicates that no documentation exists explaining this substitution of Franciscans for Dominicans. No other histories of the order provide any more clarity on this issue. Golubovich does, however, print a letter from James II of Aragon addressed to the Sultan, dated 1327, that indicates that the friars minor were then ensconced at the Holy Sepulcher: ‘Encara, rey, con nos axi, con se cove, agam gran devocio en lo sant Sepulcre de Jhesu Christ e haiam entes per alcuns Christians frares Menors, qui son, pochs temps ha, venguts de Jherusalem… per ço nos pregam la vosra altea, ab aquella affeccio, que podem, que vos asenyaladament per esguart de nos vullats atorgar, que religiosos frares Menors puxen anar per vostres regnes e terres franchament, e que nols sia demanat trahut, peatge, ne dret algun', 313–14. A copy of the letter exists, Golubovich writes, in the Franciscan archive in Jerusalem and is seemingly unpublished elsewhere.

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Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control

Mount Sion.41 In May of 1335, Margaret from Sicily (a benefactress of the Franciscan movement who was running the pilgrim hospice beside the Holy Sepulcher) bought an estate on Mount Sion for herself and for some friars, namely Roger Garin and a friar John: Margaret, then, on behalf of herself and her delegates, bought from the aforementioned Qadi Sharif-eddin, administrator of the Public Treasury, and these he sold to her, in a single deed and in single agreement, the object that is legally recognized property of the Public Treasure, that is: all the parcel of land, empty, in decay, and presently devoid of construction, situated in the noble city of Jerusalem, and adjoining the church of Sion on the southern side.42

The document of sale also mentions the 'Êllîat Sahîun', another name for the Cenacle, indicating that the Upper Room was also part of this sale, making more permanent whatever license had earlier been given to Roger Garin.43 In a document that references the original sale of just a month before, one reads that Garin bought from Margaret a portion of the land: ‘… the cleric Roger… bought from Margaret… all the third part of the entire area, indivisible, and limited and qualified as above

Golubovich (1923) cites a chronicle, the Chronica 24 Generalium written c. 1360, as saying that the sultan of Egypt gave to Garin the Cenacle on Mount Sion, 9–10, 14. The chronicle reads: ‘de quibus frater a Rogerius Garini dictae Provinciae ad Terram Sanctam pergens, obtinuit a Soldano Aegypti locum scarum montis Sion, ubi fuit illud coenaculum magnum stratum in quo Coenam cum discipulis Dominius manducavit, et illud, ubi Spiritus Sanctus super Apostolos in die Pentecostes in igneis linguis descendit’, Chronica 24 Generalium, ed. Patribus Collegii S. Bonaventure (Florence, 1897), 506; translated in Muscat (2010), 684–85: 'Among these friars there was a brother Roger Guérin, who came from the aforementioned Province. He went to the Holy Land and obtained from the Sultan of Egypt the sacred place of mount Zion, where there is the large upper room, or Coenaculum, where the Lord ate His Supper with his disciples, and also the sacred place where the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles on the day of Pentecost under the form of flames of fire'. 42 Golubovich (1923), 13, 59–63. Golubovich begins on page 13 the story of Margaret of Sicily’s acquisition of land on Mount Sion, her subsequent sale of a parcel to Fra Roger Garin, and the continuing tales of Franciscan acquisition of power over the holy sites. He provides an Italian translation of the original Arabic bills of sale which he says are located in the ‘Archivio de’ Firmani del convento di S. Salvatore in Gerusalemme’, 59. 59–63; see also Hoade (1962), 571. The original Arabic texts are edited in Serie cronologica de’ Superiori di Terra Santa (1898), 131–51, while the documents themselves are available at the Archivio de’ Firmani in the Convent of San Salvatore in Jerusalem. 43 Golubovich (1923), 61. 41

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Laying the Groundwork

[in the earlier bill of sale]…’44 Two years later, in February of 1337, Friar Roger and two other Franciscans, Adolfo and Bartolommeo, purchased further lands on Mount Sion, abutting the north side of the church.45 Nearly every recounting of this story of land acquisition indicates that it was through the help of King Robert d’Anjou and Queen Sancia of Majorca, the sovereigns of Naples, that Friar Roger was able to make this purchase of additional land.46 Niccolò of Poggibonsi recalls in his account of his 1346 trip that on his arrival the houses in which the Friars Minor lived were just to the left of St. Saviour on Mount Sion and that the Upper Room in which ‘Christ had the holy supper with the apostles, on Maundy Thursday’ was located inside ‘the church held by the Friars Minor.’47 The Franciscans were thus living at Sion within ten years or so of the acquisition of land, and they treated this special location with care. Records explain how the site of Mount Sion was understood by Christians. The two-story site was believed to be the location of a variety of events: the first floor held the tomb of David (to which an indulgence attached) and that of Solomon, in addition to the chapel of St. Thomas and the site of Christ’s last interactions with his apostles. Upstairs was the site of the Last Supper, the Cenacle.48 The Franciscans appear to have done little building at the Holy Sepulcher in the early years,49 but for some time the regnant scholarly position was that the Cenacle had been redone in the mid-fourteenth century, which would place the restora Golubovich (1923), 63–64. Hoade (1962), 571; Golubovich (1923), 64–66. The friars purchase the land again from the administrator of the Public Treasure and they are accorded all the rights that ownership of such property conveyed. This firmans, or bill of sale, follows the same formulaic language as the two previous bills (64–66). Further documents in Golubovich offer insight into the increasing control of the friars on Mount Sion. 46 Moorman (1968), 436; Brunelli (1990), 251; Roncaglia (1950), 280. The aid of this royal couple is mentioned in the Papal Bulls of 1342 that will be discussed shortly. Golubovich also discusses the work of these two monarchs (1923), 39–51. 47 Niccolò of Poggibonsi, Libro d’Oltramare (Scelta di Curiosità inedite o rare dal secolo xiii al xix, dispensa clxxxii), chapter 61, 143–44; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 34. 48 Peters (1985), 421–24. 49 Biddle (1999), 100. Biddle writes that, despite all the work done by the crusaders themselves, for three centuries after the crusades little if anything was done to the Holy Sepulcher and Christ’s aedicule. This was, rather, a time of decay. In 1555, Boniface of Ragusa, a Franciscan, supposedly oversaw some reconstruction during his time as custos (101). In May of 1728 the Franciscans restored the Tomb Chamber and then following a fire of 1808 there was some rebuilding in 1809. 44 45

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tion under Franciscan control.50 The most recent scholarship, however, suggests that in fact the Cenacle was restored under the Augustinian canons in the late 1100s and that the Franciscans arrived on the scene with the Upper Room already resembling a western Romanesque chapel.51 This resonates more reasonably with the lack of building projects elsewhere. The Franciscans had come, it seems, not to make changes but rather to maintain and protect the sites as they existed. By 1350, then, the Friars Minor had a significant presence within the Holy Sepulcher, having arrived through the strange substitution for Dominicans, and had come to control Sion at large. This brought two of the most important Christian sites in Jerusalem into the sphere of Franciscan influence, an influence that was officially recognized and sanctioned by two papal bulls in 1342. Pope  Clement  VI issued these documents that acknowledged the aid of Robert and Sancia of Naples and placed under the control of the Guardian of Mount Sion the twelve Friars Minor who were sent to Jerusalem.52 The bulls unified and stabilized the Custodia della Terra Santa (the Custody of the Holy Land, the name for the collected regions protected by the Franciscans in and around Jerusalem) under the leadership of the Minister Provincial of the Holy Land.53 The sanction of the Pope’s bulls confirmed for western Christendom at large the Franciscan domination of the Holy Sepulcher and of the Cenacle that had begun just twenty years prior and that no doubt made sense given the pervasive understanding of Franciscans as perfecters of imitatio Christi. Interestingly, the two bulls do not mention Bethlehem or the Tomb of the Virgin, despite the presence of Franciscans celebrating mass at both these sites.54 Golubovich argues that the explicit discussion in the bulls of the Sultan’s concession of the Holy Sepulcher implies a similar concession at all the holy sites.55 While eventually the Franciscans do 50 Hoade (1962), 572 argues along with Vincent (1924), 474–77, and other early scholars for a dating of 1342. See also Enlart (1925), 318–20, who argues for a midthirteenth-century dating. 51 Folda (1995); Pringle (2007); Plomner (1982), 139–47; and Ousterhout (2004), 77–94, all contend, based on stylistic grounds and similarities between the Cenacle and contemporary western architecture, that that Cenacle was restored in the late 1100’s, under the Augustinian canons. 52 Brunelli (1990), 251–52; Golubovich (1923), 52–58. Golubovich provides the Latin text of the two bulls, too extensive to quote here, as well as an analysis. The Bulls Gratias agimus and Nuper carissimae are printed in Eubel (1904), 95–96. 53 Huber (1944), 781. 54 Golubovich (1923), 58. 55 Golubovich (1923), 58.

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Laying the Groundwork

indeed take control of other sites, and while perhaps these bulls contain an unspoken message, Golubovich’s own bias (like Storme he was a devout Franciscan) makes his interpretation slightly suspect: nothing other than the future control of these sites by the Franciscans suggests that the bulls were meant to apply to all the holy locations. An examination of the continually expanding influence of the friars reveals that a lack of documentation makes confirmation of his hypothesis very difficult indeed. In the subsequent decades the Franciscans continued to extend their control over holy sites. It seems that each acquisition likely had a similar track: at first, presence was established through use (the Franciscans were one among many groups conducting services in the various holy buildings), then control was furthered through negotiations aided by the rulers of Naples allowing for the establishment of actual residence and guardianship. One scholar believes, for example, that Franciscan insinuation into the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem was probably part of the larger program of negotiations that resulted in the custody of the Cenacle.56 Firm claims about the negotiations surrounding the Nativity are impossible to make, as documents are sorely lacking, but it seems that by 1347, the Franciscans had gained official control of Bethlehem.57 This also appears to have been the case with The Tomb of the Virgin Mary in the Valley of Jehosaphat, though this is based on pilgrimage accounts rather than bills of sale or firmans issued by the sultan.58 For many sites it is virtually impossible to be exact in dating the acquisition given the dearth of official documents and the frequent vagueness of pilgrim accounts. In terms of architectural alterations, there seems to have been little work done to the basilica of the Nativity in the early years, though in 1382 the Franciscans received permission from the local government to begin repairs and the fifteenth century saw money being raised in Europe and sent to Palestine for the purposes of restoring, among other things, the roof of the basilica.59 This restoration of the roof hardly represents a major overhaul. Rather it appears that, as with 56 Roncaglia (1950), 280. There are no extant definitive documents for the growth of the Franciscan presence in the Church of the Nativity. Roncaglia's work relies largely on a rereading of Niccolò of Poggibonsi and his reference to a particular Sultan. 57 Roncaglia (1984), 5. It is actually in Roncaglia’s chapter ‘The Sons of St. Francis’ (1950) that he explores the Franciscan take-over of Bethlehem. He states that they came in officially in 1347, and that in 1384 pilgrim accounts suggest that the Franciscans were beginning to dominate the other Christian groups celebrating in the basilica, 280–81. 58 Golubovich (1923), 33. 59 Roncaglia (1950), 282.

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Custodia della Terra Santa: Franciscans Gain Control

the other sites, the Franciscans took over the Augustinian convents that had been built during the crusades and attempted to preserve the buildings rather than building anew.60 Franciscans had by 1346 made their presence well-felt. Already in the mid-fourteenth century, Niccolò of Poggibonsi describes the Franciscan reign: 'for in Jerusalem, and in all places overseas: in Syria, in Israel, in Arabia, in Egypt, there are no religious, neither secular clergy nor monks, save the Friars Minor, and they are called the Latin Christians.'61 Yet despite Niccolò's claim that there are no others except the Friars Minor, this dominance did not preclude the existence of Christians of other stripes traveling through the land or celebrating at the various holy sites. At the Holy Sepulcher, then as today, different Christian sects conducted masses side by side; the Franciscans had control of the Latin section of the basilica.62 Niccolò writes of the presence of twenty different altars each administered by different groups of Christians: 'each generation of Christians has there its own altar… The Latins, namely the Friars Minor, celebrate at the altar of Saint Mary Magdalen which belongs to us, the Latin Christians.'63 In addition to being the celebrants at the Latin altar, though, the Franciscans regulated pilgrim trips through the larger structure of the Holy Sepulcher. Niccolò describes proceeding around the church 'in the order in which the indulgences are, which are within the Church, we shall describe the places as we go and shall not retrace our steps.'64 He then relates the sites his group visited inside the church: the place of anointing and embalming, the Anastasis rotunda, the holy column, the site of the appearance to Mary Magdalene, the place of imprisonment, Calvary, the chapel of Golgotha, etc. They were regulated in this path by the Friars Minor, seemingly not free to wander at will and following the path of the indulgences that had been assigned to each holy place within the Holy Sepulcher, rather than an order prescribed by narrative chronology.65 This Franciscan control of the pilgrim Pringle (1993), 138–39. Niccolò of Poggibonsi, Libro, chapter 32, 95–96; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 22. 62 Jeffery (1919), 30. 63 Niccolò of Poggibonsi, Libro, chapter 32, 94; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 22. 64 Niccolò of Poggibonsi, Libro, chapter 15, 53; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 13. 65 Niccolò of Poggibonsi, Libro, chapters 16–33, 54–99. See also Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 13–24. 60 61

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Laying the Groundwork

experience in the Holy Sepulcher continued and over a hundred years later, in his 1492 account of his pilgrimage, Bernardino di Nali still describes how the Guardian of Mount Sion met and organized his cohort of pilgrims inside the Holy Sepulcher, and how the friars took them around the sites within the Holy Sepulcher, explaining the various locations in numerous languages.66 What had begun as a delicate insinuation of western religious into the Holy Sepulcher for the purposes of reopening pilgrimage resulted in the guardianship of numerous holy sites by the Order of the Friars Minor. Despite some troublesome times (such as the 1360’s when Peter I of Cyprus launched a failed crusade), the Franciscans have managed to retain control of many holy monuments in relative peace and they remain the dominant Latin presence at many sites to this day. In time, the Franciscans came to control, in addition to the four above-mentioned sites acquired by 1400, many other sites ‘associated with the life of Christ, of the apostles, of John the Evangelist and of the Virgin.’67 These other sites fell into the hands of the Friars Minor with, as the story goes, little or no resistance from authorities either in the east or west.68 This role as protectors no doubt has strengthened the belief in the tales of Francis’ own trip to the east as well as confirmed the Franciscan conviction that part of their mission is in fact to protect and to preserve the sacred monuments. One can only imagine, then, how much this role, along with the committed imitatio Christi of the order, has contributed to the misconception that Franciscans created and promulgated the Stations of the Cross. But as we will see in the following summary of Thurston and Storme’s works, this theory finds no basis in fact, and finds its only truth in the connection between this ritual and broader trends in Passion devotion, of which the Franciscans certainly represent a strong strain.

Bernardino di Nali, La Peregrinazione a Gerusalemme di Bernardino di Nali (1492), Italian translation in Corbo (1951), 213–55, chap. 20, 226; English translations my own: ‘and we all entered into a chapel of the Glorious Virgin Mary cared for by our brothers of Saint Francis. In this chapel, then, the aforementioned Guardian of Mount Sion ordered a visit of all the holy mysteries that are in said church, with the procession of all the religious friars and the pilgrims… with highest diligence by the religious of Mount Sion these things were shown to us and described in Italian, French, and German…’ Bernardino’s account shows that the Chapel of the Virgin Mary had now come under Franciscan control as well. 67 Moorman (1968), 437; Roncaglia (1984), 7. 68 Collin (1951), 81. 66

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EAST AND WEST

The Way of the Cross in the East With this mid-fourteenth-century Franciscan domination of the holy sites in mind, we can turn to the development of the practice of the Stations of the Cross as presented by Thurston and Storme. In its current (and official) incarnation, the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem has fourteen stations, beginning with Jesus condemned (Mt 27:15–26; Mk 15:6– 15, Lk 23:17–25).1 The rest follow: Jesus receives the cross (Mt 27:27–31, Mk 15:16–20), the first fall, the meeting with Mary, Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross (Mt 27:32, Mk 15:21, Lk 23:26), a woman wipes Jesus’ face, the second fall, Jesus speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem (Lk 23:27–31), the third fall, Jesus is stripped (Mt 27:35, Mk 15:24, Lk 23:34), the Crucifixion (Mt 27:37–44, Mk 15:25–32, Lk 33–43), Jesus dies (Mt 27:45–56, Mk 15:33–41, Lk 23:44–49), the deposition or taking down from the cross (Mt 27:57–59, Mk 15:42–46, Lk 23:50–53), and the entombment (Mt 27:60, Mk 15:46, Lk 23:53–54). The Gospels mention all but five of these incidents: the meeting with Mary, the wiping of Jesus’ face, and the three falls are apocryphal, though passages from other sections of the Bible are often linked to these incidents.2 Each Friday at 3:00 p.m., contemporary Franciscans, ‘with the faithful, carry out this All English Bible passages come from the New Revised Standard Version. Storme (1976), 19. Modern sources link Old Testament passages (e.g. from Lamentations or Isaiah) to the various apocryphal stations. For an example of this attempt to make biblical the apocryphal stations, see the Good Friday liturgy produced in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, available online at www.vatican.va. 1 2

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East and West

devout exercise’ which leads from the Praetorium to Calvary .3 These fourteen stations are canonized in the east in the eighteenth century and come to be marked in their present locations in the Jerusalem landscape in the nineteenth century, and this only after a long history of development in the east and the west. In a certain sense, Thurston holds, the story of the via dolorosa in Jerusalem begins with the earliest pilgrim accounts of travel in the Holy Land. The desire to mark the holy sites of the life of Christ and his contemporaries is clear: processions through Jerusalem and the importance of sites from Christ’s life are described in early accounts such as that of Egeria from the fourth century, and yet these pilgrims certainly do not describe their experience as uniquely marking sites of the Passion in the chronological order established by the Gospels.4 Egeria, one of the earliest known religious travelers, describes a procession, part of Holy Week, that leads ‘from Gethsemane to the gate, and from there through the whole city to the cross’.5 This procession, however, does not appear to involve any special marking of the sites along the route. Upon reaching the cross her group does listen to a reading of the Gospel, and at night, after hours of prayers and scriptural readings, everyone processes to the column of the flagellation.6 At this point, the bishop presides over a devotional ritual in which people come forward to bow to and kiss the wood of the true cross. And so, while Egeria certainly describes Stational liturgical rites (see chapter four), at no point does she use the terminology we have come to associate with the ritual of the Stations of the Cross—via dolorosa, via crucis, stationes. Also, while she does display a desire to see the places Christ lived, her account bears little if any resemblance to the meditative and prayer-filled walk the Franciscans of the Holy Land perform weekly to this day. One must look at pilgrim accounts from centuries later to begin to see conscious mentions of the street walked by Jesus. Storme and Thurston jump from Egeria’s fourthcentury account to the thirteenth century, eschewing nearly a millennium of pilgrimage texts. We will return to these in chapter two, but Hoade (1962), 178. Storme (1976), 64. 5 Egeria, Itinerarium Egeriae, chapter 36, 79–80; translated in Wilkinson (1999), chapter 36, 154. The Jerusalem Egeria encountered differed greatly from that of the later medieval period, not the least of which differences was the configuration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the sites contained therein. 6 Egeria, Itinerarium, chapter 37, 80–82; translated in Wilkinson (1999), ch. 37, 156. 3 4

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The Way of the Cross in the East

for now let it suffice to say that nowhere in these texts from before the thirteenth century is reference made to ‘stationes’, a ‘via crucis’, or even, really, to the sanctity of the street that Christ walked. Thurston and Storme recount that only with Ernoul’s La Citez de Iherusalem do we begin to see a consciousness of the path of Christ’s final walk, in addition to a consciousness of the sites themselves. This text, written sometime around 1231, speaks in terms that acknowledge that significance of the location: ‘At the edge of this way was a gate, leading toward the Temple, that was called the Sorrowful Gate. Jesus Christ passed through it when he was sent to Mount Calvary to be crucified; for this it is called the Sorrowful Gate.’ 7 And yet despite referring to this door which leads from the Temple Mount to the Mount of Calvary as sorrowful, Ernoul’s text quickly switches to discussing what he calls the Rue de Iosaffas. Interestingly, Ernoul writes his account after Jerusalem has already returned to Islamic hands. Wilkinson argues that this name, the Sorrowful Gate, must therefore have existed before 1187 and the expulsion of the Knights Templar.8 And yet, no other evidence exists suggesting that the gate from the Temple Mount was known this way before Ernoul’s trip. Ernoul also notes, in the following chapter, however, a structure marking a site where Christ rested while carrying the cross: ‘… that one calls the Repose. Here it is said that Jesus Christ rested when he was sent to be crucified.’9 And so although we see a Sorrowful Gate, we see no Sorrowful Way. We have rather the beginnings of recognition that the gates and roads themselves might be holy or at least marked as special. But it is worth noting, additionally, that Ernoul’s discussion of the site of repose and of the sorrowful gate are far removed from his discussion of the Holy Sepulcher, suggesting a text constrained by topography rather than chronology. For centuries, then, pilgrim texts describe walking about Jerusalem with little concern for following Christ’s path to his crucifixion and with next to no concern for proceeding along the roads in an order that mimics biblical chronology. Riccoldus de Monte Crucis, a Dominican friar who made his pilgrimage in 1294, may have been the first Christian pilgrim to record entering Jerusalem through the eastern gate and walking to the Holy Sepulcher along what he refers to as ‘the way by 7 Ernoul, L'estat de la cité de Iherusalem, 29–52, chap. 21, 48. Translations my own. 8 Wilkinson (1988), 76. 9 Ernoul, L’estat, chapter 22, 49.

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East and West

which Christ ascended, bearing his cross’.10 Though Riccoldus does indeed enter the city through the proper gate for proceeding directly along what will become the via dolorosa, this seems to have occurred for purely practical reasons. After visiting Galilee and Nazareth, Riccoldus and his group attempt to enter the city, arriving from the northwest after touring Ramatha/Mount Ephraim and the house of Samuel.11 Arriving, as they were from the northwest, it is unlikely that Riccoldus and his group initially attempted to enter the city via the eastern gate. Though he provides no detail as to the entry point, we can assume that this group of pilgrims made their way either to the western Jaffa Gate or perhaps to what was then known as St. Stephen’s Gate (the present-day Damascus Gate) on the north side of the city. But, they were thwarted in their attempts to proceed through to the Holy Sepulcher upon arriving at Jerusalem: ‘we could not enter because the Saracens were preventing it. From there we ascended Mount Sion, the city conquered and rebuilt by David, we came to the tower of David, built of large square stones.’12 As a result of being barred entry, Riccoldus’ group turns instead to Mount Sion. From there they proceed east to the Valley of Jehosaphat, Bethlehem, Jericho, the Jordan, and the Mount of Olives. Only after this reorganization of their itinerary does the group finally make its approach back to Jerusalem, this time from the east from the tomb of the Virgin. As such, they come through what Riccoldus calls the Gate of the Sabbath, another name for what is now St.  Stephen’s Gate: ‘We entered Jerusalem though the Gate of the Sabbath and we saw the church of Saint Anne, mother of our Holy Lady.’13 Riccoldus’ group seems originally to have intended to proceed into the city from a different direction. And when they are forced as a result, we might say, of the political climate to redirect their footsteps, it is clearly not in order to trace the sites specific to Christ’s Passion. Riccoldus does indeed mention many sites along the route, the first being where Christ speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem, an event that would eventually come to be one of the fourteen Stations: ‘Ascending thus along the way 10 Riccoldus de Monte Crucis, Pérégrination en Terre Sainte et au Proche Orient, Texte Latin et traduction/Lettres sur la chute de Saint-Jean d'Acre Traduction, translated René Kappler (Paris, 1997), 66. All English translations for Riccoldus’ text are my own. 11 Wilkinson (2002), 341. Ramatha was the understood site of Samuel’s birth in the early pilgrimage texts and although during the Latin Kingdom period it seems to have been referred to as Shiloh, here again in Riccoldus the earlier name is in use. 12 Riccoldus de Monte Crucis, Liber Peregrinaciones, 48. 13 Riccoldus de Monte Crucis, Liber Peregrinaciones, 64.

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The Way of the Cross in the East

by which Christ ascended burdened under the cross, we came upon the place where Christ said to the daughters of Jerusalem, Do not weep over me.’14 But despite these mentions, Riccoldus’ work shows little concern for what would eventually be considered the particular importance of the via crucis. We find, similarly, that other journeys through Jerusalem proceed along curious paths. In the mid-fourteenth century Niccolò of Poggibonsi follows a strange route through the Holy Land, a route whose lack of commitment to chronological order is mirrored by the highly regulated, but chronologically incorrect, trip his group takes through the Holy Sepulcher, described above. Late-fourteenth-century accounts also seem to indicate a prescribed and highly structured route, but one that was distinctly not the chronological order set by the Gospels: the friars would lead pilgrims from Calvary out to other sites in the city.15 This might have been the result of political and safety concerns as the inverted route allowed the pilgrims and their guides not only to move quickly out of the city but to see everything along the way without having to double-back.16 This meant, however, that pilgrims visited whatever sacred sites happened to be along their route no matter their placement in the narrative of Christ’s life or the lives of his mother and apostles. This resulted in a somewhat frantic, often simultaneous absorption of numerous unrelated sites. This confused order and insistence on seeing every possible sacred site, without exception or separation, continues for some time. The late-fifteenth-century pilgrim accounts of Pietro Casola (1494) and Bernardino di Nali (1492) each describe visiting the holy sites in an order that does not resonate at all with that established by the Gospels. Bernardino di Nali goes from Mount Sion, to the Holy Sepulcher, to Bethlehem, back to the Holy Sepulcher to spend a second night there, out to various other sites including Bethesda and the Chapel of St. Stephen, then back to the Holy Sepulcher for a third night, etc. His trip is scattered and seems to be planned around what was permitted to Riccoldus de Monte Crucis, Liber Peregrinaciones, 66. Thurston (1914), 22; Brefeld (1994), 30 writes: ‘Summarizing it may be said that the picture one gets of late mediaeval pilgrimage with its routine treatment of great numbers of pilgrims who seem to have been reduced to obedience, who were, if at all possible, addressed in a language they could understand and who were rushed through the country helps to create the image that pilgrimage had developed into quite a business with the Franciscan friars almost like modern professional tour guides pragmatically approaching their wards, wards that had been delivered into their custody by the equally well-organized Venetians.’ 16 Storme (1976), 94. 14 15

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East and West

be viewed: the Holy Sepulcher was open to the pilgrims at night and so they spent their days visiting other sites.17 Pietro Casola describes coming in through the present-day St. Stephen’s Gate, as did Riccoldus nearly two centuries before, but he too makes no mention of following an intentional path of the Passion. Rather, his group enters through the gate, sees various sites including ‘the Mosque which stands on the site of the temple of Solomon’ and ‘the house of Pilate’ and then does not go to the Holy Sepulcher as ‘an altercation followed’ over money and the ‘project of entering the Sepulcher was given up.’18 Once again, the order of the sites does not correlate to the order in which events occurred, and there is certainly no semblance of the via dolorosa as a unique and important devotional exercise. In fact, all these early pilgrims seem very unconcerned with the route they take, and rather more concerned with having seen it all or having received the indulgences offered at the sites. The terms ‘stationes’ and ‘via dolorosa/via crucis’ in relation to sites in Jerusalem, say Storme and Thurston, do not occur until the mid to late fifteenth century. Only with William Wey’s accounts of his pilgrimages of 1458 and 1462 does the word ‘station’ first appear with reference to sites in Palestine.19 The term, argues Thurston, was initially applied to Bernardino di Nali, La Peregrinazione, 213–55. ‘…ritornassemo in Jerusalem, per la porta, chiamata Porta de Santo Stefano unde ful lapidato… Intrati entro de dicta porta, si insegna una caxa, qual dicevano esser quella de Pillato… Siando poi in via, vidimo quella sua moschea qual dicono esser in loco unde era el etmplo de Salomone… E per lo Guardiano de Monte Sion fu fato intendere a li peregrini che ogni homo fosse in ordine per intrare a la sera in el Santo Sepulcro. ma volendo pigliare l'ordine con abraino de lo intrare, imperò che lui era spora ciò, disse voleva prima mille ducati; e con questa altrecatione, fu rota la posta de lo intrare in lo Sepulcro’, Casola, Viaggio a Gerusalemme, 192–93; translated in Newett (1907), 248–49: ‘… we returned to Jerusalem by the gate called the gate of St. Stephen, where he was stoned… within the sad gate, a house was pointed out which they said was the house of Pilate, and another which they said was Herod’s… As it was on our way, we afterwards saw the Mosque which they say stands on the site of the temple of Solomon… The Prior of Mount Sion now sent to tell the pilgrims that every man must be ready to enter the Holy Sepulchre that evening. But when he wanted to arrange for the entrance with Abrayno, who was the person with authority, he demanded first a thousand ducats. An altercation followed, and in consequence the project of entering the Sepulchre was given up’. 19 Storme (1976), 98; Wey, The Itineraries of William Wey, fellow of Eton College, to Jerusalem, ad 1458 and ad 1462, and to Saint James of Compostella, ad 1456: from the original in the Bodleian Library, printed for the Roxburghe Club (London, 1857), translated in Davey (2010). It should be noted that in the late thirteenth century, Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, 1–100, VIII, 71–72 uses the word ‘stationis’ in a passage describing a place that Mary stood while watching her son on the cross: ‘Locus vero in quo stetit beata virgo cum mulieribus aliis iuxta crucem, non fuit sub ipso brachio crucis ad aquilonem, sed ante faciem filii fere ad occidentem. Monstratur enim locus stationis eius contra faciem filii pedentis in cruce sub monte et rupe, in qua crux 17

18

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The Way of the Cross in the East

military outposts, had acquired a slightly different meaning referring to vigils or fasts, and eventually had come to be understood as a place of gathering. With Wey, the term gets reoriented once again to refer to a stopping place for veneration. Wey’s use of the word ‘stationes’ comes first in one of the initial chapters, an odd one that includes a series of hexameters that appear to be some sort of mnemonic code. The fourth hexameter is titled ‘Loca Sancta in stacionibus Jerusalem’ and includes such sites as the spot where Christ fell with the cross marked in Wey’s time with a stone, the route of the Passion, and where Mary fainted, among numerous others.20 Though this list does mention many events and sites that will come to be commemorated by the Stations of the Cross ritual, it also includes many that do not, such as ‘the golden gate through which Christ entered on the ass’ and ‘the chapel of saint Pelagia’.21 When writing of his first pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1458, Wey describes the ‘pilgrimages to the sites of the Stations’.22 After being denied access to the Holy Sepulcher, ‘the Franciscans lead pilgrims to other holy sites’ which include some events of the later Stations but also include where Mary learned to read and write, the house of Simon the Pharisee, and the tomb of St. Simon the Just.23 Once again, the list is an expansive one. As he describes the sites contained within the Holy Sepulcher, viewed on this first journey, Wey does not use the term stations once, though he had used it to describe the sites they viewed when not allowed entrance to the Holy Sepulcher and sent elsewhere. The word does appear, however, when Wey recounts how during his second journey of 1462, Friars led him and his fellow pilgrims around to various stations. He writes: At dawn the Brothers arrived summoning us to make our pilgrimage to the ‘Stations’. These are the ones we visited on 20 July: / First, the stone with the crosses where Christ fell; / Second, the street where Christ fuit fixa.’ While Burchardus uses this term to describe Mary standing at the site of the crucifixion with the other women (a religious gathering we might even argue), he does not seem to be implying veneration and he does not use this term to reference his own or his fellow travelers’ activities. 20 Wey (1857), 20; translated in Davey (2010), 47–48. 21 Wey (1857), 21; translated in Davey (2010), 48. 22 Wey (1857), 60; translated in Davey (2010), 75–76. 23 Wey (1857), 60; translated in Davey (2010), 75–76. It is worth noting, too, that Wey’s Stations are approached backwards: they are denied access to the Holy Sepulcher and walk away from it, noting ‘stations’ as they go. Most pilgrimages before the modern period proceeded in this backwards direcetion, Thurston (1914), 45–46.

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East and West

carried His cross; / Third, the home of the rich man who was damned; / Fourth, the crossroads where Christ fell with His cross;  / Fifth, the place where the women wept over Christ; / Sixth, where Veronica took Christ’s face in her handkerchief; / Seventh, where the Most Blessed Virgin Mary fainted; / Eighth, the gate through which Christ was led to death; / Ninth, the pool where the sick were healed when the waters were disturbed;  / Tenth, the two white stones in the wall above the heads of passers-by on which Jesus stood when he was condemned to death by Pilate; / Eleventh, the school of the Blessed Mary where she learned her letters./ Along that street, on the other side, is Pilate’s house, where Christ was flogged and condemned to death. 24

Once again, Wey uses the term seemingly to speak about any number of sites, including, as indicated by his comment ‘these are the ones we visited’, many more than those he lists here. So although Wey uses this all-important term, it seems to refer to a set of sites, as listed in the first mnemonic, that bear little resemblance to the Stations of today. Contemporary to Wey’s mention of stations in 1458, the Italian pilgrim Gabriele Capodilista uses the term via croce saying: ‘Having left then from the aforementioned church they directed their walk toward the gate of St. Stephen… and having arrived at the road by which one comes straight to the gate, called the Way of the Cross, to them were shown the places about which had been written: and first the house of the rich man…’25 Though Capodilista uses the term via croce, he seems to use it as the name of the street rather than to indicate a set of activities. One of the first sites he lists is the house of the rich man, Dives as he came to be called in the Middle Ages, who refused to give Lazarus the crumbs from his table (Luke 16:19–31). Dives’ house is, of course, Wey (1857), 96; translated in Davey (2010), 128–29. Capodilista, L’Itinerario, section 57, 185: English translations my own. Capodilista mentions the ‘Via Croce’ again in section 68, 190: ‘Ritornando sopra dicta Via Croce, a mano sinistra non molto distante dallo dicto loco è la chiesa di Sancta Anna, dove si mostra una grotta ne la quale naque la nostra Dona gloriosa vergini Maria…’; ‘Returning along said way of the cross, on the left hand side not far from said place is the church of Saint Ann, where is shown a grotto in which was born our glorious Lady, the Virgin Mary.’ Capodilista is clearly concerned with all possible events visible from the via crucis, rather than just those sites directly related to Christ’s walk to the crucifixion. Interestingly, Graboïs (1998), 89, claims that Niccolò of Poggibonsi mentions a Way of the Cross. Though Niccolò and his fellow travelers walk what we know is now the street considered the via dolorosa and though they pray, he provides the street with no name and gives no indication that it is special. Graboïs also fails to make a distinction between a street name and a ritual name in his discussion of Riccoldo, 172. 24 25

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The Way of the Cross in the East

a place completely lacking in association with Christ’s walk to Calvary. Additionally, Capodilista proceeds along an inverted route: the church he refers to leaving is the Holy Sepulcher and he writes that they went from that church along the Way of the Cross to the St. Stephen’s Gate. And so though we see with Wey and Capodilista the introduction of these important terms, we still have nothing that resembles the modern ritual. Untreated by Thurston or Storme, the 1480 voyage of Santo Brasca uses the term ‘via croce’ to identify the street along which the group walked.26 Brasca goes on to describe the neighboring sites of interest and the indulgences attendant to them, but he gives no indication that this street was the site of a particular ritual action. In fact, though proceeding along the via croce, Brasca’s group seems to take something of a detour off to the Temple Mount, examining Old Testament sites before returning, after quite a few visits to other locations, to the Holy Sepulcher.27 Despite Brasca’s use of the term Via Croce, the Dominican Felix Fabri who was on the same journey as Brasca in 1480, in his accounts of 1480 and 1483 simply says ‘mournful way’, ‘very painful way’, ‘the footsteps of the Lord Jesus’.28 Fabri takes great care to describe all manner of events and sites, including a spot ‘where our Lord as he carried His heavy cross is said to have fallen beneath it through anguish and horror when He beheld the rock of Calvary before Him’. 29 And yet his tour seems to operate with no sense of chronological order or even liturgical or meditative order. Rather his wanderings seem determined by geography and have no special terms attached to them. He additionally mentions the street we would now call the Via Crucis without giving Santo Brasca, Viaggio in Terra Santa, section 65, 71. Brasca, Viaggio, sections 65–146, 71–90. 28 Storme (1976), 102; Fabri, Evagatorium, vol.  II, 144; translated in Stewart (1897), vol VII, 318: ‘When we left the house of Annas the high priest, we hastened toward the house of Caiaphas, gravely and devoutly treading in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus.’ Fabri also uses the term ‘holy and sorrowful way’ in Stewart (1897), Vol. VIII, 446; Latin: ‘Transuentes consequenter per sanctam et flebilem viam…’, vol. III, 67. 29 ‘…cui erant impressa vestigia duorum pedum hominis, ac si homo staret super massam cerae mollis, et pedes infiguret, et videtur manifeste quod figurae illae vestigiorum non sunt artificiose lapidi incisae, sed aliquo miraculo; de quo tamen nulla habetur certitudo. Dicunt tamen quod vestigia illa sint Domini Jesu ibi stantis sub rupe Calvariae et suam crucifixionem exspectantis’, Fabri, Evagatorium, vol. III, 21;.translated in Stewart (1897), vol VIII, 394. As will be clear to readers of Latin, Stewart takes a certain degree of license with his translations of Fabri’s work. Nonetheless, he does capture Fabri’s thoroughness and maintains the same terminology with regard to the sites relevant to this examination. 26 27

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it any name whatsoever: ‘after this we came out of the courtyard into a street which leads from Mount Sion to Mount Calvary, and from thence leads down into the city through all its length… we had gone some way into the town down that street, up which the Lord Jesus ascended to Mount Calvary, carrying his cross’.30 Other authors along with Fabri continue to use a variety of terms and continue to describe either a backwards trek beginning at Calvary or visits that are clearly not regulated by any Gospel or chronological order, but rather by the spatial layout of Jerusalem. In some sense, then, even those accounts that use terms like ‘sorrowful way’ seem to have been providing one of many names that had been given to the street along which Jesus walked simply as a way to mark it as unique, rather than to imply that it required a certain devotional behavior. Fabri also describes the same sites over and over, in one case detailing a walk through the gate of Judgment after which he viewed the house of Veronica, the house of the rich man, the site of Simon of Cyrene taking the cross, the weeping women, Mary fainting and then the condemnation.31 Brother Fabri’s walk clearly took little note of Gospel chronology and he did not care to correct this in his description. Later in his narrative, as Thurston records, Fabri’s works provide a connection to Mary’s pilgrimage: just as Mary had gone to pray, according to tradition, at the tomb, so too was Fabri making his way to Golgotha to pray.32 Thurston interprets Fabri’s comparison as something of a devotional justification for what he terms the practical necessity of walking backwards along Christ’s route.33 As Fabri writes, ‘our Blessed Lady was careful every day to visit the holiest places in Jerusalem and the neighborhood’.34 Fabri describes Mary’s route as beginning at Sion, heading to the Holy Sepulcher and then moving down from Calvary and out the city gate. This route mirrors the route that Fabri and his fellow pilgrims took in the fifteenth century, a route not defined by biblical chronology.35 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the occasional pilgrim text flows in the right chronological order. One such account, Sir Rich Fabri, Evagatorium, vol. III, 62; translated in Stewart (1897), Vol. VIII, 440. Fabri, Evagatorium, vol.  III, 62–73; translated in Stewart (1897), Vol.  VIII, 440–52. 32 Thurston (1914), 23–24. 33 Thurston (1914), 23. 34 Thurston (1914), 25. Thurston here quotes Stewart’s translation (1897), vol. VIII, 505, 506 of Fabri, Evagatorium, vol. III, 117. 35 Thurston (1914), 26. 30 31

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ard Torkington’s 1517 work, still paints a picture of a group of pilgrims going immediately from one site to the next, not distinguishing between those sites which are part of the modern via dolorosa and those which are not.36 Though Torkington follows the chronological path, pilgrims largely still describe following the via dolorosa backwards, marking every single site associated with Christ, his mother and his disciples along the way, rather than focusing specifically on the stations of Christ’s Passion.37 Proceeding along this route, pilgrims were allowed no time to hesitate, their Franciscan guides leading them briskly through.38 Even until the sixteenth century pilgrims were getting whirlwind tours of every site of any significance, rather than following a distinct devotional path that allowed them to meditate on and reflect on the sufferings of Christ.39 It is clear, then, that the via dolorosa as it is understood in the modern period simply did not exist in Jerusalem well into the sixteenth century, despite the increasingly prevalent use of the term.

The Stations of the Cross in the West Early Passion devotion had been built upon by Francis and his followers. By the late-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries, the same time frame in which Niccolò of Poggibonsi and Riccoldus of Monte Crucis made their pilgrimages to Jerusalem and in which Angela of Foligno experienced her body-incapacitating responses to images of Christ, we see quite clearly that Passion devotion has spread broadly and that it begins to take on new forms. 36 Thurston (1914), 55. Torkington (1884), 31–34. Torkington, though he never refers to Christ’s route as the via dolorosa, or the via crucis, or any other equivalent, does use the term ‘Stacions’ to refer to the sites he sees along the road he walks after entering the city at St. Stephen’s Gate: ‘And all these Stacions thus visited the Day of Seynt Margarete afore rehersyd. We returnyd to the Mounte Syon to reffresh us and ther restyd us for a Certeyn tyme’, 34. 37 Storme (1976), 129. 38 Storme (1976), 132. 39 See, for example, Zuallardo (1587), 164. Though he includes an illustration of the Via Dolorosa, his image includes everything along the street that is of any religious importance, including the houses of various New Testament personages. His Via Dolorosa begins with Herod’s house, but his journey does not take him from there directly to time spent in the Holy Sepulcher. Rather he and his fellow pilgrims follow this path but then divert to the Mount of Olives, before returning to spend time in the Holy Sepulcher.

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East and West

Storme and Thurston mention the incredibly popular text Meditationes vitae Christi (hereafter MVC), attributed, for centuries, to Bonaventure as an example of the type of devotional, meditational manual that contributed to the invention of the Stations of the Cross. Written, ostensibly, by a Franciscan for a Poor Clare, the text repeatedly stresses the humanity of Christ, combining prayers and meditations on more general aspects of God’s nature with meditations on specific events in Christ’s Passion. Many variations of this type of Passion devotion-based instructional guide proliferated in the medieval period, among them one purported to be by Johannes Tauler.40 Whoever authored the original Meditationes or even its later incarnations matters less than does the ubiquitous favor these texts found. The pseudo-Bonaventurian work contains one hundred chapters comprised of meditations, recountings of stories from Christ’s life and exhortations both to respond appropriately to Christ’s life and to live one’s own life more properly as a result of these encouraged behaviors: ‘thus we should not become agitated when we have tribulations, since the Lord did not spare the mother but permitted troubles to come to His own as a sign of His love.’41 The MVC does not limit itself to fourteen events or even to the events of the Passion, but rather takes pains to provide details about Jesus’ life and childhood, fleshing out what information the Gospels provide. The text does treat the Passion with special emphasis, a point which we will revisit in chapter three. It does not, however, speak about a via dolorosa. Detailed and dramatic (characteristics to which we will return later), the text certainly aims at producing a sorrowed response in its readers, even though none of the terminology of the later ritual of the Stations of the Cross is present. Here is, quite simply, a prime example of the Passion devotion that had been building and expanding since the turn of the century, an example that draws on Bernard of Clairvaux and on St. Francis. Around the same time as the MVC was gaining popularity, the Dominican Henry Suso (1295–1366) began to practice meditative devotions that involved walking the path of the Passion.42 Francis had expressed his devotion to the humanity of Christ through the creation of a living nativity. His devotion was concretized physically on his being through the Stigmata. Similarly, Suso took what could easily have been Cruikshank (intro and trans.) (1925), viii. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, chapter 14, 61; translated in Ragusa and Green (1961), 88. This particular English translation was done using MS Ital. 115 from the Bibliothèque Nationale. 42 Henry Suso, ‘Leben Seuses’, 34–37, translated in (1913), 40–45. 40 41

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The Stations of the Cross in the West

internal imaginative reflections (as recommended by the MVC) on the Passion and he added a bodily ritual. Suso would literally move around the space of his church combining the mental exercise with actual movement, and he used that all important term, the Way of the Cross: ‘Then he received Him after He had been sentenced at the tribunal, and he followed Him along the sorrowful way of the cross from the court-house to beneath the gallows.’43 He refers here to the road along which he imagines walking as ‘the sorrowful way of the cross’ making him perhaps the first to use this phrase while referencing a devotional activity rather than a geographical street in Jerusalem. And yet, though neither Storme nor Thurston mentions it, Suso also describes a second ‘mournful way of the cross that he used to make’ in which he would meditate on the Virgin’s experience of grief and during which meditation he would prostrate himself.44 Evidently this term ‘way of the cross’ did not refer to a specific set of meditations on Christ’s experience, but referred more broadly to the path along which Christ walked, making it possible to use the phrase ‘making’ the Way of the Cross for any meditation that took that path as its organizing principle. So although he speaks not about a literal street in Jerusalem, we can safely argue that Suso uses this term to mean the ancient way upon which Christ walked. Thurston catalogues, too, the later Dominican friar Alvaro (d. 1420) who set up a series of oratories to symbolize moments of the Passion, and Eustochia, a Poor Clare of Messina who died in 1491 and who apparently set up locations inside her enclosure marking the Passion for devotional purposes.45 As the medieval period passes and the Reformation 43 Storme (1976), 108–09; Thurston (1914), 12; Suso, Leben Seuses, 34: translated in Knox (1913), 41. 44 Suso, Leben Seuses, 36; translated in Knox (1913), 43–44. 45 Thurston (1914), 12. Interestingly, in his article on Dominican Spirituality for Wakefield (ed.) (1983), Tugwell claims that ‘Bl. Alvaro of Cordoba (d. c. 1430) introduced into Europe the Way of the Cross, which developed into the Stations of the Cross’, 120. Tugwell makes this claim without providing any evidence. Similarly, a tome on the history of the Dominican Order claims that ‘most of our popular devotions, those best adapted to sink into the hearts of the common people, and by their very simplicity to win for themselves universal acceptation in the Church, have come to us through the hands of the [Dominican] friars. Thus the devotion of the Stations of the Cross, is said to have originated with the Blessed Alvaro of Cordova, of the Order of Friars Preachers, of whom we are told, in the breviary-office on his feast, that he constructed in his convent of Scala Coeli, representations of all the holy places of Palestine connected with the Passion, so disposed that each of the mysteries of our redemption was thus exhibited together, and that after his time this pious custom spread to other convents’, Alemany (1867) Life of St. Dominic and A Sketch of the Dominican Order, New York, 242–43. It seems likely that Alvaro did indeed set up oratories that repre-

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East and West

looms on the horizon, then, we continue to see an experiential aspect to the devotional activity alongside the authoring and proliferating of texts that advocate meditation. Francis and Angela created and experienced corporeal expressions of this Passion devotion while at the same time Bernard and Bonaventure preached and wrote on the value of internal contemplation. Similarly, in the later Middle Ages Alvaro, Suso and Eustochia represent a bodily tradition of meditation while texts like the Meditationes Vitae Christi show that a belief in the importance of internal devotions persisted. But it is not only in the privacy of monastic cells that we see Passion devotion becoming stronger and more physical. In the fifteenth century, the Seven Falls, as they were called, became a popular concept for devotion in northern Europe, and these Seven Falls are considered an important phase in the development of the Stations of the Cross. Jesus was apocryphally believed to have faltered seven times along his walk to Calvary, and these Seven Falls were linked to certain moments of the Passion.46 Storme and Thurston spend much time reviewing this particular expression of Passion devotion, identifying it as a precursor to the formalized fourteen Stations of the Cross in the West. Certainly these Falls come in time to be folded into the unified ritual, but early on they enjoy popularity on their own and in many variations. Interestingly, these apocryphal events provide the two authors of the most historically and scholarly minded works on the Stations with an opportunity to let show more of their personal commitments. Storme makes some pyschologizing claims (and his phrasing assumes a certain truth in Jesus’ experience) when he explains that these non-canonical moments of the Passion came to be included in the Stations because they were so relatable and believable: ‘[the Falls are] understandable in a man exhausted and subjected to great moral and physical suffering from the day before’.47 Whether or not we accept Storme’s explanation for why they were considered relevant, the Falls were a popu-

sented moments of the Passion, similar to Suso’s own wanderings about his church, but we can see that once again in offering a history of and interpretation of the Stations of the Cross we encounter devotional writing that does not concern itself overmuch with evidence. See also Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Full edition: February (Collegeville MN, 1998), 202–03. For information on Eustochia, see King (1991), 123; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Full Edition: January (1998), 141–42 and the life of Eustochia by Jacopa Pollicino, La Leggenda della Beata Eustochia da Messina, 76–85. See also Bihl (1908), 51. 46 Storme (1976), 112. 47 Storme (1976) , 20.

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The Stations of the Cross in the West

lar devotion in northern Europe throughout the late medieval period, with many examples offering a variety of numbers of Falls.48 To elaborate on the history of the Falls, Thurston and Storme both use the late-fifteenth-century carvings of Adam Kraft of Nuremberg, done at the behest of Martin Ketzel, a patron who had himself made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.49 Kraft’s images, done in bas-relief with inscriptions below describing the event and its distance from Pilate’s house, recount the meeting with Mary, Simon of Cyrene helping to carry the cross, Jesus speaking with the women of Jerusalem, Veronica wiping Jesus’ face, Jesus under the weight of the cross, Jesus laid out beneath the cross, and finally Jesus laid in Mary’s arms.50 Records of the early sixteenth century suggest these sculptures were affixed to seven pillars or crosses.51 While the Falls were not systematized by any stretch of the imagination, they did always depict Christ falling or stooping beneath the pressure of some incident of the Passion. In many instances, as above, they overlapped with the modern fourteen Stations, and this method of marking them with pillars and/or crosses was one that would be taken up later with the further systematization of the Stations of the Cross. In a recent article, Mitzi Kirkland-Ives outlines a more broad history of the Falls, as part of a project to recuperate devotional activities overshadowed by the narrative of the Stations of the Cross. She argues that these Falls originated as textual meditations and that physical aids such as Kraft’s bas-relief sculptures later ‘appeared to assist devotees’.52 Whether they were textual or physical, these meditations were coupled with Passion events and took place in the biblical chronological order. Kirkland-Ives writes that ‘near the end of the fifteenth-century installations of sculptures and paintings of the Seven Falls were erected along routes or within churchyards in Germany and the Low Countries’.53 These activities were primarily located in northern Europe and seem to have originated from a variant on Passion devotion texts. She also describes a further alternative, one not explained or explored by Thurston or Storme, the ‘leadings’ of Christ. This variant involved meditating on the ‘moments during Christ’s Passion in which he was forcibly marched 50 51 52 53 48 49

Kirkland-Ives (2009), 256. Thurston (1914), 63. Thurston (1914), 64. Storme (1976), 113; Thurston (1914), 64. Kirkland-Ives (2009), 258. Kirkland-Ives (2009), 259.

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East and West

from one site to the next’.54 The Falls and leadings were not the only options, however. Suso, for one, made a mournful Way of the Cross remembering Mary’s sorrows at her son’s fate. Though Kirkland-Ives refers to these as ‘less intrinsically processional Passion narratives’, she goes on to describe a sixteenth-century set of stations erected in Antwerp that mark Mary’s sorrows, rather than events that occurred to Christ. Alongside devotions like that of Henry Suso, these Falls seem to point to a larger urge, begun with the earlier devotion to Christ’s humanity and a growing commitment to imitatio Christi, to imagine oneself present in Christ’s moments of suffering and torture.55 These various forms of Passion devotion had infinitely variable numbers of pauses with infinitely variable prayers to be said at any given stop. Yet, as Storme has written, despite their immense variation ‘these “spiritual pilgrimages” [eventually] had a preponderant influence on the setting up of the Way of the Cross with fourteen stations.’56 Though of course I take issue with Storme’s categorization of these rituals as ‘spiritual pilgrimages’, no matter what we call them they do indeed seem to have eventually coalesced into a dominant ritual in the eighteenth century, far later than one might have expected. Solidification of this practice in the west was on the horizon with fourteenth and fifteenth-century rituals like Henry’s and with the creation of pillar- and sculpture-marked series of the Seven Falls, but only in the early sixteenth century does Jan Pascha, a Carmelite of Louvain, produce one of the two texts cited by both Storme and Thurston as foundational to the creation of the canonical fourteen Stations of the Cross.57 Though he never went on a pilgrimage to Palestine himself, Pascha frames his text as a journey taking place over the course of one year and it is clear, as we will see later, that he intended his book as a manual for internal devotion rather than as a guide for an actual pilgrimage. Pascha’s text became so immensely popular that in 1563 it was translated

Kirkland-Ives (2009), 260. Storme (1976), 112. 56 Storme (1976), 117. 57 Storme (1976), 119; The abridgment and translation into English was printed as the following: The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Hierusalem, contayninge three hundred sixtie five dayes iorney, wherein the devoute Person may Meditate on sondrie pointes of his Redemption (1604 or 1605). The copy consulted for this paper is a printed microfilm at the University of Pennsylvania. The reel was made from an incunable housed at the Bodleian, Oxford University, call number 8° P 154 Th. 54 55

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The Stations of the Cross in the West

into French58 and in 1630 it was abridged and translated into English, both to great success.59 He describes his work as a ‘little Treatise of A Spiritual Pilgrime’ which he believes ‘would be a thinge very agreable to al maner of devout and pious persons.’60 In his text, Pascha makes a distinction between the ‘long Voyage of the Cross’ and the ‘Way of the Cross’: the first three stations are all approaches to Jesus’ walk and as such are part of the long voyage. These first three Stations encompass whole narratives rather than simply static events. For example, the third follows Christ from Pilate’s house to Herod’s, back to Pilate’s, then on to the chapel and the whipping and crowning of thorns, ending with the presentation at the Ecce Homo arch and the sentencing. The real ‘way of the crosse towards Mount Calvarie’ begins with what Pascha calls the fourth station, ‘the place where the purple robe was pulled off when he was to beare his crosse.’61 Pascha’s spiritual pilgrimage is effectively the same as the modern system, but he includes all Seven Falls and conflates them differently with the other events of the walk. Pascha’s Stations begin at Pilate’s House (Pascha’s Station 4) and continue as follows: taking of the cross and the first fall (5), meeting with Mary and the second fall (6), the help of Simon of Cyrene and the third fall (7), Veronica wipes Jesus’ face and the fourth and fifth falls (8), Jesus speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem and the sixth fall (9), the seventh fall (10), the stripping of garments (11), the Crucifixion (12), Jesus dies (13), the deposition (14), and the burial (15).62 It is clear from the overlaps just why Pascha’s text is considered so fundamental to the development of the Stations of the Cross with fourteen stops. When we look at the other text considered central to the development of the 14 Station system, we see even more clearly the progression. A Dutch priest, Christiaan Van Adrichem, also known as Adrichomius, wrote the other text believed to form the basis of the modern Way of the Cross.63 Published in 1584 in Cologne, this work also achieved wide Thurston (1914), 86. Storme (1976), 120. 60 Pascha (1604/5), 5 of ‘The Preface to the Reader’. 61 Pascha (1604/5), 103. 62 Storme (1976), 124. 63 Again, it is Storme (1976) and Thurston (1914) who highlight these two texts as foundational to the development of the Stations of the Cross. Van Adrichem’s text is widely available in later printed editions and in translations. The Latin text, Theatrum Terrae Sanctae et Biblicarum Historiarum cum tabulis geographicis aera expressis, is from a 1593 book printed in Cologne that includes multiple foldout maps. The Eng58 59

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spread popularity and was accompanied by a large map. Van Adrichem’s text provides descriptions corresponding to numbers that cover his map. Small images of events taking place prevent the work from becoming too impersonally numeric. There are notable differences between Pascha’s text and Adrichomius’ later one: where Pascha had maintained all Seven Falls, slotting them into other events (except with the seventh which he leaves independent), Adrichomius reduces the number of marked falls to three, allowing the other four simply to become absorbed into the other events along the Sorrowful Way. And so this newer way includes twelve events which correspond perfectly to the modern stations: Jesus condemned, the taking-on of the cross, the first fall, the meeting with Mary, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, the second fall, the meeting with the Daughters of Jerusalem, the third fall, the stripping of the garments, the Crucifixion, and Jesus dying.64 Adrichomius leaves out the deposition and the entombment as he adds these to his account of a visit to the Holy Sepulcher.65 And yet, despite the popularity of these two works which so closely resemble the modern Stations of the Cross, a great deal of variety continued to remain in the west in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the eastern route still did not parallel the activities in the west.66

East Meets West: Bernardino Amico and Eventual Mirroring In 1610 Bernardino Amico published in Rome a collection of drawings of the holy sites which was intended to ‘supply models to those who wished to reproduce them in Europe’.67 This series of plans and elevations, accompanied by minimal text which relates nothing about the history of the monuments, provides a window into the ongoing transitions of eastern and western developments into the Stations of the Cross. Amico refers to the path in Jerusalem along which Jesus walked lish text consulted here is Christiaan van Adrichem, Briefe Description, translated in Tymme (1595) and is available online at www.eebo.com, Early English Books Online. Also available online is the map from the 1677 edition printed in London for John Overton. 64 Storme (1976), 125. 65 Thurston (1914), 87. 66 Storme (1976), 125. 67 Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 13.

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East Meets West: Bernardino Amico and Eventual Mirroring

as the via dolorosa, but his sites are very different from those that will become canonical and which had already gained a foothold in the west through Pascha and Adrichomius’ texts: he excludes for example the independent falls, but includes the house of the Pharisee and the House of the Rich Man.68 Almost no resonance exists, even at this stage, between the western texts and Amico’s descriptions of his drawings. Amico begins his via dolorosa at the House of Pilate and separates the path into four sections. In the first, he marks the spots where Pilate washed his hands and where Christ was scourged. The second part shows the Arch of Pilate where Christ was presented and the place of the meeting with Mary. The third part contains many events: Simon of Cyrene, the weeping women of Jerusalem, the house of Dives, the house of Simon the Pharisee, the house of Veronica, the site of the reading of the judgment and the Gate of Judgment. The last part shows the Gate of Judgment again, the Valley of Dead Bodies, Mount Calvary, and the tomb of Jesus.69 Though Amico presents the sites in the proper Gospel-based chronological order and uses the term the Sorrowful Way, both significant shifts for texts coming out of the eastern context, even in 1610 he also marks sites that are not relevant to the Passion and leaves off some of those Stations that eventually become canonical. While it is worth keeping in mind that Amico’s work is not a pilgrimage account and so does not reflect pilgrim activity in the east, he did at least go to Jerusalem, unlike Pascha and Adrichomius. His work does thus represent a stage in the combination of eastern and western experiences of the via dolorosa, one that seems mostly to continue to reflect the eastern use of the term as a street name only. Later in the seventeenth century, Franciscans in the west, for whom devotion to the Passion had always been central, began to promote vigorously the devotional making of Stations of the Cross with specifically fourteen stops. Thurston and Storme claim that the Franciscan promulgation began in Spain, with their efforts then spreading to Sardinia and on to Italy; curious, no doubt, given that the falls and various other iterations were much more popular in the northern countries. In 1628 Salvatore Vitale, a Sardinian Franciscan, set up fourteen crosses (reminiscent perhaps of Kraft’s pillar/cross markers) at the Florentine Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 27. Amico’s ‘strada dolorosa’ begins with chapter 18 on 24 of the 1619 edition and continues through chapter 21, ‘Del monte Calvario, Quarta, et ultima parte della via dolorosa’ on 30; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 78–88. 68 69

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Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte.70 A papal bull issued by Innocent  XI in 1686 extends to Franciscans in the west the same indulgences that had long been associated with actual pilgrimage to the eastern sites: properly performing the Stations in the west now carried for Franciscans the same effects as going to Jerusalem.71 St. Leonard of Port Maurice, a wandering Franciscan preacher, set up, it is said, more than 570 Stations of the Cross in the eighteenth century.72 And yet, by the end of that century ‘the sorrowful way was still in the same hopeless confusion, lacking uniformity in both nomenclature and localization of the stations.’ 73 In the east, seventeenth century Franciscan materials contradict Pascha and Adrichomius’ erroneous descriptions of the Stations (largely in questions of location determined by distances/paces) and continue to provide differing Stations. But the Franciscans’ vague attempts in Jerusalem to correct this erroneous information were largely unsuccessful, and confusion and variation continued to abound.74 It appears in a sense, then, that the Franciscans promoting the devotional Way of the Cross in the west and those actually conducting pilgrim trips in the east were in a state of disconnect. Over time, the Franciscans’ moved the order and location of the Stations in the east closer and closer to Adrichomius’ version, perhaps in an effort to achieve resonance for the sake of those pilgrims coming from Europe to Jerusalem.75 Eventually, the western tradition of fourteen stations was adopted in Jerusalem, as can be seen in the eighteenth-century account of Elzear Horn. Horn lived in Jerusalem for twenty years, from 1724–1744, and he brought the modern fourteen Stations onto the actual landscape of

70 Storme (1976), 146. See also Sticca (1989), 115, Picard (1953), 2595, and Vitale (1639), 4–10: Vitale was invited by the Bishop of Florence to erect fourteen crosses on the road to San Miniato al Monte. 71 Storme (1976), 148. For the text of this bull of September 5, 1686, see Bullarum Diplomatum et Privilegiorum, Tomus XIX (1857–1872), 709–11. 72 Storme (1976), 149. See also Sticca (1989), 115 and Picard (1953), 2597. See Wallenstien (1952), 47–70 for an account of St. Leonard of Port Maurice’s effect on the spread of the Stations of the Cross both within the Franciscan order and beyond. See also Leonard of Port Maurice (1868) and Raffaele da Rome (1754). 73 Storme (1976), 151. 74 Thurston (1914), 100. 75 For information on the topographical changes to the Stations of the Cross and the archeological efforts made in studying these, see Dressaire (1903), 366–75; Burrows (1938), 17–19; Collin (1951); Alliata and Kaswalder (1995), 217–46; and MurphyO’Connor (1996), 32–41, 52–53.

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East Meets West: Bernardino Amico and Eventual Mirroring

Jerusalem.76 As was clear in Amico, for many centuries, sites along the Via Dolorosa could be, or could not be, related to the Passion. This was true of Horn as well: he writes of many various holy locations in his description of the street called the Via Crucis. But the solution put forward by Horn in his detailing of the ritual confined the devotional activity to the Passion events alone, though where he locates them differs slightly from their current locations.77 With Horn we see a distinction between the terms via crucis/via dolorosa as street names and the concept of the Stations of the Cross as a ritual. Though indulgences are again confirmed by Benedict XIII in 1726, not until the nineteenth century does the way in the east solidify Horn’s fourteen Stations, adopted from Adrichomius, into their present-day locations.78 It is beyond the scope of this project and the desires of this author to attempt to answer why the Stations eventually come to mirror each other in east and west and why this particular set of fourteen is eventually adopted. Herbert Thurston, in another more personal moment in his scholarly work, claims that one version finally won out all over the Christian world because ‘it appeals more strongly than the other to the pious imagination or to the devotional needs and feelings of the faithful at large.’ 79 Whatever the case, by the modern period the rituals are systematized both in Jerusalem and in Christendom more broadly. The result of this equality, both in terms of action and in terms of indulgences accorded to the action, has resulted

Murphy-O’Connor (1996), 40. Bellorini and Hoade (1962), 1–2. Bellorini and Hoade (1962), 10. Bellorini and Hoade actually provide a table that shows the changes made from Amico to Horn, and they discuss how the adoption of this system required the movement of certain sites, for example, the meeting of the woman was moved outside the city gate, the Gate of Judgment became the site of the Second Fall, and many Stations were suppressed. Horn covers the Via Crucis in chapter 23:1–15 of his work Ichnographiae Monumentorum Terrae Sanctae (1724–1744), 141– 60. Bellorini and Hoade note that following his description of the street the Via Crucis, Horn describes ‘the method of meditation on the Passion, the indulgences, the prayers and meditations at the 14 Stations’ but that this portion of the text is missing from the manuscript from which they are translating (Vaticano Latino No. 9233). The missing text can be found, they say, in the archives of St. Saviour and ‘outlined’ in Diarium T. S., I (1908), 44–48 and 195–210. 78 Benedict’s bull Inter plurima et maxima of March 3 of that year grants indulgences to the whole Catholic world for the performance of the Way of the Cross. The text of the bull can be found in Bullarum Diplomatum et Privilegiorum, Tomus XXII (Turin, 1857–1872), 339–42. Storme (1976), 156; Murphy-O’Connor (1996), 40. Dressaire (1903) also argues that even in 1850 confusion reigned and that by the time of his article in 1903 the locations had been moved from the spots Horn had assigned. 79 Thurston (1914), 137. 76

77

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in an interpretation of the development of the Stations of the Cross that fails to account for the early lack of resonance.

CONCLUSION: THURSTON’S AND STORME’S THEORY OF IMITATION

Despite some popular misconceptions, the academic community thus now accepts a European birthplace for the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. Not enacted on the landscape of Jerusalem until well into the early modern period, the Stations have nothing apparent to do with the Crusades, do not owe their earliest incarnations to the Franciscans specifically, and, in some sense, have little to do with the geographical city of Jerusalem. Many centuries passed from the first instances of what we might call Stations of the Cross rituals in Europe to their finalization in the form of fourteen stops with accompanying prayers and readings that occurs in various incarnations around the world, including in Jerusalem itself. With this history of the Stations in hand, we can turn to how these two chroniclers interpret the development of the ritual. Albert Storme and Herbert Thurston both present an interpretation of the Stations of the Cross that hinges on the notion of imitation that takes pilgrimage as its ideal. Without question the end point of this history of the Stations encourages this interpretation. The aforementioned bull of 1686 could certainly be used to argue that the devotions in the west and the pilgrimages in the east were the same thing. And yet, to do so is to read the early history of the ritual through the lens of its later status, something I am unwilling to do. Though in time the two practices became one, they began in very different ways, with very different influences. A teleological reading of the Stations of the Cross seems more appropriate to a devotional account of its history, so it is with little surprise that we note the more personal nature of Thurston and Storme’s description of their interpretations.

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Conclusion: Thurston’s and Storme’s Theory of Imitation

Thurston goes so far as to begin his text with the contention that popular devotions always begin as an imitation of something else, something bigger and better.1 The idea in this case is that ‘the Stations of the Cross constituted a miniature pilgrimage to the Holy Land’. 2 Many subsequent academic works that mention the Stations accept this interpretation with little to no interrogation. As one author of a book on modern Canadian representations of the Stations writes, it is ‘historical pilgrimages from which the Stations of the Cross are derived.’3 Another scholar writes that ‘the Stations of the Cross [were] an alternative to pilgrimage to the holy Land and [were] a reenactment of Christ’s route to Calvary’ as though these two things (pilgrimage and reenactment) were in fact one and the same.4 Though at first blush this interpretation seems sensible, perhaps even obvious, undergirding it are erroneous assumptions about the long history of pilgrimage and perhaps even deeper assumptions about the 'naiveté' of the medieval mind. In order to disprove this analysis, we will turn first to notions of pilgrimage and how medieval authors understood the idea of religious travel.

3 4 1 2

Thurston (1914), 1. Thurston (1914), 2. Shantz (1991), 21. Noonan (2007), 121.

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PART II: RELIGIOUS TRAVEL

THE ‘IDEAL’ OF PILGRIMAGE

Introduction Herbert Thurston and Albert Storme’s argument for an interpretation of the Stations as an imitation of pilgrimage presupposes two false ideas. First, that pilgrimage, peregrinatio, is a static term with a consistent and singular meaning over time. Second, that whatever that singular term refers to constitutes an ideal, something worth imitating. Storme writes that: To follow in the footsteps of Christ is the wish of every pilgrim to the Holy Land. Since this wish cannot be materially fulfilled by the Sorrowful Way followed on Good Friday, it has to be transposed into what is of real import, by an attempt to enter into the mind and heart of the Saviour who passed through streets similar to those of Jerusalem today. The only thing that really matters is the ‘spiritual pilgrimage’… But is not every pilgrimage spiritual? … Amen.1

Here Storme is arguing for a vision that casts physical travel as the definition of peregrinatio and religious travel to the Holy Land as the ideal practice. Yet most believers simply cannot achieve this ideal practice, says Storme. As a result, another practice arises to substitute for the ideal, namely the ‘spiritual pilgrimage’, as so many have called it, of making the Stations of the Cross outside of Jerusalem itself. Here Storme refers Storme (1976), 59. This same notion exists in many other authors, including MacVicar (1956), 240–7 who writes that the Stations of the Cross responded to a need of believers to be devout in the Holy Land without having the ability to go there, as well as to the need of pilgrims to describe their journeys, 24. 1

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

to the Stations as ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ and even suggests that it is ‘what is of real import’. He claims ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ as what matters most, but puts its history in the context of religious travel and the desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ’ in the Holy Land. Storme’s argument simply does not take into account the complex development of peregrinatio in Christianity, while his notion of physical journeying as an ideal completely ignores the long history of Christian ambivalence toward, and at times distinct disapproval of, religious travel. In ignoring this, Storme implicitly ignores all that was at stake in the early objections to going abroad for religious purposes, including the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the political and spiritual status of the earthly Jerusalem, the value or danger of travel for religious and for women, as well as the notions of Christianity as a religion without place, a religion of the interior. Many of these concerns continued past the earliest period, particularly those about the validity of religious travel for select groups like women and monastics. This chapter will thus briefly examine the use of the term peregrinatio over time, before looking at the objections raised by many leading Christian thinkers throughout the centuries after Constantine until the early Reformation period. What will become clear is that though religious journeying continues as a popular activity, the leaders of the church held very serious reservations. I will end by turning back to the primary source material, accounts written by travelers themselves, in an attempt to ascertain if this notion of religious travel as an ideal comes from the historical texts or has been imported into them by Catholic scholars intent on justifying the activity in a post-Reformation world.

Peregrinatio One modern scholar defines pilgrimage as a ‘journey undertaken for religious purposes that culminates in a visit to a place considered to be the site of manifestation of the supernatural’.2 But such a narrow definition of pilgrimage as possessed of a geographical endpoint hardly applies to the entirety of Christian history. The notion of pilgrimage as traveling somewhere ‘other’ for the purpose of connecting to the divine or for achieving salvation negates the more complex meanings conveyed over

Tomasi (2002), 3.

2

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Peregrinatio

time by the term peregrinatio.3 This perhaps results from the limitations of English, but no matter the cause, one must recognize the broad spectrum of understandings of the word, beginning even in the earliest days of Christianity. The narrow definition in English has led at least one scholar to claim that pilgrimage was ‘itinerant devotion that began in western Christendom in the seventh century and reached its apogee in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ and that the practice eventually evolved into the ‘journey’ in the sixteenth century.4 As we shall see in the section on the history of travel to Jerusalem, this claim is patently untrue: devoutly religious people were making their way to Jerusalem as early as the fourth century, likely even before, and pilgrimage meant, throughout the Middle Ages, much more than itinerant travel. In perhaps the broadest sense, to undertake a peregrinatio meant to become a stranger, like Abraham and other biblical figures who faced exile.5 Classical Latin used peregrinus as an adjective to mean alien or foreign and peregrinari to mean ‘wandering around away from one’s place of origin’.6 Even into the medieval period, the multiple meanings of peregrinus necessitate a close examination of context in order to determine if it referred to a foreigner, one exiled, or to one on a journey. ‘Pilgrimage’ as we might understand it in English, as travel to some other place for the purpose of visiting and/or venerating a site of religious or spiritual significance, often appears as ‘orationis causa’ or ‘ad loca sancta’, journeys for the purpose of prayer or to the holy places.7 Pilgrimage as travel specifically to a religious place or for generic prayer was not the only form of religious exile people chose to undertake and was certainly not the only thing referred to as peregrinatio in the medieval world. Not the least of these varied enactments of religious exile 3 Dyas (1999), 99–118, offers a nice articulation of this negation in her essay on ‘pilgrimage’ in Middle English literature, 117. See also Maraval (1985), 137–38. 4 Tomasi (2002), 4. 5 Sigal (1974), 5. Bitton-Ashkelony (2005) describes late antique pilgrimage as ‘the desire of the pilgrim—steeped mainly in monastic culture—to be in a state of alienation from the world so as to be able to encounter the sacred… This state of alienation was closely related in some cases to the search for a new religious identity or a new intellectual profile’, 10; Webb (2002), 6–7. Webb highlights the interpretation of peregrinus by the Irish fathers whose spirituality came to mark that of western Christendom in the early Middle Ages. 6 Webb (1999), 7; Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 18; Van Oort (1991), 131: ‘peregrinari (to sojourn abroad, to be absent, to be an alien, to wander, to peregrinate), peregrinus (adj. alien, foreign; n. alien foreigner, non-citizen) and peregrinatio (journey or stay abroad, status of being an alien, pilgrimage).’ 7 Webb (1999), 7–8.

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

was monasticism. Many understood monasticism as the ultimate exile: in the joining of a monastic order one committed oneself to a lifetime set apart from society, ostensibly devoid of luxury and everyday creature comforts. Asceticism itself could be seen as exile and exile was peregrinatio; thus asceticism was understood as and spoken of as a form of pilgrimage.8 In addition to monasticism, of course some Christians did opt to conduct physical trips to holy sites around the world, including to Jerusalem. And finally, spiritual and theological writings often use peregrinatio as a metaphor for the entirety of a Christian believer’s life.9 This earthly life constitutes a form of exile from God, from Eden, from eternal life in Heaven. ‘Exile’ could be achieved through the voluntary activities listed above, or it could be done as a form of penance. Seventh-century penitentials prescribe, among other things, exile as a form of penitence.10 With the arrival of these penitential models from Celtic Christianity, enforced exile, sometimes in the form of physical journeys, became more popular and penitence became well-known as a motivator for travel. Authorities enforced these penitential voyages relatively rarely, however, and, when the journey-penalty was imposed, it most often required only a visit to a local shrine rather than involving long-distance travel.11 Yet, the idea that peregrinatio as exile could secure forgiveness can certainly be seen as an important development in the changing and evolving conception of pilgrimage over time. The difficulty of the journey and the very real possibility of death, the separateness the travel created from normal life, and the spiritual position exile implied could be used to elicit forgiveness or indulgences. Peregrinatio could thus refer to physical travel for the purpose of visiting a particular holy site, aimless wandering, monasticism, or any number of other things that smacked of exile or of removing oneself from the life of this earth. As one scholar writes, peregrinatio was ‘metaphorically conceived as a form of dying’ and so ‘was a technique and sign of radical disengagement, not only from “the world” of family, town or village, but from degenerate historical “times” as well.’12 This disengagement could

Sigal (1974), 6. Kaelber (2002), 51. 10 Sigal (1974), 17. 11 Sigal (1974), 19, 25. 12 Adler (2002), 33. 8 9

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

and did take many forms, up to and including crusading.13 This aspect of the term may have resulted from the addition of the penitential understanding and the connotation of vow completion that accompanied it. Certainly this additional meaning caused a degree of added confusion.14 Peregrinatio had once meant travel or exile in a very broad sense, but the application to the Crusaders helped to narrow this meaning. By the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, it had come to refer to travels the purpose of which was specifically religious. And so, from even such a limited exploration of the history of the term peregrinatio, it becomes clear that this word, ubiquitous and multifaceted as it was, provides little assistance in considering the Stations of the Cross as a ritual phenomenon. Peregrinatio could be used to speak about a vast array of activities that could have any number of connotations, and so henceforth I will use this term to refer specifically to religious travel. Even with an understanding of this complex term, we encounter problems as Christianity, as it has evolved over time, offers no unified response to this activity.

Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil Christian travel to Jerusalem has a long and often complicated history. While we have accounts of voyages beginning in the fourth century, writings about pilgrimage (in the modern English sense of the word as physical travel to a destination with spiritual intent) tell us that the Christian relationship to this activity of traveling abroad for religious purposes was indeed wracked by self-doubt. The practice began to take off during the years after Constantine’s conversion, but some such as Gregory of Nyssa still counseled against pilgrimage as a devotional activity.15 Though pilgrimage continued throughout Christian history (perhaps in some sense a continuation of earlier non-Christian practices), it was ‘never entirely the creature of the official church’ and many Christian thinkers and leaders in the medieval period, such as St. Anselm, raised serious objections from the beginning of the move Sigal (1974), 10. Webb (1999), 8. 15 Sigal (1974), 93. Some scholars, such as Oliver James Yarbrough, also argue for a thriving pilgrimage culture long before Constantine. Yarbrough (2008), 69; Limor (2006), 326–27. 13 14

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

ment.16 Among the difficulties were worry about ‘the degradation of pure sites of retreat’ and ‘complaint[s] about the relative valorization of some places over others’.17 From its earliest days, Christianity understood itself as ‘a religion of the spirit; God was no more present in one place than in another; the journey was a distraction from the interior quest’.18 This placelessness had biblical roots. In Matthew 18:20, Jesus declares: ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’. It does not matter where these two or three are gathered, simply that they are believers. Owing to Christ’s omnipresence, early Christianity had an entirely different notion of space than the one that developed with Constantine’s conversion of the empire. The New Testament, in addition to indicating that belief trumps location, makes no demands that believers go on pilgrimage.19 No extant documentation exists of pilgrimage before the third century and it seems likely that it only became popular in the fourth century with Constantine’s conversion and Helena’s ‘discovery’ of the True Cross. In fact, the New Testament evinces something of a mixed attitude toward Jerusalem.20 In John, Jesus tells a group of women that ‘the time is coming when [they] will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the spirit and the truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks’ (John 4:21– 23). Paul writes that the ‘present city of Jerusalem… is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free’ (Galatians 4:25–26). Although on occasion the New Testament attaches the word ‘holy’ to Jerusalem, generally the text lacks a particular affinity for the city in Judea; the eschatological Jerusalem seems to take precedence over the historical.21 And yet in the complex centuries just after Jesus’ life and death, when the lines between Christianity and Judaism had yet to be firmly Webb (2002), 74. Adler (2002), 27. 18 Webb (1999), 235. 19 Wilken (1986) writes that ‘pilgrimage played no part in early Christian life’, 299. Yarbrough (2008) provides an in-depth look at mentions of Jerusalem in the New Testament, 74–78. See also Walker (1996) for a detailed examination of Jerusalem in Jesus’ time and in the books of Christian scripture. See also the introduction to Swanson (2000). 20 Wilken (1986), 299. See also Davies (1970). 21 Sanders (1999), 93. See also Wilken (1986), 299; Wilken (1992), 62. 16 17

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

established, the Chiliastic position that believed in the importance of Jerusalem for the end of days held much appeal. Through a prophetic reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, these believers determined that the thousand year reign of Revelation 20 would necessarily take place in Jerusalem, in accordance with the replacing of law by grace with the coming of Christ. 22 As one scholar who writes on Chiliasm describes it, ‘the idea of the holy land first rises in Christianity in debates with the Jews over the meaning of prophetic texts that speak of the “return to Jerusalem.” The issue is not so much whether Judaea is a sacred precinct or territory, but whether the prophecies were to be understood realistically, that is, historically and politically.’ 23 Jerusalem, then, mattered not because it was itself intrinsically holy, but because it would be the site of the end of this earthly life and the transition to the life of the kingdom. This role in the end of days made the city integral. However, an opponent of this view, Tertullian, reasons that rather than needing the end of days to occur in Jerusalem as the final sign that the supersession of Christianity is complete, Christianity replaces a notion of the Holy Land with Christ’s flesh: They [the Jews] consider the special soil of Judaea to be that very holy land, which ought rather to be interpreted of the Lord’s flesh, which in all those who put on Christ is thenceforward the holy land, holy indeed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, truly flowing with milk and honey by the sweetness of his assurance, truly Judean by reason of the friendship with God.24

Tertullian argues that the Incarnation of Christ resulted in a loss of spatial importance; Christ’s flesh and the ‘indwelling of the Holy Spirit’

Wilken (1986), 299. Wilken describes the Chiliast view thoroughly, in addition to detailing who in these early days were its biggest proponents. Among them were Irenaeus (Wilken cites Adversus Haereses) and Justin Martyr (here Wilken uses Dialogus cum Tryphone). As Wilken describes it, Jerusalem as the site of the end of days constitues ‘the ultimate vindication of the theory of recapitulation of all things in Christ’, 299. This was in effect an inversion of the Jewish belief in a coming return to the Holy Land, Wilken (1986), 300. Prawer (1996) also describes the apocalyptic role of Jerusalem in Christianity, 323–24. 23 Wilken (1986), 303. 24 Tertullian, De Resurrectione Mortuorum, 919–1012, chapter 26, line 11, 955; translated in Wilken (1986), 300. 22

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

sanctify and all those who accept Christ as the savior almost seem to become themselves the Holy Land.25 Despite being a somewhat popular view, Chiliasm was eventually rejected not only because of theological claims to Christianity’s universality but also because it effectively lent support to Jewish messianism. This had the effect both of confusing the lines between Christians and Jews and of potentially undermining Christianity’s own claims that the messiah had indeed arrived: politically and historically, a literal reading of the Hebrew Scriptures would suggest that because Jerusalem had not been returned to the Jews, Jesus could not be Christ. 26 Early Christianity thus abandoned the Chiliast view and came ultimately to understand biblical references to Jerusalem as allegorical, making the physical city relatively unimportant and certainly providing no basis for undertaking journeys to the clay and dust physical space. And yet, this is not to say that Christianity did not have a deep commitment to the commemoration of or a sense of the historicity of Jerusalem. It simply meant that in terms of its liturgical practices and in terms of its future it did not care particularly about the present ‘Holy Land’, a phrase that only came into use much later among Christians to refer to the Judean Jerusalem.27 The earthly Jerusalem became important less for eschatological or theological reasons and more because it was the locus of memory of Christ.28 This commemoration was clear in the building projects erected by Constantine in the wake of his edict of tolerance, in his mother Helena’s trip to Jerusalem and in his attempts to convert the city into a Christian landscape. These new churches and chapels and the liturgical processions that took place at them most assuredly drew pilgrims. What we see in these earliest centuries, then, is the beginning of a split that will continue throughout Christian history, a split between what we might call the high church policy of theologians and leaders, and the popular attitude of everyday Christians. Though the church’s stated policy was 25 Wilken (1986), 302. In addition to detailing Tertullian’s objections, Wilken provides a description and analysis of Origen’s arguments, writing that Origen largely interpreted biblical mentions of Jerusalem, Israel or the Holy Land allegorically. See also Yarbrough (2008), 80 and Cohn (1969) for a discussion of the changes wrought by Origen, Augustine and others, 29–36. 26 Wilken (1986), 307; See also Harnack (1999), particularly chapters 5, 7 and 8 and Pelikan (1971), section 1. 27 Wilken (1986), 307. 28 Vikan (2010), 4.

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

that pilgrimage was unnecessary and even potentially dangerous, ‘an undercurrent of the remnants of a more ancient tradition persisted in the beliefs and practices of a “popular Church”; a “popular faith” which needed direct human contact with the holy places.’29 Church fathers discouraged pilgrimage in the early centuries, but in reality they could not stop this practice, and objections were made even more difficult with the refocusing of Jerusalem as a Christian landscape. Yet these objections did continue and by no means had Christian thinkers reached a consensus on the value of travel to and prayer at specific locations.30 The question of pilgrimage in the fourth and fifth centuries not only centered on what Bruria Bitton-Ashkelony defines as ‘the theology of landscape’ and on ‘the question of belief in a divine presence in a defined locus’ but it also ‘encompassed a wide variety of motivations and personal interests.’31 Even into these post-Constantine centuries, Jerusalem was not necessarily understood as unique among cities and the debates encompassed not only travel to Palestine but regional travel as well.32 Gregory of Nyssa, though a stalwart supporter of the local cult of martyrs, seems to have had a more complex relationship to pilgrimage to Jerusalem.33 Having traveled there for what has been interpreted by modern scholars as a combination of religious and political reasons, Prawer (1996), 316. See also Frank (2000) who writes that while the church hierarchy expressed concern over the possibility that pilgrimage might gain too much popularity and thus undercut the ideal of Christianity as a religion of the spirit, the actual pilgrims who undertook the journeys seem to have had no such qualms, 84. 30 The turn from a religion devoid of a sacred space to one that believes in the holiness of place was a complex operation. Markus (1990), 139–55, argues that this change occurred due to the cult of martyrs, itself a byproduct of Constantine’s conversion. Markus argues that the cult of martyrs led from a focus on sacred time to a focus on sacred space. Bitton-Ashkelony (1999), 188–203, points to other theories as well, writing that Smith (1987), and Taylor (1993) argue that Constantine’s preoccupation with space influenced the religion at large, while Halbwachs (1950) argues for a notion of collective memory as a process that culminates in the placement of that memory onto something physical, 22–23, 28. 31 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 5. See also Limor (2006), 327. The concern, as Limor puts it, is that pilgrimage will undermine the Christian theological notion that God is present everywhere. For more on fourth-century attitudes see Walker (1990). 32 Webb (2002), xiii. Webb notes that long-distance pilgrimage tended to be for devotional or penitential reasons, or to secure indulgences, while local pilgrimage often had a more curative focus. 33 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 48–57. See also Bitton-Ashkelony (1999). Silvas (2007), 115–16 and Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 30; both note, however, that Gregory is most often in defense of an anti-pilgrimage position. 29

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

Gregory’s letters of the 380’s provide insight into his position on international pilgrimage.34 Letter 2 presents a distinctly, though not uniquely, negative view of pilgrimage.35 When the Lord invites the blessed to their inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, journeying to Jerusalem is not listed among their good deeds… Even if there were profit in the venture, nevertheless the perfect would do well not to pursue it. But when we learn from an accurate observation of the practice that it also imposes a harmful worldly preoccupation on those who have undertaken to lead the strict life, it is worthy not so much of a blessed zeal as of the greatest vigilance if one who has chosen to live according to God is not to be infiltrated by any of its harmful effects.36

Gregory not only asserts that pilgrimage has no scriptural basis and no benefit, but he also argues that one who has adopted a monastic and religious life would indeed face all manner of dangers if he allowed himself to consider engaging in this practice. Just a few lines later in Letter 2, we read: Moreover, what gain shall he have when he has reached those places? Is it that the Lord still lives in the body today in those places and has stayed away from our regions? Or is it that the Holy Spirit abounds among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but is unable to come to us?… Again, if grace were greater in the vicinity of Jerusalem than anywhere else, sin would not be so entrenched among those who dwell there. But as it is, there is no form of uncleanness that is not brazened among them.37

Gregory defends his own journey saying it was required of him and that his trip did nothing to augment or decrease the faith he held before embarking on it.38 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 51; Silvas (2007), 115–32. As Silvas points out, these letters are somewhat suspect. Part of the Pasquali collection and preserved through few manuscripts, these letters figured prominently in Reformation and modern debates about pilgrimage. 35 Silvas (2007), 116. Silvas notes that John Chrysostom, among others, espoused similarly negative views of traveling in order to experience God. Yarbrough (2008), 73. 36 Gregory of Nyssa, The Letters, col. 1010–1011, translated in Silvas (2007), 118; Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 52. 37 Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 2, col. 1011; translated in Silvas (2007), 119–20. 38 Silvas (2007), 121. 34

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

It would seem from this letter that Gregory holds a clear and unshakable anti-pilgrimage position, and yet in Letter 3 Gregory introduces a modicum of doubt into this interpretation of his position: ‘When I saw the holy places with the senses and saw too the signs of these places manifested in you, I was filled with joy so great that it cannot be described in words’.39 The sites of Christ’s life moved Gregory, he was not immune to whatever power they seemed to hold for the hordes of pilgrims he must have encountered. Gregory’s happiness in seeing the sites is short-lived it seems, as he goes on in Letter 3 to convey a sense of despair, wondering how evil must the world be if even the place which saw the Incarnation and bears the footprints of the Lord is still infested with immorality. Letter 3 thus exhibits a sort of ambivalence; the sites without doubt move the heart of a devout Christian, but at the same time corruption and immorality inexplicably rule the ‘holy’ land in which the sites are found. Bitton-Ashkelony points to an important contradiction that expands this ambivalence, namely that Gregory does not reject entirely the idea of sacred space or pilgrimage, he merely localizes it: ‘We benefitted only this much from our travelling there, that we came to know by comparison that our own places are far holier than those abroad.’40 Though Gregory’s argument against pilgrimage in Letter 2 seems firm, his own joy at seeing the sites and his willingness to allow for the importance of local pilgrimage suggest more strongly a complex and shifting view of the practice.41 Alongside Gregory of Nyssa and his articulations of the immorality of Jerusalem and the potential dangers of pilgrimage, we find other figures whose positions are ambiguous as well.42 In the mid-380s, Jerome moved with some supporters to Palestine, and yet even he held some doubts as to the efficacy (or perhaps as to the primacy of the efficacy) of visiting or living in Jerusalem. For Jerome, travel to the sites of Jesus’ life Silvas (2007), 125; Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 51. Gregory of Nyssa, Letter 2, col, 1014, translated in Silvas (2007), 121; see also Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 56–57. 41 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 61. Bitton-Ashkelony argues that Gregory’s relationship to Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem played a significant role in Gregory’s writing of Letter 2. The competition between Cappodocia and Jerusalem may have resulted in a certain polemical stress on the evil of Jerusalem and the importance of local shrines and cults, despite Gregory’s presentation of his argument as purely theological. Cyril was himself attempting to promote Jerusalem exactly because of its proximity to the holy places, and it may have been the idea that Jerusalem was more important than Cappodocia to which Gregory truly objected. 42 Peters (1985), 152–53. 39

40

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

has intellective, educational and religious benefit, a notion to which we will later return. And yet after some years in Palestine, Jerome modifies his original position that ‘to worship on the spot where the feet of the Lord once stood is part of the faith’.43 By the 390s Jerome writes to Paulinus of Nola that he ought not ‘think that [his] faith is lacking because [he] has not seen Jerusalem’.44 Though it can have educative effects, proximity to the holy sites does not make an individual more holy and it is by no means a requirement, a fact stressed by Jerome’s occasional lamentations of the sinful and sad state of affairs in Jerusalem. One thus reads in Jerome a somewhat similar ambivalence toward Jerusalem and the idea of holy space. Where Jerome and Gregory frequently mention pilgrimage and Jerusalem but in a way that leaves their feelings in doubt, Augustine remains virtually silent on the topic. He seems never to have traveled to Rome or Jerusalem after his conversion. Though deeply involved in local cult life and thus not without some opinions on the idea of holy spaces, Augustine primarily seems to use the terms peregrinus and peregrinatio to refer to exile in the broadest sense, exile from union with God.45 The whole of life, for Augustine, is a peregrinatio in which the Christian is an alien stranded in this earthly world, one ‘who has no home here, but is on his way to his native city (patria) in heaven’.46 This view influenced many throughout the medieval period, particularly monastics.47 As a result, the Judean Jerusalem holds little unique appeal, as is clear in Augustine’s exposition on Psalm 86: ‘He was, as it were, contemplating that city of Jerusalem on earth: for consider what city he alludes to, of which certain very excellent things are spoken. Now the earthly city has been destroyed: after suffering the enemy’s rage, it fell to the earth; it is no longer what it was: it exhibited the emblem, and the shadow hath passed away’.48 The earthly city has been destroyed, has become a shadow, and has no place in the future of salvation. In Augustine’s ser43 Jerome, Letter 47 to Desiderius, 493; translated in Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 81; L. Perrone (1999), 231–43. 44 Jerome, ‘Letter 58 to Paulinus’ Epistolae, 582; translated in Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 87. See also Sumption (1975) for an analysis of Jerome and Paula’s understanding of their travels, 91. 45 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 112; Bitton-Ashkelony (1999), chapter 189–94. See also Van Oort, 131–42. 46 Van Oort (1991), 139. 47 Limor (2006), 326–27. 48 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 86.6; translated in Schaff (1886), 421.

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

mon 50, in which he preaches against the Manicheans, he nuances this notion, indicating that the earthly Jerusalem holds as the first house of God a certain glory. But that glory is fleeting, whereas the glory of those who live as citizens of the city of God, those who live as Christians, is eternal.49 For Augustine, sacred space is irrelevant, or perhaps better stated, it exists in the heart of every true believer. And yet despite the ambivalent views of some of the fourth-century’s greatest thinkers, people flocked to Jerusalem in the wake of Constantine’s conversion.50 But even as the debates about pilgrimage continued among the elite, the end of persecution brought a new religiosity to the Christian world in the form of institutionalized monasticism. Among monastics, the conversation remained alive but had a different tone and concerned itself with different issues, such as the compatibility of the vow of obedience with travel to a foreign land. Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, in some ways begins and exemplifies this tradition in his declarations that while pilgrimage for the sake of gaining closeness to God is not necessarily bad, one would do better to seek that closeness through a monastic life.51 While still maintaining that God is without place and that sacred space is located within, Theodoret of Cyrrhus offered an anti-Jewish logic of pilgrimage. Theodoret understood Christian presence in Palestine as a form of triumph, the ultimate expression ‘Prima enim domus, id est, cives terrenae Jerusalem, sicut Apostolus dicit, ignorantes Dei justitiam, et suam justitiam quaerentes constituere, justitiae Dei non sunt subjecti (Rom. X, 3). Videte si non isti dum suum esse dicunt aurum et argentum, non potuerunt ad aeternam gloriam domus novissimae pervenire. Tamen cum dicit Propheta, Magna erit gloria domus istius novissimae plus quam primae, nec ipsam primam sine aliqua gloria fuisse demonstrat. Nam de illa loquebatur etiam Apostolus, cum diceret: Si enim quod evacuatur, per gloriam est; multo magis quod manet, in gloria erit (II Cor. III, 11)’, Augustine, Sermo L, section 11, col. 331; translated in Rotelle (1990), 350 : ‘The first house, that is the citizens of earthly Jerusalem, being ignorant, as the apostle says, of the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit themselves to the justice of God (Rom 10:3). Just see whether it is not these people who have been unable, as long as they call the gold and the silver their own, to attain to the eternal glory of the latest house. And yet when the prophet says Great shall be the glory of this latest house more than of the first, he indicates that even the first one itself was not without some glory (2 Cor 3:11)’. 50 See Walker (1990) for more details on fourth-century reactions to Jerusalem. See also Markus (1994), 261. 51 Athanasius expresses this opinion in a letter addressed to Egyptian virgins who had traveled to Palestine and since returned to Alexandria. The letter exists in a Syriac translation, edited by Lebon (1928), 170–88, translated in Brakke (1995), 292–94. Bitton-Ashkelony (2005) analyzes this letter, 164–68 as does Frank (2000), 108–11; Limor (2006), 326–27. Monasticism was understood, argues Limor, as the true form of pilgrimage. 49

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

of supersession whereby Hebrew Scripture references to the return of the people to the land of Israel no longer refer to the Jews but to the Christians.52 Monastics, too, then held varying views on pilgrimage, and at the center of the discussion was the conflict between a life devoted to stability in a monastic house, a private life, and the wandering of a pilgrim, a more public life. The fifth and sixth centuries saw ongoing major building projects in Jerusalem under the guidance of Empress Eudocia and then Justinian.53 Of importance too were the multiple understandings of Jerusalem proposed during the fifth century by John Cassian.54 Offered as an example of the four senses of scripture, Cassian’s proposed interpretations of the city strengthened the idea that there existed more than one Jerusalem. Cassian writes: The four figures that have been mentioned converge in such a way that, if we want, one and the same Jerusalem can be understood in a fourfold manner. According to history it is the city of the Jews. According to allegory it is the Church of Christ. According to anagogy it is that Heavenly City of God ‘which is the mother of us all’. According to tropology it is the soul of the human being, which under this name is frequently either reproached or praised by the Lord.55

Whatever the elite theologian party-line, the earthly Jerusalem had certainly taken on importance for political leaders and for believers. As the Christian West moved into what would come to be called the Middle Ages, significant political changes began to occur in Jerusalem. Once thought to have affected the status of pilgrimage, it seems that while the Persian conquest of 614 may have decreased the number of pilgrims, the 52 Theodoret Of Cyrrhus’ anti-Jewish polemical interpretation of the Old Testament that leads to his belief in the importance of the Christian return to Jerusalem is evident in his commentary on Isaiah, available in the Sources Chretiennes series: Interpretatio in Isaiam, ed.  J.  N. Guinot (vols  276, 295, 315) (Paris, 1980, 1982, 1983). Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 174–83 works through Theodoret’s positions, arguing not only that he evinces an anti-Jewish position, but also that Jerusalem’s importance lay in its relationship to Christ. 53 Peters (1985), 161–66. For a contemporary account of Justinian’s building projects, including also bridges and roads, see Procopius of Ceasarea, Aedificia Justiniani, ed. and trans Dewing and Downey (1961), partially translated in Wilkinson (2002), 124–28. 54 Stroumsa (1999), 359–60. 55 Cassian, Collectio, section 14.8, col. 963B-964A; translated in Ramsey (1997), 510.

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

relatively quick re-conquest 15 years later by Heraclius kept the practice from dying out completely; certainly, from the seventh to ninth centuries pilgrims still made their way from the west to Jerusalem and its environs.56 And by the tenth century, despite being under Muslim rule, pilgrimage seems to have experienced an upswing.57 A continued growth did not necessarily mean increasing support. The tenth- and eleventh-century rise in pilgrimage may reflect a certain kind of millennial anxiety about sin which is perhaps also reflected in the lack of accounts: people were undertaking the voyage for the purpose of penance not pleasure, their travels were meant to be external enactments of inward contrition.58 It may also reflect the greater focus placed on Jesus the man; scholars have long noted that with the millennium a new spirituality that focused on the humanity of Christ became dominant.59 Perhaps this encouraged more devotion to the historical locations of his life. Whatever the cause, once again alongside the growth in pilgrimage came a growth in criticisms. These cautions, as Giles Constable argues, shifted subtly. Where Gregory, Jerome and Augustine had argued against locating God in one place, against the potential moral and physical dangers of pilgrimage and against the potential corollary effect of detraction from local cults, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the negative critiques came to center on the primacy of a life lived well, of an interior life, over exterior actions.60 These later arguments follow readily on the heels of the fourth- and fifth-century monastic positions against pilgrimage, as well as on the mistrust that had developed in the intervening centuries. In 813, the council of Chalon had issued a statement against pilgrimage, requiring priests in particular to ask permission before undertaking a journey. 56 McCormick (2000), 296–97, 299. McCormick notes that pilgrimage to Jerusalem was far more important during the Carolingian period than has heretofore been recognized, 305. McCormick argues that this lack of interest in Carolingian pilgrimage stems from the Pirenne thesis, but that years of prosopographic study have led him to believe that between 700 and 900 a minimum of 109 voyages were undertaken, though the travelers remain anonymous, 295–96. See Pirenne (1937). 57 Limor (2006), 335–36, 339. Limor bases this claim on the work of McCormick (2000), whose work, she writes, shows that ‘at least 109 travellers of all kinds who went from the Latin West to the Holy Land between 700 and 900, half of them known by name’, 336. 58 Limor (2006), 343. Limor notes that there are in fact no accounts or guides from the eleventh century; she cautions that this period shows the lack of correlation between extant accounts and actual pilgrim numbers. 59 See Fulton (2002) and Southern (1953). 60 Constable (1976), 125–26.

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

Suspicion about the purpose of the pilgrimages seems to have been the crux: There are priests, deacons, and other clerics who live negligently thinking that they can free themselves from sin and perform their ministry by going to these places. There are laymen who think they either sin or have sinned with impunity because they visit these places for prayer. There are powerful men who have enriched themselves by obtaining rents under the pretext of visiting Rome or Tours, have oppressed many poor men, and pretend that what they do only from cupidity is done for the sake of prayer and visiting holy places. There are poor men who do the same in order to have better means of begging. Among these are vagabonds who lie that they are going to a particular place and who, being so foolish as to think that they can be freed from sin simply by the sight of holy places, disregard the words of St.  Jerome that, ‘It is praiseworthy not to have been in Jerusalem but to have lived well for Jerusalem’.61

The council evidently worried not only about safety but about a misuse of the pilgrimage process. This caution echoed through monastic circles in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: penitential travel was not to be used as an excuse to sin with impunity. Pilgrimage, though it remained popular, paled in comparison to the ideal of monasticism. As one modern scholar puts it, ‘the religious ideal to which Western Christians aspired at that time was a monastic one: the highest form of the Christian life was considered to be that of the monk who renounced the world in order to devote himself to a life of prayer, and the highest form of the monastic life was thought to be that of the hermit.’62 Of the many definitions of pilgrim, the exilic rejection of this life, preferably in the form of hermitage, continued to be the ideal. As Pope Urban II ushered in the crusader era, the view that monks (who earlier had made up much of the pilgrim population) should not undertake journeys to Jerusalem became increasingly prevalent, even as the term pilgrimage was extended to crusading activity. Urban himself declared that travel to Palestine ought to be limited to the soldiers, while figures like St. Anselm and Geoffrey of Vendome confirmed this with urgings that monastics follow Urban’s rule and be content to dedicate 61 Concilium Cabillonense in 813, text from Concilia Aevi Karolini (1997), 273– 85, 282; translated in Constable (1976), 128. 62 Hamilton (1995), 693. Here Hamilton bases his contention on Peter Damian, Liber qui appellatur ‘Dominus vobiscum’, 248.

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

themselves to life in the monastery.63 For the laity there is benefit to be gained by traveling to Jerusalem, but for monastics, the entry into a monastery makes one’s life a perpetual pilgrimage and to stray from this would be hazardous to their souls. Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux, both of whom supported crusader activity, also recognized the imprudence of pilgrimage for monastics.64 Monastics lived a continual life of interiority, of obedience and prayer, rather than engaging in a temporary exterior act. These criticisms reflect a larger trend, noted by Constable and Jean LeClerq, toward the interior. For monastics of the high Middle Ages, ‘exterior behaviors’ became less important and ‘interior attitudes’ became the measure of a soul.65 Bernard of Clairvaux, despite preaching the Second Crusade, also argued that monks had chosen the better path to the heavenly Jerusalem.66 Many widely read and popular monks thus spoke out against pilgrimage, echoing some of the earlier opinions and expanding on others, focusing primarily on the idea that monasticism presents a far better lifestyle for reaching closeness with God and remission of sin than pilgrimage. So while monks were encouraged to stay at home, Crusaders were initially referred to as pilgrims and some confusion thus existed.67 In fact this confusion continued beyond the Crusades as the term pilgrimage still had a range of meanings with an array of implied intentions.68 In some ways further complicating their reputation in Europe, once these soldiers had secured the Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem, they brought back to that city various festivals and processions from the time of Constantine, perhaps in part to promote pilgrimage to the Holy City.69 Pilgrimage thus received a boost with the Crusades, such that one scholar has written that ‘Jerusalem was first and foremost a pilgrim kingdom’.70 63 Constable (1976), 133–34 describes monastic objections to pilgrimage, quoting St. Anselm’s letter 410 (Anselm, Epistolarum, vol. 5, 355) and Geoffrey of Vendome’s letter 4.21, col. 162 bc. See also Hamilton (1995), 693 64 Stroumsa (1999), 360–61. Stroumsa notes that for Bernard of Clairvaux, the monastery was something of a boot camp-style preparation for the heavenly Jerusalem while Jerusalem itself was a symbol of the spiritual life. See also Constable (1976), 137. 65 Constable (1976), 142. 66 Webb (1999), 236–37; Constable (1976), 142. Webb also outlines the positions of Hildebert of Le Mans and Berthold of Regensburg, 239. 67 Dupront (1987), 241. Dupront’s work at large addresses the connection between Crusaders and pilgrims. 68 Honemann (1999), 176. 69 Boas (2001), 30; Limor (2006), 344–45. 70 Richard (1979), xxiii.

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

We might argue this statement, but certainly the western conquest of Jerusalem did much to remind European Christians that the city was indeed real, that the historical interpretation of Cassian was also accurate and relevant even to them.71 The role of Jerusalem in popular imagination in the west thus shifted slightly during the crusader kingdom. As one modern scholar of pilgrimage writes, in the time of the Crusades, ‘the idea of the earthly Jerusalem became so confused with and transfused by that of the Heavenly Jerusalem that the Palestinian city seemed itself a miraculous realm, abounding both in spiritual and in material blessings.’ 72 Those clergy and monastics living in Jerusalem, conducting the newly reestablished festivals and processions, also understood these rituals to benefit not only themselves but the whole of Christendom.73 While early Christian thinkers conceived of Jerusalem only in the sense of the spiritual or Heavenly City, the Crusades made very real the geographical location. The thirteenth century brought with it the introduction of two new orders that would become incredibly popular, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. They focused their spiritual attention on a form of imitatio Christi that involved an active rather than contemplative life, that understood conversion and correction as central to the goal of any devout Christian, and that acknowledged various paths to spiritual perfection.74 In the thirteenth century, two sermons by Jacques de Vitry help to illuminate this continued divide between expectations for lay people and monastics.75 While it is entirely possible that these sermons were intended as models and were never in fact delivered, they reflect what continued to be the dominant view of the religious elite. In one, de Vitry seems to address lay people with the classic argument that Abraham was the first pilgrim who chose to make himself an alien and received reward as a result. De Vitry writes that Abraham is the ‘exemplum peregrina Peters (1985), 295. Cohn (1969), 64–65. 73 Hamilton (1995), 708. As Hamilton writes, the religious acts were performed ‘in some sense on behalf of the whole Catholic world, by performing the liturgy in the holy places, the protection of which was the kingdom’s raison d' être.’ 74 Hamilton (1995), 708. 75 Birch (1999), 79. The two sermons by Jacques de Vitry that Birch examines are ‘as yet unpublished’. They are among the Ad Status sermons, or Sermones Vulgares of which there are 74 by Jacques de Vitry. The manuscript Birch uses for work is located in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin MS 3284. 71

72

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

tionis’ and that those who imitate him will also receive benefit, so long as they take care to do so with the proper frame of mind and attention to penitence.76 The second sermon, by contrast, focuses on the notion of this life as pilgrimage. Drawing on various biblical texts, de Vitry again stresses the importance of a mind bent on spiritual goodness and a heart full of penitence, but here these are mandated as a way to live the ideal life occupied with spiritual warfare in service of God.77 One might read de Vitry as offering two possible ways of understanding the use of pilgrimage in devotion to God: one way suited to the general public and the other suited to the more spiritual elite. As we have seen, this split represented nothing new with regard to the question of religious travel, it had continued from the early centuries in which the intellectual and spiritual elite offered objections to pilgrimage and yet people flowed to Jerusalem.78 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a large group of Christians during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, travel became about missionizing more so than pilgrimage. The Franciscans and Dominicans both spread out into the world attempting to right the wrong moral understandings grown by heresies and to convert those outside the bounds of Christendom to the true religion. Francis himself, as described in the previous chapter, supposedly traveled to the Holy Land with the express purpose of converting the Sultan, not for purposes of prayer. In the wake of his death and of the Franciscan insinuation into the sites in Palestine we see small but vocal numbers of mendicants undertaking travel in order to spread the word.79 Franciscans in the Holy Land, and along the way there, worked to provide shelter and support for pilgrims.80 They often took up permanent residence abroad, making themselves aliens. In a sense then, the work of these mendicant missionaries most resembles the notion of pilgrimage behind monasticism (the idea of becoming a permanent exile) rather than travel.

76 Birch (1999), 83. Birch argues, too, that the style of this sermon, with its frequent exempla would be suited to an audience whose attention might tend to stray. The second sermon includes no exempla, merely an argument that proceeds by logic and as such Birch believes this sermon would have been delivered to or read by a clerical or at least more learned audience whose attention was already assured. 77 Birch (1999), 90–91. 78 Wilkinson (1999), 8. 79 Jotischky (2004), 89. 80 Habig (1953), 190.

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

Despite the opposition that had existed from early in Christian history and that had continued to grow as a vision of the stable monastic life took center stage, medieval pilgrims clearly still made their way to neighboring holy sites, to relic shrines and across the sea to Jerusalem. If nothing else, de Vitry’s sermons help to show that the popular tide of pilgrimage had not been (and could not be) stemmed. But never does peregrinatio in the sense of travel to a foreign site seem to have been the privileged ideal for Christian thinkers. Rather, the ideal seems to have been peregrinatio as it meant becoming permanently aware of one’s alien status on this earth. Monasticism, interestingly the site of the first hints of the Stations of the Cross ritual enacted by figures like Henry Suso and Eustochia, trumped pilgrimage every time in the eyes of the dominant intellectual Christian leaders, certainly in the eyes of the monastics themselves. 81 And so while perhaps some lay people of the high and late Middle Ages understood pilgrimage as a beneficial or even ideal activity, there can be hardly any doubt that, among those who represent the earliest stages of the development of the Stations of the Cross, pilgrimage was not something to which one ought to aspire. It was, perhaps at best, a stop-gap measure of spiritual practice for those who were unable to dedicate their lives to more pure spiritual pursuits. As the terminology of the Stations begin to develop in the west through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some modern scholars note changes in pilgrimage but not the controversy that surrounds its spiritual value. With the arrival of the fourteenth century, Pope Boniface offers what appears to be the first plenary indulgence to any who make a trip to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee.82 A certain kind of institutional support for pilgrimage, theretofore unseen, develops in the form of indulgences. In the mid-fourteenth century Pope Clement VI offered these remissions of sin, ostensibly requiring true penance, to people who made trips to certain locations during certain times of year, but also allowed those unable to make the trip to provide financial support to the Church in order to acquire the same indulgence.83 The system of indulgences grew, and without question it generated a good deal of pilgrimage, both locally and abroad. But suspicion did not end with the offer of As Dyas points out, Middle English works of literature, among them Piers Plowman (see below) of the fourteenth century certainly acknowledge these complications, 99. 82 For a précis of the history of indulgences see Fonseca (1999), 119–34. 83 Webb (2002), 27. 81

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Religious Travel: Ideal or Accepted Evil

papal indulgence. The late-fourteenth-century Piers Plowman evinces a deep mistrust of those who choose to go on religious pilgrimage; the prologue clearly criticizes those who travel as liars.84 Of course, even these suspicions fail with the onset of the age of discovery when whole new parts of the world open up and with them new reasons and increased desire for travel. Reasons that, in some cases, reflect the spreading of the fourteenth-century missionizing work of the Franciscans and Dominicans, but that in other cases reflect the growing economy better than they do the religious concerns that had once ruled travel.85 Missionizing was still understood as a form of imitatio Christi, but these economic reasons for travel, as well as the by then overly developed system of indulgences, faced criticism, especially from the growing reform contingents.86 Religious travel did not disappear with the advent of the age of discovery, but as the Reformation dawned in the form of groups like the Lollards in England, it faced serious objections, many of which echoed the earliest negative positions on the practice.87 Among these continued the notion of the ever-present nature of God; the Eucharist could be taken anywhere. Additionally, an attitude pervaded that spirituality could just as easily be pursued at home, through living the best possible life one’s station required, an idea that might be linked back to the urban mendicant movements that stressed many paths to God. Erasmus, critic of the church and sometime supporter of Luther, was of the mind that the way one conducted oneself at home was far more important than the notion of external pilgrimage;88 Erasmus, though not a monastic, thus espouses a somewhat similar view to the early attackers of pilgrimage. 84 ‘Pylgrymys and palmeres plytyth hem togedere/For to seke Seynt Jame and seyntes in Rome;/ And wente forth in her way with manye wyse talys,/And hadde leve to lye al her lyf after’, Piers Plowman: The A Version, Prologue, 46–49, 50. See also Sumption for fourteenth century (and later) suspicions about miracles, visions, and pilgrimage, 272–85. 85 Noonan (2007), 8–9. 86 Noonan (2007), 61, 86. 87 Graboïs (1998), 209; Webb (2002), 42.Webb notes that statistics are hard to come by about religious travel at the beginning of the Reformation. She posits, however, that 'criticism does not of itself, however prove that the practice being criticised is losing popularity; it may even suggest otherwise'. 88 Webb (2002), 72 writes that Erasmus ‘envisaged the devout paterfamilias performing his pilgrimage by going from room to room of his house, seeing to the welfare of the members of his household.’ See also Sumption (1975), 301. Erasmus pokes fun at the Stations and pilgrimage in general in his work Peregrinatio religionis ergo (Opera Omnia) (Amsterdam 1972), 470–94. See also Chareyron (2000), for more information about Reformation anti-pilgrimage, 9.

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The ‘Ideal’ of Pilgrimage

In some sense, however, the broadest response came in the form of a general rejection: late medieval reform groups (Lollards, Hussites, Cathars, etc.), largely rejected the authority and structures of the Catholic Church and in this they also rejected the expressions of that power and structure in the form of saints, relics, indulgences, and churches.89 Pilgrimage continued to be popular through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though we see increasingly complex motivations for departing on these journeys abroad.90 As the Age of Exploration progressed, pilgrimage became more about discovery (though still tinged with missionizing the newly opened areas of the world) and as a result the accounts came to contain observations about the people and places of the wider world; the pilgrim literature reflects the broader cultural changes taking place.91 Where once these texts barely touched on the contemporary conditions in the lands their authors visited, with these shifts, excurses on culture, language, even flora and fauna become much more commonplace. Throughout the long history of Catholic religious travel, different groups clearly saw this activity in different lights. Popular journeying to Jerusalem and more local sites seems to have been an unstoppable tide, one that was later embraced by church leaders. But all along, strident voices of objection were raised and at best we might say that pilgrimage as religious travel was understood as beneficial, though also incredibly dangerous, for the laity as a specific category. Monastics, generally, believed and argued that their life represented the true peregrinatio, the true ideal. As Diana Webb writes, ‘the professed religious was urged to understand and embrace this greater reality rather than to hanker after the lower satisfactions of mere holy sight-seeing. Jerusalem the city was after all only a place in a world destined to pass away.’92 Thurston’s unquestioned acceptance of religious journeying as an ideal Christian activity, as a ritual to be emulated if not directly undertaken, is thus already suspect based on an understanding of how travel was perceived by the larger Church. An investigation of how those who traveled to Jerusalem from the fourth to seventeenth centuries understood their own journeys will help to deepen our understanding of the role pilgrimage played in the long history of ancient and medieval Christian spirituality. 91 92 89

90

Webb (2002), 74. Housley (2000), 233. Graboïs (1998), 209–10. Webb (2002), 171.

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A JOURNEY UNDERTAKEN: PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS

The debates on religious travel accounted for above concerned more than just travel to Jerusalem, but as we narrow in more closely on the relationship between pilgrimage and the Stations of the Cross it becomes important to focus on the question of religious travel to the city of Jesus’ death. This section will deal with primary accounts of travel to the city of Jerusalem and its environs in an effort to discover what purpose Holy Land travelers ascribed to their own journeys and to understand in what context they viewed their own activities.1 Did they in fact view themselves as taking part in a desired, ideal, ultimate religious ritual? The survey conducted here, brief though it must be of necessity, suggests that in fact religious travelers had no sense that the devotional act they were performing was required, ideal, or that it ought to be sought by all devout Christians.2 1 As Honemann (1999), 178, notes, travel accounts across the Middle Ages do not often provide a concise statement of their motive and intent. As such, it is necessary to look beyond declarative statements and to consider what preoccupies each traveler and the style in which they discuss these concerns. 2 Sources are taken, where possible, from each century, to ensure a sense of continuity. Though many more could be examined, given the popularity of travel texts since the very beginnings of official Christendom, I have here limited myself to those best known and to those to which Storme and Thurston specifically point in their discussion of the development of the Stations. The reader will, however, note an increase in the number of sources when we arrive at the twelfth century and again at the fifteenth. These increases reflect, in the case of the twelfth century, a nuanced change in why travelers write their accounts and, in the case of the fifteenth, the importance of this century for the introduction in descriptions of Jerusalem of terms used to describe the nascent rituals of the west. For a thorough bibliography of accounts of travel to the Holy Land, see N. Schur (1980). See also the bibliography of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society which was an early publisher of pilgrim texts from 1884–1895.

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

The Earliest Pilgrims The earliest extant pilgrim account is that of the Bordeaux pilgrim. From coastal France, this author traveled to Jerusalem in 333 and has provided history with what amounts to a laundry list of halting places, and the distances between them, along the route from Bordeaux to Palestine.3 He gives little indication of why he undertook his travel; the text begins with a simple incipit that indicates the content of his work: ‘Passage from Bordeaux all the way to Jerusalem and from Heraclia through Aulonam and through the city of Rome all the way to Milan’.4 From there it flows into an account of resting places. The Bordeaux pilgrim does take the time to flesh out more fully scriptural sites in sections 585–99. In these passages, he provides details both about sites related to Christ (for example, he indicates that Sion was the site of the House of Caiaphas and the column of the scourging) and about those related to the Old Testament (as when he lists Schechem as the site at which Joseph is buried and where Dinah was seized).5 But nothing about his account suggests that this particular traveler made his way to Jerusalem out of an emotive, affective, or deep desire to experience and touch the sites. Little emotion breaks through this text; rather the driving force seems to be knowledge— a deeper understanding of the distances and geography and perhaps a deeper grasp of scripture (which indeed he references) through vision. The detail of the book certainly offers the reader a clear picture of the city of Jerusalem, but a far less clear picture of what ends the traveler had in mind when he began his journey. To begin to understand the purpose of early journeys to Jerusalem, including this one, we must turn instead to some of the longer, more expressive works, such as those of Egeria and Jerome. Egeria, likely a Spanish nun, traveled in the 380’s. Though lost for nearly 700 years, the portions of her text now available provide not only detail about the city but detail about the liturgy taking place around her.6 Egeria visited a city 50 years older than the Bordeaux Pilgrim’s Jerusalem, but it was largely the same landscape, filled with Constantinian

Wilkinson (1999), 22. Bordeaux Pilgrim, Itinerarium Burdigalense, section 549. The text is broken into sections from 549–617. Translations my own. 5 Bordeaux Pilgrim, 592, and 587–88. 6 Wilkinson (1999), 1. 3 4

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The Earliest Pilgrims

buildings and Christian sites.7 While the beginning of Egeria’s text is lost, she provides clues, if not to the journey itself, then to her insistent and thorough recording of her experience. In the midst of her description of the Valley of Sinai she explains to her sisters that though ‘it has been rather a long business writing down all these places one after the other, and it makes far too much to remember’ she hopes that ‘it may help… [her] loving sisters… the better to picture what happened in these places when [they] read the Books of holy Moses’.8 One might then imagine that Egeria set out with a very clear goal in mind: to see those places she had theretofore only read about in scripture. The style and content help also to further our understanding of Egeria’s trip. She records her travels with a deep awareness of her own curiosity, though this curiosity is somewhat limited to her desire to confirm biblical events and to understand the liturgical and monastic life of the cities of Palestine.9 But it is this commitment to recording the liturgical and monastic realities of Palestine that leads Ora Limor to suggest that Egeria was doing more than confirming the sites, and that in fact this was not her major focus. Rather, according to Limor, her focus was to pray at the holy sites and to fulfill her desire to see the places of Jesus’ life.10 Evidence comes for this in Egeria’s use of the phrase gratia orationis in sections 13:1 and 17:1 of the Itinerarium and her description of the sites as loca desiderata.11 So while Egeria may not provide us with a direct explanation of her three year journey, her work indicates that the impetus for her travels was some combination of a desire to pray at the sites and a desire to see those holy places with her own eyes that she might better understand the scriptures. Egeria’s motives overlap slightly with earlier pilgrims who travel for reasons seemingly more intellectual than prayerful. Melito of Sardis (second century) and Origen (third century) travel for what Ora Limor describes as ‘scholarly’ reasons.12 Eusebius recorded for posterity Melito of Sardis’ journey and motives, writing that Melito traveled in order to Wilkinson (1999), 35. Egeria, Itinerarium, 5.8, 44; translated in Wilkinson (1999), 5:8, 113. 9 Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 10. Hunt (2000), 40. As Hunt writes, Egeria went ‘to trace out on the ground the books of Holy Scripture, and to behold in visible reality the places where biblical events had occurred.’ As such, Egeria gives little to no account of contemporary Jerusalem, 43. 10 Limor (2001), 8, 10. 11 Egeria, Itinerarium, 10:7, 51. 12 Limor (2001), 15. 7 8

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see ‘the places where [these things] were preached and done’ in an effort, it would seem, to create an accurate canon rather than to perform devotional acts that so inspired Egeria.13 One might be inclined to attribute this difference to the fact that Egeria traveled in the wake of Constantine’s legitimization of the Christian religion, when a more extensive liturgy had developed.14 Yet Jerome and his companion Paula from Egeria’s own time also appear to travel for largely educational purposes, suggesting that despite this watershed moment in Christian history, some pilgrims were still traveling with a focus on the expansion of their intellective understanding rather than a specific desire to experience local liturgical customs. In the Praefatio in Librum Paralipomenon Jerome espouses the notion that seeing the sites of Judaea will enable a deeper understanding of the scriptures.15 We might, then, see this notion of deepening one’s grasp of the scriptures as a similarity in Egeria and in Jerome, but they emphasize different aspects. Egeria desires something to picture, some illustration to take home for when she reads the Bible.16 By contrast, Jerome’s focus truly does seem to be textual. In other words, where Egeria wants a fleshing out, almost a making real, Jerome wants an intellectual confirmation. Jerome, perhaps because of some of his political difficulties and the resulting ambivalence about the intrinsic holiness of particular sites, seems to lack Egeria’s desire. Rather, Jerome and his description of Paula’s journey align more readily with the reasoning and impetus observable in the early travels of Melito and Origen, i.e. the desire for an educational journey that has the capacity to instruct the traveler in a fuller knowledge of text. In both cases text figures centrally in the experience, but with a different nuance and a different focus as the experience is recorded for posterity.17 The understanding clearly is, however, that these trips will assist in illuminating text and encouraging prayer, but not that anything about them will fundamentally alter the

Eusebius quotes Melito: ‘Ego igitur cum in Orientem profectus essem, et ad locum ipsum pervenissem, in quo haec et praedicata et gesta olim fuerant’, Eusebius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae, Bk. 4.26.14, col. 398; translated in Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 19. 14 Hunt (1982), 107. 15 Jerome. Prefatio Hieronymi in Librum Paralipomenon Juxta LXX Interpretes, 401–04, translated in Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 69. Jerome in fact makes a comparison between the benefits for Christian understanding in seeing the cities of Palestine and the benefit for understanding Greek history inherent in visiting Athens. 16 Limor (2001), 11. 17 Limor (2001), 15. 13

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Before the Crusades

soul, or that, in the undertaking of these activities, sin will necessarily be wiped clean.

Before the Crusades From these fourth-century accounts we move on to a text from 570, authored by an anonymous figure now referred to as the Piacenza Pilgrim.18 Though one cannot be certain that he visited all of the places that he mentions, this author certainly did make a trip to the Holy Land and was able to describe in detail the sites and the practices in which some pilgrims, himself included, engaged.19 The Piacenza Pilgrim offers no explanation for why he begins his trip, but dives right into describing the places he travels. He does, however, provide occasional glimpses into his objective when he describes what activities he and his fellow pilgrims perform at particular sites. For example, in the Valley of Gethsemane they arrive at the place ‘where the Lord was betrayed’. They find there ‘three couches on which he reclined and where we also reclined to gain their blessing.’20 Where Egeria participated in liturgical processions and rites and Jerome hoped to find some confirmation and elaboration of his knowledge of the text of the Bible, the Piacenza Pilgrim, whatever the reason he set out on his journey, evidently expends time and energy on the gathering of blessings through the use of relics or the manipulation of objects said to have special holy properties.21 These activities involve not only touching objects or laying down on couches, but also the inges18 There are indeed extant texts from the fifth century, but these texts are largely written by people living in or working in Jerusalem and its environs, rather than by westerners who have intentionally undertaken a journey east for a limited amount of time. For the fifth-century account of John Rufus see John Rufus, Vita Petri Iberi, partially translated in Wilkinson (2002), 99–102. There are also many more accounts from the sixth century, beyond that of the Piacenza Pilgrim, but these are generally not by travelers, see for example Theodosius, De situ terrae sanctae, 113–25. 19 Wilkinson (2002), 12. Wilkinson only translates the first version, though two exist and are published in CCSL, vol. 175. The second version leaves out certain difficult passages and alters others to make them more moralizing. Wilkinson notes (12) that the secondary version shows a lack of knowledge about Jerusalem through altered place-names. 20 Piacenza Pilgrim. Itinerarium, passage 17, 137; translated in Wilkinson (2002), passage 17, 138. 21 Though Egeria herself focuses on liturgy, as Hunt (1982), 128 notes, she does mention other pilgrims’ desire to interact on a very personal level with relics; see Egeria, Itinerarium, 37.2, 81.

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

tion of objects and the modification of self, as when he drinks from a human skull said to be that of Saint Theodota or when he removes his beard on the top of Mount Sinai.22 The Piacenza Pilgrim clearly feels desire for these relic experiences, and like other authors in these early centuries refers to what we might now call pilgrimage as ‘going to pray at’. The use of this phrase perhaps strengthens an interpretation offered by John Wilkinson that ‘the overall motive for pilgrimage seems to have been the quest for perfection, sought in this case particularly by going to places where God’s mighty acts had been performed, and worshipping him there.’23 And yet, in the texts so far reviewed little mention is made of this question of perfection. The travelers are concerned with seeing the sights, with participating in prayer and ritual, but none offer an articulation of this question of perfection, none put forth travel as a unique mode of gaining closeness to God and none argue that their journeys effect an irreversible change. Wilkinson contends that the Piacenza Pilgrim’s removal of his beard and adoption of the tonsure at Mount Sinai is evidence of this seeking of perfection at the holy sites, yet perhaps all this scene truly tells us is that the (re)dedication of a soul to monasticism was the ultimate in perfection. 24 We might also see the Piacenza Pilgrim as pointing to the most basic reason for religious travel identified by Gary Vikan, one different from that identified by Wilkinson. These journeys, Vikan contends, always at their heart involved the belief that the traveler would gain something, that there was benefit to be had from seeing, touching, eating, being in contact with holy people, objects or places. 25 Despite being anathema to the placeless notions of early Christianity that held that sacrality was no more present in one place than another and despite the ever-present dangers of going abroad, we have already seen that travel continued. Sources confirm this as we move from the sixth century into the seventh where we encounter the Irish monastic Adomnán who recorded the travelers of a fellow islander, Arculf.

22 Piacenza Pilgrim, Itinerarium, passage 22, 140; translated in Wilkinson (2002), passage 22, 140, and passage 37, 148; translated in Wilkinson (2002), passage 37, 146. 23 Wilkinson (2002), 73. 24 Wilkinson (2002), 73. 25 Vikan (2010), 24–28. In this section Vikan describes the ways in which the sacred is transferred through not only touch but all the senses.

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Before the Crusades

Adomnán, abbot of Iona, wrote a book on the Holy Places in the mid-seventh century, likely based not only on the pilgrimage undertaken by Arculf, a bishop of Gaul, but also on research done at the abbey at Iona.26 In the incipit to Book 1, Adomnán writes his intention to record the words of the well-traveled Arculf, but he suggests little about why Arculf made his journey: Arculf was a holy bishop, a Gaul by race. He had experience of various faraway places, and his report about them was true and in every way satisfactory. He stayed for nine months in the city of Jerusalem, and used to go round all the holy places on daily visits. All the experiences described below he carefully rehearsed to me, Adomnan, and I first took down his trustworthy and reliable account on tablets. This I have now written out on parchment in the form of a short essay. 27

The reader learns that Arculf made daily trips to the holy places, but not much beyond that, except that his memory and Adomnán's recordings thereof are accurate. We begin to get glimpses of Arculf 's activities when we learn that he 'venerated [the Apostles cup] by touching it with his hand through a hole in the pierced door of the reliquary where it is kept'.28 Perhaps this was the very same cup venerated by the Piacenza Pilgrim.29 As Arculf continues his journey, he engages in the veneration and relic-touching that we saw with the Piacenza Pilgrim.30 Adomnán places very little emphasis on the liturgy so important to Egeria, rather he is concerned with the accuracy of the descriptions of the physical space, with venerating objects and with the miracles that attended litur Adomnán. De Locis Sanctis, 183–234, translated in Meehan (1958) and Wilkinson (2002), 167–206; 1:23:9, 200. 27 Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis, 1:incipit, 183; translated in Wilkinson (2002), 167. 28 Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis, 1:7:3, 191; translated in Wilkinson (2002), 7:3, 174. 29 ‘Ibi est et calix apostolorum, in quo post resurrectionem domini missas faciebant, et multa alia miracula, quae non recolo’, Piacenza Pilgrim, passage 22, 140; translated in Wilkinson (2002), passage 22, 140: ‘The Cup of the Apostles is there, with which they celebrated mass after the Lord had risen again, and many other remarkable things which I cannot remember.’ The Piacenza Pilgrim sees the cup in a chapel on Mount Sion, while Arculf seems to have viewed and venerated it inside the basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. It is possible, then, that there existed in Jerusalem two cups claimed to be the Cup of the Apostles, or that in the intervening century between the two travelers the cup had been moved to a new location. 30 Arculf touches or ‘venerates’ various relics: the cloth placed over Christ’s head in burial Bk. 1:9, 194–94, the water from a rock in Bethlehem Bk. 2:3, 207, and the cross in Constantinople Bk. 3:4, 229–33. 26

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

gical events, preoccupations that may or may not reflect Arculf 's own predilections.31 Adomnán ends his text with a request for prayer for Arculf, who has so kindly shared his experiences, and for himself who has taken the time out of a busy church schedule to write down Arculf 's words: Therefore I request the person, whoever he may be, who has read these short books, to pray to the divine Clemency for the holy priest Arculf, who visited these holy places, and so generously told us all his experiences. And since I, in my poor style, have set them down, at a time when the work of caring for the church kept me under pressure of business and overwork poured in from every direction all day long, I request the reader of these experiences that he do not fail to pray for me, their describer, to Christ, the Judge of the Ages.32

And so while Adomnán's account seems most to support Vikan's interpretation of religious travel as bestowing benefit primarily through contact with and veneration of holy relics rather than through the performance of liturgy at holy sites, again we see little concern with explaining the journey, little concern with articulating even a theology of travel. Interestingly, this lack of explanation may suggest that the activity of religious travel simply did not require explanation, so widespread was it despite the objections of church leaders and monastics. One can read these texts as negative evidence for a culture that accepted the religious journey as a reasonable (though not required or expected) undertaking for a devout believer who wanted to see and touch in order to gain bless31 Arculf does tell Adomnán of the liturgy celebrated during the feast of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, but even here the focus is not on the liturgy but on the miraculous gale-force wind that attends it: ‘in anniuersaria diei dominicae ascensionis sollemnitate per omnem annum ualidissimi flaminis procella meridianis horis post peracta in eadem basilica sacrosancta missarum sollemnia forti impetu inruere in tantum solet ut nullus hominum stare uel etiam sedere in illa eclesia et uicinis ei locis quoquo possit modo sed omnes tamdiu in terra prostratis uultibus superstrati iacent donec illa terribilis procella pertranseat. Huius terrifici flatus causa facit ut illa pars domus habere camaram non possit quae supra locum inpresorum domini uestigiorum, qui intra supra dictae rotae medium foramen aperte monstratur, ad caelum semper patefacta appareat. Nam quascumque materias desuper ad camaram conponendam si quando humanae manus ars edificare conabatur supra memorati diuinitus emisa uenti ualiditas distruebat. De hac itaque formidabili procella sanctus arculfus taliter nobis enarrauit, qui eadem hora qua in die dominicae ascensionis ille ualidissimus inruit flatus et ipse presens in eadem eclesia oliueti interfuit montis’, Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis, Bk 1:23:15–18, 201. 32 Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis, Bk. 3:4–6, 234; translated in Wilkinson (2002), Bk. 3:6, 206.

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Before the Crusades

ings from contact with what were increasingly understood as holy sites. Yet, Adomnán makes no mention of Arculf having a desire to travel to the Holy Land nor does he take what would have been the perfect opportunity to express any interest of his own in making a similar trip. He does not describe Arculf's journey as the epitome of spiritual devotion or even as something to be emulated. The late eighth century saw a nun named Hugeburc writing the life of her relative Willibald, a saint who traveled to Jerusalem, Rome, and other foreign locales.33 Hugeburc, despite her humble position, decides to detail Willibald’s account because ‘it did not seem right to allow these things to pass into oblivion, nor to be silent about the things God has shown to his servant in these our days.’34 Dedicated in his childhood to the church, Willibald began early to show evidence of his spiritual nature and in time he became the model monastic, seeking perfection in the community life. Hugeburc recounts that Willibald, having already renounced worldly goods, seems to have sought even more literal ways to renounce the world, ‘his country, parents and relatives’ and he ‘began to devise means of setting out on pilgrimage and travelling to foreign countries that were unknown to him’.35 In the end, however, Willibald did not renounce his parents but rather convinced his father to accompany him on this difficult journey to foreign lands. According I will not here discuss Bede, De locis sanctis, perhaps the best known eighthcentury source, as his work is largely a compilation of others’ works and he himself never made the trip east (Wilkinson 2002, 21). Bede also uses much material from Adomnán in the creation of his history, making an inquiry here redundant. See O'Loughlin (2007), 188–97 for an anaylsis of Bede’s use of earlier sources. For an account of Willibald and Hugeburc, see Iadanza (2007), 121–40. 34 ‘Unde nunc certe, ut ita dicam, mihi videtur esse proterum, quad ista omnia mutatenacitatis silentio opilatus labiis humana taceat lingua, quas Dominus suo servo per proprii corporis larborem per visionemque oculorum ostendo in nostris temporibus revelare dignatus est’, Hugeburc, Vita Williabaldi, 87; translated inTalbot (1954), 153. Talbot clearly reduces Hugeburc’s language to its most basic, removing the awkwardly phrased expressions of humility. 35 ‘Cumque ista sedule intus intra mentis volubilitate volvans tractare cepit, qualiter ista cogitatio depromeri proferrique poterit in effectum, ut caduca cuncta cosmi istius contemnere sive derelinquere quearet et non solum temporales terrnarum divitias, sed et patriuam et parents atque propinquos deserere peregrinationisque temptare telluram et ignotas externarum requirere ruras’, Hugeburc, Vita Willibaldi, 89; translated in Talbot (1954), 156. The full passage translation reads: ‘Next he began to inquire how he could put these ideas into effect so that he could despise and renounce the fleeting pleasures of this world and forsake not merely the temporal riches of his earthly inheritance but also his country, parents and relatives. He began also to devise means of setting out on pilgrimage and travelling to foreign countries that were unknown to him.’ Again, Talbot has adjusted the language of the text for readability. 33

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

to Hugeburc, Willibald’s own motivation was to ‘travel to distant foreign lands and find out all about them’.36 Yet, in order to convince his father Willibald evidently used all manner of coercion from threats of damnation to promises of eternal life. Odd that he should be willing to use such reasoning for his father but that his own reasoning should be so devoid of spiritual or religious connotations beyond making himself more literally a peregrinus. Interestingly, Hugeburc more often describes Willibald and his companions as praying at a site, rather than involving themselves in relic activity.37 But the focus here again remains on the physical sites, where they were, what they looked like, and how many miles one needed to travel to get from one to the next. In the ninth century, a monk named Bernard wrote what is now the last extant traveler’s text from before the crusades. Written around 870, his account indicates that he traveled with some companions from Rome to Jerusalem.38 The text begins much as others we have seen: ‘In the year 870 after the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ I Bernard joined two others, brethren in religious devotion, who wanted to see the Holy Places’.39 Bernard wants to see the sites of Jerusalem. His account, however, shows an increasing preoccupation with recording not only details of the churches and the holy spots in the cities he visits, but also details about the daily life of the local populace. He and his fellow travelers spent their time in Jerusalem lodging at Emperor Charles’ hospice and after giving a brief account of the gardens and library, Bernard takes the time to note that trade is conducted in the forum in front of the hospice and that one must pay two guineas per year to 36 Hugeburc, Vita Willibaldi, 90; translated in Talbot (1954), 156–57. See also Angenendt (1990), 146. 37 That said, when they arrive in Cana they do drink from one of the pots in which Jesus was believed to have changed water into wine: ‘…et veniebant in villam Chanaan, ubi Dominus aquas in vino convertit. Illic est aecclesia magna, et in illa aecclesia stat in altare unum de 6 hydriis, quas Dominus iusserat implere aqua, et in vinum verse sunt; et de illo communicaverunt vinum’, Hugeburc, Vita Willibaldi, 95; translated in Talbot (1954), 163: ‘After commending themselves to the Lord there, they set out on foot and came to the town of Chana [Halsall: i.e. Cana], where our Lord changed water into wine. A vast church stands there, and in the church one of the altars has on it one of the six water pots which our Lord ordered to be filled with water and then changed into wine; from it they drank some wine’. 38 Wilkinson (2002), 25. 39 Bernard the Monk, Itinerarium Bernardi, ch. 1, 85. translated in Wilkinson (2002), 261. Wilkinson translates a title present in the earliest manuscript, clearly not the same one Tobler uses as Tobler’s text does not provide a year, simply saying ‘in the name of God, I Bernard…’

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Before the Crusades

do business there.40 Before ending his text, Bernard also takes pains to describe how Christians can manage to keep the faith in Jerusalem and Egypt, telling his reader that ‘Christiani et pagani talem pacem inter se positam habent ibi’, so much so that he can leave his camel unattended, with all his belongings packed on it, and return some time later to find nothing disturbed.41 We hear nothing in Bernard’s text about relic interaction, or praying at the sites, we merely hear accounts of the churches, the land, and the people: in some sense we see in Bernard a shift toward describing the places he visits as they are not as they were (though of course he describes why the sites are important, citing biblical stories).42 The tenth and eleventh centuries yield few texts of use in determining motives for religious travel; particularly interesting given the Crusades that we know with hindsight were looming on the horizon.43 The existing works of the tenth century, however, are largely lists of churches.44 We do find in one such list by Eutychius the Patriarch of Alexandria what Wilkinson calls ‘insights into the theological meaning of pilgrimage’.45 In The Book of the Demonstration (c.  944), Eutychius writes that ‘by these relics and places of which He made us heirs, Christ gave us, all joined in one, a blessing, a sanctification, an approach to him, pardon for sins, feats in which men come together in his name, spiritual 40 ‘Ante ipsum hospitale est forum, in quo unusquisque ibi negotians in anno solvit duos aureos illi, qui illud providet’, Bernard the Monk, Itinerarium, ch.  10, 91–92; translated in Wilkinson (2002), 265–66: ‘In front of this hospice is the forum and any one who does his business there pays the person in charge an annual fee of two guineas’. 41 Bernard the Monk, Itinerarium, ch. 22, 98–99; translated in Wilkinson (2002) as ch. 23, 268–69: ‘Relations between the Christians and pagans are excellent. Thus, say I were travelling, and the camel or donkey which your humble servant was riding died on the way, and I left all my belongings there without any one to look after them, and went off to the city to fetch another animal. I would find everything unharmed when I came back.’ 42 In a lingering last statement, for example, Bernard comments that the masonry in Gethsemane is so polished that it operates like a mirror: ‘Denique in villa Gethsemane vidimus ejus subtilitatis marmoreos lapides quadratos, ut in eis, veluti in speculo, omnia, quaecunque voluerit homo, conspicari possit’, ch. 24, 99; translated in Wilkinson (2002) as ch. 25, 269. 43 For a consideration of pilgrim routes and for more evidence that there were indeed travelers, despite the lack of texts, see Hamilton (1999), 135–44. 44 Another useful text from this time is the Typikon of the Anastasis, selections translated into French in Thibaut (1926), an account of the liturgy of Holy Week at the Holy Sepulcher to which we will return in chapter four. 45 Wilkinson (2002), 26.

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

joy without end, and witnesses confirming the Scriptures’.46 Eutychius reaffirms what earlier travelers described or implied as their intentions; they wanted confirmation of Jesus’ life and activities, they wanted a deeper understanding of the scripture, they wanted to interact with the relics and the places touched by Christ, and they wanted to pray with like-minded Christians at these sites. Though we do not know if Eutychius himself ever made a journey to Jerusalem or merely repeated what he heard or read, this short quote from his work underscores the importance of touching and seeing, just as do the accounts of those who did make the perilous journey. The eleventh century sees even fewer texts, with only snippets appearing in sermons and the occasional mention in a larger history such as that of Rodulf Glaber.47 Despite this seeming lack of accounts, Limor argues that the eleventh century saw a dramatic increase in pilgrimages of vast scale and involving many noble and prominent people.48 This may have resulted, Limor and other scholars note, from the spiritual changes going on in Europe around the year 1000—the focus on Jesus the man and the anxiety about sin and the end of days surrounding the millennium.49 Despite what are described as ‘huge… waves of pilgrims’, no accounts exist.50 Limor contends that this absence of texts reflects not a lack of enthusiasm for travel but rather the type of travel that was being undertaken. She argues that the silence is a product of religious travels whose focus was the soul, whose purpose was penance or whose impetus was penitence: Unlike those in previous centuries, they were not looking outward unto the holy places, but inward, into their souls. Rather than looking for the historical past, they were seeking redemption in the future. For 46 Eutychius of Alexandria, The Book of the Demonstration, 310 , translated in Watt (1960), 134. For the original Arabic text, see Eutychius, The Book of the Demonstration, part 1, 165. 47 Wilkinson (2002), 26–27. The sermon excerpt is a description of Bethlehem and of Christ’s tomb by Jachintus, copied onto a leaf that is now included with homilies by St. Gregory the Great. Glaber’s work is treated below. 48 Limor (2006), 340. Morris (2000), 90–109, makes the same argument for the late tenth century, based on a quote from Rodulf Glaber that multitudes were making the journey, as well as on other ‘sporadic’ mentions of journeys to the Holy Land, 90–91. 49 Limor (2006), 341. See also Joranson (1928), 3–56. See Fulton (2002). 50 Limor (2006), 343. Limor definitively declares that ‘there are no pilgrimage descriptions from this period, nor guides for pilgrims. None of the many travelers, it would seem, not even the more learned ones, set forth to describe his or her experiences’.

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Before the Crusades

them Jerusalem was a redemptory space. To a degree, their pilgrimage was a journey to the heavenly Jerusalem through the earthly one.51

While Limor may well be right about a prevalent attitude of penitence in the eleventh century, it is something of a stretch to presume all this from silence. Limor interprets religious travel to Jerusalem, in some sense, as the culmination of the spiritual life, but she does so based on a lack of evidence. Her notion that these pilgrims were travelling to the heavenly Jerusalem through the earthly one may apply, however, to a very select group of travelers, those who went to Jerusalem to die. Among them was a man called Lethbald whose story Rodulf Glaber recounts in his mideleventh-century history. Glaber, in telling Lethbald’s tale, offers one of very few articulations that might support an interpretation of religious travel as the epitome of a Christian life and that may partially support Limor’s argument for inward travel in this time: There he threw himself down flat on the ground, spread out like a cross, and rejoiced in the Lord with unspeakable joy. Then standing up there he raised his hands towards heaven, strained to reach it as close as he could, and gave utterance to these words, his heart’s desire. ‘Lord Jesus’, he said, ‘who condescendedst for our sake to come down from the throne of thy majesty to the earth to be the Saviour of mankind; who didst also from this place which mine eyes behold, robed in flesh, return to the heaven from which thou hadst come: I pray the supreme goodness of thine almighty power that if my soul is to depart from my body this year, I may not go away from this place, but that it may happen within sight of the place of the Ascension. For I believe that as I have followed thee in the body in order to reach this place, so my soul, unscathed and joyful, is going to follow thee into Paradise’.52

Rodulf presents, as we have seen and will continue to see despite Limor’s claims, a minority view among those authors who write of trips to Palestine. According to Glaber’s account, Lethbald tells God in his prayer that he believes that he had followed Christ to the Mount of Olives in order that he might then follow him to Paradise. Lethbald’s prayer is granted and he dies in sight of the site of the ascension. This also makes his case distinct from others. He traveled not with an expectation or Limor (2006), 343. Rodulf Glaber. Historiarum sui temporis, Bk. 4, ch.  6, 680; translated in Wilkinson (2002), 272. 51

52

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a hope of returning home, but rather he believed that he was, and he desired to be, taking his final journey. So while his prayer and his subsequent death might suggest some notion of religious travel as an ultimate activity, in a sense Lethbald’s ultimate travel is his death, not his trip to Jerusalem. Glaber also notes, with disdain, that, unlike Lethbald, others made the journey and returned home with the simple desire to be admired for having done so.53 This certainly does not suggest a crusader culture permeated with notions of pilgrimage as an inward and penitential ideal. In fact, to this point, none of the travelers we have encountered have spoken of their journeys in terms of perfection or as an ideal. They have, rather, expressed a desire to see, to pray, to perhaps gain better understanding of the scriptures, and implicitly to interact with relics. Moving into the Crusades, in fact, it has been suggested by Jonathan Riley-Smith that the entirety of the Holy Land ‘was… itself, rocks, sand, earth and water, a relic,’ a notion that may help to explain the Crusades and the post-Crusade conception of pilgrimage and Palestine.54

The Crusades and the High Middle Ages With the success of the Crusades and the establishment of the Latin Kingdom, we see a distinct increase in the number of accounts of individual pilgrimage, despite the fact that travel to Jerusalem remained a dangerous and arduous activity.55 It is also in this post-crusader time that the word peregrinus comes to take on a more specifically religious bent, making it increasingly possible to translate it into the English word pilgrim with all its connotations of travel for religious purposes.56 The accounts of this time, however, continue to be largely list-like, as were those in the centuries just before the Crusades. Stilted and without personal impressions, they offer little to no account of spiritual, theological, or liturgical matters.57 One such account comes from the pilgrim Saewulf, likely of British origin, who travelled to the Holy Land that he Glaber, Historiarum, Bk. 4, ch. 6, 680:, translated in Wilkinson (2002), 272–73. Riley-Smith (1978), 93. 55 Peters (1985), 294. Saewulf, who travelled around 1104, tells how nearly all his companions died in a shipwreck and how non-Christian locals waited to attack unsuspecting passersby. He tells too of the bodies laying by the side of the road, ch. 8, translated in Wilkinson (1988), 100–01. See also Hamilton (1999). 56 Wilkinson (1988), 81. 57 Limor (2006), 348; Wilkinson (1988), 82. 53

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might ‘pray at the Lord’s Tomb’ and who most certainly felt weighted down ‘because of the burden of [his] sins’.58 Saewulf ’s text fails to elaborate on these initial comments, becoming merely a description of the city, of the distances between sites, of the importance of each place with regard to scriptural stories and with a list of what relics are contained within each site, though he does not describe any ritual action, either in the form of prayer or relic veneration. He makes one mention, in something of a throwaway line: ‘Now that I had explored as far as I was able each one of the Holy Places of the city of Jerusalem and the cities near it, and venerated them, I boarded a ship at Joppa on the day of Pentecost to go back to my country’.59 Saewulf ’s description details the sites with a focus both on the scriptural ‘why’ of their importance and on their contemporary physicality. While the focus on scripture has been consistent over time, and has a clear genesis in the very impetus for travel—the desire to better understand the scripture—the focus on the physicality of the place and on the inhabitants and their activities can be considered relatively new. F. E. Peters argues that after centuries of Islamic rule, the European conception of Jerusalem had lost touch with reality and that as a result the ‘liberation’ of the city brought a renewed interest in the contemporary physical space and renewed notions of the city’s temporal and eschatological importance, as with the idea of the navel of the world being located near to the site of Christ’s crucifixion.60 Certainly there continues beyond Saewulf this desire to account accurately for the contemporary site.61 Although he possesses the same attention to detail and the same detachment when describing the holy sites themselves, the early twelfthcentury Russian Daniel the Abbot adopts a more personal approach 58 Saewulf. Relatio pereginatione Saewulfi, 59; translated in Wilkinson (1988), 94. In all, Saewulf ’s text features a lot of copying from Bede. The translation in Wilkinson (1988) provides notes for what text is original and what can be attributed to others. Limor (2006), 348, contends that Saewulf is an exception to this impersonal rule, and while this may be the case when he describes his sea journey and the perils they faced, his account of the actual Holy Land tells little of his personal experience or reactions. 59 Saewulf, Relatio, 75; translated in Wilkinson (1988), 112. 60 Peters (1985), chapter 8, 283–332. 61 Among these writers is Daniel the Abbot. Scholars consider his work a standout among the pilgrim accounts of this time because he uses a far more personal tone, see Limor (2006), 348 and Wilkinson (1988), 9. The personal tone is limited, however, to those parts of the text that describe the ‘why’ of his journey. His elaborations of the sites themselves read a bit like a catalogue, with little mention of what he did or did not do at each site. Daniel’s work was originally printed in Russian and the English translation here in use is Wilkinson’s, made from an edition printed in Germany (1970).

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when narrating his purpose for traveling and for writing. Thus though Daniel does not come from western Europe he provides us with a striking example of the continuing difficulty around the value of pilgrimage: …I…, humbled by many sins and lacking in any good deed, urged by my own imagination and impatience, conceived a desire to see the holy city of Jerusalem and the Promised Land… I have described this road and these holy places not vaunting myself or boasting of my journey as if I had done some good on my way. Far from it. I did nothing good on my journey, but for the love of these holy places I have set down everything which I saw with my own eyes, so that what God gave me, an unworthy man, to see may not be forgotten… For if anyone hearing about these places should grieve in his soul and in his thoughts for these holy places, he shall receive the same reward from God as those who shall have travelled to the holy places. For many good men living at home in their own places, by their thoughts, charity to the poor, and their good deeds, attain the holy places and receive a great reward from God… and many who have travelled… have become conceited in their own mind as if they had done something good and thus lose the reward for their labour.62

At the beginning of his work, Daniel takes pains to say that his pilgrimage does not give him any benefit over those who are unable or unwilling to undertake one. In fact, as he explains at the end of his work, ‘blessed are those who, having seen, have believed; thrice blessed are those who have not seen but have believed. For it was by faith Abraham came to the Promised Land, and indeed faith is the equal of good works.’63 He happened to conceive a desire and have the ability, and so he made his trip. And, though he remarks that he has written his work for the faithful, that they might read it and potentially grieve and thus receive benefit, his primary reason for writing his text was that he might not forget what he has seen and done. In the earlier periods of pilgrimage the concern for topography seems to have largely been about creating guidebooks for future travelers or for helping others gain a better understanding of the Gospels. This concern for topography absolutely continues, but it seems to be overlaid with goals different from those of the earlier texts: we begin to see a focus not on helping others negotiate the actual landscape, but on memory. 62

21. 63

Daniel the Abbot, Wallfahrtsbericht, 1A, translated in Wilkinson (1988), 120–

Daniel the Abbot, Wallfahrtsbericht, 97, translated in Wilkinson (1988), 171.

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Many of the Latin Kingdom era pilgrims declare that they record their experience to aid others.64 Yet, as with Daniel, a few additionally mention the desire to aid their own memories when they have returned to their homelands. John Phocas begins his late-twelfth-century text by explaining that he hopes it will help others imagine the world he visited; he intends his text as a pleasure for those who have already been to Jerusalem and as a delight for those who have not.65 He reiterates this at the end of the text, writing that he wishes readers will find it helpful, but if not, he adds, ‘let my offspring return to me, its begetter. With its stammers may it remind me of these Holy Places, so that I can recreate their memory in my mind. For that too will be a sweet delight’.66 Failing use to others, Phocas’ text, like that of Abbot Daniel, will be useful to him as an aide memoire. John of Würzberg makes a similar comment, making this notion of memory worth examining. Where John Phocas had written his work with the hope that, should it fail in every other endeavor, at least it would provide him a memory of his time in the Holy Land, Würzberg writes with certainty that it will provide aid to his friend Dietrich: I believe that this description will be valuable to you if, by the Divine Will, you come to everything which I have described and see them physically. It will be easy for you to find them, and you will see the things which I have described to you easily, and without the delay and difficulty of searching for them. But if you happen not to go there and

64 Belard of Ascoli wants to be of use to others Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, chapter 6, 48: ‘Et ego frater Belardus de Esculo hec omnia vidi et scrutatus fui et mihi notavi, ut aliis poseem utilitatem dare', John of Würzberg wants to help his beloved colleague, 109: 'Inde est etiam, quod ego in hierosolymitana manens peregrinatione pro Domini nostri Jesu Christi amore, tui tamen absentis non immemor, dilectionis tuae causa loca venerabilia, quae Dominus noster, mundi salvator, una cum gloriosa genitrice sua Maria, virgine perpetua, et cum reverendo discipulorum suorum collegio corporali santificavit praesentia, praecipue in civitate sancta Jerusalem, quanto expressius et studiosius potui denotando in eis fact, et epigrammata sive prosaice, sive metrice styli officio colligere laboravi’, and Theodoric wants to assist readers in keeping Christ always in their mind, prologus, 314: ‘Hoc autem studio idcirco nos desudasse, lector omnis agnoscat, ut ex hac ipsa lectione sive narratione Christum, in memoria semper discat habere, et eum in memoria retinens studeat amare, amando ei, qui prope passus est, compatiatur, compatiens ejus desiderio accendatur’. 65 John Phocas. De Terra Sacnta, section 1, 927; translated in Wilkinson (1988), 315. 66 John Phocas, De Terra Sancta, section 32, 962; translated in Wilkinson (1988), 336.

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you are not going to physically see them, you will still have a greater love of them and their holiness by reading this book and thinking about it.67

Not unlike Daniel the Abbot, Würzberg seems to feel that a reader will benefit from his text, that there is something to be gained from thinking on the sites and allowing a description to increase one's love for them. Examining Würzberg's account in light of Mary Carruther's work on medieval memory, Robert Ousterhout contends that Jerusalem came to be for medieval pilgrims not merely a real city, but a locus of memory and that, as such, it could serve as help in this spiritual journey; that recording one's travels was not about possession but rather 'a step toward contemplation'.68 Ousterhout suggests that with works like that of Phocas and Würzberg, we are seeing an increase in guidebooks not intended for actual travel, but for contemplation at home. Although Phocas and Würzberg do mention memory specifically and display an even deeper concern for accuracy, Egeria, one of our earliest travelers, also sought to aid those back home in deepening their awareness of scripture. And figures like the Piacenza Pilgrim of the sixth century and Bernard the Monk of the ninth each carefully recorded the paces between the sites, not only for those that might make the journey but also for those who wished to envision it more specifically. Interestingly enough, Würzberg does not record paces. He also never suggests, despite his claim to aiding Dietrich, that pilgrimage holds special significance. What he does do, however, is speak about what the site looked like in the time of scripture and what it looks like now–what churches and chapels are there, how the site is marked, what inscriptions are present. Würzberg displays a consciousness of the dissonance between what was and what is. While we might see his determination to aid those at home as being in line with Egeria and earlier pilgrims, there is also an additional dimension of awareness, one that will continue with future travelers. Among the thirteenth-century accounts, Burchardus de Monte Sion’s c. 1280 account stands as a nice example of this growing awareness. On his travels he examines the world with what F. E. Peters calls ‘open eyes not just an open heart’.69 He illustrates what Peters sees as a gradual change to more precise accounts defined by their desire for 67

244.

John of Würzberg, Descriptio, epistola, 109; translated in Wilkinson (1988), Ousterhout (2009), 153. Peters (1985), 451.

68 69

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detail and by their self-consciousness.70 Though Burchardus does not argue stridently for pilgrimage, he does provide a justification for undertaking the travel. After describing how the ancients and Jews both venerated places and things, Burchardus writes that it should come as no surprise that Christians might also want to view the locations where Christ existed, especially the Holy Sepulcher, ‘which, whenever any man enters, so many times seeth he with his mind’s eyes the Saviour lying there wrapped in linen clothes’.71 One might almost read his prologue as something of an apology. Additionally, as we have seen so many times before, Burchardus records his experiences so that those who wish to imagine the scene and cannot themselves travel might have an aid.72 Some of these same trends of increased detail and awareness can also be seen in the Dominican Riccoldus of Monte Crucis. In the late thirteenth century, Riccoldus traveled to Palestine, he writes, that he might see the places Christ walked and might imprint on his spirit more deeply the death and blood of Christ: I set myself upon my route and crossed the sea so that I might see with my bodily eyes the place that Christ traveled over with his own body, and particularly the place where he deigned to die for the good of the human race; I  wanted to imprint more deeply in my own spirit the memory of the Passion and I wanted that the blood of Christ, spilled for our health, might give me the strength and vigor to preach and to die for him who, by his death, gave me life.73

He combines the traditional pilgrim’s topographical interest shown by his frequent offering of distances, a spiritual self-interest shown by his request and prayers that his understanding be converted, and a more secular interest shown by his accounts of not only other Christians living in the area but of the various other ethnic groups and peoples. With Riccoldus we may well be seeing the beginnings of what seems to define the post-crusade accounts: curiosity and secular interests encouraged by the broad vision of university trained friars.

Peters (1985), 449–50. Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio, Prologus, 19; translated in Stewart (1896), 1–2. 72 Burchardus de Monte Sion, Descriptio, Prologus, 20; translated in Stewart (1896), 4. 73 Riccoldus, Peregrinatio, chapter II, 38. Translation my own. 70 71

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Moving into the fourteenth century, we continue to see similar phenomena. Pilgrims make their way to Jerusalem to better their understanding of scripture and to see for themselves where Christ lived. However, in the wake of the Jubilee year of 1300 we also begin to see the increasing importance of indulgences associated with visiting the Holy Land. One of the most famous and oft-quoted pilgrimage texts of this time is that of Niccolò of Poggibonsi. Niccolò traveled in the middle of the century, 1346–1350, from Tuscany to Palestine, carefully cataloguing his journey. Not only did Niccolò catalogue distances, but also dimensions of sites, the local flora, fauna and human inhabitants, details of inscriptions and decorations, and the benefits one was said to gain from visiting each site. His work absolutely confirms the transition noted by Peters, a transition from an account devoted to scriptural understanding into a travelogue that provides information about things like ostriches, goats, and local cultures and peoples. He set out with this thoroughness in mind. As he writes in chapter thirteen: 'I had in mind to visit everything, and not to return to my country without doing so. And what I saw with my eyes and touched with my hands, and asked of others, and when I was well certified of the things, that I wrote on two small tables, which I carried by me.' 74 Niccolò did not wish to come home until he had put to paper all the details he could, details that included lists of indulgences, a feature of many future pilgrim texts, but one that we do not see before Niccolò. Where once travelers like Egeria spoke in terms of the nebulous but important benefit they would receive from visiting and praying at a site, with Niccolò we see very specific indications of what type of indulgence and for how many years, certain sites convey.75 While Niccolò does not provide a particular reason for his journey, we can make certain assumptions based both on his concern for the indulgences and on his lamentation in chapter eleven on the state of Jerusalem. Niccolò's systematic recording may well reflect, in its exactitude, these later preoccupations with how many years, months, and days one might have to spend in purgatory, but truly there seems to be little difference in the root impetus for traveling to receive indulgences. This concern with guaranteed remission of sin can be understood as a high

Niccolò, Libro, chapter XIII, 47; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 11. Bellorini and Hoade (1945) provide a table not only of Niccolò's but also of other indulgence lists from later pilgrim texts, xli–xlviii. 74

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medieval expression of the penitential travel of earlier centuries.76 He is in good company as he attempts to receive (and to catalogue for posterity) the remissions at every site. Chapter eleven provides a slightly more convoluted answer for why Niccolò travels. It begins with a lament for the lost glory of Jerusalem: Lo! the most holy, the most royal, and most noble, and magnificent above all the cities of the world, you, Jerusalem, Holy Land, how were you once great, beautiful, and lovable! for all generations of the world call you holy, as first the Christians and Jews, then Saracens, Jacobites, Nestorians, Georgians, Ethiopians, Copts, Arabs, Turks, Berbers and Pagans!77

Most holy, most beautiful, most royal, magnificent above all others, he calls Jerusalem. But which Jerusalem? The Jerusalem of Christ? Jerusalem under the Persians? The Jerusalem of the Latin Kingdom? Niccolò laments that Jerusalem's 'royal name is debased' and that 'nothing of the ancient work remains save the Golden Gate… and a vault on Mount Sion’.78 He clearly finds the lack of undisturbed ancient sites saddening; when he lauds the city it seems he lauds the Jerusalem of Christ and is disappointed, to some degree, by its current condition. Yet no matter which Jerusalem he grieves, Niccolò does not seem to believe that the city as it stands is necessarily of perfect value beyond the indulgences one can acquire. The thirteenth chapter provides insight as Niccolò writes that he is bothering to be so detailed because 'many who have a great desire to visit the holy places, poverty impedes; and others abandon it, for the too great fatigue; and others again for want of a permission, which must be had from the Pope'.79 He pays such attention to detail for the benefit of those who cannot or will not make the trip. Yet, on those who will not undertake the journey out of laziness he casts no particular aspersions, and to those who cannot due to poverty or lack of papal permission he offers no pity. There are merely those who make the trip, and those who do not. His comment does, however, importantly imply that there are those to whom the Pope will deny permission, perhaps due 76 Later, Niccolò actually writes that the Holy Sepulcher is a site 'to do penance for the soul', chapter XXXI, Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 21; 'ma veramente egli è luogo da fare penitenzia per l'anima’, Libro [della Lega edition], XXXI, 93. 77 Niccolò, Libro, ch. XI, 36; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 9. 78 Niccolò, Libro, ch. XI, 37–38; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 9. 79 Niccolò, Libro, ch. XIII, 47–48; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1945), 11.

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to their other responsibilities as public servants or their duties as caretakers of others’ souls. No matter the reason for the denial, clearly religious travel, even in the time of indulgences and increased curiosity and even in the wake of the fall of the Latin kingdom, still does not trump all else.

The Late Medieval Period This combination of a deep desire to visit the sites and to record them for others with a relative lack of expression of the vitality of traveling continues.80 Though they may seem unoriginal in their form and style, it is in these fifteenth-century accounts that we find the introduction of the terminology relevant to the Stations as discussed in chapter one. As such, it is important to look at these materials and ascertain what they, seemingly the closest in time and language to the development of the ritual, have to say about their intents and the notion of pilgrimage as ideal. In the mid-fifteenth century, Gabriele Capodilista, listed by Storme and Thurston as the first to introduce the term via croce, sets off for the Holy Land: Finding myself in the times written about in this, my work, I, Gabriele Capodelista, Paduan knight, by the highest God inspired and by Him There are, of course, the occasional emotionally-laden works, such as that of Margery Kempe. Margery Kempe traveled to the Holy Land, as well as to many other sites in Europe. Her travels were marked by emotional outbursts that not infrequently garnered the disdain of her companions. In many ways, Margery’s account falls well in line with Angela of Foligno who has visions of God and hears God speaking directly to her, resulting in behaviors that seem suspect to others. Her account is less helpful in terms of the Stations of the Cross (she does mention the Stations at Rome in chapter 22). Like others of her time, Margery makes no mention of a special route in Jerusalem and her motives for traveling are very personal. Margery undertakes her journey because she believes that God wants her to go to Jerusalem and other holy places: 'As sche was in these desyres, owyr Lord bad hir in hir mend two yer er than sche went that sche schuld gon to Rome, to Jherusalem, and to Seynt Jamys', I.1.15. When she does arrive in Jerusalem, Margery has another emotive response that leads her to fall off her donkey: 'And, whan this creatur saw Jerusalem, rydyng on an asse, sche thankyd God wyth al hir hert, preyng hym for hys mercy that lych as he had browt hir to se this erdly cyté Jerusalem he wold grawntyn hir grace to se the blysful cité of Jerusalem abovyn, the cyté of hevyn. Owyr Lord Jhesu Cryst, answeryng to hyr thowt, grawntyd hir to have hir desyr. Than, for joy that sche had and the swetnes that sche felt in the dalyawnce of owyr Lord, sche was in poynt to a fallyn of hir asse, for sche myth not beryn the swetnesse and grace that God wrowt in hir sowle,' I.1.28. In this same chapter, Margery details a vision of Christ wounded and suffering on the cross that demonstrates her devotion to the Passion, part of her greater devotion to all things holy. 80

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granted in my heart the firm intention to visit personally the holiest place of Jerusalem, site of those most precious memories of the passion with the most holy sepulcher of Jesus Christ who is the liberator by means of his acts as a one of the human race, I, already fallen because of the sin of the first relative, achieved the end of this so praiseworthy desire, according to which order in the present book it is shown…81

Like many before him, Capodilista developed a desire to go to the Holy Land to visit personally the sites, especially the Holy Sepulcher of Christ. The desire of his heart sets Capodilista’s course, but the hope to help others inspires the writing of his text. Early on he indicates that he will provide, at the end of his work, some practical guides for making the journey. The writing of the details of his journey and of his tips for others comprises part of his larger project to move the readers’ heart, to console their minds, and to promote the faith: First to move every heart, even the most obdurate, to pity and to the sweetness of serving God, then to know openly the secure verification of our faith, which although in every good Christian must be undoubted, nothing less than the reading of this devout work will console your minds.82

Capodilista gives no indication that he wishes his text to help in his own memory of the events, rather his effort seems to fall in line with the long-standing tradition of assisting those back home to grow in their spiritual paths and to expand their hearts with pity and a feeling of sweetness in Christ. In some ways, little seems to have changed over the years, though the stress has been placed on different aspects over time. So, although Capodilista is the first to use the phrase via croce (via crucis), there is nothing about his use of the term that indicates ritual activity, and we see that there is hardly anything unique in his articulation of his purposes for journeying and for writing. Storme and Thurston credit William Wey with being the first to make use of the term ‘stations’ to identify stopping places for veneration. Wey, a fellow of Exeter College and then Eton College later in life, was a highly educated ordained priest.83 Wey traveled much in his life, 81 Capodilista, L’Itinerario, section 1, 164. Capodilista’s language meanders with numerous clauses. I have attempted in the translations to clarify the language. 82 Capodilista, L’Itinerario, section 2, 164. 83 Davey (2010), 10–11.

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making his way to Compostela and to Rome, in addition to Jerusalem twice in 1458 and 1462.84 The book he writes of his journeys contains much beyond mere details of the trips themselves. Wey does not include in his prefatory remarks any indication of his own personal reasons for traveling, but his text does articulate why travelers in general chose to undergo long and arduous journeys. In fact, in chapter five, Wey articulates ten different possible reasons that people might make these trips, among them the encouragements of past religious leaders, the ‘Preceptum Christi’, the gaining of indulgences and forgiveness, and the sites themselves.85 Wey never shows his hand, never tells his reader why he himself made the journey, and his only explanation for why he chose to write down his experience appears in chapter seven: … having been asked by devout men to compile an itinerary of my pilgrimage to the most holy Sepulcher of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, [I] propose to describe in my itinerary my journey across the various seas beyond which one must sail, the cities, towns and countries through which one must travel, and the sacred places in the Holy Land together with such things as I saw and heard both there and on the way home. 86

In describing his second pilgrimage Wey does write that he was ‘inspired by God’s Grace’.87 But beyond these two glimpses—God’s Grace inspires the journey and he writes because he was asked to—Wey, like many before him, includes little personal information about his experiences. Like Capodilista, then, despite being the first pilgrim known to use the term ‘Stations’ in its modern and nuanced sense, Wey makes few, if any, claims about the primacy of his project. In 1480, Santo Brasca conceived the notion to travel to Jerusalem. Interestingly, despite being a statesmen and not an avowed religious, Brasca was still required to secure permission to travel to the Holy Land. Granted the right to go to ‘the sepulcher of our omnipotent God and from there, if the supplies allow, to Saint Catherine’s at Mount Sinai,’ Davey (2010), 15–16. Wey (1857), 25–55; translated in Davey (2010), 55–61. In this chapter Wey quotes the Revelations of St. Bridget frequently. Davey considers this in his notes, 61– 63. See also Jorgensen (1954) Saint Bridget of Sweden, vols 1 and 2, London, and Bridget of Sweden, Revelaciones. 86 Wey (1857), 56; translated in Davey (2010), 71. Given what appear to be his hexameter memory techniques, however, we might perhaps read Wey as possessing the same concern as John of Würzberg with the ability to remember aspects of his journey. 87 Wey (1857), 82; translated in Davey (2010), 115. 84 85

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Santo Brasca embarked on his journey.88 Among his companions was the author of a well-known pilgrimage text, the German Felix Fabri whose work will be addressed below.89 Brasca begins his text with an explanation of why he sets out for Jerusalem and a brief explanation of why he has written as well as what he has written and it is in his reasoning that his importance lies. Distinct resemblances to Capodilista’s text echo in Brasca’s articulation of his desire to travel, suggesting that Brasca might have had with him a copy of, or might have at least known well, Capodilista’s L’Itinerario90, continuing a long tradition of borrowing from previous travelogues: Inspired from childhood up until now by the omnipotent and highest God, unconstrained as I was by another obligation, to go personally to visit the most holy city of Jerusalem, site of those most precious memories of the nativity and the passion, where lies the Holy Sepulcher of our Lord Jesus Christ and all of the other places and out of devotion for the Holy Land, I determined for my consolation, and for any who will read my work, to describe all of my itinerary, day by day, and to commemorate particularly all of the devotions, indulgences, and prayers designed for and granted at those places, as will become apparent in the unfolding of this book.91

He goes on to say that he will describe all the necessary items for making the voyage (this occurs in a sort of addendum after his account of his journey, not unlike Capodilista’s appended practical tips for his readers) in order to aid anyone else who desires to make the trip. Primarily, though, Brasca writes, he claims, so that his patron Antonio Landriani might get a sense of what it would be like to make the personal journey and be consoled, as his public and private obligations prohibit him from traveling himself.92 Brasca’s text does, largely, what Lepschy (1966), 17; translations my own. Lepschy here quotes a letter that granted Brasca the permission to take his journey. The letter can be found in the Archivio di Stato, Milano, Reg. duc. 113, folio 250r. 89 Prescott (1950), 17. According to Lepschy, only two manuscripts of Brasca’s journey are extant: one in the Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia (mss It. cl. VI cod. 147) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana di Milano (cod. 398), 34–35. 90 Lepschy, 32. 91 Brasca, Viaggio, section 1, 45. 92 ‘…adciò che non possendo epsa per le grandissime sue occupatione publice et private venire al personal vedere et cognoscimento di tanto delectabile fructo, ella possa a le volte in le vacatione de suoi impedimenti, legendo quelo, prenderne consolatione et atribuirlo a la personal visitatione’, Brasca, Viaggio [Lepschy edition], section 1, 45; ‘…for he who not 88

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

he sets out to do in terms of providing a day to day description of the journey. He catalogues the sites and their indulgences, provides the readings and prayers that were recited at certain sites, and allows his reader a glimpse into the daily life of a pilgrim to Jerusalem. He does not, however, provide a sense of the personal aspects of the journey, leading one to wonder how Brasca expected Landriani to be consoled by the work. Much the same as the list-like guides and accounts written across the centuries, Brasca limits himself to facts and statistics, eschewing any discussion of feelings and how the pilgrimage affected him personally. And so though he declares his desire to make his patron feel as if he himself had gone on pilgrimage, the work does not succeed in producing in its reader any sort of emotional response that might resonate deeply. Among the most well-known pilgrimages of a westerner to Jerusalem are those of Felix Fabri. In 1480 and 1483 Fabri undertook two separate visits to the Holy Land fueled by the belief that, as one scholar describes it, ‘he who has beheld Judaea with his eyes will gain a clearer insight into Holy Scripture’.93 Fabri stands, then, in line with what Ora Limor calls Jerome’s intellective or educative tradition for travelling to the Holy Land. Though his first visit resulted in a very brief text, Fabri recounts his second travel more thoroughly.94 When considering the possibility of taking a second journey, Fabri hesitates to speak to his superiors, concerned that they might ‘be scandalized at [him], judging [him] to be light-minded and impatient of the quiet of the cloister, or perhaps suffering from temptations of the devil, or guilty of the sin of idle curiosity, or moved by frivolity’.95 Once again we see what amounts to a privileging of the cloistered monastic, private life of pilgrimage over pilgrimage as physical travel to engage in public activity. Yet, Fabri felt as though his first trip had not provided him with a real experience of Jerusalem, that, in some sense, he had not even truly gone to visit the holy sites. And so he overcame his hesitations and planned a second trip being able himself, because of his very grand public and private affairs, to accomplish a personal viewing and understanding of such delectable fruit, so that he might sometimes take pause from his obligations, and reading this text, take consolation and feel as if it were the product of a personal visit…’ 93 Stewart (1897), Vol. VII, 2. 94 Prescott (1950), 19–20. Interestingly enough, during both his journeys Fabri traveled with others who wrote accounts of their trips. In 1480, as mentioned above, Santo Brasca and the anonymous author of La Citez de Hierusalem accompanied him, while in 1483 Bernhard von Breydenbach and Brother Paul Walther also made the trip. 95 Fabri, Evagatorium, vol. I, 81; translated in Stewart (1897), Vol. VII, 49.

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The Late Medieval Period

which lasted twelve months. In his account of this journey, Fabri claims he made notes each day so that he might compile an accurate narrative. Though he clearly invests time and energy into his traveling to other locations, Fabri identifies Jerusalem as the central focus of his trip to the Holy Land: ‘the chief cause of our wanderings was the most sweet city of Jerusalem, whose fragrance, spread abroad throughout the world, makes the faithful run thither from all sides.’96 He notes that people flock to Jerusalem because something about this unique city draws them there. Interestingly, Fabri spends a good deal of time describing Jerusalem as it was and as it is, and attempting to determine the relationship between them. Fabri consults earlier pilgrims in order to assess whether or not the Sepulcher then venerated truly was the site of Christ’s burial.97 Upon completing this excursus in which he assesses the accounts of earlier pilgrims in order to determine accurately the history of the site, Fabri argues that it matters not whether the monuments marking the site are original. Because the site itself has been venerated for years, the ground beneath the accrued buildings has an inherent sanctity. This is, of course, quite a change from the earliest Christian positions on the holiness of space. And yet despite these beliefs, Fabri did initially express concern that his superiors in the religious life might think his journey without value, indeed might think it the result of the devil’s temptation. Even into the late fifteenth century, then, we continue to see what amounts to a divide between the official line on the comparative value of monasticism and pilgrimage, and the popular understanding of the importance of space. Toward the very end of the sixteenth century, the Belgian Jean Zuallardo set off for Jerusalem and in his text we begin to see an awareness of motivations that are perhaps not so religious as well as arguments for the benefits of pilgrimage that one can only assume were at least partially in response to Reformation critiques of the Catholic practice. A year after his journey, his text was published in Rome, and shortly thereafter editions came out in French and German.98 Zuallardo writes, in the Fabri, Evagatorium, vol. II, 109; translated Stewart (1897), Vol. VII, 279. Fabri, Evagatorium, vol.  III, 33–41; translated in Stewart (1897), Vol.  VIII, 408–16; 98 It seems that perhaps some significant alterations were made between the Italian and the French version of these texts. Both Noonan (2007) and Williams (1998) reference sections and advice given in the French but seemingly nonexistent in the Italian. In particular, Noonan (2007), 168 speaks of Zuallardo’s zealous defense of pilgrimage in a chapter titled ‘Against those who hate this Holy Journey’, a chapter not present in the 1587 Roman printing. 96

97

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

dedicatory letter that prefaces his Italian text, that he decided to travel both for faith and for curiosity.99 In addition to listing his own reasons, though, Zuallardo argues that pilgrimage would be a natural desire for any Christian: Who is, then, that Christian that will not receive an exhilaration and inexplicable satisfaction, and who will not desire to spend part of their abilities and abandon five or six months only, their own home, and their comforts, and experience a few annoyances from it in order to see those holy sites, where he who is the Creator of everyone, who has ransomed us and has suffered so much for us… and infinite other things, in all the places mentioned above, about which there is ample discussion in the sacred scriptures, and having thus seen and known them, it could not be that these things do not remain imprinted and carved in their imagination and in the frontispiece of their memory for the rest of their life.100

Zuallardo certainly believes that pilgrimage is an understandable desire for any Christian to have, independent of a need to perform penance or secure indulgences. He goes on to praise those rulers and wealthy people who sell all their belongings in order to conduct pilgrimages. And yet even he does not argue that pilgrimage is necessary, or ideal, or any sort of culmination of behaviors. In fact, appended in book six of Zuallardo’s text is a letter from Domenico Danesi da Montepulciano, Doctor of Theology, that counteracts Zuallardo’s own promotion of pilgrimage and exemplifies how the ageold ambivalence remained even into the sixteenth century. In this letter, Domenico recognizes that there are some to whom pilgrimage should not be allowed, among them women and monastics.101 He continues, Zuallardo (1587): ‘I arrived in Jerusalem where I scrupulously saw and visited all of those places, not only with that devout and pious soul that should be foremost in every Christian and that God in his grace conceded to me, but I investigated also with curiosity all the marvelous things one sees, in as much detail as was allowed to me given the amount of time I found myself in those parts’, translations my own. 100 Zuallardo (1587), Liber Primo, 21. 101 ‘A tutti pero non conviene il pellegrinare, & massime a Donne se non hanno vigilantissima custodia, & fidele, ne meno a Monaci i quali chiusi in celle con silentio, digiuno, & orationi, ch’e maggior bene, passano la vita loro’, Zuallardo (1587), 355 (Domenico letter); ‘Pilgrimage is not worthwhile for all, however, particularly for women if they are not under extremely vigilant and faithful guardianship; not even for monastics, who spend their lives closed in cells with silence, fasting and prayer, which is so much the better.’ 99

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The Late Medieval Period

however, arguing that there are some for whom the penitential act of pilgrimage is beneficial; there is nothing new in this argument. From the earliest years of the importation from Celtic Christianity of the notion of penitential pilgrimage, theologians have made a distinction among those for whom the act has value. Into the period of the Reformation and the beginnings of the counter-Reformation, not much has altered. Perhaps the epitome of the interest in concrete contemporary aspects of the city, noted by Peters as early as the turn of the twelfth century, and certainly evidenced in Fabri’s concern with the ‘realness’ of the site of the Holy Sepulcher, comes with Bernardino Amico’s travels in the early seventeenth century. A Franciscan, Amico went to the Holy Land in service of his order, but while there made records that allowed him to, as one scholar puts it, ‘reinterpret the Holy Land in exactly this contemporary idiom’; his work is ‘shot through with the architectural’.102 He published his work in two different editions. The early version from 1609 contained drawings by Antonio Tempesta, while the 1619 edition featured engravings by Jacques Callot.103 The engravings and descriptions are detailed and deliberate, and so while Bernardino cannot rightly be considered a pilgrim in the sense of one who traveled for the sole purpose of worshiping and visiting (rather he traveled, effectively, for his job), he provides a nice example of what preoccupied both authors and readers of texts about the Holy Land. The explanation for why Bernardino chose to create his work is located in his dedication letters. To King  Philip of Spain in 1609 he wrote that he ‘delineated’ the drawings of the sites ‘for the consolation of all the faithful not without great care’ and to the King’s emissary, Don Francesco, Count of Castro he wrote that the drawings ‘shall be so many pyres of spiritual fire to enflame minds to the contemplation of the mysteries wrought by the Saviour of the word’.104 The second edition contains a letter of dedication to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici. As flowery as the letters from the original text, this document declares that he ‘sketched the true and real portraits of these most sacred places, where we were redeemed through the blood of the immaculate Lamb Jesus Christ Our Lord, for the universal benefit of Christendom and in order to excite and enflame the minds and hearts of Noonan (2007), 191. Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 13–14. 104 Bernardino Amico, Trattato (1609), unpaginated; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 37–38. 102 103

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A Journey Undertaken: Primary Source Analysis

the Catholic Princes for the recovery of the Holy Land.’105 Bernardino’s declarations to his patrons boil down to what we have read over and over in earlier texts: a desire to inspire devotion, spiritual depth, and perhaps active thought among the readers. Interestingly, Amico includes as well, more explicitly in his second edition but certainly in the first, what seems to be a call to renew the Crusades for the sake of recovering the site of the redemption of humankind. Bernardino, like so many before him, understood Jerusalem as important because it was the site of the Incarnation and believed that a report of travel there might inspire some degree of contemplation and consolation. In his final chapter Bernardino does exhort anyone who develops the desire to undertake the journey to Jerusalem not to be swayed by tales of the perilous sea voyage or of the dangers posed by the local inhabitants. He writes that those with the desire should remember that their time in the Holy Land will outweigh any fears or any labors it takes them to arrive there, they should remember that ‘God gave [them] the inspiration in this undertaking, [and] he will also give [them] patience in the trials and adverse fortunes’, just as he did ‘in regard to the holy Apostles, and all the glorious martyrs’.106 What fascinates the reader about this last chapter of Amico is that he does not exhort all Christians to make the journey, he does not claim that everyone should undertake this trip. Rather, he speaks exclusively to those who have already conceived a desire. Perhaps by implication he compares those who develop the desire to apostles and martyrs, but he makes no specific remarks about the spiritual superiority of those who wish to travel or of those who have traveled.

105 Bernardino Amico (1620), Trattato, Dedicatory letter, unpaginated; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 39. 106 Bernardino Amico (1620), 65; translated in Bellorini and Hoade (1953), 143.

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CONCLUSION Conclusion

In many ways, to the extent that we can attempt to isolate the motives thereof, travel and travel writing seem to stay largely the same from their beginning in the fourth century through the high and late medieval periods, despite major changes in the history of the city of Jerusalem. By and large, travelers account for their journeys in very similar ways across pre-modern Christian history: they travel in order to pray at the sites of Christ’s life and to gain deeper understanding of the scriptures they read at home, and they write their stories down in order to aid fellow Christians in doing the same. But there are certainly notable changes within each period. The fourth century offers us Egeria’s liturgically focused text, the Bordeaux pilgrim’s catalogue-style text, and Jerome’s letters that focus on the educative potential of pilgrimage; already in the earliest period there are discernible nuances, as noted by Limor. From the fifth to seventh centuries we see a growing dominance of guidebook style works intended for use by those traveling or ostensibly for use by others in understanding more deeply the mysteries of the scriptures. The same holds true for the eighth to eleventh centuries, though there are far fewer sources to examine. The texts of the crusader era largely maintain these same concerns, focusing on topographical issues, cataloguing many sites, and often neglecting theological and spiritual concerns. One obvious shift in these texts however, noted by Ousterhout, is the newly explicit discussion of personal memory. Yet, while they show this change in understanding the purpose of writing down the text, these Latin Kingdom accounts still speak about the purpose of travel in much the same way as all earlier pilgrim texts: the authors want to see for themselves the places Jesus walked. Peters also notes an increased concern with the physicality of

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Conclusion

the actual city, a concern that continues for centuries after the crusader period. A religion that had begun as relatively placeless and with little commitment to the earthly Jerusalem as holy had shifted over thirteen centuries to understand the sites as of value, or at least as of enough value to want to take up arms for their ‘liberation’ during the Crusades. Yet even then, Riccoldus of Monte Crucis writes that though he went to see with his own eyes and imprint on his spirit the sites of the Lord, he knows he can only ever truly see with faith; echoing even in the wake of the Crusades the early Christian ambiguity over the utility of pilgrimage. As we move past the Crusades, we find that pilgrims still travel to see and to understand, and sometimes still to touch, to consume, and to bring home. The travelers themselves continually stress seeing the Holy Land—theirs was a pilgrimage to a place. They do not envision a time, or seek to recapture an event in time but rather a multitude of events in space. They stress the locatedness of the events and the physical aspects of the pilgrimage they are undertaking, its difficulty and the distances. Almost invariably they have a fascination for pacing, though the later pilgrims also display a clear and new curiosity about the people, animals and plants of the lands they visit. Up to and including Amico, they encourage those with a desire to make the perilous journey, but we also seek in vain to find in any of these texts a promotion of pilgrimage above and beyond other activities. Brief though this survey may be, it is striking that not a single traveler disparages those with no desire, not a single traveler indicates that they are going to receive some benefit that cannot be had in any other way as a result of their travel. In short, we find nowhere in these texts evidence for Storme and Thurston’s contention that pilgrimage was considered an ideal activity or even that the term peregrinatio was understood to carry one meaning or connotation. Rather, we find an ambiguity and, we might even say, an unease over the concept of religious travel that makes all the more necessary a new analysis for the Stations of the Cross and its development. Pilgrimage as travel for the purpose of religious ritual was only one type of peregrinatio for a very long time. Many medievals, following Augustine, understood the whole of life as a pilgrimage and the monastic life as the most ideal form of making oneself alien. And so, as one scholar writes, ‘it would not seem unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that within medieval spirituality, it is in fact “geographical” pilgrimage which is the metaphor, a miniature version of that longer, more complex

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Conclusion

journey which every soul must choose to undertake’.1 Indeed, to suggest that religious travel was, even in the later, post-fifteenth-century period, considered by the Church or its leaders as beneficial in all cases is simply wrong. Though it may well have experienced long-standing popular support, travel to Jerusalem, as well as to other shrines and sites, was never touted as an ideal to which all Christians should aspire. The first piece of the regnant interpretation of the ritual of the Way of the Cross thus falls apart, and we must turn to the second, imitation, and examine just what it might mean to ‘imitate’ during the period in which this devotional act develop.

Dyas (1999), 117.

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PART III: RELIGIOUS IMITATION

MEDITATION AS ‘IMITATION’

Introduction The second half of the interpretive argument offered by Storme and Thurston, one long accepted by scholarship, is that the imaginative devotion of the Stations of the Cross is an imitation of ‘real’ pilgrimage. Though they acknowledge that the ritual finds its roots in meditation manuals and Passion devotion in the west, they still insist on declaring it imitative of pilgrimage to the east. We should expect to find, then, first that imitation has some meaning that remains static throughout the medieval period and continues today, and second that western prayer texts that focus a reader’s meditative acts on the Passion of Christ stand in clear relation to pilgrimage texts. What we do find, however, is that imitation is as complex a term as pilgrimage and that manuals for contemplation, though often couched in a pilgrimage metaphor, have little to say to their readers about the ‘ideal’ of journeying to the Holy Land. As evidence of the concept of imitation, Thurston notes that across the Catholic west, beginning early in Christian history, there have existed churches, baptisteries and other religious buildings that bear the name ‘Holy Sepulcher’ or that claim to be built according to the plan of the Jerusalem structures: ‘Almost from the very beginning there went hand in hand with this earnestness in making pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulcher a desire to reproduce at home in some imperfect way the venerated sites that had been visited.’1 This supposedly long-standing tradition of imitation in the west of holy sites from the east, for which Thurston provides few examples prior to the twelfth century, stands as a Thurston (1914), 7.

1

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

form of proof that the ritual of the Stations is also an imitation. Among the most prominent of these architectural imitations was the complex at Santo Stefano in Bologna, perhaps from around the twelfth century, and the earlier Santa Croce in Rome. Santo Stefano, Thurston writes, was ‘intended to reproduce in some way the more important shrines of Jerusalem, and may be regarded as perhaps the most ancient existing example of a set of Stations of the Holy Land, even if they do not in strictness deserve to be called Stations of the Cross.’2 Into this discussion Thurston inserts brief accounts of Henry Suso, the Dominican Alvaro and the Poor Clare Eustochia, all of whom, he informs his reader, enacted proto-Ways of the Cross involving either simply their cells or oratories set about their religious houses. For Thurston, these ritual acts amount to reenactments of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Though it should be noted that at no point is he willing to argue that any of these religious actually traveled to the Holy Land themselves; rather they were reenacting another’s travels. While Storme spends far less time on this issue than Thurston, he too cites these early imitations as the genesis of an impulse to import the holy sites of the Passion to the west. What neither Storme nor Thurston addresses is the question of what exactly imitation means. Does the word hold universal meaning in different times and places? Can it be used to mean the same thing when discussing architecture as when discussing ritual or literature? In both cases the terms imitation, reproduction, and replication are used, effectively, interchangeably. They suggest that indeed any of these terms may stand for any phenomenon in which the name is the same (as in the case of calling a western church the Holy Sepulcher), a claim is made to replication (regardless of whether any similarity exists), or a structural affinity is observable (no matter that the literature around a location or activity makes no claims to imitation). In some ways, Storme and Thurston are correct in this and we shall see how later work in architectural and art historical theory bears out this notion of imitation as existing in a variety of forms. But their lack of rigor in investigating this concept is lamentable because it results in the assumption that, if indeed these ‘spiritual pilgrimages’ of the Stations of the Cross can and should be seen as imitations, they should be 2 Thurston (1914), 8. For a more recent architectural account of Santo Stefano, see Ousterhout (1981), 311–21. Ousterhout argues that early structures modeled on the Holy Sepulcher share certain features as well as dedications and names that are meant to recall the Jerusalem site, 311. As we will see in this chapter, however, these hardly amount to imitations.

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Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto

understood as imitations of physical journeys. As we shall see, if we want to argue for these behaviors as imitative, we would do better to call them imitations of Christ rather than imitations of travel. Thurston and Storme claim that mental devotions are a form of imitation of a physical ritual because of the eventual similar treatment that the two phenomena receive. They arrive at this notion of imitation from the later granting of equivalent papal indulgences but this fails to recognize the ways in which physical journey was itself an imitation. This chapter seeks to flesh out the arguments about how imitation worked in the medieval period by looking at more recent architectural theory on the subject, by examining the concept of imitatio Christi that reaches its climax with Saint Francis of Assisi, and by looking at how notions of space and religious learning, understanding and creation meet in medieval memory tactics. The chapter will close with a primary source analysis that examines what the authors of such ‘spiritual pilgrimages’ understood themselves to be doing—how they articulate their projects and whether they can be seen as conceiving of their own work as comparable to pilgrimage, as imitations thereof, or as participating in some other category entirely.

Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto Storme and Thurston begin their arguments by looking at physical imitations of the Holy Land like the complex of buildings at Santo Stefano. In the years since Thurston’s publication, however, there have been numerous advances in the theory of imitation in the field of architectural history, advances brought on by the mid-twentieth-century article ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Medieval Architecture”’ by Richard Krautheimer.3 Before beginning an examination of this work, however, it would behoove us to set out some definitions for our terms. To imitate, at its most basic, is to follow an example in some fashion or other. There exist, however, complicating terms like replica, reproduction, and fabrication, all of which can themselves be used interchangeably with or to define imitation. Annabel Jane Wharton’s work, Selling Jerusalem, provides some clarity to these terms. Both replica and reproduction are, she writes, ‘surrogates for an archetype’ varying only in Krautheimer (1942), 1–33.

3

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

intensity: we can understand a replica as a clone and a reproduction as a traditionally born child.4 With these senses in mind, a reproduction is a continuation with a variety of possible differences between itself and the original whereas a replica, though potentially ‘messier’, keeps much more of the archetype’s particularity. A fabrication, in contrast, has no clear referent or, if it does, it has a complex relationship thereto and is itself a singularly created thing. Wharton notes that in the medieval period a fabrication was potentially also an outright trick. Each of these terms might fall under the broader category of imitation, making a thorough definition of the word difficult to pin down, as evidenced by the use by scholars (including in the works examined below) of all these synonyms and more. In each discussion I have retained the author’s own preferred terminology and hopefully this will aid in illustrating the variety of meanings that might fall under the broad term imitation. Krautheimer’s work seeks to question the formalism that had taken hold in architectural theory and to suggest that medieval people concerned themselves less with questions of construction and far more with questions of function. While iconography certainly played a role in art historical inquiry before Krautheimer, the work of iconography had been largely to attempt to ‘read’ the visual language of Renaissance and Baroque art.5 This article, however, applied long-standing notions about symbol and meaning to the non-representational form of medieval architecture; it has been suggested by a subsequent scholar that the Middle Ages provided Krautheimer the seemingly most fruitful time period because of the ‘medieval tendency to understand the world in terms of symbol and allegory’.6 In order to argue for an understanding of medieval architectural theory as primarily preoccupied with meaning, Krautheimer investigates the notion of copying. Often medieval structures are compared to earlier ones or to ones in foreign lands. When both the original and the so-called copy are extant, the architectural theorist can compare them and begin to understand what led to the two buildings being likened. Krautheimer deals exclusively with the concept of imitation in architecture and it is undoubtedly the case that architecture has different modes of conveying meaning than pictorial or narrative art, 4 Wharton (2006), 3–4. The definitions of replica, reproduction and fabrication that follow come from the introduction to Wharton’s text. 5 Crossley (1988), 116. 6 Crossley (1988), 116.

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Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto

literature, or ritual itself.7 And yet, his work highlights important foci of medieval concern that suggest the ways in which ritual might be understood to imitate or not imitate another experience, especially when considered alongside other forms of medieval imitation such as that enacted by Franciscan spirituality. What we will find is that our notions of imitation do not translate well into the medieval world. Krautheimer zeroes in on the Holy Sepulcher as a prototype; Storme and Thurston also used this structure as their central example of imitative east-west practices. Between the fifth and seventh centuries, ‘great numbers’ of copies of this building exist.8 Among the western incarnations of the Holy Sepulcher, the structure that housed, after Constantine’s rebuild, numerous holy sites, are St Michael at Fulda from the ninth century and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Cambridge. The builders or commissioners of these sites, despite stating their intention to emulate the Anastasis Rotunda in Jerusalem either through dedications or other materials such as letters, create final products that vary a good deal from one another and from the building they purport to copy. Some of the copies Krautheimer reviews have a round shape that echoes the actual structure, but more often than not they have some sort of polygonal shape. The conclusion drawn is that circles and polygons were considered less distinct forms in the medieval period than they are in the modern. Additionally, though the Holy Sepulcher had an ambulatory off which at first three and then four chapels extended in the medieval period, these were by no means required of the imitations that proliferated. The elevations were also imprecise—sometimes columns were used, at other points, piers or some combination of the two. Krautheimer declares that ‘this inexactness in reproducing the particular shape of a definite architectural form, in plan as well as in elevation, seems to be one of the outstanding elements in the relation of copy and original in medieval architecture.’9 It seems that the medieval author describing architectural sites, or the medieval patron commissioning a building was not particularly concerned that the space and structure 7 Goodman (1985), 642–53. Goodman’s article discusses the ways in which architecture can convey meaning, despite its differences (non-representational, monumental, static in space) from other forms of artistic expression. His work is particularly interesting when considering the difference between the fixed-nature of pilgrimage— one must travel to Jerusalem—and the transportability of other forms of expression— such as meditative ritual.  8 Krautheimer (1942), 3. The following comes from 3–5 of Krautheimer’s article. 9 Krautheimer (1942), 7.

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

be a one to one reproduction in construction or form. Rather, copying was not about precise imitation but about the intention of the structure. Thus a picture unfolds of the complex relationship between original and copy in medieval architecture. Krautheimer cites the idea of cross-plans as an example of this distinction. Regardless of which actual layout (basilical, Greek, or T-cross), all churches with cross-plans were meant to honor and symbolically represent Christ’s triumph on the cross. All this is not, of course, to say that the symbolic meaning determined the form a building would take, or that there were universally accepted symbolic meanings to each form. Rather it just makes plain that the standards by which we judge similarity now were not the same as those employed a millennium ago. Numerical concerns provide another excellent moment in which to consider the use of imitation in medieval architecture. At the prototype in Jerusalem there are eight piers and twelve columns. Among the copies of the Holy Sepulcher, either eight or twelve supports are used. It seems that western copies of the structure tended to choose either one number or the other, though there is no correlation between the number choice and the decision to use piers, columns or a combination. Though the numbers eight and twelve each have numerous connotations throughout Christian history, a clear relationship exists between them and copies of the Holy Sepulcher.10 Unsurprisingly, this overall concern with numbers also expressed itself in a concern for measurements. Of great import to those who were creating these imitations were recorded lengths, widths, distances, often said to have been brought back from the Holy Land. Certainly this bears a resemblance to the pilgrimage concern with paces; as we saw in the examination of travel accounts, often visitors would record distances between towns, between sites, and within buildings. And yet these measurements were not particularly thorough (often one was taken but others neglected), nor were they universal.11 The overall method of copying thus seems to be that original structures were understood as being composed of constituent parts that could be used, or discarded, or remixed in order to create a new arrangement that evoked somehow the original but had little to do with it in terms of the form of the structure. What occurred was what Krautheimer calls ‘the disintegration of the prototype into its single elements’ and ‘the se Krautheimer (1942), 11. See also Hopper (1938). Krautheimer (1942), 13.

10 11

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Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto

lective transfer of these parts, and their reshuffling in the copy.’12 All one needed to make a comparison were a few key elements, not total coherence. And, as Krautheimer shows, the stated intention was often a sufficient element, if not the most important. The dedication of a building and its naming provided an adequate relationship for identifying it as a copy of another.13 Krautheimer calls construction and form similarities the ‘visual’ elements and things such as the name and dedication the ‘immaterial’ elements. The immaterial could, it seems, trump any concern over a structural dissonance.14 The name could evoke a feeling, a response, that the original religious site had itself evoked. It intended to remind the believer, hopefully, of the same promises of resurrection and salvation as did the holy site. The copies hoped to be, as Krautheimer puts it, ‘a memento of a venerated site’.15 Krautheimer suggests that through the high medieval period, an iconography of architecture exists, that types of form are linked, however they might have initially come to be so, to certain meanings. So round and octagonal structures are interchangeably linked to the Anastasis Rotunda in Jerusalem and provide enough of a hint structurally that when combined with stated intentions of imitation they become imitations. Similarly, baptisteries bear physical resemblance to mauselea, a fact that to an outside observer may make little sense but that a medieval Christian would have absolutely understood given the links between baptism and death.16 These links of liturgical and theological concern to architecture play a very important role, too, in the concept of linking buildings across time and worlds. As Robert Ousterhout has shown, repeated ritual could be the bearer of connection between two Krautheimer (1942), 14. This was certainly true in the Carolingian period of which Morris (2000) notes: ‘Such buildings as Charlemagne’s Palatine chapel at Aachen and its imitations may have been distant echoes of the great rotunda at the Anastasis in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, but there was certainly no attempt at precise imitation’, 99. 13 Krautheimer (1942), 16. 14 Weiss (1998), 216. Weiss is discussing how the Temple was understood and reproduced over time and makes use of Krautheimer’s work to argue for the ways in which these replications took place. 15 Krautheimer (1942), 17. 16 Krautheimer (1942), 20–33. The second half of Krautheimer’s article deals specifically with querying the long-standing understanding of Roman baths as the precursor to baptistery structures. He instead suggests that due to the very clear medieval theological links between death/resurrection and baptism (the death of the old self and the birth of the new self cleansed of Adam and Eve’s original sin), mauselea in fact provide a much more clear and natural root for the form of baptisteries. 12

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

spaces, rather than any formal structural similarities: ‘architecture may comment on or interact with the rituals it houses, but… it is a mistake to expect a direct symbolic correspondence. In the architectural setting, there was perhaps by necessity only a general association of form and meaning. It was the function—the liturgy—that added texture, nuance, and specificity.’17 Only with the thirteenth century, Krautheimer argues, do we begin to see a growing concern with specifics and a correlative loss of content: ‘copies, depictions and descriptions strive more and more towards giving a reproduction of the original in its visible aspects.’18 With the fifteenth century this becomes yet more clear, involving a stronger coherence between elements of a prototype. With the increased focus on construction and form a decrease occurs in symbolic meaning; content no longer transfers, but details of the structure do. As precision becomes the goal of reproduction, significance is lost. Post-Krautheimer, the world of architectural history has experienced a surge in the number of works intending to explain the form of baptisteries, a surge that seems plagued by an impulse, similar to that of Thurston and Storme, to provide a teleological narrative for the development of baptistery structure.19 Along with this surge, many works have appeared building on Krautheimer’s notion of iconography, works that attempt to understand the meaning inherent in, or imposed on, physical structures. While his work has provided fertile ground for some investigations of content and structure, it has also resulted in endless works accounting for imitations of the Holy Sepulcher the world over. In a sense, what we find in Krautheimer is that just as pilgrimage is itself a relatively useless term in the medieval period, so too is imitation. That is to say, imitations can vary so broadly, can be so loosely interpreted and understood on so many different grounds (intention, content, meaning, symbol, singular architectural elements, liturgical practices, etc.) that a claim to imitation can be made on behalf of nearly anything. The layers of meaning within a medieval building are simply too manifold to be confined to a singular interpretation linked explicitly with form, mak Ousterhout (1990), 52. Ousterhout’s article addresses the connection between the Holy of Holies and the Aedicule of Christ. 18 Krautheimer (1942), 20. 19 Smith (1950) is an example of works that seek to do this ‘applied iconography’ as Crossley (1988), 116 has called it. Among the more extensive works attempting to systematize an iconography of architecture is Bandmann (1951). See also Wilkinson (1972), 91. Wilkinson’s work examines the structure of the Tomb of Christ over time, noting that western versions of and depictions of the Tomb should not be taken as literal evidence of its architectural form. 17

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Architectural Imitation in the Medieval World: Pars Pro Toto

ing notions of imitation difficult to pin down.20 These layers extend to both the sites themselves and to the buildings that grow up around them. It has been noted that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher contains a series of seemingly mismatched elements, that its construction has little coherence. This lack, however, actually points to an important aspect of sanctity in medieval buildings, and nuances further the layering of meaning pointed out by Krautheimer. Consequently, as Ousterhout describes, the dissonance of the medieval Holy Sepulcher appears to result from a reuse of material and a commitment to maintaining past aspects of the structure, suggesting that the stones of the very building itself had come to be infused with meaning.21 The building had become a relic in its own right. So while other edifices around western Christendom were making claims to a relationship to this Holy Land church, at the site itself layers of meaning were being created by the use of spolia, the retention of earlier forms, and the continuity of liturgy. What mattered to observers of pre-modern Europe, and to the eventual participants in Stations of the Cross rituals, was not the initial creation of the work, but the original ‘reference point’ of said work. In a recent work, Christopher S. Wood describes this problem: in the medieval period, artifacts of all types, including buildings, carried the capacity to bend time, to exist beyond the limits of historical time. 22 Wood argues that with the 15th and 16th centuries, a form of archaeology emerges that begins to ‘parcel and collate historical time’ in a way that earlier artists and builders would not have understood, but which leads to the modern world in which only art (not relics or buildings) has the ability to operate outside historical time.23 The important point for our purposes is that in the medieval period ‘one artifact was as good as another’ because ‘images and buildings were understood not as the products of singular historical performances, but rather as links to an originary reference point’.24 Relics, paintings, sculptures and buildings all worked to compress time, creating not a sense of the linear passage of years, but of the 20 Crossley (1988), 117. Crossley argues this in particular in response to Bandmann’s work that seeks to assign intended meanings to individual patrons. 21 Ousterhout (2003), 4–23. 22 Wood (2008), 12–15. Wood is not the first to argue this point. In his article on the Chora Parekklesion, Ousterhout (1995), 63–76, argues for the ability of architecture to help structure a decorative program that works in concert with the timebending aspects of liturgy. 23 Wood (2008), 15. 24 Wood (2008), 15.

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

continuity between the time of Christ and one’s own time. Buildings in particular were able to achieve this, argues Wood: ‘a building was precisely a point where history caved in upon itself, where recorded event, personality, and sacred precinct were all folded one upon the other’.25 In this way, the disassembling of pieces and the reuse and cobbling that Krautheimer and Ousterhout both note makes sense. Each piece is as true as another, as important as another because it is part of a larger complex intended to point not to an historical moment of creation, not to an important moment in time, but rather to an importance over time throughout many moments, all leading back to, we can safely assume, the time of Christ himself. The jumbled nature of the Holy Sepulcher and the links through content rather than form support this notion that certain artifacts intentionally thwarted being placed into a singular moment in time, that in fact they were attempting to look timeless, underscoring their eternal nature by making them clearly unmoored in time. What mattered for these structures or icons were what Nagel and Wood call their ‘ontological stability across time,’26 something we might similarly argue for liturgy: though it may shift and grow, its fundamental purpose remains the same. The exact instant of a hymn’s creation matters infinitely less than the way it resounds through time. The lasting ritual bears truth beyond the historical moment, the authors write, just as some edifices are ‘linked, no matter how often [their] timbers are replaced, to a primordial meaning, conferring past through labeling and ritual’. 27 What matters is this larger truth, one which is accessible in many ways. Art historians also note the resemblance of these theories to those of memory and textual understanding through the medieval period, to which we will turn momentarily. Just as buildings and their aspects would have allowed the viewer to associate numerous symbols and imagine numerous meanings, so too words held multiple meanings and associations for the learned (and unlearned) medieval listener.28 These associations could be made across time and space, as when a reader links seemingly unrelated texts or when an artist puts two narrative images together in order to connect them despite a lack of relationship. But Nagel and Wood claim that art holds a primacy in this respect: ‘…visual 27 28 25

26

Wood (2008), 42. Nagel and Wood (2010), 8. Nagel and Wood (2010), 13. Crossley (1988), 121.

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Religious Imitation in the Medieval World

artifacts collapsed past and present with an ease and suddenness that no text could match. Images proposed an unmediated, present-tense, somatic encounter with the people and the things of the past. They enacted a breaking through time and a raising from the dead.’29 While we might agree that there exists an immediacy and perhaps intimacy to looking at an image, to suggest a lack of mediation in images seems disingenuous and further complications arise when we consider pilgrimage and meditation. Do they fall into the category of image or text? What do we make of the sites viewed by pilgrims—both the ‘originals’ and the iterations elsewhere? How can we understand imagined locations? Perhaps medieval observers understood place in the same way they understood buildings and other artifacts, as utterly substitutional. Nagel and Wood go immediately to the notion of virtual pilgrimages saying that ‘explicit replications’ of the Anastasis Rotunda of the Holy Sepulcher ‘can only be described as virtual pilgrimages’.30 Interestingly, however, they argue that pilgrimage was understood as absolutely linked to one place and so replicas were intentionally defying what their creators knew about authenticity. They argue that these were meaningful selfdelusions that defied understandings of space. But perhaps we can look at this in an opposite fashion. There is no singular originary pilgrimage that is unrepeatable but rather there are only the timeless pilgrimages of Jesus Christ and those of all humans on earth that are infinitely replicatable and carry authenticity that no singular journey could. In the same way that the Eucharist can be taken all over the world, again and again without losing potency, so too these images and structures can be reimagined and recreated. We might then say that these architectural iterations are commemorations, rather than imitations, and that this same notion is applicable to physical journeys and meditations as well.

Religious Imitation in the Medieval World: Passion Devotion to New Heights Architecture tends to be defined by its monumentality, its fixed nature in space, and its non-representational character.31 One might compare Nagel and Wood (2010), 32–33. Nagel and Wood (2010), 56. 31 Goodman (1985), 642–43. 29

30

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

this, relatively easily, to the experience of pilgrimage. A pilgrim travels to a somewhat (given the way in which sites moved) fixed location at which there is a marker that is non-representational, such as a church, a plaque, a tree or a wall. One must walk around the site to get a sense of its fullness, and generally one must have its importance explained by a guide or one must read it on the marker. One’s movement through the experience is determined by the fixed monumental structure itself and, as with Jerusalem, any historical or political situations that may affect it. In contrast, a meditative or devotional ritual, a religious experience, though it potentially involves physical movement, can truly be completed anywhere, just as we see with the Stations of the Cross which could be performed, certainly in its earliest stages, at home, in one’s monastic cell, in a church, on the streets of one’s town. It is ultimately a movement of the mind and heart, rather than of the body, though it may incorporate the body in order to fully capture the participant. Architecture and markers conform to the religious experience, rather than the other way around. In a sense, we can see this reflected in the way that the eastern pilgrimage route comes to be redesigned according to the expectation of western travelers: they were used to meditative techniques that were determined by convention, manuals and spiritual need rather than by architectural or geographic constraints. This question of the religious, devotional and meditative experience as distinct from the architectural does not negate, however, the similarities we see in terms of imitation in the two categories. Christian spirituality had long encompassed the notion of imitation in the sense of attempting to be like Christ (whatever that meant in its particularities) who was himself the ultimate example, the ultimate archetype. In attempting this imitation, one must grasp that the model is distinct from oneself and yet strive to be as close to it as possible, to express it and to live a life that reflects its wisdom.32 Nonetheless this conformity might take a variety of forms, because Jesus’ life had many layers and all those layers are imitable.33 In the letter to the Corinthians, the ostensible author Paul enjoins his readers to ‘be imitators of [him] as [he] is of Christ’ (1 Cor. 11). Imitation in the religious sense means, according to one scholar, ‘a very personal conformity, an intentionality, a relation of image to model’34 and many modern authors writing on medieval re Van Si (1991), 67. Van Si (1991), 96–101. As Brady (1975) writes, ‘All are called then to imitate that Exemplar; yet not all are called… to imitate Him in the same way’, 69. 34 Van Si (1991), 55. 32 33

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Religious Imitation in the Medieval World

ligiosity in fact declare that imitation was always the defining feature of Christian spirituality, what one calls its ‘highest aspiration’.35 Over the early centuries of Christianity, various monastic groups had lived their lives according to what they understood as the central precepts of the Gospel and the most important aspects of Jesus’ life.36 In this sense, the spirituality of the primary example of imitatio Christi, Saint Francis, was not so very different in intent from prior forms. Living an apostolic life was the undergirding principle for Francis as it had been for monastics since the desert fathers. As one historian of the Franciscan Order writes: [Francis] was not concerned primarily with some kind of external activity in the service of the church, perhaps, nor in any pressing way with the realization of this or that ‘virtue’ as the first principle of the order; neither was he concerned with ‘ideals’ of some kind or other but with a life, or rather, with the life according to the form of the Gospel, which the Almighty himself had revealed to him and which the Lord Pope had approved for him to live by.37

But Francis’ version of the apostolic life, built entirely on the Gospel, looked somewhat different: it expanded beyond what had come before.38 Francis himself never uses the terms imitari or imitatio, preferring instead sequi.39 For example, in his first rule, the first chapter demands that the brothers ‘follow [sequi] the teaching and footprints of our Lord Jesus Christ’, one of the most frequent refrains within the writings of Francis.40 35 Galli (2002), 143; Nguyen (1994), 231; Brady (1975), 72; Van Si (1991), 12; Ciccarelli (1962), 4, 8. 36 Nguyen (1994): ‘Thus, imitation of the apostles was the Christian ideal, beginning from the ascetics of Egypt all the way to the itinerant preachers and mendicant religious of the thirteenth century’, 231. 37 Esser (1970), 212–13. For an account of Francis’ life based on the Gospel see also Berg (1993), 39–46. 38 Brady (1975), 72: ‘They do not see themselves as better than the Older Orders, but simply consider their life and rule as a different and more radical form of the imitation of Christ, a more literal following of His footsteps.’ 39 Van Si (1991), 39, 44. See also Nguyen (1994) for a thorough accounting of the terminology used by Francis to refer to Christ. Nguyen counts the instances in which the Saint refers to Jesus Christ as Lord, beggar, servant, creator, etc. In the case of pilgrim, unsurprisingly, the term comes up only with reference to the lack of room at the inn, when Jesus was without home. Again, then, the term seems to be employed at the time of Francis more in the sense of exile or alien than intentional traveler, 47–48. 40 Francis of Assisi, Regula non Bullata in Francisci Assisiensis scripta, chapter 1, 242; translated in Habig (1973), 31.

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

The section on begging alms declares that ‘the friars should be delighted to follow [sequi] the lowliness and poverty of [the] Lord Jesus Christ, remembering that of the whole world [they] must own nothing, but having food and sufficient clothing, with these let [them] be content, as St Paul says.’41 Though the saint eschews notions of imitation, perhaps because of his intense humility, later writers show no such qualms and write often about Francis’ imitation of Christ. These begin with his earliest biographer, Thomas of Celano. Celano does certainly use the term imitari in describing how Francis lived his life and how he hoped his brethren might also live theirs.42 In his second life of Francis, Thomas writes that in order ‘that he might show himself to be a true imitator [verum imitatorem] of Christ his God in all things, he loved to the end the brothers and sons whom he had loved from the beginning.’43 Bonaventure, in his Major and Minor Lives of Francis which were meant to replace those of Celano, stresses over and over Francis as the perfect imitator of Christ. As early as Francis’ conversion, Bonaventure likens him to Jesus, claiming that in stripping off his clothes, in baring himself before his father and his townsfolk, he became naked like the crucified Christ.44 Later, he writes that ‘even while he lived on earth among human beings’ he was an imitator of the angels ‘so that he became an example to those who followed Christ perfectly.’45 Here Bonaventure begins to use the term imitator while still echoing Francis’ own concern for humbly following Christ. Despite not using the word himself, with hindsight Francis seems to have taken imitation to a radical point. He focused intently on pov Francis of Assisi, Regula non Bullata, chapter 9, 256; translated in Habig (1973), 39. 42 Van Si (1991), 39. See also Nguyen (1994), 233–34. 43 Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda S. Francisci Assisiensis, chapter 162, 211; translated in Habig (1973), 535. 44 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, chapter 2:4, 16–17; translated in Habig (1973), 642–43. 45 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, prologue: 2, 4; translated in Habig (1973), 632. Though Habig does not translate it at as such, the Latin clearly uses the term imitari. Later in the same text, chapter 11:2, Bonaventure declares that ‘si vir sanctus Scripturarum a Deo intellectum acceperat, cum per imitationem Christi perfectam veritatem ipsarum descriptam gestaret in opere et per sancti Spiritus unctionem plenariam, doctorem earum apud se haberet in corde’, 89; translated in Habig (1973), 712–13: ‘There is nothing strange in the fact that he should have been enlightened by God to understand the Scriptures; by his perfect conformity with Christ he practiced the truths which are contained in them and carried their Author in his heart by the abundant infusion of the Holy Spirit’. Once again, though Habig chooses to translate the text differently, the Latin uses imitari. 41

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Religious Imitation in the Medieval World

erty, renunciation, penance, preaching, service and fraternity. He did not encourage isolation but rather brotherhood; he did not encourage cloistering but rather being out in the world. As one modern scholar of Franciscan spirituality describes, Francis’s piety combined imitation, following and copying: Piety is the directing of the entire man to God; Christian piety is the following, the imitation and copying of the God-Man, Jesus Christ; piety as understood by all the Founders of Orders prior to Francis was merely a higher form of this following, imitation and copying of Jesus Christ, insofar as the Religious observed the counsels of the Gospel in addition to the commandments of God. The piety of the Saint of Assisi differed from this in that he strove to fulfill perfectly the entire Gospel in spirit and letter, to become like to the Saviour in every way, not only in His hidden and contemplative, but also in His public and active life.46

In these ways his movement took imitation of and devotion to the life of Jesus as its absolutely central and guiding concept and, as a result, in the poetic words of one modern biography, Francis’ own ‘life became a continuous process of allowing the words of the Gospel to enter profoundly into every fiber of his being: their sound, articulation, imagery and meaning.’47 The end result came at La Verna. Though Francis never describes it himself and according to Celano even tried to hide it, the Stigmata remained central for the biographers because it proved that Francis had been made perfectly into the image of Christ.48 Though Bonaventure’s text frequently alludes to Francis’ imitation, the high point comes with the signs of the Passion: ‘Francis understood that he must become like Christ in the distress and the agony of his passion before he left the world, just as he had been like him in all that he did during his life’.49 Felder (1982), 380. Armstrong and Peterson (2010), xxii–xxiii. Francis’ life seems, almost without fail, to inspire poetic language among devotional and scholarly writers alike. 48 In chapter 98 of the second life, Celano details how Francis would attempt to hide his stigmatic hands and feet. Translated in Habig (1973), 472: ‘From the very first, when true love of Christ transformed the lover into his very image, he began to hide and conceal the treasure with such care that, for quite a long time, even those closest to him were not aware of them.’ 49 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, chapter 13:2, 106–07; translated in Habig (1973), 730. 46 47

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

Though some Franciscan scholars have argued that Saint Francis was less concerned about imitation in terms of form and focused more on imitative content, not unlike the Krautheimerian interpretation of the imitation of architecture in the medieval period, Francis’ life seems more to bear out the above quotation, indicating that both spirit and letter mattered.50 It was not enough to feel devotion to Christ, one had to express that devotion through action; it was not enough to give up luxuries, one had to give up everything. Francis interpreted the Gospel as a handbook for how to live, and the form of that life did matter, not just the spirit; both the exterior and the interior were important.51 The hard-line that Francis took during his life on the question of poverty proves this: in his Testament Francis emphatically states that because he reads the Gospel as declaring that Jesus owned nothing, so too the brothers should own nothing.52 From the moment of his own conversion, poverty remained central to Francis’ vision because he understood Christ as having lived without belongings;53 this commitment was part of the larger project of following in Christ’s footsteps, as Francis described it, and imitation as his biographers call it. In the disputes on ownership and use among later Franciscans, the question revolved around the interpretation of how Christ lived. In other words, interpreting the Gospel properly validated or nullified the choices of the Franciscan brothers.54 Underneath this literal and spirit-based imitation, Francis displayed a clear devotion to Jesus.55 Evident in his recreation of the Nativity at Greccio, Francis’ devotion to the human Jesus aided in the eventual culmination of his imitation with his reception of the Stigmata. Naturally, this intense love for and desire to imitate the human Jesus found expres Nguyen (1994), 238, 243. Ciccarelli (1962), 19. 52 Particularly in his Testamento, a document dictated in his last days, Francis expresses his desire for the brothers to maintain absolute poverty. Translated in Vaughn (1982), 155: ‘And those who came to receive life gave to the poor everything which they were capable of possessing and they were content with one tunic, patched inside and out, with a cord and short trousers’. 53 Pàztor (2008), 141–51. This section focuses on the ways in which poverty was central to Francis vision of imitation of Christ. As Conti (1996) notes, conversion itself was also understood as a form of participation in Christ because it enacted the cycle of ‘death, resurrection and glorification’ (translation my own), 22–23. 54 Lambertini (1990), 27. See, among others, Burr (1989), Burr (2001), and Carmody (2008). 55 Galli (2002), 142. 50 51

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Religious Imitation in the Medieval World

sion also in devotion to the cross (it was a crucifix that spoke to him at San Damiano, asking him to rebuild the church) and to the Eucharist, which factored centrally into Francis’ own practice.56 Christ crucified could not be extricated from the Eucharist itself. The liturgy was a consistent reminder of the Passion and of Christ’s suffering, a reminder of which Francis partook on a frequent basis after his conversion.57 In his Admonitions to his brethren, Francis discusses his position on the Eucharist, indicating that while Christ existed in body at the time of the apostles, he now exists in the Eucharist and has and will exist eternally in heaven.58 The frequent taking of the sacrament could be understood as itself a form of imitating the apostles: love for Christ leads to wanting to be as close to him as possible, as were those who saw him alive during the time of the Incarnation. The foundation of this devotion and imitation was most certainly love and love expressed often through contemplation. Francis bore a love for Christ that was not new in Christian spirituality but was clear and lifelong. This love enabled the unity the stigmatic Francis achieved with Jesus. One modern scholar describes this love: ‘One becomes that which one loves. In participating through contemplation and the practice of virtues, in the mystery of Christ’s death, the disciple participates already in the joy of the resurrection that he feels deep in his heart.’59 This sense of love and the need to imitate, which writers identify in Francis, form one coherent desire to become unified with the object of devotion. In a sense, the love finds expression through contemplation: ‘a seeking to penetrate, by means of conformity with Him, in all the aspects and the moments of his earthly life’, writes one scholar on Francis.60 This love seems to define the basis of Francis’s relationship to Christ (and the one he prescribes to his followers) for many scholars on the saint: one falls in love and begins to imitate the external things, the habits and patterns, Felder (1982), 31–38; Van Si (1991), 127. See also Nguyen (1994), 159 and Foley (2007), 388. In the second Epistola ad Fideles (Letter to the Faithful), Francis articulates the importance of taking the Eucharist. Translated in Vaughn (1982), 69: ‘We must also confess all our sins to a priest, and receive from him the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who does not eat His Flesh and does not drink His Blood cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Yet let him eat and drink worthily, since he who receives unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself ’. See also d’Angers (1937), 475–86, for Francis’ and the later Franciscan Order’s understanding of the mass’ capacity to unify. 57 Carmody (2008), 181 and Foley (2007), 388. 58 Felder (1982), 45. 59 Van Si (1991), 129. 60 Ciccarelli (1962), 57. Translations my own. 56

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

tendencies and tastes, of the beloved. From there grows a sense that the beloved is necessary, that one’s identity depends entirely on the existence of and one’s relationship to the object of love.61 Though the process is slow and unconscious, its ultimate goal is inextricable union with the beloved, something Francis achieved when his physical form bore the marks of the power of his interior love for and likeness to Christ. The Stigmata received at La Verna makes clear the dual importance of form and content, of the exterior and interior. Francis never identifies himself as an imitator of Christ, but rather a follower. And yet, Celano and Bonaventure, and generations more after the life of the saint, have clearly seen him as such. Though Francis did not replicate Christ’s life in every aspect (indeed how can a mere human replicate the miracles performed by Jesus?), he did achieve what his early biographers referred to as perfect imitation. These texts also set up an expectation that future Franciscans would strive to do as Francis had and direct their lives entirely to Christ, basing their devotion on a deep love that results in a desire to imitate Jesus’ life, if not in its entirety at least in part.62 Yet imitation remains a complex term that can encompass any manner of behaviors and when it is applied to the question of Christ and religion it becomes even more loosely defined because, one might argue, ‘imitation of Christ is the fundamental aspect of Christianity’ and all else exists solely to enable this act.63 This notion, presented by Valentin-Breton in an essay on the imitation of Christ, is echoed in many devotional works. As Fra Leone wrote in a 1943 devotional work on the Stations of the Cross, ‘the Christian life is imitation and reinvention of the life of Christ in each and every member of his mystical body.’64 For another devotional author, Houselander, Christ was providing the ultimate exemplum, the model to which all Christians should aspire: ‘He was not simulating our humanness outwardly, but feeling as we feel’.65 Even for these modern authors, Christ was not merely a divine being condescending to save the world, but rather he felt his Passion as would any human; he accommodated himself to human Ciccarelli (1962), 74. Brady (1975), 62–63. 63 Valentin-Breton (1947), 784. Valentin-Breton writes that over the centuries Christianity has moved ‘from implicit to explicit, empirical to formal, from a cult according to the letter to adoration according to the spirit’, but always with imitation at the heart. Translations my own. 64 Leone (1943), 7. Translation my own. 65 Houselander (1979), 12. 61

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Imagination and Imitation: The Memory’s Construction of Space

capacities and feelings, and so the believing Christian should attempt through imitation and meditation to feel the same pain. When taken to heart, this notion helps us to understand better the development of the Stations of the Cross as an imitation of, if anything, the life of Christ, and not of pilgrimage. It is this concept that will be borne out in the primary source analyses that will follow.

Imagination and Imitation: The Memory’s Construction of Space In addition to their use of the pilgrimage metaphor and terminology, meditation manuals also frequently insist on including distances or other geographical information. Though seemingly accurate, these are often not so and are included in part to further the conceit of the overall text. Scholars have taken the addition of distances and topographical details as evidence that these works were meant to imitate pilgrimage texts. We might also read them, however, as standing in line with the memory techniques prevalent in the medieval period. The written word was scarce and a culture of orality prevailed that required monastics and other learned people to remember vast quantities of knowledge. The educated medieval person would have memorized the book of Psalms at a very young age, and monastics and preachers had incredible recall for the scriptures in their entirety. The ars memoria made this possible. Various techniques were employed to aid in the memorization of the written word but one of the most prominent was the use of the imagined space. Memory tracts advised envisioning gardens, turrets, ladders, seats in an amphitheater, Noah’s ark, houses, tabernacles, temples, and even Jerusalem in order to organize information. Particularly in the early medieval period biblical structures like Solomon’s temple were de rigueur for use as memory aids.66 One pictured a view that could be encompassed in full on one’s mind’s eye, and then placed information in various rooms, on various rungs, in various seats.67 In this way, knowledge was made easily accessible and interconnections could be created by placing similar or related thoughts near to each other in the imagined scene. In a sense, then, these imagined or invented spaces, often architectural in nature, allowed not only for memory but for the creation of Carruthers (2002), 5–6, 20. Carruthers (2002), 12.

66 67

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thought. By spatially associating bits of knowledge new connections were made and a deeper sense of religion and God was developed, particularly among monastics. As Mary Carruthers, one of the foremost scholars on memory in the Middle Ages, writes, ‘monastic meditation is the craft of making thoughts about God.’68 Memory of knowledge operated similarly to the imitation seen in architecture. It was in this time not only ‘“rote”, the ability to reproduce something… but [was] the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating “things” stored in a random-access memory scheme or set of schemes’.69 Just as seemingly random, pulled-apart aspects of an architectural prototype could be used and reused in order to convey a sense of imitation, so too texts could be pulled apart and reorganized according to various criteria in order to create new thought and new meditation. The Stations of the Cross ritual uses scriptural sources and adds apocryphal materials in order to create a new practice that works to imitate Christ’s life as the ultimate prototype. My analysis of the potential interpretations of the Stations of the Cross builds upon Carruthers’ conclusion that the use of architectural spaces in memory contributes to the close ties between meditative religious learning and metaphors of building. Carruthers argues that the basis for this attitude in textual memory comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which he states that upon the foundation that is Jesus Christ, each person can build up a unique edifice that will be tried and judged.70 The scripture becomes the foundation and each person brings their personal experiences and associations to bear when constructing their memory bank. Carruthers writes that ‘in the minds of monastic writers, every verse of the Bible thus became a gathering place for other texts, into which even the most remote (in our judgments) and unlikely matters were collected, as the associational memory of a particular author drew them in.’ 71 Jean LeClerq’s work, The Love of Learning and Desire for God, stresses this aspect of monastic life and learning. Associations between passages of scripture are related, he writes, not always through content but also through form: It is this deep impregnation with the words of Scripture that explains the extremely important phenomenon of reminiscence whereby the 70 71 68 69

Carruthers (1998), 2. Carruthers (1998), 4. 1 Corinthians 3:10–17, Carruthers (1998), 17. Carruthers (1998), 19.

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Imagination and Imitation: The Memory’s Construction of Space

verbal echoes so excite the memory that a mere allusion will spontaneously evoke whole quotations and, in turn, a scriptural phrase will suggest quite naturally allusions elsewhere in the sacred books. Each word is like a hook, so to speak; it catches hold of one or several others which become linked together and make up the fabric of the exposé.72

A hook word can be enough to bring together two seemingly disparate lines of text just as we might say a hook architectural element can be used to link two structures of vastly differing design. Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth-century Constructing Noah’s Ark shows just how fixated these authors of memory tools were on detailed constructions. Hugh elaborates a complex three-dimensional structure with colors and lines whose purpose is to help his readers to remember the path to spiritual wholeness.73 The ark enables its imaginer to recall the names of the patriarchs, the ages of the world as Hugh understood them, the state of the world under the Old Law and under the New Grace, the books of scripture, etc. Hugh’s ark provides a means of mentally arranging all knowledge and thus aiding in its recall. This kind of pulling apart and putting back together was, according to Carruthers, at the heart of a medieval education, the goal of which ‘was not to become a “living book” (by rote reiteration, the power of an idiot) but to become a “living concordance,” the power of prudence and wisdom.’ 74 In this way, we might already begin to conceptualize medieval pilgrimage accounts and meditation manuals as integral components of that intellectual development. While Hugh of St. Victor provides an example of using an imagined space for the purpose of arranging memorized information, one can see how these encouragements or examples might have also applied to existing spaces. As Frances Yates speculates in her work on memory, ‘if Thomas Aquinas memorised his own Summa through “corporeal similitudes” disposed on places following the order of its parts, the abstract Summa might be corporealised in memory into something like a Gothic cathedral full of images on its ordered places.’ 75 Yates suggests that the LeClerq (1982), 73–74. Hugh of St.  Victor, De Arca Noe Mystica, chapter 1, 682; translated in Carruthers (2002), 46: ‘When the middle cubit is done, I draw, around the center that I mentioned above, another quadrilateral, a long way out, of the size that I want to make my Ark’. 74 Carruthers (1998), 31. 75 Yates (1966), 79. 72 73

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Meditation as ‘Imitation’

use of imagined space in memory had the implicit effect both of recommending the use of real physical images or spaces as memory aids and of stimulating the creation of new physical images and structures: ‘the art of memory was a creator of imagery which must surely have flowed out into creative works of art and literature’.76 We might say that the use of envisioned physical space in the art of memory encouraged a certain type of mental imitation through imagination: the creation of imagined space based on textual descriptions (like those of scripture) or based on an archetype (a stereotypical medieval garden for example) can be understood as imagined imitation. Alternately, the use of imagined space in memory techniques likely encouraged figures like Henry Suso who, as we shall see, used their physical spaces as aids in meditation. In this case we might argue that Suso made use of his actual environment to imitate the spatial constructions of his memory in order to better perform his religious practice. Pilgrims to the Holy Land were, according to Carruthers, going to see things that they had already created memories for—in other words, they were going to confirm and have re-implanted the memory structures they had created by reading the Bible. ‘The pilgrims thus came not to see something new, but to recollect things well known to them already.’ 77 If this is the case, pilgrims were effectively using material images to engage in a spiritual activity that ought to move them past the need for material aids. Comparable, perhaps, to how, while on pilgrimage, Angela of Foligno saw an image that inspired a fit, but that her true union with God came in her own confinement. According to Carruthers, ‘the narrative… determined the sites, the pilgrimage routes became a path in physical actuality for “making one’s way through” the Bible readings’.78 What was central was the story, the narrative. The sites were aids to spiritual development as the images of sites were aids in memory, and thus the Stations of the Cross can represent an advanced ritual that, rather than being an imitation of pilgrimage, removes the need for the external experience that pilgrimage provides. The art of memory certainly provides an interesting cross-section between memory space, real architecture, and religious behaviors, suggesting a connection between imitation and imagination. Just as these memory techniques provided details that enabled imagined spatial con Yates (1966), 91. Carruthers (1998), 43. 78 Carruthers (1998), 43. 76

77

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Imagination and Imitation: The Memory’s Construction of Space

structions to aid in accessing information, so too meditation manuals on the Passion can be understood as providing details (however inaccurate) about spacing to help aid in the cultivation of an emotional experience that resulted in the transformation of the individual. One’s imagined presence at Jesus’ side during his life could be furthered by the inclusion of geographical information, but its ultimate goal, as we shall see, was the imitation of Jesus himself, not the imitation of pilgrimage.

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A JOURNEY WITHIN: PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS

As with the pilgrimage texts, we must compare the interpretation offered by Storme and Thurston with the intentions that authors of socalled manuals for spiritual pilgrimage declare for themselves.1 These manuals include not only those works that speak explicitly of Stations of the Cross, but also works from centuries earlier that take as their focus devotion to Christ’s life and experience of the Passion. We must also consider the language in use in these various texts. Do they use the word peregrinatio (pilgrimage) and if so what is the true context? Do they employ terms like via dolorosa (the sorrowful way) or via crucis (the Way of the Cross) and how do these operate in their texts more broadly? This primary source analysis, though not exhaustive, helps to establish that these Passion texts were concerned with meditation and devotion, rather than with pilgrimage in the sense of physical travel. For a long time Christian spiritual focus had been directed toward the Resurrected Christ through devotion and contemplation, rather than to the suffering man Jesus. The Resurrection was considered by theologians and artists alike to be the most important aspect of Christ’s life but the Passion itself was still an integral part of the event: the Passion allowed for the Resurrection, it provided the necessary lowering for the eventual raising up. In the decades before Saint Francis’ life, monastics and other religiously inclined lay people begin Again, the number of texts available for examination is quite large and I have limited this section primarily to those works indicated by Storme and Thurston as central to the development of the Stations of the Cross, other works, untreated by them, that were immensely popular during the medieval period and any others that speak particularly well to the questions at hand. For a thorough list of texts on the Passion, see Bestul (1996). 1

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

to focus on the humanity and suffering of Jesus rather than on the Resurrection of the Christ. And so while Franciscan devotion represents the clear apogee of the imitatio Christi based on love of the crucified Christ, the concept of imitation born of love did not begin with him, and earlier among Benedictine monastics there are hints of the devotion to the Passion that Francis takes to its extreme. 2 In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux focused meditation on Christ’s life, on the mysteries and wonders of his human existence as we have already seen.3 Aelred of Rievaulx, a contemporary of Bernard, wrote works that hold Christ up as an example to be imitated and as a life to be contemplated consistently. Before either Bernard or Aelred, however, Anselm of Canterbury wrote prayers and meditations that exemplify the turning in the devotional tide from concentration on the Resurrection to deep and personal love that focuses on the human life and Passion of Christ.

Before the Mendicants First a wandering student, then a devout monk of Bec, Anselm eventually rose to the appointment of Archbishop of Canterbury.4 Philosophical and theological writings number among his many works, but his prayers and meditations provide the clearest moments of intimate and personal devotion to the Passion and to Christ. In particular, the prayer to Jesus Christ promotes a new style of devotion directly to Christ as a mediator.5 Anselm asks that God turn his ‘lukewarmness into a fervent love’ and ‘that by remembering and meditating on the good things [the Lord has] done [Anselm] may be enkindled with [the Lord’s] love.’6 After many expressions of desire, Anselm turns to a consideration of 2 Bestul (1996), 35. See also Van Si (1991), 29. See, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux’ De Diligendo Dei. 3 Ciccarelli (1962), 17. 4 Ward (1973), 17; Davies and Evans (1998), vii. 5 Ward (1973), 38. Ward notes that this kind of personal devotion to Jesus existed among the early martyrs but that with the Arian controversy of the fourth century, focus shifted to Christ as equal resulting in a corollary decrease in devotion to the human Jesus. She writes: ‘This private tradition of prayer to Christ revived and developed in the eleventh century, with a new stress on the person of Jesus in his earthly life and especially in his passion, as related to the person praying,’ 39. 6 Anselm, Orationes sive Meditationes, Oratio 2, 7; translated in Ward (1973), 94.

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Before the Mendicants

the Passion.7 This section evinces a true sense of loss at not having been present during Christ’s lifetime so as to witness firsthand the death and Resurrection: Why, O my soul, were you not there to be pierced by a sword of bitter sorrow when you could not bear the piercing of the side of your Saviour with a lance? … Kindest, gentlest, most serene Lord, will you not make it up to me for not seeing the blessed incorruption of your flesh, for not having kissed the place of the wounds where the nails pierced, for not having sprinkled with tears of joy the scars that prove the truth of your body?8

Anselm wishes that he might have been present at the Lord’s crucifixion; his desire is not for modern day Jerusalem but for the life and times of his savior. He highlights this, as well as the belief that the earthly life of a believer is itself a pilgrimage when he avers that his grief ‘cannot ease while [he is] a pilgrim, far from [his] Lord’.9 He implies that pilgrimage means being without Christ, the condition of all human beings on earth. Nothing in Anselm’s meditational prayer suggests a desire to embark on a journey to the Holy Land, but rather he longs to be struck with pure love that will enable a return to union with God in heaven. The prayer ends with a call for the second coming, when, hopefully, all Anselm’s desires will be fulfilled. This prayer, though short, gets to the heart of the devotional style that comes to define later meditation manuals that focus on the Passion and will inform the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. Love forms the ground that supports the constant contemplation of Christ’s human life and sacrifice, and that contemplation works toward an eventual return to God’s side. In his prayer of an abbot for his community, Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167) highlights the ways in which the leader of a monastic community ought to imitate Jesus. Aelred grew up the well educated son of a priest and though he was denied the secular ordination his father re-

7 Though the prayer does not exhort others to the same meditation as do later manuals of passion remembrance, Anselm clearly believes in the importance of his own exercise. He writes that he is aware that he ought to be even more mindful than he already is of Christ’s passion: ‘… sic et ego non quantum debeo, sed quantum queo, memor passionis tuae, memor alaparum tuarum, memor flagellorum, memor crucis…’, Anselm, Orationes [Schmitt edition], Oratio 2, 7; translated in Ward (1973), 95. 8 Anselm, Orationes, Oratio 2, 7–8; translated in Ward (1973), 96–97. 9 Anselm, Orationes, Oratio 2, 8; translated in Ward (1973), 97.

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

ceived, he entered a Cistercian house in his mid-twenties.10 Best known for many centuries as an historian because of his histories and genealogies of the English kings, Aelred has recently been recuperated by scholars as a devotional writer.11 Aelred’s pastoral prayer speaks well to this newly rediscovered side of the medieval monastic. Not unlike the Rule of Saint Benedict, the prayer of Aelred details the responsibility of the abbot that mimics Jesus' role vis-à-vis his believers, one of benevolent kingship that parallels the love and protection of a devoted shepherd. The abbot in prayer asks outright to successfully imitate Jesus: All my feeling, all my speaking, all my rest and all my work, all my action and all my thought, all my success and all my hardship, all my death and all my life, all my health and sickness—all that I am, all that gives me life, all that I feel, all that I discern—let all this be expended upon them in all its entirety and entirely spent for their benefit, for the benefit of those for whom you yourself did not consider it unworthy to be utterly spent.12

Aelred’s belief in Jesus’ powerful example is not limited to its efficacy for the abbot. All ought to strive to be like Jesus in their desire to love and serve others.13 Love forms the foundation for this prayer, as it does for Aelred’s other devotional works that focus on Jesus the man and call their readers to live a life of imitation in pursuit of communion with God. 10 Dutton (2008), 4–5. The following biographical information comes from Dutton’s introduction. Aelred’s secretary, Walter Daniel, wrote a life on which our modern knowledge of Aelred is based (Walter Daniel, The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx and the Letter to Maurice). 11 These historical works number seven: Lament for David, King of the Scots; The Genealogy of the Kings of the English; The Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor; The Battle of the Standard; The Life of Ninian; The book of the Saints of the Church of Hexham and their Miracles; and A Certain Wonderful Miracle. See Freeland (2005) for English translations of the first four works listed above. Some of the Latin versions are contained in volume 195 of the PL, translated in Freeland (2005, while others can be found in Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X (1652), 333–422. 12 Aelred, Oratio Pastoralis, paragraph 7, 760; translated in Dutton (2008), 49. 13 Aelred’s work Spiritual Friendship (De Spiritali Amicitia), focuses on the ways in which love between human beings can help them to love Christ more fully and how friendship in this life can be a precursor to an eternal relationship with God. I will not treat this particular text here because it takes human relationships as its grounding and here we are concerned more with the treatment of the Passion and the love of God. See Dutton (2010) for a translation into English by Braceland. See also Squire (1981) for a thorough study of Aelred.

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Before the Mendicants

In another devotional work, this one on Jesus at the age of twelve, Aelred stresses again and again that Jesus’ life ought to be the basis for the spiritual development of each believer. While the work details a time in his childhood, it clearly intends to inspire in others the desire to follow Jesus: ‘now this is the beginning of conversion, a spiritual birth as it were, that we should model ourselves upon the Child, take upon ourselves the marks of poverty and, becoming like animals before you, Lord, enjoy the delights of your presence’.14 Aelred wants his readers to conform (in Latin he uses the term conformemur) themselves to the child Jesus in an effort to become closer to their Lord. Aelred works through the passage of scripture in three senses, historical, allegorical and moral. He explains: ‘His bodily progress is [their] spiritual progress, and what [they] are told he did at each stage of his life is reproduced in [them] spiritually according to the various degrees of progress.’15 But with the moral interpretation, Aelred drives home his point by charting for his friend Ibo, for whom he wrote this treatise, the spiritual progress that is meant to occur according to the life of Jesus. What becomes clear throughout Aelred’s text is the intense love for God that directs his prayers and that gives birth to the treatise itself. Aelred asks Ibo to remember in his daily prayers how he ‘seek[s] him whom [his] soul love[s], and, impatient in [his] love’ how he longs to see Jesus.16 The love that we see in Aelred’s works exemplifies the changes in devotional focus that occur around the year 1000 and that will form the basis of Francis’ spirituality that led to his reception of the Stigmata. This love also drives the prayers that Aelred prescribes for nuns in his Rule of Life for a Recluse. In this text, he outlines a meditation on past, present and future. Within the ‘past’ meditation, Aelred recommends that the nuns contemplate, among other things, the Passion. He advises them to imagine the scene in the courtyard of the High Priest and to cry, to ‘see’ how Jesus is led about after being whipped and mocked, and to envision how Jesus is taken down from the cross. Aelred’s descriptions display all the fervor of twelfth-century Passion devotion and commitment to the human aspects of Christ but also keep ever in mind that this is no ordinary human being: 14 Aelred, Tractatus de Jesu Puero Duodenni De Jesu Puero Duodenni, paragraph 4, 249–78, translated in Knowles (1971), 7. 15 Aelred, Tractatus de Jesu Puero Duodenni, paragraph 11, 258–59; translated in Knowles (1971), 15. 16 Aelred, Tractatus de Jesu Puero Duodenni, paragraph 21, 268; translated in Knowles (1971), 28.

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

Indeed he is a man. Who could doubt it? The weals left by the rods witness to it, the open wounds, the spittle which defiles him. But why is it that, so outraged, he does not betray the anger which a man would show, does not rebel against his torturers as a man would? Therefore he is more than a man.17

Though part of a larger program of meditation, Aelred most certainly provides the nuns with meditative recommendations that include imagining Christ undergoing the Passion. But the conceit of this meditation is that the nun be Mary, observing the life of Christ. Here we have an imitation, we might say, of the Virgin Mother rather than of Christ, but it is one that, as do imitations of Christ advised for men, encourages visualization and emotional heights based on love. Aelred ends his treatise by stating that he hopes it goes some way toward stirring up love of God among the sisters for whom it was composed and who eventually, hopefully, will ‘appear in his sight and say to him what is written in the Song of Songs: “My Beloved is mine and I am his”’.18 We thus see the themes of love for God and compassion for Christ in pre-Franciscan material, material that creates the basis for the mendicant perfection of the imitation of Christ.

Franciscans and Dominicans Bonaventure, who served as the minister general of the Franciscan Order from 1257 until the time of his death in 1274, represents a new level of sophistication of the ideas expressed by Aelred regarding love and devotion to the Passion. He wrote many works that both praised Francis’ own imitative devotion to Christ and that encouraged the same among later Franciscans. Drawing on Anselm, Bonaventure represented well his contemporary spirituality that was filled with ‘devotion to the humanity and passion of Christ, with concentration on vivid details, an awakening of human emotion, especially compassion, and the imitation of Christ in his moral virtues.’19 Francis was, for Bonaventure, most certainly the culmination, the perfect example of perfect imitation, Aelred, Regula sive Institutio Inclusarum (PL 32 as Augustine, de vita eremitica ad sororem liber), chapter 59, col. 1469; translated in Knowles (1971) as chapter 31, 89. 18 Aelred, Regula, chapter 78, 1474; translated in Knowles (1971) as chapter 33, 102. 19 Cousins (1978), 1–2, 34. 17

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Franciscans and Dominicans

confirmed by his reception of the Stigmata. His Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, the Soul’s Journey unto God, was inspired by thoughts of Francis’ own experience of the Stigmata, and this text provides a spiritual interpretation of the six-winged seraph that visited Francis on La Verna and whose coming gave to Francis the signs of Christ’s Passion. In this work, Bonaventure makes clear that the crucified Christ is the only way to salvation: ‘There is no other path but through the burning love of the crucified’.20 While the Itinerarium certainly stresses the idea that one reaches heaven by contemplating the blood and the Passion, one finds in the Lignum Vitae, the Tree of Life, a much clearer expression of the need to imitate Christ’s life and experience. The Lignum Vitae provides a program for meditation that follows chronologically the story of Christ’s life both as narrated in the Gospel and supplemented by Bonaventure’s own knowledge and beliefs, creating a manual very distinct from a pilgrimage text. The prologue sets up the stress of the work by quoting Galatians 2:19 stating, ‘with Christ  I am nailed to the Cross’. 21 One should, it advises, always ‘carry about continuously, both in his soul and in his flesh, the cross of Christ’.22 Bonaventure does employ the term pilgrim once in the text, when recounting the exile of Jesus: ‘When the evil Herod sought to kill the tiny King, he was taken into Egypt as a pilgrim and a pauper, directed by a warning from heaven.’23 Yet once again, the term as used here seems to be much more about exile, rather than the notion of a limited journey undertaken for spiritual reasons. In a sense, we can imagine that Bonaventure would have understood this alien status as approximating much more the position of the Franciscan friar who chose to live in poverty, separate from the lay world. Perhaps most importantly, however, the Lignum Vitae provides, much like the John of Würzburg pilgrimage text, an insight into the understanding of memory. Bonaventure declares that he has mined the Gospels for 'words to aid the memory' and he writes: 'since imagination aids understanding, I have arranged in the form of an imaginary tree the few items I have collected among many.’24 In an excellent example of 20 Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 3, 293; translated by Cousins (1978), 54. 21 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae, prologus, 1, 68; translated in Cousins (1978), 119. 22 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae, prologus, 1, 68; translated by Cousins (1978), 119. 23 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae, 8, 72; translated by Cousins (1978), 132. 24 Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae, prologus, 2, 68; translated by Cousins (1978), 119–20.

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

Yates and Carruther’s claims about the construction of imagined space in order to aid memory, Bonaventure indicates that he envisions (and expects his reader to envision) his text as a tree with many branches that allow for a steady ascent. Among the most popular of medieval Passion texts is the latethirteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi (MVC), a text whose section detailing meditations on the Passion was used and reused by subsequent authors. Labeled a Bonaventurian text for centuries, scholars now often classify the work under the author Pseudo-Bonaventure or as the work of John of Caulibus. 25 The text is known to exist in three variations: the ‘grosse text’ and then two abbreviated versions, one of which focuses solely on the Passion. 26 As with many of the Passion texts, the unknown origin and author of the MVC, while fascinating for many scholars of medieval spirituality, does not factor when considering the meditation manual’s place in the broader scope of medieval spirituality. The MVC proceeds in chronological order, typical for a manual of Christ’s life and distinct from the ways in which pilgrims describe the land they visit; pilgrims are confined by the details of their own journey and by the reality of what they see around them whereas spiritual guides have the luxury both of imagination and of choosing their own order. The author of the MVC used that creative license to include many events and episodes not found in the Gospels. He also encourages his readers to exercise their own imaginations in order to be with Christ. As one scholar writes, ‘it is in part this notion of “being present” that made the MVC so popular, for it enlivened the act of contemplation by allowing a reader to see herself in her mind’s eye interacting with the biblical figures and experiencing sacred history firsthand’. 27 The author of the MVC thus incites the mind through retellings of the Gospel stories, with supplemental tales, with praises of the Franciscan life and with encouragements to the reader. The ‘grosse Text’ provides, at its outset, insight into its purpose, describing how Saint Cecila would 25 John of Caulibus. Meditaciones Vitae Christi. In the introduction to their edition, Taney, Miller and Stallings-Taney provide insight into the author as well as an analysis of the use of language, later reception, and extant manuscripts. Their translation into English is based on the critical edition, Stallings-Taney, CCCM 153 (1997). 26 Ragusa (1961), xxii–xxiii. Ragusa provides information on the numerous copies in numerous languages held around the world. See also Fischer (1932), 25, 3–35, 175–209, 305–48, 449–83. 27 H. Flora (2009), 19.

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Franciscans and Dominicans

carry around a copy of the Gospel and would meditate on it day and night. So too, the anonymous author tells its readers, should every devout Christian: I wish to encourage you to do likewise because, above all the studies of spiritual exercise, I believe that this one is the most necessary and the most fruitful and the one that may lead to the highest level. You will never find better instruction against vain and fleeting blandishments, against tribulations and adversity, against the temptations of enemies and vice, than in the life of Christ, which was without blemish and most perfect. Through frequent and continued meditation on His life the soul attains so much familiarity, confidence, and love that it will disdain and disregard other things and be exercised and trained as to what to do and what to avoid.28

The life of Christ, and meditation thereon, is considered the highest pursuit. It will, more than any other practice in which one can engage, instill love, confidence, and the ability to avoid all those temptations to sin into which humans so easily fall. There is no mention of pilgrimage, no comparison to it in the initial lines of this most popular meditation text. In one recent study of an illustrated Italian language version of the MVC, the author, Holly Flora, suggests that there is a stress on pilgrimage by proxy in certain chapters.29 The MVC does indeed use variations of the term peregrinatio throughout the text, though sparingly. For example, in the chapter on the flight of the holy family, the text reads ‘they had to wander [peregrinari] in a strange land, poor, having almost nothing’ and later in that same chapter ‘they went to a city called Huiusmopolis (Heliopolis), rented a small house, and stayed there for seven years as pilgrims and strangers, poor and needy’.30 Yet, given the multiplicity of meanings for the word peregrinatio, one can hardly claim that the use of such a term in a medieval text necessarily refers to physical pilgrimage, let alone constitutes the endorsement of such behavior. Flora acknowledges that this seeming stress on pilgrimage and journey that she reads as providing the nuns with a ‘book-centric pilgrimage experience’ is lim MVC, Prologus, 7; translated in Ragusa (1961), 2. Flora (2009). Flora’s work intends, overall, to examine the illustrative program in combination with the text. It is in part a look at the visual that prompts her interpretation of the chapters under consideration here, but her argument is textually based as well. Her work is based on the same manuscript as the translation by Ragusa. 30 MVC, chapter XII, 50–51; translated in Ragusa (1961), 67–68. 28 29

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

ited to the sections on the holy family’s travels;31 this hardly makes for a convincing argument that the author of the MVC wanted the women for whom he was writing to imagine themselves on pilgrimage. In fact, in these sections, the stress seems more clearly to be on peregrinatio as exile rather than as pilgrimage in the modern, travel sense. No physical behaviors are expected here, but a state of mind is encouraged: ‘Therefore, as I said, be a child with the Child, while with Him who begins to grow, you become older, ever maintaining humility’.32 The Poor Clares are told to imagine themselves in time with Jesus, a child when he is a child, growing as he grows, not unlike Aelred’s meditation on Jesus as a youth.33 There is little concern with the geographical or the physical, and infinitely more concern with time. Even these chapters about the travels, journeys, and exile of the holy family enjoin the women to meditate on these things, to be there mentally, to see them imaginatively, but without participating or re-enacting. This theme continues with the sections of the MVC that focus on the Passion of Christ, the sections that concern us most for their relationship to the Stations of the Cross. Here again, the reader is told to meditate continuously and the author stresses the emotionality of the events through affective language. The chapters that retell the story of the Passion are correlated to monastic hours, making them that much more clearly reminiscent of liturgical rituals, something we will see continue in later Passion devotion manuals. Here the author again asks his readers to imagine themselves present: ‘Heed all these things as though you were present, and watch Him attentively as He rises from the Supper at the end of the sermon…’34 We find brief mentions of topographical features in this section in the form of an assurance that a fellow Franciscan saw some of the sites at which traces of old churches still remain. But with no indication of geographical location and with little physical detail provided, these mentions seem almost to be cast-off, rote, formulaic assurances that the stories told here are real; they do not amount to a focus or stress on the physical place of Jerusalem by any stretch. Throughout the section on the Passion, though asked to observe, see, meditate, watch and feel, the author appears to have no expectation that Flora (2009), 118–19, 142. MVC, chapter XII, 52; translated in Ragusa (1961), chapter XII, 72. 33 Aelred, Tractatus de Jesu Puero Duodenni De Jesu Puero Duodenni, 249–78, translated in Knowles (1971), 1–40. 34 MVC, , chapter LXXV, 256; translated in Ragusa (1961), chapter LXXV, 320. 31

32

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the meditating Clarissans will imagine themselves traveling with Christ or even enacting any physical behaviors within their enclosure that recall the movement of pilgrimage or even the movement of Christ. The MVC gives no indication that it intended to present an alternative to pilgrimage, or that it even considered itself in line with pilgrimage. Instead, the links to liturgy are much clearer, and continue with the concluding section in which the author provides a week-long schedule for making use of the meditations in the book. He also provides an explanation of just what matters most: ‘Therefore you ought to know that it is enough to meditate only on what the Lord did or on what happened concerning Him or on what is told according to the Gospel stories, feeling yourself present in those places as if the things were done in your presence as it comes directly to your soul in thinking of them.’35 Meditation is ‘enough’, it suffices [sufficit]. One need do nothing more than think and meditate on Christ’s life in order to achieve a feeling of presence, one definitely does not need to travel far afield in order to experience the shift in time being effected by the meditative techniques. The feeling of presence is paramount and is achieved not through physical action but through contemplation and cultivated sympathy with Christ in his suffering. The immense popularity of the MVC contributed to the developing forms of meditation around the Passion that led to the invention of the Stations of the Cross, particularly in the work of the fourteenth-century German mystic Henry Suso. The Dominican Suso provides us with the first known written account of meditation in the west that focuses specifically and in isolated fashion on Christ’s walk to Calvary. As part of the larger fourteenthcentury revival of religion throughout the west and particularly in Germany, Suso engaged in extreme asceticism.36 Though his violent ascetic self-inflicted acts did not persist through his whole life (at a certain point, God speaks to him, advising him to cease his self-torture), he does spend the whole of his adult life engaged in mystical interactions with God in addition to suffering often painful episodes of what he perceived to be externally inflicted spiritual torment. Both Storme and Thurston cite Suso’s work, The Life of Blessed Henry Suso as the beginning of the movement toward a solidified Stations of the Cross ritual, and we will MVC, chapter CVIII, 349–50; translated in Ragusa (1961), chapter C, 387. For more on this ascetic turn among German mystics and its relationship to the Black Death and other concerns of the medieval period, see McGinn (2005). 35

36

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see that he did indeed implement a physicality as well as some language that might have begun the move toward a true Via Crucis ritual. His autobiographical work, though written in the third person, is intended to provide its reader with some practical guidance on beginning and continuing on the path to spiritual rightness and holiness. In his prologue, he is specific: ‘the following book speaks throughout in an instructive manner of the life of a beginner, and contains, for those who look beneath the surface, information respecting the proper way in which a beginner should order his outer and inner man so as to be in harmony with God’s all-lovely will.’37 Suso writes with the express purpose of aiding others who are embarking on the spiritual path and who need some sort of help in achieving their goals. And so while the prologue insistently declares Suso’s own modesty and hesitancy in releasing the book, it also stresses the benefit of such a book by saying that anyone ‘who wishes earnestly to become a good and blessed man, and who longs after special intimacy with God… will find this book a help and comfort’ because it can ‘serve as a guide for good-hearted men to divine truth, as well as teach men of reason the right road to supreme bliss’.38 These seem to be ambitious goals, certainly, but they also display Suso’s own belief in the importance of a life spent in pursuit of spiritual perfection. The rest of his text underscores this belief. Suso refers to himself as a servitor, or servant, and initially he meditates on everything about God, not realizing that in fact his focus should be on God’s humanity.39 As a result of this broad meditative practice, Suso actually finds himself rebuked by God who instructs him that the way to eternal life and to spiritual wholeness is through the suffering human Christ. Suso resists this instruction at first, but eventually gives way and begins to devote himself with particular attention to the Passion. These devotions take the form of meditating on Christ’s final moments, beginning with the Last Supper, as Suso walks around his cloister: He now began every night after matins at his usual place, which was the chapter-room, to force himself into a Christlike feeling of sympa Suso, Leben Seuses, prologue, 3; translated in Knox (1913), 1. Suso, Leben Seuses, prologue, 6; translated in Knox (1913), 4. 39 Suso, Leben Seuses, chapter 13, 34–37; translated in Knox (1913), chapter 15, 40–45. Knox gives no indication in his translator’s preface as to why the chapter numbering differs from the earlier Bihlmeyer edition. Perhaps this is because he does not work from the Bihlmeyer, but rather from the 1828 edition of Cardinal Diepenbrock, Prince Bishop of Breslau, xxxiii. 37

38

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thy with all that Christ, his Lord and God, had suffered for him. He stood up and moved from corner to corner, in order that all sluggishness might leave him, and that he might have throughout a lively and keen sensitiveness to our Lord’s sufferings. He commenced this exercise with the Last Supper, and he accompanied Christ from place to place, until he brought Him before Pilate. Then he received Him after He had been sentenced at the tribunal, and he followed Him along the sorrowful way of the cross from the court-house to beneath the gallows.40

Nothing in this introductory paragraph suggests that in his actions Suso was attempting to recreate a pilgrimage experience. In fact his movement seems to be solely for the purpose of chasing away any laziness or tiredness, rather than for imitating the motion inherent in travel. While he does write that he went with Christ from place to place, the focus is on cultivating a sympathetic experience of Christ’s life rather than the life of a pilgrim. From here, Suso describes what exactly it meant to follow Christ along what the English translation offers as the ‘sorrowful way of the cross’ (ellenden crúzgang). He begins at the chapter-house, kneeling and kissing the step as he imagines Christ being sentenced and then taking his first step toward his death. The reader understands that this is the Way of the Cross proper that Suso has undertaken as a devotion. The ritual includes the contemplation of various Old Testament scriptures including passages from Psalms, Isaiah and Kings that were understood as foreshadowing Christ’s life and death. Suso proclaims that he accompanied Christ along four different streets, essentially through four different acts of purification. The first street involves leaving behind friends and worldly goods in order to experience suffering. Along the second, Suso gives up ‘honor and dignity’; along the third he renounces ‘all needless comfort and all tender treatment of his body, in honor of the pains of Christ’s tender body’; and along the fourth street, he cries out to Christ and prays to Christ that he might suffer along with Him. Walking these streets Suso makes no mention of any events that come to be associated with the Stations of the Cross. Rather, his streets seem to be of the meditative kind, recalling the long-standing tradition of monastic stages and levels of interior experience, such as those of Bernard of Clairvaux. Along his ‘way of the cross’, Suso is attempting to cultivate an 40 Suso, Leben Seuses, chapter 13, 34; translated in Knox (1913), chap. 15, 41. (It should be noted that throughout the original text 'crúzgang' and the variant spelling 'krúzgang' are used interchangeably.)

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A Journey Within: Primary Source Analysis

internal experience that has little to do with the realities of fourteenthcentury pilgrimage. Suso finishes his ritual at the cross in front of the pulpit, where he contemplates a selection from Isaiah normally read during Holy Week and then prays. The link to Holy Week ritual and liturgy will be further explored in the next chapter, but here it is worth noting that throughout his description Suso’s focus continues to be on the actual biblical story and on the rituals surrounding it in the normal course of the church year, as opposed to on the exceptional circumstance of pilgrimage. What is more, after describing this ‘sorrowful way of the cross’, Suso goes on to declare that the ‘servitor’ often made ‘another mournful way of the cross’ (andern inrlichen krúzgang). This one, however, follows Mary’s path from the crucifixion; Suso leads her, tear- and blood-stained, from the scene of her son’s death. The suggestion, then, is that for Suso a krúzgang was any meditative path that took the crucifixion as its start or end point, or that imagined accompanying a biblical figure along the street that had come to be known as the via crucis. Yet another complication for Suso’s text, however, arises when one considers what exactly he might have meant by this term krúzgang. In modern German the word means cloisters, while the word for the Way of the Cross is kreuzweg. In fact, throughout the rest of his text, Suso uses the term krúzgang to refer to cloisters.41 Clearly Suso did not understand his language as referring to a unique and specific act, let alone to one associated intentionally or obviously with pilgrimage. We do see in Suso a meditative act that we might cite as a proto-typical version of the Stations of the Cross, but we certainly do not see a ritual attempting to imitate pilgrimage. His are the actions of a devout man attempting to pray and meditate in sympathy with Christ crucified, according to the directive he received from God. Many various meditation manuals existed, attributed at times to any number of monastic or religious men. Among them is one attributed to Johannes Tauler, a contemporary of Henry Suso. This text, like others before it, makes no mention of pilgrimage as an ideal form to be emulated or evinces any awareness that it might exist along the continuum See, for example, the story about a dog running free in winter around the cloisters: ‘do sah er einen hund, der lúf enmitten in dem krúzgang und trůg ein verschlissen fůsstůch umbe in dem munde, und hat wunderlich geberde mit dem fůstůch’, Suso, The Life, chapter 20, 58; translated in Knox (1913), chapter 22, 72: ‘… and he beheld a dog running about in the middle of the cloister with a worn-out foot-cloth in its mouth. The dog was acting very strangely with the foot-cloth…’ 41

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with pilgrimage as a means of accessing spiritual fullness. Most famous for his sermons, Tauler may well not be the author of this particular text, but as one translator of the pseudo-Tauler text writes, this matters little because this is a book that will aid in ‘mental prayer’ regardless of its author.42 The text contends that if all Christ had left behind were humility and love, that would have been sufficient, and that the Eucharist is truly the means by which one gains closeness to God: ‘Truly then it was right to say that whatever virtues or merit Christ performed and obtained in his Life and Passion, all this is received in this Sacrament by the soul that is worthily prepared’.43 Pseudo-Tauler feels that the sacrament of the mass truly provides the best opportunity for gaining the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice, without question an orthodox view that suggests that all other rituals (pilgrimage included) pale in comparison to the liturgical ideal. Again we note a prevalence of verbs like ‘go’ and ‘see’ and ‘watch’, but these do not imply some approximate version of pilgrimage, of physically going and seeing and watching. In his description of the Passion, this author, like that of the MVC, asks his readers to ‘stand… and observe and see all that our Lord hath done for our souls’.44 Even in those moments when the author seems to approach a physical injunction, as when he writes ‘let us follow now Christ Jesus with sorrow of heart and inward devotion, and with tears and pity, into the garden’, he still maintains his stress on inner feelings, something lacking in many of the actual pilgrimage accounts.45 Rather than language that focuses on pilgrimage and physicality, this author employs language much more appropriate to discussions of meditation and memory: ‘Consider now, O my soul, with thy inward eyes, the immense love of thy Saviour’.46 Just as Suso followed Christ on four streets renouncing the world and embracing suffering and the life of an ascetic, so too Pseudo-Tauler asks in his concluding prayer that he be enabled to follow, perhaps even imitate, Christ not in the physical sense of where he walked, but in the Franciscan sense, in terms of his virtues and his way of living. These mendicant works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries represent some of the most popular, ubiquitous, and oft-quoted works 44 45 46 42 43

Cruikshank (1925), ix. John Tauler (1556), chapter 4, 234r; translated in Cruikshank (1925), 36. Tauler (1556), chapter 6, 236r; translated in Cruikshank (1925), 42. Tauler (1556), chapter 7, 239r; tranlsated in Cruikshank (1925), 51. Tauler (1556), chapter 10, 244v; translated in Cruikshank (1925), 67.

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concerning the Passion of Christ. They truly expanded and made common a devotion to Christ as a suffering human man. But the Franciscans and Dominicans were not the only ones elaborating on the experience of Jesus during the last moments of his Incarnation and these works did not exist in a vacuum. Authors of other primary religious commitment, people outside of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, were taking up the gauntlet and writing works that expressed the same sense of love, devotion, compassion, and desire.

The Broader Fourteenth Century Also in the fourteenth century, Ludolphus of Saxony wrote his Vita Christi, a work that further illustrates the relationship between meditation manuals and religious travel. Ludolphus supposedly began his monastic career as a Dominican but in time became a Carthusian.47 Among the most popular devotional texts of its time, Ludolphus’ life of Christ has been described by one scholar as a ‘meditation on the history of the life of… Jesus Christ harmonized from the four Gospels’48 and is what Charles Conway describes as ‘encyclopedic’.49 Ludolphus’ work bears some aspects of an office, offering suggestions of prayers and orders of Gospel readings for Sundays and special feasts, as well as ending every section of the text with prayer.50 As with many texts of its ilk, the Vita Christi of Ludolphus encourages meditation on and imitation of Christ.51 The work enables this, as do others as we have seen and will see, by providing what Conway calls a ‘meditational technique… by means of which the worshiper learns to visualize what he reads’ so that he ‘comes to participate in each of the events of the story, and indeed to see himself in some part of each scene, bearing some relationship with the actors in each episode’.52 This meditation and imagined presence with Christ (a form of imitation, perhaps of the apostles) aims to inspire in the reader greater love for Christ and allows for greater contact with God. Bodenstedt (1944), 1–3. Bodenstedt (1944), 16, 18. 49 Conway (1976), 1. Conway provides an excellent analysis of the way in which the incarnation and imitation of Christ form the basis of Ludolph’s text. 50 Bodenstedt (1944), 130–31. These prayers are translated in Sister M. I. Bodenstedt (1973). 51 Bodenstedt (1944), 75. 52 Conway (1976), 127. 47

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The Broader Fourteenth Century

Ludolphus does mention pilgrimage particularly in chapter 76 in which he details the appearances of Christ to the disciples on the road. But these instances of the term are hardly exhortations to imagine pilgrimage, but are rather, very much like the mentions we find elsewhere, declarations that all human beings are pilgrims upon this earth, following the first pilgrim, Christ. Once more these uses confound the definition of pilgrimage as a physical journey: ‘We therefore are pilgrims here in this world; thus we have here no permanent city, but we seek the future, if spiritually we have in us that which these pilgrims had in them, God will be the companion on our journey’.53 All are pilgrims in their distance from God and heaven, but also after the fashion of Christ and the disciples. Once again, if Ludolphus desires his readers to imitate anything, he wants them to imitate Christ and the generation that bore witness to the Incarnation. In tandem with the conflation of time and space seen in the architectural principles and memory practices of the medieval period, Ludolphus asks that his readers bring together the time of Christ’s life and their own. He presents the life of Christ as the perfect example, and feels that believers should keep Jesus’ existence ever in their minds, though it occurred in the past: And thus, although many of these things are told as in the past, you should meditate on all of them as if they were in the present; because without doubt you will taste a greater pleasantness from this. Therefore, read about what was done as if it were being done. Place before your eyes past actions as if they were present, and thus to a great extent you will taste things as more savory and delightful.54

This passage shows Ludolphus encouraging his readers to imagine the time of Christ, not to imagine a pilgrimage. They are to ‘be present at his death with his blessed Mother and John to suffer with them and to console them: and with a certain devout curiosity [feel their] way, touch each of the wounds of [their] Saviour, who has thus died for [them].’55 This sense of immediacy becomes all the more pressing in Ludolphus’ sections on the Passion of Christ, in which he reiterates the notions of meditation and imitation. ‘Many and great benefits will come to the man who meditates regularly on the Passion of Christ, and who occu Ludolphus of Saxony, Vita Christi, chapter 76, 717; translation my own. Ludolphus, Vita Christi, proemium, 4; translated in Conway (1976), 124. 55 Ludolphus, Vita Christi, proemium, 2; translated in Conway (1976), 127. 53

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pies himself with it with enthusiasm’ says Ludolphus, ‘for if you long to arrive at an understanding of divinity, it remains that you be taught through the manhood which was taken up as well as by the suffering of that man, so as to ascend step by step as by a royal way towards higher things’.56 Ludolphus’ text attempts to help its readers achieve spiritual heights through love, contemplation and imitation. The goal is not the imitation of some other ritual, but rather the transformation of the individual. By its very title, Imitatio Christi would seem to be the ideal text for comparing implications of meditation upon the Passion and pilgrimage to the actual sites of the last hours of Christ’s life. The earliest extant copy of the work Imitatio Christi comes from the early fifteenth century. Cited by Storme and Thurston among the texts that helped further the spread of Passion devotion through the late middle ages, this text was, like the MVC, misattributed for much of its history, and, much like the MVC, it enjoyed a great deal of popularity.57 Among the likely candidates for authorship is Thomas à Kempis who I shall here use. But regardless of its author, the text stands clearly in line with the Franciscan spiritual move toward imitating Christ's life in all ways, encouraging its readers to a life of prayer, humility, obedience and a life of suffering and sacrifice. Evidently the work of a dedicated religious person, the work seems also to have been intended for a strictly religious audience that could embrace its life of prayer and self-abasement. From the first, Thomas exhorts his readers to imitate Christ: … we must imitate his life and his ways if we are to be truly enlightened and set free from the darkness of our own hearts. Let it be the most important thing we do, to reflect on the life of Jesus Christ… Often remember that saying: ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear with hearing.’ Make every effort, then, to shift your affections from the things that you can see to the things you cannot see, for people who

56

132.

Ludolphus, Vita Christi, part II, chapter 58, 601; translated in Conway (1976),

Lovatt (1968), 97–121. See also the introduction to Creasy's edition (2007) for a list of various mentions of the text throughout English history as well as an explanation of the misattributions over time. Among the proposed authors have been Jean Gerson, Gerard Groote, and Thomas à Kempis. Creasy argues for Thomas à Kempis (1379– 1471), a member of Groote’s New Devotion movement, though he acknowledges that the best we can do is claim a ‘high probability’ of Thomas’ authorship. 57

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The Broader Fourteenth Century

live in the world on its terms instead of on God’s stain their conscience and lose God’s grace.58

Thomas’ work keeps very much in line with the monastic notion that the life of Christ matters more than all else and that to truly reflect on this one must move beyond the bounds of normal sight and hearing. Not unlike Riccoldus of Monte Crucis, the pilgrim from the thirteenth century who claimed that despite his travels he knew that he could never truly see Christ except with the eyes of faith, Thomas seems to believe that the ultimate joining will not occur by means of any physical activities or travels but rather through behavioral adjustments, faith-filled meditations, and reflection. When Thomas speaks of imitation he does not refer to being in Jerusalem proper, nor does he mean going out into the world. Instead, he speaks of imitating a mindset, a way of being, achieved via institutional conceits and traditional liturgical symbols. Thomas speaks about the monastic life as pilgrimage, not unlike earlier critics of physical pilgrimage. He writes that one ought to be able to live in a monastery the entirety of one’s life, happily and obediently, and thinking of oneself ‘as a stranger on earth, as a pilgrim’ who assists in completing this life task.59 And even as an avowed monastic, to him the trappings matter less than the way in which one conducts and feels about one’s life: ‘What you wear and the customs you follow contribute little; rather, changing your ways and re-focusing all of your energies toward the spiritual life will make you truly religious.’60 Moreover, in book two the reader learns that devotion to the cross forms a large part of this spiritual life for Thomas, not an uncommon theme in his day. Yet, importantly, Thomas writes that no one can truly know what Christ suffered during the Passion and that the cross itself is available to everyone everywhere: No one feels in his heart what Christ felt in his Passion, except the person who suffers as he did. So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself, and wherever you go, there 58 Thomas A Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, book 1, chapter 1, 5–7; translated in Creasy (2007), 3–4. 59 A Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, 29; translated in Creasy (2007), book 1, chapter 17, 17. 60 A Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, 29; translated in Creasy (2007), book 1, chapter 17, 17.

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you are. Look up, look down; look out, look in. Everywhere you will find the cross, and you must endure patiently if you wish to have inner peace and gain eternal life.61

Over and over the text of the Imitatio Christi encourages a life of interiority, one that certainly has nothing to do with traveling around the world to visit holy sites or relics. The work wants its reader to move beyond the need for physical assistance in meditation and to become a being of faith and devotion independent of place, much like the cross itself.

On the Way to the Stations: Pascha, Adrichomius and Horn Over a century after the appearance of à Kempis' Imitatio Christi, Jan Pascha writes the first of the two texts cited as forming the foundation of the modern fourteen station system of the Way of the Cross: The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Hierusalem, contayninge three hundred sixtie five dayes iorney, wherein the devoute Person may Meditate on sondrie pointes of his Redemption. Though written in 1530, this Dutch Carmelite’s text was not printed in Louvain until 1563. By 1630 it had been translated into English in an abridged form.62 Pascha himself never traveled to Jerusalem, but rather created his text from others, especially that of Bethlem the priest.63 Though Pascha frames his text as a journey taking place over the course of one year, it is clear that he intended his book as a manual for internal devotion rather than as a guide for an actual pilgrimage. In the preface to the reader which ostensibly offers guidance for planning one’s voyage, Pascha highlights the interior nature of the journey: ‘Thirdly, thou must provide in thy Purse good store of coin, especially of… gold… [which] is gotten by the often and worthy receiving of the Blessed Sacrament.’64 This theme continues later when Pascha mentions paying for a ship’s passage with ‘50 Paters and 50 aves’.65 Though couched as a physical trip, at every point Pascha makes clear that he in no way intends his reader to use this manual in order to undertake a trip to Jerusalem. A Kempis, De Imitatione Christi [Pohl edition], 83–84; translated in Creasy (2007), book 2, chapter 12, 49. 62 Storme (1976), 120. 63 Van Herwaarden (2003), 73. 64 Pascha, 2. 65 Pascha, 22. 61

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On the Way to the Stations: Pascha, Adrichomius and Horn

On the whole Pascha chooses not to provide verifiable facts and details, staying true, rather, to the spiritual nature of this voyage he describes. Throughout most of the work, any interjections about geographical concerns are infrequent and are largely related to what martyrs one might venerate or what relics one might see at any given location.66 He also rarely provides any concrete information about how to reach any of the sites, their topography or their current state. In the case of Jerusalem, however, he makes an occasional comment that more directly relates to pilgrimage and the modern condition of the locations. In one case, he mentions how pilgrims kiss the stone in the Holy Sepulcher and in another how the House of Caiphas is ‘now a church in which is the stone which was laid at the mouth of the sepulcher of our Lord’.67 In staying true to the spiritual nature of the ‘voyage’ he describes, Pascha’s work proceeds according to the Gospel chronology as opposed to any geographical reasoning. When he reaches his description of the Way of the Cross, Pascha indicates that this continues to be a manual for devotion, telling his reader that he has included ‘prayers for the voyage of the cross, which are in number 15 which you may say at any other time’, seemingly regardless of where one is physically in the world.68 Though he uses his title and some initial tropes in the preface to place his work in terms of a physical journey to the Holy Land, nothing about the actual text bears out this metaphor. Rather, Pascha takes every opportunity from beginning to end to ensure the reader understands the spiritual nature of this text. In the preface he writes: Seeing it is so my (Catholic brother) that this present life is no other thing but a continual Pilgrimage which we are to make upon the earth: and that all the time of our life is a term prefixed of God the Creator, during which space we ought to accomplish this voyage, which when we have faithfully walked, we may come to the City of heavenly Jerusalem, which is our kingdom and most proper country… Let us behold therefore what care and pains our loving lord hath taken of our salvation, let us learn to work courageously and like devout and holy pilgrims to follow his steps, who hath left us an example of his blessed life and passion, and ruminate in our hearts every day a part, some several points thereof, and after well to practice the same in our selves (for such

Pascha, 10. Pascha, 76–77 and 93. 68 Pascha, 85. 66 67

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ought to be the end of all our spiritual exercises) by which means we may attain to the happy end that we desire.69

Pascha speaks of one’s entire life as a ‘pilgrimage’ and of his spiritual exercises as providing a helpful way to remember the example Jesus set through his life. This preface tells its reader that the journey Pascha has laid out has nothing to do with seeing and touching the places of Jesus’ life, nothing to do with the literal geographical Jerusalem. Rather the text focuses on achieving salvation through an adjustment of behavior that focuses on imitation and cultivating the sense that one is in exile in this world, an alien on earth because one’s true home is in heaven. This stands in definite contrast to those pilgrims who describe wanting to see with their own eyes the places Christ walked. In Pascha’s text, as in the Imitatio Christi, we see the injunction to live as religious, as monastics had done for centuries, believing that this world was not their home and striving in all moments to live as Jesus did. Nothing about this text endorses actual pilgrimage, or even seems to connect this devotional exercise to true travel except through the rather poorly extended metaphor. Pascha’s text, like other meditation manuals before his, encourages internal imaginative devotion that is meant to work upon the heart and mind rather than on the rods and cones, the stated purpose of pilgrim texts for hundreds of years. Given Pascha’s preface it would be wrong to suppose that the Stations as performed in Europe as meditation were understood as a direct substitute for physical pilgrimage. His conclusion provides further evidence that such an equivalency misunderstands his intent. On the final day of this devotional manual, Pascha encourages his readers to: ‘Meditate how all faithful Pilgrims, after this mortal Pilgrimage, shall be in great ease, rest and sweetness forevermore, and shall remain happy without end. The which, the Holy Trinity, by the intercession of the Blessed Mother, and of all the Saints grant us, Amen.’ 70 Nothing is said about possibly undertaking an actual journey. Instead Pascha underscores once again the nature of this life as pilgrimage and the importance of the intercession of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, the figures that form the focus of his intermittent geographic interjections. The work following Pascha’s that scholars most often cite as establishing the modern fourteen Stations is the Briefe Description of Hierusalem and of the Suburbs thereof, as it flourished in the time of Christ Pascha, 1–2, 4–5. Pascha, 173.

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of Christian Van Adrichem. Also known as Adrichomius, this Dutch priest never traveled himself but created a map with brief descriptions of 268 places in the Holy Land. Published in Cologne in 1584, the text was translated into English by the minister Thomas Tymme and published in London by Peter Short by around 1595.71 Though Thurston, Storme, and any number of subsequent scholars cite this text as a spiritual pilgrimage and indicate its relationship to the modern Stations of the Cross, the work declares itself to be ‘a brief description of Jerusalem and of the suburbs thereof, as it flourished in the time of Christ’.72 The key is the last section of this statement: as it flourished in the time of Christ. The text makes no pretension to depicting sixteenth-century Jerusalem, Adrichomius’ contemporary Jerusalem. Rather it claims to describe Jerusalem as it was in the time of Christ. Adrichomius builds upon the Stational system of Pascha and the spiritual focus of works like the Imitatio Christi. The preface details how one ought to meditate on and follow the example of Christ: ‘and not only to the consideration and meditation of these things, but also to the Imitation, God in the holy Scripture exhorteth us…Wherefore if we would follow Christ, not only in word but also in work, we may, by his lively crucified Image on mount Calvary… be inflamed and drawn to love and to follow Christ.’ 73 Adrichomius wants, as we have seen with other authors, to provide his readers with a meditation that can help to bring them closer to God through a love of and desire to imitate Christ himself, not to imitate pilgrims to the Holy Land. While pilgrimage was likely to be a onetime occurrence, Adrichomius, referencing Augustine, writes that one ought to meditate often: ‘… it is not enough to meditate of these things once: but it is profitable to think upon them often: yea the oftener the more they avail and profit… although we profit much, yet we shall never attain to the perfect knowledge thereof, but… the full knowledge whereof is reserved to our heavenly country.’ 74 While profitable, meditation still falls short of the full knowledge that a true believer 71 The English version of the text from 1595 is available online at Early English Books Online (www.eebo.com). This earliest translation into English is the only one available. 72 Adrichomius (1593), 145. The Latin incunabulum consulted was printed in 1593 in Cologne; translated in Adrichomius (1595), 1. As with Pascha’s early English translation, I have updated the English for ease of reading. 73 Adrichomius (1593), 146; translated in Adrichomius (1595), 3–4 of the unpaginated preface. 74 Adrichomius (1593), 147; translated in Adrichomius (1595), 6–7 of the unpaginated preface.

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will only attain upon union with God in heaven. No amount of earthly activity, mental or physical, can achieve what will be achieved in death. What is of particular note, however, is that nowhere in this preface does Adrichomius compare his emotional and intellectual work to the work of an actual pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem. This lack underscores yet further that the Jerusalem Adrichomius describes has little to do with the one he would have encountered had he ever chosen to make the journey. The idea that the attempt was to describe biblical Jerusalem for the spiritual benefit of Christians everywhere, independent of a notion of pilgrimage is perhaps most clearly evident in the section in which Adrichomius details the Way of the Cross itself. He names each place along the path, indicating the number of steps Christ had to take. After this narration (which occupies barely two pages in the small English printed edition), Adrichomius writes: We have made such exact description and demonstration of the way of the cross (as also the way of the Captivity hereafter expressed under the number of two hundred and seven) to the end that every Christian man, in all places, even in the doors of his house, or walking often times in his garden, or being in a journey, or in the Temple, either lying in his bed, may by the imagination of his mind conceive the like way, and with godly affection of the heart may meditate upon the passion of Christ: the which no doubt is both acceptable unto God, and for our own souls health most profitable as the holy Scriptures, and the writings of good men by their often exhortations do testify.75

At no point in this section does Adrichomius suggest that he describes anything other than Christ’s own experience so that believers might imagine it, meditate on it, just as they would on the Holy Scriptures. He even lists ‘being in a journey’ among the times one might consider meditating on his text, suggesting that his text is not written in imitation of a physical journey but rather as a purely meditative act meant to be pleasing to God and to afford better access to Jesus Christ as believers know him from the scriptural texts. Adrichomius (1593), section 118, 164; translated in Adrichomius (1595), 59. Interestingly, a 1654 English edition held in the British Library and a 1653 edition at the University of Illinois both add a parenthetical following this paragraph: ‘But a far better help is afforded and appointed of God, even the Holy Scriptures themselves, that do best and most affectingly set forth Christ’s Passion’, which is followed by a listing of those places in the Gospels that provide the Passion narrative, 54. In all the English editions the Way of the Cross section appears as number 117 as the English editions omit what appears as 44 in the Latin, a description of the house of Veronica. 75

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CONCLUSION Conclusion

The working definition here in use for general imagined pilgrimage seems to be the notion that Holly Flora sees as specifically available to female Franciscan readers: participating by proxy in the life of Christ.1 By extension, anything and everything would constitute imagined pilgrimage, rendering the term pilgrimage so polyvalent as to never permit universality: the simple act of being a cloistered religious attempting to live each day in and with Christ, any mass in any church, any instance of the Eucharist, even physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem itself would count as an imagined pilgrimage because it is an attempt to recreate and bring closer to the devotee the life of Jesus Christ. Once again it becomes clear that pilgrimage, and by extension imagined pilgrimage, are terms with far too many meanings to allow us to easily recognize patterns that would determine the formative influence of pilgrimage on the development of the Way of the Cross in the late medieval period. We have also seen that meditative manuals say nothing about seeking to provide access to the physical pilgrimage experience that continued to draw devout Christians through history (despite these journeys being ambiguously endorsed, at best, by church leaders). They do not seek to provide true geographical details or descriptions of the actual sites. Meditative manuals, even up to Adrichomius’ map with its elaborate key, intend to provide access to God by encouraging imitation, which behavior will ‘affect the worshiper’s thought and action’. 2 They do not imitate the physical act of pilgrimage to a terrestrial geographic location; they encourage readers to imagine themselves experiencing the life Flora (2009), 117. Conway (1976), 137.

1 2

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Conclusion

and times of Jesus Christ that they might have a better understanding of their religion, their God and themselves. These manuals are, as we might also say of physical travel to the Holy Land, one form of accessing God. In light of memory studies, the meditation manuals might be thus understood as providing vague geographical details only insofar as these might help further the imagined experience and help to create a structured space for revisiting the meditation. They concern themselves not at all with real pilgrimage, using the term most often to refer to the pilgrimage that is this life, and they speak of imitation only as it pertains to the imitatio Christi that is the ideal of every Christian life. A parallel can also be drawn here to understandings of architecture in the Middle Ages that viewed all recreations and imitations as pointing toward an original referent heedless of the actual relationship or of any true resemblance. Just as vastly distinct buildings can all be imitations of the Holy Sepulcher and manifold monastic and ascetic movements can all be understood as engaging in imitatio Christi, so too virtually any Christian spiritual behavior can be spoken of in terms of pilgrimage when we understand it as attempting to recreate Christ’s life or attempting to find one’s way to Christ. If we desire, as I do, to eliminate the notion of ‘spiritual’ pilgrimage because it erases the individuality of diverse religious behaviors, perhaps we might better say of the meditation manuals that they are, as Cruikshank, an early twentieth-century translator of the supposed work of Johannes Tauler writes, ‘book[s] of mental prayer suggested by the Passion’.3 The goal of this mental prayer was to help the believer reach across time, less than space, in order to create a stronger bond with Jesus. To suggest that time and place are perfectly separable would be foolish. But the notions of imitation prevalent in the medieval period assure the modern scholar that that which was considered eternal was viewed as independent of place. Europeans could make ‘copies’ of the Holy Sepulcher exactly because what mattered about the site was not its terrestrial location but its ontological importance. Francis could enact an imitatio Christi without living in Jerusalem, without replicating to perfection Christ’s life because, although form and behavior certainly mattered, spirit took precedence; consider Francis’ own declaration that obedience, a primary vow for Franciscans, could be abandoned if a friar’s conscience required it. In the medieval preaching and monastic context, memory theory and training used spatial constructions to or Cruikshank (1925), x.

3

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Conclusion

ganize thought and knowledge in order to make it easier to cross-associate: a learned monastic could connect disparate passages of scripture and the fathers through a single word, without regard for their original contexts because the whole of the texts with which they were working were viewed as true and eternal. Medieval meditation manuals, though often couched in a frame of physical pilgrimage, did not describe themselves as imitative. They described themselves as desiring to offer the reader something on which to meditate and as wanting to change the reader’s comportment, to better him or her by allowing access to something they had not previously had in emotive (and gruesome) details: Christ’s experience, and in particular his death. What we will find, in the next chapter when we turn to liturgy, is that Wood and Nagel’s artistic and architectural concept of bending time, of the possibility of recreation, of imitation in a different place and time with a different form is a basic aspect of medieval Christian religious performance. Liturgy has always had the effect of creating a return to a moment, the Incarnation, that is both historical and eternal. This recreation of time and access to an historically located eternality for the purpose of achieving greater closeness with God is the driving force behind the meditation manuals of the medieval period and to the extent that these manuals are the precursors to the Stations, this desire for closeness with God through the bending of time is the driving force behind the development of the ritual of the Stations of the Cross. We can thus best understand the Stations of the Cross as existing on a continuum of religious behavior that includes liturgical ritual and physical pilgrimage. Ultimately, as we will see through an exploration of the effect of ritual on time, the Stations were yet one more way in the medieval and early modern world (and, we might argue, today) of reaching union with the divine through the manipulation of time and thus space.

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PART IV: PIETY AND PLACE

LITURGY: STATIONAL, PUBLIC, PRIVATE

Introduction Primary source analysis of both pilgrimage texts and the types of meditation manuals that give rise to the ritualized Stations of the Cross suggests that in fact the practice has little to do with physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Storme, Thurston and all those who make use of their interpretation seem to be reading the development of the ritual solely in light of the later application of similar indulgences to the two activities. They are content to claim primacy for pilgrimage and to allow the Stations to be understood in the academic community as a spiritual or mental imitation of the more important physical travel to Jerusalem. This argument is not borne out when we consider just how pilgrimage was viewed and how Passion devotion and meditation thereon was understood. I do not deny the relevance of the religious travel experience or meditative manuals for the development of the Stations of the Cross; clearly the Stations come into being through a process of concretization in devotional manuals like those of Jan Pascha and Adrichomius. It is also clear that religious travel inspired, if nothing else, a literary framework for those devotional manuals. But to classify, as do Storme, Thurston and many scholars after them, the ritual of the Stations of the Cross as ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ that is ‘imitative’ is to misunderstand its place in history and to deny it the transformative power it was understood to possess. Implicit in the long-standing interpretation for the development of what is called ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ is the idea that the recognition of holy places led to physical pilgrimage. This in turn led to relic translatio that allowed for local pilgrimage. Local pilgrimage then transformed into spiritual pilgrimage: the implication is that Christian spirituality

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

underwent a process of localization and privatization that eventually located ritual inside the believer’s body and soul. This account reverses what we know of the history of the development of the Stations of the Cross—we most concretely find their beginnings in private rituals of devotion that then moved outward and were enacted on the landscape of Jerusalem or publicly in local churches. This narrative of increased interiorization also fails to take into consideration that meditation on historical and future moments coexisted with pilgrimage abroad as well as with local pilgrimage. None of these activities replaced the other, none seems to have discernibly begun before the other, and it would be wrong to assume that somehow they are products of each other. All of these early Christian, medieval and early modern rituals fall together on a single spectrum that spans from public to private, from phyiscal to internal. When we recognize this spectrum, certain commonly used categories in the study of Christian ritual become obsolete. The very term spiritual pilgrimage implies a relationship of influence between meditation and religious travel that simply does not exist beyond the superficial. As Bruria Bitton-Ashkelony argues, ‘what needs to be stressed, rather than the vague connotation of “spiritual pilgrimage”… is that spiritual pilgrimage, in most cases, is not a religious phenomenon in itself; the term is used mostly as the antithesis of undertaking pilgrimage to specific sites.’1 To call devotional prayers and meditations, including the Stations of the Cross, spiritual pilgrimage is simply to classify them as not physical pilgrimage. As we have seen in the primary sources, there is a little evidence to support the claim that physical travel was an ideal that meditations imitated: those who undertook physical journeys make no argument for their activities as more praiseworthy than others; church leaders often had objections and fears about the travel experience and valued more highly the monastic or meditative experience; and those who crafted meditation manuals, even ones that use ‘pilgrimage’ as a literary frame or conceit, evince no understanding of themselves as imitative of another ritual act. The phrase ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ implies a sort of imitation of an existing behavior. But if anything, the meditation manuals out of which the Stations of the Cross seem to crystallize were attempting to imitate the life of Christ, a life that could only be imagined and reconstructed using the Gospels. A more proper word than imitation would be commemoration, or remembrance. And this is true of all the devotional activities Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), 114.

1

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Introduction

explored along the range of activites undertaken by early Christians and their medieval descendants. Each of these activities seeks to remember and bring its participants closer to Jesus; an action that requires an elision not only of time but of place. Many authors are quick to conflate the events of the actual Passion with the experience of pilgrimage. For example, in her précis of the history of the Stations of the Cross, Susan Shantz writes that there was 'no hesitancy on the part of the Christian church to reproduce these events… This tendency allowed the Stations of the Cross to appear eventually as a pilgrimage in microcosm along the walls of any Catholic church… Catholicism has developed a pilgrimage paradigm which can be depicted in any church’.2 What Shantz fails to recognize is that she, along with Thurston, Storme and numerous other historians, does not adequately separate the events of the actual Passion and the events of a pilgrimage experience. ‘These events’ of which she speaks are moments of Christ’s Incarnation; these are repeatable, with the Eucharist being the most common and perfect example of the replicability of the Incarnation within the Christian conception of history. Yet her explanation slips into a quick elision of ‘these events’ with pilgrimage experiences. In her description, the actual instance of the Passion and the viewing of the sites of the Passion become the same thing. The end of the paragraph, in which Shantz declares that this reproduction invites artistic interpretation, makes this even muddier—the implication is that what invites artistic interpretation is the experience of pilgrimage as opposed to the events of the Passion itself, the Stations. Yet a cursory look at the figural Stations examined in her book belies this. These paintings and sculptures do not depict the experience of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but rather Christ’s experience of the Passion. Despite this bizarre conflation of Christ’s Passion and the pilgrim experience of visiting the sites thereof, Shantz does point to the replicability of the Stations, which I contend mirrors the replicable nature of certain aspects of Christian history and makes sense in the context both of how imitation was understood in the medieval period and in terms of liturgical theory. This replicability is the key to a new interpretation of the development of the Stations of the Cross. Rather than being an imitation or pilgrimage, the Stations were one among many instances of commemoration through replication of the life and times of Jesus.

Shantz (1991), 28.

2

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

In a recent article, Mitzi Kirkland-Ives begins to explore the notion that the Stations fall on a spectrum of other devotional activity. Though primarily concerned with artistic representations like the seven falls, Kirkland-Ives writes that ‘clearly rather than a direct response to physical pilgrimage, Suso’s devotion appears as a manifestation of the growing popularity of practices dedicated to Christ’s life and Passion in these centuries.’3 Kirkland-Ives acknowledges the lack of resonance between pilgrimage to Jerusalem and devotional practices and she argues instead that what began as interior comes to be more external. This exteriorization seems to stem from the turn to devotion to the human Christ (it perhaps comes as no surprise that devotion to God having taken a visible external form encouraged an exteriorization of belief)4; it is familiar from Francis’ creation of the nativity scene, from the larger mendicant orders’ commitment to being present in the world rather than in their monasteries only, and from Henry Suso walking about his cloister rather than thinking without movement. With all of these moving bodies, we might be quick to assume both that this is a strong link to pilgrimage and that this movement defines the development of the Stations of the Cross. But, as we have seen, we would be wrong to overlook other key devotional predecessors that were movement-less. So, too, Kirkland-Ives considers other devotions, such as that to the Wounds of Christ (and images thereof) as part of the later medieval trend in Passion devotion, calling them ‘stational prayer practice’. She elaborates on how the devotion to the Wounds also acquired a physical aspect as sculptures and images began to be produced.5 Kirkland-Ives focuses mainly on this question of exteriorization, but fails to explain exactly what she considers ‘stational’. It appears that for her purposes, all ‘kinetic responses to the Passion narrative’ are Stational.6 This 3 Kirkland-Ives (2009), 253. As mentioned earlier, Kirkland-Ives’ article is one of few recent scholarly works on the Stations of the Cross. Her objective, however, is to rescue other rituals such as devotions to the Wounds of Christ or Sorrows of Mary and artistic representations of these devotions from the obscurity caused by the insistent discussion on the Stations of the Cross (as the dominant form of these rituals) and its relationship to physical travel to Jerusalem. Another element on the spectrum are the sacri monti that begin to appear in the late fifteenth century. They are a vast topic unto themselves, and as such I will not treat them here. See Gentile (2005), 21–46. 4 A similar argument is often made about art in Christian history. The notion is that the incarnation, by its very physical nature, enabled and indeed demanded the creation of images of God. See Kessler (2000) and Miles (1985) for more on this topic. 5 Kirkland-Ives (2009), 265–66. 6 Kirkland-Ives (2009), 266.

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Early Stational Liturgy

focus makes sense given her project to recuperate other Passion devotion rituals of the late medieval and early modern period that developed, she argues, ‘parallel with pilgrimage to Jerusalem’.7 While Kirkland-Ives’ work has the side benefit of pointing out a disconnect between the Stations and physical pilgrimage as well as beginning to create a spectrum for the ‘variety and malleability of spatial devotional experience in the early modern era’, she does not introduce liturgy into the discussion, nor does she fully discuss the ways in which these rituals work on time and space.8 The Way of the Cross and other devotional exercises link not only to meditation manuals and to physical travel, but also to the Stational liturgy of early Christian Jerusalem. Stational liturgy forms another piece of the background to the development of the Stations of the Cross, one that has been consistently overlooked. This spectrum exists from the earliest days of Christian pietistic practice, and it continues into the early modern period, as can be seen clearly in a Savonarolan tractate discussed below. These practices share the goal of deepening connection to God and creating an experience that exists outside of time, collapsing past, present, and future into a singular experience.

Early Stational Liturgy The link between Passion devotion and the liturgy is undeniable when we consider texts like that of Ludolphus of Saxony whose meditative work, Vita Christi, aligns so closely with the liturgical year that the section on the Passion has been translated as an ‘Hours of the Passion’.9 Even Storme acknowledges that Passion devotion finds its initial expression in liturgy: ‘In fact [memory of the Passion] was at the heart of this piety, since from the very beginning the Eucharist perpetuates and reenacts the sacrifice of the Cross.’10 And yet Storme does not take the Kirkland-Ives (2009), 250. Though claiming at the beginning of her article that ‘a recognition of this range and variety of Stational responses to the Passion provides a broader view of early modern devotion, narratology, and conceptions of sacred space’, Kirkland-Ives engages in little discussion of late medieval and early modern conceptions of sacred space, 251. At one point she writes that such meditations overlaid onto daily life meant that one’s ‘environment would resonate with her storied memories of the events of the Passion’, 263, but she does not move the argument much past the notion that these devotions had kinetic aspects that played out on the ground of a believer’s every day life. 9 Bodenstedt (1944), 131. 10 Storme (1976), 61. 7 8

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

step of examining how the Stations relate to early Stational activities in Jerusalem. This is perhaps because the Stations, in their earliest truly recognizable form, are private devotions, where the liturgy is so clearly a public act. But despite this difference between private and public acts of religious devotion, we can see strong trends from the oldest Stational liturgy that feed into the development of making the Way of the Cross. To understand the Stations as Stational and as participating in a project similar to that of liturgy, we can examine what was occurring in Jerusalem in the processions and celebrations conducted in the years after the religion was made official. We find there the natal forms of Stational liturgy that will help to elucidate the complex relationship between time and place in Christianity, a relationship that heavily influences both the commitment to religious travel and the development of the Stations of the Cross. My analysis here rests on research completed by historians of liturgical practices, in particular, John F. Baldovin, who wrote the definitive work exploring the details of the liturgical rites in early Jerusalem. Baldovin examines these rites as described by Egeria and offers an explanation for their development that takes into account the history and character of the city of Jerusalem.11 Baldovin argues that the liturgy was largely fixed by the tenth century and that in the cases of Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople (the liturgies/locations he examines in his book), the whole of each city became the ground for Christian worship; every site was a possible worship site, everything was sacred. This notion of ubiquitous sacrality echoes clearly the biblical idea that Christ exists wherever two or more gather in his name as well as the idea that Jerusalem the material city has, like a relic, traces of the godly feet that once trod its streets. In early Christian Jerusalem, this feeling that the city was infused with the spirit led to city-wide processions and devotions located at numerous churches in succession. I would like to build upon Baldovin’s characterization of Stational liturgy in order to help conceptualize the parallels and deviations between common liturgical practice and the Stations of the Cross. For Baldovin, Stational liturgy is characterized by four things: 1. it takes place Baldovin (1987). Baldovin’s work forms the basis of this discussion on Stational liturgy in early Jerusalem. His text serves, for many, as the authority on these issues in early Christian Jerusalem. Though Baldovin looks at Rome and Constantinople as well, we are concerned here solely with the liturgy of Jerusalem and the broader concepts of what it means to call a liturgical practice ‘Stational’. For Baldovin’s definition of the term, see 36 and for his section on Jerusalem specifically, see 45–104. 11

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Early Stational Liturgy

under the leadership of a bishop or his representative; 2. it is mobile and occurs at numerous sites; 3. the locations are dependent on the celebration; and 4. it is the liturgy being enacted in a given time. He writes that ‘stational liturgy is a service of worship at a designated church, shrine, or public place in or near a city or town, on a designated feast, fast, or commemoration, which is presided over by the bishop or his representative and intended as the local church’s main liturgical celebration of the day.’12 We can see already that we do not find in this particular liturgical practice a perfect one to one match for the Stations of the Cross—it need not be led by a bishop or his representative, though often it takes this form once it becomes a public ritual, and it was never the only or even the dominant ritual. It is however, mobile, and while historically not determined by a celebration, it did have variations and permutations appropriate to certain places or times for most of its identifiable history. Stational systems can be traced to Jerusalem in the fourth century and they continue to crystallize through the succeeding centuries.13 Given its early dates of development, few sources exist to aid an investigation of Jerusalem practice. Egeria illuminates the fourth century, augmented by the Armenian lectionaries. The Georgian Lectionary (a pastiche of manuscripts copied in the tenth/eleventh centuries) and the Anastasis Typikon, a complete order of service for Holy Week produced just before the Crusades, carry the analysis into the heart of the medieval period.14 The Jerusalem in which Stational liturgy came into its own was Constantine’s Jerusalem, one that looked vastly different from the city of today and from the city of Jesus.15 This form of ritual practice takes the physical space of an entire landscape as its ground and thus as Constantine built more and more churches that could act in service of a mobile, processing devotion, the liturgy itself could expand. Though the Christianization of the city did much to elaborate the processions and devo12 Baldovin (1987), 37. Baldovin notes that his definition is not entirely new, and that others have identified some of the same characteristics. He does stress, however, that these same authors also equate Stational liturgy with the Eucharistic rite and that this is a fallacy: Stational liturgy does not always involve the Eucharist, as is clear from his examination of the sources. 13 Verhelst (2006), 422. Verhelst points out that there is evidence for liturgy in Jerusalem earlier than the fourth century, but that it took a variety of forms. 14 Verhelst (2006) notes that there are also other works in Georgian (a collection of homilies and a collection of hymns) that can contribute to our understanding of early liturgy in Jerusalem, 430–31. 15 Baldovin (1987) describes the city as it would have looked in the time of Constantine, relying heavily on Vincent and Abel.

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

tions, the notion of worship or celebration that moved about a space was not new: it bore a relationship to earlier cultic public behavior among Christians who, in a world of decreasing persecution, wished to make known their religious affiliation.16 In a sense, an old desire to publicize and the carefully-constructed, newly-Christian city of Jerusalem came together to enable a reconciliation between the past and the present and to act as one in service of touting not only the Christian faith but Constantine’s triumph by means thereof. In other words, the city planning and the advertising through public worship went hand in hand in order to send the message that this holy place in which Christ was killed now belonged to his followers.17 In this capacity as authorizing, the liturgy had to be extensive and incredibly public. This was not simply a matter of spiritual devotion or the use of sacred topography for worship. The development of this form of liturgy was, at least in part, about the development of a community through an Episcopal claiming of physical space by a religion that had previously laid no claim to space. Baldovin writes that the liturgy came to be organized around three guiding principles: the daily/weekly schedule of worship, the initiation rite of baptism, and ‘the combination of space and time in the celebration of certain feasts’.18 It is this last, the interplay of space and time that makes Jerusalem unique. Nowhere else in the early Christian world was one performing liturgical rites that evoked historical moments in the actual places in which the historical moments occurred. The liturgy was cued to the sites themselves and to the events that were being celebrated in a way that it could not have been anywhere else; just as the Holy Sepulcher was the archetype for medieval architectural translations, so too we might see Jerusalem and its liturgical elaborations as the archetype for the ritual mutations that echo down the centuries. And so we can begin to see in the early public liturgy of Jerusalem both how the unique site of Jerusalem might have called to pilgrims (as the only location in which the events themselves Baldovin (1987), 83–85. As it is today, the question of which group early Jerusalem belonged to was difficult. For more on Jerusalem as a shared holy space, the accretion of sacrality, and the attempts to remove it by reassociating a site with one’s own beliefs, see Levine (1999) and Limor (2007), 219–31. Baldovin argues, therefore, for a multilayered origin for Stational liturgy: ‘the sacred topography was by no means the only guiding principle in the development of Stational practice in Jerusalem. Just as influential was the now public nature of the ecclesia and its means of incorporating new members’, 87. 18 Baldovin (1987), 85. 16 17

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Early Stational Liturgy

took place) and how the ritual of the Way of the Cross might find its deepest roots in these commemorative acts. Egeria left history its primary, though incomplete, description of fourth-century processions and rituals in the city of Jerusalem. Egeria describes the mobile and ubiquitous liturgical rites she witnessed in great detail, though of course her account is limited, leaving holes in our understanding of the early Jerusalem practice. She records them for her sisters because she believes they will want ‘to know about the daily service they have in the holy places’ so we seem assured that what she is transmitting is accurate insofar as she understood what was going on around her.19 She details the Sunday services, and the weekly, and then proceeds to write about the liturgical year, beginning with Epiphany. In each instance she is careful to record the differences from one day to the next in terms of how the believers are dismissed, where their processions take them, where they organize,  etc. Though we observe processional and mobile activity in these weekly and daily services, the highlight of her account comes with Great Week, the week before Easter which contains an incredible amount of movement and frequent overnight vigils.20 The week before Easter alone contains the events of the Passion that come to be the fourteen Stations of the Cross, and as a result the celebrations performed by the bishop and the Jerusalem Christians during this week are the apt place to look for the fundament of the Stations ritual. As Egeria describes, on Friday of Great Week, the day of the crucifixion, the procession seems to take the entire day, and involves many different locations around the city. Having spent the night at the site where Jesus ascended to heaven (the Imbomon), the bishop and the people come down from the Mount of Olives and march to Gethsemane. There they pray, and when done they make their way into Jerusalem, singing and walking, until they have traversed the city and reached the cross.21 These Friday processions, while not themselves identifiable as Egeria, Itinerarium, chap. 24, 67; translated in Wilkinson (1999), 142. Egeria, Itinerarium, chap. 27, 73; translated in Wilkinson (1999), 148: ‘…they assemble… in the Great Church called the Martyrium on Golgotha Behind the Cross… after the dismissal in this church they go singing, as they do every Sunday, to the Anastasis…’. 21 Egeria (chapter 36) describes a full day’s activities, on the heels of a night spent at prayer on the Mount of Olives. She notes the fatigue of the believers, writing that: ‘there are a great many people and they have been crowded together, tired by their vigil, and weakened by their daily fasting—and they have had a very big hill to come down…’, translated in Wilkinson (1999), 154. 19

20

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

a Stations of the Cross, clearly relate to the later ritual through their attention to the end of Christ’s life and through veneration of the cross. The people have marched through the city, from the site of Jesus’ prayers to the site of his death, and all the while they have been ‘groaning and lamenting and weeping so loud that people even across in the city can probably hear it all’. 22 We can imagine they have been so moved not only by their own fatigue, but also by envisioning the final day of Christ’s time on earth. They engaged in a physical activity, wearing themselves down to the point that the bishop exhorts them to be strong, telling them ‘not to be weary, but to put their hope in God who will give them a reward out of all proportion to the effort they have made’.23 The bishop’s words give the impression that what is required of the believers is almost beyond bearing, that it is simply exhausting. And yet the ritual continues. The overall picture Egeria paints is of a city, at least during Great Week, running itself ragged trying to keep pace with a system of worship that leads them all over, from the Anastasis to the Eleona Church on the Mount of Olives. Celebrations continue on Easter Sunday, and then through the following eight days. Egeria describes the actions of the bishop through this all important week (his involvement is one of Baldovin’s defining features of Stational liturgy), as well as the actions of the believers down to the ‘smallest children’. The geographical range of the sites and the inclusion of all Christians in its enactment support Baldovin’s claim that this liturgy was not ruled simply by spiritual concerns but also tied into political ones as well, as it attempted to unify the newly Christianized city. But the ritual evolves from Egeria, and as Baldovin examines the sources he notes a trend: over the centuries we see increased historicization and a distinct contraction of the rituals. Egeria’s meticulous description of the ritual participants and the locations to which they travel is supplemented by the fifth-century Armenian Lectionary (henceforth AL) which provides much information about the specific prayers, readings and songs used in these ceremonies. The AL is actually a Greek lectionary preserved in an Armenian copy and dates from around the time of Egeria’s text, though possibly Egeria, Itinerarium, chap. 34, 78; translated in Wilkinson (1999), 154. Egeria, Itinerarium, chap. 36, 80; translated in Wilkinson (199), 155. Wilkinson’s translation of ‘qui eis pro eo laore maiorem mercedem redditurus sit’ seems slightly off. We might better translate this as ‘who gives to them a reward for their great efforts’. 22 23

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Early Stational Liturgy

a decade or two before.24 The text, a sort of manual (it is not a true lectionary as it does not provide the entire text to be read) with indications of what readings should be spoken when, paints a similar picture to that of Egeria. The liturgy it prescribes is extensive: on the morning of Holy Friday alone, the assembled masses participate in eight prayers and eight psalm readings, not to mention sixteen passages of scripture.25 The readings all speak to Christ’s Incarnation and death, either through a supersessionist interpretation of Hebrew prophecy or explicitly through New Testament readings. Though Egeria’s work clearly states that readings and prayers accompanied the rituals she describes, with the AL we see just how cued these various stops, or stations, for celebration were to the Gospel narration. The AL in fact mentions eighty-one Stational celebrations, distinctly fleshing out Egeria’s recounting of the liturgical situation at Jerusalem.26 This comprehensive view is brought forward in time by the Georgian Lectionary (henceforth GL) which, like the AL, is not truly a lectionary but rather is a guide for celebrations. The document is itself a composite of six other works, put together by M. Tarchnisvili to provide a more coherent look at the liturgy of the time.27 The GL tells the story of Jerusalem rituals between the fifth and eighth centuries and it is even more extensive than the AL. Beginning with the start of the liturgical year in December, the GL contains elaborate and lengthy Lenten and Easter instructions.28 It also includes more saint’s days, but far fewer physical stations are mentioned.29 This elimination of stations continues with the final useful source for examining early Stational liturgies in 24 Renoux (1969), 21. In volume 35:2  (1969), Renoux provides an introduction and analysis of Jerusalem liturgy. Volume 36:1 (1971) contains a facing translation of the three earliest manuscripts of the Armenian Lectionary. For a quick and easy table of the AL, see Wilkinson (1999), 181–94. 25 Renoux (1971), 281–93. 26 Baldovin (1987), 72. 27 Tarchnisvili (1959), v–vii. Tarchnisvili lists the four manuscripts and two fragments in his introduction to the Latin translation of the Georgian material. Baldovin (1987), 72–73. 28 In the Latin translation, the Lent and Easter accounts take up about half of the entire text, Tarchnisvili (1959), 47–116. 29 Baldovin (1987), 79. This contrasts to Verhelst’s (2006) claim that the Armenian Lectionary contains 20 stations, while the Georgian Lectionary has nearly 80, 429–30. This may come down to a difference in how Verhelst and Baldovin define the term ‘Station’. Because Baldovin’s work represents the more thorough examination of Stational liturgy, I accept his definition.

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

Jerusalem, the Anastasis Typikon, a full order of service for Holy Week.30 This document indicates that while the city was under Muslim control, the processions and celebrations of its Christian population were more highly circumscribed. Taken altogether, then, the sources provide a look at trends in Stational liturgy from the time of the earliest accounts of travel to the holy land to the pre-crusader period of Muslim control, a time at which scholars often claim that pilgrimage became increasingly infrequent. Over the centuries, sites that are not linked to real events get dropped and events are increasingly organized according to and linked with linearly narrated Gospel events and the passages that describe them, an historicization already noted by Baldovin.31 This change of control in the city had other implications for liturgical practices. For example, Baldovin sees an increase in economy (something we might argue we see too in the development of the Stations of the Cross as they become distilled into a fourteen site system). Despite the increasing vastness of the calendar (with each successive source the calendar is more crowded by feast days), the liturgy seems to take, over time, less and less time. These contractions are unsurprising, however, when we consider that Jerusalem had been invaded by the Persians early in the seventh century and that the Muslims had assumed control in 638. It is no wonder, then, that the elaborate and far ranging liturgy described by Egeria that served to claim the city as Christian would have of necessity been simplified and economized during Muslim rule. Despite Muslim tolerance of Christian worship, wide-ranging and very public rituals that laid claim to sites all around the area could hardly have been acceptable to the ruling powers. The need to worship over a smaller space during Muslim rule may also account for the shifts in location of certain sites—many more events come to be concentrated within the complex of the Holy Sepulcher in the centuries preceding the Crusades and this 30 The Greek order of service was edited in 1894 by Papadopoulos-Kerameus, and large selections of the text are available in French in Thibaut (1926). A full edition does not seem to exist in any language other than Greek. 31 Baldovin (1987) stresses that the historicization of the events of Jesus’ life was not the singular driving force behind the development of Stational liturgy, the ‘ecclesial needs’ of the city and community were also at work, 93. As an example of this historicization, Baldovin cites Egeria’s description of a Eucharist on Holy Thursday that could be done in commemoration of the Last Supper, yet she makes no mention whatsoever of that particular gospel event. A few decades later, the AL exactly describes this Eucharist (identifiable because in both cases it is a second rite following closely on the heels of a first one) as a celebration of the Last Supper, complete with gospel readings. See Baldovin (1987), 87, Renoux (1971), 269: the prescribed reading is Mk 14:12–26. See also Wilkinson (1999), 153.

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Early Stational Liturgy

may be explained by the contraction of the liturgy.32 The decreased interest in liturgy in later pilgrimage accounts reflects this trend toward less elaborate rituals that dominate the city landscape, but the convoluted routes the pilgrims walk also interestingly countermand the increasingly chronologically organized liturgical rites. And yet, though Baldovin ends his analysis with the Anastasis Typikon of the tenth century, the notion of Stational visitations remains strong in accounts of visits to the Holy Sepulcher through the Crusades and beyond, as we have seen. While the liturgy contracted a great deal and no later accounts give an indication that anything nearly as complex as the worship of Egeria's time was taking place, there occurred what we might call Stational practice, though like the Way of the Cross it does not fit all four of Baldovin's criteria. Niccolò of Poggibonsi's fourteenth-century account describes a Stational tour around the Holy Sepulcher, and in the fifteenth century Francesco Suriano similarly describes a method of circulating within the Holy Sepulcher itself. The elaborate Stational liturgy of Egeria has been reduced to a small scale liturgy inside the Holy Sepulcher in the post-crusader era. This makes sense: with the original loss of Jerusalem, the social and historical reasons for the development of the liturgy that Baldovin so stresses no longer exist; the city is not Christian and no amount of intricate, public procession will make it so. While the Latin Kingdom had briefly provided a field for joining the city again under Christian rule, the fall of the Kingdom gave the city a new character that forced worship behind the closed doors (pilgrims were often actually locked in) of the Holy Sepulcher complex which had itself been moved under one roof.33 The story thus told demonstrates an expansion in the fourth century that then is increasingly grounded in the sites of Jerusalem, until Christianity’s loss of the city at which point we see less importance placed on the structures and more on the narrative itself. The narrative of Jesus’ life is at the center of the liturgy, the Stations of the Cross, religious travel to Jerusalem, and many other activities along the spectrum of pietistic practice. The retelling of the narrative enables a kind of time-collapse, bringing the participants in the practice closer to an experience of his life. 32 For more on the curtailment of liturgy, the issues surrounding the use of icons and processions, and the difficulty of celebrating under Muslim rule, see Griffith (2011), 207–37; Brubaker, Haldon, and Ousterhout (2001); and Thomas (2001). 33 For information on the structural history of the Holy Sepulcher, see Quénard (1903); Vincent and Abel (1914); Ousterhout (1989); Ousterhout (2003); and Morris (2005).

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

Case Study: Liturgy, Meditation and Passion in a Savonarolan Tractate In the late fifteenth century, around the same time that the vocabulary for the Way of the Cross was being introduced by Wey and Capodilista, Girolamo Savonarola was preaching in Florence. Long painted as an iconoclast, a political meddler, and a radical reformer, in recent years attempts have been made to temper the reputation that has clung to Savonarola since his downfall.34 Fra Girolamo’s personal commitment to preaching and proselytizing, a significant factor in his choice of the Dominican order, led to a determined publication of many of his works, including small sermons and manuals.35 Until the twentieth century, scholars tended to focus on those works which supported an interpretation of Savonarola initially instigated by his arrest and execution and perpetuated through scholarship that intentionally looked for the hallmarks of radicalism and that critiqued his interference in political life; there has indeed been something of a circular investigation.36 But Savonarola was a prolific author who insistently published his works in the new printed book form. As a result, many works still exist untreated. Just such a work, a short tractate entitled ‘Tractato del Sacramento che sono cinque meditationi composto da frate Hieronymo da Ferrara, dell ordine de predicatori’ (Tractate on the Sacrament in five meditations, composed by Friar Jerome of Ferrara of the order of preachers) speaks well to the time-bending nature of late medieval pious practice.37 This very brief account of the mysteries of the sacrament displays an uncon34 In particular, Martines (2006) works to dispel the long-held views on Savonarola’s beliefs and achievements. For additional biographical information on Savonarola see Weinstein (2011) and Seward (2006). 35 Weinstein (1989), 30. Weinstein notes that while Savonarola’s religious convictions could easily have led him to a Franciscan life of poverty, he ‘had vowed to become “a knight of Christ” and [so joined] the self-styled hounds of God (Domini canes).’ 36 Even in the twentieth-century interest in Savonarola’s political involvement remains. See Borelli and Passaro (2006). 37 This text, which exists in incunabulae around the world, seems to have been left untreated by scholarship. Seemingly always bound with the Regola Utile, a rule for the friars of San Marco, the text was printed sometime before 1495 and sometime after 1490 (the year of Savonarola’s return to Florence to take the helm at the convent) by Bartolommeo di Libri, a frequent printer of Savonarola’s works. See Proctor (1900), 67–68. Because it is always found bound with the Regola Utile, we can assume that the tractate was, at least initially, intended for the Dominican brethren, though its printing in vernacular Italian suggests that Fra Girolamo would have been equally pleased had the laity taken to heart his meditative suggestions.

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Case Study

troversial Eucharistic theology and its interplay of liturgy, word and image through suggested meditations can be read, I  believe, as a mental Stational text that, while it likely did not directly influence the development of the Stations of the Cross, bears a close relationship to the ritual as it eventually came to be and can certainly help to illuminate the continuum of spiritual endeavors in which the Stations themselves can be argued to fall. This tractate is of particular use in thinking about how, though different in many important ways, private and public rituals can have many similarities that unites them. This text, written at the height of Savonarola’s popularity, overlays a private, internal focus on biblical events onto the public, liturgical act of the Eucharist. Though it does not incorporate exclusively moments of the Passion of Christ, we might then read it as bridging the gap between early Jerusalem liturgy which was public, the earliest private devotions that resemble the Stations of the Cross, and the future public performances of the Stations of the Cross in Europe, Jerusalem and the world. Savonarola’s treatise finds the middle ground between fourth-century liturgy’s mobile and public nature led by bishops or priests, and the lack of liturgical assignment in Suso, Adrichomius and Pascha, which nonetheless retains the movement and focus characteristic of liturgy. We can, at the very least, understand this text as emblematic of the same temperament and mentality that caused the Stations of the Cross to be such a popular and widespread ritual, coming as it does from the mind of a late-fifteenth-century Dominican devoted to recovering and reinstituting more traditional notions of religious behavior. The text opens by summarizing the first four marvels that become the basis for prescriptions to practitioners. While the descriptions are absolutely consistent with the theology of the transubstantiation as laid out by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (each marvel noted is a basic tenet of Eucharistic theology), Savonarola goes a step further and translates these theological stances into personal directives, demonstrating the ways a Christian was meant to personally embody the liturgy: the first marvel is that the bread is truly transformed into the body of Christ and as such we must transform ourselves from earthly love to divine love; the second, that Christ is both in heaven and truly on earth in the sacrament and so must we be bodily on earth but spiritually in heaven when taking communion (this brings to mind, certainly, the simultaneity noted by Crook); third, that through the sacrament the physical attributes of the bread are no longer substantiated by the bread itself but rather by God and so must we understand that all our goodness comes

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

from God; the fourth, that the breaking of the host does not change its essence, because Christ is indivisibly present just as our undivided love of God ought never break, even through tribulations. We have, already, in these first four marvels a layering of sacrament and personal experience, a conflation of the elements of the Eucharist and the spiritual state of the one who witnesses the miraculous sacrament. These first four marvels then list aspects of the present (the sacrament exists right now in such a way, the believer should adopt a particular posture in this present moment, etc.), but they establish the grounding for the extensive fifth marvel, in which the past is brought into the present. The fifth marvel addresses the principal mysteries of the mass and elucidates how attendees were to understand these through an imaginative and meditative practice.38 Savonarola provides a point of focus for each step of the mass, telling his listeners or readers what to contemplate at every stage. The first step listed in the tractate is largely preparatory: during the confession one is meant to consider the sinfulness of human nature, ‘because of which Christ came, because all the world was filled with idolatry and ignorance of God.’39 In other words, the friars are told to mirror the words of the celebrant with internal thoughts about their own need for confession. They were supposed to enter into a mood of humility and desire for God, born out of the awareness of their own shortcomings. They are not only told to think of their own nature, however, but also to consider that it is because of that nature that Christ came at all to humankind, eventually providing for salvation and the very mass that begins with the confession. This first step conflates the origin of salvation with the commencement of the mass and demands that the friars adopt the right frame of mind to experience the sacrament properly. This same pattern continues throughout the short piece, with many of the later steps addressing those last moments of Christ’s life that eventually form the fourteen Stations of the Cross. When the celebrant offers the chalice which contains the wine that will become blood, the friars are told to contemplate the ready willingness of Christ to take on the Passion, to spill his blood in sacrifice for humankind. Time has once again been contracted so that in that moment the friars are experiencing both the mass at which they are in at38 It would be redundant to review every single step of the meditation here, so I will limit the discussion to the first, as illustrative of how this tractate works, and to those that address the Passion. 39 For a full translation into English, as well as the original Italian, see Appendix 1.

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Case Study

tendance and the original event that that mass recreates.40 The actions of the mass when coupled with Savonarola’s meditation visually affirm Christ’s willingness to be crucified: he offered himself just as the priest offers the chalice, and as the friars offer themselves to the permanent exile of the religious life they have chosen. The sense of sacrifice—of Christ’s original sacrifice, of the Eucharist as representative of that sacrifice, of the friars’ lives as imitatio Christi—dominates this particular step and in doing so it highlights the way in which liturgy (and the lives of devout believers) recreates the historical Incarnation. The next demand is that the friars contemplate the coming of Christ into Jerusalem on the ass during the preface, the prayer that begins the section of the mass that narrates the institution of the Eucharist. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem can be seen as the beginning of the narrative that leads to the Eucharistic rite, once again clearly linking liturgical act and meditative thought.The text then moves into the Passion proper. ‘Contemplate the mysteries of his Passion and how he was raised on the cross’, the friars are told, as the celebrant recites what Savonarola refers to as the secrets, but we might more rightly call the Eucharistic prayer in which the actual consecration of the host takes place.41 Savonarola tells the friars to envision the most human moment of the Incarnation narrative, for what is more human than death, as a mirror to the moment in the liturgical rite when the host truly becomes flesh and blood. This reflective focus on Christ’s humanity is not the only link; perhaps even more obviously the friars imagine the moment when Christ’s body is raised on the cross and given in sacrifice, just as the priest would have raised the host which had, after the transubstantiation, itself become the body and blood to be consumed as sacrifice by the apostles in the origi40 Eliade (1987) offers a well-crafted articulation of the importance of the incarnation for future attempts at instantiating Christ and the importance in participating in the mass as a commemoration of his human existence as a means of marking the worth of historical time: ‘Since God was incarnated, that is, since he took on a historically conditioned human existence, history acquires the possibility of being sanctified. The illud tempus evoked by the Gospels is a clearly defined historical time—the time in which Pontius Pilate was Governor of Judaea—but it was sanctified by the presence of Christ. When a Christian… participates in liturgical time, he recovers the illud tempus in which Christ lived, suffered, and rose again—but it is no longer a mythical time… Christianity arrives, not at a philosophy but at a theology of history. For God’s interventions in history, and above all his Incarnation in the historical person of Jesus Christ, have a transhistorical purpose—the salvation of man’, 111–12. 41 This part of the mass was termed the ‘secretum’ because the priest would whisper or not speak out loud at all the words that effected the consecration of the host; the words as part of the mechanism of transformation were to remain a mystery.

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

nal narrative and by the priest in the medieval liturgical experience.42 In a very physical way, Savonarola encourages the alignment of the events of the Passion, the liturgical actions of the priest, and the mental imaginings of the friar, and this physicality continues in the next step. When the priest lowers the host, ‘lo dipone’, Savonarola says to contemplate the sepulcher continually until the priest begins the pater noster. In this step, the priest lowers the host mimicking Christ being lowered from the cross, in fact the words are the same, and the friars were to imagine the sepulcher, the eventual (though temporary) resting place of the body being lowered. The mass has altered the host, just as death altered Christ, but both remain present and very real. For much of the tractate and for the mass itself, the focus is on the Incarnation and death of Jesus; the meditation works to bring the past into the present. But when the celebrant recites the pax domini, the friars were to contemplate Christ’s Resurrection. The pax domini takes place just before the actual ingestion of communion. This seems fitting: salvation, peace, and communion itself are only possible through the Resurrection. The friars are to imagine the risen Christ as the pax is shared, and the result is a coming together of the historical origin of the risen Lord’s gift of peace,43 and the friars’ current experience. Just as Christ shows the apostles his hands and side, so the priest is handling the body and blood. And, just as Christ proves the truth of his sacrifice to his disciples, so, too, the truth is made known through the sacramental transformation of the host and the ingested sacrifice that follows the pax domini.44 And finally, the future enters the picture: ‘when he turns with the book to the right, contemplate the end of the world, when even the Jews, from whom he departed and went to the Gentiles, will convert.’ There is a clear reference in the turning of the book of the Gospel to the right, the side of Christ on which will sit the saved at the end of days, to the end of time when Christ will judge and determine the fate of all. The book of Revelation makes this link explicit: ‘I saw in the right hand Kilmartin (1998), 153. Kilmartin notes that the raising of the host at the time of the consecration was a late-twelfth-century invention. 43 The pax is found in Jn 20:19–20: ‘Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.’ 44 There follows this step one in which communion is taken and the friars are encouraged to meditate on that moment when they too will be fit to enjoy the fruits of the sacrament. Given this and other incidents in which the text forgoes Gospel narrative order, clearly this work is not a Stations of the Cross precursor in the way that is Jan Pascha’s or Adrichomius’. 42

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Case Study

of Him who sat on the throne a book written inside and on the back, sealed up with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the book and to break its seals?” And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the book or to look into it.’ (Rev. 5:1–3) Christ the Lamb is the one strong enough to open this Book of Life whose contents determine the final judgment. Here, the friars are provided a very clear tie between present liturgical event (the mass is ending and the Gospel book is being put away), past historical narrative (Christ departed from the Jews) and biblically foretold future (the Book of Life will be opened, read, and put away, when the life of the world comes to a close). Savonarola asks his friars to understand the end of mass as the end of time, making all the more important the friars’ ability to reach a place of spiritual readiness and grace. The last step Savonarola gives is to ‘contemplate the glory of the blessed, to whom Christ says: Come, you who are blessed by my father’ while the priest recites the benediction, the verbal closing of the sacramental rite. The last portion of this suggested contemplation is given by Savonarola in the biblical Latin, ‘venite benedicti patris mei’ (come, you who are blessed by my father), and comes from Matthew 25:34. The surrounding text reads: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’(Mt 25:31–34)

Friars, who would be well-acquainted with the Gospel and with memory techniques of the type discussed in chapter three, would have made the association between the line quoted by Savonarola and this passage from Matthew, bringing to mind once again the Last Judgment. These final two liturgical moments speak directly to the end of days at which point Christ will come again and judge the world. We have then, a bringing together of future prophesied time, of immediate time, and of the past in the form of the written Word. All of Savonarola’s meditative injunctions highlight the liturgy’s attempt to conflate time, but it is in his final recommendation that he

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Liturgy: Stational, Public, Private

adds to this concept of time bending so many more aspects of medieval piety: the concept of sacrifice and of love that are so related to a life lived in imitation of Christ (as we see with the friars), the concept of transformation (as we see discussed in meditative manuals such as Jan Pascha’s), and the desire to commemorate (just as in the architectural imitations, in pilgrimages, and in rituals like the Eucharist). Savonarola’s concluding lines exemplify the themes of conflating space-time, generating a communal and universal experience, and salvation via imitation that have been discussed more generally elsewhere. He writes: ‘And know that you must go to mass with this intention: First to commemorate the Passion of Christ. Second to offer with the celebrant this sacrifice for yourself, and for your family, and for all the faithful: and to commune and transform yourself in the divine love.’ Savonarola is declaring, at the end interestingly rather than at the beginning, that these are the intentions with which one must approach the mass in order to benefit from it. One must come into the service, as he states in the first step, with an open awareness of one’s need for salvation. Here, however, is also stressed the need to make an offering of yourself not only for your own sake, but also for the sake of your family and for all the faithful. The distinctions between people and historical times are elided: one’s work for salvation is a link to all the faithful, beyond the boundaries of human time, and it is the work of saving many, not one. We see here, again, the personal directive born of a theological stance as we saw in the first four marvels. Christ made a sacrifice of himself and so must every faithful who approaches the sacrament of the Eucharist (the exact reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice) be willing to make a sacrifice of their self. These final lines are also a reminder that communion and transformation through communion are only possible by means of an individual’s love of God and, perhaps more importantly, God’s love for an individual. Savonarola is offering a very orthodox way to maximize the experience and salvific effects of the sacrament, and what is fascinating and instructive is just how he has chosen to do this: he has combined image, word, and ritual in the minds of his friars. His intricate interweaving of liturgical movement and speech with text and memories indicates a deep understanding of how the mind creates a holistic experience. The friars, drawing on their knowledge of scripture and on the rites taking place before them, would have achieved a deeper sense of the importance not only of the mass as they witnessed it but also of the sacrifice it recreates that they could no longer witness. This conflation of the physically performative, the internally imagined,

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Case Study

and the verbal in order to create links across time is certainly reminiscent of the Stations as they came to exist: as an act of physical and mental commemoration. This tractate, like the liturgy itself, like the imitatio Christi ideal and like the Stations of the Cross that begin to crystallize in the following century, stops time by recreating an historical moment over and over again. Savonarola, in this tractate, asks the friars to participate in a collective, or we could say public, ritual of the mass while staying particularly attuned to their internal state. And what is more, he has made his injunctions to them public through publishing them in a manual that all might read. Savonarola’s use of the most public means available to him— publishing and preaching—to encourage private devotional experience underscores the complex relationship the public and private have always had in Christian ritual. From Egeria and her desire to experience her own private transformation through public ritual but also to record it and make it available to her sisters to Savonarola and his commitment of making available to the public his calls to private devotional activity, ritual on the spectrum of Christian devotion has had shades of internal and external, of public and private, for millennia. Public ritual will only work when there is the proper internal state cultivated. The private devotion, in order to be made most useful to others who might be seeking a way to God, often must be made public through autobiographical accounts, hagiographies, and manuals of instruction. A narrative that moves Christian ritual from the outside to the inside privileges a notion of place—ritual as being located somewhere either internal or external, publicly accessible or hidden away. This privileging of place makes little sense when considering a religion in which ritual works not only to collapse time, but to transcend places and spaces.

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THE PLACELESSNESS OF PIETY The Placelessness of Piety

Stational liturgy develops out of an altered conception of space in fourth-century Christian Jerusalem but that liturgy’s relationship with time had remained unchanged. Baldovin’s work points to the contextual nature of liturgy in Jerusalem, and his investigation into early Stational liturgy speaks to the larger complications in the Christian tradition around space and time, and around what constitutes the holy in this fallen world. He accounts as well for the development of liturgies in Rome and Constantinople that work to unify cities and which he convincingly argues are barely affected by the Jerusalem liturgy though they are all linked by their motives. In concluding his section on Jerusalem liturgy, he expresses his belief that ‘the change in the style and hence in the meaning of worship is indeed profound in the fourth-century liturgy of Jerusalem, but the motive of this development is not so much a changing perception of time as a changed relation to space’.1 I believe we can understand Stational practice, then, as being born out of a new relation to space and mutating and lasting in other formats because of its capacity to enliven the ritualized modification of time. In order to better understand this interplay of time and space we can turn to twentieth-century theorists who write about liturgy’s effect on time and place. What we will find is that analyses of liturgy and its ability to translocate are applicable too to the ritual of the Stations of the Cross, despite the private nature of early enactments that contrasts with the especially public nature of the liturgy developed in Constantine’s Jerusalem. While some have, over time, interpreted liturgy to refer only to the Eucharistic rite, its broader definition includes any public worship with Baldovin (1987), 104.

1

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The Placelessness of Piety

a prescribed set of behaviors. We have seen this public aspect, certainly, in Baldovin’s description of the development of Stational liturgy: it had effects beyond the religious, it had a social purpose that was fulfilled through its very public nature. These public aspects of liturgy work not only to create a community, but to create a shared experience. Mary Carruthers writes that: The ‘commonality’ is created through a narrative mnemonic procedure. ‘Remembering’ is constructed in such processions by means of a communal walk-about among a set of ‘places’ made literally ‘common’. The processions are the routes and networks among the memories placed (as cues) within the various textually derived sites. The physical activity exactly mirrors the mental activity in which the participants were engaged.2

Though she does not use the term liturgy, she argues that public physical activities of religious significance (liturgical acts, we could easily imagine), work to create a mental set of structures and experiences that create, in essence, a collective memory. While of course the Stations in their infancy were neither public, nor prescribed, nor communal, they were textually based elaborations that connected a mental activity and a physical activity; we need only think of Henry Suso or Eustochia who walked about their cells and convents as they imagined the Passion. They were, in Carruthers’ language, creating a narrative mnemonic procedure. And, although the precursors to the Way of the Cross varied greatly, they were all based upon the same foundational story of Christ’s last minutes on earth, thus linking them. As they were crystallized more and more, though they were not necessarily performed publicly (though often they were), they were shared in the sense that they came to have a prescribed format. The Stations share certain aspects with public, prescribed religious activity. But what links the Stations even more securely with liturgy is the shared purpose of the ritual: the remembrance and commemoration of Jesus’ life on earth and the establishment of a connection with Christ through the bending of time achieved through that commemoration, just as we saw with the Savonarolan tractate. Although the point is made by other scholars of early Christianity, by Baldovin, and by Carruthers, Jonathan Z. Smith articulately puts forth in his work To Take Place this claim: Christianity was aspatial Carruthers (1998), 44. She actually writes this in elaboration of Baldovin, 87.

2

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The Placelessness of Piety

in its initial years (as one scholar puts it: ‘It may be only marginally unfair to say that Christianity’s opening salvo against the religions of the Roman world was an attack on [the] ancient idea of the holiness of place’3), but with the conversion of Constantine and of the city of Jerusalem itself, Christianity acquired, for a time at least, a place.4 From the fourth century, Christianity could then worship in the place where its most central event had taken place and its institutions could develop, as Baldovin argues, a liturgy and a constructed liturgical year that memorialized the religion and contributed to the sense of community and communal memory. Smith’s argument that the Holy Sepulcher could not initially have been built anywhere other than on the site of the tomb is obvious, certainly; the very job of the structure was to mark the supposed spot of Christ’s entombment. And we have already seen theorized the translocatability of the ‘sepulcher’ in various forms in the medieval period. But what Smith argues is that the sepulcher is translocatable not because its form can be recreated due to the loose medieval conception of imitation but because the liturgy that grew up in the space was itself replicable because of the symbolic nature of Christian religious ritual.5 Christianity is an historical faith with an abiding sense of the atemporal and of infinite return. Christ’s Incarnation on earth was an historical moment that will never be repeated, but his institution of the Eucharistic rite makes his Incarnation more than simply an historical fact. The Eucharist takes the Incarnation into the realm of eternal truths to which believers can return in every enactment of the rite, anywhere in the world. As one modern devotional author writes, Christ ‘did not choose his Passion only to suffer it in his own human nature, tremendous though that would have been, but in order to suffer it in the suffering of each one of his members through all ages, until

Collins (2012), 7. Smith’s work (1987) attacks the issues of time and place among the Tjilpa of Australia, in Judaism and in Christianity. The chapter primarily relevant to this discussion is that on the Holy Sepulcher, chapter four, 74–95. This move to caring about spaces and places was also a very practical one. As Hayes (2003) puts it: ‘the very nature of religion demanded that they build churches of stone to accommodate and focus public worship,’ 9. This is not unlike the shift the Franciscans and other reform movements underwent when they found themselves sanctioned and attempting to manage their own popularity. 5 This is in particular contrast, Smith (1987) notes, to the Jewish temple which was arbitrarily built, 86. 3 4

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The Placelessness of Piety

the end of time.’6 The historical was a singular event, but it is replicable and eternal in its reenactment. In many ways, the Eucharist is the central aspect of this manipulation of time: it marks the defining historical moment for Christians but also exemplifies that which can be repeated anywhere, at any time and which contains ahistorical meaning. The believers participating in the act create the sacred space for the ritual, not the physical location in which those believers find themselves.7 This combination of the historical and the eternal develops in the fourth century in Jerusalem liturgy, according to Smith: ‘it brought about the overlaying of a temporal system and a spatial system. In fact, the intercalation was more complex than that, for two different temporal systems were fused: an essentially ahistorical system of salvation… with a historical system of commemoration, memorialization and recollection’.8 Jerusalem was unique in that it celebrated events at the sites, and applied appropriate readings to those events and places, in contrast to the straight linear reading of the Gospel that defined earlier ritual.9 The liturgy developed in Jerusalem was a means of sanctifying time in such a way that the ritual itself could then exist independent of place (returning, we might argue, to the earliest conceptions of Christianity as without geography). Space is transformed, through liturgy, into time, because of the time-bending properties of liturgy. That is to say, liturgy works to erase time and transport participants to another time.10 In so doing, the liturgy also transports them to a different place: anywhere can be holy, if one or two gather and there enact a liturgy that brings them out of time, out of place. So that even while elaborate liturgy is developed exactly in the historical time frame during which Christianity is authorized and adopts holy spaces, the very elaboration of these structures allows for a continued relative ambivalence to place and a relatively

Houselander (1979), 11. Caryll Houselander (1901–1954) was what one might call a twentieth-century mystic. She experienced visions of Christ thoroughout her life, and wrote prolifically. Though the edition of the Stations used here was printed in 1979, the text was originally printed in 1955, shortly after Houselander’s death. See Wright (2005). 7 Davies (1994), 55–56. 8 Smith (1987), 92–93. 9 Smith (1987), 93. 10 Collins (2012), 54: ‘Liturgical action dissolves the barriers of time that might otherwise separate those disparate moments pregnant with theological meaning’. 6

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The Placelessness of Piety

easy loss of place. Smith’s work attempts to show how this occurred. He writes: Through a concentration on the associative dimensions of place together with the syntagmatic dimensions of narrative, a system was formulated that could be replicated away from the place. In this case, unlike the Temple, it was not arbitrariness, but temporality, that guaranteed replicability. With few exceptions, the hymns, prayers, scripture lessons, and gestures tied to particular places in the indigenous Jerusalem liturgy could be expropriated and exported. The sequence of time, the story, the festal calendar, have allowed a supersession of place. It is the apta diei that will be endlessly replicable, rather than the aptus locus.11

For Smith, then, Christianity’s relationship to time, as defined by its simultaneous historicity and eternality, is what allows for the transportability of ritual and the lack of concern with space in the centuries after the loss of Jerusalem. The obvious flipside to this is that liturgy works to create an experience of time for those encountering it. It places them in a suspended state that combines the temporal and the atemporal, creating what we might call a placeless time out of time that is somehow at once singular and cyclical. We see this sense of simultaneity paralleled not only in the architectural imitations, but also in the use of relics and the veneration of saints. The existence of many ‘sepulchers’ did not seem to trouble anyone; it could exist in Jerusalem and in Rome and in Aachen and so on. Similarly, as John Crook’s work on the cult of saints describes, saints were understood as both spiritually in heaven and physically on earth.12 While the purpose of his text is to track how the belief in relics affects alterations in architecture, the foundational point of his book is relevant here: neither Christianity as a whole nor the liturgy it uses can be easily put into a box as atemporal or aspatial. Particularly in the case of Jerusalem, we are faced with many layers of meaning. Stational liturgy in medieval Jerusalem is absolutely engaged with the urban environment and with the historical development of the location in which it is enacted; Baldovin argues the case for these points quite effectively throughout 11 Smith (1987), 94. These points are reiterated by Ousterhout (1995) in an article on the fresco program of the Chora Parekklesion in Constantinople. He writes that ‘the combination of monumental narrative and liturgical reenactment could combine to evoke the real presence of biblical events, transporting the worshipper from transient, linear time into eternal, divine time’, 63. 12 Crook (2000), 17.

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The Placelessness of Piety

his work.13 Yet Christian liturgy as Smith suggests, by its very nature as it evolves into a temporal structure, works to transcend those relationships to a particular city and particular holy sites. And so, we see that upon Christianity’s acquisition of space the performative aspects of the religion develop in such a way that we return to where we began at our discussion of pilgrimage, with Wilken and Prawer attempting to make sense of a religion that simultaneously affirms place for its historical value and rejects it if it becomes too limiting because the eternal can not be confined by space or by place. This question of place versus space is one that has arisen for theorists. Heidegger raises the issue in ‘An Ontological Consideration of Place’, marking a difference between horizontal and vertical places. Horizontal places are those created by external forces while vertical are those created by the internal impulses of each individual.14 This notion of different types of place was pushed further by Yi-Fu Tuan who understood the horizontal as related to the physical and the vertical to the symbolic.15 Tuan then overlays these categories onto place and space. Space becomes the abstract, the vertical. Place is the more familiar, the physical, measurable, valued and known: ‘What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.’16 The two terms cannot be separated, they rely on each other for definition. Tuan writes that ‘from the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.’17 This differentiation of space and place is instructive; Smith writes that ‘it is through structures of temporality as ritualized, that the divisiveness and particularity of space are overcome.’18 But we can push this harder and say that liturgy and other acts of ritualized behavior can change space into place, and in so doing transcend place. A church, a monastic cell, a forest on the edge of town can, through the ritualized Stations, become delineated, measured, valued as a site of holy activity. And then in the enacting of the ritual, as one imagines oneself beside Jesus, the church Baldovin (1987). This is the overarching argument of the entire text. Heidegger (1958), 18–26. 15 Tuan (1972), 27–35. 16 Tuan (1977), 6. 17 Tuan (1977), 6. 18 Smith (1987), 26. Martyn Smith (2008) articulates the idea that narrative creates an emotional tie that makes us feel precious about our spaces; or put another way, that it is emotions elicited through story-telling (we might substitute ritual) that transform space into place. 13 14

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The Placelessness of Piety

is no longer just the church, the cell not just a cell, the forest not just a forest. A believer performing the Stations is no longer simply in their own church in their own contemporary moment, rather they are transported to a biblical time and place, or perhaps more rightly, they are transported to the eternal re-unfolding of the biblical story.19 And yet, this correlation between performance of the Stations and the experience of the liturgy is uneasy. Richard Kieckhefer, in a short chapter on late medieval devotion, claims that ‘liturgical religion is marked primarily by a sense of special times, and contemplative religion by an effort to transcend both place and time, but devotional religion attends mainly to the veneration of sacred places or to the objects that make these places holy.’20 These divisions seem arbitrary at best. Liturgical religion, exactly because of its ‘sense of special times’ is able to do what he claims for what he terms ‘contemplative religion’, it transcends time and space. He then claims the Stations of the Cross as devotional religion, an act that focuses on places and objects. And yet, the Stations do not themselves involve the veneration of relics, and they certainly do not require a certain location: they do not require presence in the Holy Land (as we have seen they did not even start there) and they are, by the eighteenth century, permitted to be erected in any church.21 If anything, the Stations do what liturgy does and what Kieckhefer claims for ‘contemplative religion’, they seek to transcend place and time. In this way, the Stations are in fact like liturgy, providing access now and over and over again throughout history. As one author on Franciscan spirituality writes, liturgy ‘is the life of Christ relived in the church, along the decades, in a cycle that repeats each year, but does not run out of steam in its power and vitality, in its capacity to act on the soul.’22 The Stations are, like liturgy, infinitely repeatable and infinitely replicable, so much so that 19 One of the foremost scholars to theorize liturgy and time is Mircea Eliade. His work The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1987) discusses eloquently the ways in which time becomes blurred by liturgy and by ritual, pointing to cyclical time as a hallmark of what he terms the homo religiosus: ‘Hence religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites… [he] refuses to live solely in what, in modern terms, is called the historical present; he attempts to regain a sacred time that, from one point of view, can be homologized to eternity’, 70. 20 Kieckhefer (1987), 81. 21 MacVicar (1956), 25. 22 Ciccarelli (1962), 89. Translation my own.

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The Placelessness of Piety

they can be brought back to the landscape of Jerusalem and cause the rearranging of sites. But there are those who reject the Stations as liturgy, and their objections are useful for showing us the way in which my initial analysis of the primacy of religious travel and of imitation in the medieval period can in fact resolve the very objections they raise. In a short article from 1989, Sandro Sticca writes: Understood as an imitative commemoration of the sorrowful itinerary followed by Christ during His Passion, the Via Crucis is a devotional practice that does not have a liturgical character in the ancient and traditional meaning of the word, that is, as a participation in a religious mystery. The Via Crucis, notwithstanding its edifying and instructive aim, is neither a true liturgical expression nor the origin of the mystical catharsis that the faithful relive in the solemnity of the Eucharistic mystery or in any of the liturgical rites of Holy Week. Because of its imitative nature, the devotional practice of the Via Crucis does not possess the sacramental character of the liturgical act in which the sacramental sign unites the order of the real with that of the mystery in a symbolic rapport.23

Again we find that much of the interpretation is based in how one understands the term imitation and how one understands liturgy. Sticca rejects the Stations as a liturgical act, arguing that because they are imitative they do not create a time collapse in the same way that liturgical rites do and that they do not make ‘real’ the same way a sacrament does. If we cease understanding the Stations as imitative and instead take them as their own ritual, we can begin to correct our misunderstandings. Sticca does acknowledge the connection to the liturgy, particularly to early Holy Week liturgy in Jerusalem, writing that the Easter processions ‘exercised not only an influence on the origins of the Via Crucis but, together with the entire liturgy of Jerusalem, propagated itself through the Christian world and became definitively consecrated by the Church in the liturgy of Holy Week’.24 Yet even if we do not interpret the Stations as themselves Sticca (1989), 94. Sticca (1989), 106–07. Baldovin would likely disagree with this, painting as he does a more complex history of liturgical influence. Though there are certain particulars that are exported from Jerusalem, the major influence on liturgy in Europe (the site of the development of the Stations) seems to come from Rome: ‘… the development of Stational practice at both Rome and Constantinople was not an attempt to imitate the practice of Jerusalem, but rather the result of factors common to cities of the late antique world… on the level of origins, then, we can say that no one Stational system influenced any of the others…’, 247–48 and finally, he argues that ‘it would be a mistake , however, to turn all 23 24

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The Placelessness of Piety

liturgical, we can understand them as existing on a spectrum of religious expression that is attempting to achieve the same ends: an elision of time and space that enables a closeness to Christ. In this way the Stations do exactly what Sticca claims they do not—they participate in a cathartic reliving of the moments that give the Eucharistic mysteries their power. Using the concept of elided space, place and time to understand the connections between the Stations and liturgy also answers any concerns about the historicity of the events themselves. For example, Sticca writes that ‘as a devotional commemoration that takes place in a historical time, the pious exercise of the Via Crucis is not an expression of the liturgical cult that takes place in a mythical and sacred time rendered eternally present, but rather an extra liturgical devotion that assumes its definitive form only in the fifteenth century.’25 The Stations do not assume definitive form in the fifteenth century, but, ignoring that detail, it is also the case that though making the Way of the Cross commemorates historical time, it no more takes place in historical time than any other liturgical, meditative, or devotional act. In each case, time passes, in each case, an historical event is being remembered, reenacted or commemorated, and in each case, the devout performers of the act are hoping to make ‘sacred time… eternally present’. All of these acts inevitably take place in time, and mark the complex relationship of Christianity to time.26 The passage of time during the performance of a ritual does not negate its ability to mark time and to collapse time. In the devotional manuals that lead to the creation of the Stations of the Cross as a European ritual, we see this same sense of continual return, of making the historical and eternal simultaneously present, and of translocatability. The very idea of meditating on the sites of Christ’s Passion while not in the place in which they occurred reaffirms Smith’s claim that Christianity can be exported and still remain strong in its identity. It makes sense, then, that the MVC is itself (along with other devotional materials) organized around liturgical hours. 27 Liturgy is not of one’s attention on this question to Jerusalem’s influence in the medieval West, for by far the greater influence was exercised by THE City of Western Europe, Rome’, 249. 25 Sticca (1989), 94. 26 Even pilgrimage, the relationship of the Stations to which I am trying to tease out, takes place in time. As Quinney (2002) recounts in a story of his own pilgrimage, ‘pilgrimage is as much travel in time as it is travel in space. All pilgrimage takes place in the passing of time; the pilgrim grows older in the course of the journey. Wherever the pilgrim may be going geographically, he or she is ultimately a traveler in time’, 203. 27 Kirkland-Ives (2009), 256. Kirkland-Ives describes a text that encourages meditation on the nine leadings of Christ. This text in particular belonged to a cloistered

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The Placelessness of Piety

distinct from meditation and prayer, but rather affords a perfect opportunity to engage therein and to recreate continually various aspects of Christ’s life. Though some of the language in use may, at first glance, suggest a stronger relationship to pilgrimage, it is clear that liturgy and Passion devotion form the base from which the Stations develop and that the ritual of the Stations of the Cross shares in the goals and purpose of liturgical action and Passion devotion. This is not to deny the importance of religious journeying, but rather to suggest that all of these behaviors, including physical travel, coexisted and overlapped in their goals and achievements. An historian of pilgrimage, Jonathan Sumption writes that: 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’.28

Sumption gives to the Stations what Sticca will not, the adjective ‘liturgical’ and though he writes that the Stations find their roots in pilgrimage, he seems to be suggesting that this is so only insofar as pilgrimage itself had some of the qualities of ‘regenerative’ liturgy. The defining features of the Stations thus seem to be those that similarly define liturgical experience and meditation, and for Sumption at least, pilgrimage: the capacity of religious action to bring together past, present and future in a transformative and renewing manipulation of time that allows individuals and the ritualized behaviors themselves to transcend space and place. This careful crafting of an experience of time so that space might be transcended (even as the event takes place in real time and real space) can be seen in pilgrimage, meditation, liturgy, tractates like that written by Savonarola, and in the Stations of the Cross.

nun and exhorted her to overlap her devotions onto her daily routine. ‘Here the commemoration of the Passion takes on an explicitly kinetic character, one that focuses on the trajectory from place to place’, 261. Her activities were determined by the liturgical hours of the day, and so too her devotions would be: ‘during her quotidian activities— each claustral duty over the course of her day—her environment would resonate with her stored memories of the events of the Passion’, 263. 28 Sumption (1975), 93.

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CONCLUSION Conclusion

Christian liturgy as it developed in the medieval period allowed for the loss of the city of Jerusalem without loss of the identity of Christianity. As it had been from its inception, Christianity was a religion that could operate wherever believers gathered, wherever the Eucharist could be performed, whether it was in a church, a meadow, or a living room. This sense of placelessness correlates in many ways to the complex relationship the Christian religion has to time. History, eternity and the present moment can coexist, as we see in Savonarola’s tractate, and these can be brought together by ritual or meditative action. We even see such melding of time in the medieval works of Anselm and Aelred whose devotional texts stress a love of Christ. This time collapse unites Christian religious acts and an understanding of it can help us to better understand why the Stations of the Cross develop and where to locate the roots of this ritual. Anselm’s prayer to Jesus Christ examined in chapter three provides an instance of this collapsing of time in devotional activity. The beginning of the prayer laments that Anselm was not present during Jesus’ life to witness firsthand the Passion, death and Resurrection. The body of the prayer is a call to love and desire in the here and now, while the end is an expression of desire for the end of days. For Anselm, consideration of the Passion is at all times the consideration of something that is past, present, and future. It is as eternal as the son himself. This theme continues in the following ‘Prayer Before Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ’ in which Anselm remembers the gift of Christ’s death and redemption of the world, bemoans his own unworthiness and then prays: ‘at the Resurrection you will refashion the body of my humiliation according to the body of your glory, as you promised by your apostle, and

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Conclusion

I shall rejoice in you for ever to your glory, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever. Amen.’1 The desire is to call to mind the past, live properly in the present, and achieve eternal closeness to God and Christ. Similarly, Aelred of Rievaulx offers a threefold meditation for the nuns for whom his has written a rule. They are to meditate on the past in the form of Jesus’ life, on the present in the form of their own lives and the gifts that God has given them, and on the future as the end of days, on heaven, and on the gifts the Lord will provide at Judgment day.2 There is an interrelated nature to the phases of time—nuns cannot focus only on one, but must focus on all aspects of time as they are all present at any given moment. Christ’s life is eternally with them as is their conception of the future times. In a way, time, though distinctly linear through the narratives and prophecies being explored, becomes non-linear in these devotional moments. It becomes possible to envision Jesus’ Incarnation, one’s relationship to Christ now, and one’s future relationship to the risen Savior. This gives us another way to understand the development of the Stations of the Cross, not as a substitution for pilgrimage by imitation, but rather as one more religious performance that achieves this sense of connection between a believer and the time and place of the all-important event of the Incarnation of Christ. Scholars have, for too long, interpreted the development of the Way of the Cross as related primarily to pilgrimage. This interpretation seems to be born out of the later papal granting of equivalent indulgences to performing the ritual on the streets of Jerusalem and in churches throughout the Christian world, and this equivalency provides the proof for a theory that then declares the Stations a secondary imitation of the optimal activity of pilgrimage. In his work on forgeries and replications, Christopher Wood claims that giving indulgences in the fourteenth century ‘was a wild, unjustifiable literalization of substitutional thinking’, with the idea that indulgences could be granted for things that were mere imitations of the original.3 Wood suggests that this action was an extreme version of the substitutional and imitative mindset we saw in chapter three. But perhaps it was not, perhaps it was a clear reflection of the thinking of the Anselm, Orationes, Oratio 3, 10; translated in Ward (1973), 100–01. Anselm’s ‘Prayer to the Holy Cross’ adopts a very similar structure. 2 Aelred, Regula,chapters 47–78, cols. 1465–1474; translated in Knowles (1971) as chaps. 29–33, 79–102. 3 Wood (2008), 338. 1

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time and that in fact these things were exactly all equivalent because, as Wood shows, ‘every pilgrimage, even the one involving a physical journey, is a re-enactment of someone else’s pilgrimage’.4 The indulgences seem to be the ultimate expression of content over form, the whole basis of substitutional thinking. Every physical journey to Jerusalem itself points, ultimately, to Christ’s life, just as does every meditation on Christ and every Eucharistic moment: every mass is the Last Supper echoing through time in its eternal form. And it is this issue, one of time and access, that I believe is at the heart of not only the public liturgical experience but of the Stations of the Cross first as private devotion and then as they were placed in more and more late medieval and early modern churches. Wood makes clear his conviction about the relationship of time when he writes of six panel paintings commissioned by the Dominican convent of St. Catherine in Augsburg. The panels featured basilicas in Rome and were intended, says Wood, for these so-called virtual pilgrimages: ‘The pilgrimage to Rome was a spatial challenge but also a form of time travel, for it put ordinary Christians in the footsteps of the apostles, martyrs, the earliest popes, Constantine, and the penitent emperors.’5 The pilgrimage to Rome worked to provide people with access to an earlier time, and so did meditation even when performed in one’s home church, the architecture and name of which often conspired to assist in this time collapse. Medieval churches were understood as ‘metaphors of the Heavenly Jerusalem’6 and we have seen how easily they could be understood as reincarnations of sites in Jerusalem. I would like to suggest that the inclusion of the Stations of the Cross in churches relates much more to the recreation of an experience of the heavenly Jerusalem, the site of the infinitely repeatable salvation, rather than as true replications of the contemporary city of Jerusalem. As one art historical critic writes, to understand the metaphorical symbolism literally ‘runs counter to the whole character of medieval symbolism’.7 We need to understand the replicatory and multivalent framework in which these buildings were being built and in which these rituals were being developed in order to grasp that they are interrelated with the liturgy. Like liturgy, various

6 7 4 5

Wood (2008), 339. Wood (2008), 332. Crossley (1988), 119. See also Stookey (1969). Crossley (1988), 119.

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Conclusion

iterations of buildings and of Christ’s experience were, in the medieval world, translocatable and determined by the needs of the devout. From the beginning of our examination of pilgrimage, we have seen how popular devotion can overtake the theological party-line: though pilgrimage was considered unnecessary and even potentially dangerous by many early prominent Christian authors, they clearly were never quite able to dispose of it. Similarly, though the dominant position expressed a desire to ultimately move past the need for external aids to meditation, popular devotion still made insistent use of paintings, sculptures, plaques and physicality, as we see with the Stations and we even see with St. Francis and his externalization of his own devotion. It strikes me, then, that if we do insist on using more modern material for evidence, rather than interpreting the Stations of the Cross’ development through the lens of the papal bulls that offered equivalent indulgences, we would do better to look at what modern devotional authors have to say; the inheritors of Anselm and Aelred’s devotional works, of Savonarola’s reforming instincts, of Francis’ piety, of endless travel literature are the practicing believers who developed and perpetuated the Stations of the Cross over these centuries. Among those believers, from Pascha and Adrichomius to modern authors, what we find is that, though they may not equate the act to liturgical rites, they do understand it as providing access to Christ in something of a similar way. Beyond the Anselmian and Aelredian love, we find the desire to change and to unite for all time with God.  In his description of Ludolphus’ text Vita Christi, Conway writes that ‘one begins by regarding the Passion at first intellectually, then emotionally in such a way that one accuses oneself of having contributed towards it, then slowly moves towards a state in which one comes to view one’s own suffering as part of the suffering of Christ: a sense in which beginning in a state of Hell, one moves through Purgatory towards Heaven.’8 The idea is that one is moving toward an eternal life with Christ through a reformation of one’s position and character. The two texts labeled as the first true written versions of the Stations, those of Adrichomius and Jan Pascha, further this point. Pascha declares that his work is meant to help others meditate on the life of Christ so they might ‘attain to the happy end that [they] desire’ which is to ‘come to the City of heavenly Jerusalem’.9 Adrichomius, too, though he acknowledges that only in the heavenly Je Conway (1976), 137. Pascha, 4–5.

8 9

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rusalem will perfect knowledge of Christ’s life and Passion be given, exhorts the meditation for the purpose of becoming, as he says, ‘inflamed and drawn to love and to follow Christ’.10 By the early twentieth century not much had changed for devotees of the Stations of the Cross; as with their medieval counterparts, the focus was on love of Christ and achieving a sense of having experienced the Passion with him and on gaining future union with him. We read similar articulations in the numerous works produced before Vatican II.11 Thaddeus MacVicar, a Capuchin, writes that they are the culmination of all other forms of devotion.12 Fra Leone writes that when one ‘makes the way of the cross, one causes oneself to grow in love of Christ, and from this love is born a hatred of sin, the imitation of the virtue of Jesus, and union with the Beloved’.13 The twentieth-century English mystic Houselander reveals that among the devout, the pilgrimage interpretation of the Stations of the Cross does not always reign supreme, but rather an interpretation focusing on access does: ‘The Stations of the Cross are not given to us only to remind us of the historical Passion of Christ, but to 10 Adrichomius (1593), 146; translated in Adrichomius (1595), 3–4 of the unpaginated preface. 11 Vatican  II convened between 1962 and 1965. The council produced many documents affirming and reforming the Church’s opionion on numerous issues. Of potential relevance to understanding the history of the Stations of the Cross is the Constitution on Liturgy. Though it does not speak to the Stations directly, this document focuses on reforming the liturgy (allowing for greater use of the vernacular) and on reestablishing liturgy and in particular the Eucharistic rite as a central didactic, pastoral, and devotional aspect of Catholic religious practice. It remains to be explored how Vatican II’s Constitutions and Decrees might have affected the twentieth-century development and spread of the Stations of the Cross. Because of its general attention to the affirmation and centrality of not only liturgical rites but also of other devotions that are considered beneficial, my speculation is that, if anything, Vatican II helped to solidify and further perpetuate the Way of the Cross. That said, a study of the religious practice of the Stations among twentieth-century Catholics would have to account for more than even Vatican II by looking at, among other things, larger shifts in religiosity and in church attendance and participation. For an English translation of the various documents produced by Vatican II, see the Vatican archives online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/. 12 MacVicar (1956) writes that they are the coming together of 'devotion of the pietà; commemorating the repose of the dead savior in the arms of His mother; the devotion of the holy face imprinted on Veronica's veil; the devotion of the sacred wounds with its emphasis on the side of Christ and His sacred heart pierced with the lance; the devotions honoring His tears, the drops of the precious blood, His falls, His seven last words, the instruments of His Passion, especially the crown, and above all the holy cross', 24. 13 Leone (1943), 7. Translation my own.

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show us what is happening now, and happening to each one of us’.14 From the earliest to the more recent, devotional manuals for and accounts of the Stations of the Cross express an awareness of how the ritual works, like various other forms of religious behavior, to change the individual, bringing them closer to God. Admittedly, we find in the medieval sources only implicit links between the Stations and liturgy. Neither Pascha nor Adrichomius states outright their thoughts on the connection between the mass and the Way of the Cross ritual. But, though it is never explicit, the connection is there, implicit in the way they speak about the manipulation of time, the replication of or access to Christ’s life and the capacity of these things to take place anywhere. We find the connections once again in Savonarola’s text, where the overlapping of meditation on Christ’s life and Passion with the rite of the mass tacitly insists on their connection. But in a brief article from 1938 we find an attempt to explain the relationship between liturgy and the Stations of the Cross. In Roger Schoenbechler’s short work, published in the Orate Fratres and titled ‘The Mass and the Way of the Cross’, the author tries to explain ‘how this devotion fits into the general Christian plan of life, especially how it is related to the sacrifice of the Mass’.15 Schoenbechler argues that ‘we might say that the way of the cross represents in a human way what the Mass represents and enacts in a divine way. While it is a meditation, the way of the cross is also an historical commemoration, a psychological imitation, a moral imitation of the virtues of Christ in His Passion’.16 Schoenbechler connects the Stations and the Cross through their connection to the Passion, declaring that the Stations are a more accessible, human way of understanding the last events of Christ’s life whereas the mass provides a mystical interaction between participant and God. Ultimately, though, he believes that all devotions ‘should not only find their source in the liturgy, and be inspired by the liturgy, especially the Mass, but they should reflect back upon the liturgy and serve as a means of bringing us closer to the liturgy and the liturgical spirit, the spirit of Houselander (1979), 11. It is worth noting that Houselander’s text was originally written and published before Vatican II. 15 Schoenbechler (1938), 204. I was unable to locate any other material that attempts to discuss forthrightly the relationship between the mass and the Stations of the Cross. Orate Fratres was the original title of what is now known as Worship. The journal describes itself as ‘a review concerned with liturgical renewal’. It is published by Saint John’s Abbey, a Benedictine institution in Collegeville MN. See the Worship website, http://www.saintjohnsabbey.org/worship/index.html. 16 Schoenbechler (1938), 206. 14

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Conclusion

Christ and His Church’.17 For Schoenbechler, the Stations are valid because they enable a loving imitatio Christi and because they point back to the mass, they ‘bring us closer to the Mass itself ’ and this is wherein lies their efficacy.18 Schoenbechler clearly places emphasis on the liturgy and mass, and all other devotions are secondary to it. We can easily understand this. Christ instituted the Eucharistic rite, lending it a kind of primacy. The liturgy that grew up around this ritual thus served and still serves, in some sense, as the closest link to Christ. But other religious activities work to accomplish this same goal of erasing the distance of time and the separation of place and making Jesus Christ present and real for the practicing Christian. These rituals come in the form of both public and private devotions, and in fact the same sort of behaviors can transition, as the Stations do, between private and public exactly because meditation and liturgy both afford the possibility of closeness to God despite the different form they take. The standing interpretation of the Stations of the Cross as a ritual imitative of another religious act places it in what we might conceive of as a vertical line of inheritance leading from Jesus’ life, to pilgrimage and finally to the Way of the Cross as a western ritual. We would do better, I  believe, to conceive of all medieval devotional acts, including liturgy, pilgrimage, the Stations and other meditations, religious dramas, etc., as a cluster of behaviors that reflect and refract one another, each lending nuanced meaning to the other, aiding and deepening experience for the same ultimate purpose of achieving union with God, a union that occurs beyond time and beyond place. But there was more that was different in those early centuries before the official determination of fourteen stations in set locations that mimicked the meditative experience. For a very long time religious travelers did not engage in any activity that resembled the Stations of the Cross as they were happening in the west. Those who made the journey to Jerusalem were shown anything and everything along the streets, no one group was specially marked out, the time was not taken to conduct a unique ritual that might necessitate going back over the same ground in order to see other sites along the way that had been missed. Rather, there was a simultaneity to a visitor’s experience of Jerusalem, one that contrasts with the studied and steady linear unfolding of the Stations in western Europe. Schoenbechler (1938), 206. Schoenbechler (1938), 206.

17

18



Conclusion

When one is present at the actual site one can live in the experience without too much concern for creating the experience; even now there are spatial and temporal bounds that dictate the way one interacts with the site of Jesus’ final walk and death. There is a way in which the three dimensionality of a space presses itself insistently upon a person. And this was what occurred with religious travelers for much of the history of pilgrimage. Guided by the friars, these journeyers were led through a space that existed constantly as a ‘real’ whole, not a timed and chronologically and linearly unfolding event. Bound by its own existence in space, the visitors’ experiences were not dictated by time. They saw things in jumbled order and it did not matter; they saw multiple events at one site, learning them all, not focusing on one to the exclusion of the other. The temporal mattered infinitely less than the spatial and physical in terms of determining their actions and behaviors; they were encountering the space as if it were a relic. Jerusalem was in some way the largest reliquary in the world from which religious travelers could gain contactsanctity and return home somehow closer to God. Even with the setting up of images or columns to walk between, the ritual of the Stations of the Cross as it was (and continues to be) in western Europe was not about believing that these were true substitutes that themselves operated as relics or that mimicked the encounter of the religious traveler with the streets of the Holy Land. Rather, the linear unfolding of the Gospel story and one’s imagination dictate the meditative experience. This may account for the increasing inclusion in the west of non-canonical events, such as the three falls, events that were not imposed on the landscape of Jerusalem until much later. From the textual evidence supplied in accounts of trips to the Holy Land, we find that religious travel was never understood, even by those who undertook it, as the ultimate in Christian behavior. We also find that these records of journeys make little mention of anything remotely akin to the Stations until well into the early modern period. The meditation manuals produced in the west, even those that use a loose travel conceit as a frame, were meant for use in contemplation rather than for actual travel. Despite the use of the term pilgrimage (peregrinatio) in both types of texts, we must not confuse them as equivalent. Just as pilgrimage was understood in the earliest centuries to mean a real physical journey, an exile, or the choosing of a monastic life, so here we are dealing with the use of one term that conveys two distinctly different (and known to be different) experiences.



Conclusion

The meditation manuals that were created to aid in Passion devotion and contemplation were also aide-memoires to an experience long past and never personally experienced by the reader/meditator. These guides for bringing oneself closer to Christ operated like liturgy by circumventing the constraints of the spatial and temporal worlds and creating a living and adaptive memory that could be renewed and re-lived at any moment. Just as liturgy repeats an event localized in both time and space outside of those local constraints, so too do the Stations. Though begun in the context of private meditation and thus similar to other private religious activities like pilgrimage, they also bear a relationship to the Stational liturgy of the early Christian movement that was itself translocatable and developed on the streets of Jerusalem, of Constantinople and of Rome. We can also recognize that the Stations of the Cross move from private devotion to public ritual over the centuries, echoing the exteriorization of devotion that we see particularly among Franciscan devotees of Christ’s Passion. We can then understand the Stations of the Cross as it developed over time as participating in the larger project of Christian behaviors; the Stations were one among many rituals intended to achieve closeness to Christ. The spectrum of ritual reenactments, both public and private, on which the Stations of the Cross falls makes Christianity continually new, bringing it beyond the human bounds of time and place. As such, the ritual of the Stations of the Cross acts as a commemoration. The Stations ritual did and still does move past what was real in the sense of spatially or temporally real and cut to the heart of what was, especially for medieval Catholics, the Truth, the Truth of the Passion as a heartwrenching, personal, deeply emotional experience. We even see this in ostensibly scholarly accounts that explain the addition of the falls as understandable, for how could Jesus have not been overcome with fatigue? The implication is that there is some sort of Truth to the fabricated incidents. There is some sort of Truth in the imagined road of the Via Dolorosa, performed in a church thousands of miles away from Jerusalem. Just as early liturgy marked as special a land that was already vastly different from the land in which Christ lived, just as the mass brings people to the eternally present but historically located moments of the Resurrection and of the Last Supper, just as a baby can seem to come to life in Francis’ arms in a nativity scene in Greccio eclipsing time and space, just as Savonarola’s recommended meditations during mass bolstered the efficacy of the ritual by erasing the distance of centuries and miles, so too does the Stations of the Cross allow its ritual enactors to achieve



Conclusion

an experience of Christ and God that bends the real in favor of the Real. No medieval Christian would have believed that the western meditative ritual was equivalent to seeing the sites of Jerusalem. But most assuredly they believed in the efficacy of finding ways to be closer to Christ and the efficacy of achieving an approximate experience through replication, commemoration, travel, and imagination. Theorizing and writing about the Stations of the Cross (both as enacted in Jerusalem and as performed outside that city) has long been the purview of devotional authors, rather than academic. We might view this as a modern incarnation of the private/public divide that we have seen throughout our investigation of ritual, a divide that rarely holds up perfectly. The lines of private and public are easily muddied in Christian liturgical and ritualized behavior, in part because the goal of the activity is and always has been to move past dichotomies: to move into oneself in order to move out and make connection with God, moving from the internal to the external, the singular to the united. To go beyond the right now to exist in an historic but eternal time. To travel out of the right here to imagine the historic places of Jesus’ life and to experience the eternal place of God’s creation. The Stations of the Cross and other Christian rituals, liturgy and activity use imagination, emotion, narrative, physical activity and more in order to cultivate an experience of God made possible by the placelessness of Christian piety.



EPILOGUE Epilogue

I have only traveled to Jerusalem once. Only set foot on the dusty ground of that famous/infamous city once in November of 2010. I arrived with all the skepticism of someone who identifies with a religion that has no emotional ties to that city, not any more at least. I  went with decades of news reports about the ‘crisis in the Middle East’ dominating my thoughts about Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside, overlaid with knowledge of Jesus’ life and the subsequent millennia of religious activity. When I made my journey, my pilgrimage, there was no active threat of violence. Things were quiet. That of course didn’t stop a feeling of disquiet. Despite my unease, I  and my companions remained safe the entire time, and I had the opportunity to see and be moved by sites of importance to each of the three Abrahamic traditions. I of course spent a Friday afternoon participating in the weekly ritual of the Stations of the Cross. A group of Franciscan friars, robed in brown with their knotted cinctures, led the way. The friars were, by and large, much younger than I would have anticipated and clearly came from diverse backgrounds ethnically and linguistically. Yet they had all found their way to Jerusalem and were here ready to lead the masses that had appeared in the courtyard of the madrasah, normally closed to non-students, that is the site of the first station. The friars had microphones attached to portable speaker systems so that their voices would carry through the bustling streets to the back of the crowd. A  friend and I congregated with all the other people prepared to make the walk, some of them devout and I am sure some, like me, there more for observational purposes. With my backpack flipped forward for security and my sunglasses off despite the sun, I honestly was not sure what to expect



Epilogue

after so much study of this ritual. But there was little time to ruminate, as the Franciscans took off at a rapid clip. What stand out in my memory of this experience are the speed with which we all walked and a few odd occurrences. The first transpired near Station three, where Jesus is said to have fallen for the first time. A scuffle over who knows what was occurring between locals, and the police came through to break it up. All the while the Franciscans kept up their prayers and readings, paying essentially no heed to the goingson. The whole episode gave me the sense that this sort of thing happens all the time, and perhaps it does given the tensions of the city. I then noticed as we marched on, somewhere between station six, where Veronica supposedly wiped Jesus’ face, and station seven, the site of the second fall, that one of the people near me was making a video recording of the ritual. Curious, I thought, that rather than fully participating in the ritual she would be recording it. But I looked more closely and listened to the videographer who was, surprisingly, a nun narrating her recording. It was, it became clear, for her co-religious back home. Not unlike Egeria, I suppose, this woman wanted to give her fellow sisters a taste of the ritual as conducted in Jerusalem. Or perhaps she was actually under strict orders from her sisters to bring home images for those who could not make the journey. The next oddity came between Stations eight and nine when I heard a cell phone ring. I turned my head expecting to find someone looking shame-faced as they turned their cell to silent. Instead, I watched (and, I admit, took a picture) as a woman answered the call and began a conversation as she worked to keep pace with the group and not be trampled. She was too far away for me to hear what she was saying or what language she was speaking, but she clearly felt no compunction about answering her phone during this ostensibly meaningful religious act. It felt, during my prescribed walk behind this somewhat motley crew of friars, as if I were experiencing some odd conglomeration of all the things about which I had read. I was being hustled through the streets by Franciscan brothers who spoke numerous languages for the benefit of those they were guiding, not entirely unlike the experience of medieval pilgrims, though differing in its strictly narrative orientation. I was able to witness another participant recording the event for others who could not be there with her, not unlike the work of the travel writers throughout the long history of travel to Jerusalem. And  I was able to see the ways in which this experience was little more than touristic for some, so touristic that it could in fact be interrupted by a phone call.



Epilogue

There was an almost business-like feeling to the whole experience, at odds with the emotional and moving responses that are described even by modern participants in the Stations of the Cross. And yet, at the same time, there was a sense of a tidal wave pushing one along the uneven streets, up the steps, on and on despite the heat. The harried, bustling, interrupted and chaotic walk along the Via Dolorosa to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem was, on the one hand, completely anathema to me in terms of religious experience given my twentieth century, northeastern American Judeo-Protestant upbringing. But on the other hand, there was something Durkheimian in the way the crowd swelled and moved as one. Even those oddities like the recording device and the cell phone call could not stop the procession; the sense of purpose poured out of the friars and waved back through the gathered pilrgims. I cannot possibly know whether or not the experience in Jerusalem today mirrors that of earlier centuries; were believers then taking notes rather than living fully in the moment? Were they pausing to buy nuts as they marched along? Were local disputes disrupting their prayers? Were they speculating about their fellow travelers, about their motives and their backgrounds? I also will not pretend to know if a believer might experience something more or less on the narrow streets of the Holy Land than in their own church or home. But what I can say, with relative certainty, is that the modern experience of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem and of making the Way of the Cross at home are vastly different in many ways, not the least of which is in the physical aspects of the experience. I can only imagine that these physical aspects were also distinct in the early stages of the ritual’s development. I knew that engaging in this travel I would be participating in a long line of people, stretching back nearly two millennia, who had walked in the dust and heat of Jerusalem seeking something. Though I was seeking deeper understanding of this ritual for purposes that had little to do with personal religious conviction, my hope to gain something was no less than those millions before me. I had traveled 5,694 miles to make this walk. Walking alongside dozens of other people, I was aware that just as they had no idea why I made the walk, I had no idea why they did. We were a mass of people, participating together, publicly, each for our own unique reasons. Some were tourists, no doubt some sought forgiveness, certainly others sought a stronger experience of their personal Savior. And each, no doubt, would record the experience in their heart, in their mind, in words or song or images. While my body engaged in a visible, discernible, physical public act, the experience wove into my in-



Epilogue

terior life: I came to the ritual with a particular internal posture focused largely on others and the experience they might have, but I found that the experience marked my private understanding of how the holy operates in space, of what is designated as holy by others, of how movement helps to cultivate religious depth, and of how what is public and what is private in religious life comingle in every moment. I am no mystic, and in truth I do not consider myself a pilgrim. But there I was, walking that holy walk and finding power in the collective action, even as a non-believer. Religious experience is never simply private or simply public; never purely mental or entirely physical. It is, by hope and, in my opinion at least, by definition, holistic. Religious experience encompasses, calls into use and demands the whole of a person. And religious experience can take as many forms as there are individuals on this earth. This was no less true in the medieval period than it is now. The medieval Christian might have had different rules to follow, different expectations of their religious life, different obligations, but they too had available to them a variety of ways to come closer to their God and their own ideals. This variety, this spectrum, and the transfer of all those religious activities, was enabled by the devotion to creating time out of time and by the translocatability of this religion that transcends place. I write this final paragraph in the summer of 2014, in the middle of a resurgence of violence in the Middle East. In dark moments, I question how a study of medieval ritual practice can matter in the face of so much suffering. But in my moments of hope, I  remember that knowledge, deeper appreciation for what was, broader understanding of how people behave and why, these are the things that can help us to better understand each other in our own time. And hopefully, better understanding will contribute to creating a better future for us all.



APPENDIX Appendix

Transcription and Translation of Inc. S-240, copy 1, from the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the ­University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tractate on the Sacrament, with five meditations composed by Friar Hieronymous of Ferrara of the order of preachers. The first marvelous thing that is found in the sacrament of the altar is that the substance of the bread is transformed into the body of Christ to demonstrate that whoever wants to partake of the sacrament must transform themselves from earthly love entirely into love of Christ. The second is that on the one hand Christ is in heaven but he is also in the sacrament because he is not in the sacrament in the same way that he is in heaven, but rather he is there in a marvelous way. So must man, if he wants to take communion, be on earth with his body and in heaven his soul.

Tractato del Sacramento che sono cinque meditationi Composto da frate Hieronymo da Ferrara, dell ordine de predicatori. La prima cosa maravigliosa che si truova nello sacramento dello altare e che la substantia dep pane si transforma nel corpo di Christo per dimonstrare che chi vuole andare a questo sacramento debbe transformarsi dallo amore terreno tucto nello amore di Christo. La seconda e che altrimenti, e Christo in cielo et altrimenti nel sacramento perche non ve exteso chome egli e in cielo, ma evui per modo maraviglioso. Cosi debbe essere lhuomo che si vuole comunicare pero che in terra debbe essere col corpo, et in cielo con lanima.

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Appendix

The third, that the accidents of the bread, that is the quantity, the whiteness, and the taste: they are not substantiated by the substance of the bread as before the sacrament, but only by the divine virtue. So man must also be humble, believing every one of his virtues and good deeds does not proceed from himself, but from the hand of God.

La terza, che gli accidenti del pane cioe la quantita: la bianchezza: et el sapore: non sono substentate dalla substantia del pane come prima, ma solo della virtu divina Cosi debbe dunque lhuomo essere humile, che creda ogni sua virtu et buona operatione non procedere da se ma solo dalla mano di Dio.

The fourth is that breaking up of the accidents does not break the body of Christ: because he is in the sacrament in an indivisible way. So must our souls be undivided with love and unified with Christ so that they may not break from impatience in times of tribulation, given that the body suffers tribulation. The fifth contains the principal mysteries of the mass: which are, briefly, the following. When the celebrant says the confession, contemplate human nature full of sins before Christ came, because all the world was full of idolatry and ignorance of God. When the mass begins, contemplate the desire of the holy fathers at the coming of Christ: because it is said, Kyrie Eleison, in other words, God have mercy. When he says the Gloria, contemplate Christ born in the manger.

La quarta e che rompendosi gli accidenti non si rompe el corpo di Christo: perche eglie nel sacramento per modo indivisibile. Cosi debbe lanima nostra essere indivisa per amore: et unita con Christo che per impatientia non si rompa nelle tribulationi, dato chel corpo patischa tribulatione. La quinta contiene emisterii principali della messa: liquali sono questi per gustare in brevita. Quando el sacerdote dice la confessione contempla la natura humana piena di peccati inanzi che christo venissi per che tucto el mondo era pieno di ydolatria et dignorantia di Dio. Quando comincia la messa contempla el desiderio di sancti padri della advento di Christo: pero dice: Kyrieleyson cioe: Signore idio misericordia. Quando dice la gloria contempla christo nato nel presepio.

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Appendix

When he says the epistle, contemplate John the Baptist who preaches. When he says the Gospel, contemplate the preaching of Christ who came after St. John. When he says the creed, contemplate the faith of the people who followed Christ. When he offers the chalice, contemplate the ready willingness of Christ to accept the Passion which he suffered.

Quando dice la epistola, contempla Giovanni Baptista che predica. Quando dice lo evangelio contempla la predicatione di christo che fu doppo San Giovanni. Quando dice el Credo, contempla la fede de popoli equali seguitorono Christo. Quando offerisce el calice, contempla la pronta volonta di Christo alla passione alla quale sofferse.

When he says the Prefatio, contemplate Christ when he went into Jerusalem on the ass. When he says the secrets: contemplate the mysteries of his passion and how he was raised on the cross. When he lowers the host, contemplate his sepulcher until the celebrant says the pater noster. When he says the pax domini, contemplate his resurrection. When he takes communion, commune with him spiritually, praying to God that he give you the grace of the sacrament as if you were taking communion. When he turns with the book to the right, contemplate the end of the world, when even the Jews, from whom he departed and went to the Gentiles, will convert. When comes the benediction, contemplate the glory of the beatified, to which Christ said: Come you who are blessed by my father.

Quando dice el Prefatio conempla Christo quando ando in Iherusalem in su la asina. Quando dice le secrete: contempla limysterii della sua passione: et come efu elevato in croce. Quando lo dipone contempla la sua sepultura infino al pater noster. Quando dice pax domini contempla la sua resurrectione Quando si comunicha, comunichati con lui spiritualmente, pregando idio che ti dia la gratia del sacramento come se tu ti comunichassi. Quando torna collibro alla dextra contempla la fine del mondo: quando si convertiranno e giudei da quali elgi era partito et ito a gentili. Quando e de la benedictione, contempla la gloria de beata: a quali dice Christo: Venite benedicti patris mei.

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Appendix

And note that you must go to mass with these intentions. First to commemorate the passion of Christ. Second to offer with the celebrant a sacrifice for yourself, and for your family, and for all who are faithful, and to take communion and to transform yourself in the divine love.

Et nota che tu debbi andare alla messa con questa intentione. Prima di fare memoria della passione di christo. Secondo per offerire col sacerdote quel sacrificio per te, et perli tua et per tucti e fedeli: et to per comunicharti et transformarti nello amore divino.

GLORY TO GOD

LAUS DEO



BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibliography

Ancient and Medieval Authors Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis (L. Bieler, CCSL 175, 183–234), translated in D. Meehan (1958) and J. Wilkinson (2002), 167–206. Aelred of Rivaulx, De Spiritali Amicitia (A. Hoste, CCCM 1, 287–350), translated by L. C. Braceland in M. Dutton (2010), 53–126. —Oratio Pastoralis (A. Hoste, CCCM 1, 757–63), translated by R. P. Lawson in D.  Knowles (1971), 103–18 and by M.  DelCogliano in M. Dutton (2008), 1–57. — De Jesu Puero Duodenni (A. Hoste, CCCM 1, 249–78), translated by T. Berkeley in D. Knowles (1971), 1–40. — Regula sive Institutio Inclusarum (PL 32 as de vita eremitica ad sororem liber, col.  1451–1474), translated by M.  P. Macpherson in D. Knowles (1971), 41–102. — Opera Historica (PL 195, col.  701–96), translated in J.  P. Freeland (2005). Angela of Foligno, Liber della Beata Angela da Foligno (L. Thier and A. Calufetti, 1985, Rome), translated in P. LaChance (1993). — Il ‘Liber’ della beata Angela da Foligno (E. Menestò, 2009, Spoleto). Angelo of Clareno, Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum ordinis minorum (G. Boccali, 1999, Assisi), translated in D. Burr and E. R. Daniel (2005). Anselm, Epistolarum (F. S. Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia, 3, 1946, Edinburgh). — Orationes sive Meditationes (F. S. Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia, 3, 1946, Edinburgh, 3–91), translated in S. B. Ward (1973).

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

INDEX Index

Bernardino di Nali 26, 31, 32 Bethlehem 19, 23, 24, 30, 31, Bonaventure 12, 14, 15, 18, 38, 40, 124, 125, 128, 140, 141, 142, Boniface 72 Bordeaux Pilgrim 76, 105 Burchardus de Monte Sion 32n19, 92, 93

Acre 19 Adam Kraft of Nuremburg 41 Adomnán 80, 81, 82, 83 Aelred of Rievaulx 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 197, 198, 200, Alvaro 39, 40, 112 Anastasis Rotunda 25, 115, 117, 121 Angela of Foligno 14, 15, 16, 37, 40, 96n80, 132 Angelo of Clareno 18, 19 Anselm 10n8, 57, 68, 69n63, 136, 137, 140, 197, 198n1, 200, Arculf 80, 81, 82, 83 Armenian Lectionary 171, 174-176 Asceticism 56, 123n36, 145, 149, 160 Athanasius 65 Augustine 60n25, 64, 65, 67, 106, 140n17, 157

Calvary 7, 25, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 40, 45, 50, 145, 157 Capodilista, G. 34, 35, 96, 97, 98, 99, 178 Carmelite 42, 154 Carruthers, Mary 130-132, 188 Carthusian 150 Cassian, J. 66, 70 Cenacle 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 Chiliasm 59, 60 Christiaan van Adrichem 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 154, 157, 158, 159, 165, 179, 182n44, 200-202 Christianity 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61n29, 80, 103, 123, 128, 170, 177, 181n40, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 205 Cistercian 11, 138 Clement VI 23, 72,

Bede 83n33, 89n58 Belard of Ascoli 91n64 Benedict XIII 47 Benedictine 136 Bernard of Clairvaux 11, 38, 40, 69, 136, 137 Bernard the Monk 84, 85, 92 Bernardino Amico 44, 45, 46, 101, 103, 104, 106



Index

Constantine 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 69, 76, 78, 115, 171, 172, 187, 189, 199 Contemplation 11, 14, 40, 64, 70, 92, 103, 104, 111, 125, 127, 135, 1236, 137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 152, 180, 181, 182, 183, 193, 204, 205 Council of Chalon 67, 68 Crucifixion 11, 13, 14, 27, 29, 33n19, 34n25, 43, 44, 89, 137, 148, 173 Crusades 3, 7, 11, 19, 22n49, 25, 26, 49, 57, 68, 69, 70, 84, 85, 88, 93, 104-106, 171, 176, 177

Felix Fabri 35, 36, 99, 100, 101, 103, Fra Leone 7n1, 8n3, 128, 201 Francis of Assisi (Saint) 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 37, 38, 40, 71, 113, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 160, 168, 200, 205, Franciscans 1, 3, 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20-23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31n25, 33, 37, 38, 45, 46, 49, 70, 71, 73, 103, 115, 123, 126, 128, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 152, 159, 160, 178n35, 189n4, 193, 205, 207, 208

Daniel the Abbott 89, 90, 91, 92 Devotion 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 28, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 57, 67, 71, 75, 78, 83, 84, 99, 104, 107, 111, 113, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 147, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 179, 185, 193, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 210, Dominicans 14n14, 19, 20, 23, 29, 35, 38, 39, 70, 71, 73, 93, 112, 145, 150, 178, 179, 199

Galilee 30 Geoffrey of Vendome 68, 69n63 Georgian Lectionary 171, 175 Good Friday 27n2, 53 Gregory of Nyssa 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67 Heavenly Jerusalem 66, 69-70, 87, 155, 199-200 Heidegger, M. 192 Helena 58, 60 Heraclius 67 Holy Land 1, 2, 8, 10n8, 16, 18, 19, 21n41, 23, 28, 31, 50, 53, 54, 59, 60, 67n57, 71, 75, 79, 83, 86n48, 88, 89n58, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 132, 137, 155, 157, 160, 176, 193, 204, 209, Holy Sepulcher 7, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25-26, 28n5, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37n39, 44, 81n29, 85n44, 93, 95n76, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 155, 160, 172, 176, 177, 182, 189, 191, 209 Horn, Elzear 46, 47, 154

Egeria 28, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 92, 94, 105, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,185, 208 Eliade, M. 181n4, 193n19 Ernoul 17n25, 29 Eucharist 73, 121, 127, 149, 159, 167, 169, 171n12, 176n31, 179, 180, 181, 184, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203 Eusebius 77 Eustochia 39, 40, 72, 112 Eutychius of Alexandria 85, 86



Index

John Tauler 38, 148, 149, 160 John of Caulibus 142 John of Würzburg 91, 92, 98n86, 141 John Phocas 91, 92 John Rufus 79n18 Judaism 54, 58, 189n4 Judea, 19n35, 58, 59, 60, 64, 78, 100, 181n40 Justin Martyr 59n22 Justinian 66

Hugeburc 83, 84 Hugh of St. Victor 131 Imagination 2, 38, 90, 131, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159, 160, 166, 180, 181, 182, 184, 188, 204, 205, 206, imitatio Christi (also Imitation of Christ) 4, 10n8, 11, 13, 23, 26, 42, 70, 73, 113, 123, 124, 126n53, 128, 136, 137, 138, 140, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 160, 181, 184, 185, 203 Imitation (including imitare) 2, 3, 4, 13, 49, 53, 107, 111-119, 121-129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167, 184, 189, 191, 194, 198, 201-204 Incarnation of Christ 59, 63, 104, 127, 128, 150, 151, 161, 167, 168n4, 175, 181, 182, 189, 198 Indulgences 25, 32, 35, 47, 72, 73, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 113, 165, 198, 199, 200 Innocent XI 45 Irenaeus 59n22 Islam, 10n8, 29, 89 Israel 1, 25, 60n25, 66

Kirkland-Ives, M. 41-42, 168-169 Krautheimer, R. 113-120, 126 Kruzgang (see Way of the Cross) Leadings of Christ 41, 195n27 LeClerq, J. 130-131 Leonard of Port Maurice 46 Limor, O. 65n51, 77-78, 86-89, 100, 105, Liturgy 4, 27n2, 35, 60, 70n73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85n44, 88, 105, 117, 118, 119, 120, 127, 144, 145, 148, 148, 153, 161, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206 Love (of Jesus, of Christ, of God) 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 125n48, 126, 127, 128, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 149, 150, 152, 157, 179, 180, 184, 197, 201 Ludolph of Saxony 150, 151, 152, 169, 200

Jacques de Vitry 17n25, 70, 72 Jerome 63, 64, 67, 68, 76, 78, 79, 100, 105 Jerusalem 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 16, 17, 20-26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53-72, 74-79, 81, 83-92, 94-101, 102n99, 104-107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 122, 129, 137, 144, 153-160, 165-173, 175-177, 179, 181, 187, 189-191, 194, 195n 24, 196-200, 203-209

MacVicar, T. 201 Margaret of Sicily 21 Margery Kempe 96n80 Martin Ketzel 41



Index

Mary, mother of Jesus 15, 24, 26n66, 27, 32n19, 33, 34, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 140, 148, 156, 168n3 Meditation (including meditation manuals) 2, 3, 4, 7, 8n3, 11, 12, 13, 16, 28, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47n77, 111, 115n7, 121, 122, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 169, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202-206 Meditationes Vitae Christi 37, 38, 40, 142, 143, 144, 145, 149, 152, 195, Memory (also ars memoria, commemoration) 4, 12, 33, 60, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98n86, 99, 102, 105, 113, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 149, 151, 160, 166, 167, 169, 171, 173, 176n31, 181n40, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196n27, 201n12, 202, 205, 206 Mental 39, 113, 132, 149, 158, 160, 165, 179, 182-183, 185, 188, 210 Monasticism 11, 16, 40, 54, 55n5, 56, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 100, 101, 102, 106, 122, 123, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 144, 147, 148, 150, 153, 156, 160, 161, 166, 192, 204 Mount of Olives 30, 37n39, 82n31, 87, 174, Mount Sion 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32n18, 36, 76, 81n29 Movement 39, 122, 125, 145, 147, 168, 173, 179, 184, 210

Niccolò of Poggibonsi 22, 24n56, 25, 31, 34n25, 37, 94, 95, 177, Origen 60n25, 77, 78 Palestine 24, 32, 39n45, 42, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 71, 76, 77, 78n15, 87, 88, 93, 94 Pascha, Jan 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165, 179, 200, 202 Passion devotion 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 26, 37, 28, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 96n80, 111, 121, 135, 136, 139, 140, 144, 146, 152, 165, 168, 169, 194, 196, 205 Passion of Christ 8, 11, 14n15, 15, 30, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 93, 111, 112, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135137, 139-142, 144-146, 149-153, 158n75, 160, 179, 184, 201 Paulinus of Nola 64 Peregrinatio 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 72, 74, 84, 88, 106, 135, 143, 145, 204 “Physical Pilgrimage” 143, 153, 156, 159, 161, 165, 166, 168, 169 Physicality 3, 16, 89, 146, 149, 168, 174, 181-182, 184, 188, 192, 200, 204, 206, 209-10 Piacenza Pilgrim 79, 80, 81, 92 Piers Plowman 73 Pietro Casola 31, 32 Pilgrimage (see also peregrinatio) 2, 3, 7, 16, 18, 19, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 41, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53107, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 121, 122, 129, 131-133, 135, 137, 141-145, 147-149, 151, 153-156, 158-161, 165, 166, 167, 172, 177, 184, 192, 196, 198-201, 203204, 207, 209

Nagel, A. ad C. Wood 120, 161 Nazareth 19, 30

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Index

Place 61n30, 81, 84, 89, 90, 91, 106, 154, 160, 161, 165, 185, 187-196, 198, 202, 203, 205-206 Placelessness 58, 80, 106, 191, 197, 206 Poor Clares 144 Pope John XXII 20 Popular Devotion 40, 50, 200 Pray/prayer 2, 7, 15, 28, 36, 38, 42, 49, 55, 61-62, 68-69, 77-78, 80, 84-88, 94, 99, 105, 111, 136-140, 148-149, 152, 155, 160, 166, 168, 173-175, 181, 191, 196-197, 208, 209 Private ritual 4, 166, 170, 179, 185, 187, 199, 203, 205-206, Public ritual 170-172, 176, 179, 185, 187, 203, 205, 206

Savonarola 4, 169, 178-184, 188, 196, 197, 200, 202, 205 Seven Falls 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 168, 205 Sidon 19 Smith, Jonathan Z. 188-195 Sorrowful Way 36, 39, 44, 45, 53, 135, 147, 148 Space 4, 36, 58-59, 61n30, 63, 64, 65, 68, 81, 87, 89, 101, 106, 113, 115, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 132, 142, 151, 160, 161, 169, 171, 172, 184, 185, 187-196, 199, 204, 205, 210 Spiritual Pilgrimage 42, 43, 53, 54, 112, 113, 135, 142, 154, 157, 159, 165, 166 Stational Liturgy 4, 28, 169-171, 174-177, 179, 187-188, 191, 192, 194, 196, 202, 205, 206 Stations of the Cross 1-4, 9, 10, 16, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 57, 72, 75, 96, 98, 106, 111, 112, 119, 122, 128, 129, 130, 132, 135, 137, 144, 145, 147, 156, 157, 161, 165-167, 169-171, 173-174, 177, 179, 182n44, 185, 187, 192-193, 195, 197-198, 200-205, 207-209 Stigmata 13, 14, 38, 125, 126, 127, 128, 139, 141, Storme 8, 9, 10, 16, 26, 27, 28, 32, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 49, 53, 54, 96, 97, 106, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 135, 145, 152, 157, 165, 167, 169 Suriano, Francesco 177 Suso, H. 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 72, 112, 132, 145-149, 168, 179, 188

Reenactment 50, 184, Reformation 39, 40, 54, 73, 101, 103 Religious travel 71, 73-75, 80, 82, 85-88, 96, 106-107, 150, 165166, 170, 177, 194, 203-204 Replication (including replica) 112, 113, 114, 121, 128, 160, 167, 189191, 193, 198-199, 202, 204, 206 Reproduction 44, 111-118, 130, 139, 167 Resurrection 10, 14, 117, 135-137, 182, 197, 205 Riccoldus de Monte Crucis 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 93, 106, 153 Robert and Sancia of Naples 22-24 Rodulf Glaber 86, 87, 88 Roger Garin 20, 21, 22 Rome 44, 68, 72, 76, 83, 84, 96 (note 80), 98, 101, 112, 170, 187, 191, 199, 205,

Temple Mount 29, 35 Tertullian 59, 60n25 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 65 Theodoric 91n64 Thomas À Kempis 152-154

Saewulf 88, 89 Salvatore Vitale 45 Santo Brasca 35, 98, 99, 100

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Index

Vatican II 201n11 Via Croce 34, 35, 96 Via Crucis 31, 32, 35, 46, 47, 97, 135, 146, 148, 194, 195 Via Dolorosa 1, 2, 7, 28, 30, 32, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 47, 135, 205, 209 Virtuality (virtual pilgrimage) 121, 199

Thomas Aquinas 131 Thomas of Celano 12, 17, 18, 124, 125, 128 Thurston 9, 10, 16, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47, 49, 50, 53, 74, 96, 97, 106, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 135, 145, 152, 157, 165, 167 Time 3, 4, 10, 56, 61n30, 89, 106, 117, 119-121, 144, 151, 160-161, 167-172, 177, 178-185, 187-188, 189-196, 197-206 Torkington, Sir Richard 36, 37 Tours 68 Translocate 187, 189, 195, 200, 205, 210 Transportability 115n7, 190-193 True Cross 58 Tuan, Y-F 192 Turner, V and E.L.B. Turner 2 Typikon of the Anastasis 171, 176, 177 Tyre 19

Walter Daniel 138n10 Way of the Cross 1-4, 9, 27, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 107, 112, 135, 147, 148, 154, 155, 158, 159, 169, 170, 173, 177, 178, 188, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203, 209 Wharton, J. 113-114 Wilibald 83-84 William Wey 32-35, 97-98, 178 Wounds of Christ 13, 137, 138, 151, 168, 201n12 Yates, F. 131-132, 142 Zuallardo, Jean 37n39, 101-102

Urban II 68

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