Christian Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage

Journeying to the Sacred

Avril Maddrell, Veronica della Dora, Alessandro Scafi, Heather Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135013127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

This volume provides a theoretically and empirically-grounded study of the significance of landscape in the experience of Christian pilgrimage across different denominations and its intersection with cultural heritage and tourism. The book focuses on pilgrimages to Meteora (Greece), Subiaco (Italy) and the Isle of Man. These are each sites of scenic beauty that boast a rich heritage associated respectively to Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Ecumenical/ Protestant denominations. The study discusses different Christian theologies, practices and perspectives on the nature and the purpose of pilgrimage in these traditions. It draws on participant experiential accounts, archival research, and interviews with clergy, laity and local stakeholders. Special attention is paid to the themes of sacred space and practice, aesthetics, mobilities, embodiment and performance, emotional geographies, theology, cultural heritage, consumption and commodification, and the pilgrim-tourist continuum.

1 Introduction

Pilgrimage, Landscape, Heritage

A convoluted pathway leading to a tiny chapel in the Tuscan countryside; a Buddhist temple embedded in the rock facing a deep ravine in the Himalayas; the illuminated minarets of Mecca, emerging in the nightscape of the city; the full moon and torii gates guiding lines of Shinto pilgrims toward the top of Mount Fuji. Most of the world’s leading religions boast inspiring shrines embedded in striking sceneries. Consequently many sites of pilgrimage have been described as ‘places of geographical splendour’ (Morinis 1992, 5). The shrine, pilgrim route and their wider surroundings are often deeply intertwined as part of the pilgrim experience. In some cases particular landscape settings have acquired iconic status for a religion or a religious denomination; in others, the landscape is both iconic and a central spiritual resource in its own right, e.g. for those practising alternative spirituality at Glastonbury (UK) or Sedona (USA). Not surprisingly, such landscapes, which combine visual spectacle, cultural interest and embodied experience, have become significant attractions for a diverse range of visitors including cultural tourists, hikers and casual day-trippers.

While both pilgrimage and landscape studies have burgeoned in the last twenty years, their intersection has attracted only limited attention by commentators. While there has been a significant reassertion of place-based spiritual experience in recent studies such as Lidov’s (2006 and 2008) ‘hierotopy’ and Belhassen and colleagues’ (2008) assertion of ‘theoplacity’, there has been relatively little interrogation of the relationship between places deemed to be sacred, their landscape aesthetics and accounts of spiritual experience. Commentators such as Frey (1998) and Reader (2005) have necessarily acknowledged the significance of the wider landscape context of route-based pilgrimages to Santiago and around Shikoku respectively, but reference to landscape is more typically limited to brief reference to pilgrims’ appreciation of the natural environment at pilgrimage sites (see Shackley 2001; Coleman and Elsner 2003; Digance 2003; Andriotis 2009). Likewise, discussions of heritage tourism and site management have tended to focus solely on the shrines, largely ignoring what surrounds them (Shackley 2001). We argue that the rich concept of landscape, rural or urban, has much to offer pilgrimage studies, notably in three key ways: i) as the visual aesthetic of any pilgrimage setting which informs and impinges on experience; ii) as the corporeally experienced ante-chamber to the pilgrimage destination; and iii) as an important facet of heritage which draws devotional and non- devotional visitors to pilgrimage sites. This book seeks to address the conceptual and empirical juncture of pilgrimage-landscape-heritage in the context of European Christian pilgrimage by bringing together a consideration of the relational interaction between pilgrimage, landscape and heritage, drawing on three diverse denominational and geographical settings.

We start this introductory chapter with a discussion of pilgrimage as an undertaking and as a field of scholarship, before moving on to consideration of landscape and heritage. Given that this volume is grounded in a single research project, in the final section we briefly outline the methodologies which produced the material which underpins the three case studies explored in detail in subsequent chapters.

Pilgrimage and Faith Journeys

Historically, ‘pilgrimage’ has entailed a physical journey undertaken by the faithful—‘in search of what is sacred or holy’ (Vukonic 1996, 80). Across the globe millions of individuals embark on pilgrimage every year (Timothy and Olsen 2006; Jansen 2012) and pilgrimage events such as the Hindu Mela are among the largest human gatherings on the planet (Stausberg 2011). Within Christianity the need for pilgrimage has been much debated across time and faith communities. Pilgrimage was dismissed as theologically unnecessary by Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Cappadocian father, as well as by pre- and post-Reformation critics who branded its practices variously as superstitious, exploitative, indulgent and wasteful (Walsham 2011), prompting the removal, destruction or reattribution of shrines, relics, images and wells associated with pilgrimage during the Reformation. Even within denominations which continued to embrace pilgrimage as a spiritual practice, Church authorities have often treated with suspicion those grassroots pilgrimages arising from unauthenticated miraculous apparitions or healings (Joyce 1998). However, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries there has been a renaissance of interest in Christian pilgrimage in Western Europe, often centred on practices which blend the medieval and postmodern (Dyas 2004). This has included new pilgrimages, such as youth rallies, developed strategically by the Catholic Church as a response to the challenges of modernity (Stausberg 2011), but also a re-engagement with pilgrimage by a growing number of Reformed congregations and those seeking alternative spiritualities (see Chapters 2 and 7).

The nature of pilgrimage and definition of ‘pilgrim’ has been much debated within the academy (e.g. Morinis 1992; Reader and Walter 1993; Williams 2013). Pilgrimage journeys typically have as their destination shrines and other physical places attributed with immanent sacred qualities such as revelation, healing and the practice of godly lives. Simultaneous with this travel to a material place, Christian pilgrimage orientates believers towards a spiritual-metaphorical inner journey, one which has the heavenly New Jerusalem as the ultimate destination (Dyas 2004). Through the transformative process of this material-metaphysical journey, the pilgrim experiences a continuous state of instability—between earth and heaven, between movement and place, between a process and its outcome. The very word ‘pilgrim’ encapsulates this status. In Latin, the peregrinus was the foreigner who abandoned the comfort of his or her home to literally ‘wander’, through the fields (per agra). Pilgrims are not simply foreigners because they often move through unfamiliar territories, but because, through their simultaneous inner-outer journey, they separate themselves from the ordinary—even if for a short time and at little physical distance.

Pilgrimages can be metaphorical. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, compared the spiritual life of the Christian to a journey through different types of sceneries: meadows and cultivated farms, wilderness, mountains and ravines (On Virginity, iv). Here time is mapped on space. Terrestrial landscapes are portrayed as transient, as are the vicissitudes of life and all terrestrial things—for Gregory, and like-minded believers, the true focus of the Christian is in heaven. According to Gregory, Christians are migrants in this life because their ultimate quest is for an eternal home. Thus, in Gregory’s writing and elsewhere, material terrestrial landscapes and landforms act as powerful devices for mapping and visualizing inner states of the human soul. The same trope can be traced through subsequent Christian narratives and religious biographies. For example, Byzantine hagiographers often mapped the spiritual progress of saints as life-long journeys through actual places and recurring landscape typologies, or topoi: the ascetic’s movement from the city to the desert, the progressive ascent of a mountain culminating in a retreat to a cave or the top of a pillar, a journey through the wilderness resulting in the creation of a monastery and the cultivation of wasteland (reflecting the taming of passions and cultivation of the soul) (Greenfield 2000). In literary narratives, Dante traces an otherworldly journey through the selva oscura, the steep slopes of Mount Purgatory and paradise’s landscapes of light; and John Bunyan’s pilgrim travels through the City of Destruction, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, and the Delectable Mountains. Similar mappings of spiritual journeys through a landscape imaginary can also be found in other faith practices. Islam and Judaism share with Christianity a tradition of desert spirituality in which the challenging landscape is experienced as a theatre for human encounters with the divine (see Jasper 2004).

However, as with pilgrimage more generally, the exchange between inner and exterior topographies needs to be seen as a two-way process. For example, in the Celtic church, remote islands were often treated as substitutes for the wilderness of the desert, the ‘desert’, whatever its form, embodying spiritual and emotional, as well as physical challenges. In other Western Christian traditions the search for the spiritual led to micro-journeys of retreat such as those by saints Ninian and Benedict (see Chapter 5), who both retreated to local caves, and that of the anchorite Julian of Norwich, who withdrew to an enclosed cell. Movement through the landscape is not simply metaphorical, it can be insistently physical—and geographical.

Like Gregory’s metaphorical traveller, the Christian pilgrim moves through the material world and yet is seeking the transcendent. In the following chapters, we endeavour to draw out pilgrim experience of these intertwined physical and inner journeys, with particular reference to the spiritually-inflected experience of the landscape and cultural-faith-heritage which pilgrims encounter individually and communally.

Theorising Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage has been theorised in a variety of ways since the mid-twentieth century. The idea of sacred space, defined by believers in opposition to mundane profane space, owes much to Eliade’s (1959) conceptualisation of a (nearly) universal theory of religion. This approach allowed the identification of specific, often bounded ahistorical places of hierophany, where the sacred was believed to be revealed, accessible or even immanent. Naturally this framing was attractive to believers who wished for or perceived these qualities to be found in particular places (e.g. places of healing), as well as to those who wished to promote or market those same places as possessing sacred qualities (see Reader 2013). This predisposition can be seen in locales with strong identity (Dubisch 1995), pilgrimage sites and practices based on Old Testament notions of hierophany and theophany (McConville 2004), and in place-specific New Age or alternative spiritual beliefs such as ley lines or spiritual energy centres attributed to Sedona and Glastonbury (Ivakhiv 2001).

Turner and Turner’s (1978) study of Christian pilgrimage focused spatially on the fixed points of shrines and the images associated with them, as well as modelling an ideal community that might be experienced by pilgrims, and the liminoid qualities associated with this communitas and ritual at those sites. Subsequent studies have sought to accommodate a more diverse range of complex pilgrimage sites, practices and pilgrims, whilst recognizing the commonalities found between sites and across traditions (Eade 2000; Coleman and Eade 2004). For example, Eade and Sallnow (1991) acknowledged the interface of people, place and religious text in pilgrimage centres, and described shrines as simultaneously possessing the devotional magnetism to attract pilgrims, whilst being a ‘contested religious void’ on which pilgrims projected and reflected their assumptions and aspirations (Coleman and Eade 2004). Building on earlier reference to kinetic ritual (Turner and Turner 1978, xiii) and ‘kinaesthetic mapping of space’ (Sallnow 1987), a growing body of interdisciplinary work on pilgrimage is attentive to people, place and texts, but also the role of movement in pilgrimage. This can be seen notably in studies of pilgrimage centred on walking, such as Frey’s (1998) phenomenological study of the Camino and Reader (2005) on Shikoku, but also in wider notions of embodied, imagined, metaphorical or semantic mobilities associated with pilgrimage (Coleman 1998; Coleman and Eade 2004). A mobilities framework prompts consideration of the intersection of movement and meaning, including travel and embodied performance (Cresswell 2006), and in turn inscribes places as sacred through those performances: ‘mobile performances can help to construct—however temporarily—apparently sacredly charged places’ (Coleman and Eade 2004, 3; also see Coleman and Crang 2002; Maddrell 2011 and Chapter 8).

Thus, the idea of the sacred qualities associated with places of pilgrimage do not have to be limited to belief in geographically fixed places of immanence, enlightenment or revelation, but can be seen as produced by devotional practices and performances. Within Christian theology this has been described as ‘Eucharistic Place’ (Scott 2004) or as ‘sacramentally charged places’ produced through ‘sacramental encounters’, a conceptual framing which allows the steering of ‘a middle course between ignoring the importance of the material and its idolatrous exaltation’ (Inge 2003, 91). So too here, we want to acknowledge the perceived sacred qualities and subjective reality (Basu 2004) attributed to particular pilgrimage sites, practices and experiences, while acknowledging the material agencies of these sites and their surrounding environment. At the same time, we seek to critically explore the significance of the role of theologies, embodied sensory experience, and social and economic relations, in what has been described as ‘the often partial, performative, contested’ (Coleman and Eade 2004) and even ‘messy’ character of pilgrimage in particular place-temporalities. Moving beyond shrines alone, we will consider the perceived ‘chthonic powers of the terrain’ (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 6), ‘liturgically charged pathways’ (Coleman 2004, echoing Inge 2003) and the social processes of sacralisation through practice and engagement (MacCannell 1973; Coleman and Eade 2004), as well as other forms of embodied experience of the wider landscape (see Coleman 2005; Dubisch 2004, 2008; Frey 1998). In this way the embodied, kinetic, sensual, performative, social, emotional and spiritual experience of pilgrimage will be situated within the wider setting, experience and practice of landscape and its perceived aesthetic, numinous and therapeutic qualities.

Landscape

To date, pilgrimage studies have been attentive to ‘place’ as a material site of meaning-making, representation and experience (e.g. Turner and Turner 1978; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Coleman and Elsner 1995). Whilst place, particularly notions of sacred place, is indeed significant, attending to ‘landscape’ affords a consideration of wider contexts, relations, experiences and issues within pilgrimage studies. Landscape is a rich if slippery concept. In the West, contemporary understandings of landscape have been deeply influenced by art and the eighteenth-century Romantic movement which valorised the sublime qualities of ‘wilderness’, as well as by the development of garden design, which, historically, has reflected the idealised aesthetics of ordered nature or bucolic imaginaries, as well as shaping the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990). Thus in popular consciousness, mention of the word ‘landscape’ typically prompts mental images of rural idylls or dramatic scenery found hanging in a gallery or over a fireplace, displayed on a postcard or used as a backdrop on a computer screen saver. However, for geographers and other scholars the term is both more complex and more intellectually rewarding than these static representations of landscape imply and this complexity has been reflected in a rich literature on the subject over the last twenty-five years or so.

The Dictionary of Human Geography defines landscape as ‘the appearance of an area, the assemblage of objects used to produce that appearance and the area itself’ (Johnston et al. 2000, 429). The term itself is something of an assemblage; it denotes both the traditional framed view of specific sites and the scenic character of entire regions (Cosgrove 2006), simultaneously referring to the land itself and to the way in which we perceive and represent it. It is both a thing and a way of seeing (Cosgrove 1985, 2003). Landscape is an insistently visual concept, shaped ‘in the very act of our perceiving it, by our mindscape’ (Zwi Werblowski 1998, 10), but it is also an historical text and an arena for embodied experience and practice. For most of the twentieth century, cultural geographers understood landscape mainly as an ensemble of material forms expressive of a certain culture in a given geographical area (Sauer 1925). The late 1980s, however, saw a shift towards an interpretative, iconographic approach that emphasised an understanding of landscape as a text and cultural representation (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Duncan 1990), as well as the power relationships embedded in both the process of producing that landscape, and in acts of gazing at and interpreting it (Rose 1993; Mitchell 1996; Mitchell 2002). Other geographers have insisted on the sense of rootedness and community embedded in the etymology of landscape ( land-ship ), as opposed to its scenic connotations (Olwig 1996), whereas anthropologists and archaeologists have further stressed landscape’s materiality and approached it in terms of dwelling and temporal overlayering (Ingold 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Tilley 2004), an historical approach to landscape which can be seen in subsequent chapters.

More recent research, inflected by non- or more-than-representational theory, has stressed the role of practice and performance in the shaping and experience of landscape and the (post)phenomenological encounters between a mobile viewer and landscape (Wylie 2007; Cresswell and Merriman 2011). Within this body of work attention has been given to the ways in which particular mobile practices can shape the dynamic place-temporalities that constitute particular landscapes (Wunderlich 2010). The assemblage of the self through embodied encounters with the landscape have come to the fore (see, for example, Wylie 2002 on walking and Lorimer 2011 on running) as has work on aesthetic encounters and emotional geographies (Foster 1998; Davidson et al. 2005; Maddrell 2011; Maddrell and della Dora 2013a). Much of recent scholarship has also sought to go beyond social constructivism and to re-appreciate the visual and material agencies of landscape in shaping subjectivities and geographical imaginations (see, for example, Foster 1998; Wylie 2002; Cosgrove and della Dora 2009; Tuan 2013). Thus seen, landscape and its landforms are therefore not mere blank canvasses passively imprinted with meanings, but complex textures ‘speaking back’ to the beholder staring at or traversing it. It is through this two-way dialogue, between the land and the subject, between matter and meaning, that geographical imaginations are articulated.

Drawing on these varied epistemological and ontological approaches, we recognise landscape as understood but also functioning in three key ways: firstly, in the scenic aesthetic sense, that is as a socially and culturally constructed ‘way of seeing’ (see Chapters 3 and 7); secondly, as an historical palimpsest overwritten with the record of past natural events, human practices and ownership (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6); and thirdly, as an arena for sensual embodied practice, performance and experience (see Chapter 8). Thus both any landscape itself and anyone’s experience of that landscape is dynamic and open to interpretation. It is precisely because of its multivalent nature that landscape, we believe, is a helpful analytical tool for studying pilgrimage. A ‘landscape approach’ holds in tension and blurs the boundaries between the static and the dynamic, between imagination and lived experience, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the self and the transcendent. It combines nature and culture, process and form, land and life. It accommodates exploration of the ‘bigger picture’ of spiritual cultures and how these relate to the tangible material world, which is affirmed in the Chr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Pilgrimage, Landscape, Heritage
• 2 Theological Perspectives on Christian Pilgrimage
• PART I Pilgrimage to the Orthodox East: Meteora
• PART II Pilgrimage to the Latin West: Subiaco
• PART III Renewing Pilgrimage Practices in the Celtic West: The Isle of Man
• List of Authors
• References
• Index