The Dynamics of Pilgrimage

Christianity, Holy Places, and Sensory Experience

Dee Dyas

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198881
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Christianity

This book offers a systematic, chronological analysis of the role played by the human senses in experiencing pilgrimage and sacred places, past and present. It thus addresses two major gaps in the existing literature, by providing a broad historical narrative against which patterns of continuity and change can be more meaningfully discussed, and focusing on the central, but curiously neglected, area of the core dynamics of pilgrim experience.

Bringing together the still-developing fields of Pilgrimage Studies and Sensory Studies in a historically framed conversation, this interdisciplinary study traces the dynamics of pilgrimage and engagement with holy places from the beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to the resurgence of interest evident in twenty-first century England. Perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, from history to neuroscience, are used to examine themes including sacred sites in the Bible and Early Church; pilgrimage and holy places in early and later medieval England; the impact of the English Reformation; revival of pilgrimage and sacred places during the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries; and the emergence of modern place-centred, popular 'spirituality'.

Addressing the resurgence of pilgrimage and its persistent link to the attachment of meaning to place, this book will be a key reference for scholars of Pilgrimage Studies, History of Religion, Religious Studies, Sensory Studies, Medieval Studies, and Early Modern Studies.

Part I The background

1 The senses, the world, and the pilgrim

Multi-disciplinary perspectives

When we were all standing in the courtyard [of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem], one of the brethren of the convent of Mount Sion . .. addressed us, saying that this was that holiest of churches, worshipped by the whole world, wherein is laid up the treasure most precious to all Christians, the sepulchre of our Lord. When we heard this, we flung ourselves down . .. before the door of the church, and prayed, and kissed the very earth many times. Of a surety it seemed to the pilgrims as they lay thus on the ground, that virtue breathed forth from the earth itself, whereby their feelings were forcibly driven to prayer.

Pilgrim to Jerusalem c.1480¹

1 (Fabri 1896), I.4.

Awe stops us dead in our tracks, and sometimes, when intense enough, acts like a reset button on the self. People sometimes emerge from awe experiences with new selves, values, and allegiances. For this reason, awe is among the emotions most often implicated in spiritual transformations and religious conversions.²

2 (Sander and Scherer 2009), 5.

Place, both as a concept and as phenomenon of experience . .. is the intimate and specific basis for how each of us connects with the world, and how the world connects with us. . .. To be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places.³

3 (Relph 1976), Preface.

Introduction: exploring the dynamics of pilgrimage

Not only are pilgrims increasingly visible on trails and at sacred sites around the world today, but pilgrimage activity, past and present, is – as we have seen – being extensively scrutinised by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Routes are mapped, shrines described, saints and cults analysed, pilgrim communities compared, the rise and fall of sacred sites recorded. All this is of great value. Yet the core dynamics of pilgrimage, the factors which make engagement with sacred sites so powerful, remain curiously elusive. What makes ‘place’ so alluring, and why have human beings across diverse cultures and periods so often desired to identify places as special and map meaning onto them? How is sacredness identified and a sense of sacredness subsequently communicated to those who visit, so that they too may experience it? Clearly, this is, at least to some extent, culturally determined, but is it possible to identify primary forces and cues which repeatedly elicit response, even within a faith such as Christianity, where the theological, political, and cultural climate has often been hostile?

In this chapter, I will seek to identify what I consider to be the central elements of pilgrim experience at shrines and other places considered especially holy. I will also explore insights from a range of disciplines (including neuroscience, geography, art history, religious studies, the affective sciences, and sensory studies) which I have found to be especially stimulating and potentially illuminating, in working on the interface between history, literature, theology, and ‘lived religion.’ I will be grouping historical evidence according to the particular elements of pilgrim experience which I wish to highlight and connect, rather than by chronology as will be the case in the chapters which follow.

In The Embodied Eye, art historian and scholar of religion David Morgan offers a helpful discussion of what constitutes sacredness, citing the views of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and Peter Berger. He quotes Berger’s definition of the sacred as ‘a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience’⁴; summarises Durkheim’s focus on the sacred as ‘the differentiation of sacred from profane as collectively maintained by a group’; and cites his view that ‘the sacred was straightforwardly the natural result of processes of contagious feeling generated by and invested in ritual and myth.’⁵ We will return to the relationship of ritual and ‘contagion’ on a number of occasions in exploring the processes of interaction with sacred places experienced by individuals and groups.

4 (Berger 1969), 25. Cited in (Morgan 2012), XIV.

5 (Morgan 2012), XV.

All religions have a strong concept of sacred place, with many elements held in common.⁶ Harold Turner set out four universal characteristics of the sacred place: its function as the centre of life, its capacity to mirror a more perfect realm, its role as a meeting point for deity and mankind, and the presence of the cult object which symbolises and embodies the divine presence.⁷ Mircea Eliade’s seminal work on sacred space, The Sacred and the Profane, emphasises recognition of the substantive presence of inherent sacredness within certain sites, stating that ‘every sacred space implies a hierophany [manifestation of the sacred].’⁸ However, other scholars suggest that this view is too narrow, given the range of meanings attached to sacred places, and stress instead the role of human initiative in the deliberate sacralisation of space by communities.⁹ In practice, as we will see in the development of Christian sacred places in the early centuries of the church¹⁰ and in early medieval England,¹¹ there is frequently considerable overlap and synergy between these patterns of sacralisation. Regardless of the origin of the foundation narrative, the transformation of undifferentiated space into sacred place, layered with meaning, requires certain similar processes. Throughout history, sacred spaces have needed to be identified (whether as possessing an inherent sacredness due to the presence of a particular natural feature, such as a mountain or spring, or as being associated with a deity, other holy person, or special event); marked out and bounded (the word ‘temple’ comes from the Greek temno ‘to cut out’);¹² enhanced and explained, through buildings and rituals which communicate and reinforce the meaning of the site; and organised and ‘stage managed’ in terms of the effect created and experience offered.

6 See Chapter 7 on definitions of sacred sites today.

7 (Turner 1979), Chapter 1.

8 (Eliade 1959).

9 (Smith 1987).

10 See Chapter 3.

11 See Chapter 4.

12 See (Pedley 2005), 29.

By ‘experience,’ I mean (to borrow Yi Fu Tuan’s definition) ‘the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality,’¹³ including, thought, feeling, and the multiple complex sensory interactions between external stimuli and pre-existing beliefs and attitudes. In this, ‘emotion’ plays a key role. Neuroscientists are still working on an agreed definition of emotion, but all agree on its importance in human response, behaviour, and survival. Emotions are not superficial ‘feelings,’ to which one person may be more prone than another. Instead, they are ‘biologically-determined processes’ common to all, which ‘use the body as their theater’ and ‘affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits.’¹⁴ As we will see, they are crucial to reasoning, decision-making, and memory creation and therefore to any transformative response which a pilgrim may manifest. The American Psychological Association offers a useful working definition of emotion as, ‘A complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event.’¹⁵

13 (Tuan 1977), 8.

14 (Damasio 2000), Chapter 2. Reference at 51.

15 ‘Emotion,’ American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/emotion. Accessed July 23, 2019.

Human beings are physical creatures, and their interactions with the world, including in the realm of spirituality, are channelled entirely through their senses.¹⁶ Human engagement with sacred places, therefore, is necessarily shaped, not only by belief, instruction, and group influence, but also by interior and external landscapes and by human physiology and psychology. In this chapter, I wish therefore to examine what could be termed the ‘physicality of spirituality,’ the fundamental dynamics of Christian pilgrim experience, focusing in particular on the ways in which sacred sites evoke and shape response. Though they clearly display considerable variation according to their particular historical, geographical, cultur...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The background
• PART II Sensory experience and the power of place in England c.597-c.1540
• PART III Sensory experience and the power of place in England: the reformation to the present day
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index