Abstract
The word ‘pilgrimage’ is frequently pressed into service in cathedral circles, and is used to carry a considerable freight of meaning. This article examines pilgrimage in this context with special reference to Canterbury Cathedral with its long and on-going experience of pilgrimage.
The consistent increase in footfall in English cathedrals and abbey churches, celebrated in the Spiritual Capital report, 1 and annually charted by the Church of England’s statistics department, is often accounted for in terms of the contemporary popularity of pilgrimage. This resurgence of interest in pilgrimage is undeniable, and has attracted significant and substantial research funding. The university of York has an established Centre for Pilgrimage Studies, and is now reaching the end of the first year of an extensive three-year research project ‘Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present’ to examine the motivation and experience of pilgrims, past and present, to Durham Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster and Westminster Abbey.
However we account for the resurgence in ‘pilgrimage’, walking traditional routes, such as the Via Francigena (the pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome), or the Camino pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, is increasingly popular, and each year sees yet more publications and innumerable pilgrim tweets and blogs.
But what is it that might distinguish a pilgrim from the tourist or casual visitor who is happy to visually graze as they walk through the spaces of a cathedral? And how can we differentiate between making a pilgrimage and setting out to walk a physically demanding journey? The question is sharpened when we reflect on the recent interest in historic walkways,
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and ask what the difference might be between walking The Ridgeway, along the top of the undulating Berkshire Downs, and walking the Pilgrims’ Way in Kent. Both the serious walker and the pilgrim may suffer from blistered and aching feet, and find the whole exercise to be physically exerting. Again, both the walker and the pilgrim may well follow an established route across the landscape and have a clear destination in sight. But it is the fact that the pilgrim’s destination is a religious site that distinguishes the pilgrim from the walker. This point merely shifts the ground of the discussion and begs the question of what it is that makes a place religious and what we might mean by the term anyway. Many would claim that the physical act of setting out on a journey carries a religious resonance. We may recall, for instance, Abraham setting off from the city of Ur, not knowing where he was going, but simply holding to the divine promise. Echoes of this are to be found in the epistle to the Hebrews. One passage in this epistle presents the figure of Abraham as a model of faith (Heb. 11.8), but the figures evoked in this chapter are not model pilgrims but exemplars of faith. Indeed, the Greek plural word in Hebrews 11.13 translated as ‘pilgrims’ in the King James’ Bible (1611) is more accurately translated ‘exiles’, or ‘sojourners’ (as in the
The word that came to be translated as the English word ‘pilgrim’, or more strictly speaking ‘pilgrimage’, was perigrinatio, which referred to a wandering journey, rather than a mapped-out journey to a particular destination. Here there is a sense of journeying, but where was the goal or the object of the journey? Some of the foundational documents of Christianity voice a sense that the Christian seeks a ‘city that is to come’ (Heb. 13.11), the ‘Jerusalem above’ (Gal. 4.26; cf. Rev. 21). These passages could lead the reader to think that Christians in the ancient world did not think that physical geographical locations were especially significant, but this would be, at best, a partial and selective point of view. Even allowing ambivalence towards geographical sites in primitive Christianity, an attitude probably engendered by the fall of Jerusalem in 70
Jesus, Luke tells us, set his face towards Jerusalem, and the story of Acts tells of the expansion of the Christian movement to Rome, and it is precisely these same destinations that came to be places of pilgrimage. Indeed, following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, a considerable number of churches were built precisely to mark those places in Jerusalem and elsewhere associated with recorded biblical events. Presumably these sites were kept alive in the memory of Christians following the destruction of Jerusalem, and the rebuilding certainly rehabilitated a sense of ‘holy place’ and politically served to make Jerusalem a focus of unity in the region. The most monumental of these churches was the complex marking the alleged sites of Jesus’ death and resurrection in Jerusalem: evidence survives of individuals travelling to these significant sites. We have the record of an anonymous pilgrim of Bordeux (c.333
Egeria was a keen-eyed observer of the Holy Week and Easter liturgies in Jerusalem. 5 She observed how the readings and prayers of these liturgies matched the place and the event being commemorated, and so suggests that the key moments of Holy Week become dramatically present for the pilgrim sharing in these liturgies. Time, in other words, was condensed, and what had happened then, for example, in Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and in the Garden of Gethsemane, dramatically impacted on the present experience of the pilgrim.
This recalibration of time may well be an impetus for pilgrimage, but it was evidently not necessary for the Christian to make the physical journey to the Holy Land. Journeying to distant places, however attractive and however closely they were associated with the events of Christ’s life, passion, death and resurrection, was not deemed to be necessary for the Christian, and this may well be illustrated by the later development of the liturgies of Holy Week, particularly in Rome, where all that had happened in Jerusalem became ‘live’ during the celebrations of the triduum. 6 Some were positively discouraged from going on pilgrimage. Indeed, there is evidence that monastics were warned against pilgrimage, 7 not only because of the dangers and distractions of travel but also because of the ‘staying-put’ quality of the monastic vocation that developed into the stabilitas of the Benedictine tradition.
Nevertheless, early Welsh and Irish ascetics gained something of a reputation because of their wanderlust, embarking on a voyage across the sea, or setting out on a winding journey through difficult terrain. 8 Some places were evidently considered to be sites of encounter with the divine, yet one Irish monastic saying warns the pilgrim that if you are going on pilgrimage to Christ the King you will only find him if you carry him in your heart. The Celtic sense of peregrinatio is well illustrated by the sixth-century Irish saint Colum Cille, popularly known as Columba, who, incidentally, died in the same year (597) as Augustine, dispatched by Pope Gregory, arrived on English soil in Kent and became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Columba became a self-imposed exile and chose to live as a stranger in unknown territory as an expression of sorrow for his sins. In all probability his pilgrimage was a form of penance for the violent crimes he had committed in his native homeland. For Columba, who in the Irish tradition came to be regarded as the model pilgrim, pilgrimage meant setting out to sea. He set off across the sea as ‘a pilgrim for Christ’, confident that the breath of God would drive him and his companions to a safe haven, to what would become their ‘resurrection place’. The place where they landed was the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, and from which Ireland could not be seen. They had safely navigated the waters of the wild sea and reached another shore. What this Celtic excursion illustrates is that the meaning of the terms ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’ has shifted and changed in different historic epochs and religious and cultural contexts.
Later centuries saw something of a paradigm shift, and one that corresponds more closely to our connotation of the words ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’. The traditional medieval pilgrimage routes had and continue to have a destination. The pilgrims’ way leads to a particular place, and invariably the place is associated with key religious figures, such as saints Peter and Paul in Rome, the apostle James at Santiago, Columba at Iona, and Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Indeed, the destination of a pilgrimage came to be regarded as the ‘home’ of the saints who, it was believed, effectively connected people to the divine. 9 A pilgrimage was always a pilgrimage to – a journey to a particular place where the pilgrim had access to a person who was perceived to mediate the holy. It was not that the place itself was intrinsically holy, but its association with the person who came to be regarded as a cypher and conduit of divine power. Canterbury, for instance, is where pilgrims sought to connect with Thomas Becket. And so it was the person, or more precisely the stories of that person, that drew and attracted the pilgrim to the place, making the person logically prior to the actual physical location. 10 Tellingly, in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer says that his pilgrims set out to Canterbury ‘to seek the holy blissful martyr’ (Prologue I.17). The object of their journey was to encounter the presence of the saint. 11
The story of Becket’s murder is well known. On 29 December 1170, four knights, motivated by the desire to win the king’s favour, cornered Archbishop Thomas Becket and killed him. Becket was an ambiguous figure and an unlikely person to become a ‘saint’. He had straddled the world of Church and State, and during his time as Archdeacon of Canterbury he had served as Chancellor to King Henry II. In addition, it was at the king’s instigation in 1162 that Becket became archbishop, but in the end, and much to the king’s chagrin, Becket resolutely defended the Church’s legal and moral responsibilities over and against those of the Crown. In Henry’s eyes this was obstructive intransigence, and on one fateful occasion he is said to have cried out in exasperation, ‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ Some of the knights in the royal court took this as an instruction to remove Becket, who had recently returned from a period of exile, and so it was that he came to be summarily butchered. This violent death gave Thomas the revered Christian name of ‘martyr’. On hearing the news of Becket’s murder in the cathedral, the king was devastated, and it was his public acts of penance that added impetus to the emerging cult of Becket. And although Thomas Becket was canonized by Pope Alexander III just three years after his death, it is important to realize that the first initiative towards the recognition of Becket as a saint was a popular and a local claim. The people claimed Becket as their holy man, a move first resisted by the fearful monastic community at Christ Church Priory and by the city authorities who actively discouraged visitors from coming to Canterbury. The monks of Christ Church Priory undoubtedly feared that the large number of pilgrims attracted to Canterbury by the popular acclamation of Thomas’s power to intercede would disrupt their ordered monastic life. The tensions caused by the presence of pilgrim shrines in monastic cathedrals and abbeys is well documented, and measures were taken, even when pilgrimage became a significant source of revenue for these communities, to guard the monastic quire and enclosure from visiting pilgrims, and this accounts for the later fifteenth-century construction of shrine screens at Winchester and at St Albans. 12
Nevertheless, provision was made for pilgrims who came to these holy places. But what was it that motivated pilgrims to undertake their journey? Medieval pilgrims to Canterbury certainly came conscious of their needs. Some came seeking physical or mental healing, others to seek divine approval or success for their endeavours. Some came to express sorrow for their sins and misdemeanours, others came to offer thanks, or to fulfil an oath or promise made to another. And so, in increasing numbers, pilgrims came to Canterbury, to the eastern crypt where Becket was buried, and after Easter in 1171 Benedict of Peterborough, a monk of Christ Church, was given responsibility to care especially for the sick and infirm pilgrims, and in doing so also recorded the pilgrims’ prayers that had been answered, the miracles performed at the tomb of Thomas. The following year a fellow monk, William of Canterbury, assisted Benedict in recording these answers to prayer, a record that testified to the intercessory power of one who was believed to have been made a saint through his episcopal ordination, evidently regarded as a life-changing event, and through the manner of his death. 13
The space in which Thomas was buried was enlarged between the years 1180 and 1184, and a wide ambulatory was constructed beneath a new rib-vaulted ceiling, around the site of Becket’s tomb so as to give access to it. Walls were constructed on either side of the tomb, punctured with oval holes, known as foramina, so that pilgrims could literally make physical contact with the tomb which contained the earthly remains of the saint. 14 The desire to touch the tomb echoes the care of the dead that marked Christianity out in its original context in the ancient world. As the anthropologist Margaret Visser has observed, the honouring of the bodies of the dead, famously in the case of the second-century martyr Polycarp, radically reversed the sensibilities of the classical world, for in the Roman world burial sites were ‘outside the city’, beyond the zone of civilization. The Christian honouring of their dead made the place polluted by the corpse into a sacred site and a holy place. 15 On 7 July 1220, a more favourable time for pilgrims to travel than the feast of his martyrdom on 29 December, the body of Thomas Becket was translated to an opulent shrine, decorated with sheets of gold and glittering jewels in the Trinity Chapel to the east of the quire at Canterbury. 16 Beyond this was built the corona that was intended to house the most prized relic of Becket, the crown of his head. The imposing shrine itself was demolished at Henry VIII’s direct command in 1538, and today the site is marked by an inscription in the floor and a simple burning candle.
The building of the shrine and the corona meant that the cathedral was not simply the destination but itself became a site in which to make a pilgrimage through the spaces associated with the story of Becket: the altar of the sword-point, the place of his martyrdom; the descent into the eastern crypt to the site of his burial; and then an ascent via the south transept to the pilgrim steps ascending to the shrine in the Trinity Chapel. This space is surrounded by stained glass, the schemes of which show the benefits of making pilgrimage to Thomas at Canterbury, and in juxtaposition with the ancestor of Christ windows, portray Becket as a Christ figure mediating divine power and bringing healing and comfort. 17
The aim of this article was to demonstrate the multiple meanings of the increasing use of the word ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’ in discourse about the mission of and ministry of cathedral and abbey churches today. But what it is that motivates the pilgrim today, and how far do visitors understand themselves to be pilgrims? We have only alluded to the connection between pilgrimage and identity, but to a greater or lesser extent who we are and what it is that motivates the visitor to our cathedrals is shaped by our experience of sacred landscapes and historic places of pilgrimage. This is not to say that meanings can only be generated by uncovering past practices, but that it may be a good place to start in constructing a taxonomy of pilgrimage. Three particular points suggest themselves:
Coming to a place of pilgrimage may well situate the visitor or pilgrim in a place where prayer is possible. At a pilgrim site visitors can find themselves in a place where ‘prayer has been valid’, and in the very act of placing themselves there may discover, as the pilgrim Paulinus of Nola did when he journeyed to the holy sites in Palestine in c.400 Journeying to a pilgrim shrine may help us to recover the sheer physicality of Christian life, and the importance of touch in the life and the practices of prayer of the embodied Christian. Coming to a traditional pilgrimage site may well reawaken in the visitor/pilgrim a sense of how our individual lives are bound up and knitted together with a ‘cloud of witnesses’, and that one participates in a wider society, the communion of saints that straddles heaven and earth.
How far these three trace elements of pilgrimage can be mapped onto the phenomenon of the experience of the modern pilgrim is open to debate. The social scientist, Zygmunt Bauman, titled what was to become a seminal and influential essay ‘from pilgrim to tourist’. 19 Bauman sets up an opposition between a pilgrim and a tourist. The first, the pilgrim, he characterizes as a person who steps out towards a greater reality, and the second, the tourist, as the person who seeks a temporary diversion, a deliberate ‘stepping away’ from the routines and obligations of quotidian life. Given the semantic twists and turns of ‘pilgrimage’ in this article, perhaps there is ample room to regard visiting tourists as pilgrims, even if it is just a momentary experience of pilgrimage as they respond to the architectural language of the holy place, and offer a silent prayer, or simply light a candle.