PILGRIMAGES

PILGRIMAGES. Pilgrimage is the travel to holy places, e.g., Jerusalem, the Holy Land generally, the tomb of a martyr or ascetic saint (qq.v.), or a place sanctified by a monastery. The notion of “holy place” is a complex one, but surely derives much force from the special character accorded Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple mount in the Old Testament. The account of the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna (q.v.) provides early evidence (ca. 170) of the cult of the martyr and the latter’s burial place and physical remains, as does the desire of Christians in the 2nd-c. Roman Church to be buried next to an apostle (q.v.).

Pilgrimages doubtless occurred in the early centuries of Christianity. They became a mass phenomenon following the conversion of Constantine (q.v.). Jerusalem is a very important pilgrimage site by the mid-4th c., as attested by the travel diary of Egeria, a Spanish nun on pilgrimage in the days of Cyril of Jerusalem (q.v.). The accounts Rufinus and Jerome provided of their pilgrimages to Egypt to see the Desert Fathers (qq.v.) are eloquent testimony to the new veneration accorded famous monks. Christians also began to travel widely as an act of worship or asceticism (q.v.) or to receive a blessing from the living saints they went to visit. In later monasticism (q.v.), and especially in Russia of recent centuries, pilgrimage became a way of life, an asceticism of homelessness, and the pilgrim (strannik) was a recognizable feature of the tsar’s highways and byways. From one of these wanderers comes the famous and anonymous work of the late 19th c., The Way of a Pilgrim, with its influential meditation on the “Jesus Prayer.”