The Pilgrimage in the Ancient Church

THE PILGRIMAGE IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH The the passages cited above, Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives figure as the main goal of the pilgrim : and on the Mount of Olives the mind must naturally turn to the Garden of Gethsemane and the scene of the Ascension. It may seem surprising that there is no mention of Golgotha and the Sepulchre. But the visitation of these sites was rendered impossible to the Christians by the destruction of Jerusalem and the erection of the town of Aelia Capitolina. The one holy site in the town of Jerusalem, before the time of Constantine, was the so-called Coenaculum, which received its name in later years. It was re garded as the house in which—according to the Acts of the Apos tles (xii. 12 sqq.)—Mary, the mother of John Mark, lived; and the belief was that there the Lord held the Last Supper, and that there the eleven assembled after the The pilgrimage to Palestine received a powerful impetus from the erection of the memorial churches on the holy sites, under Constantine the Great, as described by Eusebius in his biography of the emperor (iii. 25 sqq.). At the order of Constantine, the accumulation of rubbish covering the supposed site of the burial place of Jesus was removed, and the cave was discovered in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid the body of Jesus; and above this cave and the Hill of the Crucifixion the imposing church of the Holy Sepulchre was built (A.D. 326-336). The churches in Bethle hem and on the Mount of Olives were erected by Helena, the mother of Constantine, who herself undertook the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. These churches were then endowed with new sanctuaries of miraculous powers; and relics of Christ were found in the shape of the Cross and the nails. The result was an ex aggerated importance attached to these pilgrimages, a view which led to energetic protests, especially from Gregory of Nyssa, who composed a monograph on the pilgrimages (De its qui adeunt Hierosol.). Jerome, like Gregory, insists on the point that resi dence in Jerusalem has in itself no religious value : it is not locality, but character, that avails, and the gates of Heaven are as open in Britain as in Jerusalem (Ep. 58, 3).

But Jerome never denied the religious uses of the pilgrimage ; he considered it an act of faith for a man to offer his prayers where the feet of the Lord had stood, and the traces of the Birth, of the Cross, and of the Passion were still to be seen (Ep. 47, 2). With the number of the pilgrims the number of pilgrim-resorts also in creased. Of Jerusalem alone Jerome relates that the places of prayer were so numerous that it was impossible to visit them all in one day (Ep. 46, 9). In the Holy Land the list was still longer: the natives were ready to show everything for which the f or eigners inquired, and the pilgrim was eager to credit everything.

In her expedition to the East, Paula, the friend of Jerome, visited, among other places, Sarepta and Caesarea. In the first-named place she was shown the tower of Elijah ; in the second, the house of Cornelius, that of Philip, and finally the grave of the four vir gins. At Bethlehem she saw, in addition to the church of the Nativity, the grave of Rachel; at Hebron the hut of Sarah, in which the swaddling clothes of Isaac and the remains of Abra ham's oak were on view (Hieron. Ep. io8).

In the

pilgrim-resorts were thus filling the East, their counterparts began to emerge in the West. And here the starting-point is to be found in the veneration of martyrs. Care for the tombs of martyrs was sanctioned by immemorial custom of the Church; but, in this case also, a later age failed to preserve the primitive conception in its purity; and Augustine himself was obliged to defend the usage of the Church from the imputation that it implied a transference of heathen ceremonial to the sphere of Christianity (Contr. Faust. xx. 2 ) . The martyrs were the local heroes of particular communities; but there were men whose life and death were of significance for the whole of Christendom—the apostles. Of these Peter and Paul had suffered martyrdom in Rome, and it was inevitable, from the nature of the case, that their graves should soon become a resort, not only of Romans born, but of strangers also. The Roman cemeteries were visited by numerous pilgrims even in the 3rd century: for the earliest graffiti in the papal crypt of the Coemeterium Callisti must date from this period (De Rossi, Roma sotter. i. 253 sqq.; Kraus, Rom. Sott. 148 sqq.).

Pilgrims were drawn to the graves of the saints convinced that there divine succour was certain; hence came the belief in a never-ending series of miracles there performed. Doubt was unknown. St. Augustine observes that, though Africa was full of martyrs' tombs, no miracle had been wrought at them so far as his knowledge extended. This, however, did not lead him to doubt the truth of those reported by others—a fact that is somewhat surprising when we reflect that the phenomenon caused him much disquiet and perplexity. Who, he asks, can fathom the design of God in ordaining that this should happen at one place and not at another? And eventually he acquiesces in the conclusion that God, who gives every man his individual gift at pleasure, has not willed that the same powers should have efficacy at every sepul chre of the saints (Ep. 78, 3).