The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (review)

The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity.By Georgia Frank. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 30. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. 232pp. $40.00.

In this innovative and thought-provoking work, Georgia Frank deftly negotiates the intricacies of ancient thinking about travel, vision, memory, and religious experience. She reads late fourth- and early fifth-century Christian pilgrimage texts in the context of a broad range of other Christian and non-Christian literature to reconstruct both "the religious sensibilities of pilgrims who journeyed to visit living saints" (2) and the religious sensibilities of those "armchair pilgrims" who read and valued these texts, but may not have undertaken pilgrimages themselves (4). "All travel writing," she says, "is a form of seeing for the reader, who must rely on the eyes of another" (102). The Memory of the Eyes illuminates the conditions that helped to shape early Christian ideals and expectations about seeing holy people, even as it also enacts the argument being developed as Frank trains us to see the past through her eyes.

The title of the book is especially well chosen. The Memory of the Eyes signals the overarching framework for Frank's analysis and for the work's broadest significance. She persuasively interprets late antique pilgrim accounts as evidence for the central importance of vision in late antique Christian piety (34, 174-80); her argument suggests that the pilgrim texts composed in the late fourth- and early fifth centuries do not simply illustrate but actually helped to crystallize this visual piety. Taking two pilgrim texts as her main focus, the anonymous History of the Monks in Egypt and Palladius's Lausiac History, Frank argues that these writings encapsulate and articulate a mode of Christian spirituality that bridges the present with the biblical past, especially through vision. These texts, she emphasizes, do not merely report on sacred places or holy people; rather, they indicate that the pilgrim/reader must undergo a spiritual transformation of the senses in order to be able to see the biblical past (33).

Frank's focus on pilgrims to living saints enables her to make an important contribution to the kind of piety we associate with pilgrimage. Although she stresses that pilgrimage to places and people formed a "coextensive piety" (7) fueled by "the desire to experience the Bible more vividly" (10), she destabilizes the assumption that this piety necessarily entailed physical journeying to the geographical sites associated with biblical events. By keeping our attention trained on ways of seeing, especially ways of seeing holy people, Frank persuades us that these pilgrim narratives fashioned a "portable sanctity" for Christians. That is, the kinds of transformative experiences pilgrims relate to proper visualization enable the viewer to glimpse the biblical past in the faces of holy men (or women disguised as men) (103, 75, 77). The implication of this convergence of biblical realism, holy people, and the "eyes of faith" were enormous, as Frank makes clear. These texts obviated the need "to stand at the site of the crucifixion to see Christ or on Mount Sinai to see Moses. Instead, the pilgrim could come face to face with these biblical exemplars by gazing intently at the face of a holy monk" (170). By training one's eyes to see biblical figures in living holy faces, Christians could bring the Bible into the present anywhere--not simply in physical locations mentioned in biblical texts (32,170).

Many different kinds of readers will benefit from this well-written, complexly conceived work--not only historians of Christianity, but also those with comparative and contemporary interests in pilgrimage, and the formation and expression of spiritual ideals and practices.

As a historian of early Christianity, I found particularly compelling Frank's argument that the prevailing understanding of vision as a tactile sense (though not...