Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (review)

Israeli scholars have of late produced tremendous work on the topic of pilgrimage. The present volume, a substantially revised dissertation written at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, makes available to non-Hebrew-speaking historians a taste of that rich, ongoing work. Bitton-Ashkelony surveys an impressive variety of late ancient sources (in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, from western Gaul to Mesopotamia) in her exploration of nascent notions of sacred geography. Rejecting overly simplistic rubrics such as "popular religion," Bitton-Ashkelony instead probes the theological, political, and social dimensions of a religious phenomenon whose origins are obscure (or even irrelevant) but whose impact was ineluctable. At the heart of her study lies the city of Jerusalem, allegorized in the New Testament but brilliantly rematerialized in late antiquity, a religious center around which crystallized diverse responses to the idea of venerable Christian place.

An introductory chapter lays out scholarly approaches to the question of sacred space, betraying a tendency, little expressed in the rest of the volume, toward a religionsgeschichtlich approach. The first three chapters tackle "great thinkers" of late antiquity. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa were lukewarm toward Jerusalem pilgrimage, even as they heavily promoted local cultic shrines, possibly due to competition with other bishops such as Cyril of Jerusalem (chap. 1). Jerome at times embraced the sanctity of the holy land (in which he settled), yet at other times polemically rejected the special sanctity of the holy city. Once again, for Bitton-Ashkelony, ecclesiastical politics intervene; yet even a political figure such as Jerome cannot escape the rising tide of the adoration of sacred space (chap. 2). Augustine pointedly refrained from articulating any theology of sacred geography beyond typically Pauline allegories of God's omnipresence and the "New Jerusalem." Bitton-Ashkelony views this reticence as pastoral condescension from the great bishop, focused more on the behavior of his flock than on their locus (chap. 3).

The final two chapters push into the monastic realm which, Bitton-Ashkelony argues, was central to the political and theological developments of a "territory of grace." She persuasively demonstrates the productively paradoxical importance of both xeniteia (wandering) and he–sychia (tranquility) in the accounts of desert saints in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria into the sixth centuries. Three significant monastic thinkers then ground these hagiographic sources: Athanasius of Alexandria, who deftly acknowledges holy land pilgrimage but subsumes it into (episcopally supervised) monastic practice; Evagrius Ponticus, whose highly theorized mystical monasticism provides an even more thorough (and influential) internalization of the pilgrimage idea; and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, whose biblical interpretations incorporate pilgrimage into a supersessionist, anti-Jewish theology. The last chapter (chap. 5) returns to the question of "local versus central" pilgrimage in Palestinian and Syrian sources. Here Bitton-Ashkelony produces her most compelling argument: the imagination of local pilgrimage sites (particularly monastic sites) as a "second Jerusalem," suggesting that "local" sacred space could only predominate through an imagined, and redistributed, "center."

Encountering the Sacred is an enormously learned volume, superbly written and notated, required reading for students of early Christian pilgrimage and monasticism. Bitton-Ashkelony dispenses with the typical frameworks for discussing Christian theologies of space—most notably (and perhaps a bit hastily) the persistent influence of Platonism—and in so doing presents us with theologians and theorists who are always responsive and reactive. Some more tantalizing suggestions might have been pursued further, such as the importance of monastic theology as foundational for medieval pilgrimage, or the ways in which biblicism could mediate between material piety and theological anti-Judaism. It is, however, the mark of a dynamic study to leave the reader wanting more, and doubtless the groundwork laid here will provide intellectual provocation for numerous further studies.