Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/104

Rh PILGRIMAGE teachers whose own acts had helped to propagate the opinion in question. Thus, only a few years after the letter above cited, urging Marcella to migrate to Bethlehem, St Jerome writes to Paulinus (393) pointing out that many of the most celebrated saints and ascetics had never visited the holy places, that heaven is just as open from Britain as from Jerusalem, and that the circumstances of life in Jerusalem itself were far from helpful to devotion. But his own abode at Bethlehem, the celebrity of the religious houses he founded and directed there, and the unlike tenor of other letters he wrote, entirely counteracted this advice. St Chrysostom at one time speaks of the need- lessness of pilgrimage (Horn. i. in Philem. ; Horn. iii. and iv. ad pop. Antiock.), and at another expresses his own wish to see the relics of St Paul at Rome (Horn, xxxii. in Rom. ii., iii.; Horn. viii. in Eph. ii.). So, too, St Augustine con tributed powerfully to promote pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, by sending in 404 two clerical disputants to the shrine of St Felix of Nola, in the hope that some miracle would be worked there to decide the matter, though no such signs had been granted at the grave of any African saint (Ep. Ixxviii.). And in another place he attests the working of many miracles by the relics of the protomartyr St Stephen in various African towns where portions of them had been shrined (De Civ. Dei, xxii. 8). Nevertheless, in yet a third place he appears to con demn this very temper as mere superstition, stating that, while he knows many professing Christians who are worshippers of tombs and pictures, &quot; the church condemns them, and daily strives to correct them as evil children&quot; (De Mor. Eccl. Cath., xxxiv. 75, 76). Here, too, example proved stronger than precept, and the only unqualified opposition to the popular tendency which issued from any quite unimpeachable source (for Vigilantius and Jovinian cannot be fairly cited) is the remarkable letter of St Gregory of Nyssa to a friend, on the subject of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the heads of which are as under: there is no divine precept for the usage; the moral dangers of the journey, from bad companions and from the quality of the inns, are great, especially to women, and above all to nuns ; the immorality and irreligion of Jerusalem itself are gross and notorious. True, he had gone thither himself, but it was on public ecclesiastical business, connected with the Arabian Church, and he had travelled in a public vehicle with a company of monks. He did not find his faith stimulated or improved in any way by a sight of the scenes of the gospel history, and he recommends others to stay at home, assuring them that no spiritual benefit is lost by so doing, and no spiritual gain acquired by visiting the most sacred places without inward amendment (Epist. ii.). The authenticity of this epistle has been challenged, but on no sufficient grounds. What makes the devotion to the tombs of saints such a powerful factor in ecclesiastical history is that, after the Holy Sepulchre itself, no grave had such a hold on Christian imagination as that where the bodies of the two chief apostles, St Peter and St Paul, were held to rest in Rome. And consequently, as the division of the empire lessened the intercourse between East and West, as the decay of the old lines of communication made travelling more difficult, and as the advance of Mohammedanism in Syria and Palestine made it more dangerous also in that direction, Rome gradually supplanted Jerusalem to a great degree in the West as the goal of pilgrimage, and the enthusiasm of the visitors did much to consolidate the papal monarchy over Latin Christendom. So markedly did this new influence prevail that it has left its trace in more than one European language. The Low Latin romeriut, romipeta for a pilgrim anywhither, romeria, romi- petayium for the actual pilgrimage, the obsolete French romieu, romijyete, romivage, the still current Spanish romero, romeria, and Portuguese romeiro, romaria, the Italian forename Borneo, and the English romare (Piers Plou man) attest the celebrity and popularity of this pilgrimage, into which soon entered such further ideas as the desirability of confessing sins to the pope personally and obtaining absolution from him, the reference of private cases to papal arbitration on the part of bishops and other ecclesiastical judges, and the injunction of the journey as in itself a penance, a notion prevalent in the Gallic churches as early as the close of the 5th century (Caesar. Arelat., Horn. iii.). Nowhere was the pilgrimage to Rome more popular than in Saxon England, and amongst the crowds of penitents who made the journey were four kings, Ceadwalla, Ine, Coinred, and Offa, all of whom died in Rome, two of them as monks (Beda, H.E., v. 7, 19). There were not wanting efforts to check the movement. Apart from the theological objections raised by Claudius of Turin, there is a letter extant from Boniface of Mainz, an Englishman born, to Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, written about 743, begging him to get a canon enacted to forbid the pilgrimage to Rome, especially to nuns, on the ground of the moral perils of the road, stating that no city of France, Lombardy, or Italy was without Englishwomen leading depraved lives, whose virtue had fallen during pilgrimage. And the council of Chalons, in 813, enacted a canon to check pilgrimages both to Rome and to the shrine of St Martin at Tours (then the most famous sanctuary in France), on the ground of serious abuses on the part of both clergy and laity; and the council of Seligenstadt made a like effort in 1022. But even the robber barons who looked on pilgrims as their natural prey could not arrest the movement (which was specially stimulated, as we learn from Radulphus Glaber, in 999 and 1000 by the belief that the end of the world was at hand), and the Roman pilgrimage reached its height in the Middle Ages through the institution of the Jubilee, or plenary indulgence to pilgrims, by Boniface VIII. in 1300, when 200,000 are said to have availed themselves of it, and smaller but still considerable numbers on its various repetitions at irregular intervals since. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem received fresh stimulus in the 9th century by the first occurrence of the alleged miracle of the heavenly fire on Easter Eve at the Holy Sepulchre, and continued to be frequented till checked by the fanaticism of the caliph Hakem-Biamr illah about 1018, and more severely and permanently by the Seljukian Turks on their conquest of Syria, which occasioned those armed pilgrimages, the crusades, to whose history this branch of the subject thenceforward belongs. Meanwhile, a third class of sanctu aries had been steadily coming into notice and popularity, consisting neither of the seats of great historical events nor of the ascertained resting-places of eminent saints. These were the purely legendary shrines, the sites of some alleged vision, of the supernatural discovery of hidden relics, or of the presence of a wonder-working image or picture. One of the earliest and most famous of these was that of Compostella, where the relics of St James the Great were said to be discovered in 816, and, after being again hidden for many centuries, to have been discovered afresh in 1884. This was one of those most frequented by Eng lish pilgrims, no fewer than 2460 licences being granted for the journey in the one year 1434 (Rymer, Feed., xi.). 1 1 This concourse of English pilgrims was soon looked on in France as politically dangerous, so that in the 14th century, when Pedro the Cruel was dethroned by Henry of Trastamara, the latter was compelled by his allies to refuse entrance into Spain to all pilgrims who had not licence of transit from the king of France. This kind of jealousy