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| ISBN-10 | 0520222059 |
| ISBN-13 | 9780520222052 |
| Authors | Georgia Frank |
| Publisher | University of California Press |
| Publication Date | 2000-03-15 |
| Pages | 232 |
| Dewey Decimal | 270.2 |
| Rating | 5.00 |
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Pilgrims in the deserts of Egypt and the holy land during the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. often reported visiting holy people as part of their tours of holy places. This is the first comprehensive study of pilgrimage to these famous ascetics of late antique Christianity. Through an original analysis of pilgrim writings of this period, Georgia Frank discovers a literary imagination at work, one that both recorded and shaped the experience of pilgrimage to living saints. Taking an important new approach to these texts, Frank finds in them a record of the writers' and readers' spiritual expectations and uses these fresh insights to add substantially to our understanding of the purposes and practices of pilgrimage.
Frank focuses in particular on two important and well-known early texts--The History of the Monks in Egypt (ca. 400) and Palladius's The Lausiac History (ca. 420), situating these narratives in their literary, historical, and spiritual contexts. She compares these narratives to exotic travel writing and to tales of otherworldly journeys. Bringing in contemporary theory, she demonstrates the importance of sight as a means of spiritual progress and explores the relation between the function of sight in these narratives and in other expressions of visual piety in late antiquity Christianity, such as the veneration of relics and, eventually, icons.
With its unique focus on the sensory dimensions of pilgrimage--especially visuality--this absorbing book widens our understanding of early Christian pilgrims and those who read their accounts. At the same time, it also sheds new light on the relation between religious experience and the senses, on literary representations of visual experience, and on the literature of pious travel.
The Memory of Eyes
The hopeful assertion that frames this elegant study is that "the pilgrim's experience is never completely beyond our reach" (82). In this revision of her 1994 Harvard dissertation, Professor Frank has her scholarly sights fixed on the "religious sensibilities" of late ancient Christians, gleaned primarily (although not exclusively) from two Christian accounts of pilgrimages to visit Egyptian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries: the anonymous Historia monachorum in Aegypto and Palladius' Historia Lausiaca. Frank's study aims at more than a description of the inner world of two Christian travelers, however: it seeks also to articulate how students of late ancient Christianity might write a historical account of "religious experience" without being naïve or essentialist. To this end, she employs tools of literary analysis, as well as social-historical and anthropological studies, to craft a narrative that is theoretically aware while remaining sympathetic to its subject. Through careful analysis of "the poetics of pilgrims' writings" (3), Frank pursues a finer understanding of "the religious sensibilities behind pilgrimage to the living" (31).In chapter one, Frank places the practice and the literature of "pilgrimage to the living" in their social and literary contexts. Here she lays out some of the central themes that will emerge from her study: exoticism in these Christian travel writings, the "biblical realism" that informed and emerged from these texts, and the emphasis on visuality as the privileged transmitter of moral and divine truth.
The second chapter examines these historiai as means of "cultural translation" (37), mediating the foreignness of Egyptian asceticism to the more temperate climate of "everyday" Christians. Palladius and the anonymous author of the Historia monachorum emphasized and exoticized the spatial and temporal distance between the reader and the "living saint," who inhabited a thoroughly biblical and miraculous world. According to Frank, the miraculous and exotic were familiar tropes from Hellenistic travel writing, and she concludes that these literary "displacements" served both to mediate the strangeness of the desert ascetic for a more worldly Christian audience and to allow that audience to "experience" the Bible in a new and thrilling register.
In chapter 3, Frank turns away from her historiai to other texts that recount travel (literal and figurative) to "people," including mystical accounts of ascent to God (Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses ), visions of heroes and villains in para-dise and hell (the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul ), and hagiographic accounts of pilgrimage to ascetic figures (Jerome's Life of Paul the First Hermit ). This particular concatenation of physical and spiritual "travels" allows Frank to isolate a persistently articulated desire on the part of the traveler: the desire to see the face of the object of travel and achieve thereby an ultimately salvific ex-perience.
The remaining chapters build on this insight. Chapter 4 asks why visuality was the preferred sensory idiom of the pilgrim's experience, while chapter 5 turns to the question of "the ascetic face" as the object of religious desire and medium of divine transformation. Through an examination of classical sources on "the senses" and the literature of pilgrimage to holy sites, Frank concludes in chapter 4 that, throughout antiquity, vision retained a peculiarly "tactile" quality, so that sight and touch together were means by which experience itself was encoded and understood. Through a reading of physiognomic literature, Frank determines in chapter 5 that "the ascetic face" was the site (and sight) at which Christians could best visualize, and appropriate, a desired "biblical realism." For these pilgrim-authors, "the face had become the canvas of biblical identity"; as such, the saints' faces "functioned as another tool by which to fragment and selectively reassemble the pilgrims' experiences" (162-64). Through the faces of the living saints to whom they traveled (and whom they inscribed in their historiai ), these Christian authors "found a language for portable sanctity" (170).
The final chapter embeds these conclusions about the function of travel writing and Christian physiognomy into a broader theory of "visual piety," by which Frank signals "Christian practices in which a lingering gaze conjures a sacred presence" (174). She considers the later Christian phenomena of relic and icon veneration, and suggests that "by this tactile and conjuring eye of faith, pilgrims articulated a theology of vision that would find its fullest expression in the cult of icons" (181).
One place where Frank's analysis loses some traction is in the use of non-Christian sources to inform Christian texts. It is unclear how she envisions the literary or contextual relationship between these bodies of literature: Is it a question of cultural "appropriation" or "background" (see 32)? Are we to imag-ine a common "affinity" or "resemblance" (56-58) between world-views, "echoes" (129), or a wholesale "Christianization" of pagan sensibilities (163)? Her use of diverse non-Christian sources is at times ingenious and illuminating (the use of physiognomic literature is particularly deft), but in her careful tri-angulation of literature, experience, and world-view, the confrontation of poten-tially competing or complementary literatures, experiences, and world-views could only enrich her study.
This is, however, an extremely minor quibble. The graceful language and use of both Christian and non-Christian sources, from Phlegon of Tralles to Euna-pius of Sardis, make this volume a fitting addition to Peter Brown's Transformation of the Classical Heritage series. Throughout the work, Frank is refreshingly consistent in both her critical reading and sympathetic approach to ancient religious experiences. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars interested in the intersections of thought and action, of literature and life, will find tremendous value in the subject and approach of this book.
Andrew S. Jacobs