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Pilgrimage In Christianity
The Journey Within - Pilgrimage Without Moving
We are so used to images from the Canterbury Tales and long trailing paths of pilgrimage. But the earlier concept of pilgrimage – pilgrimage as a way of moving away from worldly concerns – never really disappeared, even during the high Middle Ages.
Hermits
Many religious people became monks in monasteries or lived solitary lives as hermits. They were expected to stay in one place – some ‘anchorites’ (as the name suggests, such people were ‘anchored’ in one place) were famously bricked-up in their cells! However, such people still saw themselves as pilgrims – they thought of themselves as leaving the familiar in order to venture into a spiritual wilderness to find God. Indeed, they were sometimes scornful of pilgrims who spent their life travelling from shrine to shrine. As the English Hermit Walter Hilton wrote in the 14th century:
“There is no need to run to Rome or Jerusalem to look for Jesus there but turn your thought into your own soul where he is hidden.”
Progress through work
There were always some people who did not agree with the idea of pilgrimage. For example, after the Reformation (15th and 16th centuries) some Protestants rejected Catholic ideas about devotion to saints. This was partly because they were repelled by trickery and greed that sometimes developed at popular shrines, and partly because they thought all devotion should be directed towards Jesus. Such people were not inclined to travel on pilgrimage, but tried to work out their faith in their day-to-day lives.
With the coming of open rebellion against the Roman Catholic church in the sixteenth century, many monasteries were closed and demolished. In Protestant countries pilgrimages to shrines were abolished. The idea of pilgrimage lived on, though, as a spiritual journey. Most famously John Bunyan, a Baptist minister, wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. The hero is called Christian and the course of his life is imagined as journey towards the Celestial City – with lots of encounters with deceivers and ogres, who try to distract him on the way. Bunyan’s book, which was translated into many languages and has many editions, has been very important in keeping the idea of spiritual pilgrimage alive in Protestant churches.