Pilgrimage Of Etheria-Etheria

Section one of The Pilgrimage of Etheria.

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The Pilgrimage of Etheria by Etheria.

Introduction: The Narrative and its Authorship.

This book was discovered by Signor Gamarini in a manuscript of the eleventh century at Arezzo, and he published it first in 1887, and again in a corrector edition in 1888.

Three years later an English translation, with text and notes by Dr. J. H. Bernard, and an appendix on the topography by Sir C. W. Wilson, appeared under the auspices of the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society.

In 1895 Dom Cabrol issued a treatise of some importance, entitled Les Églises de Jérusalem.

Then came M. Paul Guillet's edition in 1898, in vol.

xxxiv.

of the Vienna Corpus Script.

Eccl.

Lat., who still further emended and elucidated the text.

Up till that time Signor Gamarini's conjecture that the authoress was Silvia of Aquitaine, sister of the Emperor Theodosius' minister Rufinus, had been considered plausible, but had not been either corroborated or disproved.

But in 1903 Dom Ferréton [Revue des Questions Historiques, vol. lxxxiv.] sought to identify her with the virgin named Etheria mentioned by Valerius in a letter to the religious brethren of the Berzo in north-west Spain, and his arguments have met with very general acceptance.

In 1909, however, a detailed and determined attack upon his views was made by Karl Meister in the Rheinisches Museum, so far as the date and nationality of the pilgrim are concerned.

But his arguments were, in Montaigne Duquesne's opinion, successfully met and answered by the Abbé de Conic [Revue Biblique, 1910] and others.

No one probably now adheres to the theory that Silvia was the pilgrim.

Meister himself agrees with the other scholars already mentioned who have identified her with the abbess named Etheria to whom Valerius refers: he only disputes her date and nationality.

Dom Ferréton's theory, amounting almost to a certainty, was that she was a fellow-countrywoman of Valerius, who had visited the East towards the end of the fourth century, i.e. in the reign of Theodosius .

Valerius himself lived in the second half of the seventh century, and is chiefly known as the biographer of his contemporary St. Fructuus, Bishop of Braga.

He was abbot of the Monasterium Rufianensens near Astorga, in the mountainous district of Galicia now called the Berzo.

In the letter mentioned above he speaks of Etheria as extremo occidui maris oceani litore exorta [sprung from the farthest shores of the Western sea, the Ocean] , while a doubtful phrase, where the true reading is uncertain in chapter i., seems nevertheless almost necessarily to connect Etheria with the extremitas huis occidue plaga [the farthest part of this western coast].

If huis occurred in the first of these two expressions, the inference that she was from Galicia would be certain.

As it is, the phrases are so similar that very little doubt can be entertained that she was.

Meister, however, maintains that they do not of necessity indicate this district, and that, inter alia, as her language exhibits no trace of a Spanish dialect, but distinct traces of that of Gallia Narbonensis, and as she refers to the river Rhone as if it were familiar both to herself and her readers, she came from south-east Gaul, and that her monastery was perhaps at Marseilles or Arles, where there were well-known religious houses in the sixth century, to which he assigns her pilgrimage, viz.

in the first half of the reign of Justinian .

A considerable portion of Meister's argument rests upon the language used by Etheria.

He goes into minute details over her usages, and the upshot of his examination is that she was not unlearned, but was familiar with the Scriptures, to the language of which her own is similar, her phrases being often suggested by, or formed from, the same.

This seems to him to point to a later date and a different nationality than the one we have accepted.

We, too, do not think she was for her time and country badly educated and unlearned nor unfamiliar with the Scriptures: no one could think that.

But, making all possible allowances for the inaccuracies of the scribe to whom we owe our knowledge of her narrative—and they are probably serious and frequent—yet the fact remains that she wrote a very slipshod Latin.

Her deficiencies cannot all be due to the carelessness or ignorance of the copyist.

And this is the more surprising because, though she does not appear to have picked up any Syriac or other native tongue in her journeys, yet she is by no means without knowledge of Greek, for she uses quite a large number of Greek words and phrases, and transliterates them as a rule with accuracy .

Besides that, she displays great intelligence and exercises great powers of observation and appreciation of what she sees and hears wherever she goes; and this makes her narrative always lively and entertaining, in spite of the defects in her style and occasional obscurity of meaning.

Stress has been laid, and not without reason, on the indications of Etheria's social importance which her story affords.

Wherever she went she was well received and entertained by bishops, clergy, and monks, who spared no pains in acting as Cithaeronæ to her.

She was provided with escorts of Roman soldiers when passing through a disturbed and dangerous district between Sinai and Egypt, page 14, but dispensed with their services when it was no longer necessary to trouble them, page 17.

Though she often uses the first person singular as the head of the pilgrimage, yet she no less often speaks of we and us in a way that serves to show that she travelled with a certain retinue of her own.

While in the journey to Mount Sinai she was also accompanied by certain holy guides, teductores, and again when she went to Mount Nebo.

The cost of this expedition from west to east and back again, which occupied several years, must have been great, however abundant the hospitality was which she met with.

In the return from Mount Sinai to Clysma, Suez, she mentions the animals she used.

These were apparently not camels, for she immediately speaks of them by name as used by the natives of Paran.

But for the first part of the ascent of Mount Nebo, east of Jordan, she was able to use asellus, an ass or mule, whereas she had to walk all the way up Mount Sinai, not even a sella, litter, being possible, because of its great steepness.

If she had been an ordinary pilgrim in those days she would have been content to go on foot the whole way.

Such considerations again were amongst those which led earlier editors to identify our pilgrim, as has been said above, with either Galaplacidia or with Sylvia of Aquitaine.

But though there is a certain amount in Sylvia's case that fits in with what is here contained, yet the terms in which the Lausiac history of Palladius speaks of her in connection with her journey from Jerusalem to Egypt show that she was an ascetic of the most severe type in her practices, and that our pilgrim never shows herself to have been, however much she respects and admires asceticism in those she meets or visits.

Three other matters remain to be considered which bear upon the dates of the narrative, besides being of general interest.

A. Etheria speaks of the three bishops whom she came across in Mesopotamia, at Bathnae, Edessa, and Haran, as conspicuous for their holiness, being both monk and confessor in each case.

She does not apply this word confessor to any other of the bishops, although she has several times noted that they were or had been monks formerly, while the still vigorous old priest whom she saw on Mount Sinai had been both a monk from an early age and as they say here an ascete.

According to Monsignor Duquesne, we know that the three bishops who are called confessors were victims of the persecution under Valens, A.D. 367-378, page 547.

We can hardly be said to know this, but only that this is more likely that they were, other things being considered, than that they were those whom the emperor Anastasius, favoring the Monophysites, drove out in the early years of the sixth century, as Meister maintains.

Is it, however, altogether certain that confessor in these three cases means more than a stricter ascete than an ordinary monachus? Duquesne himself recognizes that this is a frequent meaning of the title in those days.

See Christian Worship, page 142, 173, 284, and 420, and Bradesol, East du Breve, Rome, page 57.

Still Eulogius, bishop of Edessa, died 388, seems to have suffered persecution, and this would no doubt fit in with our date for the pilgrimage.

B. Etheria quotes the bishop of Haran's statement to her that at that time the Persians held the district of Nisibis and Ur, and the Romans had no place there, page 39.

As the emperor Jovian had yielded the district to King Sapor in 363, that seems to be the explanation of the statement.

On the other hand, in the years 540-545, the Romans under Balisarius regained their supremacy in the East, so that Meister allows that the pilgrimage must have taken place before then.

For that reason, among others, he assigns it to 534 or thereabouts.

C. Dr. Bernard has drawn our attention to another point in favor of the earlier date, which Meister seems to have overlooked.

It is this.

When we come to the pilgrimages which are admittedly of the sixth century, e.g. the so-called Breviarum and the pilgrimage of Theodosius, both of which may be dated about 530, we find among the churches in Jerusalem visited by pilgrimage St. Peter in the house of Caiaphas and St. Sophia in the Praetorium.

Etheria knows nothing of these.

She names only the Martyrium, the Anastasis, and the Church of Zion, and as her description of the holy city is rich in detail, it may be reasonably concluded that these were the only churches which she saw, and that her visit was prior to the erection of those named by Theodosius.

Meister uses a similar argument to prove that the pilgrimage must be prior to the building by Justinian of the Church of St. Mary d'Apara in 543, as it certainly was.

But this reasoning is equally conclusive to establish its priority to the Breviarium and the Peregrinatio Theodosii.

The present edition and its editors.

That part of the text which relates to Jerusalem had been translated for the English version, second edition, of Duquesne's Origines du Culture Chrétienne, which Mrs. McClure published in 1904.

For it she was mainly indebted, as she tells us, to her brother, the Reverend George Herbert, who had the advantage of many criticisms and suggestions from so eminent a scholar as the late Canon Charles Evans, formerly headmaster of King Edward's School, Birmingham.

Mr. Herbert also translated the rest of the text which now appears with the same assistance.

Moreover, he read through K. Meister's book on the subject and made a careful resume of his conclusions for her, of which use has been freely made in this introduction.

Most of the footnotes were added to the text by Mrs. McClure herself, a few by the present writer.

But though the results of their joint labors had been set up in print for some time, and she had spent a good deal of time in further research and thought over them with a view to writing the introduction, she had to lay the work aside while she was completing the fifth edition of Christian Worship and seeing it through the press.

This she had hardly done when she was called away just as she was intending to resume her work on The Pilgrimage of Etheria last summer, 1918.

There are many reasons why we mourn her loss, and surely among them we must reckon this, that we are not now permitted to share with her the joy of seeing the fruits of her long study brought to completion.

She left very few materials for the introduction behind among her papers, and though the present writer has in all cases done his best to utilize what there was and to reproduce what he thought to be in her mind on various points, yet he has had very largely to start de novo in drawing up the introductory sections and to treat the text more or less independently.

He must be forgiven, therefore, if he has failed sometimes to do justice to her ideas and to the researches on which she had so long been engaged, and if there is a certain amount of confusion in arrangement and of discrepancy between her part of the volume and his.

Mrs. McClure had frequently discussed points with friends of considerable expert knowledge like Archbishop Bernard, Monsignor Duquesne, Professor Flinders Petrie, and others, and sometimes mentions them by name in her notes as having told her this or that.

The first named of these had written a short foreword to the volume in September 1916, but he has requested the present writer to withdraw it as being no longer suitable to its purpose and to use the additional facts that he there gave in his own introduction.

This he has been very glad to do and begs to acknowledge his indebtedness to his grace for them, as well as to others, who have contributed to the production of the book in its present form, and in particular to the Reverend A.D. Rigby, who has read through the proofs and made several valuable suggestions which he has been able to adopt.

Etheria's route to and from Constantinople.

We have, of course, no hint of the route taken by Etheria from her home in the extreme west of Europe as far as Constantinople and back again, unless her mention of the river Rhone be taken as indicating that she crossed it in her journey, possibly at Arles.

But it is interesting to note that nearly fifty years before her, the anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux gives the route which she pursued and that may possibly have been Etheria's too.

She went out by land, she tells us, across the north of Italy, through Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia, and Thrace, while on her return she embarked at Olon in Epirus and crossed the south Adriatic to Hydrontum, Otranto, and reached home by Rome and Milan.

End of section 1.