[In the following excerpt, Holloway surveys the content of the extant text of Itinerarium Egeriae.]

Around a.d. 417, a Spanish nun, Egeria, is to be found at Mount Sinai, from there traveling to Jerusalem and Constantinople, in the footsteps of the prophets, of Christ, and of the Empress Helena.¹

Let me begin with Egeria where her surviving, mutilated manuscript has us begin, in view of Mount Sinai.² Egeria's account of her pilgrimages made Bible in hand throughout the Holy Places comes down to us in several forms. One is in the letters she wrote and sent back to Spain to her fellow nuns. That text survives, in mutilated form, from a manuscript likely copied out in Monte Cassino in the eleventh century. Another version is in a seventh-century letter written in her praise and in which the Galician monk Valerius urges his fellow monks to emulate her. Another is in a compilation made at Monte Cassino by Peter the Deacon in the twelfth century. Because Valerius' seventh-century text clearly had access to the now fragmentary version we possess of the manuscript written by Egeria in the fourth century, let me give an excerpt.

A longing for God set on fire the heart of this most blessed nun Egeria. In the strength of the glorious Lord she fearlessly set out on an immense journey to the other side of the world. Guided by God, she pressed on until after a time she reached what she had longed for, the most holy places of the birth, passion, and resurrection of the Lord. … First with great industry she perused all the books of the Old and New Testaments, and discovered all its descriptions of the holy deserts. Then in eager haste (though it was to take many years) she set out, with God's help, to explore them … moved by the longing for a pilgrimage to pray at the most sacred Mount of the Lord, she followed in the footsteps of the children of Israel when they went forth from Egypt. She travelled into each of the vast wildernesses and tracts of desert which are set forth in the Book of Exodus.³ … this woman, once having heard the voice of the gospel, hastened to the Mount of the Lord, and went, you may be sure, joyfully and without the slightest delay. They, while Moses was receiving the Law of the Lord, could not wait forty days, and made themselves a graven image to take God's place; but she awaiting the Lord's coming as though she could perceive it already, forgot her female weakness, and went on to the holy Mount Sinai …. With unflagging steps, and upheld by the right hand of God, she hastened to that beetling summit with its top almost in the clouds; and thus, borne onwards by the power of her holy zeal, she arrived at the rocky mountain-top where the divine glory itself, God Almighty, condescended to abide whilst Moses was given the holy Law. There her joyful exultation burst forth in paeans of prayer, and she offered to God the sacrifices of salvation, and giving heartfelt thanks to his glorious Majesty, went forward again. …⁴

Thus the seventh-century letter has us reach Mount Sinai where Egeria's own manuscript now has us first find her, in her emulation of the pilgrimages of Empress Helena. Valerius goes on to narrate of her other mountain ascents including those of Tabor, the Beatitudes, Carmel and the Quarantana above Jericho, all of which the Franciscan-guided pilgrimage likewise visited in 1992.

Egeria's own account tells us of the prospect of Sinai and its valley and about the mountain's ascent by stone steps:

They are hard to climb. You do not go round and round them, spiralling up gently, but straight at each one as if you were going up a wall, and then straight down to the foot, till you reach the foot of the central mountain, Sinai itself. Here then, impelled by Christ our God, and assisted by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we made the great effort of the climb. It was quite impossible to ride up, but though I had to go on foot I was not conscious of the effort; in fact I hardly noticed it because, by God's will, I was seeing my hopes coming true.

So at ten o'clock we arrived on the summit of Sinai, the Mount of God where the Law was given, and the place where God's glory came down on the day when the mountain was smoking. The church which is now there is not impressive for its size (there is too little room on the summit) but it has a grace all its own. And when with God's help we had climbed right to the top and reached the door of this church, there was the presbyter, the one who is appointed to the church, coming to meet us from his cell. He was a healthy old man, a monk from his boyhood and an ‘ascetic’ as they call it here; in fact just the man for the place. Several other presbyters met us too, and all the monks who lived near the mountain, or at least all who were not prevented from coming by their age or their health.

All there is on the actual summit of the central mountain is the church and the cave of holy Moses. … So when the whole passage had been read to us from the Book of Moses (on the very spot!) we made the Offering in the usual way and received Communion.⁵

She will elsewhere similarly stress that linking of the physical pilgrimage with its mental recollection through the book of the Bible, in her case the Old Latin Bible as Jerome was yet to write the Vulgate.⁶ She says

And it was always our practice when we managed to reach one of the places we wanted to see to have first a prayer, then a reading from the book, then to say an appropriate psalm and another prayer. By God's grace we always followed this practice whenever we were able to reach a place we wanted to see.⁷

She next tells us of their descent. “Our way out took us to the head of this valley because there the holy men had many cells, and there is also a church there at the place of the Bush (which is still alive and sprouting). … This … is the Burning Bush out of which the Lord spoke to Moses, and it is at the head of the valley with the church and all the cells. This Bush itself is in front of the church in a very pretty garden which has plenty of excellent water.”⁸ Today, the Constantinian church with its still-living supposed Burning Bush, is immured about with walls, becoming the monastery of St. Catherine of Alexandria, these walls being built by Justinian and repaired by Napoleon. But, apart from these walls and the addition of the St. Catherine legend, all is as Egeria had described it in the fourth century, the imposed fiction of all these Biblical places as being clustered together at this mountain and in this valley being carried on to this day. Indeed, when one makes this pilgrimage, it really does not seem to matter to know that the pilgrims' Mount Sinai is likely not the true Mount Sinai. The fact that generations of pilgrims have made this ascent with this belief endows this physical mountain with sanctity.⁹

The text next has us journey with Egeria from Sinai to other Holy Places.¹⁰ The manuscript which we have of Egeria's pilgrimage to the Holy Places is incomplete, lacking its beginning, its ending and several pages within its body. It is one copied out from her original text, likely in Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, later coming to Arezzo.¹¹ The manuscript, when intact, had been used by other writers, compiling accounts of the Holy Places. One such compiler is Peter the Deacon, a monk of Monte Cassino, who in 1137 dedicated his text to his Abbot Guibald. Peter the Deacon used both Bede's work on the Holy Places and Egeria's.¹² It is possible in Peter the Deacon's text, using Valerius' seventh-century letter concerning Egeria, to identify those sections which once were in Egeria's text.

It is from the text of Peter the Deacon that Egeria's descriptions of the region about Galilee can best be found. She speaks of St. Peter's House being made into a church at Capharnaum and of the adjacent synagogue, both of which pilgrims can see today. She also speaks of nearby Tabgha with its stone steps going down into the lake where Jesus had stood (where pilgrims step down into the waters to this day), and of the stone on which Christ placed the bread of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, now made, she says, into an altar. Nearby, she notes, is the Mount of the Beatitudes.¹³

In the surviving manuscript text she visits such places as Elijah's brook of Cherith and Jacob's Well, while also going farther afield to see the shrines of Holy Thecla¹⁴ and of Holy Euphemia.¹⁵ She next goes on to Constantinople, then gives her ‘loving ladies’ a full account of the Jerusalem liturgy.¹⁶

Egeria's account of Mount Sinai is a major focal point in her work. Her other most important section is the discussion of the liturgy carried out in Jerusalem. She particularly praises the Jerusalem liturgy's use of suitably juxtaposed lessons from the Old and New Testaments in tandem with the Gospel readings. With Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures first delivered in Constantine's basilica for the Holy Sepulchre in a.d. 348 and with Egeria's Pilgrimage of 381-84, we can come to an understanding of the liturgy as carried out by the Primitive Church, in particular that of Jerusalem, founded by Christ and James, versus that by Peter and Paul in Rome.¹⁷ What Egeria has to say about the Jerusalem liturgy lies more in the domain of the East rather than the West, but she is transmitting that valuable information to her fellow nuns on the shores of the Atlantic. The Church is thus indebted to women such as Helena, Egeria, Paula and Eustochium for peacefully forging again the links between Jerusalem and Rome, between the East and the West, despite the tensions underlying them.

Egeria begins her account of the Jerusalem liturgy first by telling of an ordinary week's activities in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. At cockcrow the Anastasia is opened, monks, nuns and lay people entering, singing refrains to hymns, psalms and antiphons. As soon as dawn comes they start the Morning Hymns, the bishop, who is Cyril of Jerusalem's successor, and his clergy joining them. The bishop first enters the cave of the sepulchre and inside it speaks the prayers for the catechumens and the faithful, then emerges to bless everyone. At midday another service with psalms and antiphons, the bishop joining them and again entering the cave of the Sepulchre, takes place. Another service takes place at three o'clock, a further one at four, the Lychnicon or Lucernare, at which the great glass lanterns and many candles at both the Anastasis and Golgotha are lit from a single light brought forth from within the Sepulchre. That ceremony goes back to Judaism's blessing of the candles by the women of the household on the Sabbath Eve. On Sunday these ceremonies are carried out more elaborately adding to them much censing, with the bishop reading the Gospel account of the Resurrection from within the screen of the cave to the Sepulchre and the presbyters preaching so that the people will continually be learning about the Bible and the love of God.

She next describes the celebrations at Epiphany at both Bethlehem and at Jerusalem, following that with the account for Easter. The faithful gather six days before Easter at the Lazarium at Bethany, on Lazarus Saturday. The next day begins the Great Week with the faithful meeting at the Eleona Church on the Mount of Olives where at five o'clock the Gospel account of Palm Sunday is read and all then process to Jerusalem carrying branches of olive and palm. On Maunday Thursday the faithful meet at Gethsemane; on the Friday they assemble before and kiss the wood of the True Cross at Golgotha, also the Ring of Solomon and the Horn of the Anointing; then spend the afternoon, from noon until three o'clock listening to passages from the Gospels in the open courtyard between the Cross and the Anastasis. During this period there is great fasting. The next great celebration is Pentecost which is held at the church on Sion, the site of the Upper Room, followed by the Ascension at its church. She next discusses the Lenten/Easter Cathechesis by the bishop Cyril of Jerusalem of the sponsors of the baptismal candidates in which he teaches the entire Bible and the Creed, article by article, for three hours each day of the forty days of Lent.¹⁸ Then the manuscript, which has also lost several pages within its text, tantalizingly breaks off. Now we do have an abbreviated version of these lectures, not one for every day in Lent or even in the Easter Octave, but only five, and likely written not by Cyril but by his successor John. These give us a more complete description of the Jerusalem Eucharist.¹⁹

Egeria accurately observed Christian religious practices on different continents, Africa and Asia, then her own of Europe and left a most important record of them. She was willing to pay heed to the Greek of the liturgy used in Jerusalem, though she was writing her account in Latin. She noted that the great basilicas in Jerusalem and Bethlehem were built by Constantine and adorned by Helena.²⁰ She portrays to us as well as to her intended audience of fourth-century nuns in distant Spain a figure in a landscape who, Bible in hand, participates fully in that sacred geography, responding to it with knowledge and joy.

Notes

1. It is generally thought that Egeria was in the Holy Places around A.D. 385. However, see Frank Leslie Cross, St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Protocatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catechesis (London: S.P.C.K, 1953), p. xviii, citing Jerome's Epistle 133.4.

2. Wilkinson, pp. 91-98; CETEDOC CLCLT.CD. Being interested not only in Egeria and Paula but also in women who came after them and who imitated them, such as Saint Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe of Norfolk, I too took their pilgrimages to Israel and Sinai and at two o'clock in the morning climbed Mount Sinai with a group of pilgrims. At the St. Hilda's Conference on Women and the Book in the Middle Ages I was able to show slides of these places, including a series of the greatening dawn from the top of Mount Sinai and of the Mass celebrated there by Spanish, Mexican and Italian Franciscan priests and their pilgrims.

3. The text goes on to add: “The children of Israel marched for three days, thirsty and without water; and when they murmured, and the Lord made Moses bring abundance of water out of the hard rock, the hearts of those men remained ungrateful. She at that place thirsted for the Lord, and in her heart a fount of living water sprang up into life eternal. That multitude hungered, and by God's dispensation received the holy manna coming down from heaven. But even then they despised it, and longed for the accursed food of Egypt. She at that very place was refreshed by the Word of God, and, giving him unwearying thanks, went on her way without fear. They, many times hearing God's voice, could see his grace going before them by day and night in the pillar of cloud and fire; yet still they doubted, and thought to retrace their steps.” The text resonates with the monastic morning psalm, 95, and with the Exultet of the Pascal Candle.

4. Wilkinson, pp. 175-6. The letter goes on to say, pp. 177-178: “We cannot but blush at this woman, dearest brothers, we in the full enjoyment of our bodily health and strength. Embracing the example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, she transformed the weakness of her sex into an iron strength, that she might win the reward of eternal life; and while, compassed about with her weakness, she trod this earth, she was obtaining paradise in calm and exultant glory. Though a native of Ocean's western shore, she became familiar with the East. While she sought healing for her own soul, she gave us an example of following God which is marvelously profitable for many. Here she refused rest, that she might with constancy attain to eternal glory and bear the palm of victory. Here she inflicted material burdens on her earthly body, that she might present herself irreproachable, a lover of heaven to heaven's Lord. Here, by her own will and choice she accepted the labours of pilgrimage, that she might, in the choir of holy virgins with the glorious queen of heaven, Mary the Lord's mother, inherit a heavenly kingdom.’

5. Wilkinson, p. 94. Egeria typically speaks of receiving communion after making her offering, and she also speaks of being given ‘blessings’ by the monks. Early Christians brought with them offerings of bread and wine, in so doing symbolizing themselves as the Body of the Church, of Christ, the early Eucharist being solemnized by the Bishop and served by the Deacons back to the Congregation, all functioning as the Royal Priesthood to Christ as the High Priest, represented by the Bishop. Christians also took the blessed bread into their homes to use as the reserved sacrament during the week: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1945), passim. In the Coptic church in Africa, the Korban or Mass is deeply centered upon the bread, again called the Korban, which is baked in an oven by the church the day of the Mass as small round loaves marked with crosses, one loaf being chosen out of several for the Korban itself, the remainder, called in Primitive Christianity and so called by Egeria, ‘blessings,’ being given to the congregation at the conclusion for them to take home: H. V. Morton, Through the Lands of the Bible (London: Methuen, 1938), pp. 168-77 and plate between pp. 344-345. Sometimes, however, the ‘blessings’ given to Egeria can be fruit grown by the monks in their gardens. I should like to add that at Sinai our priest guide had no wafers and I suggested he use the round leavened Egyptian brown loaves we had for supper; and he did and preached a sermon on them.

6. She also visited the next mountain which the monks said was Horeb and tells the “reverend ladies my sisters,” her fellow nuns back on the Atlantic coast in Spain: “This is the Horeb to which the holy Prophet Elijah fled from the presence of King Ahab, and it was there that God spoke to him with the words, ‘What doest thou here, Elijah?’, as is written in the Books of the Kingdoms. Indeed, whenever we arrived, I always wanted the Bible passage read to us.” Wilkinson, p. 95.

7. Wilkinson, p. 106.

8. Wilkinson, p. 96.

9. That pilgrim knowledge of African topography was to deeply influence European culture. Dante's Mount Purgatorio even is modeled on the Mount Sinai of the medieval pilgrims.

10. Let me give an example of her style: “This holy presbyter said to us, ‘You see these foundations … they were part of Melchizadek's palace. … That is the road by which holy Abraham returned … from Sodom, and it was on that road that he was met by holy Melchizadek, king of Salem.’ Then I remembered that according to the Bible it was near Salem that holy John baptized at Aenon. So I asked [about it]. … ‘There it is’, said the holy presbyter. … ‘If you like we can walk over there. It is from that spring that the village has this excellent supply of clean water you see’. … We set off. He led us along a well-kept valley to a very neat apple-orchard, and there in the middle of it he showed us a good clean spring of water which flowed in a single stream. ‘This garden’, said the holy presbyter, ‘is still known in Greek as Cepos tu agiu Iohanni, or in your language, Latin, ‘St John's Garden’.” The priest went on to speak of Easter baptisms there as still performed in that garden spring, the candidates then proceeding to the church called Opu Melchisadech in a procession by torchlight, singing psalms and antiphons, and accompanied by the clergy and the monks. Wilkinson, pp. 110-111.

11. It was discovered there in 1884 by J. F. Gamurrini and published by him in 1887. It was translated the following year into Russian and in 1891 into English: Wilkinson, p. 7. It is not without interest that Arezzo has the Piero della Francesca cycle of frescoes concerning St. Helena's Discovery of the True Cross.

12. Wilkinson, p. 179.

13. Wilkinson, pp. 194-200.

14. Wilkinson, pp. 112, 119-120, 121-123, at which she meets again her friend and acquaintance the deaconness Marthana to her great surprise and joy.

15. Wilkinson, pp. 112, 119-120, 121-123, 123.

16. Wilkinson, p. 123.

17. The Primacy of Peter, Bishop of Rome, was constantly under threat to that of James, Bishop of Jerusalem: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 176. Rome countered Jerusalem's threat by claiming that Jacobites are Monophysite heretics. Nevertheless later Spain's Compostela laid claim to the body of Saint James in order to foster its great western pilgrimage and Reconquista of that land from Muslim hegemony. Beatus' Apocalypse likewise had much to do with instituting the Reconquista. It is interesting that the pivotal text is one that places Rome as Babylon in an adversarial position to Jerusalem. See John Williams, Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination (New York: Braziller, 1977). Compostela's Galician clergy, because of James' Primacy, claimed special privileges not accorded to those of Rome. I found the Franciscans, as Custodians of the Holy Places, tended to disparage the Byzantine side of Jerusalem, as, for instance, in the otherwise excellent book by Sabino de Sandoli, The Peaceful Liberation of the Holy Places in the XIV Century (Cairo: Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies, 1990). Yet one can also find in such a work as Stephen Graham's With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem that these Jerusalem liturgical practices were revered by the Greek and Russian Orthodox and continue into our own century, liturgy having about it an extraordinary timelessness and conservatism. See Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London: Nelson, n.d.); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

18. Wilkinson, pp. 123-147; The Catechetical Lectures of Saint Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, trans. John Henry Newman (London: Smith, 1885), in A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and West, Translated by Members of the English Church.

19. Wilkinson, pp. 172-173. Besides Egeria's and Cyril's texts we also have the contemporary Old Armenian Lectionary, and between the three texts it is possible to study the fourth-century Jerusalem liturgy almost in full: Wilkinson, pp. 253-277.

20. Wilkinson, p. 167.