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‘Secular men and women’: Egeria’s Lay Congregation in Jerusalem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Rachel Moriarty
Rachel Moriarty*
Affiliation:
King Alfred’s College, Winchester
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Egeria’s account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt, in his analysis elsewhere in this volume, discusses the part played by monks in Egeria’s ‘scriptural vision’. This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’ Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 36: The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History , 2000 , pp. 55 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2000

References

1 See pp. 45-54.

2 These terms, in a modern context, are imprecise and open to question: clergy, it is argued, do not lose their ‘lay’ status, and religious communities include ‘third orders’ or ‘tertiaries’ who are not completely inside them. I shall use the word ‘lay’ to mean those not formally ordained or living in religious communities; but, as the paper shows (p. 61, below), there was a comparable ambiguity in Egeria’s time. See Fontaine, Jacques, ‘The birth of the laity’, in McGinn, Bernard, Meyendorff, John, and Leclercq, Jean, eds, Christian Spirituality, I: Origins to the Twelfth Century (New York, 1985), pp. 453–75.Google Scholar

3 Textual references in brackets are to Egeria’s work, from the following editions: Wilkinson, John, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land (3rd edn, Warminster, 1999)Google Scholar [hereafter Wilkinson]; Egeria, Diary of a Pilgrimage, ed. and tr. George E. Gingras, Ancient Christian Writers, 38 (New York and Ramsey, NJ, 1970) [hereafter Gingras]; Egèrie, Journal de voyage (itinéraire), ed. and tr. Pierre Maraval and Valerius du Bierzo, Lettre sur la Bse Egerie, ed. and tr. Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, SC, 296 (Paris, 1997) [hereafter Maraval] - this includes the Latin text, from which quotations are taken. Besides the commentaries in these works, the following form the basis of these summarized conclusions: Hunt, David, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312-460 (Oxford 1982), and Wilken, Robert, The Land called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT, and London 1992)Google Scholar.

4 Augustine, Confessions, 1, xi, 17; V, xiv, 25; VI, xi, 18. For translation, see Augustine, Saint, Confessions, tr.Chadwick, Henry (Oxford 1991)Google Scholar, from which references are taken.

5 Hippolytus, , Apostolic Tradition, 17, in Hippolytus, a Text for Students, ed. Cuming, Geoffrey J. (Nottingham 1976).Google Scholar

6 Basil, Regulae Fusius Tractatae (The Longer Rules), XV, 356, D-E, trans, in Clarke, W. K. L. Lowther, The Ascetical Works of St Basil (London 1925), pp. 175–8.Google Scholar

7 Wilkinson, pp. 51-2.

8 Gingras, p. 241 n.396.

9 Clark, Gillian, ‘The Fathers and the children’, SCH, 31 (1994), pp. 1–27 Google Scholar, and Fontaine, ‘Birth of the laity’, pp. 472-3, who quotes Augustine, On John, 51.13.

10 For the text of Cyril’s Baptismal Homilies, see Yarnold, Edward, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation (Slough 1972), pp. 65–95.Google Scholar

11 Maraval, p. 27.

12 Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, pp. 164-5. There may even be a political implication here, so soon after Theodosius had issued his edict Cunctos populos in 380, which set Roman Christianity as authoritative throughout the empire (Cod. Theod., XVI. 1.2; text in Stevenson, J., ed., rev.Frend, W. H. C., Creeds, Councils, and Controversies (London, 1989)Google Scholar [hereafter CCC], p. 150). There is some doubt about its effect, but it would surely have seemed significant to western Christians like Egeria and her community.

13 See the ‘Letter of Valerius’, 1 and 4-5, translated in Wilkinson pp. 200-4, and Maraval, pp. 323-49.

14 For discussion on the differences between these terms, see Wilkinson, pp. 46-8.

15 See W. Jardine Grisbrooke, The formative period: cathedral and monastic Offices’ in Cheslyn Jones et al, eds, The Study of Liturgy (London 1978), p. 358.

16 Ibid., pp. 360-1.

17 See Palmer, Anne-Marie, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar, chs 3-4, on Sidonius Apollinaris and his ‘circle of like-minded litterati’, and Fontaine, ‘Birth of the laity’,

pp. 453-75.

18 Jerome, Ep. 127 (trans, in CCC, pp. 197-200), and Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina (trans, in W. Lowther Clarke, The Life of St Macrina (London, 1916)).

19 Jerome, Ep. 22, 34, trans, in CCC, p. 166.

20 Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 113-14, and Wilkinson, pp. 60-4. As he mentions earlier (p. 8), the notion of pilgrimage to holy places was not supported by all.

21 Especially at Rome and Milan; see Dix, Gregory, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster, 1945), pp. 329–30 Google Scholar; and for Milan see Augustine, , Confessions, IX, vii, 15.Google Scholar

22 See Grisbrooke, ‘Formative period’, p. 367.

23 Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, p. 199.

24 Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 122-5; he quotes Leo’s advice to Eudocia, Ep. 123, and Jerome’s idea of the patria of the Lord, Ep. 108.

25 See the account of the Church in Rome in 250, in Eusebius, , Historia ecclesiastica, VI, 43, 11–12 Google Scholar, translated in Stevenson, J., ed. (rev. W. H. C. Frend), A New Eusebius (London, 1987), p. 232 Google Scholar. Augustine’s conversion, though individually undertaken, caused him to give up secular work in favour of Christian community life: Confessions, IX, ii, 4-iii, 5.

26 Dix, Shape of the Liturgy, p. 329.

27 Ibid.; and see Augustine, , Confessions, IV, ii Google Scholar, 2.

28 Hunt, Holy Lana Pilgrimage, p. 150; he quotes Jerome, Ep. 58.

29 See Paul Meyendorff, ‘Eastern liturgical theology’, in McGinn, Meyendorff, and Leclercq, Christian Spirituality, p. 354; and Wilken, Land Called Holy, pp. 113-14.