Egeria--The Tourist Pilgrim Nun From the Fourth Century and the Liturgy of Holy Week

Egeria 

I think one of the reasons I am so enamored of the Holy Week Liturgies is that they continue the oldest known liturgical forms of worship in the Church.  While there are hints about the worship of the late first century in the Book of Revelation, and while the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and Hippolytus provide some glimpses into the liturgies of the second and third centuries, tt is the travel journal of Egeria, a nun from modern Galicia (North-western Spain) describing the annual commemoration of the Lord’s Pasch in Jerusalem that really fills out our understanding of the Church’s foundational liturgical practices. And reading her account of the festivities of Palm Sunday and the drama of the Triduum we can see just how our liturgical uses developed from the practices of the early Church. 

The Christians of Jerusalem in Egeria’s day were far more devout than we—Holy Week was an almost continuous single prayer with the faithful gathering from before cockcrow in the morning until after dark at night for the singing of psalms and attentive listening to readings, but the noted elements of our Holy Week—the procession with palms, the evening Eucharist on Holy Thursday, The veneration of the Cross on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, the baptisms at the Great Vigil—are all there in the last decades of the fourth century at Jerusalem.  There is also a somewhat primitive sense of the Stations of the Cross—admittedly not a liturgical service for us but it was for them—on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, when the faithful gather at the various sites such as the column of the scourging for prayers.  Egeria (I prefer the more classic spelling Aegeria but no one else seems to) spent three years in the Jerusalem and wrote her sisters back in Galicia a fervent and detailed account of the Church practices.   

Reading Egeria’s account I cannot but wonder what we can do to deepen our appreciation of the mysteries of Our Lord’s death and Resurrection during Holy Week.  I think an increased use of the daily offices and in particular the re-introduction of Tenebrae, would be a good step.  Modern adaptations of the singing of psalms and prayers such as Taizé prayer also can be deeply moving.  Night time processions with guided meditations and hymns at various stations would recapture the way the Church moved from the Garden of Olives to Golgotha and the tomb.  Even reviving the medieval tradition of the “watch at the tomb” could deepen the experience. 

From a historical point of view, Egeria’s journal is particularly fascinating not only because she shows us the basic development of the Holy Week Liturgy as it had evolved by the end of the fourth century, but because we have a woman who is free to travel as extensively as Egeria did on her pilgrimage that lasted over a period of years; we have a woman who can comment insightfully on the Liturgy  and on the practices of the Church, and we have a woman who is—unlike other women in the Romano-Christian world, in charge of her own destiny and not subject to the oversight of a male superior, familial or ecclesiastical.  Today she would be on the leadership team of the LCWR or one of the “Nuns On The Bus.” 

A careful reading of her account permits us to see the fissures that were already developing between the Liturgical approaches of the Eastern and Western Rites.  Some of the ceremonies she describes survive only in the West, many more only in the East.  In both the East and West the liturgies would become more and more elaborate over the centuries but the central core would remain.  In the Middle Ages, both East and West began to play around with the clock giving the ceremonies of Holy Week a surrealism.  Matins and Lauds gradually get shifted from the earliest hours of the pre-dawn (say 2 am until 4:30) to the evening before so as not to discourage the sleepy from prayerful vigil.  And thus prayers and hymns written for the morning are being celebrated at night.  To balance this out, Vespers—the evening prayer—is being said at midday and often even in the morning.  The Good Friday Liturgy is moved from the Hour of the Lord’s Death into the morning and the Easter Vigil is now on Holy Saturday morning.  The Liturgy had become, as the Irish say, “a dog’s dinner”—a mashup of all sorts of things that are totally out of step with the mysteries being celebrated.

During the Second World War the German and Austrian clergy, and especially the monks, restricted from so much of their pastoral work by the Third Reich undertook extensive research in the history of the Liturgical development.  The Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany was particularly ambitious in reconstructing the older forms of the Triduum liturgies.  Their work paid off when in 1955 Pius XII decreed the first reforms in centuries of the Holy Week Liturgies, stripping away much of the bells and whistles that had been added over the years and restoring the Liturgies to their proper hours. These reforms of the Holy Week Liturgies were the precursors of the far more widespread Liturgical Reforms mandated by the Council and carried out by Paul VI in the Missal of 1970.

The Rites of Holy Thursday

The Main Altar of the

Church of the Holy

Sepulcher today

Aegeria’s account of Holy Thursday is very much unlike our Holy Thursday celebration as that she records no commemoration of the Last Supper (Missa in Cena Domini), the institution of the Eucharist, and the washing of the feet.  Holy Thursday in the Church of Jerusalem was all prelude to the Passion.  As in the Roman Rite today, the normal morning offices were celebrated as on a Lenten weekday and the Bishop celebrated the Eucharist in the courtyard before the Holy Sepulcher in much the usual manner.  But then the Bishop, the clergy, and the people gathered at the site of Calvary where the Eucharist was celebrated a second time but with a far greater simplicity than normal.  There was also a curious variation in the liturgy that Aegeria recounts.  Normally the bishop “offered the oblation”—celebrated the Eucharist—“before the cross.”  On Thursday before the Passion of the Lord, he celebrated it “behind the cross”
This terminology is a bit confusing, especially that while we do know the floor plan of Constantine’s Basilica and shrine, we do not know the exact layout of the Chapel where the Holy Cross was kept.  The Cross itself had been broken into several large pieces after its discovery.  One large piece went to Rome; one to Constantinople, and one was retained in Jerusalem.  (Several smaller fragments were given to various individuals or sent to other shrines.)  The piece of the Cross remaining in Jerusalem was kept in a silver reliquary-chest in a chapel within the Church of the Resurrection built on the site of Calvary.  The closeness of Calvary to the Holy Sepulcher is an amazing coincidence—probably less than a two-minute walk—the tomb clearly visible from Calvary and both are under the same roof today.  In Aegeria’s day there was an open courtyard separating the Calvary chapel from the Anastasis, or the rotunda of the Holy Sepulcher.  But there seems to be no record of the arrangement in the chapel of Calvary.  Presumably the Cross was kept on an altar in the style of which the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches still use today—square and freestanding.  As it was freestanding, the altar could be approached from any side.  Today the altar in that chapel is not free-standing—a real exception in the Orthodox world and even more exceptionally actually faces south rather than east.  To the best of my research we do not know the direction of the altar in the Constantinian chapel.  The Basilica itself faced west, again a strange phenomenon for a Church built at that time although the Roman Constantinian basilicas, Saint Peter’s on the Vatican, Saint Paul’s on the Via Appia, and Saint John’s in the Lateran were all also western-facing, not oriented. 
Whatever the direction of the altar, it seems that the bishop—when celebrating the Eucharist in the chapel at Calvary normally faced the reliquary of the Cross—that is, stood with his back to the people.  On Holy Thursday, however, he stood “behind the cross” and probably facing the people on the other side of the reliquary.  Why this aberration?  I don’t know but can only surmise that it reflects an earlier practice even as the idiosyncrasies of the Holy Week Liturgy in the Tridentine and Modern Roman Rites reflect the purity of the Rite before various accretions were added over the centuries of liturgical development.  In other words, as the liturgy changed over the decades and centuries, the ceremonies of Holy Week—because of their ties to the most sacred time of the year—remained relatively unchanged.  Thus the Good Friday liturgy with its simple and silent entrance, prostration, and opening prayer, with its series of calls to prayer and collects for the “prayers of the faithful,” its simple communion rite, and its simple dismissal show us not only the Good Friday ritual but the simplicity of the early Roman Rite before the Penitential prayers (originally private prayers of the priest), the Kyrie, Gloria, and other elaborations were added to become part of our everyday Mass. 
In the evening all gathered around the Bishop at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives and scripture lessons were read, a procession proceeds to a second site on the Mountain—one associated with the Ascension—and more scriptures are read—and then back to Gethsemane where the account of Christ’s arrest is read.  A slow procession through the night traced the steps of Christ as he was led captive back to Jerusalem. 
It is curious that Holy Thursday is rather low key in the ancient Jerusalem Church and that, at least according to Aegeria there was no commemoration of the institution of the Eucharist or of the washing of the feet.  Most of our liturgical practices for Maundy Thursday including the procession of the Eucharist to the Repository date from the medieval period and were unknown in the ancient Church.  Good Friday, on the other hand, is today much as it is described by Aegeria.

          

Of Nuns, Tourism, and the Paschal Mystery

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem

Let’s move off from Pope Francis for a few days—it being Holy Week—and look to, well, Holy Week.  We can come back to Francis after Easter, and I have not forgotten my series on the Church of England that we had begun before Pope Benedict threw the Catholic world into an uproar with his historic resignation.   But there is time for all that later.  Holy Week
needs to take some precedence. 
When we look at the history of Holy Week—which is what we are about to do—we depend on the writings of a fourth-century nun, Aegeria Sylvia, (sometimes spelt Egeria, sometimes Etheria, and sometimes just called Sylvia.  Aegeria Sylvia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early 380’s and wrote an account of it to send back to her sisters.  It is not clear where her monastery was located nor is her own nationality known with certainty other than being from the Gallic regions of what today would be South-western France or North-western Spain.  We first hear about her from Valerio of Bierzo, a seventh century Galician monk (Galicia is the north-west corner of Spain) and so refer to Aegeria as “Spanish” but “Spanish is an anachronism and the three hundred years between Aegeria and Valerio is a monitum against presuming her to be known to Valerio because they were from the same locale.  She wrote in a declining Latin that is already showing some signs of breaking down into one or another of the today’s romance languages.   And it gives us one of the earliest instances of a woman engaging in the production of literature.
Aegeria’s account does not today survive in full—at least in any known manuscript.  The surviving portion of her account opens with her visiting Mount Sinai, continues through the Holy Places of Syria-Palestine, and concludes with her visit to Constantinople.  She visits extensively throughout the mid-east, going as far as what is today Iraq to visit shrines at Edessa and Haran. 
Aegeria gives a very thorough account of the liturgical customs of the Jerusalem Church.  it is obvious that she stayed in Jerusalem a considerable period of time and was there for the feast of the Epiphany, as well as Lent and Holy Week. 
Many of our Catholic liturgical traditions originate in the Jerusalem Church of the fourth century rather than from the Roman Church.  In other words, Rome borrowed Jerusalem customs—as did the Churches of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria.  The  “liturgical year” originated at Jerusalem as the Bishop of Jerusalem, his clergy and his people would gather at the various sites mentioned in the Gospel—Bethlehem, Bethany, Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, etc. to relive the experience of Christ and his disciples by reading the appropriate gospel stories, offering prayers, hymns, and psalms, and celebrating the Eucharist on the various spots.  Pilgrimage groups in Jerusalem and the Holy Land do the same today.  Their faith was a living and vibrant appropriation of the Gospel—a walking through the Gospels as it were—that made them examine themselves for faithfulness to the life and teaching of Jesus.   
As we go through the ceremonies of Holy Week we need to ask ourselves if they are mere rituals or if they are experiences of touching for ourselves the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of the One whom we recognize to be the Christ of God.