Pluralistic Pilgrimage: Travel as the Quest for the Strange

Abstract

Pluralistic Pilgrimage: Travel as the Quest for the Strange Frederick J. Ruf “The aim of knowledge,” declares Hegel, “is to divest the objective world of its strangeness and to make us more at home in it.”1 Some might say the same of pilgrimage. William James quotes Hegel’s statement in A Pluralistic Universe, a text that I’d like to propose as a model for contemporary pilgrimage. If I’m allowed to shift Hegel’s concern somewhat, his words surely offer the two chief options in pilgrimage: the effort to be at home, and to use pilgrimage to go, we might say, Home; or the effort to leave home, to seek the strange and plunge into it. It’s a stark choice and one we need to keep in mind when looking at least one contemporary form of pilgrimage, travel. We might see the search for Home in many analyses of Medieval Christian pilgrimage, for it is often seen as a powerful device for establishing and cementing identity. As Jonathan Sumption points out in Pilgrimage: an Image of Medieval Religion, pilgrimage acted as a counter and solution to the profound disruptions of evil, be they physical, emotional, or spiritual. Life was seen to contain overpowering forces that governed and could destroy an individual’s existence, both on earth and in an afterlife. Religious life had “a desperate, almost frenzied quality” in the later middle ages because present and eternal health, harmony, and happiness were so precarious.2 Pilgrimage offered opportunities to re‐form the self according to healing models by journeying to sites that housed the relics of the saints or presented the scenes of Christ’s life and death. Though we might see medieval Christian pilgrimage as itself disruptive since it involved, as Sumption himself suggests, “an escape from the stifling framework of parish life,” as well as “curiosity to see new places and experience new things,” its importance in the stabilizing of the medieval self is certainly what Sumption’s analysis emphasizes. Victor and Edith Turner’s classic study of pilgrimage might be largely viewed as outmoded and non‐empirical, yet it is still highly influential, and it doesn’t contradict this aspect of Sumption’s view, for while there is a separation from home and liminality on the journey, according to the Turners, there is also “aggregation” on arrival when one is exposed to the powerfully formative symbols of the destination at a point (in time and space) when the pilgrim is most susceptible to their effect.3 More recently, scholars like Eade and Sallnow focus on the contested discourses of any given pilgrimage site, an understanding that multiplies the identities that are formed, but that does not seem to undercut the stability of what takes place according to any given story of the site when the pilgrim arrives. The definition of “home” may be contested but it still seems to be Home that is both sought and found.4 What draws my interest in this essay is the very un‐Hegelian desire to be less at home, the desire to seek the strange. I believe it can be found preeminently in the experience of that most contemporary form of pilgrimage, travel, even in the most common tourism. The religious importance of travel and its oddness are insufficiently appreciated and demand greater understanding which I hope to begin to provide. William James’s pluralism and pilgrimage In his classic study of pluralism, James takes issue with what he calls the “block universe,” the view that we live in a clear and unified world that is transparent and uniform and familiar.5 That block universe utterly lacks pluralism. Being an early twentieth‐century New Englander, James probably is thinking of a block of wood or ice, both of them with a uniform composition, grain or crystalline structure. Both are homely objects, perhaps for chopping or carpentry, or for cooling. Severely geometrical, they have the right angles of post and lintel, of beams, of frames, of flooring, of joists and studs, and of civilizations. And, yet, I can’t help but see a neighborhood metaphor in James’s figure, as well. Mightn’t James be arguing against a...