Adomnán’s Book on the Holy Places

There are lots of academics out there mining rich—if obscure—topics. That may seem obvious, but it’s not appreciated enough when it comes to evaluating the creative output of academics. Some stuff is just published for tenure.. and you can recognize the heartless stuff pretty easily. But then there are people who explore odd corners that will just never get reviewed in the New York Times. These academic books are engaged in the project of imagining the terms by which the world was experienced in a distant time or place. This stretch of the imagination exemplifies the values promoted here at Old Roads.. and over the summer I want to search for some ways to spotlight recent academic books you will never run into in mainstream reviews.

An example of a book like this is Adomnan and the Holy Places by Thomas O’Loughlin, although strictly speaking it is not a new publication since it came out in 2007. It was published by T & T Clark, and I happened to come across it in some catalog and then requested that our library pick it up. Adomnán was a monastic and theologian from the 7th century AD. He is best known for his life of Columba, available as a Penguin Classic. He also wrote On the Holy Places, which is a topographic description of the Holy Land as recalled by Arculf, a mysterious figure who was supposedly shipwrecked near Iona (in Scotland) on his return from the Holy Land.. and then described that distant land to a rapt Adomnán (at least that is the story).

O’Loughlin’s book tries to establish On the Holy Places as a serious work of theology.. instead of allowing it to remain as just a curiosity. This attempt to rejuvenate a genre is relevant to my own work since I would like to make a parallel argument about Maqrizi’s Khitat (a description of Cairo). At one point O’Loughlin writes some pointed lines about methodology:

One can always be tempted to start with modernity and see all earlier work as simply leading toward this finale. We can see this trend when modern maps of Palestine and the Mediterranean are used as the end-papers to the most widely used critical edition of the Greek New Testament, inviting the reader to imagine that those who wrote about those places in the text had the same view of the interrelationships of places that we have. This is the assumption that their world is just a a less accurate version of our world. [39]

I like the way O’Loughlin evokes the maps on the flyleaves of modern editions of the Bible. It is a reminder how even the physical apparatus of our books pushes us to wrongly imagine the views of the world held by ancient authors. It lets us get away with not asking the really hard question: what are the points of reference within which these authors lived and experienced their world? The answer to that question will not be a fuzzier version of a modern map, but something else entirely.. perhaps resembling the schematic “mental maps” that O’Loughlin supplies in this book.

O’Loughlin goes on to more exactly diagnose the issue:

A failure to recognize the genre to which [On the Holy Places] belongs and the dynamics of that tradition is indeed a failure to understand what is being read by assuming Arculf’s worldview—Adomnán is effectively eliminated within this approach—and that of a modern observer are identical. A historian might call this the error of anachronism; a theologian might see in it the essence of fundamentalism; but at the very least it is a case of lack of attention and of despising the text, ignoring its richness and complexity, by reducing it to a quarry for one’s own concerns. [40]

A central part of “despising the text” is the assumption of a common cognitive and cultural frame shared across time. Everyone realizes that technology and modes of life change drastically as we move back in time.. but commonly when we think about the past we just imagine ourselves dressed kind of funny and riding a horse.. or something. In this case the complexities of texts are inconsequential.. and can mostly be ignored. If one takes seriously the idea that human beings perceive the world in vastly different ways, then the complexities of the text are not there to be overlooked, but rather are to be carefully sifted with the goal of arriving at an understanding of this historical person/community.

Unfortunately none of this comprises a recipe for success in contemporary best-seller charts. Those books thrive by making us feel as if the past is a mirror in which we can see ourselves.