The Healing Journey: Experience, Practice, Affect, and Imagination in Christian Therapeutic Pilgrimage

Abstract

This article examines Christian therapeutic pilgrimage as a historical form of healing grounded in experiential processes later studied by aesthetics. Drawing on sources from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages, it identifies four intertwined mechanisms—sensory-embodied, ludic-enactive, affective-participative, and narrative-imaginative—through which pilgrimage produced therapeutic effects. Sensory engagement fostered psychophysical balance; distance and penitential practices enabled self-transformation; collective rituals channelled passions into communal attunement; and imagination and narration allowed the reworking of suffering into meaning. Together, these mechanisms articulate a proto-aesthetic model of care in which embodiment, emotion, and imagination converge. The article concludes by suggesting that this framework can illuminate contemporary practices in art therapy and videotherapy, where the interplay of sensory experience, enactive participation, and narrative imagination reactivates the ancient synergy between external representation and inner transformation.