Liturgy and Architecture

From the Early Church to the Middle Ages

Allan Doig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351921855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this book Allan Doig explores the interrelationship of liturgy and architecture from the Early Church to the close of the Middle Ages, taking into account social, economic, technical, theological and artistic factors. These are crucial to a proper understanding of ecclesiastical architecture of all periods, and together their study illuminates the study of liturgy. Buildings and their archaeology are standing indices of human activity, and the whole matrix of meaning they present is highly revealing of the larger meaning of ritual performance within, and movement through, their space. The excavation of the mid-third-century church at Dura Europos in the Syrian desert, the grandeur of Constantine's Imperial basilicas, the influence of the great pilgrimage sites, and the marvels of soaring Gothic cathedrals, all come alive in a new way when the space is animated by the liturgy for which they were built. Reviewing the most recent research in the area, and moving the debate forward, this study will be useful to liturgists, clergy, theologians, art and architectural historians, and those interested in the conservation of ecclesiastical structures built for the liturgy.

CHAPTER 1

The Earliest Christian Worship and its Setting

The New Testament gives us important clues, however fragmentary, about both the form and context of the worship offered by the earliest followers of Jesus. The disciples, like Jesus himself, were observant Jews, and though at first after the crucifixion they cowered behind locked doors, their subsequent visions of the risen Lord transformed their lives (John 20:19–20). In the very last verse of Luke (24:53), after the Ascension the apostles went up ‘and were continually in the Temple blessing God’. The Temple of Jerusalem had been the centre of Jewish worship since the time of Solomon, then destroyed by Nebuchadrezzar in 587/586 BCE. It was rebuilt when the exiles returned from Babylon in 538 BCE, and extensively renewed by Herod from 20 BCE. In Acts (2:46), the three thousand who were baptized following Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, ‘day by day’ spent much time together in the Temple. And it would be reasonable to assume that it was a return to their habitual pattern of worship when, after Pentecost, ‘Peter and John were going up to the Temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour’.

However, only about four decades after the crucifixion, in 70 CE, the Temple was destroyed by Titus, never to be rebuilt; then, with the exception of sacrifice, the social and religious functions of the Temple were taken over by the synagogue. Even by that time the Temple was only a distant image for the Jews of the diaspora, and its ways and worship were not known to them in any detail. Its lasting effect on Christian worship was as an image to be taken at different historical points and filled retrospectively with particular religious significance; examples of this will be seen later. Still, the power of such an image must not be underestimated, especially when the image usually emerges as a particular interpretation of the earthly reflection of a heavenly sanctuary.¹ Even when the contrast to, as opposed to the connection with, the Temple is emphasized, the image remains powerful, not to say controlling; for example, Gerd Theissen in his recent exploration of A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion argues:

The objects present in the rite are removed from everyday, secular use – including the places and buildings in which the rites take place. A theory of primitive Christian religion has to deal with a great divide in the ritual forms of religious expression. At that time – in different ways in Judaism and Christianity (and also in philosophy) – the traditional ritual actions (bloody animal sacrifices) were replaced by new (bloodless) rites. Traditional holy objects like the temple lost their ‘holiness’. But above all a paradoxical new relationship developed between ritual actions and their interpretations: the first Christians developed a religious sign system without temple, without priests, yet in contradiction to the facts they maintained these traditional elements of religious sign systems in their interpretations – often even in an archaic form what was already obsolete at that time. They may have ceased to sacrifice animals, but in their interpretations they reactivated a form of sacrifice which was already long obsolete, namely human sacrifice – as the atoning sacrifice of Jesus.²

This passage clearly demonstrates that the effects or influences of the Temple can be construed or presented in very different ways, and although in Theissen’s sense the theological, architectural and even liturgical influence of the Temple was both considerable and complex (which will be further explored later), the inheritance by the early Church of specific patterns of liturgical worship was negligible.

On the other hand, the relationship with the synagogue was very different. When not in Jerusalem, the followers of Jesus, ‘as his custom was’ (Luke 4:16), would worship in the synagogue. St Paul too was clearly a strict and enthusiastic Jew who, even after his conversion, would go first to the synagogue on his arrival in a new city. When he and Barnabas journeyed to Cyprus, ‘arriving at Salamis, they declared the word of God in the Jewish synagogues’ (Acts 13:5), then in Pisidian Antioch they went to a service in the synagogue consisting of readings from the Law and the Prophets followed by a sermon from Paul himself. The following sabbath, the Apostles returned at the invitation of the congregation, but on that occasion there was conflict, as there was in the next town, Iconium (Acts 14). In the beginning, Christians were one non-normative Jewish sect among several, certainly in the diaspora; for example, on Delos from the second to the first century BCE there were two widely divergent Jewish groups, one Samaritan, and the other of a more orthodox cast.³ Like Jesus before them, Jewish Christians soon met serious opposition in the synagogue, and were eventually banned from its gatherings.

Before the destruction of the Temple, these synagogue gatherings focused on readings from the Hebrew scriptures, and in the diaspora at least, on prayer, but there is little evidence of the use of prayer in the synagogues of Palestine itself apart from a few references such as Matthew 6:5: ‘they love to stand and pray in the synagogues’. Although over a hundred sites have been identified as ancient synagogues in Palestine, only half a dozen can be securely dated before Constantine, and those are in the diaspora. The archaeological evidence indicates that the latter were all built for other uses, by and large domestic, and then adapted: ‘In the Diaspora [the synagogue] functioned as a social as well as religious centre, and there was neither a fixed liturgy nor architecture in the pre-70 period.’⁴ It was probably only in the second century, in association with the development of the Torah shrine as an architectural element, that a liturgy became more elaborated and fixed. The earliest known example is in the first synagogue at Dura-Europos on the right bank of the Euphrates in the Syrian Desert. The synagogue was adapted within a private house still in domestic use, towards the end of the second century.

Liturgical scholars had long maintained that Christians took some of their Jewish inheritance with them in the singing of hymns and psalms and the reading of scripture in the context of praise and prayer, but recently many have begun to question whether such a ‘service of the word’ existed as a separate entity before the third century.⁵ The evidence of the Torah shrine at Dura may push that date back to the end of the second century, the same time that Tertullian described the content of Christian meetings: ‘We meet together as an assembly and congregation, that, offering up prayer to God as with united force, we may wrestle with him in our supplications. … We assemble to read our sacred writings, if any peculiarity of the times makes either forewarning or reminiscence needful.’ In passing, Tertullian also mentions the setting of worship:

You must get the accountants to tell you what the tenths of Hercules and the sacrificial banquets cost; the choicest cook is appointed for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries; the smoke from the banquet of Serapis will call out the firemen. Yet about the modest supper-room of the Christians alone is a great ado made. Our feast explains itself by its name. The Greeks call it agapè, i.e. affection. … The participants, before reclining, taste first of prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger; as much is drunk as benefits the chaste. … After manual ablution, and the bringing in of lights, each is asked to stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God, either one from the holy Scriptures, or one of his own composing, – a proof of the measure of our drinking. As the feast commenced with prayer, so with prayer it is closed.⁶

Since the Apology was written for a polemical purpose, Tertullian may have exaggerated the contrast, including the simplicity of the room, but it is useful to have a description of the structure and flavour of the occasion, with music as an important part. Scriptural ‘hymns to God’ doubtless included the psalms, a rich and wonderfully resilient element of Temple worship. The strength of the form is such that the musical chant has shown remarkable consistency for three thousand years from Temple to Gregorian to Anglican chant:

Even in translation, the nature of the psalms have produced remarkably consistent patterns of musical setting over a period of nearly 3,000 years. Plainsong, Anglican chant, or the more recent settings of Joseph Gelineau all echo the patterns of the original Hebrew. … This suggests that the structure and beauty of the Hebrew psalms are too strong to be neglected by musicians and will continue to enrich Jewish and Christian music.⁷

Tertullian tells us that every member of the community gave what they could for its use in these acts of worship, and for some that would mean hospitality and space in their houses for meetings of the assembly, and a private domestic setting was consistently the architectural setting of the earliest Christian liturgies. What he describes is entirely consistent with aspects of worship of the Apostolic age that can be gleaned from the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles.⁸ Typically, the dining room of the house, or triclinium, was on the top floor, where it would be well lit and catch the breeze. The Last Supper itself had been celebrated in such an upper room of a house borrowed for the occasion (Matthew 26:18; Mark 14:14; Luke 22:11) and after Pentecost new Christians broke bread together in their homes (Acts 2:46) and here in Jerusalem, as later in Corinth (Acts 18), there would appear to have been a number of loosely associated house-churches.

Eventually, a part, or even the whole, of a house would be given over permanently to worship, when physical alterations would be carried out to accommodate changing practices. In the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr wrote what is the earliest surviving detailed description of the Sunday eucharistic breaking of bread. Because, as he says of the eucharist, ‘no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins’,⁹ there was a need for the exclusion of the uninitiated, and increasingly for a specially adapted built environment to accommodate the rite as it became gradually elaborated and more strictly codified as numbers grew:

We afterwards [that is, after baptism and first eucharist] continually remind each other of these things. The wealthy among us help all those in need, and we always keep together. For everything we receive we praise the maker of all things through his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. On the so-called Sunday everyone in town or countryside gathers together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read out, for as long as time permits. Next, when the reader has finished, the president in an address admonishes and exhorts us to imitate these good examples. Then we all stand up together and offer prayers; when we have finished praying, as I said before [in section 65], bread, wine and water are brought out, and the president offers prayers of thanks, to the best of his ability; the people assent, saying Amen, and each person receives and shares in that over which thanks have been given, and a portion is taken by the deacons to those not present. The wealthy and willing each gives what he wants as each sees fit, and what is collected is deposited with the president. He helps orphans and widows, and those in need through sickness or any other reason, those in prison, foreigners staying with us; in a word, he takes care of everyone in distress.

On Sunday we make our common gathering since it is the day on which God changed darkness and matter and made the world, and on which Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead.¹⁰

Unlike Paul (1 Corinthians 11), Justin makes no mention of the agape, and in fact Tertullian is the only one to record a single community with celebrations of both the eucharist and a meal he refers to as an agape.¹¹ It used to be accepted that eucharist and meal became disengaged from one another very early in the history of the Church and that the meal finally ceased to be celebrated. Contemporary liturgical scholarship tends to draw a less rigid distinction between the two, seeing them as varieties of sacramental practice. The disappearance of the practice of taking a more extensive sacramental meal is intimately bound up with the architectural setting. The house in which hospitality wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Earliest Christian Worship and its Setting
• 2 Constantine, Continuity and Change in the Fourth Century
• 3 The Emergence of the Byzantine Rite and the Church Building as Sacrament
• 4 Late Antiquity in the West and the Gallican Rite
• 5 Carolingian Architecture and Liturgical Reform
• 6 Monasticism, Pilgrimage and the Romanesque
• 7 Gothic Architecture and the Latin Rite: From Origins to the Close of the Middle Ages
• Bibliography
• Index