Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (34 page)

Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection. Already in the 380s the Jerusalem liturgy had arrived at a state of elaboration lovingly described by an exotic visitor, Egeria, a member of one of the first western European communities of nuns, who had travelled all the way from the Atlantic coast of Spain (we are lucky that a single manuscript of her account written for her sisters turned up in Italy in 1884).
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Interestingly, it is clear from Egeria's description that the Church authorities made little attempt to commemorate the other events of Jesus's life which associated him more positively with the old life of Jerusalem, such as his presentation in the Temple in adolescence, or his angry expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple. Any liturgical reminiscences around these events might have provided opportunities for Jews to make unwelcome polemical points, and they would also have compromised one of the best-attested predictions of the Saviour himself, that not one stone of the Temple would remain on another.
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The silence continued in later centuries, during which the site of the Temple remained a wilderness; its rehabilitation awaited those who listened to the prophet Muhammad (see pp. 255-61).

According to Luke's Gospel, the Mother of God celebrated her pregnancy with a song praising God for putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away.
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Now Christianity was becoming the religion of the powerful and it was entering what might be seen as an increasingly cosy alliance with high society. Power in the Graeco-Roman world lay in cities. Christians had acknowledged this by making them their own centres of power as they gradually created the uniform system of leadership by bishops and when they identified their leading bishops as 'metropolitans': those who presided over the Christian community of a 'metropolis'. This became so much a habit in both the Roman and the Greek Churches that when Rome started sending missionaries into northern Europe during the sixth and later centuries, it still encouraged bishops to find cities as bases and take their title from them, although there were hardly any communities recognizable as cities.

Even in the second century, long before the alliance with Constantine, the Apologists and Logos-theologians were witnessing to Christian willingness to express itself in the terms of conventional Classical culture (see pp. 141-3). Eventually the Latin and Greek Churches became so identified with the Graeco-Roman world that within living memory in the Christian West, almost fifteen hundred years after the disappearance of the last Western Roman emperor, schoolboys and schoolgirls learned Latin as a necessary qualification for entry in any subject to two of England's leading universities. The crucial stage in this extraordinary cultural saga was the reign of Constantine. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea so identified Constantine's purposes with God's purposes that he saw the Roman Empire as the culmination of history, the final stage before the end of the world. Gone was any expectation of a thousand-year rule of the saints, which he felt to be a deplorable falsehood, associated with the Book of Revelation, which he mistrusted. But this Christian historian felt very differently about the nature of the empire from the great Latin historians of the past, such as Tacitus or Suetonius. The city of Rome meant little to him and he took a comparatively restrained interest in its history; the empire had become something greater, more universal in God's plan.
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Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its arch-enemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west, with a dividing line running through central Europe to the west of the Balkans, and a separation of North Africa and Egypt. In Europe, that boundary is very largely that existing today between Orthodox and Catholic societies, with fairly minor adjustments, even to the division of Slavic peoples between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: 'diocese'. In the Western Latin Church, this has become the term for an area under the control of a bishop. The Churches of Orthodox tradition reserve it for the territories of the whole group of bishops who look to a particular metropolitan or patriarch, such as the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, or the Bishop of Constantinople, who is now known as the Oecumenical Patriarch. For the area presided over by a single bishop, they use a word which the West has redeployed for much smaller pastoral units served by a single priest: the
parochia
or parish. The West has another term equivalent to diocese, from a Latin word for a chair,
sedes
, which comes into English as 'see'.

This new vocabulary reflected the fact that the role of a bishop had been radically transformed now that he was not the leader of a small intimate grouping which might be scarcely larger than a household. That was what the Pastoral Epistles (see pp. 118-19) had described when they considered how a bishop should lead his people, but now the situation had radically changed. Willy-nilly, but mostly without much protest, bishops were becoming more like official magistrates, because their Church was being embraced by the power of the empire. Less than a century before, the heap of charges against Bishop Paul of Samosata had included the complaint that he had sat on a throne like a 'ruler of the world'; now all bishops did this.
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The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for 'chair',
cathedra
, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop's principal chair could be found: his cathedral. The buildings which the Church now put up for the worship of their great congregations reflected the bishops' role as politicians and statesmen: churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration.

The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a
basilica
. Conventionally it was a rectangular chamber big enough to hold large numbers, with an entrance through one of the long sides to face the chair of the presiding magistrate or ruler, often housed in a semicircular apse in the other long wall. Interestingly, although the new Christian basilicas took this architectural form, they made two radical modifications to it. One of the earliest examples of this major re-envisioning of the basilican plan can still be seen in Rome at Constantine's church now dedicated to St John Lateran, and it is splendidly instanced in the slightly later pair of basilicas dedicated to Sant' Apollinare in Ravenna (see Plate 4), but there are countless others. The plan was applied in a remarkably uniform fashion throughout the imperial Church, and indeed beyond its borders as far away as the Church in Ethiopia in its early years. The first Christian innovation was, wherever possible, to 'orient' the building: that is, to lay out its long axis west to east, with an apsidal end at the east to contain the eucharistic table or altar with the bishop's chair behind it. There are a host of biblical justifications for east-west orientation, from the eastern entrance of the Garden of Eden leading to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3.24) to the angel of Revelation 7.2 who rises from the east and gives safe passage to the chosen - but one feels that none of them would have had a decisive architectural effect without the plain fact that the sun rises in the east, regardless of the Bible and its preoccupations. Second, instead of an entrance in a long side wall, the west gable of a Christian basilica now housed the entrance. So those coming into the building had their gaze directed throughout its length, both to the bishop's chair and to the altar in front of it, which increasingly frequently contained or stood over the remains of some Christian martyr from the heroic era of persecution.

The purpose of this replanning was to turn the basilica into a pathway towards all that was most holy and authoritative in Christian life: the pure worship of God. If it is in the fourth century that we first get substantial numbers of surviving Christian church buildings, it is also from this period that we first have substantial evidence about the worship for which they had been designed as theatres. Despite the efforts of much liturgical scholarship, it is remarkably difficult to get a coherent picture of what Christian worship looked like or felt like before the time of Constantine; throughout the Christian world, probably only the present-day liturgy of the Syriac Churches is anything like a form which predates that period (see p. 184). In a brilliant miniature study, the twentieth-century liturgical scholar R. P. C. Hanson indeed established that in general, up to the end of the third century, bishops were free to improvise a form of words around set themes which would be considered appropriate for the great drama of the Eucharist. They were after all the Church's teachers, as their
cathedra
chair came to symbolize, and they could be trusted to include the right material. In the fourth century the situation changed: the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured. From that era onwards, architecture and manuscript evidence come together for the first time to offer a flood of light on these matters at the heart of Christian experience.
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Armed with this combination of knowledge, we could enter a basilica to look eastwards towards the table of the Lord's death and resurrection. We would remember the martyred servant of Christ whose bones were incorporated in it, and who by his or her suffering had a place guaranteed close to the Lord in Heaven. In the great services of the Church's year, we would also see the living representative of God on earth, the bishop sitting in his chair, flanked by his clergy. This was a model of the Court of Heaven; and naturally everyone at the time would expect splendour at a Court. It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. The copes, chasubles, mitres, maniples, fans, bells, censers of solemn ceremony throughout the Church from East to West were all borrowed from the daily observances of imperial and royal households. Anything less would have been a penny-pinching insult to God.

Although the Church celebrated God's banquet, the Eucharist, by annexing countless symbols of worldly triumph, there remained a difference from imperial feasting. The triumphal atmosphere was edged with the memory that the Eucharist was a meal of 'Last Supper' which had led directly to Christ's suffering and death, and which had then been re-enacted in joy in the presence of the risen Christ at that table in the village of Emmaus (see pp. 94-5). The Cross which was now becoming universally familiar as a visual symbol of Jerusalem, of crucifixion and resurrection, was never far from the portraits of the imperious Christ staring down from the walls on his servants celebrating below. And like the imperial Court, some people must be excluded from the festivities because they were not authorized to enter. Those who had not fulfilled the requirements for baptism and were still under instruction (
catechesis
) were the 'catechumens'. They were dismissed before the Eucharist began and restricted to the entrance area of the church, which often developed as a separate chamber at the west end of the basilican building.

And for all Christians, there was a time of preparation before the great festivals which became longer and more elaborate in direct proportion to the elaboration of the festivals themselves. From early days, the time of anxiety and tragedy which led up to the Resurrection was marked out by abstinence and vigil. By a natural progression of ideas, this was linked to the story in the Synoptic Gospels that Christ had retreated from his active life and ministry into the desert for forty days and nights. It was the perfect time of the liturgical year for catechumens to spend a last rigorous preparation before their triumphal reception into the Church during the celebration of Easter. This forty-day period, first explicitly mentioned without much fanfare in the Canons of the Council of Nicaea and therefore probably of long standing, was the season which in English is known as Lent.
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Christ's birth and the celebration of the Christ Child's adoration by non-Jewish astrologers (his 'showing forth' or 'Epiphany') came over the next centuries also to be observed with a similar introductory period of fasting and austerity, during which the faithful could act out their longing for the Saviour's arrival or 'Advent'. That forty-day season would make all the more joyful the Christmas and Epiphany festivals at the darkest time of the calendar, when the days were at their shortest, as the release came at last from the time of preparation.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MONASTICISM

It seemed that episcopal authority had now triumphed in the Church. But worshippers at the Eucharist, seeing the bishop seated before them with his presbyters, might be aware that there was an alternative source of power and spirituality in the Church: an institution which had only gradually emerged during the third century. The closer the Church came to society, the more obvious were the tensions with some of its founder's messages about the rejection of convention and the abandonment of worldly wealth. Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death. It is not surprising that many have sought a radical alternative, a mode of life which is in itself a criticism of ordinary society. Worldly goods, cravings and self-centred personal priorities are to be avoided, so that their accompanying frustrations and failures can be transcended. The assumption is that such transcendence has a goal beyond the human lifespan, the goal which some term God. The movement known as monasticism is a way of structuring this impulse.