Praxiteles

Journal of Sacred Architacture

Domus Dei, Quae Est Ecclesia Dei Vivi: The Myth of the Domus Ecclesiae

by Steven J. Schloeder, appearing in Volume 21

A desire of the ressourcement movement was to recover the true meaning of the Christian liturgical assembly and the true meaning of Christian assembly space. Therefore, it was commonly held that the Church should emulate the early Christian Church in their liturgical practices and its surroundings. The architecture should be simplified to heighten the symbolic expression of the gathered community. Architectural accretions should be removed as nonessential, distracting, and counterproductive to the goal of “active participation.”

Active Participation

It is historically curious that the desire to promote active participation of the faithful came to imply a radical reductionism in the majesty, beauty, iconography, and symbolism of church buildings. The notion of “active participation” as the genesis of the twentieth-century liturgical reforms was first articulated by Saint Pope Pius X (d. 1914) in a small exhortation on sacred music, Tra le Sollecitudini. Pius X reminds the faithful of the importance of the church building in the formation of the Christian soul through the Christian liturgy:

Among the cares of the pastoral office…a leading one is without question that of maintaining and promoting the decorum of the House of God in which the august mysteries of religion are celebrated, and where the Christian people assemble to receive the grace of the Sacraments…Nothing should have place, therefore, in the temple calculated to disturb or even merely to diminish the piety and devotion of the faithful, nothing that may give reasonable cause for disgust or scandal, nothing, above all, which directly offends the decorum and sanctity of the sacred functions and is thus unworthy of the House of Prayer and of the Majesty of God.1

For Pius X, “the sanctity and dignity of the temple” was important so that the faithful might acquire the proper spirit for true “active participation” in the holy liturgy. Active participation properly understood is the goal of worship in the liturgy―it is the end, not the means. Among other things, the means include that the liturgy is done well in a place aptly designed for worship. In the mind of Pius, the church building ought be constructed to express the majesty and dignity of the House of God.

Given the clear intent expressed in this motu proprio of Saint Pius X as the point of departure for the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement, how are we to explain the subsequent diminishment of the church building as a sacramental sign of the heavenly realities?

The Mid-Century Liturgical Arguments

The typical rhetoric of the mid-century liturgical authors was that we ought to build churches for the “modern man” or “constructed to serve men of our age.” Styles and forms from previous ages were declared “defunct” or “no longer vital.” One even finds the condemnation of wanting a “church that looks like a church” as being “nostalgic”―an unhealthy yearning for a past Golden Age that really never was.2

For instance, Edward Mills wrote in The Modern Church: “If we do not build churches in keeping with the spirit of the age we shall be admitting that religion no longer possesses the same vitality as our secular buildings.”3 His book concerns topics such as efficient planning, technology, cost abatement, and environmental considerations. It is worth mentioning that only a few years before this book, Mills had written The Modern Factory, with the same rationalistic concerns for efficient planning, technology, cost abatement, and environmental considerations.

But we see something else going on in the mid-century writers. One cannot simply discard two millennia of sacred architectural forms and styles without having a new paradigm to replace it, and one cannot have a valid new paradigm without have grounds for discarding the old paradigm. The paradigm itself needed to change: and all the better if the new paradigm was promoted as the “authentic” paradigm, the recovery of what was lost.

Within this rhetoric of building churches for our age and in the willingness to discard the past is an embedded mythos. By this accounting, the Church began to formalize her liturgy and her architecture only after the Edict of Milan, when Constantine first legalized Christianity. The imperially sponsored building programs brought formality and the hierarchical trappings of elements take from the Imperial court.4 Prior to this Pax Constantiniana, the Church was a domestic enterprise, and the model of domestic architecture―the domus ecclesiae (literally, “house of the church”)―was the simple, humble, and hospitable residential form in which early Christians gathered to meet the Lord and meet one another in the Lord for fellowship, meals, and teaching. This became valued as a model for contemporary worship and self-understanding. The early house church―seen as pure, simple, unsullied by later liturgical and architectural accretions without the trappings of hierarchy and formality―was to be the model for modern liturgical reform.

Basilica of Constantine at Trier, nave and large apse at one end (Photo: Berthold Werner).

As Father Richard Vosko surmised, “The earliest understanding of a Christian church building implies that it is a meeting house—a place of camaraderie, education and worship. In fact, the earliest Christian tradition clearly held that the Church does not build temples to honor God. That is what the civic religions did.”5 This notion was put most forcefully by E.A. Sovik, writing: “It is conventionally supposed that the reasons that Christians of the first three centuries built almost no houses of worship were that they were too few, or too poor, or too much persecuted. None of these is true. The real reason that they didn’t build was that they didn’t believe in ecclesiastical building.”6

The ascendency of the residential model as the authentic liturgical form raised another question of architectural history: what to do with the intervening 1700 years of church building? For the mid-century and later architectural writers, the simple answer was that the domestic model was the ideal, and all later grand and hierarchical buildings are the deviations. Therefore, all the intervening eras, liturgical and artistic expressions, and architectural forms and styles came in for censure.

The changes in the age of Constantine were implicated for the advent of clericalism, turning the congregation into passive viewers at a formalistic ritual, the loss of liturgical and spiritual intimacy, and the subjugation of the Church’s evangelical mission to the politics of the Emperor. The Christian basilica was thereby rejected as an expression of power-mongering and imperialistic tendencies.7 The Byzantine churches were rejected for their courtly imperial formality, where the ministers are hidden behind the iconostasis, only to venture out in courtly processions. The Romanesque was rejected for its immensely long naves that separated the people from God, and the proliferation of side altars required for the monks to fulfill their daily obligations to say private Masses.8 The Gothic style was criticized for its alienating monumentalism and for its reliquaries of dubious merit.9 Baroque architecture comes in for special censure: for triumphalism, for Tridentine rubricism, for pagan artistic themes and sensuality, for hyper-valorization of the Eucharist in reaction to Protestantism, and for dishonesty in the use of materials.10 Father Louis Bouyer’s judgment of the Counterreformation liturgy was that it was “embalmed” – devoid of life and vitality.11

The decided trend of mid-twentieth century liturgical and architectural thinking was to reject historical styles. Clearing the table to start anew, with a sweep of the hand, Father Reinhold dismissed all previous architectural eras, styles and forms:

Conclusion: We see that all these styles were children of their own day. None of their forms are ours. We have concrete, steel, wood compositions, brick, stone, glass of all kinds, plastic materials, reverse cycle heat and radiant heat. We can no longer identify the minority, called Christendom, and split in schisms, with the kingdom of God on earth. Our society is a pluralistic one and lives in a secularist atmosphere… [O]ur architects must find as good an expression in our language of forms, as our fathers did in theirs.12

The Problem of the Domus Ecclesiae

Thus were 1700 years of Christian architectural history discarded as liturgically erroneous and inapplicable for contemporary buildings in favor of simpler domestic-scaled places for assembly. This however, was not manufactured out of thin air. It was clear from Scripture that the early Church worshipped in the residences of the wealthier members of the community. The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions mention a wealthy and powerful man who gave over his great house to the Church to establish what ought to be considered the first ‘cathedral’ as the chair of Peter.13 Given the lack of excavated basilicas from the pre-Constantinian era, it was assumed that there was some sort of organic development between the domestic house and the basilica that only found full expression in the fourth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many historians grappled with the question of transition between these two forms, looking at the Roman house with the triclinium, various sorts of intermediate structures such as the aura ecclesia, adaptations of the Roman civic basilica, and the architecture of the imperial palace, among others.14

These speculations all went by the wayside in the mid-century, and the model of the house church came to the fore, with the discovery of the church at Dura Europos in the 1930s. This discovery was of profound importance given that it was the only known identifiable and dateable pre-Constantinian church. It was obviously a residence converted to the needs of a small Christian community. Significantly, it was also a rather late dated church―about 232 AD―and quite in keeping with the expectations from all the various scriptural references to a domestic liturgical setting.15 Henceforth, especially in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the dominant thesis in liturgical circles took the domus ecclesiae as the architectural model for pre-Constantinian Christian architecture. The common vision for new parishes built in the wake of Vatican II was therefore toward simpler, more domestically-scaled buildings in emulation of the domus ecclesiae in which Christians supposedly gathered before the Imperial approbation of Christianity in the fourth century.

Interior of Saint John the Evangelist Church, West Chester, OH, by Richard Vosko, PhD and John Ruetschle Architects (Photo: stjohnwc.org).

The only problem for this romantic model of a domestic residential architecture, built for a small gathering of early Christians celebrating a simple agape meal, is its dubious merit.

Domus ecclesiae―popular among liturgists to emphasize the communal nature of the assembly―is not a particularly apt term. More to the point, it is simply anachronistic. The phrase domus ecclesiae is not found in Scripture. No first, second, or third-century author uses the term to describe the church building. The phrase domus ecclesiae cannot be found to describe any church building before the Peace of Constantine (313 A.D.), but rather seems used to imply a building owned by the Christians, such as a bishop’s residence.16

There are many other ancient terms used to identify the church building, but domus Dei seems to be of particular importance. Throughout the New Testament, the assembly of Christians is called domus Dei, the house of God. Paul’s passage in 1 Tim 3:15 could not be clearer: in domo Dei … quae est ecclesia Dei vivi (“the house of God, which is the church of the living God”). Likewise, domus Dei or its derivative domestic Dei (household of God) is found in Eph 2:19, Heb 10:21, and 1 Pt 4:17.

Following scripture, Tertullian (d. 220) used domus Dei in a way that can only mean a church building. This key term, domus Dei and its Greek equivalent oikos tou theou, is found in Hippolytus (d. 235), Clement of Alexandria (d. 215), and Eusebius (d. 339), among others. But even oikos or domus does not suggest any humble residential or domestic association. Oikos is generally a house, but it can also serve to describe a temple (as in a house of the gods). Similarly, domus could also refer to the grandest of buildings, such as the emperor’s palace—domus divine—or Nero’s ostentatious Domus Aurea. These are hardly small-scale and intimate associations. It seems that long before the time of Constantine, the Church had already begun to move out of the residential environments we read of in the book of Acts and the letters of Paul.

Textual Counter Evidence

The problem is that we know very little about pre-Constantinian liturgy or Christian architecture. Yet from the scant literary evidence we do have, we should not reject the strong probability that even in the second century the Church owned land and built special buildings for the community. The earliest record of the special purpose church building seems to be from Chronicle of Arbela, a fifth-century Syrian manuscript which tells us that Bishop Isaac (Ishaq) (135-148) “had built a large well-ordered church which exists today.”17 The Chronicles of Edessa mention a Christian church destroyed in a city-wide flood around 201.18 Around the year 225 A.D. Christians acquired a piece of public property in a dispute with inn-keepers to build a church with the explicit blessing of Emperor Severus Alexander, who determined “that it was better for some sort of a god to be worshipped there than for the place to be handed to the keepers of an eating-house.”19

Saint Georgeous Church, Rihab, Jordan, of 230 AD, which stands atop an archeological site of a first century church discovered in 2008 (photo: rihabresearchcenter.blogspot.com).

The pagan Porphyry (d. 305), writing in the second half of the third century, attacks the Christians who, in “imitating the erection of the temples, build very large houses20, into which they go together and pray.”21 The Emperor Aurelian (d. 275) makes passing reference to a Christian church (Christianorum ecclesia) in contrast to his own religious temple (templo deorum omnia).22 Lactantius (d. 320) recounts the destruction of the church in Nicomedia, calling it a “lofty edifice” and describes how it was “situated on rising ground, within the view of the palace” and how the emperors Diocletian and Galerius could see it and debated whether to burn it to the ground or pull it down.23 It seems that, if the Emperor of the Roman Empire knew a Christian church when he saw one, it was no simple obscure house.

The Problem of Place

Despite the textual evidence that argues for significant church buildings before the age of Constantine, the dearth of archeological evidence for formal church buildings has seemed persuasive. With the recent discovery of a pre-Constantinian basilica at Aqaba it seems timely for liturgists and architects to reconsider the validity of the residential domus ecclesiae as a meaningful model for contemporary church architecture. The Aqaba church dates comfortably to 300, and perhaps as early as 280 A.D.24 We have no knowledge of what other pre-Constantinian churches looked like, but we can have certainty that Christians had special, purpose-built, urban-scale churches before the Emancipation in 313 A.D. We should therefore reevaluate the claims about the “authenticity” of the simple house church as a meaningful architectural model for the Christian assembly both in the early Church and for today.

However, we should also consider the emotional impetus for the house church. The romantic notion of the primitive house church has a strong sense of attraction: the desire for more communitarian and domestic church buildings is enticing in the alienating condition of post-agrarian and post-industrial modern life. Both the massive scale of the modern city and the anonymity and placelessness of suburban sprawl contribute to the desire for a sense of domestic rootedness. Increased mobility in the modern work force and the consequent breakdown of traditional community and family life also create a tension and a desire for familiarity, welcome, and belonging in the parish community.

These perhaps contribute to the nostalgic longing for a more domestic parish facility. But the church building must function on a variety of levels. Church architecture is necessarily symbolic, and the various metaphors by which we understand church buildings are derived from the metaphors by which we understand the Church. These metaphors find their poignancy and potency in the human condition: matters of embodiment, relationship, dwelling, and community life form a matrix of symbols for the Church, the parish community, the liturgy, and church architecture. Among the most significant Scriptural images for the Ecclesia (and therefore the liturgy and the church building) are the Body of Christ, the nuptial relationship, the Tent of Dwelling/ Temple of Solomon, and the Heavenly City. These speak of the fundamental human experiences of embodiment, of marriage and domestic family life, of dwelling and habitation, and of social life.

This residential model of domus ecclesiae has been placed into a false opposition to the domus Dei as a model for sacred architecture. Both are models that find their validity in the human experience of dwelling and family life, but the former has come to imply an immanent expression of the home for the local community whereas the latter has a transcendental and eschatological horizon that is more apt for sacramental buildings that are called to be “truly worthy and beautiful and be signs and symbols of heavenly realities.”25 The desire for a domestically-scaled liturgical environment is not wrong per se, but it cannot stand in isolation without reference to the broader framework of ecclesiastical, liturgical, and architectural symbolism. All are needed for the person and the community to understand how the liturgy and the liturgical environment express and participate in a greater sacramental reality beyond the confines of the local assembly.

If the domestic model has no sure foundation, then the arguments erected for rejecting the hierarchical and formal models of liturgy; for discarding the sacramental language of Christian architecture in favor of a functionalist and programmatic approach to building; and for dismissing any appeals to the rich treasure trove of Catholic architectural history and various historical styles are susceptible to falling like a house of cards.

Isometric of the House Church at Dura-Europus circa 232 AD (after Crawfoot; Photo:Dura-Europus, by JW Crawfoot, Antiquity Vol 19, No 75: 113-121).

Steven J. Schloeder, PhD AIA is the founder of Liturgical Environs PC, an architectural firm specializing in Catholic church projects across the United States. He is the author of Architecture in Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1998), among many other articles in scholarly and popular journals. He can be contacted at steve@liturgicalenvirons.com.

1 Pius X, Tra le Sollecitudine, November 22, 1903.
2 See for instance, Maurice Lavanoux, “Religious Art and Architecture Today,” in F. McManus, ed. The Revival of the Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 152-54.
3 Edward Mills, The Modern Church (London: The Architectural Press, 1956), 16. See also Mills, The Modern Factory (London: The Architectural Press, 1951).
4 Cf. Kevin Seasoltz, A Sense of the Sacred (London: Continuum, 2005), 95-98.
5 Richard Vosko, God’s House Is Our House: Re-Imagining the Environment for Worship (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 22.
6 Edward A. Sovik, “The Place of Worship: Environment for Action,” in Mandus A Egge, ed. Worship: Good News in Action (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973), 98. Quoted in Mark A. Torgerson, An Architecture of Immanence: Architecture for Worship and Ministry Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 152-53.
7 Vosko, (2006): 27; Michael E. DeSanctis, Building from Belief: Advance, Retreat, and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 30.
8 Joseph Rykwert, Church Building (London: Burns and Oates, 1966), 81.
9 H.A. Reinhold, The Dynamics of Liturgy (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 87.
10 H.A. Reinhold, Speaking of Liturgical Architecture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), 13.
11 Louis Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 7. Also Kevin Seasoltz The House of God: Sacred Art and Church Architecture (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 110-114.
12 Reinhold, Speaking of Liturgical Architecture 32.
13 Ps.-Clement. Recognitions. 10.71.
14 E.g., S. Lang, “A Few Suggestions Toward a New Solution of the Origin of the Early Christian Basilica,” Rivista di archeologia Christiana 30 (1934): 189-208.
15 Cf. Kimberly Bowes, “Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field”, in Religious Compass 2/4 (2008): 575-619.
16 Katerina Sessa, “Domus Ecclesiae: Rethinking a Category of Ante Pacem Christian Space,” in Journal of Theological Studies, 60:1 (April 2009): 90-108.
17 Cf. Sources Syriaques. t.1, trans by A. Mignana (Mossoul: Imprimerie des Peres Dominicains, 1907). NB: Davies gives the dates even earlier as 123-136 in his The Origin and Development of Early Christian Church Architecture (London: SCM, 1952), 14.
18 Cf. Uwe Lang, Turning Towards the Lord (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 67. Harnack makes note of this in his The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (London: Williams and Norgate, 1908).
19 Lampridius, Life of Severus Alexander, 2.49.
20 The Greek in Macarius is “they build very large buildings”. Porphyry distinguishes between these large buildings and residential houses, “their own houses”, in which they lived. In Ezra 4:1, the same construction is used specifically for the building the Temple. There is no reason therefore to assume “oikos” meant a residential dwelling house, since it could be used for a house, any building, or a temple. Cf. Macarii Magnetis Quae Supersunt, ed. C. Blondel (Paris: Klincksieck, 1876), 201.
21 Porphyry, Adversus Christianos, known to us from the fragment addressed by the later Macarius in Apocriticus, 4. 21. Cf. T.W. Crafer, The Apocriticus of Macarius Magnes (London: SPCK, 1919), 146. Crafer notes that some took this passage as proof that Porphyry lived and wrote after the Emancipation, though he considers this argument weak. The conventional dates for Porphyry are c. 234 – c. 305.
22 Epistle of Aurelian, quoted in Joseph Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae (London: 1722), 8.1.1.
23 Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, 12. Cf. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, VII, “Lactantius” (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1886). Lactantius uses the term editissimum to speak of the tall building, and notes the church was ex palatio videbatur.
24 Another formal basilican church, Saint George at Rihab Jordan, is quite controversially and, in my view, improbably dated to 230. The earliest accepted church currently is the Christian prayer hall in Meggido, Israel, which is not a basilica and found in the structure of a larger early third-century Roman villa. NM
25 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 288.

From the Journal of Sacred Architecture

Editorial: Quo Vadis

by Duncan G. Stroik, appearing in Volume 21 (Spring 2012).

Three miles from Disneyland there is another famous theme park, which proclaims itself as “America’s Television Church.” The Crystal Cathedral, perhaps the first mega-church in the United States, is about to undergo conversion classes so that it can finally get the cathedra and bishop it has always wanted. The Diocese of Orange, California, has purchased the thirty-one-acre property and its four buildings for $53 million, a steal even in this real estate market. Realizing that recent cathedrals built from scratch have cost upwards of $200 and $250 million on the West Coast, retrofitting sounds like a financially savvy move. However, turning this prismatic beacon of televangelism into a house of God may be easier said than done.

Does this purchase signal a new role for Catholic charity: to buy up properties of bankrupt Protestant ministries? If so, there may be some good opportunities in the future. How does the bishop encourage full, active, and conscious participation in the liturgy by purchasing one of the buildings most associated with religion as theater? Begun as an open-air service at a drive-in theater, the church was designed around Rev. Schuller’s flamboyant preaching. Associated with glitz and money, it was the site of fancy and expensive holiday celebrations including trapeze artists, live animals for Christmas, and a lavish $13 million production called Creation.

Said to be the first all-glass structure built for religious purposes, it is associated with the feel-good theology of the 1980s. How to convert a building like this and at the same time disassociate it from its founder and his theology? Crystal Cathedral Ministries was a religion about self-promotion, and, appropriately, its main buildings were designed in disparate modernist styles by three well-known architecture firms: Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, and Richard Meier. Each building is a personal expression of the architect, so that together they create a campus without much to unify them. Perhaps what may be of more concern to its future owner, the Neutra tower (1968) does not meet earthquake codes and the Crystal Cathedral (1980) and the Welcoming Center (2003) are high maintenance glass and metal buildings. This could be an expensive investment.

Can the Crystal Cathedral be converted to a Catholic Cathedral? We shall see. After all, the much noted cathedrals of Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are all expressionistic modernist sculptures. The diocese has said that they will not change the exterior of the church and will not compromise the architectural integrity of the 2700-seat interior. Yet, without a radical transformation the building will always come across as a technological mega-church rather than as a sacred place. It needs to be totally gutted and reconceived. And even if the interior can be functionally retrofitted for Catholic liturgy, many believe that its identity will always be that of the Crystal Cathedral.

One of the major criticisms of Catholic architecture during the past fifty years is that it has incorrectly adopted many of the forms of low-church Protestantism: the theater form, a fear of sacred images, asymmetrical layouts, vacuous sanctuaries, minimalist liturgical elements, prominently placed Jacuzzis for baptism, and the banishment of the Blessed Sacrament to the baptistry. The altar area becomes a stage with a focus on entertainment alongside praise bands that perform upbeat music. In response, liturgists have argued that all of these things are simply the outgrowth if not the requirement of Vatican II. Are they finally admitting their agenda by purchasing a ready for TV mega-church complete with a jumbotron and three huge balconies for the “spectators”?

The timing of this is wrong. A whole new generation of priests, laity, and theologians has grown up with this stuff and find these Protestant innovations dated and lacking in substance. They desire an architecture that grows out of the Church’s rich tradition and that will enable them in worship. Asked what cathedrals should look like in the twenty-first century, they point to Saint Patrick’s in New York, Saint Peter’s in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris, and other obvious suspects. These are buildings constructed hundreds of years ago, yet continue to speak to believers and unbelievers alike today. A timeless architecture built for the ages, a cathedral should be a durable building constructed out of masonry, transcendent in height, and directional in length. Unfortunately for the new generation and their children, the Orange diocese has chosen the opposite direction and will foist on them a building that is of its time and not particularly suited to Catholic worship and devotion. Twenty years from now, it will not matter that Orange got a really good deal whereas another California diocese quadrupled its budget. People will simply ask if it is a beautiful cathedral, worthy of the Creator.

Duncan G. Stroik is the editor of Sacred Architecture Journal.

New Benedictine Abbey, Stamullen, Co. Meath

http://en.gloria.tv/?media=293502

English Heritage has just published new guidelines on new works in historic places of worship.

The full text is available here:

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/publicationsNew/guidelines-standards/new-work-in-historic-places-of-worship/places-of-worship-2012.pdf

Cathedral renovation reveals rare 15th Century carvings

Seven rare 15th Century alabaster carvings have been discovered during restoration work at a Sheffield cathedral.
The carvings were discovered in a sacristy cupboard at St. Marie’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on Norfolk Street.
They depict scenes from the life of Christ, including his
arrest.
Father Chris Posluszny, dean of the cathedral, said many carvings were exported in medieval times but were destroyed during the Reformation.
“This is a rare find. To have so many doesn’t often arise,”
he said.
The carvings are small – each is about the size of a piece of A4 paper – but Father Posluszny said they were very detailed.

‘Beautifully carved’

He said: “There are so many figures, so beautifully carved and telling so many stories of what’s in the scriptures in just one scene. The carving of Christ’s arrest includes Judas’ betrayal, St Peter running away, three soldiers, and a man whose ear was cut off, reaching out to be healed.”

The carvings are believed to have been donated to the church when it was being built in the 1840s.
They were on the underside of an altar in the Mortuary Chapel until 1970.
“They were removed from the altar and replaced by an effigy of Father Pratt who built the church, until 1970 when they were put up for sale,” explained Father Posluszny.
However, the carvings became lost after they failed to sell at auction.
“Nobody, not even the Historic Churches Committee, knew where they were,” said Father Posluszny.
“When we found seven boxes in the Flower Sacristy we assumed it was just the usual junk, but when I had a look, it was the missing alabaster carvings covered in 42 years worth of dust.”
The carvings have now been insured for £30,000.
Once restored, they will be displayed in the cathedral cloister.

Building a Catholic Church in the 21st. Century: Tradition Observed (Part One)

by Frank Mitjans

From Antiphon (Journal of Society for Catholic Liturgy) vo. XVI, 2 (2011).

http://www.scribd.com/doc/91543760/Scan-0074

The Origins of the Iconostasis [continued]

JULIAN WALTER, AA
(Eastern Churches Review, Vol. Ill, No. 3. 1971)

Conclusion

We are thus back where we started. The text which I quoted from Bishop Symeon’s mystagogical commentary describes the Byzantine sanctuary screen just at the time when it was about to be transformed into the classical iconostasis. The earlier elements would remain. Two icons, the Pantocrator and the Hodegetria or Eleousa replacing the Paraklesis, would continue to be particularly venerated. They were fixed to right and left of the door to the sanctuary. The Deesis and the Great Feasts also remain, but incorporated into a more far-reaching programme embracing the whole divine dispensation. The icons, particularly those executed in Russia, would rapidly grow in size. The Deesis attributed to Andrei Rublev which forms part of the choir screen at Zvenigrad is over three feet high.

Multiplication of themes, increase of size, and perhaps also the impulse of Hesychast piety, which favoured the contemplation and veneration of icons, partly explain these later developments. I do not propose to go into them here but rather to pause in order to ask a question which seems to me to be of ecumenical significance. Is it not the case that in both East and West a progressive separation occurred between clergy and laity, particularly in liturgical celebrations, which is not a reflection of Christ’s teaching nor of the Apostles’ practice? This separation, now of long standing, did not, of course, come about in the same way in East and West. Practically speaking, however, the result in both cases was that the Eucharist became the preserve of the clergy in their sanctuary, while the laity, unworthy creatures, were kept at a distance. Their way of seeking communion with Christ was rarely by participation at the Eucharistic meal. They performed private devotions, and meditated upon the truths of faith which these devotions set forth.

It must be added that during long centuries, in the Roman and Byzantine rites at least, the laity did not particularly resent this separation. However in the West there has been a reaction, abetted by the clergy themselves, which reached considerable momentum at the time of the Second Vatican Council. I do not know whether there has been a similar reaction among Christians of the Eastern rites. If so, I hope, having observed the healthful consequences of renewal in the West, that it will also gain in momentum. Once this momentum is gained it will necessarily sweep away the classical iconostasis. This was, as I hope I have made clear in the course of this short essay, a late development in Byzantine tradition.

Presenting the faithful with a sensible representation of the divine plan, it has the disadvantage of hiding from them the intelligible mystery which is the Eucharistic celebration itself. No doubt there will always be devout Eastern Christians who would rather venerate an icon than participate actively in the Eucharist, just as there will always be devout Roman Catholics who would rather tell their beads. They will not easily accept the removal of the iconostasis from its place before the sanctuary, where it has become, falsely, the focal point of the Byzantine church, and the less easily since it is something of great spiritual beauty. However there is no room for doubt. The iconostasis bars the way towards the intelligible mystery, towards the Incarnate Logos, in whom all mankind—clergy and layfolk from East and West—will ultimately be One.

Pugin Bi-Centenary in Tasmania

At St. Patrick’s, Coledale

http://www.puginfoundation.org/index.php?page=1&target=bicentenarymassgallery

The Origins of the Iconostasis [continued]

JULIAN WALTER, AA
(Eastern Churches Review, Vol. Ill, No. 3. 1971)

The Iconography of the Iconostasis

The screen not only acted as a physical barrier between the clergy and the laity. It was also an ideological frontier. Within the sanctuary reigned official conceptions of doctrine and worship. Outside were the faithful who, while ready to listen to official doctrine and participate in official worship, retained, perhaps, a preference for their private devotions and beliefs. We have, therefore, not only to interpret correctly the pictures displayed on the screen but also to determine how far the liturgical notions expressed in them were modified by the clergy capitulating to the devotional preferences of the laity.

As far as official doctrine was concerned it would seem that the screen was at first decorated with subjects which were usual in the apse. In the period before iconoclasm Christ was conceived as the Emperor of Heaven, surrounded by his court. The courtiers were the angels and those who had acknowledged his divinity as the Word made Flesh: the Virgin, John the Baptist and the Apostles. To these could be added the prophets who had foreseen his coming and sometimes those who had seen him in a vision after his resurrection. Portraits of these ‘visionaries’ in medallions appear at the entrance to the apse of San Vitale in Ravenna and around the mosaic of the Transfiguration at Saint Catherine’s, Mount Sinai.

It is with these mosaic programmes that I would associate the medallions which decorated the screen in Saint Sophia. It would be quite wrong, to my mind, to see here a Deesis. The Deesis, one of the most widespread themes in later Byzantine art, is composed of the Virgin and John the Baptist interceding for mankind before Christ. It appears also in an expanded form, known as the Great Deesis, incorporating other saints. But in the period before Iconoclasm the Virgin and John the Baptist are not represented as interceding for mankind; they are witnesses of Christ’s divinity. They continue to appear as such after the Triumph of Orthodoxy, for example in a chapel in Hagia Sophia where they are represented together with other ‘visionaries’ like Constantine and the ieonodule patriarchs, who had recognized that an icon of Christ was, as Theodore the Studite put it, the image of the hypostasis of the Incarnate Word.

The intercessory role of the saints had been called in question by the iconoclast Emperor Constantine V Copronymus. It was explicitly stated to be part of the doctrine of the Church at the second Council of Nicaea. Monastic writers encouraged devotion to the saints, stressing particularly the supreme mediatory role of the Virgin. The Virgin was, in fact, given the title of Paraklesis—advocate, and represented as such upon icons, inclining her head and stretching out her arms. The earliest surviving representation of the Virgin in this position is probably in the mosaic over the main door leading from the narthex into Hagia Sophia. It dates from the reign of Emperor Leo VI (886-912), who is himself prostrate at the feet of Christ in the same mosaic. John the Baptist is not represented the other side but an angel courtier. Christ himself appears as Emperor and Pantocrator. Christ’s role as governor of the universe was another doctrine which was very much in vogue in the decades following the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

Icons of Christ Pantocrator are extremely numerous. They must have been often coupled with icons of the Virgin Paraklesis, although few of these have survived. However two which evidently have always belonged together are still in the Hermitage of Saint Neophytus in Cyprus (Plates 3 and 4). Other evidence may be cited in support of the view that these icons, symbolizing the principal themes of orthodox doctrine, were the object of widespread devotion. Saint Stephen the Younger, one of the principal iconodule martyrs, is often represented holding a double icon of Christ Pantocrator and the Virgin Paraklesis; one example is in the Theodore Psalter in the British Museum, illustrated in 1066. Further in a picture of the second Council of Nicaea in the Metropolis at Mistra in Greece the emperor, empress and council fathers are represented venerating the same double icon.

We have an example here of devotion, albeit a devotion which was profoundly doctrinal, influencing the decorative programme of the sanctuary. The Pantocrator and the Virgin Paraklesis seem to have regularly figured there. Either they were portable icons or they were painted in fresco on the pillars either side of the choir screen, as at Qeledjlar in Cappadocia or at Lagoudera in Cyprus. A third possibility, as we have already seen, was to fix them to the roof of the baldaquin. An example of the Pantocrator and the Paraklesis flanked by angels and placed in front of the roof of the baldaquin is to be found in the Madrid Skyllitzes, to which I have already referred. The miniature is in bad condition, but I can vouch for the accuracy of the drawing, having examined the manuscript myself in August 1970.

The incident in question concerns the iconoclast Patriarch John the Grammarian who was exiled at the beginning of the reign of the Emperor Michael III (842-867) to a monastery. John Skyllitzes based his account of Michael III’s reign largely upon that of the chronicler known as Theophanes Continuatus. According to the latter John the Grammarian saw upon the roof a picture which seemed to be looking at him. Unable to bear the idea of being observed by a picture, he ordered his servant to put its eyes out. The point of the story is double. First it is evidence of the iconoclast’s lack of respect for icons; secondly it betrays him as aware in spite of himself of the ‘presence’ of the prototype in the representation.

John Skyllitzes tells the story with embellishments. He specifies that there were several pictures portraying Christ, the Virgin and the angels. John the Grammarian, according to him, ordered a deacon to climb up and put out the eyes of these venerable images, saying that they lacked the faculty of sight. The Empress Theodora, Michael Ill’s mother and a fanatical iconodule, retorted by having John the Grammarian deprived of the same faculty.

In the Madrid manuscript we see a construction which is presumably a baldaquin with the icons set in arcades in a continuous row. It is thus that the icons appear which once ran along the top of the architrave of sanctuary screens at Saint Catherine’s, Mount Sinai, Vatopedi on Mount Athos and the Hermitage in Leningrad. In none of these groups of icons do we find the Paraklesis and the Pantocrator. The Deesis has taken their place. Here again we have, perhaps, a sign of popular devotion influencing an official programme, for the Deesis seems to have first figured as a devotional theme before being incorporated into the scene of the Last Judgment in the late 11th century.

The icons which survive from 11th- and 12th-century sanctuary screens have only a limited range of subjects. Those in Leningrad show the Apostle Philip with Saints Demetrius and Theodore and two of the Great Feasts. The saints and the feasts are not from the same screen. Those in the monastery of Vatopedi show Christ flanked by the Virgin, John the Baptist and other saints; in medallions between the arches are angels. At the extremities are two scenes from the Childhood of the Virgin and six of the Great Feasts. Part of this long panel (originally it would have been about fifteen feet from one end to the other) is lost. The Mount Sinai icons also show the Deesis and saints together with the Great Feasts. But in one case the Deesis is flanked with scenes from the Life of Saint Eustratius.

To these should be added the series of six Great Feasts richly decorated with jewels and now incorporated into the Pala d’Oro in Saint Mark’s, Venice. These enamels, some of the finest Constantinopolitan work of the 12th century, were brought to Saint Mark’s as booty by the Venetians after the Sack of Constantinople. Two hundred years later, on the occasion of the Council of Florence, John Syropoulos saw the enamels in Saint Mark’s; he maintained that originally they were in the Pantocrator, the monastery of the Comneni in Constantinople. They would have no doubt been mounted on the screen of one of the three churches built there by Emperor John II Comnenus (1118-1143) and his wife Irene.

To the subjects which should be connected with the sanctuary screen I should add the Annunciation, often represented on the doors. This is a subject which belongs to the sanctuary, often being represented to left and right of the triumphal arch before the apse. The other subjects, however, the great Deesis and the Great Feasts, do not belong particularly to the sanctuary. How did they find their way to the sanctuary screen? They were certainly portrayed on icons which were the object of private or public devotion. The icon of a Great Feast, known as the icon of the proskynesis, would be displayed upon a stand, as we have seen, and Venerated on the occasion of the feast in question. I should suggest that in assembling icons which were the object of devotion in a coherent programme and mounting them on the screen liturgists were attempting to integrate private devotion into the public worship of the Church. The connection between the Great Feasts and the liturgical calendar does not need to be laboured, while the icons of saints would correspond to the invocations in the Litanies used during the Eucharist. Consequently we find the programmes of the sanctuary screen being brought back again into relationship with the sanctuary, for it was at precisely the same period that new programmes were being developed for decorating the apse, which related the Eucharist to the Communion of the Apostles and the Celestial Liturgy and associated in this common worship the canonized bishops of the Byzantine church.

Fr. Hegarty’s Review of the late Richard Hurley’s
Irish Church Architecture in the Era of Vatican II (Dominican Publications, Dublin 2001)

It was kind of Fr. Hegarty to remind us the late Richard Hurley’s book Irish Church Architecture in the Era of Vatican II in his recent sympathetic review which was one of the very few items, if not the only, to appear in wider Irish and international obital press. While his subject’s contribution to Irish ecclesiastical architecture was expectedly recalled and marmorised by the contributions of Bishop O’Reilly of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise in his diocesan website and by Fr. Patrick Jones in a more ecclesiastical establishment publication, Fr. Hegarty’s contribution has done some service to his wider church (and non church) readership by contextualising the real significance of his subject’s oeuvre both in national and international terms, as well divesting it of the kind of establishment straight-jacket which risked monopolizing it.

While all will readily understand the literary constraints imposed on critical judgement by the circumstances of Fr. Hegarty’s revied of this 2001 publication, nonetheless, discretion may have been the better part when faced with the book’s almost childlike repetition of the liturgical historeography so much associated with the figure of Andreas Jungmann; and of the idea of active participation advanced as early as 1928, principally though not exclusively, by Pius Parsch which can sometimes become fixated with the texts of the Mass and the speaking of those texts (cf. R. Stafin, Eucharistie als Quelle der Gnade bei Pius Parsch: Ein neues Verhältnis zwischen Gott und dem Menschen (Würzburg, 2004), pp 130ff); as well as the levelling out of all hierarchial distinctions within the worshipping community (cf. Theodore Schnitzler, Die Messe in der Betrachtung II (Freiburg, 1957)); or, ironically, the recourse to authoritarianism needed to maintain order on an otherwise amorphous type of worshipping assembly advocated by Paul Weß (cf. ‘Die Stellung der Gemeinde in der Meßfeier’, in Bewahren und Erneuern: Studien zur Meßliturgie (Innsbruck), 1995.

As with Prof. Emmet Larkin’s theory of the devotional revolution in 19th. century Ireland, these theories of the liturgical movement of the early 20th. century, while often containing a grain of truth in their original context, have over the past 50 years been refined, qualified, critically re-cast or simply abandoned. Repeating them as Vatican II stone-graven untoucheables is simply naive, unhistorical and quite oblivious to a considerable amount of liturgical scholarship which has gone on since the 1960s.

While reading Fr. Hegarty’s juxta positioning of the active happy-clappy participating liturgical assembly in some idealised post Vatican II context with a pre Vatican II situation in which
“The people were now seen … as pious observers of exalted rituals…”: one could not help thinking of Eamon Duffy’s description of the vibrant liturgical and devotional life which characterised the English church on the eve of the Henrician and Edwardine reformation (Cf. The Stripping of the Altars). Duffy makes more than abundantly clear that there was active participation in the church’s liturgical life at this period in England. Furthermore, he make perfectly clear that through institutions such as the guild system, that participation was played out on a multiplicity levels and to a wide variation of degree. Every worshipper found his own level and degree of participation in the sacred rites and in the church’s devotional life. Fr. Hegarty must surely regard it as paradoxical that the liturgical Gestapo made its first appearance in the Catholic Church in the post Vatican II period often to jackboot a one-sized version of active participation on all and sundry? Surely, there must be some personal aspect to active participation if the liturgy is not simply to degenerate to something like the Nuremberg rallies?

Fr. Hegarty’s review did well to diffuse his subject’s views with regard to the place of Irish modernism in a European or global context. It might have been illuminating, if it were needed, to have hear something of their reception among our European and American peers. Liam McCormack is particularily lauded but we are again left very much in the dark by the reviewer’s omission of any attempt to locate his subject’s oeuvre in that same context.