Download PDF | (Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture, 13) Robin Griffith-Jones, Eric Fernie (eds.) - Tomb and Temple_ Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem-The Boydell Press (2018).
562 Pages
PREFACE
Editors gladly and gratefully acknowledge many debts. Above all we are grateful to our contributors for their papers and for their patience during the book’s gestation. Further thanks quickly follow. Caroline Palmer and her colleagues at Boydell have taken all their characteristic care to make the book as handsome as its subject deserves; the J. C. Baker Trust and Lord Judge of Draycote have provided generous financial support. At the Temple in London Liz Clarke, Cath D’Alton, James Lloyd, Katrina Marchant and above all Catherine de Satgé have in various ways lightened our load.
The book is particularly timely. The aedicule in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was damaged in the earthquake of 1927; in 1947 a steel frame was built round it to prevent its collapse. In March 2017, after several months’ work of restoration, the aedicule was re-opened to pilgrims and visitors. The steel frame has been removed and the stone has been cleaned; what had seemed for decades to be a sad symptom of scarce resources and of division is now, once more, a fitting centrepiece to the rotunda. We add our own congratulations to all those who made possible the repair.
The rotunda of the Temple Church in London, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre, was in use by 1162. In 2010 Robin Griffith-Jones of the Temple Church and David Park of The Courtauld Institute of Art edited The Temple Church in London: History, Architecture, Art, published by Boydell. We are delighted to commit into our readers’ hands this sequel, produced with Boydell in a second happy collaboration between our two institutions, close neighbours in central London.
Robin Griffith-Jones Eric Fernie The Temple Church The Courtauld Institute of Art
INTRODUCTION
I will sing you hymns of love while I am groaning with groans too deep for words [Rom. 8.26] during my pilgrimage, and remembering Jerusalem, towards which my heart is raised high, Jerusalem, my country, Jerusalem, my mother [Gal. 4.26]. And I shall remember you, her Ruler, her Father, her Guardian and her Spouse ... I shall not turn aside until I come to that abode of peace, Jerusalem my mother.
- Augustine, Confessions 12.16.23
The keeper let me enter the tomb alone. ... Bowing down before the holy tomb and kissing with love and tears the holy place where the most pure body of our Lord Jesus Christ lay, I measured the tomb in length and breadth and height, for when people are present it is quite impossible to measure it. ... I gave the keeper of the key a small present and my poor blessing. And he, seeing my love for the Lord’s tomb, pushed back for me the slab which is at the head of the holy tomb of the Lord and broke off a small piece of the blessed rock as a relic and forbade me under oath to say anything of this in Jerusalem.
— Daniel the Abbot, in Jerusalem at Easter, c. 1106!
Jerusalem has informed the Christian imagination from the time of Jesus himself: as the setting of events within human history which transcended and redirected all history; as the “New Jerusalem, the final and longed-for home of the faithful, currently hidden in heaven and due at the last times to be realised on earth; as the representation in buildings of the living, human stones built by God into the present Church, herself already informed and animated by the spirit, the down-payment and seal of the New Creation; and therefore as the centre, symbol and goal of God's action in the individual soul and throughout creation. Our first series of colour plates (I-X) introduces the two buildings in Jerusalem to which we will revert throughout the following pages: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and the Dome of the Rock.
Much of this book is focused on architectural representations of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb. In a preparatory chapter, Robin Griffith-Jones surveys a number of certain and likely evocations, widely diverse in medium and scale, of the Sepulchre.” GriffithJones, attending to some of the smallest and most elaborate mementos, asks if the sensibilities apparently deployed on such containers of stones and oil informed as well the experience of the entire buildings with which, in the main body of the book, we will be chiefly concerned. We then turn to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from Constantine in the early fourth century through to the crusaders in the twelfth. Griffith-Jones surveys the early literary and archaeological evidence.* Denys Pringle outlines the building programmes undertaken in the Sepulchre between the capture of Jerusalem and the works’ completion in the 1160s.‘ Jaroslav Folda broadens our horizons: he shows the influences at work on the Sepulchre’s south transept facade, and in particular its connection to Santiago de Compostela and the pilgrim churches of southern Europe.?
Robert Hillenbrand ensures that we do some justice to the Dome of the Rock, built on the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount, in the centuries before its appropriation by the crusaders. He describes a deepening Muslim veneration for the city and in particular for the Dome over several centuries following its completion in 691 to 692. To conclude, Hillenbrand, writing from a personal experience of the Dome now rare for non-Muslims, evokes the rich sensory impact that the Dome would once have made. The rest of this book will be focused on Christian Jerusalem. We turn back in several chapters to the influence of the buildings on the Temple Mount. For the “Temple; Eric Fernie finds the significance of supposedly ‘Solomonic’ spiral columns, before the fifteenth century, not in the Temple but in St Peter’s.? David Ekserdjian takes us back to the Dome of the Rock and to the influence of its lovely symmetry on Renaissance depictions of the Temple.
Historians describe in ever closer detail the devices by which Christians of the Western and Eastern Churches, far from Jerusalem, have realised in their own churches and lives the city’s manifold sanctity. These were, at their simplest, decisions over the design of new churches and of cities, decisions made by the patrons and engineered by their architects or master-builders. Also at issue, however, has been the putative experience of a wide range of believers: those who travelled to Jerusalem - and in some cases, as serial pilgrims, to other holy places - and brought back both memories and mementos; those in secular and religious life who reflected on Jerusalem with the help of travellers’ reports or of devotional manuals; and those who worshipped in the many churches whose dedication, history, design, furnishings, relics or liturgies were intended to evoke quite specifically this terrestrial Jerusalem. The rest of this book is largely about such commissions as these, in Western Europe, Byzantium, Russia and the Caucasus, and Ethiopia. In a foundational article to which our contributors will make repeated reference, Richard Krautheimer drew attention to the churches that were intended - as we can see from their dedication and their description by chroniclers - to evoke the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.’ Most startling to modern eyes is the mismatch, in most such churches, between their dedications or descriptions that recall the Sepulchre and their designs that in any evident sense do not. As will become clear, we may seek an explanation for this oddity (i) in the general medieval understanding of a copy or representation;” (ii) in the particular character of Jerusalem's buildings and of their heavenly analogues; or (iii) in the liturgical, civic or political agenda of the copies’ patrons.
Most elusive of these three avenues is the second. Here the copy would not, at root, be a copy of the earthly prototype in Jerusalem, but - in Augustinian terms - of the heavenly reality (res) which Jerusalem’s prototype had (as a signum) shared in, instantiated, prefigured or revealed. The copy would not so much represent as re-present - make present in the new setting the res behind and within that prototype. Robert Ousterhout has in the past explored, from various angles, the character of such putative copying; and in his chapter here he distinguishes, in debts and allusions to the Temple, between (i) narrowly symbolic and (ii) rich, polyvalent metaphorical reference." We will be asking throughout, who noticed and who cared about such debts and allusions, and then further (with an eye on the buildings’ patrons, paymasters and architects) who noticed who noticed, and who cared who cared.
Antony Eastmond refines the familiar notion that the centralised churches throughout the Caucasus were linked with the Holy Sepulchre. He asks us to pay greater attention to the buildings’ liturgical and other functional needs, and he looks to the inspiration - chiefly liturgical rather than martyrial - which the Caucasus drew in its basilicas from the Church on Mount Sion. The replication of Jerusalem in Mtskheta (Georgia) developed over centuries. In Armenia the links are rather with Jerusalem as a spiritual ideal than as a real city, matching an apparent preference for imagining Jerusalem and its sanctity rather than encountering it directly.”
One part of our interest - as historians, anthropologists or theologians - will be in the buildings’ particular capacity, when they were built, to represent or to realise not just the Jerusalem of this world but also the Jerusalem of the next. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem distilled into a single voyage the course of two journeys: the journey of an individual’s Christian life towards death and the final home after death; and the course of all history towards its consummation, envisioned at Rev. 20-21, in the creation of a new heaven and new earth, the descent of the New Jerusalem and the end of death in this home of God and urban Eden that will both recover and transcend the condition of pre-lapsarian paradise. It was a journey from geographical and spiritual peripheries to the navel of the old creation and, in Christ, of the new; and so to the origin and term of the whole world and of the individual soul. The city of God was the aim and destination of spiritual life, quite independent of any local or distant buildings; the buildings, their settings and the journeys needed to reach them were the visible counterpart to long-established traditions of interior space, travel, danger and destination. To be devoted to the city of God and to the journey there was already to be its citizen. For Augustine himself, the significance that once lay in the earthly Jerusalem and its Temple has now passed:
The city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it lives as a foreigner [peregrinatur] till the time of its reign arrives, when it shall gather together everyone when they rise in their bodies, when the promised kingdom shall be given to them, where they shall reign with their prince, the king of the ages, without any end of time. A certain shadow and prophetic image of this city did indeed serve on earth to signify it rather than to make it present, at the time when it needed to be represented; and this shadow was even called the holy city itself, by merit of the image and its significance, not of the actual and expressed truth as it is going to be."
This age and the next were, in some measure, porous. Patrons and artists would rather welcome to the present world a still-embattled New Jerusalem than none at all. The Westwerk at Corvey, massive and set square like the New Jerusalem, with three arches on each of its four walls (Rev. 21.12-21), needed protection; an inscription prays, “This city [civitas]: surround it yourself, O Lord; and may your angels guard its walls’ A manuscript could show the New Jerusalem ‘and on its walls, as an inscription confirms, ‘a guard of angels."4
Dedication services revelled in the evocation of the New Jerusalem. Antiphons from a tenth-century Ordo play on the history and promises of the past, the present liturgy and its prefiguration of the final salvation to come: ‘Salvation will go out from Mount Sion, for protection will be upon this city and it will be saved for the sake of its servant David ... Walk on, holy ones of God, enter into the city of the Lord, to your destined place, which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world [Matt. 25.3]?
Thus far, this all remains too narrowly devotional. We need as well the buildings’ wider political, economic and architectural contexts. Robin Milner-Gulland here sets Russias New Jerusalems into their dynastic settings.!° David Phillipson addresses the links and ease of travel between Ethiopia and Jerusalem during the centuries of Lalibela’s construction;” and Emmanuel Fritsch finds the sources of Ethiopia’s round churches (i) in Dongola (in the Nubian kingdom of Makuria) several centuries before these round churches began to appear, then to be reinforced in (ii) the vernacular architecture of the rotundas’ own time.'® Griffith-Jones and Ousterhout summarise the dynastic rivalries behind Justinian’s boast over H. Sophia, ‘I have defeated you, Solomon’;” and Griffith-Jones returns to address the cultures which informed the Arculf/Adomnan drawings of the Sepulchre, Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen and Theodulf’s oratory at Germigny-des-Prés.”° Cecily Hennessy links the architecture of devotion to St James in Jerusalem and in Constantinople.”!
In the book’s final section we bring together architectural, social, political and devotional enquiries into Britain's round churches, and in particular into London’s Temple Church. We hope thereby, in this one case, to approach a compendious overview. Eric Fernie analyses the supposed copies of the Sepulchre and the criteria that have been used to identify them.” Alan Borg surveys judiciously the role of texts and of the military orders in the dissemination of the Sepulchre’s form; he draws our attention once more to the Arculf/Adomnan drawings.” Catherine Hundley surveys the English round churches built during the crusaders’ rule over Jerusalem; she provides a welcome gazetteer.** Michael Gervers takes up the theme, and asks what if anything was distinctive in these churches’ local social and economic functions.*> Nicole Hamonic then takes us onto a larger stage: twenty-one visitation indulgences issued in support of the Old and New Temple in London, c. 1145 to 1275, are recorded in BL Cotton MS Nero E VI; Hamonic gives them the attention that they have always deserved and never had.”° Here we do at least some justice to the exchange of benefits — spiritual and economic - possible at such pilgrim-shrines: indulgences on the one hand, offerings on the other; the hope of an eternal reward among patrons for the provision of the church, and among pilgrims from the blessings they secured there. Sebastian Salvado introduces us to liturgy and to a startling evocation of the Orders’ likely processions within their European rotundas.” GriffithJones brings us back at the close to questions of devotion: he sounds some of the theological harmonies implicit in a Marian rotunda built in imitation of the circular Sepulchre by an Order headquartered in Jerusalem opposite the octagonal “Temple of the Lord, the Dome of the Rock; and he asks who will have heard, in the shape of the Temple Church and its allusions, how rich a symphony of thought and feeling.”
Thanks to our contributors we can map in outline a thousand years and three continents of architectural, devotional, cultural and political history, and we can survey at least some of the deep cultural shifts and divergences that have informed this landscape. Each of the contributors introduces the historiographical background, as and if needed, to his or her own study; and so they cumulatively reveal the advances in understanding offered through the course of the volume.
FROM THE TABERNACLE OF THE WILDERNESS TO THE TEMPLES OF JERUSALEM
It may be helpful to sketch at the outset the succession of structures — real, envisioned and hoped for - which underlie much of this book.
When the people of Israel were in the desert, Moses built the tabernacle in accordance with God’s commands in seven stages (Ex. 25.1-31.17), corresponding to the six days of creation and to the seventh, of God’s rest.” Moses was ordered to build the tabernacle and its contents according to the design which was shown to him on the mountain (paradeigma LXX / similitudo Vg, Ex. 25.9; tupos / exemplar, 25.40; eidos / exemplum, 26.30; cf. 27.8); and the ark of the covenant was to be made ‘from incorruptible wood’ (ek xulon asépton, LXX, acacia or incorruptible; de lignis setthim, Vg). The principal craftsman was Bezalel, filled with the spirit of God in wisdom, knowledge and skill (Ex. 31.1-11). Within the tabernacle were the mercy-seat and its two flanking cherubim: ‘from there, God told Moses, ‘I shall teach you and speak to you, that is, over the mercy-seat [propitiatorium] and in between the two cherubim who will be above the ark of the testimony - everything which I will command through you to the children of Israel’ (Vg, Ex. 25.22). The tabernacle, therefore — and within it the incorruptible ark - were like no other artefacts on earth; and they established within scripture the existence of heavenly prototypes, plausibly read by later generations as Platonic forms in which their imperfect, perishable counterparts participate on earth.
The tabernacle’s plan was the basis for the Temple's, in Jerusalem. The sanctuary of Solomon’s Temple was an oblong block. A portico led into two rooms: the portico was 10 cubits deep and ran the whole 20 cubits’ width of the outer hall and Holy of Holies; the outer hall was 40 cubits long, 20 wide and 25 high;*° and beyond it stood the innermost Holy of Holies, a cube of 20 x 20 x 20 cubits (1 Kings 6.1-22; 2 Chron. 3.1-13). Both rooms were decorated with trees and fruits. It was a paradise. In the Holy of Holies stood the ark of the covenant. Behind the ark was a further pair of giant cherubim. Their wings were outstretched; the outer wing-tip of each cherub touched the wall, the inner wing-tip touched the other’s (cf. Ex. 25.22; 1 Sam. 4.4; 2 Sam. 6.2; Psalms 80.1, 99.1). This Temple was destroyed in 587 BCE; the ark and the cherubim were not seen again.
Ezekiel, in exile in Babylon after the Temple's destruction, dreamt of a Jerusalem with a new Temple. To see it he was carried to the top of a high mountain overlooking Israel (Ez. 40.2). The Temple’s inner court was square, 100 x 100 cubits; the sanctuary’s outer hall and Holy of Holies were, as in Solomon's destroyed Temple, 40 x 20 cubits and 20 x 20 cubits (Ez. 40.47, 41.2—4). Ezekiel saw the river of life, and on either side the trees of life bearing a crop of fruit in each month of the year (Ez. 47.12). It was to be set in a Jerusalem with twelve gates, three set in each of its four walls, and each named for one of Israel’s tribes (Ez. 48.30-35).
The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt by the Jews, led by Zerubbabel, who returned from exile in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. The new building was consecrated in 515 BCE and then again, after desecration, in December 164 (1 Macc. 4). From 20/19 BCE, Herod the Great rebuilt the whole complex. He drastically expanded the Temple Mount, creating a vast esplanade for the outer court, the setting for the exchange of coinage and sale of sacrificially pure animals.*' Two flights of steps and a balustrade raised the enclosed area of the sanctuary twenty feet above the court’s level; within the enclosure twelve further steps led up to the sanctuary. Construction continued until the early 60s CE.” Josephus gives a full account of the Temple as it stood in the first century CE. Protecting the outer hall and the Holy of Holies from daylight and from human sight were two sets of overlapping veils. One set was embroidered in blue, linen, scarlet and purple, representing for Josephus the elements of air, earth, fire and sea. So by its material the veil already signified the universe; and its embroidery showed the whole spectacle of heaven. In the sanctuary’s outer hall the seven-branched lampstand signified, for Josephus, the seven planets; the twelve loaves, the months and zodiac; the altar of incense, the due offering of all created things to their maker. To pass beyond the veil was to pass through and beyond the created universe and the heavens themselves to God’s domain above. The outer hall was entered by the priests on duty every day, morning and evening. The Holy of Holies was entered only on the Day of Atonement and by the High Priest alone. It was, as far as any such claim could be made for a single place in God’s creation, the home of God on earth; and so it was the intersection of earth and heaven. Adam had been the gardener of Eden, and named all the creatures there (Gen. 2.15, 19-20). As God had once walked with Adam in Eden in the cool of the day, so the place of such encounter was once more an Eden; Jewish mystics ascended, for a glimpse of God’s glory, to paradise (2 Cor. 12.2-4).*4 At the time of Jesus, the Holy of Holies was empty. According to the gospel of Mark, the heavens had been torn open (schizomenoi) at Jesus’ baptism; the veil of the Temple was torn (eschisthé) from top to bottom when Jesus died (Mark 1.10, 15.38). The heavens and the veil alike, adorned with sun, moon and stars, hid God’s heaven and God’s plans from human view; the veil was torn at the moment of God’s ultimate self-disclosure on Golgotha.
The Letter to the Hebrews expounds the death of Christ as the entry of the new High Priest into the Holy of Holies, taking the blood not of a sacrificial bull and goat but of himself. This Holy of Holies was in heaven; the author, then, most directly evoked not the Temple in Jerusalem but Moses’ tabernacle and its heavenly prototype. He describes the High Priest’s annual entry into the Holy of Holies, already ordained for the tabernacle (Lev. 16); ‘but Christ, having appeared as the High Priest of future benefits, through the fuller and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands - that is, not of this creation - and not through the blood of goats and bulls but through his own blood entered once for all into the eternal Holy Places, having found eternal redemption. The earthly ministries have their role: ‘it is necessary that with these the antitypes [antitupa, LXX, exemplaria, Vg] of heavenly things should be cleansed, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Jesus has not, in holy places made by hands, entered the antitypes of the true things but into heaven itself, so that he might now appear before the face of God on our behalf’ (Hebr. 9.11-12, 24).
The Book of Revelation knows the unique standing of the ark: at the sounding of the seventh trumpet in Revelation, ‘the sanctuary of God in heaven opened, and the ark of the covenant could be seen inside it’ (Rev. 11.19). At the close of Revelation we return to Jerusalem and Eden together. The Temple as imagined by Ezekiel informed Revelation’s closing vision, of a new heaven and new earth and a ‘heavenly Jerusalem that descends to earth as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 21.1-22.5). This Jerusalem is the tabernacle of God (Rev. 21.3); but there is no temple in it nor any sun or moon, for God and the Lamb are themselves its temple and its light (Rev. 21.22-3). It is a square, described as also ‘equal in height’ (Rev. 21.16); with twelve foundations and with twelve gates that bear the names of Israel's tribes; and with Ezekiel’s river and fruitful trees.
The earliest panegyric of a church to survive is Eusebius’ record of his own speech at the dedication of Paulinus’ church at Tyre, c. 315. It combines biblical and Platonic thought with startling complexity. The many later treatments of the theme, more directly homiletic, relish an exuberant but conceptually simpler range of interpretive possibilities. Eusebius compares Paulinus to Bezalel, Solomon and Zerubbabel. The speech then follows a single theme in four ways. First, the human race was sunk under devils, in tombs and graves; once redeemed, the individual soul becomes a Holy of Holies, seen only by the High Priest Christ and (it may be) by the High Priest Paulinus. Secondly, there was the church at Tyre. The land had been covered with rubbish, the haunt of wild beasts. But as Christ did what he saw his father doing, so Paulinus used Christ’s actions as his patterns and archetypes; and as Bezalel was called to construct through symbols the sanctuary of heavenly types, so Paulinus, bearing the whole Christ, the Word, and Wisdom in his soul, had built Tyre’s sanctuary according to the pattern of the greater sanctuary, visible according to the pattern of the invisible. Thirdly comes the still greater wonder: the restoration of souls, previously captured and slain by demons, buried and covered in rubbish; these souls are the archetypes, the rational prototypes and divine models of the building, a spiritual edifice restored by God. Eusebius finally brings building and souls together, placing the believers of different calibres in suitable roles around the Church and church, and locating the altar in the Holy of Holies that is the soul of Christ himself. So the Church is the sanctuary built throughout the world as the spiritual image on earth of the vaults that stand beyond the vaults of heaven.* Eusebius stands, unsurpassed, at the head of an enormous river of such interpretations, ever more varied in detail.
TEMPLE AND TOMB: JESUS AND HIS BURIAL
The Temple, as the tabernacle before it, was a microcosm of creation; and by the time of Jesus its daily prayers were conceived as upholding creation’s order.** John’s gospel is in turn the story of a new creation; and the links between the Temple and Jesus’ tomb find here their first expression. Genesis had opened ‘in the beginning’ with creation by God’s word (Gen. 1.1-3); so John’s prologue, a prefatory hymn, introduces the Word who was ‘in the beginning, who was with God and was God, and through whom all things came to be. God’s first command had been for light (Gen. 1.3); in John’s “Word’ was life, and the life was the light of humankind (John 1.4-5, 9). The Word makes its tabernacle with humankind (1.14). Jesus is presented throughout as the new Temple: he speaks of the sanctuary that is his body (2.21); he makes present in his own person the light and water of the Feast of Tabernacles (7.37-9; 8.12).
Jesus died at Passover, the season of creation. God had begun creation on Day One with light and darkness; at the end of Day Six, with the creation of the Human(s), God ‘completed’ his works (sunetelesthésan, sunetelesen, Gen. 2.1, 2). At the trial of Jesus on the morning of Good Friday, once more Day Six, Pontius Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd: “Look; said Pilate, ‘the Human!’ (19.5). He spoke more correctly than he knew. As the afternoon of Day Six drew towards its end, Jesus said: ‘It is completed [tetelestai], and died (19.30). In John’s gospel (and only in John’s), Jesus was buried in a garden (19.41). On Day Seven, with creation complete, God had rested; Day Seven became the Sabbath, and on it the story of John’s gospel pauses. On Day Eight, the day of perfection which is again Day One, ‘very early, when it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb (John 20.1). When at last she looked in, she saw two men standing, one at each end of the stone on which Jesus had been laid. Echoed here are the cherubim that flanked God's throne; the tomb of Jesus is now the Holy of Holies, where he himself is at once sanctuary, priest and victim. When Mary turned and saw Jesus, she took him for the gardener; he called her by her name, and she recognised him.
Light of all kinds, in John’s narrative, was rising on Day One. John was evoking an Eden, in a world reborn, where a new Adam - once more, supposedly, the gardener — and a new Eve were together again. At Jesus’ burial the Temple's paradise became a tomb; through Jesus’ presence the tomb became the Temple. John needed his audience to enquire what human figure could possibly belong - let alone, as a corpse - between the cherubim, the guardians in the Holy of Holies of the throne of God.** John’s gospel demanded of its audience a sensibility alert to nuance and allusion, and a bold typological imagination; for the audience was clearly being invited through the story not just to recognise but to occupy for themselves that new creation. John’s compositional devices show that he knew how drastic - and perhaps how difficult - would be the attainment of the insight to which he was leading his audience.
Gregory the Great, expounding John’s Easter story at the end of the sixth century, considers the role played by these angels: the angel at the head represented the Word who was God, the angel at the feet the Word made flesh. But further: we can also see in the angels the two testaments: the Old at the head, the New at the feet; they form a proper pair, both announcing Jesus pari sensu. So they recall the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, facing with perfectly paired gaze each other and the mercy-seat (propitiatorium) which is a figure of the incarnate Lord (propitiatio, 1 John 2.2). These cherubim as the two testaments tell in harmony the mystery of Christ’s dispensation: the Old, what was, when it was written, yet to be done; the New, what has now been achieved.”
John’s particular typology did not come to dominate the Church. The sanctuary and the tomb have continued, nonetheless, to be inseparably linked in the liturgy. In the East, the altar was associated by the fifth century with Christ’s tomb. “We may think of him on the altar, wrote Theodore of Mopsuestia in a long account of the offerings brought out as Christ was led to his passion; they are placed on the altar ‘as if henceforth in a kind of sepulchre, and as having already undergone the passion’;*’ the linens represent the burial cloths, the fans keep anything from falling on the body, the ministers are around the altar as the angels flanked Jesus’ tomb. Theodore’s pupil Narsai pursued the theme: “The altar is the symbol of the Lord’s tomb without a doubt, and the bread and wine are the body of our Lord which was embalmed and buried?“ The tradition (untainted by Narsai’s heresies) has endured from John Climax of Mount Sinai until the present day.” In the West, Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780-856) inherited the symbolism of the white, linen corporal (the cloth on which the chalice and host are placed) as the grave-clothes. The paten and chalice quodammodo Dominici sepulcri typum habent: the chalice as the grave, the paten as its cover; or the chalice as Christ’s suffering and the paten as the cross; the elements’ elevation as Christ's elevation on the cross; the bread’s fragment, dropped in the wine, as the ongoing food of the risen Christ; the unconsumed bread on the altar as Christ’s abandonment by his disciples and his burial. From the ninth century onwards it became standard practice for one or three hosts to be entombed in an altar at its dedication.“
In his Liber officialis III (issued in three editions, 821-35) Amalarius of Metz comprehensively described the ninth-century Mass as such an allegorical drama.* It calls for mention precisely because of its apparently widespread appeal; the condemnation of Amalarius in 853 confirms that Amalarius had ‘infected and corrupted almost all the churches in France and many in other regions ... the simpliciores are reputed to love them and read them assiduously.“ The altar is the sepulchre from which Christ is risen at the communion; death, burial and resurrection are all enacted. At Nobis quoque peccatoribus Christ ‘is sleeping with head inclined’ on the cross. Amalarius notes that in the Gallican service the chalice was placed to the right of the paten, to catch the holy blood. From then on until the end of the consecration at Per omnia saecula saeculorum, priest and deacon were enacting the burial of Christ. The chalice and paten, elevated and then wrapped in sudarion and sindon, were replaced on the altar as in the tomb. At this point the drama turned to joy. A subdeacon received the paten, signifying that it was the women who first heard the news of the resurrection. The communion itself represented the events of Easter Day: the commingling reunited body and blood and so re-created the miracle of the resurrection; in the Pax Domini the Lord’s salutation made happy the disciples’ hearts (John 20.19, 21); the fraction was a symbol of the risen Christ and of his living presence at the service.’
Such a dramaturgical instinct is summed up by Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1100): Those who recited tragedies in theatres presented the actions of opponents by gestures before the people. In the same way our tragic author [the celebrant] represents by his gestures in the theatre of the church before the Christian people the struggle of Christ and teaches them the victory of his redemption.
Such was the daily, transcendental drama of the Mass, performed in the many thousand theatres of liturgy created by the altar; we have not even touched on the special but ubiquitous ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter, or on their widespread props and drama.“ We concentrate for much of this book on representations of the Holy Sepulchre, as experienced all through the year. Throughout, we will ask what made these few programmatic and often spectacular - architectural recollections of the Sepulchre how special and why in whose eyes and lives.
This book is a study in architectural history, not in the recovery of medieval sensibilities. But we will from time to time look beyond the analysis of form and function, to acknowledge the part played by these places and the devotion they inspired, focused or amplified in cultures which can now seem irrecoverably distant from our own.
An age becomes an age, all else beside, When sensuous poets in their pride invent Emblems for the soul’s consent That speak the meanings men will never know But man-imagined images can show.
Archibald MacLeish, Hypocrite Auteur, 2
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