Every act of worship must have a setting, whether in the open air, a domestic room, at a hospital bedside, in a prison, the parish church or the grandest cathedral. Aspects of the setting will seem more or less appropriate to the occasion, either detracting from, or by contrast intensifying, the meaning of the rite; Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s deeply private communion in prison awaiting execution for his resistance against Hitler, without canonical means or text, is perhaps more moving (and surely as valid before a loving and merciful God) than the eucharist celebrated according to the most elaborate rubrics in a great cathedral, but the one simply could not be transferred to the other setting. It is like using the appropriate register of language in a given context; you know when it is right, and may be able to make some general rules. Likewise, there isn’t a simple formula or necessarily a direct correspondence between given aspects of the register of the liturgical language and specific elements of its surroundings, which are almost always architectural. Still, the languages of the text, the gestures, the choreography of the movement within the space, and the specific details of setting all come together to interpret the rite to those present at that particular time. It should be fresh each time, but it is not new every time. Rites have histories, and each time we reflect on the grand narrative of salvation forms another layer of our understanding. It is part of the spiritual pilgrimage of the people of God.
So there is clearly some relationship between the liturgy and architecture. On the simplest level, there needs to be a table, vessels for the bread and wine, room for worshippers, often with offerings that have to be dealt with, and space for the celebrant and assistants to carry out the rite according to the given rubrics. The liturgy and its context (architectural and socio-political) shape one another. We have some idea how the earliest Christians worshipped through the biblical witness. They worshipped in the Temple of Jerusalem, in synagogues and in houses, different kinds of worship in different contexts and for different purposes. When Christians were excluded from Judaic worship, they had to make their own provision for the various aspects of worship. It wasn’t long before the demands of worship required permanent changes to the house in which it took place. Of course, the earliest, unremodelled, houses actually used for worship cannot now be archaeologically identified, and the oldest identifiable place of Christian worship we know was discovered quite by chance at Dura Europos in modern Syria. The changes that were made to the house during the middle of the third century help us to reconstruct how worship would have unfolded within those spaces. For one thing, documents indicate that a higher theology of priesthood meant that priests were literally elevated to the level of a dais. Paintings and graffiti also help to reconstruct their theological outlook, their vision of the ‘city of God’ of the psalmist.
Changes outside both liturgy and architecture can also bring about profound changes in them both: developments in the socio-political context might trigger a change in the form of worship, which might in turn bring more changes to the building, or type of building, or technology being used. When Christianity found imperial favour with Constantine, the leader of the formerly oppressed cult was given magisterial status, an imperial palace and two huge basilicas were begun, one as the cathedral of Rome, the other over the tomb of St Peter. Needless to say, imperial ceremonial would have a very considerable impact on the form of worship in these great basilicas at the very least, though it would have little or no impact on worship in existing house-churches of Rome. Forms of worship would also differ between the two great basilicas, with refrigeria, or family picnics at the graves of relatives buried ad sanctum, close to the Apostle in St Peter’s Basilica, where there were also ceremonies associated with the growing cult of the Martyr himself. Further developments of such cults will become a familiar thread running through the fabric of this story, until they come to a dramatic crisis.
Each situation will be found somewhat different from the last. Liturgy and architecture both have an internal logic, and their forms develop at different rates. Liturgical forms and texts were originally pretty fluid, with much being left to the ability of the presiding bishop to improvise, but through the centuries it became progressively fixed, becoming standardized in written form by about the sixth century. Even standard forms develop over time, and the rubrics, or red-letter glosses of the text giving the ‘stage directions’, can be highly individual to the ‘Use’ of the specific place, as at medieval Salisbury, Hereford or Durham. Those rubrics are very powerful liturgical engines for change in the architectural setting, since, for example, they detail the form and route of processions and interpret the theology of the architecture and the programme of the painting and sculpture, as will be found at Saint-Denis, Chartres and Wells.
The theological vision and imaginative world expressed in the liturgy in a private house, at a hospital bed, in a parish church or in different ages and climes in pilgrimage churches at Bethlehem and Golgotha, in an imperial basilica in Rome, in the basilicas of Gaul in the twilight of Empire, in the churches of Charlemagne’s European Empire, or in the blaze of glory of high-windowed Gothic are all very different. That vision in its context brings the kingdom of God ‘very near’. The liturgy seeks to join our worship with the heavenly worship, to bring us beyond imagery to reality itself in the presence of God. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote: ‘Like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than is laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 4.10–11), and there is the vision of the heavenly city in the Revelation of St John (Rev. 21.10ff). Building the architecture of the church and edifying the Church by bringing its members closer to God through the liturgy became more than just parallel activities; one was a figure for the other, and would be used time and again by preachers and writers from Eusebius preaching at the consecration of the Cathedral at Tyre at the turn of the fourth century before the ‘Peace of the Church’ under Constantine, to the hymn for the rebuilding of the Cathedral at Byzantine Edessa in the middle of the sixth century, to Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in the thirteenth. The great work of building the city of God was on the one hand architectural, because it was a physical interpretation of the theological and biblical vision, while on the other, the liturgical rehearsal and enactment of the biblical record of the events of salvation history brought the people into the very presence of those events in the dramatic presentation of the liturgy, and in the very presence of the Saviour himself through the transformative power of the sacrament:
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Eph. 3.19–22)
The interpretation and extrapolation of this scriptural image within liturgical fellowship and hard stone architecture together will vary endlessly from the Early Church to the close of the Middle Ages, but that variation is also endlessly rich and fascinating.