The unexpectedness and dimness of the passage down into the church of Sant’Agnese, the time that the descent requires, and the strong sense the staircase gives of contact with the past, combine to provide an initiation into the church itself, especially for the first-time visitor.
Once you have passed through the glass door at the bottom of the stairs, you discover on your right, here as in any Catholic church, a basin of water called “holy” because it has been formally blessed.1 This water is for a ritual form of ablution or washing, which signifies purification upon entry, the intention to go in with a pure heart: people dip their fingers into the water and with them make a sign of the cross, from head to chest and from shoulder to shoulder.2 They do it again when they leave the church, for a church is holy ground—indeed, as we shall see, a church is often cross-shaped ground—and leaving it is as momentous as going in.
What lies before you now is simply a continuation of the passageway; it turns slightly left and then continues straight on and ends at a door. The door opens into the antechamber of the entrance to the catacombs. Today, when the passage is lit by electricity, you can see the whole distance, down the steps, through the glass, and as far as the catacomb door, from the moment you enter at the top of the stairs. There is no groping through the dark; nevertheless, the unexpectedness of finding a long journey still before them, forward and down, makes most first-time visitors pause, then take their time in the descent between the walls that rise on either hand, covered with marble inscriptions. There is no sign of any church at the bottom; you are left “in the dark,” and must advance and explore before being enlightened.
To your left, after the entrance through the glass partition, is a wall. Doors pierce this wall now, but for many centuries it was blank,3 and behind it lay solid earth, perforated by warrens full of graves. This area was once very shadowy, lit only by diffused light from beyond the four dark pillars on the right; it is still relatively dim. You naturally turn right, towards the light—and with a rush the space opens out and the generous volume of the church interior rises and widens about you.
Most people arriving for the first time in Sant’Agnese’s—and in my case several times thereafter—do not even realize that they have turned ninety degrees to the right to step into the church. They are drawn into the movement, almost unawares. It is like taking the first bite of a delicious meal: the experience is so concentrated and satisfying that the action needed to procure it occurs almost unconsciously, without will or effort. The last step of initiation has been taken, from dim vestibule into the main body of the building. One has scarcely had time to realize that the passage is actually the vestibule of the church.
Such a vestibule is known as a narthex, a Greek word meaning “fennel stalk.” In the ancient Mediterranean world, a section of a very large fennel stalk was commonly used as a container. For example, Prometheus in Greek mythology stole fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and gave it to humankind, carrying the hot brand down to us enclosed in a narthex. A perfume box, too, could be made out of a section of a hollow fennel stalk. The front and transitional portion of a church was known in the Greek Christian world as a narthex, a sacred enclosure. New converts awaiting final initiation into Christianity, the catechumens (literally “those still being instructed”), were sometimes not admitted into the church proper but had to stand in the narthex during church services. Once baptism had been received—a much larger, once-and-for-all-time version of the ritual ablution with holy water at the church entrance—they would formally enter both the building and the institutional Church.
A narthex is ordinarily dim; exterior church doors are usually kept closed or curtained so that the only light in the vestibule comes from the temple beyond it. The preliminary section of many early churches was an enclosed area outside the front doors, a courtyard before the temple, often with greenery and flowers and a fountain. It was an area of transition before entry into the building. In Latin the name for it was an atrium (as the courtyard of a Roman house was called), or a porticus because it was a pillared enclosure; or it was called a paradisus, a garden, but one with biblical connotations. “Paradise” comes from a Persian word meaning a “walled-in enclosure,” often a deer park. The word came to denote more vaguely a “pleasure garden.” For this reason “paradise” was used to translate the Hebrew word gan, or garden, in the Book of Genesis: the place where Adam and Eve lived in delightful innocence before they disobeyed God.4 The French word for an area in front of a church is parvis, from paradisus. A narthex inside a church also stands for paradise.
At the culmination of the Christian year, just before midnight on the eve of Easter, an ancient hymn is often sung in the darkness by the light of only the Easter candle. The candle is carried into the church from outside, and symbolizes Christ and the light he brought into the world. The song tells us, among other things, that the mythical sin in Paradise of Adam and Eve, First Man and First Woman—a sin of curiosity, a longing to know and so become “like gods”—turned out to be “a happy fault,” felix culpa, even though it meant that humankind was thereafter forced to leave Paradise. The fault was happy because it eventually caused God’s irruption into human history, the coming of Jesus Christ, “so wonderful a saviour.” As Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, with Adam sin “entered the world,” but with Christ grace came, “grace abounding”: there is far more grace, which is the undeserved mercy of God, than there is sin.5 The first disobedience was the end of innocence—but still it is seen as standing at the beginning of the story of the human race. And similarly, to enter a church we step out of the narthex or “paradise.”
Now the next stage of the journey can begin. The “road,” the church’s central aisle, lies ahead, its length representing the time humanity has before it, the span each person has to live. The church includes within its walls not only the beginning but also the end, the journey’s destination. No sooner have we entered than we are presented with a full view of this destination, symbolized by the apse: when the journey is complete and paradise regained, it will be at a higher and eternal level, where the journey will be transfigured and understood.
In the children’s game of hopscotch, the origins of which are very old, a pattern of squares is scratched on a bald patch of ground, or drawn in chalk on a city sidewalk. Players, taking turns, throw or kick a stone into the squares in a set order, hopping on one leg to do so; when a pair of squares is reached, landing on both legs is permitted. When a player arrives at the end of the diagram, he or she must turn, then hop back to the beginning and out of the pattern’s outline.
Some hopscotch patterns are spiral, with the goal in the middle, like a labyrinth. There the player is said to be “reborn”: the next stage of the game is to turn and hop back out. This hopscotch design can be interpreted as a figure of the “journey” of life, as well as a static picture of the soul: of the truth—God—to be found at the heart of every self. Round churches are built in part to evoke such ideas. A different hopscotch pattern resembles the ground-plan of a basilical church with a transverse section or transept. This shape expresses, as we shall see, the spiritual life in time; it also represents a human body, with the double squares (the transept) as the arms, and the far end as the head. The normally rounded hopscotch end-piece is known in many languages as “paradise,” or by a word such as “crown” or “glory.”
Human beings readily think of time in terms of space. This propensity is built into the English language, and indeed into all languages. Psychologists explain that children learn about space first—up and down, far and near, large and small. Only later do they find out about time, and they do so linguistically, using the spatial concepts they already know. The language itself has already given to spatial words temporal meanings, imitating the order in which a child learns, and perhaps assisting the child by doing so. “Now,” for example, is “here” and present to us; it is “the present.” What has already happened, what once was present, has moved on and is now absent, as though it has “passed” us. “Present” and “past” are words that give away the unspoken metaphor that we all use to think about time, as a line—a road, a river—in the “course” of which events “take place.” A clock face with its moving hands is a spatial area that shows the “amount” of time “gone by,” and how much of it is left.
A narrative—a story recounted in time—organizes events into meaningful sequences. When “the plot” in a story is told to us, we demand not just a jumble of facts, but a string or connecting line to join them, disclosing causes, consequences, even form. Often the “line” of connection in stories is pictured as a thread. (The word “line” itself comes from the Latin linea, a flaxen thread for making linen.) We speak of “spinning a yarn,” and, if we become distracted, of “losing the thread” of the tale or argument. The word “text” is cognate with “textile” because a narrative is thought of as woven, out of threads.
In ancient Greece the propensity to find patterns in events was expressed in a belief in fate, what the Romans called fatum. Greek myth spoke of three Moirai (“Sharers Out”), personifications of fate: ancient women who sat spinning the threads or ropes of what is “bound” to happen. (Ancient Roman, Scandinavian, and German mythologies also have groups of three crones who spin and weave the events of the world.) Their names in Greek were Clotho (“Spinner”), Lachesis (“Allotment”), and Atropos (“Not to Be Turned Aside”): we can see from these meanings that one’s “spun” fate was exterior to oneself, a “given,” yet personal as well as inescapable. The Roman word fatum means “a thing said”—it “reports” a sequence of events before it occurs. An event that is fated cannot not happen; the plot, fatum, or script cannot be changed, as the poet Yeats said, “by an inch or an ounce.”6 It is a length or a weight, a pattern, a line, a thread, a thing, completely existent before it works itself out in time.
It is easy to dismiss such myths as “merely” stories, but they carry a truth we all recognize or they would not fascinate us as they do: Human beings are never in total control of their lives or of everything that happens to them. They often feel forced and dragged into situations and courses of action against their will. It is then that they know what the ancients called fate: unfreedom. Such experience is the context—again the “textile” metaphor—of all moral judgement and spiritual understanding. Every religion states the problem of freedom, and offers its own insights into its meaning.
What Christianity proposes instead of fate is destiny. And, it adds, this destiny is life with God, a personal God, who cares about what happens to human beings. The difference between the two conceptions is important. Whereas fate is allotted or “said” in the beginning, destiny (from which we get the word “destination”) is the end, the aim. We are free to walk towards the goal or away from it, just as we are free to walk past a church rather than enter it. Nobody, not even the ancient Olympian gods, could gainsay fate; the Pattern was older than they were. But the Judeo-Christian God is a person,7 who created all there is out of gratuitous love, who takes a hand in human lives, and who gives meaning to their experience. In the Christian understanding of the journey towards destiny, it is also possible to get lost on the way, and to be found or saved as well.
The Cross, the human body, and destiny are three of the ideas that have informed the traditional design of many churches for centuries. A church is often cross-shaped—that is, in the form of a human body, with the arms constituted by the transept, the head by the apse, and the heart by the altar. A strong directionality is commonly expressed: a door, then a narthex, and then the long main body of the church or nave, heading directly to the altar and the rounded apse wall beyond it. The people in the church are on a journey, the “journey of life,” towards their destiny, which is God. Time—the life of the group, the lifetime of each individual person—is expressed as space. Moving up the nave and aisles is moving towards our end: our aim (“end” as purpose) and also our body’s death. Movement and immobility, the temporal and the eternal, time and space: all these oppositions are expressed in a church’s geometry.
When people decide to create a sacred space (such space may remain flat, as in many of the Indian or Tibetan mandalas, or eventually have a building or even a whole city constructed upon it), they tend to make the beginnings solemn and instinct with meaning. An ancient Roman temple occupied an oblong area, drawn in a ritual manner by a priest who specialized in prophetically interpreting signs, and who was known as an augur; the building had to be “inaugurated.” A templum was most literally a piece of earth or a section of the sky, delineated by an augur. When a temple was built, it needed a ritually outlined space, a templum.
The word templum itself is cognate with Greek temnein, to cut: the special area is “cut off” by a boundary from the space around it. Greeks called a sacred “cut off” area temenos. In ancient Rome many official state functions—meetings of senators, for example—could take place only once the space for them had been ritually outlined. Inside a temenos the augur would draw two lines crossing at right angles. Roman camps, and most Roman cities, made these intersecting lines the two main roads, creating the central and most important crossroad. Around the city or camp or temple was a wall, the sacred boundary.
“Sacred,” from Latin sacer, meant essentially something that should be respected, and not tampered with or “desecrated.” Separateness is an essential element of the notion of the sacred; a sacred area should not be “polluted,” that is, mixed up with what has no business invading it. The boundary must not be broken. Cleanliness is the ideal, and purity; sacredness has to do with categories, and keeping them clear. Defilement of the sacred produces in people who respect it a reaction of shuddering and disgust. To give an everyday example, a dinner table is a “sacred” area in a house, especially if it has food on it. So someone’s dirty socks (or anything else considered “revolting” by prospective diners) lying on that table, especially once it has been “set” or laid out and thereby ritually set apart for its function, is a form of defilement.
The idea of a bounded area—where what is inside is more special, more focused, and more concentrated than what is outside, and therefore demands purity from people who enter it—is very strong in the related Latin word sanctus, holy. The most powerful area in a building may be called the inner sanctum, where only the most important, the most “qualified” people ever penetrate. The strange English word “sanction,” which means both “allow” and “forbid,” derives its opposite meanings from what is sanctus. Something no one dares touch or alter is “sacrosanct”—which doubles the meaning by adding “sacred” to sanctus. A holy building, or an especially holy part of one, is known as a “sanctuary.” A place that is sacred can act as a refuge for anybody who takes shelter inside it; such protection, which relies upon the “untouchable” nature of the sacred, is also called “sanctuary.”
In ancient Greece and Rome a temple was a house for a god; it often stood on a hill, was raised on a podium, and was approached by steps. Around it was a precinct (literally “something with a belt—a cinch—tightly surrounding it”), a space where worshippers could gather; it was not for those who did not intend or who were not allowed to take part in the sacrifices and the feast that followed. The temple proper was not where people congregated. The god’s statue stood alone in the temple, in a windowless walled enclosure with a large door in front. Columns stood around the outside of this room, which was called the cella. The altar’s place was in the precinct, not in the temple; when sacrifice was performed, the door to the god’s enclosure was opened so that the deity could watch what was going on.
The sacrifice took place pro fano, in front of the fanum or “fane,” the temple. (Fanum is from the Greek root phan-, meaning “show,” as in “epiphany”; this was a place where the god revealed himself or herself.) What was outside the temple, pro fano, also could mean what was not holy, that is, merely—or sometimes appallingly—profane. The distinction between an outlined space and the undifferentiated space beyond it is invariably important.
Christianity was born at the height of the Roman Empire; and when Christians eventually came to build their own churches, they built some of the first of them in Rome. So churches were heavily dependent, architecturally speaking, upon Roman technological and artistic know-how. Christian thinking grew within the matrix of ancient Classical culture. But Christianity was born out of Jewish, not Greek or Roman, religion. The Jews also had a temple, a single building in Jerusalem that focused the nation and provided its ritual centre. Within the “holy of holies,” its sacred inner sanctum, this temple held for centuries the written Decalogue or Ten Commandments, fruit of the encounter of Moses with God. The Jewish temple remembered and kept alive that revolutionary contact with the divine. Every Christian church remembers this temple, and often contains features that specifically echo its structure.
But Christians, like Jews, are people of the Word, of memory and narrative; they are the children of time. The physical object that is sacred in Judaism (and therefore in Christianity) is first and foremost the Book, the Bible. There were certainly vast numbers of stories and myths in Greco-Roman religion, but there was nothing like the Bible, a book that is more sacred than any building.
The Bible is not a history book. It has history in it, certainly, but it contains all sorts of other literary genres too: poetry, myths, stories, prophecies, canons of law, commentaries, ethical pleading. The word “Bible” is, in fact, a plural noun (Greek ta biblia, “the books”), and that is what the Bible is—many books, many historical periods, many points of view. But behind all of them is a tradition, a continuity, one river through which many waters flow. The purpose of the Bible is to reveal the true nature of God; in doing so, it also shows the ways in which people have missed the truth, or misunderstood it.
The Gospels open the Christian part of the Bible, the “New Testament.” A “testament” is writing that bears witness to what has happened. The English word “gospel” is a contraction of “good” and “spell,” and means “good news”; the writer of a Gospel is called an “evangelist,” from the Greek for an “announcer (angel) of what is good (eu).” The Gospels, all of which were written in Greek, tell the life of Jesus—but in a manner that little resembles what modern people would expect in a biography. There is no description of what Jesus looked like, for example, nothing about what he did for most of his life, let alone anything about what he “must have” felt. There are no footnotes and no documents adduced, although the writings of the Old Testament are quoted frequently.
In a Gospel, everything is seen in the light of what the writer believes, and the writer never pretends it is otherwise. But he rarely allows himself to address the reader directly; his belief is expressed in the story he tells. Modern writers of biography and history—once those genres and their rules had become set and differentiated from other kinds of writing—have pretended to be objective and unprejudiced, to have obtained and verified the available facts. A Gospel writer, on the other hand, was a witness, giving “news” that he was not afraid to call “good”; he was saying that a new intensity had begun in the relationship between human beings and God, that God had chosen to draw closer to humanity. Emmanuel, meaning in Hebrew “God with us,” had come, as it had been foretold.8
Postmodern thinking has recently come to distrust the notion of any objective reporting of “the facts.” It has become necessary to demolish the idea that a writer could have no assumptions, could have no axe whatever to grind when relating a sequence of events or expounding an argument. The New Testament, like the Old, is openly partisan; the writers believe in a meaning, and they present that meaning with the full and open intention of confronting their readers with it. They even challenge the reader to change his or her life and point of view as a result of the confrontation. So unconcerned is the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) about “the facts” that it often presents, without attempting to reconcile them, two or more versions of the same events, told by two or more people, with different perspectives on those facts. What is most interesting, in the Bible, is what “the facts” mean to the reader or listener.
The New Testament offers no fewer than four versions of the life of Christ, each written with a different emphasis and for a different audience. There are enough discrepancies among the four to provide lifetimes of scholarly debate about what the “actual facts” might have been, although in most respects the accounts do agree among themselves. The Gospels, being four, should never let us imagine that there are no assumptions involved, no differences arising out of emphases and points of view. The Gospels, being four, ought to pull the rug out from under any literalist stance well in advance.
The Gospels were written when the Church had already come into being. Indeed, they were written by the Church, from its understanding of events at that time. The intention was to record the message, so that people could hear it and respond to it, each person in his or her own way. Like the Old Testament, the Gospels set out to reveal the true nature of God. They were written out of a sense that people living then had a solemn duty to ensure that these world-shattering events were not forgotten; the story must be handed on.
In the beginning, then, is an epic, told in the many books of the Bible, the world’s fullest account of the history of a people from their ancient origins. Running like a great river of memory through the Jewish scriptures is the story of the Exodus, where Moses leads his people out of oppression to liberty.
In the course of this journey, after many adventures, Moses went up to the top of Mount Sinai, and there he met God. He was given a Covenant, or binding promise, that God would grant divine favour to the Israelites provided they obeyed the Covenant Commandments. The Commandments and the Judgements delivered by God to Moses were preserved in the Ark and tent of the Covenant: an acacia-wood box and a portable tent shrine, carried by the people when they journeyed through the desert and into Canaan. Yahweh (God) himself designed it, giving Moses careful measurements and prescriptions for its structure.9 This tent, carefully recalled by both the temple of Jerusalem and the modern Jewish synagogue, is also the archetype underlying everything in a Christian church. The journey to liberation is still the theme, the story of the Jewish Exodus the founding pattern.
Over the Ark was set a gold plate with depictions of cherubim—celestial beings of mixed human and animal forms—with wings touching, guarding the box and its gold cover, the site of aspersions of blood from animal sacrifices. Its name was kapporet, from the Hebrew verb kipper meaning “wiping away” (of blood) and hence “propitiatory,” “atoning”: the blood of the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur atoned, in two separate acts, for the sins of priests and people. The ultimate purpose of this ritual was to remember and celebrate the direct encounter with God, of which the Law, and the requirement of uprightness and sinlessness, were the fruit. There was also in the original tent for the Ark, at God’s request, a gold seven-branched candlestick, the menorah.
The people, however, had apostasized even before Moses came down from his forty days on the mountain with God: they disobeyed the first and fundamental Commandment by worshipping not God, but an idol, the golden calf. Moses had the tent and Ark made, but God’s presence was not among the people even then, because they had not remained faithful to the divine revelation; Moses made this absolutely clear by leaving the Ark and tent outside the Jewish camp.10 Then Moses begged God to forgive and reconsider. God heeded his pleas and gave the people the Covenant all over again, although this time Moses had to write everything out himself; the original prescriptions had been written by God, but Moses had smashed the tablets in rage when he found his people worshipping the golden calf. And then God came once more to live with his chosen people. The story makes the point, central to Judaism and to Christianity, that only God, the one transcendent God, is holy. Nothing else whatsoever is to be adored.
The Ark moved on, bearing the laws and the promises inside it. By the time of the Judges (roughly 1200–1050 B.C.), the Ark was being kept at Shiloh, about twelve miles south of Nablus, in a building called the “house” or “palace” of Yahweh.11 In about 1030 B.C. it was captured by the Philistines.12 But the Philistines suffered nothing but trouble until they returned the Ark to Israel. Even then there was no peace until the Ark was brought to where God wanted it, in Jerusalem, which by then was known as the city of David, for King David had made it his capital. The city of Jerusalem was to be the “type” of final and universal salvation, not only for Israel but for all peoples.13 (The Bible uses “types”—objects and events—that are like riddles to be solved: the answer to the riddle becomes clear only later, when what has been foretold in the “type” comes to pass. What Christians call the Old Testament contains many “types” or adumbrations of what happens in the New Testament.)14
King Solomon, son of David, finally built a permanent home for the Ark.15 When the great temple was finished—it was an immense project requiring the utmost skill and the most precious of materials—Solomon had the Ark placed in the holy of holies, the temple’s inner sanctum.16 The building had taken seven years to complete, sometime during Solomon’s reign, between 965 and 928 B.C.
The Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem stood on a platform on a hill, in an area probably about fifty yards north of the present Dome of the Rock. Two free-standing bronze pillars rose at the top of the steps in front of the entrance, forming part of what was known as the ulam, a vestibule, porch, or narthex fifteen feet deep. From there the priests, and the priests alone, could enter an oblong space, the hekal, which is calculated to have been sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. The shape of this temple—similar as it is to the form of many a church today, including Sant’Agnese’s—had very ancient Middle Eastern roots. A hint of its antiquity can be glimpsed in the word hekal. It derives from Sumerian È-GAL, “great house,” referring to the house of a god or a king. The great temple culture of the Sumerians, in modern Iraq, lasted from the fifth millennium to the twenty-fifth century B.C. Abraham had set out for Canaan from Ur, the temple city built by the Sumerians, probably during the early second millennium B.C.
At the end of the hekal of Solomon’s temple, opposite the entrance, was a square room, probably reached by climbing steps. It was a cubic space thirty feet by thirty feet by thirty feet, closed off with olivewood doors sheathed in gold. This was the holy of holies, the sanctum sanctorum, the debir in Hebrew. In this room—into which no one could enter but the high priest, and he on only one day in the year—stood the Ark containing the Covenant, watched over by two fifteen-foot-high golden cherubim, whose extended wings reached from wall to wall.17
The altar for animal sacrifices rose in the courtyard outside the temple proper (pro fano). Near it was a huge basin known as the “sea of bronze,” resting on the backs of twelve bronze bulls; there were also ten tables supporting bronze basins. The priests used the “sea” for their own ablutions, and the other basins for purifying the sacrificial victims.18 Sacrificial blood entered the debir, or holy of holies, only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when it was poured onto the golden kapporet, also called God’s “throne.” When the high priest went into and came out of the holy of holies, crossing the ultimate boundary, he changed his clothes and washed himself from head to foot.
The temple of Jerusalem “stood for” or refracted the entire cosmos: the sea (the “bronze sea” or giant laver in the court outside), the earth (the hekal with the altar of perfumes, the golden “tree” or menorah, the “showbread” or fruit of the earth formed into twelve loaves symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel), and heaven, the dwelling place of God (the debir, recalling the meeting of Moses with God on Mount Sinai and containing the Commandments in the Ark). The two bronze pillars that stood in the narthex or ulam are of unknown significance. Perhaps they referred to the two mystical trees in Paradise, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; if so, the ulam was symbolic of Paradise, gan eden.
The temple stood for nearly four centuries, until the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem in 587 B.C. The temple was burned down, and the Ark of the Covenant disappeared. All the gold and precious metals from the treasury were stolen, as well as the bronze from the two great pillars and the “sea.” The survivors of the battle were deported to Babylon.19
Yet during the exile Ezekiel prophesied that the time would come when a new temple would rise. He described it in detail.20 In his vision it was similar, but not identical in measurements, to Solomon’s temple. This time, however, the temple was symbolic, an embodiment in the mind of reunion and wholeness, of a return home from exile, of cohesion and order, harmony and balance: everything about this visionary temple was triumphantly symmetrical. Then the vision shows us a marvel. Ezekiel says that he was taken to see the fountain of water that would well up in the temple. It poured out from under the threshold to the east, since the temple faced east. This water became a stream, a river, a flood; it flowed into the Dead Sea and made the salt water fresh, so that it teemed with fish and water creatures. Trees grew in profusion around it, and people fished in the water and lived on the fruit of the trees and used the leaves for healing. The temple of Ezekiel’s vision would turn the desert into Paradise, and death into life.
In 538, when the Jews returned from their forty-nine-year exile in Babylon, their Persian rulers permitted them to rebuild the temple. It took twenty-three years of intermittent work to restore it. The Ark was not remade, and the debir of the temple was left empty except for a new kapporet to receive the blood offering,21 with its function of ritually focusing God’s presence inside the holy of holies. But the hope stirred up by visionaries like Ezekiel was henceforward unforgettable. The idea of a new temple began to grow. It was also increasingly believed that a saviour would come to Israel.22
During the reign of King Herod I, the Great (73 B.C.–4 B.C.), the temple was rebuilt and refurbished. He doubled the size of the Temple Mount and created a podium thirty-six acres in extent to support a huge complex of buildings in addition to the temple. He recreated the menorah, the single gold candlestick that had graced the original tent in the wilderness, with seven branches holding cups in the form of open almond blossoms and lamps filled with pure olive oil. The veil that hung in front of the debir or inner sanctum, also required in the Exodus prescription, was woven again in wool and linen of violet and scarlet and crimson, and worked with cherubim. A second, less magnificent curtain hung at the entrance to the temple from the ulam or narthex. The purpose of the two veils was to separate; the curtain hanging before the debir, in particular, served to draw the line between “the holy place and the holy of holies.”23
The temple was surrounded by courtyards that progressively sifted out the impure and prevented them from approaching the central and most sacred area. An external wall around the temple precinct prevented Gentiles (non-Jews) from entering the temple area at all; warnings were set up in Greek and Latin (two of them have been found) forbidding any foreigner to set foot on this ground on pain of death. Jewish women were allowed only in the outermost court of the temple precinct; then—purer—came the court of Israelite men; then came the court of the priests, purer still. Only priests could penetrate the temple proper, the hekal Only the high priest was permitted, and that only once a year, to pass beyond the veil that hung before the holy of holies.
This was the temple precinct that Jesus knew. He would not have been allowed into the temple proper, because he was not a priest. The grandeur of the entire complex, its ancient story, deep significance, and profound roots should be present to anyone who hears that Jesus said he came both to fulfill the Law and to replace the temple—that indeed he was the real temple.
The temple in all its splendour was demolished by the Romans in 70 A.D., when they destroyed Jerusalem. On the Arch of Titus in Rome is depicted the scene of the Roman army returning in triumph with their booty, including what is apparently the gold candlestick, the menorah, from the temple. They ruthlessly wiped out the entire complex of buildings and pillaged its riches. But the temple that Ezekiel foretold, the visionary temple, lived on.
There had been only one temple, the one in Jerusalem. But Jews had other shrines, and they also performed religious rituals at home, as they do to this day. In addition, they had meeting houses for prayer, meditation, and instruction. The Greek word for such a building is a synagogue, literally a “coming together.” It is still unknown when the first synagogues were conceived and built, but they represented a wholly new idea of communal religious observance. They were flourishing at the time of Jesus, who began his public ministry in one.
The form of the synagogue made reference to the temple. Then as now it was usually rectangular in plan, with a shrine-cupboard containing the rolls of the scriptures set in one wall. It also had a raised platform in the midst (bema in Greek) on which sat the elders and officials of the synagogue, and from which much of the service was conducted. The alcove for the scriptures recalls the debir at the temple, the place where the Ark containing the Covenant was kept. The bema can be thought of as an echo of the hekal. A synagogue is for hearing and learning and discussing the Word: the history, traditions, prayers, and commentaries of the Jewish people. With the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Jews had to learn to do without the temple. The practice of sacrifice ceased. The many synagogues took over the role of religious centres.
In the earliest days after the death of Jesus, his followers continued to attend the still-standing temple. They also met together wherever a room large enough to contain the group could be found.24 The Jewish scriptures remained their foundational book, as they still are for Christians today. For larger meetings they had the model of the synagogue, which was intensely familiar to them: almost all of them were Jews, and Jesus himself had been a Jew who was deeply committed to his people’s religion.
The word “Christian” was not coined till some decades later—probably by Gentiles, and as a term of opprobrium.25 The first Christians continued simply to be Jews, or Judaizing Gentiles. However, they differed from their fellows in their belief that the Messiah, or “Anointed One” foretold, had come. He had turned out to be not a triumphant warrior or a master politician, but someone they had personally known, their own friend, a poor man, someone of immense personal power but of no account in the world of public affairs, an innocent man, utterly committed to nonviolence, who had suffered the death of a criminal. Such a Messiah could not have been more unexpected (although, in the Christian interpretation, his character had in fact been foretold in the Jewish scriptures).26 For Christians, Jesus and none other was the Messiah, Christos, “Anointed One” in Greek. Not only that, but they also believed Jesus was no longer dead; he was still with them. In Jesus, they came to be convinced, God himself had become human.
The temple at Jerusalem is very much a part of the narrative concerning Jesus in the four Gospels. But the actual temple, from a Christian point of view, was always destined to pass away. Indeed, at least three of the Gospels were written after the temple had been destroyed (that of Mark may have been the exception). The temple, however, was an embodiment of the story of God’s chosen people and a sign or “type” of what was to come; for Christians it was subsumed in Jesus and in the Church. Christians believed that Jesus was what the temple had anticipated; he was the “presence of God” that it promised.
The climactic end of Jesus’ life began with his outrage at the people’s lack of respect for “his father’s house”—the temple. (The rage of Jesus recalls that of Moses when he found his people worshipping the golden calf.) So important was this incident in the memory of his disciples that all of the Gospels record it, and John places it very near the beginning of his account.27 It took place in the outer esplanade of the temple, the only area where Gentiles were allowed. There Greek and Roman currency was exchanged for Jewish and Tyrian shekels, and animals and birds were sold for sacrifice. Even Jesus’ own parents, when they had presented him as an infant at the temple in accordance with the laws of Israel, had changed their money for shekels and bought birds for the mandated sacrifice.28 But in his rage Jesus pushed over the tables, made a whip of cords, and thrashed the money vendors and the salesmen out of the “den of thieves” they had created. It was shocking behaviour, and clearly arose from his sense of reverence for God’s holy place.
But the source of the drama was even more revolutionary than it looks to us at first sight. Certainly, the market must have seemed crass—rather like the sale of tasteless goods outside many a church or shrine today. But there was more: the market itself and its relegation to a profane place outside the temple proper had a solemn purpose, and that purpose was purity. The market ensured, first, that only animals deemed pure would be sacrificed in the temple. Further, Greek and Roman money was considered impure, and its impurity would contaminate the animals it paid for. Pagan money, idolatrous money with the picture of the divinized emperor on it, was therefore not allowed in the temple; it had first to be exchanged for shekels. To attack the market was symbolically to strike at the exclusivity, the relentless purity, of the temple itself.29
Immediately after this incident Jesus said to the people who remonstrated with him, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They were furious, and contemptuous of his folly; the charges at his trial included the blasphemy of this remark. But they had not understood the riddle. By “this temple” Jesus meant himself; he was saying that he had replaced the temple. His kingdom was not to be protected and privileged by means of purity. He himself was not sacrosanct: his body would be agonizingly pierced, and his heart pierced again after his death. He saw to it that everybody could have access to him by means of the endlessly reproduced bread that is his body, “this temple.” No one would be excluded, unless people wished to exclude themselves. And he would “raise the temple up” from death, in three days.
When Jesus died on the cross, Matthew relates that “the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”30 Henceforth, Christians believed, the holy of holies would lie open for all to approach it; salvation history was beginning a new era.
“Christianity” is the name of a continuing endeavour to take up and live the implications of the life and death of Christ, of the belief that in him God has broken into human history. Within the family of institutions that try to remember the insights they receive from him, there are many cultures, many tastes and traditions, many differences of attitude and emphasis. These are expressed especially vividly in the buildings they occupy.
Some Christians prefer to worship God at home and in private, or with other people in something ad hoc—under some trees, say, or in a garage or a shed or a school basement. And indeed, according to the Gospels Jesus instituted the Eucharist in a dining room borrowed from a friend, and foreshadowed this event in the multiplication of loaves and fishes in an open field and in the hills beside a lake.31 When Christians meet in buildings the architectural possibilities range widely, from the austere to the exuberant. Everything is to be found, from the simplest halls or meeting houses—to modern churches that may be purely functional or make dramatic “statements”—to imposing, fortresslike stone buildings, perhaps accommodating here and there a minimum of artistic heightening—to magnificent and elaborate Gothic cathedrals and their progeny—to luxuriously decorated churches (Sant’Agnese’s could be classified as a minor example)—to Baroque edifices revelling in deliberate excess—to garish constructions choked with statuary and clutter, ranking low in the judgement of people of “good taste.”
But why have churches at all? The very idea of having such a thing as a church building must be questioned, given Christianity’s founding story. For a Christian, not to ask this question, or even to feel comfortable about his or her answer, is to deny something that lies at the heart of Christianity. God, or the truth, is not confined to the Church, let alone by church buildings. Every Christian should remain deeply suspicious of churches—both as buildings and as institutions; it is part of following Christ.
The paradox is there from the beginning. For example, when Jesus hounded the money-changers out of the temple, he wanted people to respect God’s house—even as he proposed to replace it. Churches can be confining and deadening—and churches may liberate and enliven. Buildings are unnecessary—but needed. Churches remain—but they remain in order to keep alive a message that is all about movement; about hope and change. In short, a Christian church seems to be—and quite consciously is—a contradiction in terms.