From one point of view, the mystical, Christianity is a series of oppositions transcended. From another, the ethical and psychological, Christianity turns the value system of what Jesus called “this world” on its head. By “this world” Jesus meant the world as it is at present organized, insofar as it stands in deliberate opposition to God’s will. The ideal that Jesus revealed is “the kingdom of God,” in which power, selfishness, and violence are rejected. In this alternative order, the poor own the kingdom, the merciful receive mercy, the gentle “inherit the earth.” And those persecuted for the sake of the truth are, if we could only comprehend the breadth of the perspective offered, fortunate and blessed.1
The church of Saint Agnes was built in honour of a young girl who was put to death because of what she believed. She was buried here, in this place, by her family and friends. The people who shared her beliefs visited her grave, and were convinced, not that the cruel brevity of her life was a shame and a waste, but that she had shown a bravery and integrity that they all wished they could attain.
Being a young girl, in those days much more than in ours, meant having no power, no prestige—not even any social autonomy, let alone heroic “prowess.” And yet Agnes had managed to express the depth of her conviction, and to find the courage to face its consequences at the hands of “this world.” To take her for a hero, to visit her grave and honour her, was to express one’s own belief, while deliberately choosing the opposite of what was generally thought brilliant and worthy of admiration.
People kept coming. They wanted to stand before the remains of an actual human being who had freely, indisputably, and spectacularly embraced God. Agnes was little—but her courage was magnificent; a person unknown during her life and of no account—yet whose integrity of soul the massive and concentrated power of the Roman state had been unable to crush; a very young girl—but (in the opinion of these people) a great hero. They also believed that she had died, but lived; that she could still help them to see what she had seen, and even to do what she had done; that she could share her gifts if they sufficiently longed to receive them.
They turned their backs, therefore, on the glory of marble and gold, the great monuments and marvels of central Rome, arguably the most magnificent city ever created. Instead, they travelled out into the country to visit a simple burial space in a catacomb.
In ancient Greece and Rome, death, and in particular dead bodies, were considered utterly revolting; the dead polluted the living. Dead bodies were disposed of outside the city walls. Beside roads leading to and from Rome, sometimes in the gardens of private estates, tombs above ground and hypogea (graves under a family’s burial plot: the word means literally “under the earth”) were constructed. Many of the dead were cremated; the bodies of those too poor to afford named graves would be thrown into communal lime pits. Roman law forbade any touching, moving, or otherwise tampering with dead bodies. (Respect, in pollution beliefs, is achieved by avoidance and underwritten by disgust.) The loathsomeness of corpses made them the family’s business: the family had to bury their dead, and the Roman government was only too happy to leave them to it.
Whatever their religious belief, people were accustomed to visiting these burial places, as people do today, to remember family members and friends, and to care for their graves. (Part of the horror of being dumped when dead into a lime pit was the impossibility of such visits and such remembrance occurring.) There was something festive about visiting a grave to commemorate a relative’s death; you walked out of Rome into the country, a distance often of a mile or two, carrying provisions for a meal, and made a day of it. People could sit, enjoying the bucolic surroundings, and picnic at the family’s burial site. There was also a sense, more or less explicitly believed in, that when friends and relatives ate together at or above the graves they were somehow including the dead people in the party, cheering them up, warming them with love and remembrance, and even sharing food with them: people made libations of wine and left food for the dead.
In the late second century Romans, and in particular Jews and Christians, began to bury their dead in catacombs.2 The city of Rome is built on soil shot through with seams of tufa, formed by chemical precipitation from volcanoes that erupted between two and a half and three million years ago. Tufa can take a multitude of forms. Certain tufa seams have the consistency of clay, which hardens on exposure to the air; it was into these that the catacombs were dug.3 The system was economical because it saved space; all that was legally required was proof of ownership of the surface area, underneath which gallery after gallery could be excavated. Catacombs are found in places other than Rome, including Naples, Syracuse, and Malta. Christians living in places lacking tufa continued to bury their dead in ordinary cemeteries.
Pozzolana, a non-cohesive form of tufa, was invaluable to the Romans because they used it to make an excellent cement. (It is named after the cement quarries near the town of Pozzuoli on the Gulf of Naples.) The Romans dug assiduously for pozzolana. They perforated the earth in several areas around Rome with quarries called arenariae, “sand pits.” Catacombs tend to be associated with pozzolana warrens; sometimes Christian burials are found inside their wide, irregular tunnels.
The Roman authorities knew perfectly well the Christian predilection for burying their dead in catacombs, which were usually associated with surface cemeteries. Christians were allowed to dig through the tufa as much as they liked, provided they owned and duly registered the land directly above the galleries full of graves. Christians would club together and buy such land, or rich converts would donate it. When galleries covered the whole area under a given surface, a new set of passages was excavated underneath them, or a passageway was deepened. The result is that in many high catacomb galleries, or where there are several levels of passages, the graves on the lowest level were dug last. Tunnels frequently come to an abrupt end underground because it was illegal to dig beyond the surface plot.
Air and light were provided in the galleries by a series of shafts rising to the surface; it was also via these openings that the tufa was extracted from the tunnels. Jerome describes, in about 413 A.D., how he and his friends used to visit the catacombs when he lived in Rome in the 360s. “Often I would enter the crypts, deep dug in the earth,” he wrote, “with their walls on either side lined with the bodies of the dead…. Here and there the light, not entering through windows but filtering down from above through shafts, relieves the horror of the darkness.”4 The early Christians called the catacomb galleries cryptae, which means “hidden places” in Greek. Much later it became common for churches to have chapels underneath them, called crypts. These crypts ultimately derive from the ancient custom of building churches, such as Sant’Agnese’s, over the bodies of saints buried in the catacombs.
A Christian corpse was given a simple embalming treatment with spices and scented ointments. Before burial, the body was covered with quicklime and then wrapped in a linen shroud. It was usually placed in one of the burial slots now called loculi (“little places”); more lime was sometimes added, and tiles or bricks or a marble slab closed the aperture. In graves that have been opened in modern times, the balm has become a reddish dust that still gives off a pleasant scent when burned; the lime, now hardened, often preserves the imprint of the shroud. Yet for all this care, catacombs must commonly have smelled of decay. Glass perfume flasks are often found in catacomb galleries. Visitors probably used perfumes to overcome the smell; they certainly sprinkled perfume onto the slabs closing the loculi.5 The custom was also an evocation of life, not unlike that of bringing flowers to the graves of the dead.
A modern myth about early Christians is that they hid in the catacombs during the various persecutions. There was certainly clandestinity in these terrifying periods—Christians met for religious services in private houses, and must have hidden in private houses from time to time. But the catacombs, which the Romans occasionally confiscated to prevent Christians from meeting in their grounds, would not have made feasible hideouts because they were too well known. In any case people could not have survived for long down among the dead.
In the earliest catacombs all Christians received the same burial; later some were given larger and more decorative tombs inside cubicula (square rooms containing all the graves of a particular family and its dependants), but the impression remains of an egalitarian togetherness. The community took responsibility for the burial of even its poorest members; it was one of the advantages of being a Christian, especially among the poor. Very often a grave had only the person’s name written on it, but after about 250 A.D. more information began to be supplied. At more and more of the graves, especially those dug after Christianity was officially sanctioned in 312 A.D., the walls are plastered and then decorated with simple painted pictures, of enormous historical and iconographical interest. Occasionally, the family pressed a small object into the tufa wall outside the grave: a finger ring, a bone doll for a child, a sign showing what a man had done for a living.
There are about sixty catacombs, of varying sizes, around Rome; Sant’Agnese’s is a fairly small one. A large catacomb, such as that of Priscilla or of Dominila, has from six to eight miles of explored galleries, every one of which has several layers of loculi. The Roman catacombs have been rifled many times over the centuries, and most graves are now empty. They nevertheless provide unparalleled evidence about the lives of ordinary people, including the very poor, during the more than three centuries the catacombs were in use, from the late second century to the sixth century A.D.
Christians, like their pagan contemporaries, visited their dead.6 However, Christians tended to gather in groups to do so, at the cemeteries and catacombs outside the city walls, in the secluded, “impure” places where the Roman state was not inclined to interfere, and where it was an ancient right of the family to bury and mourn their own. There was a tradition in Rome of burial societies, whose members paid dues and met regularly to deal with cemetery business. Many of these private clubs served social purposes other than merely facilitating burials; they were for making and meeting friends, and usually offered premises for holding dinner parties as well. It is likely that, in the early years, Christians often met together in the context, and sometimes under the pretext, of belonging to such clubs.
Christians were drawn together at the graveside not only to celebrate their own families but also, as a larger Christian community, to celebrate their heroes, the persecuted dead. The body of a person killed during one of the recurrent periods of persecution, for disobedience to the state because of his or her religious beliefs, was often handed over to the family for burial, like any other dead body. To Christians, people killed in these circumstances were martyrs, literally “witnesses” to their beliefs. The Greek and late Latin word martus (“martyr”) derives from the same root (mar- and mer-) as memor, memory, a “keeping in mind.” Early Christians remembered the graves where martyrs were buried, and built shrines or martyria to mark out and honour a burial place that the community invested with particular significance.
When the new emperor, Constantine, decided after his victory over Maxentius in 312 that he would legitimize Christianity, he not only restored to the Church its confiscated property, but also began an ambitious program of church building. He donated the area and buildings known as the Laterani, which was part of his wife’s dowry,7 to the bishop of Rome for an official residence and administrative centre, and next door to it he built the Basilica of the Saviour, just within the city walls. The baptistery of the basilica, separate from the main building, was dedicated to John the Baptist. By the twelfth century its name had become attached to the church, which is why the Lateran is known today as St. John Lateran. A hall in a palace occupied by Constantine’s mother Helena, also just within the walls, was converted into the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. It was so called because Helena brought from Jerusalem to Rome a piece of what was believed to be the cross on which Jesus had died, and placed it in the church, to which it gave a status similar to that of a martyrium.
The other churches built under the auspices of Constantine, both in Rome and in Palestine, were conceived of not as regular meeting places for Christian communities but as martyria or memorials of sacred events. By the early fourth century many people in Rome, perhaps as much as a third of the population, were Christians, and they already had many places in the city in which to meet for regular prayer.8 These centres also housed offices and living space for the clergy, and depots of clothing and food for the poor. Some of them were private houses donated to the community and named after the original owner: titulus Clementis, titulus Caeciliae, and so on. (Strictly speaking, a titulus was a marble plaque set into the wall of a house with the name of the owner carved on it, establishing his or her title to the property.) There were twenty-five such tituli by the end of the fourth century, many of which still survive in modern Rome. Even before 312, a few large halls had been built specifically to serve as Christian meeting places or churches. The remains of one such pre-Constantinian hall lie alongside the present church of San Crisogono in Trastevere. Martyria, on the other hand, were of necessity built in the cemeteries, and therefore outside the walls of Rome.9 They were too far away for daily or even weekly church-going. People went out there occasionally, as a kind of pilgrimage, to visit their dead and to pray at the burial place of a saint.
The great basilica of St. Peter rose across the Tiber River, on top of a cemetery on the slopes of the Vatican hill beside Nero’s circus, where Christians remembered that the Apostle Peter had been put to death and next to which they said he had been buried.10 The ground was levelled at enormous cost and effort so that the church should stand directly over the nondescript grave that the Christians believed was Peter’s. The site of the Lateran had no connection with a martyr. It was chosen for purely practical and administrative purposes, and because it was available. The buildings on it always remained primarily official. In contrast, it was the idea of who Peter was, what his death meant, and the actual place of his burial that really appealed to Christians.
As Rome’s power and population declined, the Lateran, although it was within the city walls, gradually became marooned in uninhabited land, and the popes11 found themselves having to travel tiresome journeys to and from the actual life of the city. Slowly, during the course of many centuries, the area around St. Peter’s was incorporated into Rome. In the fifteenth century, the popes finally capitulated and moved definitively to St. Peter’s.12 The Lateran remains the cathedral of the pope in his role as bishop of Rome, but its fame continues to be overshadowed by that of the martyrium of Peter.
All Constantine’s foundations at Rome were made in the twelve years between his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 and his departure for Byzantium, where he founded “the new Rome,” Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Constantinian foundation at the catacombs of Sant’Agnese was made, in fact, soon after the emperor left Rome. Sant’Agnese’s, like St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, is one of the martyria that stood in the cemeteries, and therefore in a ring around but outside the walls of Rome. Eleven out of the original thirty-eight martyria still remain.13 As Sant’Agnese’s is a fairly stiff walk from the present gate in the Aurelian Walls, the Porta Pia, visiting the catacomb must have been a special event rather than a daily occurrence. On the anniversary of her death each year, on January 21, Christians gathered there in increasing numbers.14
The small loculus in which Agnes had been laid was probably first isolated inside the catacomb, and then enclosed in an arched shrine with an inscribed eulogy affixed to it. Later a small oblong church, almost buried in the hillside, was built over the grave in order to accommodate visitors. In about 630 A.D. the present church replaced the earlier building. It was no longer than its predecessor, though made broader by the addition of aisles. The resulting building, without the chapels that were added later, measures roughly 78 feet by 42 feet; the apse is a further 8 feet deep. There was no doubt, in the mind of either the founder of the church or its architect, what the ground plan and the general disposition of the church should be: it has, naturally, the shape of a basilica.
A basilica is a pre-eminently Roman type of building, the kind Constantine and his advisors chose to erect when he first set about throwing up huge edifices, at the Lateran and over or beside martyrs’ shrines, for the Christian community. The Christian version of the basilica commonly used in Rome had a half dome, rising from a half cylinder, at one end. It was the ancient Romans who developed and most confidently expounded the architectural technology of the arch, the vault, and the dome.15 Ancient Greek temples, for example, for all their beauty and sophistication, employed neither domes nor arches. Roman temples, unlike basilicas, were archaizing structures that avoided domes and arches, although cylindrical temples existed in Rome as in Greece, and were invested with special connotations. Also typical of the first Christian basilicas in Rome was their construction out of brick, the traditional Roman medium for most public buildings; Greek and Roman temples tended to be made of marble.
The word “basilica” means “royal” in Greek, but ironically enough, as an architectural term it is known to us first in the context of Republican Rome in the early second century B.C. The Basilica Porcia was built on the south side of the Roman Forum by Cato in 184 B.C., and named after himself (Marcus Porcius Cato, the Censor). Five years later the Basilica Aemilia was erected close by (the remains of its first-century A.D. restoration are still visible in the Forum today); subsequently, the Romans built basilicas all over their empire. These buildings played a role similar to that of stoas—edifices with colonnaded porticoes that edged Greek and Hellenistic agoras, providing shade but also open air. The agora was the Greek equivalent of the Roman forum or central city square. Basilicas, like stoas, were large and multi-purpose public buildings. But unlike stoas, they were wholly enclosed: if there were rows of columns, they stood not outside but inside the basilica’s walls.
Basilicas were used as markets and tribunals, as meeting halls for the military, or for holding fiestas. They were also components of the gigantic public Roman baths. Their main feature was that they were large enough to accommodate a lot of people. The principle remained the same when basilicas became churches: Constantine’s Lateran basilica, which was larger than those in the Forum, provided space for a congregation of three thousand. A basilica, moreover, could be quickly constructed: it was oblong, made of bricks, and had a timber roof covered with tiles rather than a vault. For extra breadth, Christian basilicas were provided with side aisles. These were separated by rows of columns from the central part, the nave; the aisles could be closed off from the nave at will with curtains. In order to let light in, the longitudinal nave was given walls higher than those of the aisles, and these higher parts of the walls were pierced with windows to form a “clear storey,” or clerestory, above the columns.
The hugeness of the early Christian basilicas not only allowed them to accommodate large crowds, but also encouraged processions inside them in the course of the liturgies. Almost from the beginning, the aisles in certain very large Christian basilicas were made to join up at the apse end, thus forming a U-shaped route leading up one aisle, around the apse, and back down the other aisle—and then across the narthex and up again if desired. The apse bend in such an arrangement is called an ambulatory, a “place for walking.”
The long walls of a basilica were straight and plain. There were no chapels let into the sides; those in Sant’Agnese’s today were added in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The one complexity in the building’s periphery was the apse, usually a semidome. (“Apse” is from the Greek haptein, “to grab”: each end of a curved apse “holds on” to the ends of the straight sides of the rectangular building.) In ancient Roman multi-purpose halls the apse could be at one short end, at both short ends, or in the middle of one of the long sides, in which case the entrance was in the side opposite. An apse arched over a raised platform; it marked out as special whatever took place there. When a basilica was used as an administrative building, the magistrates would sit in this space, as would the emperor, if present. The emperor sat in the apse of the basilical audience chamber of his palace; and it was in the apse, too, that a statue of the emperor was commonly placed.
A Christian basilica was always longitudinally ordered; the flexibility of pagan Roman buildings on this point was forgone. From among the varieties of basilica that the Romans had created, Christians chose the oldest version of all, with narthex, then nave, then the apse opposite the entrance, just as the Jerusalem temple had progressed from ulam to hekal, with the debir as the climax. In or before the apse of a basilica Christians placed the altar. In a church like Sant’Agnese’s, the altar is sheltered under a ciborium or canopy.
The floor of the central aisle at Sant’Agnese’s is a plain path of pale grey veined marble, pushing aside to left and right the overall floor pattern in light and dark grey. The purpose is to emphasize the route straight forward. This floor is quite modern. It was made from marble left over from the repaving of the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura when that basilica was reconstructed in 1854, after its destruction in large part by fire. It is certain, however, that earlier floors, including the magnificent medieval mosaic pavement the church once possessed, would have made the same statement.16 The medieval floor doubtless included, as do other surviving floors of the same period, porphyry circles surrounded by decorative mosaic patterns and set in a row up the centre. The clergy would have used these designs to mark out places and distances as they performed elaborate processional liturgies—rather as a stage is marked to show actors where to stand.17
On either side of the central aisle are the pews, which are benches with kneelers, and the chairs. (“Pew” originally meant a raised and enclosed wooden stall for a preacher. It is from pes, “foot,” and is related to “podium,” the word for a “stand.” In English Protestant usage the word came to mean a private, sometimes raised bench enclosed with doors; and then an ordinary open bench for members of the congregation.) This seating and kneeling arrangement was certainly not what the church was designed for: originally at Sant’ Agnese’s people stood during church ceremonies.
The central aisle or “road” forward in any church is a symbol of the length of a life: the life of all creation, of all humanity, of the Church as a community, of each individual person. The “journey of life” symbolized in the floor of a church nave is accompanied by many other significant journeys in Jewish and Christian memory. There is the journey of Abraham, trusting that he would find the Promised Land; and the Exodus journey of the Jews (the Greek word exodos means a “way out”), a wandering for forty years in the desert as they struggled to achieve a liberation from oppression.18
Exodus is a central theme in the Christian imagination, as it is in Judaism; the great biblical liberation stories are narrated at the yearly vigil of the Resurrection, Easter eve. Christ’s breaking out of the tomb is for Christians the climactic event in the series. The penultimate journey towards the Resurrection was Christ’s journey to his crucifixion, his being forced to carry the instrument of his own torture and death out of the walls of Jerusalem to the hill called the Skull, Golgotha in Hebrew, Calvary in Latin. This journey is commemorated in every Catholic church by the Stations of the Cross.
In Sant’Agnese’s, the Stations of the Cross are very simple and sober, modelled in plaster stained to look like wood and hung on the walls along the aisles, so that people can walk the journey past them, pausing at each one.19 The Stations are fourteen episodes from the crucifixion of Jesus, from his condemnation to his burial and including his road to Calvary. From early times Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem would walk through the city, where they were shown places said to have been exactly where each event took place. Some of these episodes are quite unscriptural and almost certainly imagined by people who felt they “must have,” “should have” occurred. The “places” where these events “happened” were then supplied also, in Jerusalem.
For example, a woman named Veronica is said to have wiped the face of Jesus, covered with blood and dirt and sweat; the imprint of his face, a “portrait,” remained on the veil. The story expresses the longing of Christians for a picture of Jesus, so they could know what he looked like. Veronica stands for the pity and regret Christians feel about the death of Jesus, their wish that it had not happened, that it could have been avoided. Veronica probably never existed, but her story expresses things many people care about, and so they agree to tell it: in this sense Veronica enacts a Christian myth, much as Oedipus enacts a Greek one. Her deed, which is one of the Stations of the Cross, has become more “real” than most documented events in history: the figure of Veronica has been a catalyst for personal response to the revelation of God’s love in countless people.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, members of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, living in Jerusalem and entrusted with the care of the holy places, “systematized” the Stations of the Cross, gradually giving them a canonical number and order. Not everybody could visit the Holy Land, of course. But this has never been a major problem for Christians. A way was provided for people to visit the Holy Land and to follow the journey of Jesus to Calvary “in spirit,” without actually going there.
“Stations of the Cross” were made and placed in every church: a picture of each event, with spaces left between them.20 The spaces are important: they allow people to “walk the distance,” making their own “journey” of spiritual accompaniment, responding inwardly, in their own way. At each picture the devotee stands still (is “stationary”) and contemplates the picture and its meaning for him or her. During a service the clergy may make the journey while the people simply stand in their pews, turning to face each Station.
Following the Stations of the Cross is only one of many journeys that take place in Sant’Agnese’s. The priests and their ministers enter the building in procession to begin services. They walk in procession with candles to the podium when it is time to read aloud passages from the Bible, and to give commentaries on their meaning. People walk up the central aisle to the altar to present offerings during Mass, and then again to receive Communion. They approach and embrace the Cross on Good Friday, the day of Christ’s death. They walk up the aisles to see the elaborate crib created every Christmas by members of the congregation, and in this they are imitating the journey of the shepherds, the journey of the Wise Men following the Star, and indeed the journey of Mary and Joseph searching for a place where Jesus could be born. During Advent (the four weeks preceding Christmas) the present congregation of Sant’Agnese’s leaves the church to walk in procession through the neighbourhood, following an exuberantly cometlike star mounted on a slowly moving car, in memory of the Wise Men.
And the church itself represents a journey. There are three main symbols here. The first is Exodus, signifying the journey of all humanity towards liberation. Taking its cue from the Jewish Bible, a church thinks of itself as a tent carried by the people, as the Jews carried the Ark of the Covenant on their quest for the Promised Land; the church is searching for and journeying towards the kingdom of Christ, and the “heavenly Jerusalem” at the end of the world. Secondly, a church must reflect the fact that Christianity is a religion of both sudden revelations or conversions, and ongoing transformation—both in history and in every individual soul. The space traversed from entrance to altar and apse expresses change, both dramatic (all at once) and gradual (requiring the course of a lifespan). Finally, the church as “journey” recalls the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life….”21 And so the building erases itself before what it represents, namely Christ himself, who now “is” the temple and the path we are to follow. These bricks, marbles, and mosaics were set up in full consciousness that all they can do is point to what they mean.
The spatial metaphor of a journey is essentially one-dimensional: life as a line. But to join two ends of a line on a flat surface is to achieve another dimension: an area. A labyrinth is a confusing warren, where the object is to arrive, eventually, at the other end of the path, its goal. This is usually in the middle of the design; the traveller then has to find the way out again. The route cunningly turns and twists, and so fills out a two-dimensional space.
There are two kinds of labyrinth. In one, there is a correct route and there are many dead ends: every choice of direction is consequence-laden, and it is easy to travel a long way in error. (The word “error” in Latin means a wandering—erro, “I wander”—away from the correct route.) The other kind of labyrinth is unicursal: there is only one way, and it surely arrives at the goal, although the route often seems to be wrong and the traveller appears to be walking in a direction that will never reach its destination.
Both kinds of labyrinth are used metaphorically in Christian thinking. The first is often found in narrative, in stories like that of the Quest for the Holy Grail. It is also embodied in mazes, which are a form of physical riddle and a test of prowess. (The word “maze” is related to “amazement.”) This type recalls the origin of the word “labyrinth” in Greek myth, where Theseus might never have emerged from the Cretan Labyrinth had he not been supplied with a coil of thread (the name for which is a “clew,” the origin of the word “clue”) to follow back to the entrance. You cannot see over the walls of a maze if you are walking in it: the experience recalls the frustrating puzzles of human existence. Cleverness and luck are what you need in order to succeed; but these gifts are, in fact, the outward expressions of profound psychic knowledge and readiness, of openness to the possibility of epiphany.
The second type exists in space, but it is spread out for us to see it whole. In certain medieval churches—in Amiens cathedral or in Chartres—it is still possible today to walk the labyrinth, a mini procession or pilgrimage laid out for that purpose in the floor. These labyrinths are always unicursal. All you need to do is choose to start—to enter the labyrinth and then to persevere to the end, no matter how far the twisting road seems to be taking you from your goal. The road symbolizes a human life with all its difficulties and failures, and the common feeling of being lost; the message is that mental agility is not the most important gift for the spiritual life. But the road here is also Christ, “the way, the truth, and the life.” He is the thread—both meaning and guide—and also the goal. The Judeo-Christian God is “the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end, imaged by the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet—and, it is implied, including the whole series of letters in between.22 At the centre of a church labyrinth is Christ, eternal bliss, the soul’s core.
Whereas a labyrinth’s “end” is its centre, a basilical church’s “road” moves straight ahead, from Alpha (Jesus also said, “I am the door”23) to Omega, the apse and God. In a unicursal labyrinth the goal is visible from the start, just as one can see the apse, or Omega, as soon as one enters a church; but still the distance needs to be covered. Another of the great Christian opposites, articulated in many ways in Christian art, is “already” versus “not yet.” Both are true, at one and the same time, paradoxical as the claim most certainly is. Christians believe that salvation is already here, because Christ has come; the truth has been revealed. However, there is a long way to go yet: paradise regained and the end of the world are still to come. The kingdom is to be struggled for; it is both present among us, and not yet. The journey is ongoing.
From earliest days Christians have symbolized the organizational Church as a ship. In the ancient Mediterranean world, where roads were few and mountainous regions common, travel was often achieved more swiftly by sea than overland, so a ship was an obvious symbol of movement. People in a boat relied utterly upon it for safety as they steered it towards harbour, the “safe haven” of arrival at their destination. A ship stood for protection from the sea—but also for venturing into the unknown.
The image is a composite one, drawn from Greek, Roman, and Jewish metaphors for life’s perilous journey, and also from the Gospel narrative. In the Jewish myth, Noah’s ark saved both nature and humanity from the flood that threatened to destroy life on earth:24 a common symbol for the Church, and also for a church, is the ark, with its hugely diverse mixture of creatures on board, afloat amid the murderous tumult of “this world.” Apart from Noah’s ark, Old Testament marine metaphors are few, for Israel was not a sea-going people.
Shipping symbolism is, however, to be found everywhere in the literary tradition of the Greeks, reflecting the importance to them of sailing, both in commerce and in war. Always the sea is presented as changeable and dangerous, the Mediterranean being peculiarly prone to storms: the sea is a major metaphor in Greek literature for fate and necessity, or circumstances otherwise beyond human control. Greeks also elaborated the metaphor of the “ship of state,” protecting the citizens within its hold.
The Gospels, for their part, record that the twelve men Jesus chose to begin spreading his message across the world were most of them fishermen. They worked the Sea of Galilee—a body of water liable to sudden storms. Saint Paul on his journeys around the Mediterranean, as we learn from his letters and the Acts of the Apostles, suffered shipwreck repeatedly. Fishing, boats, storms, and water are therefore common themes in the New Testament.
Christians were struck by the resemblance of a ship’s mast and its crossbar, known as a “cross-tree,” to the primary Christian symbol, the Cross. Like a ship, the Church carried people of many different origins; Christ was the pilot; the Roman double rudder was “the two Testaments.” Sails and rigging were “stretched out” like love for others or like Christ himself embracing the Church. The rigging was a cosmic ladder, a “way up” towards God. Human technology—the craft of ship builders, sailing by the stars, understanding the winds, the plotting of routes—enables the ship to arrive where it wants to go, just as the Church is led by God’s Word, by grace and response, by wisdom, and by fixing its sights on its goal.25 The point of the ship metaphor, however, is above all movement forward, towards the world’s destiny, and also towards both end and fulfillment for the individual. On some of the burial tablets fixed to the walls of the passage down into Sant’ Agnese’s church, a simple anchor is incised, a typically Christian symbol signifying salvation, the end of the “sea voyage” of life, and eternal rest with God.
A church building, too, is thought of as a ship, sailing onward, bearing the congregation inside it. In an “orientated” church—one built so that the congregation faces east—the “ship” sails east, towards the dawning of eternal bliss; if turned westward it is directed towards the world’s end, “the setting of the sun.” (Sant’Agnese’s church “sails” roughly eastward.) The word “nave” means “ship,” navis in Latin. Aisles are literally “wings,” Latin alae: the rising and dipping banks of oars on either side of a ship always reminded the ancients of wings, making the boat “fly” forward. The fact that the wooden beams of church roofs were often left exposed must also have encouraged people to think of travel in the hold of a ship. The symbolism turns on a series of imaginative linkages: from group to building, to ship, to movement. Thus the building is turned into a metaphor for a journey; stationary space signifies moving time.
People today have largely abandoned static models of reality for a distinctively dynamic view of the way things are. Plato’s eternal Ideas have been placed on the shelf, while the Greek philosophers who claimed that “all is movement and change” are more than ever in vogue among philosophers and theologians as well as ordinary people. Today mobility—both physical and social—tends to trump ideals such as rootedness or commitment. The Church, too, chooses now to stress its “pilgrim” aspect over its stability. (Its stake in the “perennial” or static model remains, of course, as the other term in this pair of opposites.)
Christians today tend to see themselves as foreigners, though living very much in the midst of “this world,” struggling on, risking everything, but believing in a destiny; people on a journey that is full of pain and danger, but deliberately undertaken because of the end in view. They also believe that the kingdom is not only “still to come,” but is already here. Their hope, despite the cosmic scale of the project, rests upon faith that “absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God.”26 The word “pilgrim” is from Latin peregrinas, “travelling away from home.” Modern people look for the expression, in a church, of this view of Christian commitment.
In the church of Sant’Agnese itself, everything about the journey metaphor is, of course, spatial. The passage downward is initiation, finding the way to where there is a new beginning. The threshold at the door of any church represents the interruption of the course of history that was Christ’s coming and the Church’s founding, and also the place of beginning for each person entering. The narthex or “paradise” is still there when one has stepped into the church and onto its central “road.” The distance covered endures even as the travellers press onwards, just as a road or a route on a map exists both before and after the trip. The “end”—the apse—is in view from the beginning. The church contains both the road and the movement upon it. In a Christian temple, the past is never to be forgotten or disowned or discounted: it is part of each person, as it is part of the Church, and also part of what this building expresses. In a church the future is always open, while the past is never shut off.
The columns on either side of the nave in a basilica enhance the sense of a road ahead. They allow the eye to measure the length of the nave by their regular spacing, and as they appear to decrease in height and press together at the end of the sightlines, they visually underline both the stability of the building’s structure and its dynamism.
Columns are for support; they are bearers of weight. The earliest temples, in ancient Greece, for example, are known to have had wooden columns. And all columns continue to remember trees, to the point where an ancient Egyptian or a classical Greek or Roman column unfolds into a severely controlled arrangement of leaves and tendrils at the top. A nave resembles a “tree”-lined avenue.
The shaft of a pillar can be so vast as to dwarf a human being, but always we remain aware that human technology made it: a column is a deeply enculturated object. Yet—and perhaps in part for that very reason—we tend to humanize a column, to think of it as like a person. Verticality in itself is for us a primary human characteristic: we are proud of our “erectitude,” our two long legs and what we call our “spinal column.” A string of pillars seems to stride through space. The floor on which a colonnade stands is called a stylobate. Stylos is Greek for “pillar” and bates is “one who treads”: the columns “walk” the stylobate.
A column ideally feels like a living thing, taut with energy. For this reason, the beauty of a column often includes entasis, “swelling” or “exertion” in Greek: the outline of its shaft will curve outwards very slightly in the middle, and gather itself more tightly at the top. A straight-up-and-down column forgoes this tension and movement, and nearly always ends up looking mechanical and lifeless. The leafy or otherwise elaborated and figured top is called a capital, meaning that it is also like a head (Latin caput).
Sometimes architects and sculptors join forces and turn columns into statues, stone people charged with carrying the weight of the building for ever. Caryatids, they are called, after the female virgins who danced for Artemis at her great temple at Caryae in Laconia.27 The ancient Greeks called pillars carved in the shape of male statues atlantides, after Atlas, who once carried the world on his back. (“Atlas” means “very enduring” in Greek.) Christians very early spoke of the Apostles as columns: James, Peter, and John are “pillars” in Jerusalem for Paul;28 Paul himself (the Apostle to the Gentiles) and Peter are called “pillars of the Church” in the Letter of Clement (ca. 96 A.D.).29 The columns of a church basilica represent the founders, but they also represent “supporters,” everyone who belongs to the Church.30
In the Greco-Roman world, columns had become an essential component of architectural beauty. The Roman basilica, plain as it was on the outside, loved grandeur within, and beautiful columns provided undeniable splendour. The early Christian basilicas could be built quickly and relatively cheaply of brick; and columns were easy to find. Rome by 313 A.D. was a forest of columns: Romans had been collecting stone and cutting columns for centuries. Much of the work was done at quarries all around the Mediterranean, before the shafts were shipped for polishing and finishing at Rome. Columns had also been stolen from all over the empire, as when Sulla had the columns of the Athenian Olympieion brought to Rome in 86 B.C. to embellish the Capitol.31 Christians, under Constantine, began a career of taking columns from pagan buildings to adorn their churches.
In the ancient world one of the essential characteristics of a magnificent building had been the similarity of the columns adorning it. They were made as a set for this particular temple or stoa or portico and no other: that was part of their strictness, part of their extravagance. (In his “Cantique des colonnes,”32 the French poet Paul Valéry calls the columns of a Greek temple “pieusement pareilles,” (“dutifully identical.”) He also describes them as “incorruptible sisters”—colonnes are feminine—and “servants without knees.”)
Christians in late antiquity, perhaps unable to afford the luxury of a full complement of specially made columns, would content themselves with looting pillars here and there from pagan monuments: early churches often have columns and capitals of various designs, even of differing sizes, reflecting the variety of their origins. And Christians did not mind this: they quickly began to see in the hodgepodge of lifted goods a symbol of diversity among the people who became Christians. The inclusion of absolutely every kind, class, and race of person, from anywhere, has always been a distinctive mark of Christianity.
In a similar investment of a material necessity with a satisfying new significance, a Christian basilica could be thought of as having turned a classical temple inside out, much as Christianity in important respects stood classical culture on its head. The columns around the outside of a pagan temple (as opposed to a basilica) have migrated indoors to make a Christian temple, as has the altar, which is now no longer for bloody sacrifice.33 And the traditional Roman basilica, plain without but extravagantly marbled within, could express for Christians the revolutionary ideal of a human being who has chosen an unassuming exterior but spiritual riches “in the heart.”
Columns were to have a very long history in Christian architecture. By the Gothic period, in the great cathedrals of France and other countries to the north, columns were to become bundles of narrow reeds of stone, springing high and then fanning out into the tall vaults they carry. In Rome, however, churches have always been made in a spirit of balance and repose; the lucid harmonies of Greco-Roman architecture remained what people living in Rome felt to be “right.” The solemn, grounded feeling produced by a broad, solid Roman church is totally different from the soaring aspiration of Gothic. (Rome possesses, indeed, only one Gothic church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, near the Pantheon.)
Roman church columns carry either entablatures—straight stone beams, adding a powerful horizontal element to the verticality of columns—or, as at Sant’Agnese’s, a series of round arches. Arches are literally as well as symbolically dynamic forms: they carry stress, channelling the downward thrust of the upper parts of structures into the earth via walls, pillars, and columns. They appear to leap and fall, like water or moving objects; arches surmounting columns produce a graceful lightness, turning a stride into a decorative dance.
Sant’Agnese’s has rows of columns bearing arches on two levels around three sides of the building. In addition to these are four built pillars that also help to carry arches: two cruciform ones at the narthex end and two rectangular ones beside the apse. From the gallery (originally at street level) people could look down into the deep interior of the church. The gallery columns are both thinner and shorter than those that support them from below.
For the visitor standing in the nave, the floor level of the gallery underlines the horizontality that is essential to the tradition of Roman buildings. At the same time the gallery itself harbours space. The smaller columns above invite comparison with the heavier lower ones, and look higher because they are smaller. And the nave’s walls higher still are pierced with windows, a bright arched space for every dark arched space in the gallery. The windows are smaller than the gallery’s arched spaces, though similar in shape: again, this makes them look higher than they are.34 Everything has been done to make the little church, buried underground for half its height, feel nevertheless airy, graceful, varied, and light inside.
The nave is much wider than the aisles,35 but, thanks in part to the columns, it maintains its role as “avenue” leading to the altar and the apse behind it. The nave is only twice as long as it is wide, however, and the altar area takes up much more of the space in front of the apse than is evident at first sight: out of eight intercolumnar spaces created by the seven columns and the pillar on each side, the altar and its steps occupy three. This makes the space for the congregation broader in relation to its length than is usual in this kind of church. Sant’ Agnese’s, then, is short for a basilica and very high for its length. There is no transept; the church is “monoaxial,” all moving forward.
On top of each column capital in the gallery is a pulvin (from pulvinus, “cushion” in Latin): a block placed between the capital and the arch. The pulvins for the gallery’s columns, the galleries themselves, and also the proportions of the church in general point to Eastern, which is to say Byzantine, influence. When we look at the apse mosaic, the Byzantine background of the building is even clearer. And if you measure Sant’Agnese’s in Roman feet, you get fractions; if you measure it in Byzantine feet, the measurements are in round numbers except for one half-foot result.36 Sant’Agnese’s is a basilica, all right, but a basilica wedded to Byzantine taste. It is likely that the architect was Byzantine, although the workmanship in the building is believed to have been Roman.37 We know that Byzantine artists fled in large numbers to Rome during the period 726–843 A.D., when the Eastern Church embraced Iconoclasm and banned all images. But Sant’Agnese’s, built a hundred years beforehand, shows us that there were highly appreciated Byzantine artists working in Rome before the diaspora caused by Iconoclasm began.
The church in Rome that most closely resembles Sant’Agnese’s is the earlier of the two joined churches that now form San Lorenzo fuori le Mura.38 This basilica was erected forty-odd years before Sant’Agnese’s, over the grave of the martyred deacon Lawrence. It, too, was built into a catacomb outside the walls, with galleries to provide access at street level.39 It has similar proportions, and a similar Byzantine cast. San Lorenzo’s is a more “masculine” building, however, with its straight entablatures rather than arches, and its more massive pillars. Both churches display an apparently deliberate variety among their columns.
Sant’Agnese’s has sixteen large columns at the lower level, sixteen little ones in the gallery, and four to hold up the ciborium (the dome over the altar). The six large columns that flank the altar, three on either side, are all exceptional. There are four of precious pink portasanta marble from the Greek island of Chios, the subtle colour of which, as we shall see, gives the tone for the colour harmony of the entire church. There are two columns of grey-white pavonazzetto marble standing on either side of the altar steps. (Pavonazzetto means “bluish,” and the marble came from Phrygia in Asia Minor, modern Turkey.) They are famous examples of virtuosity in columnar carving. Grooves run straight up the length of each column, each groove or flute containing another, which contains another, and so on. Each column has 140 flutes: twenty broad flutes and another six within each of these. All of them join up with their opposite numbers inside each broad flute in elegant curves at the top and bottom of the column. There is nothing bombastic about this exquisitely difficult, totally achieved workmanship; the overall impression is of quiet grace.
In the past the love of columns could become an obsession, one that can gradually grow even in a modern visitor to a church like this one. Originally spoils from pagan buildings, columns could also migrate from church to church in the various heats of rivalry. As late as the seventeenth century column envy nearly cost Sant’Agnese’s four of her best pillars: two of the pink portasantas and the two fluted pavonazzetto columns almost went to embellish the new funerary chapel for the Aldobrandini family in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Only the vigilance of the abbot of Sant’Agnese’s monastery (the future Pope Leo XI), and his diligence in very quickly finding substitute columns on the antiquarian market, saved these glories of the church from leaving for somewhere else. Pope Clement VIII, himself a member of the Aldobrandini family and in whose name the transfer was to be carried out, accepted both the column replacements and the veiled reproach, and rewarded the abbot with a sapphire ring.40
Column connoisseurship involves appreciation for the provenance and quality of the materials and their colouring. But a great deal more enters into it: the way irregularities of size are overcome in a church full of columns taken from different buildings; form and carving skill in the column bases; the subtle entasis of the shafts, which might also have sophisticated surface fluting; and, very particularly, the capitals. The builders of Sant’Agnese’s carefully picked the columns they pilfered from classical buildings; they then meticulously planned just where they should go in the church. For example, in the gallery the shafts of the columns around the entrance have spiralling grooves on their surfaces, while the columns near the altar are fluted. The others are alternately plain and fluted.
It mattered intensely where a column with a particular capital was put. Apart from the Tuscan order, ancient Rome had inherited from the canonical orders of Greece three types of columns, each with a distinctive capital. Capitals were Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and—the Roman contribution—Composite.41 Each had its own status. Romans used Composite capitals to express their own glory—on triumphal arches, for example, such as the Arch of Titus, which celebrated the crushing of Jerusalem (70 A.D.). On the Colosseum (72 A.D.) columns and capitals of the Doric order adorn the first and lowest level of the building, Ionic the second, and Corinthian the third. Composite was reserved for the emperor’s entrance and for the building’s interior, where the Roman populace and its rulers would sit and watch the gory games. The sequence here of Doric-Ionic-Corinthian-Composite exemplifies the status of the orders, from lowest to highest, with Composite highest of all.42
The status of the orders is preserved at Sant’Agnese’s. At the entrance into the nave from the narthex stand two dark granite columns with Composite capitals. They clearly announce that stepping from the street into the house of God is a momentous act: you are leaving the world outside to enter a place that represents your own inner being, your deepest desire and transcendental destiny. After the entrance and along the nave the columns are of a lighter colour and have Corinthian (“lower” than Composite) capitals. The finest columns stand around the altar: fluted ones with Corinthian capitals and pink ones crowned with Composite. (These capitals look unfinished. They may have been made as late as the seventh century, perhaps when the church was built. But their Composite order is unmistakable.)
In the gallery the little columns over the narthex have Ionic capitals. The capitals of the other small columns alternate Composite, Corinthian, Composite, Corinthian, the length of the nave; four of them date from the fifteenth century.43 The spaces between the upper columns were closed off with panels of marble, forming parapets, a necessary protective barrier when people came into the church at gallery level and stood there, craning towards the altar. These panels disappeared in 1600, to be replaced first by balustrades echoing those still standing in front of the altar, and then, in 1855, with the plain transenne, pierced by circular and cross-shaped holes, that are still in place.
Today, the gallery is never used, except for the part over the narthex, which contains the organ.44 The old entrances from the street are closed. Once a year during the saint’s week in January, the church’s custodians—who, like the organist, can enter the gallery from a spiral staircase leading from the right-hand aisle or from the adjoining canonry—drape over the parapets a series of handsome red hangings kept for that purpose alone. The hangings are red because Agnes spilled her blood as a martyr. It is common practice in Mediterranean countries for people living in the houses and apartments that line the route of a parade to decorate their balconies by hanging rugs or bright drapery over them. The hangings at Sant’Agnese’s treat the nave, appropriately, as a street during a fiesta.
Above the nave of the church stretches the carved wooden ceiling, like a lid on a rectangular box. It was added in the seventeenth century and hides from our view the simple wooden beams and tiles that roofed the church on their own for a thousand years previously. (The central horizontal beam of the roofing structure must have stressed again the movement forward that is represented by the central path of the nave’s floor.) The present ceiling, coloured predominantly in pink, plum, blue, ochre, and gold, is coffered. Curling fronds, white and gold on plum and blue, decorate the sunken panels.
Three carved figures of women look down on the congregation from large cross-shaped spaces set the length of the nave. In the centre is Agnes with her lamb and her martyr’s palm. Nearest the door is Constantina, daughter of Constantine, with an empress’s crown tall on her head, carrying a budding plant with three branches, probably referring to the Trinity. Nearest the apse is Saint Cecilia, virgin martyr and patron saint of music, with her attribute, a set of organ pipes. St. Cecilia’s church in Trastevere was the favourite place of worship of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, under whom repairs to Sant’Agnese’s were completed. He inaugurated the ceiling in 1606.45 On September 20, 1870, when armies advanced on Rome along the via Nomentana, a cannonball fell onto the basilica, smashed a hole in the roof, and damaged the ceiling; repairs were made a year later.
The colours in the big portasanta marble columns that stand round the altar—a deep pink with grey inclusions—provide the church with the keynote for its colour scheme. The background colour throughout is pale and darker grey for the marble floors and apse walls, the painted side walls, most columns, and all capitals. The pink is picked up by the eight pink marble sections of the dome over the altar, with its grey and white cornices, ribs, finials, and capitals. It deepens into porphyry in the gorgeous small columns holding up the dome, the echoing porphyry verticals of the pilasters in the apse, and the porphyry horizontal band above them; and it metamorphoses into purples in the robes of the figures in the mosaic above. Gold gleams from the mosaic background and from the ceiling; ochre and pink (an exact match for the pink of the columns) are the main colours of the ceiling, together with plum and blue for the sunken coffers. (Coffering, the imposition of geometrical design upon ceilings representing the heavens, “means” the cosmic order of the skies). Light and dark blues are the colours of the starry circular heavens in the mosaic, out of which the Hand of God reaches with the crown of martyrdom for the saint.
During the annual week of festivities in honour of Saint Agnes, red and plum velvet hangings with gold embroidery clothe the apse; there are red hangings at the parapets of the gallery and also at the door to the canonry from the street. Passersby note the hangings and know that the church of Sant’Agnese is celebrating its feast. The clergy wear seventeenth-century red and gold vestments on the saint’s special day, January 21. Pink and purple flowers (orchids on the occasions I have been there) deck the altar. The overall effect is delicate, solemn, and intensely female.