Orthodoxy Christianity, Vol iii, Chapter 2: Churches and Church Building in the Byzantine Tradition
After the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the synagogue developed and persecutions of Christians increased, private homes, often from the wealthy, were opened to pray for the dead and receive the eucharist. Catacombs, which contain around 8,000 Christian burials, were well-known around the empire, but especially preserved at Rome, where underground there are artistic decorations, proto-icons, memorials for the martyrs, and biblical scenes are depicted. These tombs became the Christian altars for liturgical worship. Liturgy, then, was a very “familial” atmosphere. The Edict of Milan was a document that allowed the construction of churches within the Roman Empire and halted the government backed attack on Christians. Roman culture used rectangular structures for business and public life called basilicas. Christians took over these buildings for liturgical worship. The Basilica Aemilia (179 BC) in the Roman Forum is important early, pre-Christian basilica. But many of the first basilicas used or built were destroyed by persecutions, and that left only Dura-Europas in Syria next to the Euphrates river as the earliest standing Christianized basilica. Next to this Syrian-Roman basilica were temples to Zeus, Mithras, Adonis and Roma. Christ’s teaching on the concepts of family, home, and temple helped Christians prepare for the harsh reality that they will be betrayed and excommunicated by their own culture and allies in business or family. So, the first churches were held in homes during martyrdom, in catacombs to memorialize the martyrs, and in the basilicas to publicly worship at the altars with the martyrs.
Under Emperor Theodosius (381 AD) church buildings exploded across the imperial territories in Gaul, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and the Aegean Sea. At this point, there was no sharp distinction as we understand it today as “western” and “eastern,” though there were still real differences between these regions and cultures. These churches weren’t like the Temple or cultic centers that limit or lure the deities to certain locales. But these places offered eternal life just as Noah’s Ark gathered up many different creatures into one ship. Basilicas came to represent the church as a saving ship. Christians move about the waves and seas of change and chaos, but it is required to be steered by “good order” as the Apostolic Constitutions (4th c.) discuss the governance of a church. The sails of the ship are filled with the Holy Spirit who guides the Church orderly into the safe harbor. After some development in the East during 6th c., domed basilicas gave the viewer from the inside the experience of a “circular motion” as if a sailor were navigating. The altar is in the east apse of the basilica and it represents “light” (1 Jn 1:5), “the son of righteousness” (Mal 4:2), “the dayspring” (Lk 1:78) and “paradise” (Gen 2:8). What happens in heaven, happens on earth. This symbolic gesture of all people turning toward the East to worship points to the event already that all will give God worship and submission; no one will be facing west, as it seems in the end. The triple-nave basilica during 4th – 8th c. contained a vestry (south nave), table of oblation (north nave), and a sanctuary (east nave) with a screen and architrave beam over the pi-shaped columns. An ambo too was used for the readers and homilies and liturgy of the catechumens.
Hagia Sophia was built under emperor Justinian and it grew out of this development of basilica structures. It was said to be illuminated by light from the base of the dome’s windows, and the marble inside reflected the rays of light everywhere. It paralleled the tabernacle, Solomon’s temple, and the temple during Ezekiel the prophet. The ciborium (tent) matched the holy of holies, the wall matched the veil, and the narthex the courtyard. The domes represented the heavens. The liturgy enacts what already has happened in heaven or has been happening. Liturgy then is a way for humans born within time to worship within a timeless dimension. The sky is like the sanctuary and the earth is like the nave, this is the point at which created time meets the timeless heavens. That is a fuller picture of beauty and the cosmos that is found in scriptures, not merely philosophy. Psalms 19, 148, and many other passages describe the world in this way. Maximus the Confessor speaks of how the sanctuary is like the soul and the nave is like the body, and the members of the church do different works, but they perform them in unity; it is diversity arranged in unity. He describes the Church in cosmic but practical ways, “each is made for the other” by freeing each person into different callings and showing their “sameness in unity.” That the Church on earth is like a shadow of the cosmic heavens has huge implications for how we understand time, eternity and eschatology within the gospel and incarnation and final judgment. Classical education, the philosophical and theological variety, argues from first principles, and assumes beauty and harmony as the goal and beginning just like the scriptural account of reality. Church architecture and liturgy is a beauty first approach only because beauty is the end. Like Origen argued, we can only understand the beginning by understanding the end.
Medieval education consisted of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), and the following group of studies or “ways” – the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy) – that assumed there is harmony and beauty in the universe and in humanity as a first principle, starting-point. Medieval thinkers believed that is worth pursuing for its own sake, as opposed to a purely useful, mechanical, technical, or immediately practical skills. The liberal arts begin with beauty because beauty is the end. It is a kind of education that can free the mind and protect from a pharisaical, machiavellian, and strictly pragmatic approach to life. A liberal education sets the mind free to practice an ethical life that reflects the beauty and harmony of the cosmos within the body and the soul. That would imply that the artist who holds the paintbrush and the architect with the chisel should be holy men and women, their souls should be beautiful before they create beauty. Modern science (episteme) and technology does not always assume that this is true or useful. From all of this, we receive principles of symmetry (analogia) and proportion that were applied to building churches and were borrowed from the beauty and proportions of the human body. Virtuvius the Roman, architect of the 1st BC said, “without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of a well-shaped man.” There are also proportions of the soul in relation to the body just as there are co-occurring events between heaven and earth, between the cosmos and church liturgy. Harmony is the characteristic of interpretation. In the study of geometry, the golden ratio or “divine proportion” occurs when “the ratio of the larger portion to the smaller portion equal to the ratio of the sum of both parts of the segment to its larger section” (36-37). Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us that Plato taught, “there is a mean … becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same and having become the same with one another will be all one” (Timaeus 31c-32a). The Holy Trinity does come down specifically into the liturgy of the churches, but God is also “all in all” in mystical timelessness that we can experience on earth through the mysteries of the Orthodox Church. One of the last developments of basilicas is the cross-in-square churches in the 9thc. and continuing to the present day in Orthodox countries with a long history such as Syria, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Georgia – each having their own distinct architectural traditions of ecclesial basilicas