Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 20

The Visible Church.

Yet now the Christians themselves were beginning to build churches, and after the time of Constantine, Church building became one of the main features of Christian life. Did this mean a break in the mind of the Church, a return to the well-trodden road of a temple concept of religion? The answer is contained in facts which might at first appear to have only archaeological interest. The basic model of the Christian temple in the fourth century was the basilica. This was not in origin a religious building but specifically profane, designated for large gatherings — for the court, for trade, or for politics. This meant that in building their own churches Christians deliberately rejected as prototypes both the pagan temple and the Temple of Jerusalem, described in detail in the Bible. In the light of Christianity a temple acquired a completely new meaning, incompatible with the old. The pagan temple was subordinated architecturally to its religious function as the house of a god; in its center, therefore, stood an idol or a depiction of the god.
The Christian church, on the other hand, was wholly subordinate to the concept of the Christian gathering, and so was its architecture. In the center of the building stood that which transformed this gathering into a Church, uniting Christians into a living temple of the Body of Christ: the table for the celebration of the Eucharist. The appearance of Church buildings, therefore, changed nothing essential in the Church, but on the contrary, the building itself acquired a new significance.

With Constantine, the Christian church emerged into full view and ceased to be a place of semisecret meetings, so that gradually it became the center of religious life in the city. In Constantinople, his new capital, which was ceremoniously opened in 330, he had originated the plan for a Christian city which was to be the standard for all city construction in the Christian Middle Ages. The Church building was its mystical center or heart. A church crowned the city with its cupola or protected it with its sacred shadow. The idea itself was admittedly borrowed from paganism, and historians are still arguing as to what inspired Constantine in his rebuilding of ancient Byzantium — whether it was the vision of a sacred center for the Christian empire or echoes of ancient dreams of a philosophical city. For later generations, in any case, Constantinople remained the specifically Christian center of the empire. In the Church building, from then on, man’s whole life received a religious sanction. The Church gatherings in it gradually came to coincide with gatherings of citizens.

A new “physical” link was established between the Church and the world. The martyr who had suffered in this city was naturally distinguished from the throng of martyrs as its own saint, the spiritual patron of the city; and the prayer offered in the Church “for all and in behalf of all” was now perceived to be primarily a prayer for that particular place and for these people. It naturally came to include their daily needs and embraced man’s whole life in a new way, from birth to death, in all its forms: governmental, social, or economic. Frequently, it is true, the Christian saint assumed in the popular mind the significance formerly held by the local god or “genius,” and the Church service was interpreted as a ritual religious sanction for all aspects of life. Yet at the same time the Church building and the cult were now becoming the main channels or forms for preaching Christianity to a still semipagan world — the school for a new Christian society. By responding to all the needs of this world and assuming the function previously performed by paganism, the Church united everything from within with the Good News, and placed the image of Christ in the center of life.

 

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