much long use may have habituated us to the application of the word to material buildings, we can well understand how instinctively an earlier age would shrink from any lower meaning than the moral and spiritual sense attached to it in those Apostolical Writings which had taught the world that the true temple of God was in the hearts and consciences of men. And therefore, in the words of Bingham, "for the first three ages the name is scarce ever (he might have said never) "applied to Christian places of worship;" and though instances of it are to be found in the rhetorical language of the fourth, yet it never obtained a hold on the ordinary language of Christendom. The use of the word in Roman Catholic countries for Protestant churches is probably dictated by the desire to represent the Protestant service as heathen. What, then, was the ancient heathen structure, whose title has thus acquired a celebrity so far beyond its original intention? It is the especial offspring and The Basilica. symbol of Western civilization;- Greek in its origin, Roman in its progress, Christian in its ultimate development, the word is coextensive with the range of the European family. In the earliest form Its form. under which we can catch any trace of it, it stands in the dim antiquity of the Homeric age—at the point where the first beginnings of Grecian civilization melt away into the more primitive forms of Oriental society. It is the gateway of the Royal Palace, in which the ancient Kings, Agamemnon at Mycenæ, David at Jerusalem, Pharaoh at Thebes or Memphis, sat to hear and to judge the complaints of their people; and of which the trace was preserved at Athens in the "King's Portico" under the Pnyx, where the Archon King per 1 It is perhaps doubtful how far the form of the word "Basilica," though of course itself purely Greek, was ever used with this acceptation in Greece itself. Στοὰ βασιλέως is the designation of the Athenian portico, and οἶκος Οἱ ναὸς βασιAéws is Eusebius' expression for the Christian Basilica. formed the last judicial functions of the last shadow of the old Athenian royalty. But it was amongst the Ro mans that it first assumed that precise form and meaning which have given it so lasting an importance. Judging from the great prominence of the Basilicas as public buildings, and from the more extended application of them in the Imperial times to purposes of general business, the nearest parallel to them in modern cities would doubtless be found in the Town-hall or Exchange. What, in fact, the rock-hewn semicircle of the Pnyx was at Athens what the open platform of the Forum had been in the earlier days of Rome itself1-that, in the later times of the Commonwealth, was the Basilicathe general place of popular resort and official transactions; but, in accordance with the increased refinement of a more civilized age, protected from the midday sun and the occasional storm by walls and roof. There was a long hall divided by two rows of columns into a central avenue, with two side aisles, in one of which the male, in the other the female appellants to justice waited their turn. The middle aisle was occupied by the chance crowd that assembled to hear the proceedings, or for purposes of merchandise. A transverse avenue which crossed the others in the centre, if used at all, was occupied by the advocates and others engaged in the public business. The whole building was closed by a long semicircular recess, in the centre of which sat the prætor or supreme judge, seen high above the heads of all on the elevated 2 1 The Tynwald in the Isle of Man is an exact likeness still existing of these early assemblies in the open air. 2 The "judgment-hall" or prætorium of the Roman magistrates in the provnces had no further resemblance to the Basilica than in the coincidence of name which must have arisen from their frequent formation out of the palaces of the former kings of the conquered nations. But so necessary was the elevation of the judge's seat considered to the final delivery of the sentence, that, as has been made familiar to us in one memorable instance (John xix. 13), the absence of the usual tribunal was supplied by a tesselated pavement, which the magistrate carried with him, and on which his chair or throne was placed before he could pronounce sentence. "tribunal," which was deemed the indispensable symbol of the Roman judgment-seat. Its adapta tian worship. This was the form of the Basilica, as it met the view of the first Christians. Few words are needed to account for its adaptation to the use of a Christian church. Something, no doubt, is to be ascribed, tion to Chrisas Dean Milman well remarks, to the fact, that "as these buildings were numerous, and attached to any imperial residence, they might be bestowed at once on the Christians without either interfering with the course of justice, or bringing the religious feelings of the hostile parties into collision." Still, the instances of actual transformation are exceedingly rare-in most cases it must have been impossible, from the erection of the early Christian churches on the graves, real or supposed, of martyrs and apostles, which, according to the almost universal practice of the ancient world, were necessarily without the walls of the city, as the halls of justice, from their connection with every-day life, were necessarily within. It is on more general grounds that we may trace something in the type itself of the Basilica, at least not uncongenial to the early Christian views of worship, independent of any causes of mere accidental convenience. What this was has been anticipated in what has been said of the rejection of the temple. There was now a "church," a "congregation," an "assembly," which could no longer be hemmed within the narrow precincts, or detained in the outer courts of the inclosure — where could they be so naturally placed as in the long aisles which had received the concourse of the Roman populace, and which now became the "nave" of the Christian Cathedrals? Whatever distinctions existed in the Christian society were derived, not as in the Jewish temple, from any notions of inherent religious differences between 1 History of Christianity, iii 343. different classes of men, but merely, as in the Jewish synagogue, from considerations of order and decency; and where could these be found more readily than in the separate places still retained by the sexes in the aisles of the Basilica; or the appropriation of the upper end of the building to the clergy and singers? There was a law to be proclaimed, and a verdict to be pronounced, by the highest officers of the new society; and what more natural, than that the Bishop should take his seat on the lofty tribunal of the prætor,1 and thence rebuke, exhort, or command, with an authority not the less convincing, because it was moral and not legal? There was, lastly, a bond of communion between all the members of that assembly, to which the occupants of the Temple and the Basilica had been alike strangers - what more fitting than that the empty centre of the ancient judgment-hall, where its several avenues and aisles joined in one, should now receive a new meaning; and that there, neither in the choir nor nave, but in the meeting point of both, should be erected the Altar or Table of that communion which was to belong exclusively neither to the clergy nor to the people, but to bind both together in indissoluble harmony ?2 1 The Basilica Æmiliana and the Basilica Julia were examples in the Roman Forum of this sort of edifice. But there were others where the judicial character was more strongly impressed on the building. Such were the Basilica Sessoriana, now converted into the Church of Sta. Croce in the Sessorian Palace at Rome; the Basilica Palatina, still to be traced on the ruins of the Palatine, with its apse and its oblong hall; the Basilica attached to the palace at Trèves, and since converted into a Protestant church by the late King of Prussia. 2 The "atrium" and "impluvium" of the more private hall seem to have berome the models of the outer court and "cantharus" or fountain of the Basilica. The obvious appropriation of the seats immediately round the altar to the emperor and his attendants, when present, is preserved in the probable derivation of "chancellor," from the "cancelli" or "rails," by which that officer sat. In the Eastern Church the screen of the Iconostasis, which now divides the nave from the choir, has assumed a solid shape to furnish a stand for the increasing multiplication of sacred pictures. But originally it was a curtain, then a light trellis work. And in the Western Church it has never intruded, until in the fifteenth - The popular the Church. There are some general reflections which this transformation suggests. In the first place, it may no doubt have been an accident that the first Christian place of worship should have been taken from an edifice so expressive of the popular life of Greece and Rome, — so exact an antithesis to the seclusion of the Jewish and Pagan Temple. But, if it was an accident, it is strikingly in accordance with all that we know of the strength of the popular element of the early Church, not merely in its first origin, when even an Apostle did not pronounce sentence on an offender, or issue a decree or appoint an officer, without the concurrence of the whole society; but even in those later times, when Au- character of gustine fled from city to city to escape from the elevation which he was destined to receive from the wild enthusiasm of an African populace; when a layman, a magistrate, an unbaptized catechumen was, on the chance acclamation of an excited mob, transformed into Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan. It is precisely this true image of the early Church, the union of essential religious equality with a growing distinction of rank and order, that the Basilica was to bring before us in a visible and tangible shape. It might have been unnatural, if the whole constitution, the whole religion of the three first centuries was wrapt up in the institution of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons ; but it could not have been deemed altogether strange, in an age that still caught the echoes sentury, for quite another reason, the screen was introduced to hide the local .hrine of the saint, as at St. Albans and Westminster Abbey (if so be) from the eyes of common worshippers. The altar was a wooden structure, as it still is in the Eastern Church. It was gradually changed to stone in the sixth century, from the incorporation of a relic of a saint inside, and the wish to consider it as a tomb (see Chapter XI.). What was therefore once its universal material has since then been absolutely forbidden in the Roman Church. It was also commonly placed in the middle of the apse of the church. The modern practice of its attachment to the eastern wall was absolutely unknown. Its ancient name "the Table," by which it is still always called in the East. (See Chapter was III.) |