The whole arrangement of the church is symbolised at much length, as setting forth the different divisions of the laity and the states of the faithful with respect to advance in holiness. The great portico symbolised God the Father: the side porticoes the other Two Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The seats represented the souls of the faithful, upon which, {lxxiii} as on the Day of Pentecost, the cloven tongues would descend and sit upon each of them. 'The revered and great and only altar, what could this be but the spotlessness of soul and holiness of holies of the common Priest of us all?' [Footnote 48] Once more, the parallel between the spiritual and the material Churches being continued, the Word, the Great Demiurgus of all things, is said to have Himself made upon earth a copy of the heavenly pattern which is the Church of the Firstborn written in heaven, Jerusalem that is above, Sion the Mount of God, and the city of the living God.
[Footnote 48: Euseb. H. E., x, 65.]
It appears then that throughout this description a symbolical meaning is found attached to the material church: and this not far-fetched or now first fancifully imagined; but appealing, as it seems, to what the auditors would be prepared to grant, and admitted by the historian without a comment, as one specimen of a class.
We have before remarked that every notice of the particular distribution of a church for the reception of the different classes of Christians, may be taken as an argument on our side: for if it can be shown that the form of churches was not arbitrary, but was adapted to certain peculiar wants, it must be granted that there was some particular law of design, and that law connected with Ritual: and then, as before pointed out, this arrangement becomes itself symbolical, and that intentionally. We shall only refer here to a passage quoted by Bingham, [Footnote 49] in which S. Gregory Thaumaturgus describes the places in church assigned respectively to the five degrees of Penitents. Mede [Footnote 50] argues for the existence of churches in the first three centuries, from the universal custom of praying towards the East, the necessity of {lxxiv} providing distinct places for the Penitents, Hearers, Catechumens, and Faithful, and from the patterns of the Jewish proseuchae and synagogues. But all these arguments seem to tell as much for some particular form of churches as for their existence: that is they prove that the earliest churches were designed on rules which, even if not intentionally symbolical (though we have shown that many were so), became by a natural process intentional among later church-builders.
[Footnote 49: Greg. Nyssen, iii, 567.]
[Footnote 50: Discourse of Churches, Folio Edn., p. 333.]
So also with respect to the great division into nave and sanctuary by a screen of some sort: concerning which the passages that might be cited from ancient writers would be innumerable. We shall only give one quoted by Father Thiers from a Poem of S. Gregory of Nazianzum, in which the balustrade or rood-screen is said to be 'between two worlds, the one immovable, the other changeful; the one of gods (or heaven) the other of mortals (or earth); that is to say between the choir and the nave, between the clergy and the laity.'
We have attempted to prove then that the earliest Christian churches were designed, or described, symbolically: by showing that there was a reason for their shape, whether oblong, cruciform, or circular; for their main division into choir and nave, and their subdivision for the penitents: for their orientation; and even to some extent for their minor internal arrangements: and that some type or pattern of a church was universally recognised. [Footnote 51]
[Footnote 51: Much stress is laid by some on the acknowledged Bascilican origin of churches as an argument against the principle here contended for. But we find a great authority on the Antiquities of Christian Rome deciding differently: 'There seems to be in the building of churches, as in the mosaics, and other works of art of the old Christian times in Rome one constant type in which the art of building could show little freedom or variety.— Beschreibung der Stadt Rom. Basiliken. vol, i, p. 430.]
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It would require more reading than we can boast of to give a catena of writers who have asserted the symbolism of churches. But if the point has been in any way proved for the first four centuries, enough will have been done: since from that period we can trace from existing edifices the gradual relinquishment of the peculiar Basilican plan, and general adoption of the Latin Cross, or oblong, in the West, while the East consistently retained the Greek Cross. We observe it stated [Footnote 52] that Mr. E. Sharpe, in a paper read before the Cambridge Camden Society, described the gradual typical additions' to the Basilican ground plan. Indeed symbolism, to any extent, once made known, must have become a rule and precedent to later church architects.