صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

nave. But long before this date it had acquired its final sense in Rome itself, and is used for the whole Church; not, however, for every Church, but for those only which possessed parochial rights.2

The first person who is recorded to have instituted parishes of this kind is Pope Evaristus in the third century, but the authority is somewhat doubtful, and the earliest real authority is the Acts of the Roman Council of 499. At that time it applied to twentyeight churches, of which almost all remain to the present time. The list is as follows: "Titulus Praxedis, Vestinae (St. Vitalis), St. Cecilia, Pammachii, Byzantis (SS. John and Paul), Clementis, Julii, Calixti (St. Maria in Trastevere), Chrysogoni, Pudentis, S. Sabinae, Equitii (St. Martino ai Monti), Damasi (S. Lorenzo in Damaso), Matthei (now SS. Pietro e Marcellino), Aemilianae, Eusebii, Tigridis, Crescentiani (S. Sisto), Nicomedis (unknown), Cyriaci (now transferred to St. Maria in Via Lata), S. Susannae, Gaii, Romani (doubtful), SS. Apostolorum, Eudoxiae (S. Pietro Vincula), Fasciolae (SS. Nereo e Achilleo), S. Priscae, S. Marcelli, Lucinae (S. Lorenzo in Lucina), Marci, Pallacinae. The original number before the peace of the Church was twenty-five. Three had been added in the fourth and fifth centuries, viz. SS. John and Paul, S. Lorenzo in Damaso, and another. The others were the original churches of the times of persecution, and we may suppose were for the most part at first private houses permanently used as churches, and with duly consecrated and permanent altars. They were probably all, or at least most of them, destroyed in the persecution of Diocletian, and rebuilt again after the peace of the Church. It may be noticed that they are all in the suburbs of Rome;

1" Chron. Cass.," ii. 3-7; Migne, "P.L.," vol. 173, p. 586.
2 Ibid. p. 747.

at least none are in the central part, which afterwards had so many round the Forum. Nor are any in buildings which have been taken over from the pagans; the time for this had not yet come, although from the same lists of the signatories of the Council of 499 we see that the deacons had their offices already in buildings of this kind, in the Templum sacrae Urbis (SS. Cosmas and Damian, and in the horrea or public barns (St. Maria in Cosmedin 1).

At a later date the parish organization of Rome increased largely. The remains of the old system, however, can still be traced in the College of Cardinals with their "titular" churches; not, as is commonly supposed, churches from which they take their titles, but rather parochial churches of which they are, in theory, the parish priests. The deaconries survive also in like manner, and are held by the "Cardinal Deacons". Their number is, however, no longer strictly limited to seven.

1Cf. Duchesne, "Les titres presbyteraux," Mélanges de l'Ecole Fr. 1887.

CHAPTER II.

The Basilicas and the Development of Church Architecture.

We have seen in the last chapter that there were certainly Christian churches set apart for Divine worship, already existing everywhere before the end of the time of persecution. Such churches, we concluded, were probably for the most part ordinary houses, given up to this one purpose, and perhaps specially adapted for that end by internal alterations. The word basilica does already occur in describing these edifices, and it is possible that here and there private basilicas in large houses may have been used as churches, but this cannot have been common, and everything leads us to believe that the pre-Constantinian churches were small and square-ended for the most part, not having as yet the basilican form or possessed of an apse at the western end.

In the year 312 an event took place, the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated in the history of church architecture. Constantine handed over to the Christians the palace and basilica of the Lateran to serve as the residence of the Pope St. Zephyrinus, and to be the cathedral church of Rome. The basilica seems not to have been wholly rebuilt, but simply refitted to prepare it for its new use. St. Jerome1 speaks 'Ep.," lxxiii.

166

of it as basilica quondam Laterani, and the passage in the "Liber Pontificalis " which records the donation and the consecration of the church does not say that it was actually built at this time.

As so often happens when a great forward step is taken in architecture, the acquisition of this great hall, probably of exceptional size and grandeur for a private basilica, set the type for the churches so many of which were so soon to be erected. Just as Justinian's great church of St. Sophia at Constantinople set the form, first for all the smaller churches of the East, and afterwards, since the Conquest, for all the mosques of the Turkish world, so did the basilica of the Lateran set the type for many centuries for all the churches of the Western Empire, and wherever Roman influence was paramount.

The course of ages has made so much alteration in this most important church that it is hard to say just what was its size and shape in its original condition. It can hardly have been so large in its original state as at present, and probably it was greatly enlarged and practically rebuilt in the fifth century by the Consul Flavius Felix. The provision of the transverse nave, for reasons which we shall see presently, must be set down to this period and not to the original building. The position of the altar in every church of the Constantinian period seems to have been on the chord of the apse, just in front of the bishop's throne, and such arrangements as transverse naves are all of later development.

The general type of the basilica is at first quite constant, and is completely accounted for if we may suppose that in the Lateran Palace the basilica occupied the position of the tablinum or oecus of an ordinary house. The plan of Old St. Peter's or S. Clemente, or of S. Ambrogio at Milan, illustrates the point.

The basilica itself takes the place of the peristyle, and the apse succeeds to the tablinum. The atrium preserves its name, and is kept as an open forecourt, surrounded sometimes with pillars making a kind of cloister, through which the church is approached. The impluvium or fountain, which was usually found in the atrium of a Roman house, kept its place in the centre of the atrium of the basilica. The transition is by no means abrupt from the ecclesia domestica of the earlier time to the great basilicas of the centuries that follow. Even the memory of the pillars which were returned along the side of the peristyle farthest from the tablinum survived. We find pillars thus returned along the eastern side of many basilicas of the earliest date, although they seem to serve no special purpose. It was so, for instance, in the lower church at S. Clemente; in the Deir el Adra, a rock-cut church of the fourth century on the Nile; at Sta Agnese fuori le mura, and in the cathedral, now destroyed, at Messina.

Four great basilicas were erected by Constantine in Rome itself, besides the Lateran and those which he built at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, at Tyre and in Constantinople. All the four at Rome were outside the walls and over the tombs of the martyrs. They differed from one another chiefly in the number of aisles. St. Peter's, by far the largest of all, had five aisles, the others at the Lateran, Sta Agnese, S. Lorenzo, and St. Paul's had only three. Sta Agnese and

S. Lorenzo, probably because the great depths to which they were excavated made this arrangement convenient, had upper galleries over the aisles. The roofing of all was by means of wooden beams carried transversely.

There is no reason to think that in making the church of St. Paul so much smaller and less important than that of St. Peter, or indeed than those of

« السابقةمتابعة »