Liturgical Space

Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe 1500-2000

Nigel Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754657958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317104100
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the internal arrangement of church buildings in Western Europe between 1500 and 2000, showing how these arrangements have met the liturgical needs of their respective denominations, Catholic and Protestant, over this period. In addition to a chapter looking at the general impact of the Reformation on church buildings, there are separate chapters on the churches of the Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and on the ecclesiological movement of the nineteenth century and the liturgical movement of the twentieth century, both of which have impacted on all the churches of Western Europe over the past 150 years. The book is extensively illustrated with figures in the text and a series of plates and also contains comprehensive guides to both further reading and buildings to visit throughout Western Europe.

Chapter 1

The Legacy of the Pre-Reformation Church and the Impact of the Reformation

The aim of this introductory chapter is to set the scene for the core of this book, a discussion of the ways in which Christian worship and church buildings have changed between the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the present day. It will begin with a brief survey of the development of Christian worship and church buildings from the days of the Early Church to the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, and then look, in a comparative context, at the way in which the different forms of Protestant worship before the end of the sixteenth century impacted on the liturgical arrangement of church buildings and the consequences this had for the preservation or otherwise of pre-Reformation furnishings. Consideration will also be given to the changes in the appearance of Roman Catholic churches as a result of their own response to the ideas of the Protestant reformers and the new devotional culture of the Counter-Reformation.

The Origins of Christian Architecture

The first Christian churches were rooms in large private houses. Examples of such churches, dating from the third and fourth centuries, have been excavated at Dura Europas in Syria and at Lullingstone Roman Villa in Kent. When separate church buildings began to be erected after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were based on the secular basilica, an aisled hall with an apse at each end. This was adapted so that there was only one apse, at the end opposite the entrance, and this was used as the seat of the bishop, who would have been surrounded by his presbyters, sitting on benches. The altar would have stood in front of the apse so that people could gather around it for the eucharist. The font, for the baptism of new Christians, was usually placed in a separate baptistry adjacent to the main church. The altar was usually covered by a canopy or ciborium and surrounded by a low screen or cancelli. The liturgical action at the altar was, however, fully visible. In front of this sanctuary area there was usually an ambo, for reading and preaching. A good example of this early basilica style of church is Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, built in 432-40 (Figure 1.1), though it has been wholly refurnished in the centuries thereafter.

Figure 1.1 Ground plan of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

In the eastern part of the Roman Empire a slightly different type of church began to emerge from the sixth century. This was a square or cruciform building with shallow arms, the principal feature of which was a central lantern or dome. As the liturgy became more complex much of it began to take place behind a screen or iconostasis, which separated the clergy from the laity (Figure 1.2). This type of church, with only a single altar and in which the eucharist only took place on Sundays and festivals, has remained the norm among Eastern Orthodox Christians, but within the western church, under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, two major developments took place which have had a major impact on the design of church buildings. The first was the development of two distinct types of eucharistic liturgy, the sung High Mass with priest, deacon and sub-deacon for Sundays and festivals, and the more simple Low Mass, which was said by a priest alone. The medieval western church also began to develop a doctrine of purgatory, in which the prayers of the living could relieve the sufferings of the departed as they were purified before their entrance into heaven. Many people endowed special altars and chapels in churches in which Mass could be said for the repose of the souls of members of their families. A second, and equally important, development in the medieval western church was that of the sermon as a means of encouraging popular piety, delivered outside the Mass and sometimes associated with special, non-eucharistic, services or extra-liturgical devotions such as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in which the people were blessed with a consecrated host displayed in a monstrance.

Figure 1.2 Ground plan of eighth-century Eastern Orthodox church

These developments in the medieval western church were to lead to the building of a very different type of ecclesiastical building, one in which the large central space with the closed-off sanctuary area was replaced by a much longer building, divided into a series of compartments. Churches that had begun as simple two-cell structures, the nave for the people and the chancel for the clergy, were extended in a variety of ways. Towers were erected at one end, or over the central part of the building, to house a peel of bells to summon people to church. The nave, and frequently the chancel, were given aisles and sometimes both outer and inner aisles. Transepts were added to make the church cruciform. In cathedrals and other large churches a separate chapel, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, was frequently added beyond the high altar. Instead of only one altar, there would be several; in the aisles or the transepts, wherever they could be accommodated, or in separate chapels added to the church by wealthy benefactors who wished to endow chantries in which priests would celebrate Mass for them and other members of their families. Before the Reformation the church of St Alphege at Solihull (Figure 1.3) had as many as ten side altars in addition to the high altar. Chancels were lengthened so that they did not just contain the high altar but stalls in which the clergy could sing the offices of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. In theory these should have been sung separately every third hour of the day and night, but in practice they were usually grouped so that they could be sung early in the morning before Mass, in the middle of the day and in the evening. The clergy in the chancel were usually separated from the laity in the nave by a screen on top of which was a loft, frequently with an altar for reservation of the Blessed Sacrament and figures of Christ on the cross supported by the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist. The epistle and gospel were frequently read from the top of the screen but otherwise the action of the Mass would not have been visible and key points, such as the elevation of the host, would have been announced by the ringing of bells. As in the Eastern Orthodox Churches today, there were two services taking place: the liturgy of the clergy on one side of the screen and the private devotions of the laity on the other. The links between the two were infrequent and highly formalised.

Figure 1.3 Ground plan of St Alphege’s, Solihull, in the early sixteenth century

The development of the sermon, popularised by the new orders of friars from the thirteenth century, necessitated the furnishing of the nave as well as the chancel. Pulpits for preaching were installed, either at the chancel end, or in the middle, of the nave, and benches for people to sit on were gradually introduced. The proliferation of side altars and shrines led to many churches becoming extremely cramped, and the spaciousness that early Christian, and even Eastern Orthodox, churches had tried to achieve was lost. They suited the development of private devotions associated with the cults of saints and relics, the offering of prayers for the departed and the veneration of the Blessed Sacrament, but they did not work for any form of corporate worship. Consequently, although individual furnishings have survived, there is probably not a single church in Western Europe that fully reflects the liturgical climate of the Middle Ages. One exception to this will be the church of St Teilo, Llandeilo Talybont, in the process of re-erection at the Museum of Welsh Life at St Fagan’s near Cardiff. This church was replaced by a new church in the largest village in the parish, Pontarddulais, in the late nineteenth century and it gradually became redundant and a target for vandals. Eventually the complete set of furnishings of 1810 were destroyed. During the process of dismantling an important series of medieval wall-paintings was discovered and this led to the extremely imaginative decision by the museum authorities to re-erect the church so as to replicate a building of c.1520, complete with facsimile paintings and furnishings. When the church opens, scheduled for some time in 2007-8, it will give as good an example as can be achieved of what the typical medieval western village church looked like on the eve of the Reformation.

Pre-Reformation Worship and the Reformers

It is not possible to understand the attitude of the Reformers to public worship and its architectural setting without also understanding their objections to the theology, liturgical practice and private devotions of the late medieval western church. Whereas the theology of the medieval schoolmen was extremely sophisticated and argued on sound philosophical principles, that of the average man and woman in the parish, or for that matter of the parish priest, rarely rose above the level of popular superstition. People on the whole were less enthusiastic about enjoying the presence of God, His angels and saints in heaven, than they were to avoid the terrible punishments waiting for them in hell, or to reduce the amount of lesser punishment that they were likely to experience in purgatory. They were reminded of the terrors of hell on at least a weekly basis by representations of the Last Judgement, frequently painted over the chancel arch, an excellent example of which has survived in St Thomas’s, Salisbury. Just as the pre-Reformation church had two, largely unrelated theologies, so it also had two liturgies: the formal one conducted by the clergy, at which the laity were merely remote spectators, and the private one of the laity which focused on the repetition of popular prayers, the lighting of candles, the veneration of relics and statues and penitential devotions. The church undoubtedly used, although by no means always from disreputable motives, the credulity and superstition of the laity to provide the funding that churches needed to maintain the clergy and the regular round of church services. The early Reformers were extremely critical of such practices and it was the alleged corruption of the pre-Reformation church which was to provide the catalyst for the development of Protestant theology and Protestant forms of Christian worship.

Heresy had been a problem in the medieval western church since the twelfth century, with the emergence of Catharism in Germany and France and the Waldensians in France and Italy. In 1233-4 the Inquisition was established by Pope Gregory IX to deal with these and other heresies. However, new proto-Protestant groups were to emerge in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries such as the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia. Many of their beliefs anticipated those of the sixteenth-century Reformers. The first of these was Martin Luther who, on 31 October 1517, fastened a copy of his 95 theses condemning the sale of indulgences and, by implication, the doctrine of purgatory, on which such sales depended, to the castle church at Wittenburg. Luther was a fairly conservative reformer. He was initially concerned merely to purify the church from what he considered to be its corruptions. His doctrine of justification by faith, which became the core of Lutheran belief, was not fully expressed until 1520. Luther’s theological conservatism was replicated in his attitude to the reform of the liturgy. He wanted to get rid of private masses and, therefore, side altars; to permit the laity to receive not just the bread, but the wine as well, at Holy Communion; to increase the reading of the Bible and the preaching of sermons; to have at least part, and if possible the whole, of the mass in the vernacular and to remove any reference to the mass being a sacrifice. The Lutheran Sunday service was always in the form of a mass, but with a much simplified eucharistic prayer, which was not said if there was no communion. The traditional vestments and altar ornaments were retained and there was little destruction of traditional imagery in Lutheran churches. Lutherans believed that Christ was truly present in the eucharist, but they rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine was believed to become instead the Body and Blood of Christ. They replaced this with a doctrine of consubstantiation in which it was believed that, although the bread and wine remained such after consecration, they also took on the additional reality of being Christ’s Body and Blood.

Compared with Luther the other leading reformers were much more radical in their theology and they all rejected any idea of the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread and wine. For reformers like Zwingli the eucharist was really no more than a commemorative meal; for others, like Calvin, there was a Real Presence in the sacrament but it was associated, not with the bread and wine, but with the individual belief of the communicant, the doctrine usually termed receptionism. The emphasis in the services was to be even more on the reading of the Bible and preaching. The structure of the pre-Reformation mass was destroyed and replaced by a service in two parts: the first part comprised readings, prayers and preaching; the second the actual celebration of communion. However, since communion was, in effect, restricted to those worthy to receive it, it became more and more infrequent, with the result that the normal Sunday service consisted of the first part only, with the second taking place only a few times each year. The development of this new and much more radical form of Sunday service is shown in the analysis of the rites of the leading radical reformers of the early sixteenth century: Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and John Calvin (Figure 1.4). As the preaching service got longer so the communion service got shorter and even more infrequent. Along with the production of a service free from colour and ritual went the stripping from the churches of anything remotely ‘popish’: vestments, candles, pictures, statues, even organs were condemned to be discarded in the interests of scriptural purity. A Zwinglian or Calvinist Reformation was a very different affair from a Lutheran one.

Figure 1.4 Outline of Sunday services adopted by Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and John Calvin

The way in which the Reformation impacted on Europe varied greatly, not only from country to country, but even from region to region within a country. A great deal depended on whether the Reformation was a ‘top down’ or a ‘bottom up’ phenomenon. In the former case it could be a relatively speedy affair; in the latter it was usually a long-drawn-out process and could lead to more than a century of religious warfare or broken settlements. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, Lutheranism was the official form of Christianity throughout Scandinavia and large parts of Germany; either Zwinglianism or Calvinism in Scotland, Switzerland and the northern Netherlands; and a more moderate ‘reformed’ church in England and Ireland. Roman Catholicism remained the official religion of southern Europe, France, the southern Netherlands and parts of Germany and there were significant Roman Catholic minorities (sometimes more numerous than the established Protestant churches) in Ireland, Switzerland and the northern Netherlands. There were also strong Calvinist minorities in France and some parts of Germany. Lutheranism, because of its conservatism and the power it allowed to the ruler to determine the details of religious observance, was popular with the Scandinavian kings and German princes. In Denmark the Reformation was accomplished within a decade, the monarch simply imposing a new set of bishops and services on the Danish church. The more radical reformers were less favoured by secular rulers since their doctrines gave secular rulers little power in their churches. In France there was a long struggle between the government, which wanted to maintain the Roman Catholic church, and those who wanted to establish reformed churches wherever there was a demand for them. An attempt at a compromise, in which freedom of worship was offered to the Protestants, was offered by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, but the privileges of Protestants were further and further curtailed until they were revoked in 1685 and it became virtually impossible to worship as a Protestant in France.

In some countries the process of Reformation moved in fits and starts. A good example of this was England where King Henry VIII declared the national church independent of the papacy in 1534 but enacted no reforms other than the dissolution of the m...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Liturgical Space
• Copyright Page
• Content Page
• List of Figures
• List of Illustrations
• 1 The Legacy of the Pre-Reformation Church and the Impact of the Reformation
• 2 The Lutheran Churches of Germany and Scandinavia
• 3 The Calvinist and Reformed Churches
• 4 The Worship and Buildings of the Anglican
• 5 Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism
• 6 Ecclesiology and Neo-Medievalism
• 7 Liturgical Renewal and Church Design in the Twentieth Century
• Guide to Further Reading
• Guide to Buildings to Visit
• Index