Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/456

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NOTES ANk QUERIES. [9*s.ni.juNEio,m

CANON TAYLOR interestingly adduces the improbability of the Christians adopting " the model of the places associated in their minds with condemnation to horrible death." But surely this sentimental improbability is rather insecure in face of the evidence regarding their practical methods of appro- priation. The worship of Christ, in the eyes of his early followers, could in few more satisfactory ways parade its victories than by converting to its own uses everything that was pagan. If they purified and con- secrated as places of worship the very spots associated with the barbarous torture and infamous punishment of their own martyrs, why should Christians have drawn the line at purifying and consecrating the judgment halls where those martyrs had suffered trial and condemnation 1 Again, if they abhorred the very name of basilica on such accounts, why did they openly adopt that name? I fear that argument will, at least, not go very far. And surely they did not desire to be confounded with the ortho- dox Jews.

If, however, it cannot be shown that the Roman Christians either had need to borrow, or did borrow, structurally from the syna- gogue, that does not alter the fact that their general organization and their ritual strongly reflected those of the synagogue, albeit other influences, Mithraic, &c., may have commingled with the reflection.

Before the fourth century there were no Christian basilicas; nor, apparently, was the word basilica adopted by Christians to designate their churches before the reign of Constantine. The early "domus Dei," or "dominicum," was simply a chamber, occa- sionally an upper chamber, in the villa or the house of a Christian. The cemeterial "cubiculum" or "oratory" was a different structure, and was borrowed from the ordi- nary "cubiculum memorise," or sepulchral pre-Christian chamber. These subterranean chambers display very various shapes; some are circular and some are rectangular; but they do not resemble the Etruscan type. And though they became the nuclei of cer- tain among the earliest Christian basilicas, such as those of S. Ermete and S. Agnese, the Christian basilican form did not evolve from them. CANON TAYLOR, however, does not attempt to trace the basilican form of church to these, but solely the cruciform domed churches. Both types are found united, needless to say, in these days; and the present basilica of St. Peter's is, of course, a prime example.

Of the original Constantinian Basilica Sal-

vatoris (Lateran) but a few fragments remain embedded in the Borrominian walls of the nave, and are now covered over with paint- ings; but that it observed the basilican form as well as name is generally accepted. That the Christians, whose sense of appropriateness CANON TAYLOR inclines to consider somewhat deferentially, should have permitted, as they have in this instance, the name, not merely of a saint, but of the Redeemer himself, to become supplanted by the name of the pagan "Laterani" upon the site of whose property the church had been erected, is worthy of re- mark. Archseologically,it is highly interesting, because it very happily conjoins things pagan and things Christian; but it is needless to state that the Church, in learning so to desig- nate the mother church of Rome, had no inten- tion of gratifying mere lovers of history. Later in the same fourth century appeared the basilicas of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Cle- ment. These all seem to have been Christian constructions for the express purpose of worship, and may have been designed by the same hands that designed Constantino's j basilica at Treves, or that other of Gratian j in the same city.*

But if we step into the next century, the fifth, what do we see but wholesale appro-

Eriation and adaptation of pagan ceremonies, jstivals, and buildings by the rightly triumphant Christians? And with regard to the last, it was not merely the appropria- tion of "templum," and "sedes," and "arcus," but " basilica," and doubtless " schola." If it became a principle with the Christian archi- tects, or those employed by Christians, in the fourth century to use not only the basili- can design, but also the name, it is an un- deniable fact that in the following century j the pagan basilicas were actually converted j into churches, of which the basilica erected i in the palace of Junius Bassus (Consul 317 A.p.) is an illustration. In A.D. 4G8 Pope Simplicius converted this into the church of S. Andrea (in catabarbara). (Cf. Ciampini, 'Vet. Monum.,' i. 21; Hiibsch, 'Alt-christliche Kirchen,' s. 71 f. t. xxx. 15.)

Once more, therefore, we come back to the | unquestionable fact that purely practical i considerations appealed to the authorities of the early Church in favour of the basilican j form. They desired buildings in which;

basilica of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, built in A.p. 370 by Pope Damasus, near Bramante's Cancelleria, on the site of the atabiilarium of the "Factio Prasina of the Circus Maximus, and also that other basilica of S. Lorenzo, fuori le Mura, in reality a double one doubled in A.D. 440.
 * With these must be mentioned the original