Westminster Abbey, St. John's Lateran, & Hagia Sophia

Johnson, Paul. British Cathedrals.  London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.  Available at:  http://www.amazon.com/British-cathedrals-Paul-Johnson/dp/0688036724/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376348246&sr=8-1&keywords=paul+johnson+british+cathedrals

This book is worth every penny of it.

A lovely picture of Westminster Abbey, p.7.  The vault is 102 feet from the nave floor.  This is “exceptionally high for English Cathedrals.”

Some statements by Mr. Paul Johnson:

·        “noblest of human artifacts”

·        Cathedrals had a “spiritual purpose”

·        “statements of faith”

·        “certain conception of man’s relationship to his maker”

·        a society “which acknowledges this relationship to be the central fact of existence”

·        Cathedra = chair

·        Rhetoricians, philosophers, and judges spoke from their chairs.  Bishops would soon do likewise

·        Bishops “adopted the magisterial role from Roman civil courts”

·        St. Chyrsostom used an ambon  or “pulpit”

Constantine gave “the Lateran, one of his palaces…” to the Bishop of Rome as his residence.  St. John’s Lateran was built on the site of a former Roman cavalry barracks.

St. John’s Lateran now has an “aisled nave, 250 feet long by 180 feet wide, supported by 15 green-marbled columns on high pedestals.”  The sanctuary, with an apse, holds 200 clergy and the “great nave” holds “several thousand layfolk.”  The clergy were separated by a “silver screen on a double row of columns.”

Hagia Sophia was an Orthodox Church instigated by Emperor Justinian in 532-537 A.D. The following is offered:

·        Vast dome

·        Derived, architecturally, from the Pantheon in Rome

·        This was “Caesaro-papalism of the Byzantine monarch and imperial ceremonial in its religious aspect” (Johnson, 9)

·        From every angle, every worshipper, could see the “mysteries”

The rectangular basilica developed in the cruciform shape. 

Bishops in time were “the source of secular as well as spiritual authority in the 5^th and 6^th centuries, and dispensed justice and administration, as well as divinity, from their cathedrae…An increasingly heriarchal church was thus stamped on ecclesiastical architecture."  A nave-chancel distinction indicated the clergy-laity distinction.

 

Westminster Abbey for the next several pictures

 

 

 

 

St. John's Lateran, Rome