The Sacristy as the Virgin’s Womb, the Altar as My Heart

Symbolism in a medieval church

For two weeks now we’ve been working toward a new vision of reality based on the medieval understanding of human life as a diversely, beautifully, superabundantly symbolic journey. I will bring this discussion to a close with Tuesday’s post, which will explain the fundamental and, in my view, most life-changing insight that medieval symbolism offers us. It will also more fully answer the question of why, as I proposed in the first article of this series, there can be no feast without symbol.

Today, I would like to share with you one final “case study” in medieval symbolism. I’ve been emphasizing symbolic experiences that more directly inform and enrich daily life for all classes of people—in other words, symbols that are woven into the very fabric of material Creation rather than those crafted by poets or painters. We’ve already explored the symbolism of numbers, the four classical elements, and flowers, all of which contributed to the grand symbolic world of the places that we’ll study today. These places appeared as a liminal realm uniting material Creation to human craftsmanship, and they were, without doubt and to an extent that we modern folks can scarcely imagination, central to daily life for all classes of medieval people. In English we call them churches, and in the Latin of the Middle Ages, they were understood as a templum: that is, as a building which—itself adorned and resplendent with symbols—was the supreme fulfillment of the symbolic Temple that God Himself had built into the history of Israel.

Before we consider specific symbols of sacred architecture, let’s reflect on the people who encountered these symbols. Summarized, itemized accounts of artistic realities can make something seem more definite and systematized than it actually was. Thus, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here: children of the Middle Ages didn’t sit in Sunday School and memorize the moral and anagogical meanings of all the objects inside their village church; there was no official manual entitled “Doctrinal and Mystical Significations of Ecclesiastical Structures”; monks were not transported with contemplative fervor as they walked around their monasteries and recalled the symbology of cloister, refectory, etc. Such things would, in any case, run counter to the balanced, well-grounded, deeply incarnational spirituality that predominated in the Middle Ages.¹

Symbolic associations emerged organically, from within communities; intellectually, from the minds of scholars or mystics; and historically, from texts and traditions handed down by ages past. Among the class of ordinary churchgoers, some folks would have been more conversant with, and more sensitive to, these associations. Presumably some had only the vaguest notions of the symbols in their church and thought far more about the festival next week, or the looming grain harvest, or the maddening tendency of a prized breeding ram to start limping for no apparent reason; no matter how lamely and miserably he wandered around out there in the meadow, that confounded hoof always looked the same.

Nevertheless, I propose that the symbolic dimension of ecclesiastical architecture affected medieval Christians more strongly than we might expect. This was due not so much to “formal education” in sacred symbolism as to their poetic mode of life, which predisposed them to feel and sense and respond to—often subconsciously—the various symbolic energies and relationships written into the vast visual poem of a finely crafted church.

Allow me to elaborate for a few paragraphs on the poetic mode of life, before I return to medieval people and their richly symbolic churches.

The poetic mode of life is something I often allude to, though I haven’t yet made it the primary subject of a Via Mediaevalis essay. No doubt such an essay will appear at some point in the future; for now I will cast a bit of light on one important aspect of this concept. As Thomas Aquinas pointed out, “Any truth can be manifested in two ways: by things or by words. Words signify things, and one thing can signify another.” If we focus on the figurative ways in which words and things communicate, we can rephrase this as follows: “Truth is made known through allegory and symbol.”

In The Spectre of a Rose I defined allegory as “‘speaking the other,’ that is, … telling two stories at once,” and as Dr. Mark Spurrell observed, “a symbol can be described roughly as a visual allegory and an allegory as a verbal symbol.”² Allegory and symbolism declare the presence of another, and furthermore, they are two sides of the same fundamental poetic coin: with allegory, words denote one thing while signifying something else, and with symbolism, an object appears as one thing while signifying something else, and in both cases, this “something else” is more moving and inspiring, or more timeless and transcendent, or more spiritual and celestial than the literal meaning of the words or the material meaning of the object.

I am emphasizing here that symbolism and allegory go hand in hand, and now I will add that we can also understand allegory as the essence of poetic language, and by extension, the essence of poetic experience, which extends beyond the artistic, metrical language that we call poetry into prose, into speech, even into daily life. The late-medieval Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati recognized that the allegorical mode and the poetic mode are intimately related:

“This way of speaking is poetical, … which, whether through things or through words, means something other than it shows.”

“Do not suppose that everything that is metrically composed is a poem, unless what is bound [by poetic meter] is also an imaginative utterance graced by figures and especially by allegorical language.”

“The art of poetry … often binds in verses anything that it relates; nevertheless, it does not reject prose.”

Now we return to medieval Christians and their ability to feel and internalize the many symbolic resonances of a medieval church. These people were immersed in allegorical language and allegorical ways of thinking: the narratives of the Bible, the Psalms, ancient epics, contemporary poems, local songs, fables, folk tales, religious love-lyrics, morality plays. A life thus permeated by allegory is a poetic life, and a mind attuned to allegory is a mind attuned to symbolism—perhaps attuned to a degree so great that we modern folks, with our overwhelming burden of prosaic and scientific language, could never attain it and will never fully comprehend it.

The overarching symbolism of sacred architecture in the Middle Ages is a matter of changing a lowercase “c” to an uppercase “C”: the church represented the Church. This correspondence was vividly described in an important, though anonymous, thirteenth-century treatise entitled Speculum de mysteriis ecclesiae:

The church to which people resort for the praise of God signifies the holy Catholic Church, which is built in Heaven of living stones. It is the house of God, strongly built. Christ was sent as the corner stone of the foundation. Not beside it, but actually on it is the foundation of the apostles and prophets…. The walls built on them are the Jews and Gentiles coming to Christ from the four corners of the world.

Now, when we read things like this, it may initially seem interesting but somewhat unremarkable. “Of course a church would have all sorts of symbolic connections,” we might say. “It’s a place of worship filled with religious images and sacred objects and scriptural texts. Symbols are bound to crop up in an environment like this.” Fair enough. But let me ask you: have you ever actually walked into a church and had thoughts, or even vague feelings, like this? Have you ever imagined the foundation of the church as signifying the Apostles, or the four walls of the church as declaring the spiritual presence of vast multitudes from north, south, east, and west who have embraced Christianity?

The medieval theologian Honorius of Autun (d. 1140) likewise interpreted the church as a symbol of the Church but saw the four walls as the Four Gospels, which lift up the Mystical Body of Christ unto great strength, and St. Bruno of Asti (d. 1123) declared that “we are the Temple of God” and “we also have an altar; that altar is our heart.” Is this the way that we think or feel when we are sitting in church? Maybe we should all try it and see what happens. Next time you’re in church, look at the four walls and say, “These are the Gospels, which protect me from the darkness of Enlightenment agnosticism, and the pain of modern fragmentation, and the despair of postmodern nihilism.” Look at the altar and say to yourself what Bruno said. I don’t mean hazy thoughts about how the altar is a reminder of the interior life or some such. Let’s be medieval about this: “That altar is my heart.”

The symbolic associations found in the sacred architecture of the Middle Ages are far too numerous for an introductory article like this one. I’ve selected a few for you to ponder, and maybe we’ll revisit this topic in the future.

• the mortar that binds the church’s stones: the charity that binds man to God and neighbor

• the door: Christ as the gate of the sheepfold

• the floor: ordinary Christians who, with their labors and contributions, support the Church

• the crypt: those devoted to the eremitical life, who serve God in secret

• pillars, in general: the bishops of the Church

• the four corner pillars: the four cardinal virtues

• the roof: protection from temptation

• the roof tiles: knights who defend the Church

• the bells: doctrines that inspire the faithful to live virtuously

• the towers: those who preach the Faith

• the windows: the Doctors of the Church, who illumine us with the light of Truth

• the two sides of the choir: the angels and the souls of the just, united in songs of praise

• the sacristy: the womb of the Virgin Mary, where God was clothed in human nature

• the cloister (of a monastery): paradise

1. For further reading on the idea of medieval (or from another vantage point, “pre-Reformation”) spirituality as distinctively “incarnational,” see Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama, by Dr. Margaret Owens: “Fundamental to incarnational piety was a belief that the human body could provide access to the sacred.” (We could think of “the human body” here as physicality more generally.) This incarnational piety was eventually displaced by the “logocentric and textual emphases of Reformation humanism.” She theorizes the opposed spiritualities of medieval and Reformation culture as “corporeality” (medieval) vs. “textuality” (Reformation).

2. For the specific symbolic meanings of medieval churches and the objects within them, I am greatly indebted to Dr. Spurrell’s excellent book The Symbolism of Medieval Churches: An Introduction.