Ann Marie YASIN

The Invention of Early Christian Sacred Space?

Many early Christian writers distanced themselves from their pagan contemporaries by stressing
the futility of "containing" God within physical structures. Scholars have frequently cited such texts as
explanation for the absence of pre-Constantinian sacred architecture in the archaeological record.
Similarly, post-Constantinian phenomena of monumental churches, relic veneration and pilgrimage
journeys have been seen as an abandonment of the ideals of the Apostolic period and the embodiment of a
radically new (pagan-influenced) notion of sacred space. These later practices, it is argued, demonstrate
that for late antique Christians, the holy could be pinpointed, circumscribed and approached—in short,
that it became a locus. This concept of a clearly defined holy place is moreover seen as completely
antithetical to the pre-Constantinian rejection of sacred architecture.
These arguments, this paper suggests, are compromised by both a selective reading of the literary
evidence and an over-readiness to dismiss an early Christian sense of holy space in order to distance it
from pagan practices. Examination of a wider range of pre-Constantinian evidence, from Cyprian and
Gregory Thaumaturgus to the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, reveals that
even before the construction of monumental basilicas, the physical structure of the church became a
symbolically loaded sacred space. Though the "house-church" had not yet adopted a consistent
architectural type, patristic and archaeological sources demonstrate that special material arrangements and
ritual demarcated this space as set apart, not ordinary—as sacred. Thus, like Greco-Roman temples, I
suggest that early Christian church space was conceived of as holy. Yet, unlike pagan temples, it was
sacred not because it was seen as the locus of the divinity, but for the sacred activity that took place inside
it and for the communion of Christians it housed.