More Italian Yesterdays. Mrs. Hugh Fraser
in his turn made place for a Boniface (III) who lived but one year after his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint, a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out that though imperial Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century of apparent eclipse had taken root below and shot out branches above, and had become as a mighty tree affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole Christian world.
Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on his memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the acceptance and fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the Faith for all time. To it was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who decreed and carried out the triumph of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER IV MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON
If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look down from the spot where St. Peter was crucified, you will see, rounding up in the low-lying heart of the city, a dome, white, huge, uncrowned, standing out from the darker buildings round it like an enormous mother-of-pearl shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the air, taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the Pantheon, and thus it has stood, reflecting every mood of the Roman sky, since the days of Hadrian, who became Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the magic dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the gigantic lettering on the pediment over the portico. Ninety years before his time, Marcus Agrippa, the intimate friend and (for his sins!) the son-in-law of Augustus, erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths which still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of which my brother has told the touching story in “Ave Roma Immortalis.” Agrippa must have forgotten to properly propitiate the gods; we moderns should say that he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple was soon struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to restore it.
This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had done with it, the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” “all-holy”) must indeed have dazzled the eyes of the beholders, for the dome was entirely covered with tiles of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it seem a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The gilt tiles were stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor, Constans II, who took them away to Syracuse, whence the Saracens successfully looted them a few years afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-pearl is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead, when the heavens have looked on it long enough, may become a thing of life and beauty. When Hadrian had finished his building there was nothing left of Agrippa’s original one except the portico; but Hadrian, with rare moderation, left the original founder’s name on that. The Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most perfect pagan monument in Rome,” seems to have been, in its beginnings, unfortunate, for only sixty-four years after Hadrian’s death it again stood sadly in need of repair, if we may believe the magniloquent inscription left on its front by Septimus Severus and his son, Caracalla, when they had carried out their pious designs of further restoration.
But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place where the winds of heaven may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the sun has shone, and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the vault of heaven above.
But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun and winds had their way in the stupendous empty fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same that guard it now (and perhaps this and a few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer, should be remembered to his attenuated credit), preferring to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a church of the Lord.
Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now and then to surprise us by some memorable action—said the Pope was right, and gave him the building to do with it as he liked. And then Boniface carried out the great plan which must have been simmering in his brain for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the seven planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies of the Saints and be consecrated to the one True God, under the title of “St. Mary of the Martyrs.” Under that perfect dome of exactly equal height and diameter (142 feet) he would finally lay to rest all the sacred remains which were still buried in the Catacombs all round the city. But there was much to do first. The rich architectural disposition of the interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a High Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would not close; when dust and rubbish were cleared away the material preparations were over, but the tremendous ceremony of purification and consecration had yet to be accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of such profound meaning and glorious diction as remains matchless in the annals of the Liturgy.
We can only see it now with the eyes of the spirit, but, even while trying to do that, we must not let the magnificence of the external function make us forget that which the Church so lovingly and repeatedly impresses upon us—first, that there is but one Sanctuary worthy of the Most High, His Throne and dwelling in the inaccessible light of the Fixed Heaven, round which all universes that the human mind can grasp revolve, like starry spindrift round a living sun; and, secondly, that the home God has built for Himself on earth and loves with the most passionate tenderness is the heart of the Christian, where He will abide for time and eternity if it do not cast Him out.
The chief object of ecclesiastical architecture is to symbolize the grandeur of the union between the soul and its Creator; as such, and as the storehouse and dispensary of graces, the banqueting-hall where He feeds us with Himself, the arsenal where He arms us for the combat and trains us for His soldiers, where, in His surpassing love and mercy, He deigns to remain in the adorable Eucharist, the consecrated Church is the crown of human production, and rightly do we strain every nerve to make it rich and noble and fair.
When that is done, and all that men can give has been lavished on beautifying and enriching it, it has to be cleansed from every blemish of earthy contact before it can be offered to the service of God. When we wander through the Cathedrals of the world, Westminster Abbey, Strasburg, Notre Dame, Milan, asking ourselves how mere men ever attained to the production of such beauty and grandeur, do we ever stop to think that those towering walls were washed from vault to pavement, within and without, with holy oil, on the day of consecration?
The Cathedral was the symbol of the soul, and every act and prayer of the ceremonial depicted for our fore-fathers—so well instructed in the truths we first take for granted and then forget—the processes by which God confers on us the gift of immortality. On the eve of the great day all left the building, the new doors were closed, no step sounded on the pavement, no voice might break the stillness of the place. It was a dead thing waiting for life, as the soul that is not united to God waits, under its inherited burden of sinfulness, for regeneration.
Outside the precincts a great tent has been erected, and here, all through the night, the Bishop and his assistants have been praying the prayers of David the great penitent. All night long the penitential psalms have been going up, beseeching the Lord to wash away the sins of His people, His exiles on earth who are waiting without the camp and entreating Him to take them into grace and bring them to their Father’s home. With the first faint light of