Orientation, as it was in the beginning
Stefan Heid, Altar and Church: Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2023), ISBN 9780813237435, hardcover, 512 pages.
THE MARRIAGE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND LITURGICAL STUDIES is a beautiful thing, combining as it does, well, rocks, and things that may have been done around, upon, and with them in the context of worship. German Catholic priest Stefan Heid has given us just such a thing in his magisterial Altar and Church: Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity, published first in 2019 and in English translation in 2023. His work is a bombshell rejecting the current “virtually complete ecumenical agreement that the original, true Christianity knew neither altars nor sacred spaces and in fact expressly rejected them as a matter of principle.”
Heid’s methods bring together philology, art history and iconography, architecture, scripture, and patristics and medieval studies to create a powerful synthesis arguing in favor of sacred altars rather than domestic tables as the universal location of Christian worship during formative centuries.
The present people’s altar, whether round or rectangular, is the product of historical misinformation or ahistorical archaeologism. The idea that it existed in the early Church as the centre of a eucharistic meal fellowship is a piece of scholarly fiction.
He goes further:
The all-defining function of the early Christian altar was not to serve as a meal table for a congregation gathered round it in a circle and looking at each other; rather, its function from the outset was to be a place of prayer and at the same time also a place of sacrifice. Prayer is directed toward God and, according to a universal practice, is to be offered facing east. […] This became so much the common practice that it was maintained even when churches were no longer built with east-facing apses or when side altars were erected facing in different directions.
Heid’s work is the archeological-liturgical carrying forward of important post-conciliar theses by Klaus Gamber and Uwe Michael Lang on orientation in Christianity. Its thrust is against both Presentism and a kind of Protestantism that assumes a chimerical, pristine or “genuine” Christianity before a supposed date of corruption — notions that fall directly at the feet of much of the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement notwithstanding its many worthwhile fruits.
Altar and Church is necessary reading for any person who believes that celebration facing the people has roots in the early history of Christianity, and it will cheer and buoy those who have adhered to earlier practices.
A condensed version might be in order for persons unwilling to invest the sitzfleisch for 500 pages of unanswerable scholarship, but that very truncation would vitiate the power at work here: nascent Christianity comes to life in all of its social, linguistic, economic, and geographic diversity coalescing in a catholic orientation that is both gift and given. Apparent exceptions — including at the Lateran basilica — receive their treatment in due course, and Heid is writing not with anti-conciliar anger or even angst, but rather from a spirit within the Church seeking to show ourselves again trajectories that have been lost, obscured, or misunderstood. Perhaps the greatest good of the book is its archaeological destruction of the idea of a perfect past in which Christianity was devoid of contamination by either antecedents or later imperial companions.
Heid leaves the Christological and mystagogical implications of eastward-facing liturgy to others in favor of his essentially archaeological project, but he points the reader over and over to the altar as “a privileged place of prayer” and “the centre of the experience of holiness” in Christianity. “Christianity emerges once more not as an anti-religion but rather as an integral, albeit always critical, part of the social and religious culture of late antiquity” in which it arose.
