The Christology of the Stairs: Medieval Raised Sanctuaries vs. Modern "Worship Spaces"
The elevated altars of Umbria and Tuscany
Visitors to the medieval churches of Umbria and Tuscany are often surprised by an architectural feature that is found surviving in great abundance in our area; raised or elevated sanctuaries in our most ancient churches. That is, the place where the liturgical actions happen, that we are used to seeing conducted right in front of us, is set on a high platform, sometimes as much as 15 feet above the level of the nave, and mostly impossible to see.
We’re used to the sanctuary part of the church being raised at least a few feet above the level of the nave, often with the altar raised again on a stepped platform, but several meters? So high the congregation can’t see anything?
Architecture always catechises. We all know that Catholic church architecture is used to express particular beliefs about the nature of reality, Christology, man’s relationship with God and his proper place in creation. Most Catholic churches, until the middle of the twentieth century, were built on a cruciform floor plan. The church itself is the image of the crucified Christ; the faithful literally enter into the symbol.
Medieval builders extended this symbolic language far beyond the floor plan. Every aspect of the building could be made to communicate theological truths. These ancient stone churches emerge from a worldview that understands reality itself as hierarchical, which the designers of the elevated sanctuaries took very literally.
Why are so many ancient churches in Umbria and Tuscany built with sanctuaries raised high above the congregation, sometimes so high that much of the liturgy would have been difficult to see? It has very little to do with practicality and a great deal to do with how medieval Christians understood Christ, the Mass, heaven, earth and the structure of reality itself.
In today’s post for all subscribers, we’re exploring the remarkable elevated sanctuaries built in central Italy a thousand years ago, and the forgotten theological language built into their architecture.
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Vertical architectural theology
In the ancient tradition of the raised sanctuaries, that dates at least to the 8th century, the church is designed in vertical layers. In the crypt, usually with its own small nave, sanctuary and altar, is kept the relics of the church’s patron saints provides the deep connection with the church’s past, where the dead are commemorated and prayed for. Above that level is the main nave, where the pilgrim Church, the “Church Militant,” is still moving through history. And the sanctuary rises higher still, as the threshold where heaven and earth meet in the liturgy. The entire building becomes a vertical map of reality, an expression of medieval Christian cosmology.
This design appears throughout Western Europe, from large urban basilicas to tiny rural churches, between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries, reaching its fullness as an expression of the Romanesque style.
Enjoy our exploration of the ancient abbey church of San Felice and Mauro:
It was at this time that relics of saints, and pilgrimages became increasingly important to western Christians. Churches wanted the altar located directly above the saint’s tomb or relic shrine. Pilgrims needed access to the relics without disrupting the liturgy - which in popular shrine churches would have been nearly constant, with monks or canons singing the Divine Office between Masses in the church above. The solution was to raise the sanctuary above the crypt below and provide separate entrances to both.
The Son of Man raised up
“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.”
This He said, signifying what death He should die.
John 12:32-33
The first reason the sanctuary is elevated because it is the place where the sacrifice of Calvary is made present sacramentally. Medieval Christians never thought of the Mass primarily as a mere gathering of believers where one received words. The earliest records we have show that it was primarily understood as participation in Christ’s sacrifice; it provided a place of entry into the heavenly liturgy. The sanctuary therefore represents a reality that is objectively higher than and separated from ordinary life, and it made perfect sense to the medieval Christian mind to show that reality physically.
Christ is physically raised above the crowd upon the Cross. In the Gospel of John, Christ repeatedly speaks of being “lifted up” or “raised up,” language that simultaneously refers to His Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and ultimate glorification for all eternity in heaven. The paradox is central to Johannine theology: the moment of apparent humiliation is also the moment of enthronement. The Cross is at the same moment an instrument of execution and the throne from which the King reigns.
This connection helps explain another common feature of Romanesque churches: the image of Christ in Majesty dominating the apse above the altar. To modern mind, that thinks of church art as decorative, the Pantocrator may appear as a sacred image placed where there happened to be an appropriately shaped space available. But medieval Christians would have understood the relationship with that particular image in that particular space.
The altar and the Pantocrator belong to the same theological programme. At the altar, Christ’s sacrifice is made present - He is “lifted up” and offered to the Father. Above the altar appears the glorified Christ who reigns eternally in heaven. The Victim is also the King.
Throughout Scripture, encounters with God are repeatedly associated with ascent. Moses climbs Mount Sinai to encounter God in the burning bush, and then to receive the Law. Elijah encounters God in the small, still voice upon Mount Horeb. The Temple is built upon Mount Zion, and pilgrims literally ascend to Jerusalem to worship. Christ is transfigured, revealing His divine glory to Peter, James and John from the summit of Mt. Tabor. Even Golgotha itself stands upon a height outside the walls of Jerusalem.
Seen in this theological, scriptural light, the organisation of these Romanesque churches with crypt, nave and raised sanctuary, with the altar and the apse image, form a single vertical axis that reflects the divine ordering of salvation, and of the cosmos itself.
From Ascent to Assembly
Protestants are especially sensitive, and quite blunt, in describing the theological meaning conveyed by the architecture of the interior of their worship spaces. In one article about the importance of the interior layout of a church, Brad Isbell specifically said that the purpose of such an arrangement was to keep things focused on the words, and to avoid whatever might be going on with the “elevated tables”:
The lagging but pernicious effect of the early 19th century’s high church Oxford Movement in England led to grand but ungainly buildings replacing simpler ones in the US, and saw central pulpits shifted to the side in deference to elevated tables, massive organs, and ornament.
The split chancel is absolutely the worst layout for a Reformed church, which ought to value the centrality of preaching, spoken prayers, readings, confessions, and congregational singing over high church affectations, accoutrements, and accretions.
Very simply, the point of having your “worship hall” set up horizontally with everyone facing each other toward a central space, was to avoid giving the impression of a “sacrificial, sacerdotal temple worship.”
He’s saying the quiet part out loud, the part that the New Catholic apologists of modern church architecture do not dare to say. He is explicitly rejecting precisely the symbolic, theological cosmology that produced the Umbrian raised sanctuary.
For the medieval western Catholic, the sanctuary was elevated because worship was understood as ascent into a higher reality. For the Presbyterian author, the elevated sanctuary is undesirable exactly because it communicates a sacrificial and sacerdotal understanding of worship - and consequently of man’s relationship with God. The two building styles therefore embody two fundamentally different visions of what is taking place when Christians gather before God.
“Hierarchy” originates from the Greek ἱεραρχία (hierarkhia), meaning “rule of a high priest”. (Hieros, “sacred” or “holy” and arkhein “to lead, rule or order”). So in a religion with a hierarchical cosmology, with God, heaven, earth and man in a divinely ordered vertical structure, these distinctions must be made in worship. In Catholicism these have always been seen between sanctuary and nave, clergy and laity, reflecting those between heaven and earth.
The sanctuary was not separated from the nave in medieval Catholic (and eastern) churches because the clergy were socially superior to the laity. It was separated because heaven is distinct from earth and the priest was the one chosen out of the congregation and consecrated in order to cross that threshold, because his liturgical role was to act sacramentally in the person of Christ.
Medieval Christians could have placed the altar at the same level as the congregation. They could have arranged the “worship space” so the congregation surrounded the sanctuary on all sides. But generation after generation continued to construct churches whose architectural structure proclaimed ascent, hierarchy, sacrifice and the kingship of Christ.
The raised sanctuaries of Umbria are much more than an architectural curiosity. They literally preserve in stone a way of seeing reality that once shaped the whole of Christian civilisation. The crypt below, the altar above, and the Pantocrator reigning over all form a single statement about the incarnate God, His relationship to man and the structure of the cosmos. Once we learn to read that symbolic language, these churches cease to be picturesque medieval buildings. They become witnesses speaking those same theological realities across the space of a thousand years.
I think you’re right that medieval Christians would have understood the meaning of a Romanesque church’s architecture and iconography, but I also think even 21st-century Americans receive messages implicitly from the spaces they worship in. A Catholic who goes to Mass in a horizontal “church in the round” will imbibe the message that the cosmos is unstructured and a-hierarchical, and one who attends Mass in a traditional church with an elevated altar beneath a soaring apse will also probably imbibe the sense that the universe is a hierarchy of values, even if neither could articulate it. I guess that’s what the modernist church architects were counting on.
I did notice the elevation in Tuscany churches but never realised the symbolism and meaning behind it.
It is quite fascinating to see how architecture, much like icons, embodies this constant communion between the material and spiritual worlds—realities that we modern people have completely forgotten, if not actively rejected.
Thank you for helping us see these truth again.