University of Virginia Library

II.1.9

EASTERN APSE

ALTAR OF ST. PAUL

The eastern apse (exedra) houses the altar of St. Paul,
which is designated with the hexameter:

It has been argued that St. Paul was given this prominent
position in the Church of St. Gall because he was the
patron saint of an earlier church torn down in 830 to make
room for Abbot Gozbert's new building. This contention
has no base in fact. In the entire historical tradition of the
Abbey of St. Gall there is no source that would attest the
existence of a sanctuary dedicated to St. Paul.[70]

SYNTHRONON

The apse has the full width of the fore choir and is
furnished in its entire circumference with a wall bench that
continues the course of the fore choir benches. Together,
this range of benches offers sitting space for forty-eight
monks and the abbot. Its curved portion in the apse is
broader than the two straight arms in the presbytery. The
latter are 2½ feet wide (1 standard module); whereas the
former look as though they were meant to have a width of
3¾ feet (1½ standard modules). Again I think that this dimensional
differentiation is deliberate and that the designer
used it to stress the hierarchical prominence of that portion
of the bench on which the abbot and the senior monks
were seated, thus distinguishing it from the seats where
monks of lesser status were placed westward in sequence of
decreasing seniority. The designer had used the same
device in stressing the greater liturgical significance of the
benches for the specially trained singers (formulae) in the
crossing square in relation to those located in the transept
arms.

To seat the highest dignitaries of the ecclesiastical
community on a semicircular bench raised against the wall
of the apse (synthronon) is not a monastic invention, but a
transference to monastic ritual of a custom established in
the secular church. In Palestine this arrangement is
attested, as early as 314 A.D., for the basilica of Tyre
(fig. 104), built by Bishop Paulinus (known through an
unusually accurate and detailed description by Eusebius)
and such later fourth-century buildings as the Constantinian
Nativity Church in Bethlehem (333 A.D.), the
basilica of Emmaus (first half of the fourth century), the
cathedral of Gerasa (third quarter of the fourth century),
and the Church of the Multiplication of the Bread at
et-Tabgha (end of the fourth century). Toward the turn of
the same century it also appears at the coast of Istria in the
so-called Chiesetta at Grado and Santa Maria delle Grazie
at Grado. By the middle of the fifth century the layout is
standard in most Near-Eastern countries, and above all in
Greece. Frequently the semicircular benches in the apse
are prolonged by two straight arms reaching westward into
the bema. Good examples of this arrangement are the
basilica of Thasos (figs. 94 and 144) and the magnificent
church of Corinth-Lechaion (fig. 161). The Constantinian
basilicas of Rome do not appear to have been provided with
this type of bench for Bishop and clergy—unless they
were built in wood, leaving no traces for posterity—but
toward the end of the sixth century a synthronon of
impressive monumentality was set up by Pope Gregory the
Great in the apse of the most venerable church of western
Christendom, Old St. Peter's (fig. 103) forming a sight of
inescapable impressiveness to every transalpine visitor of
Rome, layman or clergyman, and inter alia the physical
stage for Charlemagne's coronation on Christmas day of
the year 800.[71]

At what time precisely this seating arrangement was
adopted by the monks is an unsolved historical problem.
But it is not unreasonable to conjecture that its acceptance

[ILLUSTRATION]

94. THASOS, MACEDONIA

Presbytery of the basilica, perspective reconstruction [after Orlandos, II, 1954, 528]

in the monastic ritual was associated with the ascendancy
(if not victory) of Benedictine monasticism over the more
individualistic forms of Irish and Near-Eastern monachism.
The earliest monastic example known to me is the synthronon
of the royal abbey of St. Denis (fig. 167) consecrated
in 775. Here the Abbot-father took his seat on a
throne of bronze placed into the apex of the apse at the very
spot where the bishop had his cathedra in episcopal
churches. The seat, of Roman workmanship and known as
"the throne of Dagobert" is still preserved, forming one
of the treasures of the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris.

Was it the close alliance between regnum and sacerdotium
in the life and administration of the Abbey of St. Denis
that gave the historical impetus for the transfer to the
abbot of a liturgical prerogative formerly exclusively
associated with episcopal churches? Is this another
Carolingian innovation, foreshadowing the powerful role
the monastery was to play as a supportive agency in the
government of this great statesman and ruler?