If you have ever been in one of the big cathedrals of Europe, you may have noticed that the chancel is filled with folding chairs. Or consider this painting by our main man Lucas Cranach, showing Luther preaching Christ:
Notice how the congregation is mostly standing up. Some of the women are in chairs, and a child is on the floor. But there are no pews! It turns out, pews are a relatively recent invention. They started as special seats of honor for the nobility or local gentry, which the families had to pay for. (Notice that if you visit a colonial-era church.) Still most Orthodox churches do without pews. Fr. George W. Rutler gives us the history of pews, making the case that they aren’t necessarily a good idea.
From Fr. George W. Rutler, The Problem with Pews – Crisis Magazine:
For most of the Christian ages, there were no pews, or much seating of any sort. There were proper accommodations for the aged (fewer then than now) and for the infirm (probably more then than now) but churches were temples and not theatres. One need only look at the Orthodox churches (except where decadence has crept in) or the mosques whose architectural eclecticism echoes their religion’s origin as a desiccated offshoot of Christianity, to see what churches were meant to look like. The word “pew” comes from the same root as podium, or platform for the privileged, indicating that if there were any pews in the Temple of Jerusalem they were those of the Pharisees who enjoyed “seats in high places.” The first intrusion of pews into Christian churches was around the twelfth century and they were rare, and mostly suited to the use of choir monks in their long Offices. But filling churches with pews was chiefly the invention of the later Protestant revolution that replaced adoration with edification.
Increasingly, manorial lords had special seats in the churches that were in their “living” not unlike the Pharisees, and this eventually extended to other people of means and in fact became a source of income. Pew rentals were precursors of pledging for the bishop’s “annual appeal.” Pews were property and could be part of a bequeathed estate. It was this sort of instinct that moved Ambrose Bierce to say of Celtic culture: “Druids performed their religious rites in groves, and knew nothing of church mortgages and the seasonal-ticket system of pew rents.” By the eighteenth century, in Protestant lands, “box pews” became like little cabins, where people could doze during long services and even brew tea and keep small charcoal warmers. Pews gradually were adapted by Catholics in areas imbued with a Protestant culture and were alien to purer Latin traditions. Try to find pews in the great Roman basilicas. Curious, then, is the way some people have come to identify pews with “traditional Catholicism” when they are its antithesis.
[Keep reading. . .]
HT: Anthony Sacramon
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In