Who is being greeted in church with a kiss?
Aplan to fit a chest of drawers for vestments into an altar at St Mary Redcliffe has been stopped by the Chancellor of Bristol sitting in an ecclesiastical court. Church law stipulates that an altar should be kept in a “seemly manner”.
In the law of the Church of England, the altar is “the table of the Lord”, a solemn enough thing. In Catholic practice it is something yet more. Quite what that is, I have been wondering since I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago that the priest kisses it at the beginning and the end of Mass.
The rector of St James’s church, Spanish Place, in London, dropped me a line to remind me that, in the missal of 1962 and before, the priest says a prayer as he first kisses the altar, asking God to pardon his sins “by the merits of your saints whose relics lie here”. It was a bit more than a reminder, actually, since I was not even aware of this prayer.
I had suggested that the altar was kissed as representing the body of Christ. The prayer about the relics of the saints built into every altar could be taken as meaning that the kiss was a recognition of the holiness of these. Then I came across the rite for the dedication of an altar, which was revised as a consequence of the Second Vatican Council, but not published until 1977.
The introduction to this rite says that it is “altogether proper to erect altars over the burial place of martyrs and other saints or to deposit their relics beneath altars”. Moreover, from the earliest times, Christians saw themselves as altars.
St Ignatius of Antioch, a splendid character who lived in the generation after Christ, fired off a series of letters on the way to Rome where he was to be chewed up by lions. In one, he referred to the sacrifice of his martyrdom, with the altar being his own body.
The rite of dedication of an altar takes as a starting point the fact that “the ancient Fathers of the Church did not hesitate to assert that Christ was the victim, priest, and altar of his own sacrifice”.
I suppose the Cross could also be taken as an altar of a kind, and there are plenty of references in ancient service books to ara crucis, “the altar of the Cross”. But Christ’s sacrifice in his own body no doubt has primacy. In any case, the claim is biblical, since the Epistle to the Hebrews talks of Christ as the High Priest who is also the living altar of the heavenly temple.
The rite of dedication acknowledges that the altar in church is “a table at which the Church’s children gather to give thanks to God and receive the body and blood of Christ”, but it is a strange kind of table, since it is also “a unique altar on which the sacrifice of the cross is perpetuated in mystery throughout the ages until Christ comes”.
As far as the question of what kissing the altar recognises, it declares: “The martyr’s body does not bring honour to the altar; rather the altar does honour to the martyr’s tomb.” Again, the biblical warrant for this idea comes from an idea of the heavenly liturgy, this time in the book of Revelation, whose narrator says: “I saw underneath the altar the souls of all the people who have been killed on account of the word of God, for witnessing to it.” Of course martyr is from the Greek word for witness.
While the body of Christ was really an altar, an altar in church is not really the body of Christ. But it stands for it, and is the place where the sacrifice is sacramentally made present.
I remember Laurie Lee saying that the one thing he regretted doing in the Spanish Civil War was using an altar as a bed for the night. He was no mystic and worse things were done in that war, but I can see that a profanation like that is the reverse of the sacred kiss from the priest to the altar.