Stairs worn to a sea of rounded marble waves
No pilgrim has come to Rome without wanting to visit the Holy Stairs. So, on their website, say the custodians of this strange staircase, better known as the Scala Sancta. I’m afraid it had never crossed my mind to visit them, though now I am filled with curiosity to do so.
What has changed my mind is the accidental beauty of these 28 marble steps up to a chapel in what used to be the papal palace at St John Lateran in Rome.
I think most people like the appearance of old steps worn down by generations of feet. A beautiful example is at Wells Cathedral, where stone steps curve off from the main flight into the door of the Chapter House. A celebrated view was caught in a photograph from 1903 by Frederick Evans, called by him A Sea of Steps.
The marine metaphor applies as strongly to the Scala Sancta, where the marble has worn in gentle waves from side to side and from front to back of each tread. The risers are now not sharp right-angles but a sort of corrugation, as if the thing were made of rolls of dough. It must be odd to feel the smoothed marble under one’s knees, since that is the customary way to ascend them.
The reason for the respectful posture, and the penitential ascent, is that these are reputed to be the steps from the praetorium of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem that Jesus went up and down more than once during his trial. The stairs are said to have been brought to Rome by St Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. She it was who claimed to have found the cross of Christ buried quite near the place of his tomb. That discovery is related in histories from the 4th century. I don’t know of documentary mention of the Scala Sancta until the 9th century.
Even if these were the stairs that Christ had trodden, what would it be that pilgrims to Rome later experienced?
The flight was taken from one place in the Lateran Palace in 1589 and reassembled to lead up to the so-called Sancta Sanctorum. This is a chapel used by popes from the
early Middle Ages. It is rather beautiful, not, to my eye, for its Renaissance murals, but from the two modest monolith pillars that frame the small altar, above which is kept an ancient icon sometimes called the Acheiropoieta (“Not made by hands”).
That designation is at odds with an attribution to the hand of St Luke. It is certainly from the 6th century or earlier, before the wave of iconoclasm that destroyed most early icons in the Eastern Roman Empire. But that is a different subject.
The Scala Sancta has been in the care of the Passionist religious order since the middle of the 19th century, they having been entrusted with it by Pius IX. The order takes its name from the devotion of its founder, St Paul of the Cross (who lived 1694-1775, in the brave era of the Enlightenment), to the last suffering hours of Jesus’s life leading to his crucifixion. It is the literal crux of Christianity, which teaches that Jesus died to save all mankind.
It was for that motive – to contemplate the loving sacrifice made by Jesus Christ – that pilgrims ascended on their knees, in a sort of act of solidarity.
Three spots where Christ’s blood was thought to have fallen on the steps are marked with a cross of red porphyry and two of bronze, of an ancient appearance. From 1723, pilgrims would have felt wood beneath their knees, since the steps were encased in walnut or maple wood. As part of a programme of restoration, this casing has been taken away, and until June 9 the marble stairs are open to visitors. There is no fee.