May 13

From Pagans to Christianity: The Consecration of the Pantheon

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On May 13, 609 CE, Pope Boniface IV stepped through the bronze doors of the Pantheon and began the rite of exorcism.

The temple of all the gods had become a church…

A Building Too Beautiful to Destroy

The chronicles that survive describe what occurred that day in May would not be out of place in a grimoire…

Chaos erupting from within the building, chilling screams audible to the crowd outside, the assembled faithful so terrified by what they heard that many could not remain standing. The idols, ancient accounts claim, knew what was coming. The demons that had inhabited the temple for nearly five centuries of pagan worship were aware that their tenancy was ending—and they were not leaving quietly. Only Boniface, unmoved at the entrance, continued praying. And then, when the exorcism was complete and the screaming stopped, the demons fled—pouring out through the open oculus at the apex of the dome, through the great bronze doors, out into the Roman sky. The building fell silent. The Pope declared it consecrated to the Virgin Mary and all the Christian martyrs.

The building that stands in central Rome today is the third structure to occupy the site, and the most remarkable feat of engineering the ancient world produced. Marcus Agrippa, the great general and son-in-law of Augustus, commissioned the first Pantheon around 25 BCE as part of the vast building program that transformed Rome from a city of brick into a city of marble. That first structure burned in the great fire of 80 CE. Domitian rebuilt it; it burned again, struck by lightning, in 110 CE. Then Hadrian—who became emperor in 117 and spent his reign building things that would outlast every empire that came after his—ordered the definitive reconstruction.

What Hadrian built, completed around 126 CE, was and remains unlike anything else in the history of human architecture. The structure consists of three elements: a traditional rectangular portico with sixteen enormous Corinthian columns of Egyptian granite, forty feet tall; a short rectangular connecting vestibule; and behind it, the thing that changes you when you first see it, the vast circular rotunda surmounted by the dome. The dome's diameter—142 feet—is exactly equal to its height from floor to oculus. The building can contain a perfect sphere. It was built from unreinforced concrete, and it remains, nearly nineteen centuries after its completion, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. No one has surpassed it. No one, using the same materials, has come close.

At the apex of the dome is the oculus—the eye, thirty feet across, open to the sky. There are no windows in the Pantheon. The oculus is the only source of natural light, and it is everything: a disk of sky that moves across the interior as the sun moves, a sundial on a cosmic scale, a literal opening between the human world and whatever lies above it. Hadrian, in the imaginary autobiography that the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar gave him in Memoirs of Hadrian, described his intentions for the building in terms that read less like an emperor's architectural brief than a magician's working: “My intention was that this sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the terrestrial globe and the stellar sphere, that globe which encloses the seeds of eternal fire, that hollow sphere containing all. The hours were to circle the centre of its carefully polished pavement where the disk of daylight would rest like a shield of gold.” Whether or not those were Hadrian's actual words, they describe something true about the building. The Pantheon is a model of the cosmos. Standing under the oculus is standing at the center of the universe as the Romans understood it.

The building was dedicated to all the gods—pan theon, all divine—which gave it a peculiar theological status in the Roman religious system. Most temples were dedicated to a single deity or a closely related group; the Pantheon's universalism made it something different, a kind of meta-temple, a place that acknowledged the totality of the divine rather than any particular piece of it. In the niches along the interior walls stood statues of gods and deified emperors: Mars, Venus, Augustus, and others whose names are now lost. The building was not primarily a place of public worship in the way modern churches are—Roman religion didn't work that way—but a sacred precinct in which the emperor could preside over ritual, receiving in his person the emanations of all the heavens simultaneously. Cassius Dio, writing about seventy-five years after Hadrian, speculated that the dome's resemblance to the heavens was precisely the point: the Pantheon was the universe in miniature, and whoever stood at its center stood where the divine and the mortal intersected.

A Long, Trembling Silence

By the time Boniface IV negotiated its transfer from the Byzantine emperor Phocas in 608, the Pantheon had been standing empty for a long time. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed in 476 CE, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and simply declined to appoint a successor. Rome itself had become a shadow city—its population had collapsed from perhaps a million at the height of the empire to somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand, a medieval town rattling around in the ruins of an ancient megalopolis. The great temples, one by one, had fallen into disrepair, been stripped for building materials, or simply crumbled. The Pantheon had survived better than most—partly because of the sheer quality of its construction, partly because its circular form made it difficult to cannibalize for the rectangular blocks that medieval builders preferred, and partly because it was too prominent and too massive to ignore. But it had not been maintained as a functioning sacred space for generations.

Phocas was not a particularly admirable figure—he had seized the Byzantine throne by leading a military revolt, executing his predecessor Maurice along with Maurice's sons in front of their father before Maurice himself was killed, and his reign was characterized by military disaster and theological controversy. But he had a political interest in cultivating the papacy as an ally, and the gift of the Pantheon to Boniface was part of that diplomatic project. The historian John the Deacon recorded the transaction with the flat administrative prose that medieval chroniclers favored: “Another Pope, Boniface, asked the same [Emperor Phocas] to order that in the old temple called the Pantheon, after the pagan filth was removed, a church should be made, to the holy virgin Mary and all the martyrs, so that the commemoration of the saints would take place henceforth where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped.”

The phrase “where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped” is doing a great deal of theological work in a very small space. It encodes the Christian position on pagan religion with complete precision: the entities the Romans called gods were real, but they were not what they claimed to be. They were demons—fallen spirits, adversarial beings who had accepted worship under false pretenses and corrupted the souls of those who offered it. This was not, from the Christian perspective, a metaphorical statement. The screaming that the chronicles describe during the exorcism was taken entirely literally by those who witnessed and recorded it: the pagan intelligences that had inhabited the Pantheon for half a millennium were present, audible, and enraged at their displacement. The exorcism was not a ceremonial gesture. It was a magical operation conducted in dead earnest.

The Carriages of the Dead

Once the exorcism was complete and the building had been declared spiritually clean, the consecration proper could begin. What Boniface did next was extraordinary in its logic: he filled the Pantheon with martyrs. Twenty-eight carriages—some accounts say cartloads—processed through the streets of Rome from the catacombs along the Via Appia and the other roads out of the city, carrying the bones of Christian martyrs who had died in the centuries of Roman persecution. These relics were brought to the Pantheon and reinterred in a great porphyry basin beneath the high altar. Boniface also placed within the new sanctuary an icon of the Virgin Mary as the Panagia Hodegetria—the All-Holy Directress—the devotional image that had served as Constantinople's most sacred protective talisman.

The logic of this was profound and deliberately inverted. The Pantheon had been built to honor all the gods of Rome—to contain the divine totality of the pagan world. Boniface was replacing that totality with another kind: not the gods who had received worship in the niches, but the humans who had died rather than offer that worship. The martyrs were, in Christian theology, the proof that the pagan gods were false—they had chosen death over acknowledgment of those powers, and their deaths had been vindicated by resurrection. Filling the Pantheon with their bones was a statement that the building's original purpose—to honor all the divine forces of the universe—was now being fulfilled correctly, with the right beings receiving the honor. The martyrs displaced the demons. The porphyry basin replaced the statue niches. The temple of all the gods became the church of all the martyrs.

The date chosen for the consecration was not accidental. May 13 was the final night of the Lemuralia—the ancient Roman festival of the restless dead that we wrote about just two days ago in this space. For five centuries, Roman householders had spat black beans into the darkness of this date to appease the lemures, the hungry and potentially malevolent ghosts of the untimely dead who returned to haunt the living during these three nights in May. Christians in Roman Edessa had already been observing a feast honoring all Christian martyrs on May 13, aligning their commemoration of the holy dead with the pagan calendar's existing meditation on the dangerous dead. Boniface's choice of the same date for the Pantheon's consecration was a deliberate act of liturgical replacement: the night when Romans propitiated their restless ghosts became the night when Christians celebrated their triumphant martyrs. The black beans gave way to incense and relics. The terrified paterfamilias gave way to a crowd watching an exorcism.

The Architecture of Mere Survival

The Pantheon's survival into the modern world is one of the stranger stories in architectural history, and the story of what was lost in the process of its preservation is almost as interesting as the story of what was saved. The building itself survived because becoming a church gave it an institutional protector with both the theological motivation and the financial resources to maintain it. Every other major pagan temple in Rome was stripped, collapsed, or built over. The Pantheon alone stands essentially intact—the great bronze doors still hang in their original frame, the marble floor is a nineteenth-century accurate restoration of the ancient original, the coffered concrete dome has been continuously repaired and maintained for nearly two thousand years.

What was lost was the bronze. Hadrian's Pantheon was sheathed in it: the dome was originally covered in bronze tiles, the portico ceiling was gilded bronze, the original inscription on the façade was bronze lettering. Pope Urban VIII—Maffeo Barberini, whose papacy ran from 1623 to 1644 and whose name has become synonymous with a particular kind of cultural depredation—ordered the bronze stripped from the portico ceiling and melted down. An estimated 200 tons of bronze went to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who used it to construct the great baldacchino over the altar of St. Peter's Basilica and to cast cannons for the Castel Sant'Angelo. The Roman satirists coined a phrase for it: Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini—“What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.” The barbarians had left the Pantheon's bronze alone. The Christian pope took it. The irony was not lost on Rome.

The building's subsequent history is a register of the remarkable figures it has absorbed into its walls. Raphael, the greatest painter of the High Renaissance, was buried there in 1520, at thirty-seven, at his own request—the first major artist to be given a royal burial in an ancient monument, and a precedent that the Italian kings Vittorio Emanuele II and Umberto I followed when unified Italy needed a mausoleum worthy of its dynastic ambitions. Michelangelo, standing inside the dome and looking up at the engineering that no one had matched in fourteen centuries, reportedly said it was the work of angels, not men. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica—which Michelangelo designed—is a direct response to the Pantheon's, and through St. Peter's, the Pantheon became the template for every domed building in the Western world: the United States Capitol, the Panthéon in Paris, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, hundreds of courthouses, state capitols, university libraries, and bank lobbies from Edinburgh to Buenos Aires.

The Eye That Witnessed It All

The oculus is the thing that stays with you.

Every architectural feature of the Pantheon is extraordinary—the portico columns, the bronze doors, the marble floor, the coffered dome—but the oculus is in a category of its own. It is an unglazed circular hole thirty feet across at the top of a dome 142 feet above the floor, and it is open to everything: sunlight, rain, snow, wind, birds, the slow movement of clouds. The floor slopes almost imperceptibly toward drains that have been there since Hadrian's engineers installed them. When it rains, the rain falls through the oculus and pools briefly on the ancient marble before draining away. On clear days, a disk of sunlight moves across the interior walls and floor as the sun moves across the sky, a sundial of impossible scale. On the days of the equinoxes, the sunlight falls in precise alignment with the building's entranceway, flooding through the great bronze doors and illuminating the threshold between inside and outside, sacred and secular, for a few minutes at noon.

The ancient Romans understood the oculus as the point of contact between the terrestrial and the celestial—the place where the dome of the building, which represented the dome of the sky, opened to the actual sky it was modeling. The gods entered through it. The light of the cosmos came through it. Hadrian's building was not a box for worship but a lens for focusing the divine, concentrating it at the center of a perfect sphere and letting it fall on whoever stood below.

The medieval Christian exorcism narrative gives the oculus another role: the escape route of the demons. When Boniface's prayers drove the pagan spirits from the building, they fled through the eye in the dome—chaotically, audibly, in a great din—back into whatever darkness they had come from. The oculus that had once admitted the gods now expelled the demons. The hole that had let heaven in was now the hole that let hell out. It's a powerful image, and it captures something true about the way the building functions at a symbolic level regardless of your theology: the oculus is the place where inside and outside, above and below, the human and whatever is not human, meet and exchange.

The building is still a functioning church. Mass is celebrated there regularly. Tourists move through it in thousands, every day, standing on the ancient marble floor and tilting their heads back to look at the sky through the oculus, some of them understanding what they're looking at and most of them simply arrested by the experience of it, which is the same experience Hadrian's contemporaries would have had and the same experience Boniface's crowd would have had after the screaming stopped and the church was quiet and the light came down.

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