Petrification of the church

In his recent La Maison Dieu , Dominique Iogna-Prat asks “How did the Church, in the sense of the community of the faithful, come to take its identity from space bounded by stones.” In the words of the TLS reviewer, Iogna-Prat “offers a history of the ‘petrification’ of Western Christianity across the central middle Ages.” As successors of “the Rock,” Popes play an important part. But the shift to church-as-building occurred during the Carolingian period: “Carolingian churchmen could begin to conceptualize and to order their flocks on a scale undreamt of in the West since the fall of Rome some four centuries earlier. In the work of Amalarius of Metz in the first half of the ninth century, for example, Iogna-Prat finds articulated the key synecdochic relation between church as physical space and Church as trans-temporal community. The container comes to stand for the contained; walls do make Christians.”