Sacred Space between Inclusion and Exclusion: The Dynamics of Liturgical Access in the Christian East

Abstract

This article explores sacred space in the Christian East as a site where order and disruption are not opposites but entwined. It examines how access to the sanctuary, though often framed as fixed and hierarchical, is in practice shaped by exceptions, reversals, and local traditions that complicate traditional boundaries. The first half of the article traces the structuring of space in early and medieval Christian texts, while the second focuses on gendered access through historical roles like deaconesses, female monastics, empresses, and laywomen. Drawing also from the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the contested “punk prayer” performance of Pussy Riot, the article reflects on how sacred space both enforces and exceeds its own limits.

1. Introduction

In February 2012, members of the Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot entered Moscow's rebuilt Christ the Savior Cathedral, mounted the bema before the iconostasis, and launched what they called a “Punk Moleben” (Панк-молебен), using the Russian term for a supplicatory service. ¹ Lasting less than a minute before security intervened, their shouted plea asked the Theotokos to “drive Putin away.” Wearing brightly colored balaclavas, they enacted Orthodox gestures, crossing themselves and prostrating. Other lyrics were equally pointed:

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin

It would be better if he believed in God instead

The belt of the Virgin can’t stop the mayhem

Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest! ²

The performance was a protest against the close ties between the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin, and it sought to deny the patriarch's ecclesiastical authority by referring to him by his secular surname, Gundyaev. Carried out in front of the altar, it triggered an immediate public outcry. The reference to the Virgin's belt undercut the relic's highly publicized tour in late 2011, organized by a foundation linked to Vladimir Putin and drawing approximately 285,000 visitors in Moscow alone, many of whom waited more than twenty-four hours to venerate the relic. ³ Three of the performers were arrested and, following a lengthy trial, imprisoned for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. ⁴

Reactions to the event diverged sharply. Many dismissed the performance as sacrilegious. ⁵ Others interpreted it as an ecclesiologically significant protest, an unconventional prayer staged deliberately within the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. ⁶ The cathedral itself embodies the close alignment of church and state in post-Soviet Russia. Destroyed by the Communist regime in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s, it functions as a potent symbol of trauma, memory, and revival. ⁷ In this context, both the intensity of public outrage and the logic of the protest become intelligible. The action aimed to expose how sacred memory and sacred space can be co-opted for political purposes. ⁸

Some observers interpreted the punk prayer through the Russian tradition of the holy fool (yurodstvo), a figure who deliberately embraces disruption and social marginality as prophetic witness. ⁹ This tradition includes St. Xenia of Petersburg, an eighteenth-century woman of social standing who gave away her possessions, donned her deceased husband's clothing, feigned madness, and embraced public rejection in a manner that can be read as a kenotic protest against wealth and fragile social identities. Critics countered that Pussy Riot's members, unlike earlier holy fools, were not practicing Orthodox Christians. They pointed, for example, to unfamiliarity with the Byzantine manner of making the sign of the cross, a gesture that is instinctive to those actively participating in Russian liturgical life. ¹⁰

Yet prophetic action has never fully depended on conventional belonging. Prophets are less concerned with foretelling the future than with exposing what is spiritually misaligned in the present, naming the idols of their age, and unsettling the comforts of injustice or ritual formality. ¹¹ Seen from this perspective, Pussy Riot's performance may be read as a form of ethical discernment central to prophetic witness, even if its agents do not conform to accepted models of piety. Such nonconformity is historically intelligible within a twenty-first-century post-Soviet context in which the Orthodox Church itself is still emerging from decades of internal occupation, systematic suppression of theological education and liturgical practice, and the enforced normalization of atheism. Read in this light, the performers’ limited theological sophistication need not disqualify the action from prophetic interpretation, but may instead reflect the fractured conditions under which religious meaning is presently negotiated. I do not suggest an equivalence between Pussy Riot and recognized ascetic or prophetic figures, but rather point to structural similarity in the disruption of sacred space as a site of ethical contestation. The Hebrew Bible offers comparable examples of prophetic agency exercised through unexpected figures. The Persian king Cyrus, who does not know the God of Israel (Isa 45:4–5), is nevertheless named the anointed one (māšîaḥ; מָשִׁיחַ; Isa 45:1) and commissioned to restore the Jerusalem temple (Ezra 1:1–3). The prophet Isaiah, in turn, condemns the temple sacrificial system as meaningless without justice, even though it stands at the heart of Jewish religious life (Isa 1:11–17).

What unites these disparate examples—a punk performance in a symbolically charged cathedral, a prophet rejecting temple sacrifice, and a foreign king restoring the Jerusalem sanctuary—is their intersection with sacred space. Each exposes a tension between how sacred space is expected to function and the ways in which it becomes the setting for divine action. Sacred space establishes boundaries, but it also has the capacity to unsettle them. It orders religious life, yet, when historical circumstances demand, it can exceed its own ordering in pursuit of a concealed theological truth. This article argues that sacred space in the Christian East is defined by a paradox. It is hierarchically arranged and theologically codified, yet it persistently generates exceptions and reversals that prevent its boundaries from becoming fixed or self-enclosed. Attempts to define sacred space too narrowly by regulating access and visibility, whether by function, gender, or public role, risk obscuring its theological depth. Sacred space is a living locus of theology, where order and disruption coexist, and where divine encounter emerges within, and sometimes against, established structures.

To explore this paradox, this chapter proceeds through two interrelated themes. The first concerns the deliberate ordering of liturgical space in Eastern Christian contexts. Church interiors are arranged according to functionality and theological significance, and the placement of bodies reflects liturgical roles shaped by ecclesial and cultural norms. This concern with spatial order is already present in the biblical text and is first codified within early Christianity in late antique church orders, continuing, with considerable local variation, across Eastern Christianity to this day. ¹² One early witness is the Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-century Syrian text that assigns great importance to the regulation of persons and places within the assembly. ¹³ Aimed in part at reinforcing episcopal authority, its prescriptions seek to secure proper conduct through comprehensive spatial organization. Yet the text also reveals moments where this logic is unsettled from within.

The second theme examines the relationship between gender and sacred space, focusing on the widespread tendency within Orthodox discourse to treat women's exclusion from the sanctuary as intrinsic to tradition. ¹⁴ Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a far more complex and internally differentiated picture. In certain contexts, women's presence in the sanctuary has long been permitted and carefully regulated, especially within women's monastic communities and in specific forms of non-liturgical or auxiliary service, even as such access has remained sharply contested elsewhere. Both the historical record and contemporary practice resist any categorical formulation. Across different periods, and in some communities today, women do in fact enter the sanctuary and engage ritually with the altar. Deaconesses, empresses, and female monastic ecclesiarchs, each within their own historical and ecclesial contexts, exercised sanctioned roles in the sanctuary and, in some cases, direct access to the altar. These figures cannot be dismissed as marginal anomalies but belong squarely within the tradition itself. Their presence makes clear that sanctuary boundaries have never been determined by gender alone, but have instead been shaped by intersecting considerations of role, status, ritual moment, and liturgical function.

This study responds to the 2025 Societas Liturgica Congress's invitation to consider liturgical space as a locus theologicus, not merely as the setting of worship but as a medium through which theology is revealed, negotiated, and actualized. It does not argue against structure as such, but against the reduction of its meaning. In the Christian East, as in the West, sacred space has always meant more than its historically-conditioned boundaries. Its theological significance emerges through lived tradition, where boundaries mark the holy, yet acquire their meaning through the ways they are inhabited, negotiated, and at times overturned.

2. Church Orders and the Ordered Church: The Didascalia Apostolorum

As is widely known, early Christian church orders offer insight into the formative centuries of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean. Focused on governance, liturgy, and moral conduct, this “living literature,” as Paul Bradshaw called it, often regulates bodies and positions groups within the assembly, though the specific solutions across the sources reflect local variation. ¹⁵ The earliest example, the Didache (late first century), says little about positioning but affirms eucharistic commensality as proper only for the baptized. ¹⁶ Later texts, such as the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum and the fifth-century Testamentum Domini, make the regulation of sacred space more explicit, echoing Paul's call that “all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Cor 14:40). ¹⁷ The Didascalia Apostolorum, composed about 230 ce in northern Syria likely by a bishop, survives in a fragmentary Latin version (the Verona Palimpsest) and more fully in a Syriac translation likely made in the late fourth or early fifth century. ¹⁸ The work is marked by a commitment to taxis not only in doctrine and discipline but even in the bodily placement of worshipers. Teresa Berger notes that its gendered logic begins early: men are urged not to dress in ways that might tempt women, and women are told to avoid public bathing and domestic strife. ¹⁹ These moral codes flow into spatial and ecclesial prescriptions, translating gendered behavior into the worshiping assembly.

This is especially pronounced in chapter twelve. ²⁰ The bishop sits at the east near the altar, flanked by presbyters; lay men behind them. Farther back, women are segregated by status (virgins, married, widows, elderly), while children remain with parents or off to the side. Deacons enforce the arrangement, relocating the misseated, silencing whisperers, preventing dozing. Newcomers are vetted about their social status (married, widowed, orthodox) before being seated, and bishops are reminded not to interrupt their own ministry for any dignitaries arriving late. The congregation is thus sorted and arranged, resulting in an assembly layered with hierarchies. Each body in attendance reflects a theology of rank: clergy over laity, men over women, orthodox over heterodox. The text underscores the point with an analogy: just as “oxen with oxen, sheep with sheep” gather by kind, so too must the Christian assembly.

And if anyone is found sitting in a place which is not his, the deacon within should warn him and make him stand up and seat him in the place which is his own, as is right. For our Lord compared the church to a pen (John 10:1), for there we may observe that dumb animals, by which we mean oxen and sheep and goats, lie down and get up, feed and chew the cud, in family groups, and none is separated from its own species. ²¹

This vision, though distinctively Christian, reflects broader cultural habits. In Greco-Roman society, formal banquets were arranged by status, just as theaters seated senators up front, equestrians next, plebeians at the margins, and Roman temples restricted access to the inner sanctum. ²² By adopting this grammar, the early church fused ritual hierarchy with inherited cultural habits of visibility and spatial control.

Yet at the end of chapter twelve the Didascalia takes an unexpected turn. After instructing bishops not to interrupt their homily even for arriving dignitaries, it introduces the new figure of the poor:

But if a poor man or woman should arrive, whether from the same district or of another congregation, most especially if they are well on in years, and they have no place, then you, bishop, should act for them from your heart, even should you sit on the ground yourself. ²³

Here the spatial logic of the assembly is suspended and even reversed. Although the bishop occupies the apex of the assembly, he is instructed to give up his seat and to sit on the floor so that the poor may be seated in his place. The instruction may be rhetorical, but its point is clear. Spatial order ordinarily gives shape to the liturgical assembly, yet in this moment mercy takes precedence, and the poor elderly person, and not the bishop, comes to be manifest iconographically as Christ. The interruption reveals that sacred space is not governed solely by its own established logic. Even in a text deeply invested in hierarchy, the needs of the vulnerable break through, and taxis becomes porous under the pressure of grace. Indeed, it is precisely the established ordering of the assembly that gives such symbolic ruptures their full force.

The architectural ordering of the church contributes to this tension. While the archaeology of late antique Eastern churches shows regional variation, standard Byzantine churches eventually developed with three main zones (the narthex, nave, and sanctuary), separated by increasingly regulated thresholds. ²⁴ Catechumens and penitents were sometimes restricted to the narthex; full members stood in the nave; only those with liturgical roles entered the sanctuary. ²⁵ In late antiquity, deacons or consecrated doorkeepers (ostiarioi) could even be charged with enforcing these divisions in some contexts, although the very need to enforce also shows a lack of strict adherence. ²⁶ The fifth-century Testamentum Domini explicitly linked spiritual status to physical position, assigning catechumens and the categories of the baptized to specific areas of the church during the liturgy. ²⁷

Though such practices are rarely observed today with the same degree of specificity, their echoes remain. Some Orthodox communities maintain segregated areas in a church building, or arrange the faithful during communion by age, gender, and status. Still others enforce boundaries of Orthodoxy. I have encountered this tension and its flexibility firsthand. In one monastery in southeastern Europe, a Roman Catholic friend was asked to stay in the narthex due to his Catholic identity; a few kilometers away, another monastery invited him into the altar area to observe newly painted frescoes; at a third, where the community recognized his theological and liturgical identification as closely resonant with Orthodoxy, he was offered to commune, a gesture he declined in order to avoid placing the priest in jeopardy. Far from anomalies, these experiences reflect the ongoing negotiation between ritual boundaries and pastoral discretion in Orthodox life.

The Didascalia offers one of the earliest articulations of spatial order in worship, yet one that contains within it a capacity for interruption. It prescribes a highly structured spatial theology that remains responsive to the demands of the gospel. This logic recurs across the historical record and persists, in various forms, into the present day.

3. Gendered Boundaries and the Sanctuary

The second case study builds on the first by examining a specific form of spatial ordering: the intersection of gender and sanctuary access in the Christian East. A widely repeated claim holds that women cannot enter the altar area, a view common not only among Western observers but also among some Orthodox Christians who treat it as a universal and uninterrupted tradition. Yet both historical evidence and contemporary practice complicate this assumption. In 2023, a video circulated online showing laypeople, including women, entering the sanctuary of a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Melbourne to venerate a newly installed icon. ²⁸ The post offered no commentary, only a citation of Canon 69 from the Council in Trullo (692), and quickly drew over 40,000 views and a flood of criticism focused almost entirely on the women behind the icon screen. Canon 69 states:

Absolutely no one from amongst the laity shall be allowed to enter within the holy sanctuary; though the emperor's majesty and authority shall in no wise be hindered from doing so, whenever he desires to offer the gifts to the creator, in accordance with a most ancient tradition. ²⁹

The canon addresses clerical status, not gender, extending entry also to the emperor, and, as we will see, in rare cases also to empresses, who are quasi-clerical figures by virtue of their chrismation. Yet, online outrage reframed this functional restriction as a gendered one.

One of the earliest prohibitions against women entering the sanctuary appears in Canon 44 of the mid-fourth-century Council of Laodicea in Asia Minor, which states: “Women may not go to the altar” (Ὅτι οὐ δεῖ γυναῖκας εἰς τὸ θυσιαστήριον εἰσιέναι). ³⁰ Robert Taft and others argue this canon is not addressing general access to the sanctuary but a specific form of female liturgical ministry at the altar. ³¹ The same council banned the so-called presbytides (literally “elder women who sit in front”: πρεσβύτιδας ἤτοι προκαθημένας), likely elder women akin to canonical widows, pointing to a local effort to curtail certain female roles in worship. But this was not a universal rule.

The fifth-century church order known as the Testamentum Domini, also probably from the Syrian milieu, describes the spatial arrangement behind the closed sanctuary veil during the eucharistic liturgy. ³² It specifies that bishops and presbyters, as well as deaconesses and widows, stand inside the sanctuary, each assigned a place according to function. At the same time, the text prohibits access to the altar for those experiencing bodily conditions deemed incompatible with the honor of the sacred space. A bishop or presbyter who has had a nocturnal emission is instructed not to offer the eucharist. Nor is anyone menstruating to approach the altar, but should remain in the nave. In all such cases, reintegration requires fasting and washing. Put differently, access to the sanctuary is not structured by gender, but by liturgical function and temporary bodily condition.

A related example comes from a fourth-century epitaph by Gregory of Nazianzus. Mourning his mother Nonna, he describes her dying in prayer within the sanctuary, hands clutching the altar: “Who died as Nonna died, by the pure table, her hands clinging to the sacred boards?” (τίς θάνεν ὡς θάνε Νόννα, παρ᾽ εὐαγέεσσι τραπέζαις, τῶν ἱερῶν σανίδων χερσὶν ἐφαπτομένη;) ³³ In evoking Nonna's presence at the altar, Gregory emphasizes her sanctity, echoing a broader theme of presenting Nonna's entire life as a sacred offering. The image may also suggest a liturgical role, since later tradition identifies Nonna as a deaconess, though this remains uncertain as Gregory does not refer to her as a deaconess. ³⁴ Gregory likewise places his sister Gorgonia, a lay married woman, within the sanctuary, describing how she laid her head on the altar and covered her body with the eucharistic gifts in a desperate act of faith during illness. ³⁵ It is difficult to imagine Gregory invoking such imagery if it was entirely inconceivable within prevailing norms of sacred space, as doing so would undermine the very force of his rhetorical aim. While these episodes are clearly presented as extraordinary, they align with a broader pattern in early Christian sources in which sanctuary access, though normally governed by ritual function, could in rare cases be extended to individuals marked by exceptional need. Just as the Didascalia Apostolorum instructs a bishop to surrender his seat to a poor elderly person, casting the vulnerable as living icons of Christ, Gregory's portrayals of Nonna and Gorgonia, both mothers and likely laypersons, depict holy women approaching the altar in the sanctuary in moments of crisis or spiritual transformation, thereby revealing the sacraments’ ultimate aim: the healing and salvation of the human person.

As previously discussed, Canon 69 of Trullo, issued in the late seventh century, barred all laypersons from the sanctuary, without reference to gender, while explicitly permitting the emperor to enter on specific liturgical occasions. This silence on gender makes sense, especially given that the female diaconate remained active in Constantinople at the time. The Barberini euchologion, an eighth-century service book copied in Southern Italy from a Constantinopolitan model, includes a cheirotonia (χειροτονία, ordination prayer conferred through the laying on of hands) for a deaconess that is nearly identical to that of a male deacon. ³⁶ As Valerie Karras and others have shown, Byzantine deaconesses stood in the sanctuary and received communion at the altar with the other clergy. ³⁷ By the twelfth century, the female diaconate had largely disappeared, persisting the longest in the cathedrals of Constantinople and Jerusalem. ³⁸ Although scholars have proposed various hypotheses, no consensus has emerged regarding the reasons for its decline. Writing in the fourteenth century, Matthew Blastares attributes the disappearance to several factors, including concerns about menstruation and ritual impurity. ³⁹

While growing concerns about ritual purity may have contributed to the decline of the female diaconate, the ministry did not entirely vanish from the Christian East. Beyond the Byzantine Orthodox sphere, the Armenian Apostolic Church preserved the female diaconate through the centuries, especially in monastic settings where nuns and abbesses served in liturgical roles. ⁴⁰ Today, Armenian women, sometimes including married women, continue to serve as deacons in certain communities, for example in Iran and Argentina, with ordinations undertaken at the discretion of the local bishop. ⁴¹ A comparable development can be observed in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, which has recently revived the female diaconate, including to married women. ⁴² These cases are illustrative of a wider and still evolving engagement with the diaconal ministry of women across parts of the Christian East. While the scope and functions of contemporary deaconesses vary and remain a matter of debate, it is generally agreed that where female deacons serve, they are granted access to the sanctuary.

Sanctuary access was not historically limited to clerics, male or female. As noted above, Canon 69 of the Council in Trullo explicitly permitted imperial rulers to enter the sanctuary, an exception that at times extended to imperial women. For instance, the fifth-century empress Pulcheria appears customarily to have received communion within the sanctuary, possibly wearing a distinctive vestment comparable to the stole; when Patriarch Nestorius objected, she defended the practice by appealing to her role as empress. ⁴³ Over a millennium later, in the eighteenth century, we find an etching depicting Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia, inside the sanctuary with the holy doors of the iconostasis behind her, receiving communion from the patriarch on the day of her coronation (Figure 1). ⁴⁴

Figure 1.

Catherine the Great receiving communion inside the sanctuary on the day of her coronation. Etching after drawings by J.-L. de Veilly and M. I. Makhaev (drawing 1796; impression ca. 1827–1830).

Yet such access for non-ordained women was not merely an imperial prerogative. In women's monasteries, nuns have long served as ecclesiarchs, a role that presupposes authorized engagement with the sanctuary, although much of their liturgical service is enacted on the bema and nave. As ecclesiarchs, nuns’ service closely parallels that of male altar servers, while the extent and manner of their sanctuary access are more limited and regulated by local norms. They assist the celebrant in altar-oriented tasks, prepare the censer, accompany the clergy bearing candles, and assist at communion on the bema. They also read the epistle and assist at pontifical liturgies when needed. One example occurred during a visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch to Ormylia, a women's monastery in northern Greece, when nuns assisted him in communing the laity. ⁴⁵ This practice is relatively common in Orthodox female monasteries, but can contrast with contemporary Western liturgical practice in similar hierarchical contexts. ⁴⁶ At Orthodox women's monasteries, such as the historic thirteenth-century Žiča monastery in Serbia, nuns perform incensations during some all-night vigils. ⁴⁷

In some Orthodox settings, the abbess holds a significant degree of liturgical authority regulating the movement of bodies within the church building. She not only assigns roles to the nuns of her community, thereby determining their placement, but also serves as a reference for visitors. Laypeople, for example, may request her blessing before approaching the bema for communion. I have witnessed this firsthand: during a pontifical celebration with a bishop presiding at a female monastery, the faithful spontaneously approached the abbess for her blessing before receiving communion, despite the bishop's visible presence nearby. In this moment, they enacted a lex credendi that challenged canonical hierarchies, sacramental gender binaries, and prevailing assumptions about who governs sacred space in the Christian East. These and similar examples reveal that spatial and even sacramental access in the Christian East, both historically and today, is shaped by intersecting dynamics of liturgical function, ecclesial authority, and local contextual tradition, underscoring a theological complexity that resists simplistic claims.

This paper has aimed to respond to the 2025 Societas Liturgica Congress's call to consider liturgical space as a locus theologicus, not just a worship setting, but a medium through which theology is enacted and disclosed. In the Christian East, sacred space is ordered: shaped by thresholds, hierarchies, and canonical instruction. Yet this order is never total. At times, something unexpected emerges, sharpening our perception of sacred space as the locus of the mysterion, defined and ritually ordered, yet never capable of enclosing the holy, which always exceeds spatial boundaries and remains irreducible to the finite realm. A biblical parallel appears in John's Gospel, when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman. As a Samaritan, she lies outside orthodoxy, and as a woman with a tangled marital past, she draws water at noon to avoid others. Yet she raises the question of sacred space: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that Jerusalem is the place to worship.” Jesus affirms the temple (“salvation is from the Jews”) but unsettles its singularity: “The hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). Sacred space is upheld, yet opened, thus made porous. Only then does the woman mention the Messiah, and only then does Jesus reveal what he had not yet told anyone else: “I who speak to you am he.” The power of this gospel narrative lies in how it both inhabits and unsettles order and sacred space. At the edge of propriety and geography, sacred space is not abolished but transfigured. Its boundaries remain, but their purpose is revealed precisely in their simultaneous existence and suspension: worship begins not with access, but with encounter.