THE ROMAN CATACOMBS
From the catacombs, the subterranean burial-places of the first Roman
Christians, to the basilica of S. Peter's, the greatest ecclesiastical
building on earth, there is no break in the drama of history. When you
come out from the cemetery of Callistus, on to the fields bordering
the Appian Way, and look across to the dome of the great church
commemorating Peter, you say to yourself "That is the interpretation
of this": this may see in its own humble features the lineaments of
that; the church which dominates the Roman country--in imperial
possession of Rome--may recognise that the silent underground
galleries of the Appia had already taken as effective a possession of
the capital of the world.
The Roman Church is founded upon three events: the apostolic
preaching, the constancy of its martyrs, its position as the heir of
Imperial Rome--a position early figured and represented in the persons
of its bishops. All these things have their monument in the catacombs;
which bear indisputable traces of the sojourn and the preaching of
the Apostles, which are the earliest shrines of the Roman martyrs, and
which preserve for us in the crypt in the cemetery of Callistus, set
apart for the leaders of the Roman Church from Antheros to Eutychian
(A.D. 235-275),[3] the veritable nucleus of papal domination. It was
the successors of these men who were to fill the role left vacant by
Constantine's departure for Byzantium; to be forced into a position of
overlordship through the uncertainty of the emperor's government by
lieutenants--first in Rome and then in Italy; to consolidate this
power by constant accretions of Italian territory, and, finally, to
acquire by spiritual conquest a universal suzerainty as real as that
of the Roman emperor. If those who inscribed the proud words round the
dome of S. Peter's had known that hidden in the catacombs there were
frescoes representing Peter as the new Moses striking the rock from
which flow forth the saving waters of Christ--the name _Petrus_
clearly written above him--even they must have thrilled with wonder
and awe: the upholders of Petrine primacy could not have imagined or
devised a parable of the first centuries better fitted to their hand.
[3] The popes from the time of Zephyrinus, the predecessor of
Callistus, to Miltiades, who lived on the eve of the "Peace," rest
in this great cemetery.
The burial-places of the first Christians in Rome were their only
certain property. The law allowed to every corporation its _religiosus
locus_, its God's acre, property seldom confiscated even in the worst
hours of the great persecutions. It was thus that the Christians,
though they never lived in the catacombs, came to regard them as
retreats, as places where it was safe to meet for prayer, for mutual
encouragement, even for the catechising of neophytes and children.
Round them were their dead, their loved ones, nay, round them were
their martyrs, the men and women who were to prove that "the blood of
the martyrs is the seed of the Church"; whose heroic deaths had been
witnessed by many; the memory of whose heroism was to prove almost as
potent as ocular witness when their burial-places became the nuclei of
the first Christian churches, and the abounding reverence felt for
them inaugurated the Christian cult of the saints.
[Illustration: A PROCESSION IN THE CATACOMB OF CALLISTUS
The nucleus of the great catacomb on the Via Appia was formed by the
crypts of Lucina and the _hypogaeum_ of the family of the
_Caecilii_, both pagan and Christian members of which had their
burial places on the Appian Way. S. Cecilia was buried here. See
pages 42, 45, 46, 29.]
The catacombs lie for the most part within a three mile radius of the
wall of Aurelian. They number forty-five, and it is calculated that
the passages, galleries, and chambers of which they consist cover
several hundred miles, forming a vast underground city--"subterranean
Rome." For the first 300 years, until "the Peace of the Church," this
was the ordinary place of burial, certain catacombs being affiliated,
from the third century, to the ecclesiastical regions in the city.
Even after the "Peace" Christians were sometimes buried here, until
the fifth century, after which the catacombs were visited as places of
pilgrimage for another 400 years.
From the ninth century they fell into complete neglect; no one visited
these sanctuaries of the sufferings, these monuments of the human
affections and religious beliefs of the first Christians. Visitors
heard that Rome was built upon terrible underground chasms, filled
with snakes, some part of which was every now and then revealed to the
terrified inhabitants. No one penetrated till the fifteenth
century--the first pioneer belongs to the sixteenth--and it was not
till the second half of the nineteenth that a new world was laid bare
to the student by the excavations of De Rossi, who rediscovered the
great cemetery of Callistus, containing the now famous "papal crypt,"
and whose labours have resulted in restoring to us nearly twenty
catacombs.
The terrible underground chasms filled with snakes were found to be
galleries of tombs, crypts of all sizes, lighted by shafts, some with
seats for catechists, some adapted as miniature basilicas, decorated
with frescoes recording biblical scenes, New Testament parables and
symbolical representations of New Testament events--(in which the
"apocrypha" is not distinguished from the "canon," and the history of
Susanna and the Elders sustained the faith and comforted the courage
of Christians by the side of the scene of Moses striking the rock or
Christ feeding His disciples); eloquent with inscriptions in the
epigraphy of the first four centuries, recorded in moments of simple
human emotion, intended only for the dead and those who survived them
sorrowing; and lastly, covered with _graffiti_, with prayers, names,
acclamations, scratched on the walls of galleries leading to some
favourite crypt by pilgrim visitors in later centuries.
[Illustration: FLAVIAN BASILICA ON THE PALATINE
See pages 31, 35, 45, and fly-leaf, page 252.]
In this hidden and quiet place of the dead there is recorded a
revolution parallel to a volcanic upheaval of nature. Here we have
a permanent record of the meeting of classical Rome with Judaea and
Christianity; here the graceful art of Pompeii meets the imagery of
the Hebrew bible; here the Flavii met the Jews of the Dispersion; here
as in a Titanic workshop, Rome, taking its religion from the Jew,
moulded the faith which the Chosen People had discarded into the
greatest religious organisation on earth--Catholic Christianity.
The two arch-cemeteries are those of Callistus on the Via Appia and
Priscilla on the Salaria. They are arch-cemeteries because their
origin and the part they played in the early years of Roman
Christianity gave them a pre-eminent importance, and having been
bestowed upon the Church by their owners they became the official
catacombs of the Christian community. Each bears in its bosom the
record of the first Roman converts; each is rich in frescoes and
inscriptions; each bears testimony to the fact that from the beginning
the Roman Christians counted among them many of patrician and
senatorial rank; we meet with the names of the _Aurelii_, _Caecilii_,
_Maximi Caecilii_, of _Praetextatus Caecilianus_ and _Pomponius
Grecinus_, and of _Cornelius_, the first bishop to belong to a Roman
_gens_, in the catacomb of Callistus; and with those of the _Prisci_,
_Ulpii_, and _Acilii Glabriones_ in that of Priscilla. Priscilla, with
her son the Senator Pudens, is the reputed hostess of Peter on his
visit to Rome, and in the catacomb which bears her name there occurs
repeatedly the Apostle's name--unknown in classical nomenclature--both
in its Greek and Latin forms, _Petros_, _Petrus_. It is a region of
this catacomb which preserves the tradition of the _Fons sancti
Petri_, "the well or font of S. Peter," "the cemetery where Peter
baptized" or "where Peter first sat," still unconsciously recorded in
the Roman feast of "the Chair of S. Peter" on January 18. Here too was
buried the philosopher Justin, martyred under Aurelius in A.D. 165,
who lived in the house of Pudens, and here, when Justin was describing
the rite itself in his Apology to the emperors, was frescoed the
earliest representation of the solemn moment of the breaking of bread
at the Eucharist. The mystical number of the guests, seven, the fish
on the table, archaic symbol of Christ, the "seven baskets full" in
allusion to the miracle of the loaves, and the fact that the _agape_
was already dissociated from the Eucharist in the time of Justin, mark
this out as a typical example of that symbolical treatment of real
events which is characteristic of early Christian art. The celebrant
stands at one corner of the crescent-shaped table breaking the bread;
five men and women sit at the table, the only other standing figure
being that of a woman wearing the Jewish married woman's bonnet,
filling, apparently, the office of _vidua_ or woman-elder. The
catacomb of Callistus--an agglomeration of separate _hypogaea_, which
originated in the _crypts of Lucina_ and the cemetery of those
_Caecilii_ who were among the earliest Roman families to embrace
Christianity--is no less interesting.
The unique interest of these monuments lies in the fact that they are
the incorruptible record of the sentiments, affections, and beliefs
of the first Christians. In these frescoes and inscriptions no
forgeries or interpolations could creep, no P1 and P2, no "Elohist"
or "Jahvist" could confuse the issues and mystify the interpretation.
The untouched story appeals to us in mute eloquence.
To what side does the testimony of the Roman catacombs lean? The
critical method in history has destroyed the foundations of historical
Protestantism: has it laid bare the foundations of historical
Catholicism? The people who frequented the catacombs did not feel or
think or believe like the men who reformed Christianity in the
sixteenth century, but it is as true to say that they did not think or
believe like the men of the Catholic reaction. The catacombs record a
period when Christian life and Christian discipline still seemed more
important than Christian dogma, when this last was not yet fixed, when
it was still true that "what can be prayed is the rule of what may be
believed"--_lex orandi lex credendi_; and here in the place of the
dead "what could be prayed" became a veritable norm of what Christians
were to formulate as precious dogma later.
In the first place then, the frescoes and inscriptions frequently
bring before us the notions of rebirth by baptism, and of eternal life
by participation in Christ through the mystical commerce of the
Eucharist--the Johannine conception; new birth and new life are the
keynote ideas in this place of the dead. Sacraments, conceived as
material channels conveying grace, already form an integral part of
the Christian consciousness; but the assumption that "the seven
sacraments" are to be found in the catacombs shows as little knowledge
of the history of the Church for the first twelve centuries as of the
habits of belief of the Christians of the first, second, and third.
If there had ever been an age of the Church before controversy, we
might say that the catacombs recorded it. But there never was such an
age: what can be found here, however, are the spontaneous
Judaic-Gentile beliefs of Christians who learnt their faith through
terrible and comforting experiences almost as much as through the
first apostolic preaching or the later ministrations of those visitors
between Church and Church called in the New Testament "apostles and
prophets." The religion of the catacombs was partly formed in the
living; it is the faith, formulated, gauged, and tested by the
faithful. Hence there is not only spontaneousness, but boldness,
liberty of spirit, the absence of all fear of being misunderstood,
misconstrued. They did not think as we do, and centuries were to
elapse before the minimisers or the maximisers would torture what they
said and did with meanings they would not bear.
Of these bold spontaneous doctrines none is more conspicuous than that
of the intercourse between all the members of Christ, "those who have
gone before us with the sign of faith" and those "who wait till their
change comes, till this corruptible puts on incorruption." A Christian
called upon his dead to pray for him in the realms of light, he called
upon God to give to his beloved a place of light and refreshment, he
besought the confessors gone to their reward to pray for both them and
him. So strong was this belief in a holy and indissoluble union
between the members of the one Church and the one Body of Christ, that
at every celebration of the liturgy the whole body of the faithful
were understood to be present--either really or mystically; and thus
the Commemoration of the Living in the mass speaks of those (present)
who offer and those (absent) for whom they offer the sacrifice of
praise, as all equally "standing round about." And as they offered and
prayed for those who were with them in the same town, so they offered
and prayed for those who were already with Christ--_in bono in
Christo_. The three commemorations of the Roman Canon, the _Memento
Domine ... omnium circumstantium_ of the living, the _Communicantes et
memoriam venerantes_ of the martyrs, and the _Memento ... qui nos
praecesserunt_ of the dead, may be thought of as liturgical features
crystallised in the catacombs.
It is easy to see too how the funeral celebrations of the
liturgy--given this initial idea of intercommunion and intercession
among all Christians living and dead--extended the idea of eucharistic
sacrifice. How easily the oblation of Christ--the Christian's one
offering--became the means of intercessory prayer for all men and all
occasions, and gave rise to the requiem mass, the mass for some
special grace, the mass of thanksgiving, the mass in commemoration of
a saint.
Bold treatment of sacred things belongs naturally to an age when the
_sentiments_ of the faith, aspiration and hope, outrun dogma--before
unfaithfulness in doctrine urged upon the early Church and its leaders
the necessity for stricter definition, or unfaithfulness in life had
made it easier to substitute a hard and fast creed for "the weightier
matters of the law." The symbolism and inscriptions of the catacombs
testify how freely such elements were at work there. Take as an
instance the fresco representing Christ on a throne giving a book to
Peter, with the legend, _Dominus legem dat_, "the Lord gives the law."
In other examples of this subject Peter is replaced by some simple but
faithful disciple--"the Lord gives the law to Alexander--to Valerius."
The allusion is to the "tradition of the Gospel" in baptism; it is not
hierarchical.
The catacombs influenced the Roman Church in another way. There are
none but martyrs' names among the liturgic commemorations of the
confessors of the faith (whom we now call "saints"); and these names
loudly proclaimed in the _Canon_--in the solemn portion--of the
eucharistic services which were held at their graves, not only on the
day of deposition but on many other stated days besides, were the
nucleus of that long line of "_canonised_" saints which figures in the
modern calendar. When, after the "Peace," churches began to cover the
city, the very grave of the confessor became the nucleus of the
Christian edifice--that confession or sunk tomb which is the central
point of the Roman basilica. And as the liturgy had been celebrated on
the stone slab which closed the grave so when churches were built
the altar was placed over the confessor's tomb: "I saw under the altar
the souls of those that had been slain for the word of God, and for
the testimony which they held."
[Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN ON THE PALATINE
Painted on a stormy day. The sombre scene of the ruined Library in
the Palace of the Flavian Emperors suggests the ruin of classical
learning which followed on the introduction of Christianity. The
mother of Domitian's two nephews, whom he had intended to designate
as his heirs, was martyred as a Christian, and their cousin of the
same name--Flavia Domitilla--founded the catacomb of the Flavian
House.]
Thus subterranean Rome prepared, as in the hidden working of a mine,
not only many affirmations of the faith which was to assert itself in
the light and replace the religion of classical Rome, but also the
sanctuary of those great basilicas which were to spread over the
surface of the city as soon as the Christians, in no real but
nevertheless in a highly suggestive sense, "came up from the
catacombs." The catacombs are the link between pagan Rome "drunk with
the blood of the saints" and the Christian Rome which arose in the
imperial city from the ashes of her martyrs. The pagan city on the
seven hills as truly sunk into the grave with the bodies of the Roman
martyrs as Christian Rome eventually took possession of the same _urbs
septicollis_ by carrying her dead into it.