CHAPTER XIII.

THE ROMAN CATACOMBS.

THE belief of the early Christians, that is, of the Christians from the close of the first century to the conversion of the Empire at the beginning of the fourth, is a question which is at once more difficult and more easy to answer than we might have thought beforehand.

It is in one sense extremely difficult.

The popular, the actual belief of a generation or society of men cannot always be ascertained from the contemporary writers, who belong for the most part to another stratum. The belief of the people of England at this moment is something separate from the books, the newspapers, the watchwords of parties. It is in the air. It is in their intimate conversation. We must hear, especially in the case of the simple and unlearned, what they talk of to each other. We must sit by their bedsides; get at what gives them most consolation, what most occupies their last moments. This, whatever it be, is the belief of the people, right or wrong—this, and this only, is their real religion. A celebrated Roman Catholic divine of the present day has described, in a few short sentences, what he conceives to be the religious creed of the people of England: that it consists of a general belief in Providence and in a future life. He is probably right. But it is something quite apart from any formal creeds or confessions or watchwords which exist. Is it possible to ascertain this concerning the early Christians? The books of that period are few and far between, and

these books are, for the most part, the works of learned scholars rather than of popular writers. Can we apart from such books discover what was their most ready and constant representation of their dearest hopes here and hereafter? Strange to say, after all this lapse of time it is possible. The answer, at any rate, for that large mass of Christians from all parts of the empire that was collected in the capital, is to be found in the Roman Catacombs.

It is not necessary to enter upon the formation of the Catacombs. For a general view it may be sufficient to refer to "On Pagan and Christian Sepulture," The Catain the "Essays" of Dean Milman. For the combs. details of the question it is more than sufficient to refer to the great work of Commendatore De Rossi. It has been amply proved by the investigations of the last two hundred, and especially of the last thirty years, that there were in the neighborhood of Rome, from the first begining of the settlement of the Jews in the city, large galleries dug in the rock, which they used for their places of burial. The Christians, following the example of the Jews, did the same on a larger scale. In these galleries they wrote on the graves of their friends the thoughts that were most consoling to themselves, or painted on the walls the figures which gave them most pleasure. By a singular chance these memorials have been preserved to us by the very causes which have destroyed so much beside. The Catacombs were deserted at the time of the invasion of the barbarians, and filled up with ruins and rubbish; and from the sixth to the seventeenth century no one thought it worth while to explore them. The burial of Christian antiquity was as complete as that of Pagan antiquity, and the resurrection of both took place nearly at the same time. The desertion, the overthrow of these ancient galleries, has been to the Christian life

of that time what the overthrow of Pompeii by the ashes of Vesuvius was to the Pagan life of the period immediately antecedent. The Catacombs are the Pompeii of early Christianity. It is much to the credit of the authorities of the Roman States that at the time when the excavations began they allowed these monuments to speak for themselves. Many questionable interpretations have been put upon them, but in no respect has there been substantiated any charge of wilful falsification.

We confine ourselves to the simple statement of the testimony which they render to the belief of the second and third centuries. For this reason, we exclude from consideration almost, if not altogether, those subsequent to the age of Constantine. We merely state the facts as they occur; and if the results be pleasing or displeasing to the members of this or that school of modern religious opinion, perhaps it will be a sufficient safeguard that they will be almost equally pleasing or displeasing to the members of all such schools equally.

I. First, what do we learn of the state of feeling indicated in the very structure of the Catacombs beyond what any books could teach us?

The Catacombs are the standing monuments of the Oriental and Jewish character even of Western ChrisTheir Jewish tianity. The fact that they are the counterparts character. of the rock-hewn tombs of Palestine, and yet more closely of the Jewish cemeteries in the neighborhood of Rome, corresponds to the fact that the early Roman Church was not a Latin but an Eastern community, speaking Greek, and following the usages of Syria. And again, the ease with which the Roman Christians had recourse to these cemeteries is an indication of the impar

The toleration of the early Christians.

tiality of the Roman law, which extended (as. De Rossi has well pointed out) to this despised sect the same protection in respect to burial, even during the times of persecution, that was accorded

to the highest in the land. They thus bear witness to the unconscious fostering care of the Imperial Government over the infant Church. They are thus monuments, not so much of the persecution as of the toleration, which the Christians received at the hands of the Roman Empire.

These two circumstances, confirmed as they are from various quarters, are, as it were, the framework in which the ideas of the Church of the Catacombs are enshrined, and yet they are quite unknown to the common ecclesiastical histories.

3. A similar profound ignorance shrouded the existence of the Catacombs themselves. There are no allusions to the Catacombs in Gibbon, or Mosheim, or Neander; nor, in fact, in any ecclesiastical history, down to the close of the first quarter of this century. Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" was the earliest exception. Nor again is there any allusion in the Fathers to their most striking characteristics. St. Jerome's narrative of being taken into them as a child is simply a description of the horror they inspired. Prudentius has a passing allusion to the paintings, but nothing that gives a notion of their extent and importance.

II. We now proceed to the beliefs themselves, as presented in the pictures or inscriptions, confining ourselves as much as possible to those which are earliest The pictures. and most universal. But before entering on

these, let us glance for a moment at those which, though belonging to the latest years of this period- the close of the third century—yet still illustrate the general character even of the earlier. The subjects of these paintings are for the most part taken from the Bible, and are as follows In the New Testament they are the Adoration of the Magi, the Feeding of the Disciples, Zacchæus in the Sycamore, the Healing of the Paralytic, the Raising of Lazarus, the Washing of Pilate's Hands,1 Peter's

:

1 Tertullian (On the Lord's Prayer, c. 13) censures strongly the practice of

Denial, the Seizure of Peter by the Jews. In the Old Testament they are the Creation, the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Stag desiring the Water Brooks, the Striking of the Rock, Jonah and the Whale, Jonah under the Gourd, Daniel in the Lions' Den, the Three Children in the Fire, Susanna and the Elders.

in the East

in the West

On this selection we will make three general remarks. 1. Whilst it does not coincide with the theology and the art of the modern Western Church, it coincides to a certain degree with the selection that we find in the Eastern Continuance Church. The Raising of Lazarus, for example, ern, neglect fell completely out of the range of the Italian ern Church. painters and out of the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages; but it may still be traced in the Byzantine traditions as preserved in Russia. In one of the most ancient chapels of the Kremlin there is a representation of the mummy-like form of Lazarus issuing from his tomb, exactly similar to that which appears in the Roman Catacombs. The Three Children, who cease to occupy any important place in the Latin Church, are repeatedly brought forward in the Eastern Church. Three choristers stand in front of the altar at a particular part of the service to represent them, and the only attempt at a mystery or miracle play in the Middle Ages of Russia was the erection of a large wooden platform with the painted appearance of fire underneath, on which three actors stood forth and played by gesture and song the part of the Three Children.

Contradic

tion of

2. Secondly, the mere fact of paintings at all in these early chapels is in direct contradiction to the theological general condemnation of any painting of sacred subjects in the writers 1 of the first centuries. washing hands before prayer, and says that on inquiry he found it was in imitation of Pilate's act.

writers

1 See the summary of opinions of the Fathers on art in the English transla. tion of Tertullian in the Library of the Fathers. (Notes to the Apology, vol ii. p. 110.)