CHAPTER III



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) 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.

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.

Thee 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.

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, U lpii, 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 Pons 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 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
lvfemento ... 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
weighter 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."

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.

Rome painted by
Alberto Pisa

Author: Alberto Pisa, Text by M.A.R. Tuker
Editor:Adam Charles Black
Published: 1905