Roman catacombs

“ The Christian Rome underground is a rebuke to the Papal Rome above it; and, from the worldly pomp, the tedious forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. ”

“ For two centuries,--from the thirteenth to the fifteenth,--scarcely any mention of them is to be found. Petrarch, in his many letters about Rome, dwells often on the sacredness of the soil within the city, in whose crypts and churches so many saints and martyrs lie buried, but hardly refers to the catacombs themselves, and never in such a way as to show that they were an object of interest to him, though a lover of all Roman relics and a faithful worshipper of the saints. ”

“ And truly, if all these monuments had been preserved and gathered together into one place, or, better still, had all been left in their original places, they would have formed an invaluable and inexhaustible library for the Christian archæologist. This, however, has not been their lot. Hundreds and thousands of them have been destroyed by those [109] who have broken into the Catacombs from time to time during the last thousand years, and drawn from them materials for building. ”

“ In all these parts of the world, writers in books, poets in hymns, preachers in sermons, artists in painting, the very masons themselves on gravestones, made use of it without a word of explanation, in a way that would utterly mystify any modern Christian community. Who would now dream of carving or painting a fish upon a gravestone in a Christian churchyard? yet scores of graves in the Catacombs were so marked, and some of them with hardly a word or an emblem upon them besides. ”

“ The interest in the investigations has become more general, and no visit to Rome is now complete without a visit to one at least of the catacombs. Strangely enough, however, the Romans themselves, for the most part, feel less concern in these new revelations of their underground city than the strangers who come from year to year to make their pilgrimages to Rome. It is an old complaint, that the Romans care little for their city. "Who are there to-day," says Petrarch, in one of his letters, "more ignorant of Roman things than the Roman citizens? ”

“ And nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome itself." It is, however, to the Cavaliere de Rossi, himself a Roman, that the most important of these discoveries are due,--the result of his marvellous learning and sagacity, and of his hard-working and unwearied energy. The discovery of the ancient entrance to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, and of the chapel within, where St. Cecilia was originally buried, is a piece of the very romance of Archaeology. ”

“ In the service of the Roman Church used at the removal of the bodies of the holy martyrs from their graves in the catacombs is a prayer in which are the words,--"Thou hast set the bodies of thy soldiers as guards around the walls of this thy beloved Jerusalem";--and as one passes from catacomb to catacomb, it is, indeed, as if he passed from station to station of the encircling camp of the great army of the martyrs. Leaving the burial-place of St. Agnes, we continue along the Nomentan Way to the seventh milestone from Rome. ”

“ During their stay in Rome the brother (Hippolytus) renounced idolatry, and became a convert to the Christian faith, whereupon he devoted himself to the laborious and heroic work of a fossor. This probably happened during an interval when the Catacombs were under the ban of the Government, for we read that the scene of his labours was an arenarium or sandpit, and that he lived as well as worked in it. Certainly, the conditions of life would have been much more tolerable in a sandpit than in a proper Catacomb ”

“ The worship of the saints began to take form, at first, in simple, natural, and pious ways, in the fourth century; and as it grew stronger and stronger with the continually increasing predominance of the material element in the Roman Church, so the catacombs, the burial-places of the saints, were more and more visited by those who desired the protection or the intercession of their occupants. ”

“ J. Spencer Northcote, called _The Roman Catacombs, or some Account of the Burial-Places of the Early Christians in Rome_: London, 1857. It is the best accessible manual in English,--the only one with any claims to accuracy, and which contains the results of recent investigations. Mr. Northcote is one of the learned band of converts from Oxford to Rome. A Protestant may question some of the conclusions in his book, but not its general fairness. Our own first introduction to the catacombs, in the winter of 1856, was under Mr. ”

“ By and by, in proportion as the Catacombs were more explored, and it became possible to compare the paintings of one cemetery with those of another, and all of them with the paintings of Pompeii, the baths of Titus, the tomb of the Nasones, and other newly-recovered Pagan monuments whose ages were known, Catholic writers began to assume a bolder tone, and to claim a greater [62] antiquity for the Christian use of painting than they had done before. ”

“ The Huns, the Goths, the Lombards, and, later, the Normans and Saracens, were rivals in spoliation and destruction.
During the intervals of peace the Roman pontiffs endeavoured to restore the Catacombs and re-adorn the martyr shrines, which were still the objects of pious veneration. They were also used during the barbarian invasions, as during the pagan persecutions, as places of refuge. Boniface I., having been for some time concealed in the Catacomb of Felicitas, afterwards elaborately ornamented it. Symmachus and Vigilius were also especially diligent in their care for the Catacombs. ”

“ It is of importance, however, as enabling us to trace the development of religious error, and the introduction of unorthodox additions to Christian belief, and as showing the slow progress toward image worship. It demonstrates the non-apostolicity of certain Romish doctrines, the beginning of which can be here detected. It utters its voiceless protest against certain others which are sought for in vain in the places where, according to the Roman theory, they should certainly be found. Where still employed in the Catacombs, art shared the corruption and degradation above described. ”

“ The devotion of Pope Damasus to the Catacombs was as intelligent as it was ardent. He longed, as he himself tells us, to be buried in them, in a chamber where many of his martyred predecessors and other saints already lay; but he respected too much the integrity of their tombs, and prepared his place of burial therefore elsewhere. He built a place for the purpose aboveground, in which himself, his mother, and sister, were all buried. It would have been a happy thing for Christian archæology if others had been equally scrupulous ”

“ We have descriptions of other relics of the same kind from the Roman Catacombs,—such as a marble slab bearing upon it the mark of the sole of a foot, with the words "In Deo" incised upon it at the one end, and at the other an inscription in Greek meaning "Januaria in God"; and a slab with a pair of footprints carved on it covered with sandals, well executed, which was placed by a devoted husband over the loculus or tomb of his wife. Impressions of feet shod with shoes or sandals are much rarer than those of bare feet ”

“ In like manner, we think our readers would justly complain if we bade them take leave of the Catacombs without saying a word about their epitaphs. And if the study of any considerable number of epitaphs anywhere is pretty sure to be rewarded by the discovery of something more or less interesting, how much more have we not a right to expect from the monuments of Roman Christianity during a period of three or four hundred years! ”

“ We only mention here that, of course, there are such paintings, as it was not to be expected that the Christians would cease to decorate the places in which the relics of the martyrs still lay; but they are few in number as compared with the great mass of paintings throughout the Catacombs, and they are also so totally unlike those of the præ-Constantinian era, that it would be impossible for any intelligent person to mistake the one for the other. ”

“ These are, (1) the Cemetery of Priscilla, excavated, according to an ancient tradition, in the property of the Roman Senator Pudens, mentioned by St. Paul, and in which, it is said, were interred his daughters Pudentiana and Praxides; (2) the Catacomb of Domitilla, the grandniece of the Emperor Domitian, in which she herself was buried, together with her chamberlains Nereus and Achilles, who were beheaded for their steadfastness in the Christian faith; (3) the Crypt of Lucina, afterwards part of the Catacomb of Callixtus, in which some of the most ancient inscriptions have been found. ”

“ This solemn tragedy they felt to be the theme of devout and prayerful meditation rather than of portraiture in art. Hence we find no pictures of the agony and bloody sweat, the mocking and the shame, the death and burial of Our Lord. “The Catacombs of Rome,” says Milman, “faithful to their general character, offer no instance of a crucifixion, nor does any allusion to such a subject of art occur in any early writing.” [458] “The passion is not [Pg 274] represented literally,” says Dr. Northcote, a strenuous advocate of Roman Catholic views, “but under the veil of secresy. ”

“ The visitor to the Catacombs may see them painted, in a different colour from the rest, in the copy of the epitaph which De Rossi has caused to be affixed to the wall; and he will observe that amongst them are [153] some letters which are wanting in the more ancient copy transcribed on the reverse of Caracalla’s monument. It is clear that the original must have been broken in pieces, by the Lombards or other ancient plunderers of the Catacombs, and that the copy which we now see is one of the restorations by Pope Vigilus or some other Pontiff about that time (page 47) . ”

“ It may not be often possible to trace as clearly as we have just done in a single instance, the logical order and dependence of the several subjects that were selected for representation in each chamber of the Catacombs; they may not always have been so admirably arranged as to be in fact equivalent, as these were, to a well-ordered dogmatic discourse. Nevertheless it is only when read in this way, that the decoration of the Catacombs can be made thoroughly intelligible ”

“ Fig. 111.—A Reputed Symbol of Martyrdom.
In the Vatican Museum are certain truculent-looking objects, said by the Roman custodians to be instruments of torture taken from the graves of the martyrs. [632] But the locality in which they were found is seldom recorded, which deprives them of much of their historic value; and many of them are probably fictitious. Dr. Northcote admits that they are often “of doubtful authenticity,” and that “many look more like domestic utensils, and seem to be of Etruscan workmanship.” “These,” he adds, “were probably never taken from the Catacombs at all.” ”

“ Accordingly, at the very outbreak of the Decian slaughter, the venerable Fabian, head of the Roman church, perished by decapitation; and the Catacombs were glutted with a host of unknown martyrs. In the very chamber in the Cemetery of Callixtus to which his mutilated corpse was borne, may still be seen the Bishop’s epitaph—ΦΑΒΙΑΝΟΣ · ΕΠΙ—with the monogram of his martyrdom, the conjoined letters ΜΤΡ, added probably by a later hand. The church seemed [Pg 83] paralyzed with fear, and for sixteen months no successor was elected. ”

“ It may be used in two senses. When first the Catacombs were made, and as long as the true history of their origin and gradual development was remembered, “the Cemetery of Callixtus” was only a small and well-defined area, measuring 250 Roman feet by 100, and situated on a little cross-road which united the Via Appia with the Via Ardeatina. But as time went on, other areæ were joined to this, until at length a vast and intricate subterranean necropolis was formed, measuring several hundred feet both in length and breadth ”

“ And hence, in the Catacombs, a singular variety of objects have been found. Stone weights, therefore, may have been put into the graves of Christians, not as instruments of suffering but as objects typical of the occupation of the departed in this life, in accordance with the habit of their pagan forefathers, which the Roman Christians had adopted. Some, however, of the stones, as I have said, may have been used according to the popular legend for the drowning of martyrs ”

“ More than two centuries had now elapsed since the Catacombs were begun, and they had attained a [32] degree of development far beyond anything that could have been anticipated. Divers modifications also had been gradually introduced in the execution of the work, and of these it will be worth while to give some account. We will take the cemetery of St. Callixtus as a specimen ”

“ The instances are numerous in which pictures of the highest interest have been thus ruthlessly defaced. No sacredness of subject could resist the force of the superstition; and we remember one instance where, in a picture of which the part that remains is of peculiar interest, the body of the Good Shepherd has been cut through for the grave of a child,--so that only the feet and a part of the head of the figure remain.
There is little reason for supposing, as has frequently been done, that the catacombs, even in times of persecution, afforded shelter to any large body of the faithful. ”