Catafalque

“ Meanwhile, Nanteuil, with dry eyes and pursed lips, had fixed her eyes upon the black cloth with which the catafalque was covered, and was impatiently waiting until enough holy water, candles and Latin prayers should be bestowed upon the dead man for him to depart in peace. She had [Pg 145] seen him again the night before, and she thought he had returned because the priests had not yet bidden him to rest in peace. Then, reflecting that one day she, too, would die, and would, like him, be laid in a coffin, beneath a black pall, she shuddered with horror and closed her eyes. ”

“ Time has scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the dead. ”

“ CHAPTER III. CHRISTIAN LIFE AND CHARACTER AS READ IN THE CATACOMBS. The inscriptions of the Catacombs give us many interesting indications of the social position, domestic relations, and general character of the primitive Christians, as well as of their religious belief. They lift the veil of ages from the buried past and cause it to live again, lit up with a thousand natural touches which we seek in vain from books. They bridge the gulf of time, and make us in a sense contemporaries of the early church. ”

“ In the city above the Christian religion had been increasing for successive generations, and during all this time the dead had been coming here in ever-increasing numbers, so that now the Catacombs formed a vast city of the dead, whose silent population slumbered in endless ranges, rank above rank, waiting till
"The wakeful trump of doom should thunder through the deep." ”

“ CHAPTER III. THE DISUSE AND ABANDONMENT OF THE CATACOMBS. From the period of the Edict of Milan, A. D. 313, a new era opens in the history of the Catacombs. Christianity, emerging from those gloomy recesses where she had so long hidden in darkness, walked boldly in the light of day. She laid aside her lowly garb, put on the trappings of imperial state, and at length, unhappily, exchanged her primitive simplicity for worldly power and splendour. But therein was her danger. The shadow of that power shed a upas influence over the church. ”

“ It is a fascinating task to spell out the sculptured legends of the Catacombs—the vast graveyard of the primitive church, which seems to give up its dead at our questioning, to bear witness concerning the faith and hope of the Golden Age of Christianity. ”

“ But we feel that all the kingdoms of the world, and all the glory of them, were a poor compensation for the loss of the primitive simplicity, purity, and spiritual power of the humble service of the Catacombs. We turn away from the gorgeous ritual and hollow pomp to those lowly crypts where the Christian hymn of a persecuted remnant of the saints ascended from beside the martyr’s grave, as the truer type of Christ’s spiritual temple upon earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ About two miles down the Appian Way, near the tomb of Caecilia Metella, the large round tower, you know, bodies have frequently been discovered. It is conjectured that these are the bodies of the Christians which have been obtained from the amphitheater and carried away for burial. On the approach of the guards, the Christians have dropped the bodies and fled. But, after all, this gives no assistance, for after you enter the Catacombs you are no nearer your aim than before. No human being can penetrate that infinite labyrinth without assistance from those who live there. ”

“ This is the theme, Christ’s resurrection, and that of the church in his person, on which, in their peculiar language, the artists of the Catacombs seem never weary of expatiating; death swallowed [Pg 333] up in victory, and the victor crowned with the amaranth wreath of immortality, is a vision ever before their eyes, with a vividness of anticipation which we, who have been born to this belief, can but feebly realize. ”

“ On the following day he went with the messenger to the Catacombs. There he saw the Christian community, and beheld the place of their abode. But from the previous accounts of his friend he had gained a clear idea of their life, their sufferings, and their afflictions.
Again the mournful wail arose in the dim vaults and echoed along the arched passage ways, that wail that spoke of a new brother committed to the grave; but the grief that spoke of mortal sorrow was succeeded by a loftier strain that expressed the faith of the aspiring soul, and a hope full of immortality. ”

“ But the life which she had led in the Catacombs, the alternating hope and fear, joy and sorrow, the ever present anxiety, and the oppressive air of the place itself, had overcome both mind and body. Her delicate nature sank beneath the fury of such an ordeal, and this last heavy blow completed her prostration. She could not rally from its effects.
That night they watched around her couch. Every hour she grew feebler, and life was slowly but surely passing away. From that descent unto death not even the restoration of her son could have saved her. ”

“ There is something in the air of a burial place which is unlike that of any other place. It is not altogether the closeness, or the damp, or the sickening smell of earth, but a certain subtle influence which unites with them and intensifies them. The spell of the dead is there, and it rests alike on mind and body. Such was the air of the catacombs. Cold and damp, it struck upon the visitor like the chill atmosphere from the realms of death. The living felt the mysterious power of the dead.
The boy Pollio went on before and Marcellus followed after. ”

“ I checked myself with a jerk after the lapse of a thousand and odd years in the midst of the times of persecution.
I hate persecution.
I found myself deposited, with all my Anglican principles and prejudices, in the city of Rome.
I should have preferred Jericho.
Suddenly I discovered myself standing candle in hand in the gloom of a Catacomb.
The ventilation of the catacombs is most imperfect, and the close proximity of the dead to the [Pg 6] living must be prejudicial to health, it should be made a matter of investigation by the sanitary commissioners. ”

“ The walls carry down to later ages the words of grief, of lamentation, and of ever-changing feeling which were marked upon them during successive ages by those who were banished to these Catacombs. They carry down their mournful story to future times, and bring to imagination the forms, the feelings and the deeds of those who were imprisoned here. As the forms of life are taken upon the plates of the camera, so has the great voice once forced out by suffering from the very soul of the martyr become stamped upon the wall. ”

“ Here death reigns supreme. Not even so much as a lizard or a bat has penetrated these obscure recesses. Nought but skulls and skeletons, dust and ashes, are on every side. The air is impure and deadly, and difficult to breathe. “The cursed dew of the dungeon’s damp” distills from the walls, and a sense of oppression, like the patriarch’s “horror of great darkness,” broods over the scene.
Fig. 15.—Section of Cubicula with Luminare.
The Catacombs were ventilated and partially lighted by numerous openings variously called spiragli, or breathing-holes, and luminari, or light-holes. ”

“ Those who have seen the Catacombs themselves will call to mind others of which we have not spoken, but we think their meaning is generally obvious so as to need no explanation. We will name one class only of these paintings; those in which our Lord and His Blessed Mother appear. Our readers will hardly expect to find anything that pretends to be a portrait of either one or the other. We have seen that the disposition in primitive Christian art was to represent facts rather than persons, and the mystery which the facts signified rather than the facts themselves. ”

“ The youngest born into the kingdom puts our faith to shame. Let us look to the joy set before us. 'For we know that if this earthly tabernacle be destroyed we have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.'"
"Death comes nearer," he continued, "our enemies encircle us, and the circle grows narrower. Let us die like Christians--"
"Why these gloomy forebodings?" said Marcellus. "Is death nearer to us than it was before? Are we not safe in the Catacombs?" ”

“ Who is afraid to risk his life now? There will never cease to be a supply of food so long as we live in the Catacombs. If we escape pursuit we bring help to our brethren; if we die we receive the crown of martyrdom."
"You are right, Marcellus. Your faith puts my fear to shame. How can those who live in the Catacombs be afraid of death? It is but a momentary gloom and it will pass. But this day we have heard much to distress our hearts and fill our spirits with dismay."
"Alas," continued Honorius in a mournful voice, "how are the people scattered and the Churches left desolate! ”

“ The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are among the cheerfulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and martyrs. ”

“ The other sort of Authors give indeed a mighty Idea of the Catacombs, represent them as a work of that vastness, that the Christians in the persecuting times had not number enough to carry it on; but then most undevisedly with the same breath they confound them with the Puticuli in Festus Pempeius, where, at the same time that the Anicent Romans us'd to burn the Bodies of their dead, the custom was, to avoid expence, to throw those of the Slaves to rot. ”

“ Meetings for prayer and praise were frequent throughout the Catacombs. Cut off from ordinary occupations of worldly business, they were thrown entirely upon other and higher pursuits. Deprived of the opportunity to make efforts for the support of the body, they were forced to make their chief business the care of the soul. They gained what they sought. Earth with its cares, its allurements, and its thousand attractions, lost its hold upon them. ”

“ The healing of the paralytic has been regarded as a type of the restoration of the soul paralyzed by sin. Ingenious Romanists have discovered herein a symbol of [Pg 326] “the Sacrament of Penance,” and also of “Baptism and the Remission of Sins.” In the frescoes of the Catacombs the man is represented in the act of obeying the command, “Take up thy bed and walk.” Sometimes the bed is a mere reticulated frame-work. It is also shown as in the foregoing example from the Catacomb of Callixtus. See Fig. ”

“ Haste we now towards the catastrophe of my tale—I say Catastrophe (cries Slawkenbergius) inasmuch as a tale, with parts rightly disposed, not only rejoiceth (gaudet) in the Catastrophe and Peripeitia of a Drama, but rejoiceth moreover in all the essential and integrant parts of it—it has its Protasis, Epistasis, Catastasis, its Catastrophe or Peripeitia growing one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle first planted them—without which a tale had better never be told at all, says Slawkenbergius, but be kept to a man's self. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Nor must we look for order in the Apocalypse; but we must follow the meaning of those things which are prophesied. Therefore in the trumpets and phials is signified either the desolation of the plagues that are sent upon the earth, or the madness of Antichrist himself, or the cutting off of the peoples, or the diversity of the plagues, or the hope in the kingdom of the saints, or the ruin of states, or the great overthrow of Babylon, that is, the Roman state. ”

“ In the church of the Catacombs these images of sadness and gloom have no place. All is bright, cheerful, and hope-inspiring. In the following chapter we shall see that these characteristics are strikingly manifested in all the representations of Our Lord that there occur.
Note.—We have made no reference in the foregoing remarks to the pre-Christian crosses, of which so many examples occur. ”

“ 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. ”