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| Monumental Christianity; or, The art and symbolism of the primitive church. CHAPTER II - CHAPTER 11. STRUCTURE OF THE CATACOMB& |
Page 2 of 5 CHAPTER 11. STRUCTURE OF THE CATACOMB& The Structure of the Roman Catacombs, and their Monuments as evidences of the Truth of Christianity. — Authorities : • Bosio, Boldetti, Agincourt, and De Rossi. — What the Catacombs reveal of the Primitive Faith and Practice of Christians. — An independent Record of Truth. AS Rome was the centre of the world's civilization at the rise of Christianity, so through Apostolic labor and self-sacrifice it became in due time the centre of Christianity itself, at least for all the West. The monuments of the Catacombs there, and of those at Naples, and in the south of France, consisting of paintings and sculptured sarcophagi, and funeral tablets, contain a record of early Christian belief and practice, quite independent of the Scripture records, yet in strict agree- ment with them. I am inclined to think that the earliest and best of these paint- ings and sarcophagi were made before the Canon of the New Testament writings was formed, as we now have it. For the Rev. F. B. Westcott says, ** It is impossi- ble to point to any period as marking the date at which our present Canon was de- termined. When it first appears, it is presented not as a novelty, but as an ancient tradition. Its limits were fixed in the earliest times by use rather than by criti- cism ; and this use itself was based on immediate knowledge.** ' The consensus of the churches, not the private opinion or judgment of individuals, was the court of appeal as to the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament writings, then as now. The tradition was the keeping and guardianship of the oral teaching of Christ and His Apostles until that teaching was committed to writing, just as the Apostles* Creed was ; and I am greatly mistaken, if this Creed was not the test and the touchstone of all Canonical Scripture as distinguished from apocryphal gospels, and other spurious writings. Be this as it may, the ancient and original * General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament ^ p. 537. London, 1855. .^o Monumental Christianity. tradition of Christian verity must have been that which the first Christian artists followed, under the authority of the Church, in their symbolism of the Catacombs, For Christ Himself wrote no book of the Gospel : He simply taught it orally, and His Apostles and Evangelists recorded that teaching, together with the events of His life. And so it was a doctrine and a life which were confided to the symbols of early Christian art, just as they were confided to books. And one is just as good evidence of Christian truth as the other. There were no printing presses in those days to multiply books as now : and an original manuscript of any portion of the New Testament was the precious legacy of some particular church, copies of which would be in the hands of the clergy alone. And so the people at large must de- pend for instruction on oral teaching and the symbols of Christian art. Why the appeal to these symbols has not been more extensively made for the truth of Scrip- ture, in modern systems of evidence, I do not know. Can it be that the Roman archaeologists are not trustworthy in their representations? No; for they give us facts and things directly at variance with more modern Roman notions, doctrines, and practices. Have these monuments all been tampered with, retouched and altered? When? and by whom? Again, no; for the reason that none of the earlier of them teaches any other than the old doctrines and sacraments of Scripture, and of the primitive fathers of the church. Even Mr. J. H. Parker, with his calcium lights and photographs, and the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt, with his doubts as to the genuineness of a certain famous Callixtine fresco, can not shake my faith in De Rossi and his magnificent books, especially as I am in company with Dean Milman, and Dr. Burgon, and C. Hemans, who believe in him and his labors most implicitly, and who, like myself, studied the monuments on the spot, but who do not accept all De Rossi's inferences and conclusions. Facts are one thing, and opin- ions about them another ; and we may certainly accept the facts which the Roman archaeologists give us, without committing ourselves to their opinions about them. Maitland, Milman, Hemans, Burgon, Bishop Kip, and Withrow have given us, in part, the Protestant view of the Catacombs and their monuments ; while Rock, Wiseman, Northcote, and Melia. have given the Romish view. And all these writers in English — there are others in French and Italian — are more or less controversial, or touch upon those points of doctrine and practice only as are in dispute between Protestantism and Romanism. My effort will be to appeal to these monuments solely in the interest of all Christian truth as embodied in the creeds against infidelity, atheism, scepticism, and error, avoiding controversy as much as possible. I wish to ascer- tain what the early Christians at Rome, nearest the times of Christ and His apos- tles, believed ; how they lived and worshipped ; what were their faith, hope, and charity. And I think that we shall be able to discover a simple and very positive Structure of the Catacombs. 3 1 faith and worship ; and above all, a pure social and private life in strange contrast with the prevalent social and private life of paganism. And to preserve this pure faith and life, we shall also find a compact and well-ordered church system, just as fresh from Apostolic hands as the faith itself, and the life of Christian hope and charity practiced among its members. These Catacombs, to the number of forty and two, running in all directions under the Roman Campagna along the Appian Way, chiefly, whose aggregate of miles is from 350 to 8co or 900, are just as much the witnesses of the faith and practice of early Christianity, as the monuments of Egypt, Etruria, and Babylonia, are of pagan beliefs and modes of life and worship. When Volney says, ** I will inquire of the monuments of antiquity what was the wisdom of former ages; in the very bosom of the sepulchres, I will invoke the Spirit that formerly in Asia gave splendor to states and glory to their people," he is giving to the Christian archaeolo- gist a two-edged sword with which to smite his opposition to Christ and His church and all other like hostility ; for he says again, " There are absolutely no other mon- uments of the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being, than a passage in Josephus, {Ant, Jud. Book 18, c. 3,) a single phrase, in Tacitus, {Annals^ Book 15, c. 44,) and the Gospels."* We shall make our appeal to numerors monuments of Christianity and see. We shall invoke from the sepulchres ** the Spirit that has given splendor to modern states, and glory to their people/* We shall see that modern art, and civilization, and jurisprudence were all shaped and adorned by the patient and pure spirit that excavated and painted the Christian Catacombs at Rome. In fact, we shall see an entirely new kind of civilization springing up in the very centre of debauched and worn-out paganism, and challenging our admira- tion because of its purity and heroism. And we shall obtain abundant evidence of the truth of Christianity and the life of Christ, in all the most minute details. Prof George Rawlinson states the argument fairly when he says of the early documents of Christianity, " Till recently these have been generally regarded as presenting the whole existing proof of the faith and practice of the early Church ; and sceptics have therefore been eager to throw every possible doubt upon them, and to maintain that forgery and interpolation have so vitiated this source of knowl- edge as to render it altogether untrustworthy. The efforts made, weak and con- temptible as they are felt to be by scholars and critics, have nevertheless had a certain influence over the general tone of thought on the subject, and have caused many to regard the infancy of Christianity as a dim and shadowy cloud-land, in which nothing is to be seen, except a few figures of bishops and martyrs moving ' Ruins, pp. 14 and 122-3, "ote. London, 1827. 32 Monumental Christianity. uncertainly amid the general darkness. Under these circumstances, it is well that attention be called — as it has been called recently by several publications of greater or less research — to the monumental remains of early Christian times, stili extant, and which take us back in the most lively way to the first ages of the Church, exhibit- ing before our eyes those primitive communities which Apostles founded, over which Apostolic men presided, and in which confessors and martyrs were almost as numer- ous as ordinary Christians. As when we tread the streets of Pompeii we have the life of the old pagan world brought before us with a vividness which makes all other representations appear dull and tame, so when we descend into the Catacombs at Rome we seem to see the struggling, persecuted community, which there * in dens and caves of the earth,* (Heb. xi. 38,) wrought itself a hidden home, whence it went forth at last conquering and to conquer, triumphantly establishing itself on the ruins of the old religion, and bending its heathen persecutors to the yoke of Christ. Time was when the guiding spirits of our Church not only neglected the study of these precious remnants of an antiquity which ought to be dearer to us than that of Greece or pagan Rome, of Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon, but even ven- tured to speak of them with contempt, as the recent creations of Papal forgers, who had placed among the arenaricB or sandpits of heathen times, the pretended me- morials of saints who were never born, and of martyrs who never suffered. But, with increased learning and improved candor, modern Anglicanism has renounced this shallow and untenable theory ; and it is at length admitted universally, alike by the Protestant and Romanist, that the Catacombs themselves, their present contents, and the series of inscriptions which have been taken from them, and placed in the Papal galleries, are genuine remains of Christian antiquity, and exhibit to us — im- perfectly, no doubt, but so far as their evidence extends, truly — the condition and belief of the Church of Christ in the first ages." ' It was no less a personage than Bishop Burnet, perhaps not the wisest man in the world, who is referred to by Prof. Rawlinson as speaking so disparagingly of the Roman and Neapolitan Catacombs, when as yet they had been only explored by the indefatigable Bosio, whose magnificent work on the Roman Catacombs, still the first and best authority, was published in 1632. Bishop Burnet travelled in Italy in 1685, and wrote some letters to a friend (T. H. R. B.) which were published at Rotterdam in i686. His opinions of the Roman Catacombs are all that now concern us, as specimens of a Protestant zeal greater than his discretion, and as mere curiosities in the light of modern research and knowledge of the subject ; and they are to this effect, viz. : (i.) That the Catacombs can not be supposed to have > Bampton Lectures, 2d Ed. VIII. pp. 221-3. London, i86a Structure of the Catacombs. 33 been the work of the primitive Christians, and nothing seems more evident than that they were the common burying-places of the ancient heathens. (2.) His reasons for so thinking are that the Catacombs, at least the only two that he visited, viz., St. Sebastian and St. Agnes, were outside of the city, according to the laws of the Twelve Tables, which forbade all interments within the walls, just as if Chris- tians could not obey these laws as well as pagans ; " that in those days when they had not the use of the needle, they could not know which way they carried on those works when they were so far engaged underground as to lose themselves," — just as if pagans would not need the compass as much as Christians ; " that the mountains of rubbish thrown out would betray the Christians to their enemies," — when indeed very little was thrown out, but placed in the empty sand-pits close by, or in galleries already occupied with dead bodies ; ** that the stench arising from the putrefaction of the bodies would make assemblies there for worship impossible," — when all graves were hermetically sealed, and the bodies embalmed, and the lumin- aries gave sufficient light and ventilation, at least in the cubicula^ or chapels ; "and that the number of Christians at Rome was insufficient for such a gigantic work," — when the fact is that the Catacombs were the work of three or four centuries on the part of those swarms of Christians of whom Tertullian speaks, and who took . possession of the Roman empire under Constantine. The Bishop says, " I am as little subject to vapors as most men, yet I had all the day long after I was in them, which was not near an hour, a confusion and as it were a boiling in my head, that disordered me extremely ; " and this " inexhaustible magazine of bones, which by all appearance are no other than the bones of the pagan Romans, supplies the- Papacy with relics which are now sent over the world to feed a superstition that is as blind as it proves expensive." * Half an hour for a knowledge of the Cata- combs 1 Perhaps it was the Papacy itself that made his head boil. But Bishop Burnet was not alone in his low estimate of the Catacombs. Maximilian Mission, a gentleman of great reading and general knowledge, who, with the Duke of Ormond's grandson, and other noblemen, travelled in Europe in the years 1687-8, thus gives his opinion of the Roman Catacombs: " I am apt to believe there is no place in the world that can compare with Rome for subterra- neous passages ; and though the earth has stopped up the entrances of some, yet there is still left a prodigious number of caves, generally known by the name of Catacombs among modern authors, though they can not well support the etymolo- gies they produce. These Catacombs are not single vaults, but rather whole sub- terraneous cities, with turnings and windings like streets, as, for instance, those of St ' Letters^ pp. 201-2x3. 34 Monumental Christianity. Agnes or St. Sebastian. They are dug out from among the rocks, each passage being commonly betwixt fifteen and eighteen feet wide, and twelve or fifteen feet high. The graves are hollow niches one above another in rows, where the dead are deposited without coffins. We saw one of these niches opened, where we found a skeleton mouldered away to whitish ashes. The Roman Catholics have taken great pains to persuade the world that these subterraneous vaults were dug by the Chris- tians in primitive times to bury their dead in, with the exclusion of all Pagans ; that they used to perform their religious worship in them during the times of per- secution ; and that consequently they contain an inexhaustible store of relics of saints and martyrs interred in them."* Mission does not believe this, and goes or to argue its impossibility from such considerations as these, viz., Horace's couplet as to the Puteculiy or public burying-places of the poor, which exactly applies to the Catacombs ; heathen inscriptions found in them which the Christians would not use ; the glass vessels and vases are pagan ; and the difficulty of digging such vast passages without discovery, and the impossibility of disposing of the materials dug. When Christian symbols and inscriptions are found, they are only used to distin- guish Christian graves from heathen ones, as both used them in common ; and the paintings and altars were the invention of the popes to encourage pilgrimages, and increase their power and influence! With such opinions as these put forth by men of such knowledge and influence, who had spent half an hour each in two of the most frequented Catacombs, it is no wonder that Protestant England paid no attention to the matter of evidence which these Catacombs furnish in favour of Christianity itself; and no Protestant of any eminence has done so until very recent times, except the Danish bishop, Frederick Munter, in his '' Sinnbilder*' published at Altona, A. D. 1825. Even F. Spanheim, in his Ecclesiastical Annals^ when writing of the affairs of the second century, and admitting how glorious martyrdom was then considered ; how the sepulchres of the martyrs were held in the highest respect and reverence ; how their bodies were sedulously obtained from their murderers and religiously buried, commonly in places where the Christians might safely assemble ; or any part of these bodies which survived the fury of the beasts or of the flames, was carefully gathered up and deposited in the earth ; can yet say this : ** But the account of the Roman writers, that there were caves. Catacombs, and crypts full of their remains, and that they were dug up in the following century, and preserved by the pious zeal of the faithful, is too extravagant for belief.'* " And Bingham, too, is inclined to believe with Bishop Burnet, that the Catacombs at Rome and Naples were the joint work * Horrid Voyages, II. pp, 573-4. * Wrights Trans, p. 192. X/Ondon« 1840. Structure of the Catacombs. 35 of Christians and pagans.' Mosheim makes no appeal to them either in his History or Commentaries ; and the latest church historian, Robertson, has no reference to them. Charles Maitland, a layman and physician, seems to have been among the first of Englishmen to call special attention to the subject in his Church of the Catacombs ; and Cardinal Wiseman, in his romance entitled Fabiola^ also North- cote's two works on the Catacombs, and Lord Lindsay also, in his Sketches of the History of Christian Art^ published in 1847, ^^^ some interesting matter as to the symbols and subjects of the Catacombs ; and since then, we have Charles Hemans* work on Ancient Christianity and Sacred Art in Italy ; Burgon's Letters from Rome ; Bishop Kip's little work on the Catacombs ; and more recently, St. John Tyr- whitt's two works, entitled Christian Art and Symbolism^ and The Art Teaching of the Primitive Church, Later still is The Catacombs of Rome, by the Rev. W. H. Withrow. Dean Milman has also referred to the Catacombs in his publications, and has studied their remaining monuments with De Rossi, and Mr. Lecky in both his works appeals to them in favour of a pure Christianity. |