The Catacombs

The popular picture has to go first, because everything else is misread as long as it stands. In that picture the Christians of Rome fled underground and lived there, holding secret services by torchlight while soldiers hunted them in the streets above. It is a wonderful image, and in its strong form it is false. It comes largely from the nineteenth century, from devotional novels like Wiseman's Fabiola and Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, and that fiction has outlived the scholarship by a century and a half.

What the catacombs actually were is simpler. They were cemeteries. Roman law forbade burial inside the city walls, a prohibition reaching back to the Twelve Tables, so every Roman burial ground, pagan and Jewish and Christian alike, lay outside the walls along the consular roads. The rock beneath the Roman campagna is tufa, a volcanic ash soft enough to cut with a hand pick and stable enough that the galleries do not collapse. Christians cut narrow corridors, lined the walls with graves, and dug down to a new level when one filled. None of this was secret; the entrances stood in the open on well-traveled roads. Nor was it lawless. A Roman tomb was a locus religiosus, and violating one was an offense regardless of whose body lay in it. Roman law protected graves even when it did not protect the living who dug them.

Galleries cut through soft volcanic rockThe tufa under Rome cuts like cheese and hardens in air. That single geological fact is why the catacombs exist at all.

And here the legend, having been dismissed, must be partly let back in. Christians did use the cemeteries for assembly, and the government knew it. Valerian's first edict in 257 forbade Christians to hold assemblies or to enter their cemeteries, and we know it from the acts of the proconsular trial of Cyprian of Carthage, where the proconsul states the prohibition to his face. On the sixth of August, 258, Pope Sixtus II was seized and killed in a cemetery on the Appian Way while seated teaching the congregation, and the source is not legend but a letter of Cyprian written within weeks. Two years later Gallienus reversed course, and Eusebius preserves the rescript restoring to the bishops the places of the cemeteries. Diocletian confiscated them again in 303.

So the accurate statement is narrower than the legend and more interesting. Christians did not live underground; there was no water, no food, and no hiding a congregation for years in a place the authorities could find on a map. But they gathered at the graves of their dead, knowing it was forbidden, and some of them were killed there.

The word is an accident. Ad catacumbas was a local name for a dip in the ground near the third milestone of the Appian Way, usually explained from the Greek kata kymbas, roughly "down by the hollows." The Christians' own word was coemeterium, from the Greek for a sleeping place. That is where the English word cemetery comes from, and it was a theological claim.

There are more than sixty known catacombs in the ring around Rome, and the length of their galleries is usually given in the hundreds of kilometers. How many people were buried in them cannot be established: de Rossi estimated several million, current estimates are far lower, and the honest answer is that we do not know within an order of magnitude. The men who cut them were the fossores, the diggers, named in inscriptions and painted on the walls holding the short pick called a dolabra and a clay lamp.

Loculus

The ordinary grave: a slot cut into the gallery wall, sized to the body and stacked four or five high, sealed with tiles or marble in mortar, the name often scratched into the mortar with a nail.

Arcosolium

A costlier tomb: a tub-shaped grave in the floor of a niche with an arch carved above it. The arch gave a painter a curved surface, which is why most surviving frescoes are in arcosolia, and the closing slab made a table.

Cubiculum

A small room off a gallery, normally a family chamber, often with a painted ceiling. These are the chapels of the popular imagination, and they hold perhaps a dozen people standing.

Four names recur. San Callisto, on the Appian Way, was the first cemetery owned and administered by the Roman church as a body; our source is Hippolytus, who reports that Pope Zephyrinus set the deacon Callistus over it, and since Hippolytus was Callistus's bitter enemy he had no interest in making the arrangement sound official. Within it is the Crypt of the Popes, where third-century bishops of Rome were buried, their names cut in Greek, several with the abbreviation for bishop and some with the word martyr. Domitilla is the largest, with some seventeen kilometers of gallery on four levels. Priscilla matters most for this chapter, and San Sebastiano is the one with the graffiti.

Burial niches stacked from floor to ceilingLoculi — shelves cut for a body, sealed with tile or marble and inscribed. A single Roman catacomb could hold tens of thousands of them.

Christians did not invent this. Rome has Jewish catacombs too, at Villa Torlonia and Vigna Randanini, cut in the same tufa in the same way, and some may be as early as anything Christian. The catacomb is a Roman technique. What is distinctively Christian is what got painted on the walls and written on the slabs.

Burial in the catacombs stopped in the early fifth century, and for two or three centuries afterward they remained pilgrimage sites. Then, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the bodies were moved into churches inside the city, because Rome was no longer safe outside the walls. Once the martyrs were gone the pilgrims stopped coming, the entrances silted up, and the galleries were forgotten. On the thirty-first of May, 1578, workmen quarrying pozzolana on the Via Salaria broke through into a painted gallery full of graves. The effect in Rome was electric: in the middle of the confessional controversies of the sixteenth century, when both sides were arguing about what the primitive Church had looked like, the primitive Church had just been found under a vineyard.

What happened next is not creditable, and softening it would serve no one. For two centuries the catacombs were treated as a quarry for relics. Bodies were removed by the thousand and distributed to churches across Europe as martyrs, on evidence that would not survive five minutes of examination: a palm branch scratched on a slab, or a glass vessel found near a grave and assumed to hold the martyr's blood, which a decree of 1668 treated as a sufficient sign. It was not. The palm was a common funerary motif with no necessary link to martyrdom, and the vessels usually held perfume. Frescoes were damaged, inscriptions were lost, and the stratigraphy that would have let later scholars date what was found was destroyed.

The serious work was done at either end of that stretch. Antonio Bosio began exploring in 1593 and spent his life underground with a candle and a notebook, and his Roma Sotterranea appeared after his death. Scientific Christian archaeology then begins with Giovanni Battista de Rossi, who noticed a marble fragment in a vineyard on the Appian Way reading NELIUS MARTYR, recognized it as the end of an inscription for Cornelius, bishop and martyr, and reasoned that the lost papal crypt lay beneath; excavation in the 1850s proved him right. A generation later Josef Wilpert photographed the paintings systematically, which is why we can still study frescoes that have since faded off the walls. Because so much was disturbed before anyone recorded it, the dating of individual paintings and inscriptions is often looser than popular accounts admit.

There is no surviving Christian art earlier than this. Whatever the first Christians made in Jerusalem or Antioch is gone, and the earliest painted Christian rooms we possess are the baptistery at Dura-Europos in Syria, destroyed and thereby preserved in 256, and the Roman catacombs, whose earliest decorated chambers are usually dated to around the year 200 or a little before. That is the whole of the early corpus. It means the first thing Christians are known to have done with a wall is paint it, and the first walls they are known to have painted are the walls of their tombs.

The subjects repeat, which tells us they were not decoration. The commonest figure is the Good Shepherd, a young beardless man with a sheep across his shoulders, a form borrowed from classical art and filled by Christians with Psalm 22 [23] and the tenth chapter of John. Next in frequency is the Orant, a standing figure with arms raised and palms open, which in a Christian tomb stands for the soul of the departed at prayer. Then a set of Old Testament scenes chosen with obvious deliberation: Jonah above all, thrown to the sea monster, disgorged, and asleep under the gourd vine; Noah with hands raised and the dove returning; the three young men in the furnace of Daniel 3; Daniel among the lions; Moses striking water from the rock; Abraham over Isaac; Susanna between the two elders. From the New Testament: the raising of Lazarus, over and over; the multiplication of the loaves; the woman at the well; the baptism of Christ; and the Magi bringing gifts to a child on his mother's lap.

A painted burial chamber ceilingCatacomb cubicula were plastered and painted like any Roman tomb, but with Jonah, Noah, the raising of Lazarus and the Good Shepherd instead of the gods.

Read the list again and notice what it is. It is not a gallery. It is a set of prayers for the dead, in pictures. Every one of those scenes is an instance of God delivering somebody from death or from impossible danger: the man in the fish, the family in the flood, the boys in the fire, the man in the lions' pit, the woman falsely condemned, the corpse called out of the tomb. There is an ancient prayer at the deathbed, known as the commendation of the soul, which asks God to deliver his servant as he delivered Noah from the flood, Daniel from the lions, the three young men from the fire, Susanna from false accusation, and Jonah from the whale. The prayer and the paintings list the same deliverances in nearly the same order. The catacomb wall is a liturgy.

The symbols work the same way: the fish, which stands for Christ both by the acrostic in which the Greek ichthys spells out Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, and because it is drawn beside bread; the anchor, which Hebrews gives as the image of the hope that enters within the veil; the dove, the vine, the peacock. The Chi-Rho appears constantly, but it becomes common only in the fourth century, after Constantine. Something is missing too: there is no Crucifixion. Christ crucified does not appear in Christian art until the fifth century. The early Church painted Christ raising Lazarus, not Christ dying.

An arcosolium — an arched grave with its frescoThe wealthier dead were laid in an arched recess, and the wall above was painted. Christians prayed beside these arches and eventually set the Eucharist on them.

Now the point for a Protestant reader, stated without ornament. If images in the life of worship, the honoring of the departed, and prayer in the presence of the dead were medieval corruptions grafted onto a simpler apostolic faith, then the catacombs are a problem, because the grafting would have to have happened before the graft. There was no fixed New Testament canon when these rooms were painted. The list of twenty-seven books does not appear in a surviving document until Athanasius's festal letter of 367, and the agreement it represents took another generation to settle. The Christians who cut these galleries had the Scriptures but not yet the table of contents. They were the people who would hand that table of contents on. And they painted.

Two of those scenes, Susanna and the deliverance of Daniel, come from portions of Daniel that Protestant Bibles do not contain. And the argument can be pushed too far: painted walls in a cemetery do not by themselves establish the theology of the icon defined at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. Funerary art and liturgical veneration are not the same thing.

In the catacomb of Priscilla, in one of the older galleries cut through an abandoned sand quarry, there is a badly worn fresco in the curve of a niche. A woman sits with a child at her breast. To her left a man stands in a philosopher's cloak holding what appears to be a scroll, one arm raised, pointing upward at a star. It is generally described as the earliest known image of the Virgin and Child, and the Pontifical Commission dates it to the first half of the third century, while some older scholars argued for the last decades of the second.

Christ, painted underground in the fourth centuryOne of the earliest surviving painted faces of Christ. It is on the wall of a burial chamber, not a church — which is where nearly all the oldest Christian art is.

The reader should know how firm that is, because it is asserted with more confidence in popular writing than the evidence supports. There is no inscription and no dated slab in the chamber; the dating rests on style and on the position of the gallery within the growth of the cemetery, neither of which yields a year. A range from about 200 to about 250 is defensible, the second-century date is a minority view, and a few scholars have argued later. The identification is argued too. The majority reading is that the standing figure is a prophet pointing to the star of the Messiah, either Balaam, whose oracle in Numbers 24:17 says a star shall rise out of Jacob, or Isaiah. A minority holds that the seated woman is simply a deceased mother of the family that owned the chamber.

Here is what can be said without overstating. In the Greek Chapel of the same catacomb there is an Adoration of the Magi, generally dated to the third century, in which a woman holds a child on her lap and receives the gifts, and that scene is not seriously disputed as to subject. So the honest formulation is this: whether or not the worn fresco in the sand-quarry gallery is the oldest image of the Theotokos, the third-century Christians of Rome were unquestionably painting the Virgin holding her Son on the walls of their tombs. The debate is over which painting is first. It is not over whether they did it.

A related caution. In several catacombs there are orant figures, arms raised, sometimes with a child before them, that popular guides identify as the Virgin; the best known is in the Coemeterium Maius on the Via Nomentana. It may be the Mother of God, but the monograms flanking it suggest a fourth-century date, and the orant is the standard figure for the soul of the deceased, so an equally natural reading is that this is the woman buried in that grave, shown at prayer.

Tens of thousands of inscriptions survive from the Roman catacombs, most very short, many scratched by hand into wet mortar by people who could barely write. That crudeness is part of their value. These are not compositions by theologians; they are what ordinary Christians said over their own dead, at the grave. The commonest formula is in pace, in peace, often with nothing else but a name. Close behind come dormit in pace, he sleeps in peace, and vivas in Deo, may you live in God, addressed to the dead person in the second person. The Christian stones are talking to somebody.

Two families of inscription matter most for the argument this site makes elsewhere. The first asks God for the dead: the recurring word is refrigerium, refreshment, and refrigera is written on slab after slab, sometimes as a wish and sometimes as a petition that God would refresh the spirit of the departed. The second asks the dead for the living. The verbs are petere and rogare, to ask, to beg, and the formula is pete pro nobis, ask on our behalf. There are inscriptions asking a wife to pray for her husband by name, and asking a departed Christian to pray about the sins of the survivors.

A gallery lined with the bones of the dead, and a crossBurial beside the faithful departed was never thought of as morbid. It was thought of as staying in company.

The most famous examples are not in a gallery at all but in a covered courtyard at San Sebastiano, where an early cult of the Apostles Peter and Paul was centered. Its plastered walls carry hundreds of graffiti scratched by pilgrims in the second half of the third century, short and repetitive, saying the same thing over and over: Paul and Peter, pray for Victor. One records that a man named Tomius Coelius held a refrigerium here for Peter and Paul, meaning that he kept the memorial meal at their shrine. These are the scratchings of ordinary pilgrims, and they consist almost entirely of asking two dead men to pray.

What cannot be read off this should be said first. It cannot be shown from the inscriptions that third-century Christians had a developed theology of the intercession of the saints, with the distinctions later Greek writers drew between the worship owed to God alone and the honor given to his friends; those came later, under pressure. Nor can it be shown that every community did this, since the evidence is heavily Roman and heavily funerary. And some of these formulas were taken over from ordinary Roman custom rather than invented.

But what can be read off them is not small. Asking a departed Christian to pray for you was a normal, unremarkable, widely practiced thing in the Church of the third century, common enough to be scratched on a wall by a pilgrim who was not thinking about doctrine at all, and praying for the refreshment of the departed was equally normal. Neither is introduced anywhere in the sources as a novelty, argued for, or defended, which is what we would expect if either had been a change. The claim that they were later accretions on a simpler earlier practice has to be squared with a wall of graffiti that knows nothing of the simpler earlier practice.

The chapter on intercession and the section on prayers for the departed set out the case in full, including 2 Maccabees 12, where Judas Maccabeus sends a collection to Jerusalem so that sacrifice may be offered for the dead, and Paul's prayer in 2 Timothy 1:16-18 for the household of Onesiphorus.

Romans ate with their dead. On the day of burial and on the anniversary the family gathered at the tomb for a meal, and tombs were built to accommodate it. Christians inherited the custom and kept it, calling it the refrigerium: in the catacombs there are tables cut beside the graves, and at Rabat in Malta the visitor can still see round stone tables with the reclining couch carved out of the rock around them. The Church was not uncritical about it, because it could become what a Roman funeral feast usually was, which is drunk. Augustine reports in the Confessions that his mother Monica arrived in Milan with her basket of bread and wine for the memorial meal and was turned away, because Ambrose had forbidden the practice in his diocese. The meal at the grave was not being abolished. It was being disciplined and drawn toward something else.

That something else is the Eucharist. In San Callisto a group of small chambers de Rossi named the Crypts of the Sacraments, dated to the early third century, carries a painted program of a baptism, a fish with a basket of bread on its back, Moses striking water from the rock, Abraham over Isaac, Jonah, and figures reclining at a curved table with loaves. Read singly, any one might be something else; read together, in a room where a family gathered to eat beside its dead, the program is hard to take as anything but a statement about baptism and the Eucharist as the ground of the resurrection hope. The most discussed single example is in the Greek Chapel at Priscilla, which Josef Wilpert cleaned in the 1890s and published in 1895 as the Fractio Panis, the breaking of the bread, calling it the oldest representation of the eucharistic sacrifice. His reading has been contested ever since, the alternatives being the funerary meal or the banquet of the age to come, and a number of scholars would say those three were not sharply separated in a third-century mind. Even on the most deflationary reading, what is painted there is Christians breaking bread in the presence of their dead, in the first half of the third century.

The Chi-Rho, the monogram of ChristThe first two letters of ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ laid over one another. Scratched on graves long before it was carried on a standard.

Follow the line forward, because it does not stop. Christians wanted to be buried near the martyrs; the practice has a name in the sources, depositio ad sanctos, and the floors around a martyr's tomb are packed with graves cut in wherever there was room. Augustine was asked whether this did the dead any good and answered, in a short book of about 421, that the place of the body does not of itself help the soul, but that burying a man at a martyr's shrine commends him to that martyr's intercession and to the prayers of the living who come there. Christians also celebrated the Eucharist at the martyrs' tombs on the anniversary of the death, and since the flat slab of an arcosolium is a table, the altar of that liturgy was the grave itself. When the persecutions ended they built over it, and the basilicas outside the walls, San Lorenzo, Sant'Agnese and St. Peter's itself, are raised over graves so that the altar could stand above the body. The image is not a Roman invention: at the fifth seal in Revelation 6:9 John sees, under the altar, the souls of those slain for the word of God.

From there the practice became law. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, at Nicaea in 787, legislated in its seventh canon that relics are to be deposited in churches consecrated without them, and that a bishop who consecrates a church without relics is to be deposed. That is ancient custom turned into a rule for the whole Church, and it is the reason for the object on the holy table of every Orthodox church: the antimension, a cloth printed with the burial of Christ, with relics of a martyr sewn into it, signed by the ruling bishop, without which the Liturgy is not served. So the line runs like this, and every link is documented. A congregation eats a memorial meal at the grave of a man killed for the faith. It offers the Eucharist there on the anniversary, using the slab over his body as the table. It builds a church over the grave when it is safe to build. It legislates at an ecumenical council that no altar anywhere may be without a martyr under it. And when a priest unfolds a cloth on the holy table this Sunday, in Thessaloniki or Moscow or a converted storefront in an American suburb, the reason there are bones sewn into it is a grave in a tunnel outside Rome.

Practice varies in detail. In Slavic use relics are normally sewn into the antimension itself; in some Greek use the relics are in the altar table and the antimension carries the bishop's signature and blessing. The name is a compound meaning, roughly, instead of the table.

Rome has the most and the most studied, but not the only ones. Naples has three major catacomb systems, of which San Gennaro is the largest, cut in a different tuff and so wide and high rather than narrow. Syracuse in Sicily has catacombs on a scale second only to Rome's, cut in limestone, the largest being the complex around San Giovanni with the crypt of St. Marcian, whom local tradition makes the first bishop of the city; that tradition is late and cannot be verified. Malta has the catacombs at Rabat, which preserve the rock-cut tables for the memorial meal better than anywhere else, with Christian and Jewish burials side by side. At Sousse in Tunisia an enormous catacomb named for a Good Shepherd fresco holds thousands of graves.

A painted Christ, and the church that grew over the practiceThe continuity a Protestant reader is asked to weigh: the same subject, the same posture, in a tomb and then in a nave.

Cappadocia belongs here with a qualification. The volcanic rock of central Anatolia is even softer than Roman tufa and it is honeycombed: hundreds of rock-cut churches, and the underground cities of Derinkuyu and Kaymakli with their rolling stone doors and ventilation shafts. The qualification is that most of the painted rock churches are middle Byzantine, from the tenth and eleventh centuries, not from the age of persecution, and the underground cities seem to have served as refuges chiefly during the Arab raids of the seventh to tenth centuries. The irony is worth stating: the one place where Christians genuinely did shelter underground for extended periods is not Rome, where the legend puts them, but Anatolia, centuries later. Nor does the thread end in late antiquity. In 1051 a monk named Anthony, returned from Mount Athos, dug himself a cave above the Dnieper at Kyiv; others joined him, and the result is the Kyiv Caves Lavra, galleries of cells and chapels and the tombs of monks, whose bodies lie there still and are venerated by pilgrims walking past them with candles.

A church cut into the rockRock-cut and underground churches were not only Roman. They survive across Italy, Malta, North Africa and Cappadocia.

This is the part to say plainly, because it is why the chapter is here. Inquiry into Orthodoxy usually begins as an argument about doctrine, and doctrine matters. But the catacombs are not another argument. They are an introduction. The people who cut those galleries are the people whose names are read at the Liturgy, whose relics are in the altar, whose paintings are the ancestors of the icons on the walls, who scratched pray for us into wet mortar with a nail because they did not think death had removed anybody from the room. Becoming Orthodox is not first of all agreeing to a set of propositions about them. It is being buried with them.

A reader can weigh all of this and still conclude that the Church went wrong somewhere, and serious people have reached that conclusion honestly. What is no longer available is the story most of us were raised on, in which a simple apostolic faith of preaching and Scripture was gradually overlaid with images, saints, relics and prayers for the dead by an institution accumulating power in later centuries. That story has to be given up, not because Orthodoxy says so, but because there is a hole in the ground outside Rome with the overlay already painted on its walls, in the generation of the grandchildren of the apostles, by people who were still being killed for it. They called the place a dormitory. They wrote in peace on the slabs and meant that the person behind the slab was at rest and not gone. They asked him to pray.