Roman Catacombs

 After the brutality of the Colosseum, and the languor of the Roman baths, Edward Hutton found something very different in the Catacombs.

The Catacombs—the place by the tombs, in which to the curious philologist every symbol of Christianity seems to lie hid, the cup of the Holy Grail, the ship of the Church, was indeed the very cradle of Christianity, of Catholicism, where Love lay helpless, a little child… Born, as it were, in the desert, in the stony silence of Judea, Christianity, by an act of Love, had at once solved the great mystery; it was in itself a denial of Death, of the power of Death, and as though to prove its sincerity, its belief in the hope it alone had dared to offer mankind, it made its first home in the Catacombs, those cemeteries of the dead. They too are our company, it seemed to say, for Death is not death but a sleep; and so it refused to be separated from them, waiting patiently beside their resting place, really in communion with them, who had slept and wakened. The Christian alone in Rome found hope in his heart…. (97)

 

 

There in the darkness, lighted only by occasional lumenaria, they celebrated their mysteries, even in the time of the Apostles, the Mass, the Commendatio Animae, the Funeralia, refusing always to speak of the departing brother or sister as dying, but rather as of one summoned or called away, accertitus, as the beautiful Roman inscription has it, assercitus ab angelis—summoned by angels…. (98)

 

These cemeteries, later to bear the names of Saints, … stretched really for miles outside the Wall on the left bank of the Tiber. And beside them were the gardens—horti—those cemeteries in the open air… these gardens were, however, comparatively few and were too public to be used for worship. It was in the Catacombs, so many of which still remain unexplored, that the Christian Church spent its childhood… (98)

 

Equanimity, a bold and confident gladness, grave and yet by no means without its more joyful moments, would seem to have been the most striking characteristic of the Catacombs. Expressing itself in many a beautiful or graceful custom accommodated to the human heart…especially in a wonderful new music and poetry… (99)

 

The Mass indeed would seem to have been said always, even in the Apostolic age, though not as we have it today; … A ritual, altogether expressive and full of meaning—a meaning often obscure to us in its detail at any rate—grew little by little about it in those early times really for the sake of expressing some profound mystery that could only thus be made plain, which it was not lawful to speak. And for the Christians of the Minor Peace certainly, the ritual of the Mass, its action namely, was altogether indicative, not hiding but expressing the very ‘heart of the mystery,’ which for them, as for us was often rather obscured than made plain by the words, then in the Greek language, the people answering in their own vulgar tongue, that colloquial or base Latin into which, though without any more popular success, the whole of the Liturgy had gradually passed… (100)

 

It was then as a dramatic action, a tragic drama, as we might say, that the Mass from the earliest times presented itself to those who in the subterranean oratories of the Catacombs were gathered together not merely in a common act of worship to hear the words of life, to be made partakers with Christ of the Kingdom of Heaven, but chiefly to remind themselves of the great deliverance won for them by that mournful and heroic Figure who passed before them in the words of the drama, the actions of the priest, from birth to death, to resurrection, into His Heaven. (102)

 

And so one’s first impression on entering one of these catacombs today is altogether of serenity and peace; a kind of ecstatic happiness, temperate and still fresh with a hope that has never quite passed away. On the walls one reads words of quiet expectation, full of light, confidence, and repose; Pax, you read, Pax tibi, in Pace Christi or Vivas in Deo; and then sometimes as though to sum up all contentment, Vivas in Christo, in Bono. And the scenes painted there are serene and glad. In those days at any rate they do not seem to have been very preoccupied with the Crucifixion, the death of Christ; they thought only of the resurrection. A certain Latin sanity and quietness are expressed in the work we find there; and indeed there is no hatred or contempt at all of Pagan thought or religion, not even a complete repudiation of it, for it remains, yes, a real thing, seen with new eyes as we might say, seen really for the first time, and drawn gently into the service of Christ, so that Orpheus becomes as it were but a prophecy of Him there in S. Calisto, and the Good Shepherd bears the lamb on his shoulders precisely as Hermes had been wont to do, but with a new tenderness….(105)

 

It was indeed a new ‘state of soul,’ really a new morality that one came upon suddenly in these dark obscure ways…Side by side they lay down to sleep, the rich beside the poor, the bond by the free, all whom Christ had made equal, to await in perfect confidence the promised resurrection. (106)

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

 

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