Christians were said to live like everyone else.
But there was one point in which it was particularly obvious that they were
different from the others and that was in their concept of death and of life
after death. From the end of the second century, their perception of death and
the next life caused them to adopt practices quite distinct from the pagans
ones Christians had followed up to that point.. In all things Christians had
accepted the life of the pagans. They carried out their duties as soldiers,
merchants, slaves. But concerning the concept of death, they felt quite differently.
Up to the end of the second century, in fact,
there had been no problem about being buried among the pagans in communal graveyards.
As is well known, St. Peter himself, had been buried a few metres distant from
pagan tombs, as had St. Paul beside the Via Ostiense. But at the end of the
second century, Christians wanted to have distinctive burial rites and to separate
their burial places from those of the pagans. Why was this?
For pagans the concept of death was of something
cold, and without hope. They knew about survival after death and believed in
it, but for them it was a survival without meaning In fact for paganism the
soul survived in the Elysian Fields or some other place apart from earth, but
as long as it was remembered. As soon as the dead were forgotten, they were
absorbed into an amorphous mass in the Manes without feelings, lacking all individuality.
This is why the pagan tombs, as we can easily point out,are all along the consular
roads.
For kilometres their remains line such roads (in
particular the Appian Way) , showing by their inscriptions that they did not
want to be forgotten; they believed that as long as someone could look on them,
read their names, see their images, they would survive. When all memory of them
was lost, they would cease to exist. For this reason they left rich legacies,
to have their descendants remember them. In the epigraphs we have preserved
texts where the owners of the tombs left great sums of money to their freedmen,
so that each year, on the anniversary, they should come and light a lamp at
their tombs or make a sacrifice: all so that they would be remembered. To take
but one example of a grand tomb which attracted the attention of the living,
it is enough to remember the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way.
For Christians none of this made sense: they
truly believed in the afterlife, not one so cold and hopeless. This is why they
wanted to create their own distinct burial areas. Thus they made their Koimeteria,
a term which literally means dormitory. This word was to the pagans completely
incomprehensible, and in fact they did not in the least understand this term
applied to burial areas.
For example, in the edict of the Emperor Valerian
in 257, made known to us by Eusebius of Caesarea, it is reported that the goods
of Christians and their meeting places which belonged to the community (in Trastevere
evidently this meant the "tituli" of Callixtus, Chrysogonus and Cecilia) were
confiscated. Apart from these possessions, the so-called Koimeteria,
dormitories, were also seized. The Romans did not understand what this meant.
For a pagan, in fact, "dormitory" was the room where you went to bed at night
and rose in the morning. For Christians it meant more than that: you went to
sleep so that you might waken again; death was but a place of rest; you would
certainly rise anew. There were other terms which
Christians used in speaking about death and we find them in the catacombs: An
example is the word Depositio. The gravestones with the word Depositus,
very often abbreviated (depo, Dep or simply D ) can be identified
immediately as christian. In fact, Depositio was a legal term used by
lwayers, which meant " the giving on deposit": the dead were confided
to the earth just like a grains of wheat, to be restored in the future
crops. It was a concept which had not yet occurred to the pagans.
For all these reasons, their theology of death
was so different from that of the pagans, that Christians wished to be separate
and to make their own burial grounds. The Hebrews felt the same, but this only
came later. The excavations of the Villa Torlonia have decisively shown that
the Hebrew catacombs were made at least 50-60 years after those of the Christians.It
was the Hebrews that imitated the Christians in this type of burial.
This christian concept of death, or better,
this world where the dead were thought of as alive, entered the mind-set of
the early Christians of Trastevere as elsewhere. Externally there were potters,
millers, porters, soldiers, fishmongers, boatmen etc like the others (we also
know that they were highly esteemed by their fellow citizens who knew that they
carried out their work conscientiously). But in the depths of their being they
had something very different from the others. There was found in the Cimitero
Maggiore on the Via Nomentana a beautiful christian epigraph. On the surface,
it is a small piece of marble which is not particularly remarkable, but in the
concepts it expresses, it is one of the most beautiful to be found. It tells
us of a Sicilian who died in Rome and who wished to record, in a very rfew words
of Greek, his conception of life: "I lived here as in a tent (i.e in something
temporary) for forty years, now I live eternally."
Here we find the full difference between the Christian
concept of life and that of the pagans. For the early Christians it was a matter
to understand the present as a living temporarily in order to go to our true
dwelling place. For pagans, life had an exclusive meaning and death was its
end. The tragic moment of death for Christians became the entrance into happy
surroundings. Jesus compares it to a wedding feast. For this reason, Christians
painted their tombs with roses, birds, butterflies. In the decorations of the
catacombs we often find this happy, calm place with symbols expressing serenity
and tranquillity.
From: Umberto Fasola,
Le origini cristiane a Trastevere, Fratelli Palombi Editori, Roma, 1981, pp.
61. By kind permission of the Editors.
Note on the author. Umberto
Fasola, Servite father, Licentiate in Sacred Theology , Christian Archaelogy
D, Ph. D, Professor of Cemeterial Topography, former Rector of the Pontifical
Institute of Christian Archaeology, and Secretary of the Pontifical Commission
of Sacred Archaeology, Curator of the Collegium Cultorum Martyrum; discovered
and studied several Catacombs, among which the Coemeterium Majus on the Nomentana
Way; author of very many books and articles on Christian Archaeology.