Part 27

the Ebionite practice with strict observance of the time of the Passover, and awakened thereby a lively controversy in the church of Asia Minor, in which opposite sides were taken by the Apologists, Apollinaris and Melito (§ 30, 7). The dispute assumed more serious dimensions about A.D. 196 through the passionate proceedings of the Roman bishop Victor. Roused probably by the agitation of a Quartodeciman named Blastus then in Rome, he urged upon the most distinguished bishops of the East and West the need of holding a Synod to secure the unequivocal vindication of the Roman practice. On this account many Synods were held, which almost invariably gave a favourable verdict. Only those of Asia Minor with Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus at their head, entered a vigorous protest against the pretensions of Rome, and notwithstanding all the Roman threatenings determined to stand by their own well established custom. Victor now went the length of breaking off church fellowship with them, but this extreme procedure met with little favour. Even Irenæus expressed himself to the Gallican bishops as opposed to it.--Continuation § 56, 3.

§ 37.3. =The Ecclesiastical Institution of Fasting.=--The Didache gives evidence that even at so early a date, the regular fasts were religiously observed on the _Dies stationum_ by expressly forbidding fasting “with hypocrites” (Jews and Jewish Christians, Luke xviii. 12) on Monday and Thursday, instead of the Christian practice of so observing Wednesday and Friday. The usual fast continued as a rule only till three o’clock in the afternoon (Semijejunia, Acts x. 9, 30; iii. 1). In Passion week the Saturday night, which, at other times, just like the Sunday, was excluded from the fasting period, as part of the day during which Christ lay buried, was included in the forty-hours’ fast, representing the period during which Christ lay in the grave. This was afterwards gradually lengthened out into the forty-days’ fast of Lent (Exod. xxxiv. 28; 1 Kings xix. 8; Matt. iv. 2), in which, however, the _jejunium_ proper was limited to the _Dies Stationum_, and for the rest of the days only the ξηροφαγίαι, first forbidden by the Montanists (§ 40, 4), _i.e._ all fattening foods, such as flesh, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, etc., were abstained from.--On fasting preparatory to baptism, see § 35, 1. The Didache, c. i. 3, adds to the gospel injunction that we should pray for our persecutors (Matt. v. 44) the further counsel that we should fast for them. The meaning of the writer seems to be that we should strengthen our prayers for persecutors by fasting. Hermas, on the other hand, recommends fasting in order that we may thereby spare something for the poor; and Origen says that he read _in quodam libello_ as _ab apostolis dictum: Beatus est, qui etiam jejunat pro eo ut alat pauperem_.

§ 38. THE CHURCH BUILDINGS AND THE CATACOMBS.

The earliest certain traces of special buildings for divine worship which had been held previously in private houses of Christians are met with in Tertullian about the end of the 2nd century. In Diocletian’s time Nicomedia became a royal residence and hard by the emperor’s palace a beautiful church proudly reared its head (§ 22, 6), and even in the beginning of the 3rd century Rome had forty churches. We know little about the form and arrangement of these churches. Tertullian and Cyprian speak of an altar or table for the preparation of the Lord’s supper and a desk for the reading, and in the _Apostolic Constitutions_ it is required that the building should be oblong in shape. The wide-spread tradition that in times of sore persecution the worshippers betook themselves to the Catacombs is evidently inconsistent with the limited space which these afforded. On the other hand, the painter whose works, by a decree of a Spanish Council in A.D. 306, were banished from the churches, found here a suitable place for the practice of sacred art.

§ 38.1. =The Catacombs.=--The Christian burying places were generally called κοιμητήρια, _Dormitoria_. They were laid out sometimes in the open fields (_Areæ_), sometimes, where the district was suitable for that, hewn out in the rock (κρύπται, crypts). This latter term was, by the middle of the 4th century, quite interchangeable with the name _Catacumbæ_, (κατὰ κύμβας=in the caves). The custom of laying the dead in natural or rock-hewn caves was familiar to pagan antiquity, especially in the East. But the recesses used for this purpose were only private or family vaults. Their growth into catacombs or subterranean necropolises for larger companies bound together by their one religion without distinctions of rank (Gal. iii. 28), first arose on Christian soil from a consciousness that their fellowship transcended death and the grave. For the accomplishment of this difficult and costly undertaking, Christian burial societies were formed after the pattern of similar institutions of paganism (§ 17, 3). Specially numerous and extensive necropolises have been found laid out in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. But also in Malta, in Naples, Syracuse, Palermo, and other cities, this mode of sepulchre found favour. The Roman catacombs, of which in the hilly district round about the eternal city fifty-eight have been counted in fourteen different highways, are almost all laid out in the white porous tufa stone which is there so abundant, and useful neither for building nor for mortar. It is thus apparent that these are neither wrought-out quarries nor gravel pits (_Arenariæ_), but were set in order from the first as cemeteries. A few _Arenariæ_ may indeed have been used as catacombs, but then the sides with the burial niches consist of regularly built walls. The Roman Catacombs in the tufa stone form labyrinthine, twisting, steep galleries only 3 or 4 feet broad, with rectangular corners caused by countless intersections. Their perpendicular sides varied greatly in height and in them the burial niches, _Loculi_, were hewn out one above the other, and on the reception of the body were built up or hermetically sealed with a stone slab bearing an inscription and a Christian symbol. The wealthy laid their dead in costly marble sarcophagi or stone coffins ornamented with bas-reliefs. The walls too and the low-arched roofs were adorned with symbols and pictures of scripture scenes. From the principal passages many side paths branched off to so-called burial chambers, _Cubicula_, which were furnished with shafts opening up to the surface and affording air and light, _Luminaria_. In many of these chambers, sometimes even in the passages, instead of simple _Loculi_ we meet with the so-called _Arcosolium_ as the more usual form; one or more coffin-shaped grooves hewn out in the rocky wall are covered with an altar-shaped marble plate, and over this plate, _Mensa_, is a semicircular niche hewn out spreading over it in its whole extent. These chambers are often held in reverence as “catacomb churches,” but they are so small in size that they could only accommodate a very limited number, such as might gather perhaps at the commemoration of a martyr or the members of a single family. And even where two or three such chambers adjoin one another, connected together by doors and having a common lighting shaft, accommodating at furthest about twenty people, they could not be regarded as meeting-places for public congregations properly so called.--Where the deposit of tufa stone was sufficiently large, there were several stories (_Piani_), as many as four or five connected by stairs, laid out one above the other in galleries and chambers. According to _de Rossi’s_[103] moderate calculation there have been opened altogether up to this time so many passages in the catacombs that if they were put in a line they would form a street of 120 geographical miles. Their oldest inscriptions or epitaphs date from the first years of the second century. After the destruction of Rome by the hordes of Alaric in A.D. 410, the custom of burying in them almost entirely ceased. Thereafter they were used only as places of pilgrimage and spots where martyr’s relics were worshipped. From this time the most of the so-called _Graffiti_, _i.e._ scribblings of visitors on the walls, consisting of pious wishes and prayers, had their origin. The marauding expedition of the Longobard Aistulf into Roman territory in A.D. 756, in which even the catacombs were stripped of their treasures, led Pope Paul I. to transfer the relics of all notable martyrs to their Roman churches and cloisters. Then pilgrimages to the catacombs ceased, their entrances got blocked up, and the few which in later times were still accessible, were only sought out by a few novelty hunting strangers. Thus the whole affair was nigh forgotten until in A.D. 1578 a new and lively interest was awakened by the chance opening up again of one of those closed passages. Ant. Bosio from A.D. 1593 till his death in A.D. 1629, often at the risk of his life, devoted all his time and energies to their exploration. But great as his discoveries were, they have been completely outdone by the researches of the Roman nobleman, Giov. Battista de Rossi, who, working unweariedly at his task since A.D. 1849 till the present time, is recognised as the great master of the subject, although even his investigations are often too much dominated by Roman Catholic prejudices and by undue regard for traditional views.[104]

§ 38.2. =The Antiquities of the Catacombs.=--The custom widely spread in ancient times and originating in piety or superstition of placing in the tombs the utensils that had been used by the deceased during life was continued, as the contents of many burial niches show among the early Christians. Children’s toys were placed beside them in the grave, and the clothes, jewels, ornaments, amulets, etc., of grown up people. Quite a special interest attaches to the so-called Blood Vases, _Phiolæ rubricatæ_, which have been found in or near many of these niches, _i.e._ crystal, rarely earthenware, vessels with Christian symbols figured on a red ground. The _Congregation of rites and relics_ in A.D. 1668, asserted that they were blood-vessels, in which the blood of the martyrs had been preserved and stood alongside of their bones; and the existence of such jars, as well as every pictorial representation of the palm branch (Rev. vii. 9), was supposed to afford an indubitable proof that the niches in question contained the bones of martyrs. But the Reformed theologian Basnage shows that this assumption is quite untenable, and he has explained the red ground from the dregs of the red sacramental wine which may have been placed in the burial niches as a protection against demoniacal intrusion. Even many good Roman Catholic archæologists, Mabillon, Papebroch, Tillemont, Muratori, etc., contest or express doubts as to the decree of the _Congregation_. At the instigation probably of the Belgian Jesuit Vict. de Buck, Pius IX. in A.D. 1863 confirmed and renewed the old decree, and among others, Xav. Kraus has appeared as its defender. But a great multitude of unquestionable facts contradict the official decree of the church; _e.g._ the total absence of any support to this view in tradition, the silence of such inscriptions as relate to the martyrs, above all the immense number of these jars, their being found frequently alongside the bones of children of seven years old, the remarkable frequency of them in the times of Constantine and his successors which were free from persecution, the absence of the red dregs in many jars, etc. Since dregs of wine, owing to their having the vegetable property of combinableness could scarcely be discernible down to the present day, it has recently been suggested that the red colour may have been produced by a mineral-chemical process as oxide of iron.

§ 38.3. =Pictorial Art and the Catacombs.=--Many of the earliest Christians may have inherited a certain dislike of the pictorial arts from Judaism, and may have been confirmed therein by their abhorrence of the frivolous and godless abuse of art in heathenism. But this aversion which in a Tertullian grew from a Montanistic rigorism into a fanatical hatred of art, is never met with as a constituent characteristic of Christianity. Much rather the great abundance of paintings on the walls of the Roman and Neapolitan catacombs, of which many, and these not the meanest, belong to the 2nd century, some indeed perhaps to the last decades of the 1st century, serves to show how general and lively was the artistic sense among the earliest Christians at least in the larger and wealthier communities. Yet from its circumstances the Christian church in its appreciation of art was almost necessarily limited on two sides; for, on the one hand, no paintings were tolerated in the churches, and on the other hand, even in private houses and catacombs they were restricted almost exclusively to symbolico-allegorical or typical representations. The 36th Canon of the Council of Elvira in A.D. 306 is a witness for the first statement when it says: _Placuit picturas in ecclesia non esse debere, ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur_. The plain words of the Canon forbid any other interpretation than this: From the churches, as places where public worship is regularly held, all pictorial representations must be banished, in order to make certain that in and under them there might not creep in those images, forbidden in the decalogue, of Him who is the object of worship and adoration. The Council thus assumed practically the same standpoint as the Reformed church in the 16th century did in opposition to the practice of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. It cannot, however, be maintained that the Canon of this rigorous Council (§ 45, 2) found general acceptance and enforcement outside of Spain--Proof of the second limitation is as convincingly afforded by what we find in the catacombs. On the positive side, it has its roots in the fondness which prevailed during these times for the mystical and allegorical interpretation of scripture; and on the negative side, in the endeavour, partly in respect for the prohibition of images contained in the decalogue, partly, and perhaps mainly, in the interests of the so-called _Disciplina arcani_, fostered under pressure of persecution, to represent everything that pertained to the mysteries of the Christian faith as a matter which only Christians have a right fully to understand. From the prominence given to the point last referred to it may be explained how amid the revolution that took place under Constantine the age of Symbolism and Allegory in the history of Christian art also passed away, and henceforth painters applied themselves pre-eminently to realistic historical representations.

§ 38.4. The pictorial and artistic representations of the pre-Constantine age may be divided into the six following groups:--

a. =Significant Symbols.=--To these belong especially _the cross_,[105] though, for fear of the reproaches of Jews and heathens (§ 23, 2), not yet in its own proper form but only in a form that indicated what was meant, namely in the form of the Greek Τ, very frequently in later times in the monogram of the name of Christ, _i.e._ in a variously constructed combination of its first two letters Χ and Ρ, while the Χ, as _crux dissimulatæ_, has very often on either side the letters α and ω.

b. =Allegorical Figures.=--In the 4th century a particularly favourite figure was that of the _Fish_, the name of which, ἰχθύς, formed a highly significant monogrammatic representation of the sentence, Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ, and which pointed strikingly to the new birth from the water of baptism. Then there is the _lamb_ or _sheep_, as symbol of the soul, which still in this life seeks after spiritual pastures; and the _dove_ as symbol of the pious believing soul passing into eternal rest, often with an _olive branch_ in its mouth (Gen. viii. 11), as symbol of the eternal peace won. Also we have the _hart_ (Ps. xlii. 1), the _eagle_ (Ps. ciii. 5), the _chicken_, symbol of Christian growth, the _peacock_, symbol of the resurrection on account of the annual renewal of its beautiful plumage, the _dolphin_, symbol of hastiness or eagerness in the appropriation of salvation, _the horse_, symbol of the race unto the goal of eternal life, _the hare_, as symbol of the Christian working out his salvation with fear and trembling, _the ship_, with reference to Noah’s ark as a figure of the church, _the anchor_ (Heb. vi. 19), _the lyre_ (Eph. v. 19), _the palm branch_ (Rev. vii. 9), _the garland_ (or crown of life, Rev. ii. 9), _the lily_ (Matt. vi. 28), _the balances_, symbol of divine righteousness, _fishes and bread_, symbol of spiritual nourishment with reference to Christ’s miracle of feeding in the wilderness, etc.

c. =Parabolic Figures.=--These are illustrations borrowed from the parables of the Gospels. To these belong conspicuously the figure of the _Good Shepherd_, who bears on His shoulder the lost sheep that He had found (Luke xv. 5), the _Vine Stock_ (John xv.), the _Sower_ (Matt. xiii. 3), the _Marriage Feast_ (Matt. xxii.), the _Ten Virgins_ (Matt. xxv.), etc.

d. =Historical Pictures of O. T. Types.=--Among these we have Adam and Eve, the Rivers of Paradise (as types of the four evangelists), Abel and Cain, Noah in the Ark, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Scenes from Joseph’s History, Moses at the Burning Bush, the Passage of the Red Sea, the Falling of the Manna, the Water out of the Rock, History of Job, Samson with the Gates of Gaza (the gates of Hell), David’s Victory over Goliath, Elijah’s Ascension, Scenes from the History of Jonah and Tobit, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, the Three Children in the Fiery Furnace, etc. Also typical material from heathen mythology had a place assigned them, such as the legends of Hercules, Theseus, and especially of Orpheus who by his music bewitched the raging elements and tamed the wild beasts, descended into the lower world and met his death through the infuriated women of his own race.

e. =Figures from the Gospel History.=--These, _e.g._ the Visit of the Wise Men from the East, and the Resurrection of Lazarus, are throughout this period still exceedingly rare. We do not find a single representation of the Passion of our Lord, nor any of the sufferings of Christian martyrs. Pictorial representations of the person of Christ, as a beardless youth with a friendly mild expression, are met with in the catacombs from the first half of the 2nd century, but without any claim to supply the likeness of a portrait, such as might be claimed for the figures of Christ in the temple of the Carpocratians (§ 27, 8) and in the Lararium of the Emperor Alexander Severus (§ 22, 4). Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, in accordance with the literal interpretation of Isa. liii. 2, 3, thought that Christ had an unattractive face; the post-Constantine fathers, on the contrary, resting upon Ps. xlv. 3 and John i. 14, thought of Him as beautiful and gracious.

f. =Liturgical Figures.=--These were connected only with the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

§ 39. LIFE, MANNERS, AND DISCIPLINE.[106]

When the chaff had been so relentlessly severed from the wheat by the persecutions of that age, a moral earnestness and a power of denying the world and self must have been developed, sustained by the divine power of the gospel and furthered by a strict and rigorous application of church discipline to the Christian life, such as the world had never seen before. What most excited and deserved wonder in the sphere of heathendom, hitherto accustomed only to the reign of selfishness, was the brotherly love of the Christians, their systematic care of the poor and sick, the widespread hospitality, the sanctity of marriage, the delight in martyrdom, etc. Marriages with Jews, heathens and heretics were disapproved, frequently even the celebration of a second marriage after the death of the first wife was disallowed. Public amusements, dances, and theatres were avoided by Christians as _Pompa diaboli_. They thought of the Christian life, in accordance with Eph. vi. 10 ff., as _Militia Christi_. But even in the Post-Apostolic Age we come upon indications of a tendency to turn from the evangelical spirituality, freedom and simplicity of the Apostolic Age toward a pseudo-catholic externalism and legalism in the fundamental views taken of ethical problems, and at the same time and in the same way in the departments of the church constitution (§ 34), worship (§ 36) and exposition of doctrine (§ 30, 2). The teachers of the church do still indeed maintain the necessity of a disposition corresponding to the outward works, but by an over-estimation of these they already prepare the way for the doctrine of merit and the _opus operatum_, _i.e._ the meritoriousness of works in themselves. Even the _Epistle of Barnabas_ and the _Didache_ reckon almsgiving as an atonement for sins. Still more conspicuously is this tendency exhibited by _Cyprian_ (_De Opere et eleemosynis_) and even in the _Shepherd of Hermas_ (§ 30, 4) we find the beginnings of the later distinction, based upon 1 Cor. vii. 25, 26; Matt. xxv. 21, and Luke xviii. 10, between the divine commands, _Mandata_ or _Præcepta_, which are binding upon all Christians, and the evangelical counsels, _Consilia evangelica_, the non-performance of which is no sin, but the doing of which secures a claim to merit and more full divine approval. Among the Alexandrian theologians, too, under the influence of the Greek philosophy a very similar idea was developed in the distinction between higher and lower morality, after the former of which the Christian sage (ὁ γνωστικός) is required to shine, while the ordinary Christian may rest satisfied with the latter. On such a basis a special order of Ascetics very early made its appearance in the churches. Those who went the length of renouncing the world and going out into the wilderness were called Anchorets. This order first assumed considerable dimensions in the 4th century (§ 44).