The care of the dead in late antiquity

252 Pages·2009·1.37 MB·English

by  Rebillard

CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Problem of the Origins:
Christian Burial in Rome and
Carthage 2. Burial and Religious
Identity: Religious Groups and
Collective Burial 3. Voluntary
Associations and Collective Burial:
The Church, Christians, and the
Collegia 4. Violation of Tombs and
Impiety: Funerary Practices and
Religious Beliefs 5. Christian Piety
and Burial Duty: From the Duty to
Bury the Dead to the Organization
of Burial for the Poor 6. Christian
Funerals and Funerals of Christians:
The Church and the Death Ritual in
Late Antiquity 7. The Church,
Christians, and the Dead:
Commemoration of the Dead in
Late Antiquity Conclusion
Primary Sources Secondary Sources
ABBREVIATIONS
CIL Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin, 1862–.
CPG Clavis Patrum Graecorum. Edited by M. Geerard. Turnhout, 1983–.
PG Patrologia Graeca. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris.
ICVRInscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae. Rome, 1922–.
ILCV Inscriptiones latinae Christianae veteres. Edited by Ernst Diehl. Berlin,
1961.
PIR Prosopographia Imperii Romani Saeculi I, II, III. Berlin, 1933–.
CJ Codex Justinianus. Corpus Iuris Civilis. Vol. 2. Edited by Paul Krueger.
Berlin, 1954.
INTRODUCTION
This book’s title, The Care of the Dead in
Late Antiquity, is directly inspired by the title of a treatise augustine wrote
toward the end of his life.1 his friend Paulinus of nola had asked him about the
utility for salvation of being buried next to a martyr. it was a difficult question
and augustine offered a carefully balanced answer: burial, whether or not next to
a martyr’s tomb, is not relevant to salvation and therefore would not matter from
a Christian point of view were men not attached to the idea. in this text and a few
others, augustine elaborated a clear distinction between what is relevant for
salvation and to be taken care of by the ecclesiastical institution, and what is not
relevant for salvation and is left to the care of the family. We will get a better
and more nuanced understanding of what is at stake in augustine’s treatise, but
for now this brief presentation suffices to introduce the main topic of this book:
the role the bishops claimed to play in the relations between the living and the
dead in Late antiquity.
In his Tod und ritual in den christlichen Gemeinden des Antike, ulrich volp
provides a good summary of the scholarly consensus on this topic:
The universal and totalizing claim that Christianity exercised on the life of
the believers was not compatible with leaving death, burial and the
commemoration of the dead simply to the families and professional
undertakers. The holy Christian texts demanded intervention in this sphere
—given, for example, the centrality of the resurrection in the new
Testament! Both the functions of the traditional “family religion” and those
of the public cults were taken over by Christianity, at least from the fourth
century onward, despite not having resources and personnel on a medieval
scale (which is why religious funerals, and regular masses for the departed
became common practice everywhere only later).2
In this book I argue against this consensus, and claim that burial and
commemoration of the dead were left by the bishops out of their sphere of
control and to the care of the family. In this sense, my study of the care of the
dead contributes to the shifting of the traditional paradigm from a focus on
bishops and their regulating role to an emphasis on lay people and their
expectations.3
The case of the catacombs is typical of the old paradigm: these impressive
underground burial structures in the suburbium of Rome had to be the result of
the entrepreneurship of the bishops and therefore had been understood as
communal burial grounds developed exclusively for Christians by the bishops
from the beginning of the third century. In chapter 1, I summarize the results of
some of my preliminary research on the topic and suggest that the texts
archaeologists relied upon were not in fact supporting their interpretation of the
material remains. I propose, therefore, to temporarily leave aside the
archeological evidence of the Roman catacombs, and with them the assumption
that bishops provided for the care of the dead in Late Antiquity since they had
organized cemeteries since the third century.4
The rest of the book is based on written sources. The blending of written
sources and archaeological data too often leads only to circular reasoning, and it
is highly difficult—which is not to say impossible—to analyze both with wholly
up-to-date criteria.5 In my study of the written sources, I try to discuss pagan,
Jewish, and Christian evidence together.6 I do not necessarily believe in Late
Antique common patterns, but I do not want to passively assume a difference.
As long as Christians are considered in isolation, it is tempting to conclude that
they were living separately and in opposition to surrounding communities.
On the other hand, it is also important not to prejudge that religious affiliation
is a relevant criteria. The numerous groups whose proliferation characterizes the
religious life of the Roman Empire from the third century onward do not impose
any rule related to burial. This observation, documented in chapter 2, opens the
way to other questions—in particular, that of Christians’ participation in one of
the most typical forms of collective behavior in the Roman Empire: the
association or collegium, whose funerary role is reevaluated in chapter 3 in light
of recent research.
After the first three chapters, dedicated to forms of collective burial, in
chapters 4 and 5 I consider issues involved in burial itself. Chapter 4 looks at the
reason why it was important to Christians to be buried. There again, in order not
to make assumptions about what might have been specifically Christian, I start
from a study of the evidence on tomb violation in imperial laws and in private
measures taken to protect tombs (funerary fines and curses in epitaphs). The
body seems to become the focus of a new concern, one that leads to the
definition of the crime of profanation of cadavers as opposed to damage to the
definition of the crime of profanation of cadavers as opposed to damage to the
tomb, which was the only crime taken into account prior to the end of the third
century. This concern for the body reappears in a number of discussions
concerning the best means of disposing of it at death. These took place at a
moment when cremation was increasingly abandoned in favor of inhumation as
the dominant funerary practice in the Roman Empire. Today it is generally
agreed that religious beliefs were far from being the primary factors in this
change, and I also emphasize that, contrary to a widely held view, Christian
belief in the resurrection does not make burial a religious necessity for
Christians.
Chapter 5 is concerned with burial duty and its relative importance among
good works. Providing burial to martyrs played a significant role in the
construction of a Christian identity throughout the third century and at the
beginning of the fourth. In the fourth and fifth centuries, however, pastoral
discourse on good works devotes little attention to burial. As for the burial of the
poor, it is indeed part of the strategy of the bishops to promote “that other city”
so well described by Peter Brown;7 but the continuing role of the state, whether
directly through the emperor for Rome and Constantinople or through the city
authorities in the rest of the empire, explains why burial of the poor played such
a minor part in ecclesiastical sources and why concrete measures are relatively
few.
Chapters 6 and 7 address two aspects of the same question: the existence of
specifically Christian ritual responses to death in Late Antiquity. Chapter 6 deals
with the funerals, and chapter 7 with the commemoration of the departed. The
earliest documents describing a Christian ritual for funerals date from the eighth
and ninth centuries, as do also the earliest rituals for the blessing of the burial
ground,8 and, while it may be possible to find several elements of these rituals
already attested to, it is vain to hope to reconstruct a Christian liturgy of death
for the period. The church neither required nor proposed any ritual for a
Christian burial in the fourth and fifth centuries. The presence of clergy at
funerals and the celebration of the Eucharist were left entirely up to the family. It
was also ultimately to the family that the church left the responsibility for
remembering the dead. The commemoration of the departed by the universal
church was both general and anonymous, concerned only with the baptized and
offering no assurance of salvation for sinners. Pastoral documents, however,
reveal somewhat different expectations on the part of Christians. The church, in
Late antiquity, seems more concerned with fixing strict limits to the relations
between the living and the dead than with taking responsibility for remembering
the dead. This might explain not only why Christians continued traditional
practices but also why the bishops did not attempt to stop them.
Should we conclude, as does Ramsay MacMullen, that “for centuries, the
pagan cult of the dead was a common part of Christianity?”9 This is too
schematic a view of the interactions between bishops and lay people. On the
other hand, I hope to show that the attempt to locate practices linked to the care
and memory of the dead within the continuum from the profane to the religious,
as MacMullen proposes to do for other practices, will prove very fruitful.
Only a few changes have been made to the text or notes of the French original.
I have added a few items of recent bibliography when they are particularly
relevant to the issues I discuss and altered the text where the French original was
not satisfactory. I must thank my two translators, Elizabeth Rawlings and
Jeannine Routier-Pucci, for their patience with my multiple corrections due
mainly to my concerns about the French text.
Translations of primary and secondary sources not listed in the bibliography
are by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings and Jeanine Routier-Pucci.
1. I must here thank Peter Brown for suggesting it; see chapter 4 for more on
this important text.
2. Ulrich Volp, Tod und ritual in den christlichen Gemeinden des Antike,
supplements to vigiliae Christianae 65 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 270 (English
summary).
3. This shift characterizes Late Antique studies in the last few years. See the
special issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies 15, no. 2 (2007): “Holy
Households: Domestic Space, Property, and Power,” with contributions by Kim
Bowes, Kate Cooper, and Kristina Sessa; see also Kim Bowes, Private Worship,
Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); Kate Cooper, The Fall of the Roman Household
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Kevin Uhalde,
Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
4. This assumption has recently been challenged from a different perspective
by John Bodel, “From Columbaria to Catacombs: Collective Burial in Pagan and
Christian Rome,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context,
Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah
Green (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 177–242.
5. See Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later
Roman Empire, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006), 9–12. I myself have used the “mixed argumentation” against which
Goffart warns us in two papers where I propose a new interpretation of the
mission given to Callixtus by Zephyrinus; see Éric Rebillard, “KOIMHTHRION
et COEMETERIUM: tombe, tombe sainte, nécropole,” Mélanges de l’École
française de Rome. Antiquité 105, no. 2 (1993): 975–1001; and “L’Église de
Rome et le développement des catacombes: à propos de l’origine des cimetières
chrétiens,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Antiquité 109, no. 2 (1997):
741–63. Jean Guyon and Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, “Relire Styger: les origines
de l’ area I du cimetière de Calliste et la crypte des papes,” in Origine delle
catacombe romane, ed. Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai and Jean Guyon, Sussidi allo
studio delle antichità cristiane 18 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di
archeologia cristiana, 2006), 121–61, successfully show on archaeological
ground that the koimeterion that the bishop of Rome Zephyrinus entrusted to
Callixtus could not have been the so-called Crypt of the Popes, as I suggested,
but they cannot prove their case when they contend that it was the whole Area I,
and that therefore Zephyrinus was willing to accommodate in a ecclesiastical
cemetery the desire of those Christians who wanted to be buried together,
because they do not take into account my philological arguments about the
meaning of the term koimeterion.
6. In retrospect, I wish I had done it more systematically, especially in the last
two chapters on the commemoration of the dead.
7. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian
Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Peter Brown, Poverty
and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001); see also Éric Rebillard,
“La conversion de l’Empire romain selon Peter Brown (note critique),” Annales:
histoire, sciences sociales 54, no. 4 (1999): 813–23.
8. On this topic, see Donald Bullough, “Burial Community and Belief in the
Early Medieval West,” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon
Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald,
Donald Bullough, and Roger Collins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 177–201; and
Cécile Treffort, L’Église carolingienne et la mort: christianisme, rites funéraires
et pratiques commémoratives, Collection d’histoire et d’archéologie médiévales
3 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996), 141–43.
9. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth
Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 111.
CHAPTER 1
The Problem of the Origins
Christian Burial in Rome and Carthage
Textbooks on church history or Christian
archaeology all contain accounts of the organization of cemeteries by the first
Christian communities at Rome and Carthage at the end of the second century.
As I have stated in the introduction, the question is actually far from being as
simple as one might think from reading the textbooks. In this brief chapter I wish
to point out that the question of the origins is now facing an impasse, and thus
pave the way for an approach that will take a radically different point of view.
The basic account for the organization of the Catacombs of Rome was developed
by Giovanni Battista De Rossi (1822–94) and has changed very little since; the
case of the areae of Carthage has been recently revisited, but also without any
significant change. As we shall see, these two aspects of the “dossier of the
origins” together present an excellent example of the “philologico-combinatory
method” criticized by Arsenio Frugoni in the following terms: “as though
dealing with perfect pieces in a mosaic, statements—that is, attested facts—have
been connected with utmost confidence to Providence, always so well-disposed
to the endeavors of historians.”1 The issue for us is not to reconstruct the
biography of a heretic but to examine the organization governing a set of
monuments.
Was the Catacomb of Callixtus the First Cemetery of the Roman
Church?