Out Of The Earth

Out Of The Earth
By Professor EM Blaiklock MA Litt D

CHAPTER EIGHT
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE EARLY CHURCH
PART ONE
The Church under Rome
The Appian Way and its tombs-world-weariness of pagan Rome-the contrast in the Catacombs-nature and archaeological worth of the Catacombs-their evidence for the
"lateral" and "vertical" spread of early Roman Christianity
-Gibbon refuted-Tertullian vindicated-the Christian faith among the Flavians-wide attraction of Christianity—
Butterfield's contention.
AND from thence," concludes Luke's account of Paul's journey to Rome, "we fetched a compass and came to Rhegium, and after one day the south wind blew, and we came the next day. to Puteoli: where we found brethren, and were desired to tarry with them seven days: and so we went towards Rome.
And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as the Appii Forum...." Over the last miles of the long pilgrimage the Apostle trod the ancient cobblestones of the Appian Way, and moved through a pageant of Roman history. If Paul's spirit was
"stirred within him" as he viewed the monuments of Athens, and saw the city "wholly given to idolatry,"? he must have felt a similar emotion amid the clustering monuments of Rome.
The "queen of roads," the Appian Way, runs south from Rome, and along its length stand the crumbling tombs of the proud families who fed on the fat of Rome's dominion. It was a barren joy. The worn Latin on the stone is full of the weariness of the age. "Misce, bibe, da mihi," runs one ("A cocktail, please for you and me").
Another reads: "Somno aeternali" ("In eternal sleep"), and with the words the symbol of the inverted torch.
"What I ate and drank I have with me; what I have left I have lost," runs another.
"Wine and lust ruin the constitution, but they make life, farewell."
Some cynicism marks the age, and Matthew Arnold's verse finds a multitude of illustrations. It was sombre truth that,
“On that hard pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell”
World-weariness was rife. Here is Catullus, poet of high society in the days of Julius Caesar:
“Suns may rise and set again, but for us eternal night
remains for sleeping.”
"Fruitless words on dust which cannot answer,"' he sobs over his brother's grave. And here is the stern friend of Cicero, writing in those days when the Republic was crumbling. The great orator's daughter is dead, and Sulpicius sends consolation.
Here, he says, is a little thing which may comfort you.
On my way back from Asia I travelled by sea between Aegina and Megara, and I began to look at the regions round about. Behind was Aegina, Megara was in front. On the right was Piraeus, and on the left Corinth, towns once in the glory of their strength, which now lie broken before our eyes. This is how my thoughts began to run, "Ah! We little men are hurt if one of ours should die! Yet the wonder is we live so long when in one place the corpses of so many cities lie." Provinces, my friend Cicero, are being shaken. Why, in such a day, be so moved if you have become the poorer by the frail spirit of one poor girl?
So "the Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind," as Byron called Sulpicius.
The cultured Hadrian, who built the mighty wall across Britain, put the same pessimism into his little poem:
Poor little soul, little sweet fluttering thing, my body's friend and guest, whither now away, all pale and cold and pitifully stripped?
But move on a few generations, and some indication of the transformation wrought by Christianity is found in a similar context. Under Rome, deep below the Appian Way, run the ancient Catacombs. They are cut through the soft tufa rock, a network of galleries encompassing the city, and even acting as a cushion against earthquake shocks. In them are multitudes of Christian graves, and countless inscriptions breathe the faith of men and women.
Here lies Ulpia in a small recess. She needed little room, Ulpia, who "sleeps in peace," as the inscription puts it, for she is but a handful of bones, whose fragments perhaps tell how she died. Her friends wrote on the stone that she had not been buried, but "decorated." Hard by, a marble slab records the fact that Eutychia, "hap-piest of women," lies beneath. A locket with her body depicts Christ bearing the fruit of the tree of life, and above is cut the outline of a strong, sweet face. In strangest paradox the corridors of death contained all that was truly living of ancient Rome. In the simple art and wall inscriptions is the warmth of hope and faith. Pagan Rome above was in the Indian Summer of her imperial
strength. Storm was brewing in the vast hinterlands of the twin continents, and all that which the Caesars had built and fought for was to pass in rack and ruin. All that had been worth while in Rome's great story was to be preserved for another age by those who bore their martyred dead to burial in the dark tangle of the Catacombs.
The life of the early Church, the cherished beliefs of its men and women, their favourite stories, their heroism and endurance is read vividly in the graffiti and simple art of the Catacombs. Those persecuted generations, vibrantly alive, and unaffected in their devotion, seem in every way more intimately near than those of Medieval Christendom who filled Rome above with churches and sombre art.
Withrow remarks on "the complete avoidance of all images of suffering and woe, or of tragic awfulness, such as abound in sacred art above ground... There are no symbols of sorrow . .. nothing to cause vindictive feelings even towards the persecutors of the Church; only sweet pastoral scenes, fruits, flowers, palm branches, laurel crowns, lambs, and doves; nothing but what suggests a feeling of joyous innocence as of the world's golden age."
It is a pity that wider areas of these amazing galleries are not open to the Christian public. Serious archaeologists have nevertheless done fine work, and some of their findings are a striking contribution to the history of the Church. This is notably true on the vexed question of the strength of the first Christian communities in Rome, for on this subject the Catacombs have a clear and authoritative word to say.
Consider first the lateral spread of the Church. The adjective is James Orr's, whose striking Morgan Lectures, delivered at Auburn in the State of New York.
The Morgan Lectures were delivered at the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and took place in September 1894 (by Sir William Mitchell Ramsay) and October 1897 (by James Orr), roughly 129 to 132 years ago.
The first Morgan Lectures made many Protestants aware of the historical significance of the Roman Catacombs. Orr's lectures, in fact, published in a modest volume under the title Neglected Factors in the History of the Early Church, merit, like many others of his apologetic writings, a generous modern edition.
Reliable calculations suggest that the vast tangle of the Catacombs contains up to 600 miles of galleries. The lowest estimate of the graves they contain is 1,750,000; an admissible probability is something like 4,000,000.
This is obviously a question which could, with a will to do so, be settled quite conclusively. At any rate some ten generations of Christians are buried in the Catacombs, so that, on the second figure, we have a Christian population, in and about Rome, of 400,000 for one generation. On the smaller computation this would be I 75,000.
Such averaging, of course, is not good statistical method, for the number of Christians was smaller in the earlier, and larger in the later generations of the period concerned.
But if the figure of 175,000 is taken as representing a middle point in that period, say round about the middle of the third century after Christ, those who remember Gibbon's estimate of the Christian population of Rome will immediately mark a huge discrepancy.
Gibbon's guess, recorded in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was that the Christians at the end of the third century numbered something like one-twentieth of the population of Rome. That population is reliably estimated at something like one million. The most conservative interpretation of the Catacomb burial figures would, therefore, suggest that not one-twentieth but one-fifth of Rome's people in the middle Empire were Christians, and it is possible that the proportion was at times much greater.
And what of the Roman world at large? The quite
impartial archacological evidence is confined to the capital, but it was a close-knit world, with the Gospel moving through the main centres of population, from the East progressively to the West. Gibbon himself believed that the Christian minority was fairly evenly distributed, and that seems likely. If, therefore, what was true of Rome was also true of Carthage and Alexandria and similar main cities, other evidence becomes available.
The fiery Tertullian, who speaks for North Africa at the end of the second century cannot, for example, be lightly dismissed.
It seems impossible to deny the fact that, in spite of State action, the numbers of the Christians were exciting pagan alarm. "The killing beast that cannot kill," of Edwin Muir's moving poem, had done its worst without avail. "Men cry out," says Tertullian, "that the State is besieged; the Christians are in the fields, in the forts, in the islands; they mourn, as for a loss, that every sex, age, condition, and even rank, is going over to this sect;" and, he tells us, "the temple revenues are every day falling off; how few now throw in a contribution." And speaking in brave defiance before the Proconsul Scapula, where exaggeration could only be bad argument, he maintains :
"Though our numbers are so great-constituting all of but a majority in every city (pars paene maior ciuitatis cuiusque) we conduct ourselves in quietness and modesty." He also says that if the Christians in Carthage were to present themselves in a body before the Governor's tribunal, he would have to decimate the city to make an example of them.
In the context of such claims, made before authorities in a position to deflate mere rhetoric, must be placed the same speaker's celebrated outburst: "We are but of yester-day, and yet we have filled every place belonging to you — the cities, islands, castles, towns, assemblies, your very camps, your tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum-we leave you your temples only."
It is clear that, throughout many generations of the three pagan centuries, the Christian community formed a larger proportion of the whole than the regular church goers of Britain do today. Admittedly the social cleft between Christian and non-Christian was deeper and more pronounced, but the Church could in no sense be looked upon as an unimportant minority. The Christian might have felt the pressure of pagan opprobrium, but he need never have felt alone. From at least A.D. 200 onwards he had reason to regard the future as his, and to rejoice in the growing strength of the Church.
The Catacombs also provide illustration of the vertical spread of the faith in society. Viewing the church at Corinth in the middle of the first century, and speaking with some irony of its tendency to a false intellectualism, Saint Paul was constrained to say that their numbers contained "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty not many noble.", This remark, which referred to one church only, has been quite illegitimately extended to the whole. It is possible to show from the Gospels and the New Testament generally that Christianity from the very earliest times invaded the ranks of the middle and upper classes, and touched the intellectuals. As Orr says:
"It may be going too far to say, with Professor Ramsay, that Christianity 'spread at first among the educated" more rapidly than among the uneducated'; but this is nearer the truth than the opinion often expressed that Christianity drew the great bulk of its adherents in the earliest times from persons of the lowest and most servile positions-that, in Gibbon's well-known words, the new sect was 'almost entirely composed of the dregs of the populace of peasants and mechanics, of boys and women, of beggars and slaves.'"
Consider, for example, the case of Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, who won military fame in Britain.
Tacitus reports that this noble lady was tried before a domestic tribunal on a charge of entertaining a "foreign superstition." It was long ago suggested that the lady concerned was a Christian, but failing other evidence the suggestion remained in the realm of conjecture.
That evidence was supplied by De Rossi, most indefatigable of the explorers of the Catacombs. From epigraphical testimony he established the fact that the crypt of Lucina was connected with the aristocratic Pomponian family, one member of which bore the very name of the person mentioned by Tacitus, in its masculine form-Pomponius Gracinus. De Rossi suggests that Lucina (which may be rendered "Lady of Light") was a Christian name assumed by Pomponia Graecina herself at baptism, and that she was the owner or founder of the vault which bears the name.
And if Pomponia was, in fact, a Christian, since she lived on into the principate of Domitian, she may have played a major part in two aristocratic conversions of which there is some evidence-those of Flavius Clemens, the consul, and Domitilla, his wife. The former was the cousin, and the latter the niece of Domitian himself.
It is another pagan historian who provides the clue.
Dion Cassius informs us that Flavius and his wife were accused of "atheism," a common allegation against Chris-tians, and of "going astray after the customs of the Jew." Flavius Clemens was put to death, and his wife banished.
Eusebius adds his word of testimony, asserting that Flavia Domitilla was exiled for confessing Christ. By an obvious error he calls her the niece of the consul. He meant, or should have said, of the Emperor.
De Rossi appears to have established the Christianity of this illustrious pair. He discovered the crypt of Domitilla, and whether the lady was the person of Cassius' notice or her niece, the existence of a Catacomb crypt under the name is sufficient to confirm the Christian connexion.
Add the discovery of an elegantly constructed "crypt of the Flavians," and Harnack's contention that " an entire branch of the Flavian family embraced Christianity," is established. These facts furnish startling illustration of the extent to which, by the close of the first century, Christianity had pushed its conquests. Next to the Emperor himself, Flavius Clemens and Domitilla held the highest rank in the Empire; their two sons had even been designated by Domitian as his heirs to the purple. It seemed, says Orr, "almost as if, ere the last Apostle had quitted the scene of his labours, Christianity were about to mount the seat of empire!"
It is quite clear that society generally was permeated by the Christian faith at a very early period of its history.
The church admittedly was neither better nor worse for the social standing of its members. Indeed, in the New Testament documents themselves, Corinth is castigated for its pretensions to philosophy, and Laodicea rebuked for the harmful influence of its wealth. What it is important to point out is that the world of the early church was such a world as the church knows today, where people of all ranks felt the attraction of Christianity, and mingled in the exercise of their faith. We have already quoted a letter from a Roman governor to the Emperor in which he describes the grip of Christianity on the province in his charge. He speaks of "all ages, all ranks and both sexes," who had embraced the new faith.
It is clear that the world of the early church was a spiritually hungry world, craving for the consolations of religion, and that the faith from Israel ran through its stubble like a prairie fire.
The thought which emerges is this — the world in many ways was not very different from the world of today, anxious, war-ridden, disillusioned. Can Christianity do again what it did before? We are, as Professor Butter-feld the Cambridge historian has remarked,' in many ways back in the religious situation of the first century, and that situation provides us often with indications of how we should act.