The Church and Christian Places of Burial

No one would deny that the Church had no control over the burial places of the vast majority of Christians in Late Antiquity. The involvement of the Church in the development of the first Christian cemeteries is a question that cannot be dealt with here. Whatever the exact role of the Roman church in the development of the catacombs, we do not know of any parallel in the rest of the empire {see the contributions in Fiocchi Nicolai and Guyon 2006).

Bishops developed places of burial for the poor as early as the third century, but they by no means replaced the local towns or cities in this responsibility. In Rome and Constantinople, the emperor delegated this task to the Church in exchange for tax exemptions {Rebillard 1999). The bishops’ involvement in the burial of the poor, however, had more to do with the new style of urban leadership they were trying to impose {Brown 1992, 2002) than with a special concern for burial {Rebillard 2003:

130-41).

There is no late antique ecclesiastical regulation concerning who can be buried where, except when the burial is to be in a space controlled by the Church. This must be why, in a recently discovered sermon, Augustine explains why a catechumen cannot be buried where the Eucharist is celebrated. He was asked to intervene by a local bishop who had difficulty resisting the pressure of a family, rich local landowners, regarding the burial of their unbaptized son. It is difficult to assert positively that the family was trying to obtain for its son the privilege of a burial ad sanctos, in the close vicinity of the saints, as there is no allusion to saints or martyrs in the sermon; but it was clearly meant to be a privileged burial {Sermo 142 augm.; see Rebillard 1998). This short allocution is all the more precious because it is a unique document, opening a window on the expectations of the rich laity at the end of the fourth century and on the role they were ready to concede to the Church. Burial ad sanctos, however, was clearly a privilege reserved mainly for the clergy and for members of the lay nobility (Brown 1981; Duval and Picard 1986; Duval 1988).

Historians and archaeologists have increasingly dated the growth of parish cemeteries to later and later periods. The fourth and fifth centuries did see the development of‘‘managed cemeteries,’’ large areas of orderly rows of inhumation graves. They are no longer considered ethnic (mainly German) cemeteries, but we still lack an overview of their evolution (Young 1999; Effros 2003: 188-200). There was obvious control over the layout of graves, but nothing indicates that it was by the Church. Normally, no cult building was associated with these managed cemeteries, which were large and mainly urban. They were not abandoned until the end of the seventh century, and only then were they progressively replaced with burial areas linked to a church (Fixot and Zadora-Rio 1994).

There is a growing body of evidence regarding the role of the Church, or the absence of that role, in creating or managing Christian burial places; but a general account can still only be tentative.