The noninvolvement of the Church in the death and burial of Christians in Late Antiquity finds, if not an explanation, at least a plausible context in the complex relationship between the living and the dead. The usual picture is of fourth - and fifth-century bishops struggling against the cult of the dead, which they stigmatized as a pagan practice in which newly converted Christians indulged. We owe this picture largely to Augustine. In the letter in which he narrates his success in reforming the cult of the martyrs, he explains that, after the Peace of the Church, his predecessors had tolerated the customary eating and drinking on feast days because they did not want to discourage ‘‘a mass of pagans who wished to come to Christianity,’’ and also that the time had now come to enforce proper Christian behavior for the feast of the martyrs (Ep. 29. 9). Peter Brown has already warned us about accepting as a historical truth this ‘‘piece of clerical euhemerism’’ (Brown 1981: 29): Augustine, who was addressing respectable Christian families, was only trying to shame them. Recently, Ramsay McMullen has also strongly reminded us how widely diffused those habits were, from at least the time when Christian funerary monuments can be identified as such (McMullen 1997: 110-11). What still needs to be emphasized and understood is that this struggle concerned the cult of the martyrs, not the cult of the ordinary dead.
It is important first to offer a description and an interpretation of the traditional cult of the dead in the Roman world. John Scheid (2005) has provided us with a thorough analysis of the available information. The feast for the dead, the Parentalia, was celebrated each year in February. Eight days after the official opening of the feast, on February 21 (Feralia), a sacrifice in holocaust was offered to the Manes of the deceased; it was followed by a banquet near the tomb. The food consumed at this banquet had to be brought from town, as there was no sharing of sacrificial food with the infernal deities unless a second sacrifice to the family deities (Lares and Penates) took place. The following day (February 22, Caristia or Cara cognatio), another banquet was held at home. Food and banquet were thus central elements in the traditional commemoration of the dead. They were the media through which the different statuses of the dead and of the living (and of their relations) were expressed. ‘‘As long as the family or the community celebrated the banquets of the Parentalia and the parentationes, the deceased survived as a member of this community, even if his place in it was not much to be envied’’ (Scheid 2005: 188). Thus, it is clear that the cessation of these rites would have meant abandoning the deceased to the definitive death of oblivion.
These rites are reconstructed from documents dated to the first and second centuries (Verg. Aen. 5. 64-5; Ov. Fast. 2. 533-4; inscriptions from Misenum: D’Arms 2000; see Scheid 2005: 320-3); but we have no reason to think that they changed much in the centuries that followed. In fact, Christian bishops mentioned the Parentalia and some associated rites throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, and even beyond. Christians, like their pagan parents and neighbors, celebrated funerary meals on, or near, the tombs of their dead. Archaeological evidence leaves no room for doubt on this matter (MacMullen 1997: 110-11).
The silence of the third-century Christian texts has sometimes been interpreted as a sign that early Christians did not take part in the traditional cult of the dead (Kotila 1992: 62-3; but see Rebillard 2005: 101-2). When Tertullian says that Christians do not sacrifice to the gods or give any food to the dead and that they do not eat from sacrifices or offerings to the dead (De spectaculis 28), he is prescribing what Christians should not do, not describing what they do not do. Archaeological evidence confirms that in the third century, at least in Rome, where we find the only monuments securely datable to this time, Christians celebrated funerary meals like their pagan relatives and neighbors (Fevrier 1978). We have seen that the consumption of food near the tomb was not in fact directly linked to the sacrifice.
In the fourth century, bishops more regularly denounced funerary meals. In a sermon preached to newly baptized Christians (c. ad 360-80), Zeno of Verona includes among examples of forbidden sacrifices the meals on the tombs ( Tractatus
1. 25. 6. 11). To justify their banqueting, some Christians were apparently mentioning the nearby tomb ofa martyr. Zeno does not disguise his indignation. It is difficult to reconstruct the social context underlying such preaching but the sermon does provide evidence that, in the middle of the fourth century, some Christians in Verona continued the practice of funerary meals, and Zeno’s moral reflections clearly indicate that prohibition would have been in vain. Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia in northern Italy at about the same time, adopted the same attitude. In a sermon also preached to the newly baptized (Tractatus 4. 14-15), he includes the Parentalia among a list of idolatrous practices and interrupts himself to explain why. He also chooses to insist that it is disrespectful to the dead to be drunk near their tombs. We know through a famous anecdote in the Confessions that Ambrose had forbidden the bringing of food and drink to the tombs of the martyrs in Milan. According to Augustine, Ambrose thought that the practice was too similar to the Parentalia (Confessions 6. 2. 2). That the prohibition concerned the tombs of the martyrs is confirmed by the fact that
Augustine’s mother Monica (who was the immediate object of Ambrose’s anxiety) had no family relatives buried in the city. In Africa, however, it was her custom to visit the tombs of her own dead and to ‘‘share’’ some wine with her parents. Ambrose himself does not comment on this prohibition among his extant texts: his only known allusion to the Parentalia is, like those of his Italian colleagues, a moral criticism of excessive drinking in honoring the dead (De Helia et ieiunio 17. 62). The issue was apparently more important for Augustine when he was writing the Confessions than it ever was for Ambrose (see McLynn 1994: 236).
Augustine’s campaign back in Africa against these rites at the tombs of the martyrs is well known (documents in O’Donnell 1992, ii: 334-9; see Van der Meer 1962: 520-5; Saxer 1980: 141-7; Kotila 1992: 62-77). I want to emphasize that he makes a very clear distinction between the martyrs and the ordinary dead and does not forbid meals on the tombs of the latter. Like his Italian colleagues, he tries to convince the Christians to be moderate in their eating and drinking and to invite the poor to these meals so that they become an exercise in almsgiving and thus an aid to the dead (Ep. 22; see Rebillard 2005: 103). Other sermons (Ennar. in Ps. 48, sermo 1. 15; Sermo 361. 6. 6), preached long after the heat of his campaign against banquets at the feasts of the martyrs, show that, at least among his own flock, the practice of bringing food and drink to the tombs continued (see Rebillard 2005: 104-5). At the time of his reform, he explained why one should not forbid meals at the tombs of the ordinary dead: people believe that they are ‘‘a solace for the dead'' and they do not want ‘‘the memory of their dead to be neglected’’ (Ep. 22. 1. 6).
Evidence from the east is scarce. In the Apostolic Constitutions, the members of the clergy are asked to drink moderately when they are invited to funerary banquets (8. 44). Gregory of Nazianzus has several epigrams against the gathering of drunkards on the tombs ofthe martyrs, but he does not allude to meals or food offerings for the ordinary dead (references in Mossay 1966: 244-6). Other bishops denounce feasts and banquets in moral terms, but not as practices against religion (Harl 1981). The lack of evidence prevents us from concluding that bishops in the east were less hostile to the traditional commemoration of the dead; but they surely did not forbid it.
According to Augustine, the true Christian commemoration of the dead was to be performed in the church (Ep. 22. 1. 6); but what was done exactly? There was no feast of the dead before the eleventh century, when the whole Church gradually adopted the feast of All Souls, instituted at Cluny by Odilo, and celebrated on November 2 (Lauwers 1996: 140-6). Joannes Belethus, a liturgist of the twelfth century, was struck by the fact that the festival of St. Peter’s Chair, February 22, falls on the same date as the pagan festival of the Caristia, the familial banquet held at the grave of a dead relative (Rationale divinorum officiorum 83). Ancient and modern liturgists have tried to explain this coincidence as an attempt by the Church to substitute for the pagan festival of the dead a Christian one. No explanation, however, has been satisfactory, and it has now been proved that the Christian feast had no funerary character (Fevrier 1977).
The Church regularly commemorated the dead among the intercessory prayers during the eucharistic service. It is sometimes said that the ancient Church made use of lists with the names of the dead, which were read during the eucharistic celebration. There is no convincing evidence of this before a late date, and I contend that the commemoration of the dead in Late Antiquity was, rather, general in character and anonymous. It is not necessary to review all the evidence here (see Rebillard 2003: 178-86), only the documents most discussed.
The testimony of Augustine for the African rite leaves no room for believing that the names of people were read aloud (Bishop 1912 had already made the point; see Rebillard 2003: 179-82, 2005: 106-7; contra, Saxer 1984: 162-5 and Klockener 1992: 196-9). The only names read during the prayers were those of the living members of the clergy, some dead bishops, and the martyrs. The ordinary dead were mentioned under the general category of‘‘those who have fallen asleep.’’ In On the Care for the Dead, Augustine is explicit:
The Church has undertaken to make those supplications [for the spirits of the dead] on behalf of all who die within the Christian and catholic community, even if they sometimes take the form of a general commemoration, without names being mentioned, so that those who lack relatives or sons or any other acquaintance or friend ready for that task may nevertheless have them provided by the one faithful mother who is common to them all. (De cura mort. 4. 6)
According to Robert Taft (1991), the diptychs - the tablets on which the names of the dead were written - had been introduced in the east by the end of the fourth century. At first, the churches would have recorded the names of all the dead, and the deacon would have read their names during the intercessory prayers. The list was progressively restricted to official names, mainly of bishops, and their inclusion became a political issue. This last part of the story is well known and abundantly documented, and is especially true of the polemics surrounding the inclusion of the name of Chrysostom. The first part of Taft’s reconstruction, however, is much less convincing. Among the documents he provides as support, the only unambiguous one is a rubric of the eucharistic prayer transmitted before ad 350 under the name of Serapion, bishop of Thmuis in Egypt (Johnson 1995).
The only other mention of a list of names appears in the description of the eucharistic liturgy in Cilicia by Theodore of Mopsuestia at the end of the fourth century. Before the consecration, the deacon reads from the tablets of the church the names of a few, living and dead; and ‘‘it is clear,’’ says Theodore in his comment, ‘‘that in the few of them who are mentioned now all the living and the departed are mentioned’’ (Catechetical Homilies 15. 43, Mingana 1933: 94). These names were very likely the names of those who brought offerings and of the person for whom they offered, a well-known practice I shall comment upon later. Later in Theodore’s commentary, there is in fact another mention of a commemoration of the dead, an anonymous and general one, included among the intercessory prayers (16. 14). There is positive evidence that other churches did not read the names of the dead (Antioch, Jerusalem, Constantinople: see Rebillard 2003: 182-6). Thus in the east as in the west, with perhaps the exception of Egypt, there was no reading of names, but a general and anonymous commemoration of the dead.
As I have just mentioned, it is possible that some more individual form of commemoration in or by the Church did take place. According to a practice documented in both the west and the east, the names of the persons bringing the offerings and/or of the person on behalf of whom they brought them were mentioned in a special intercessory prayer at the beginning of the service. Tertullian thus mentions the duty of the widow to bring every year, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, offerings on his behalf (De exhortatione castitatis 11. 1; De monogamia 10.4). Cyprian makes a negative allusion to the practice in a letter where he discusses the case of a bishop who has been judged unworthy of such a commemoration (Ep. 1. 2. 1-2). In the fourth and fifth centuries, the practice is barely hinted at (Rebillard 2003: 176-7). A story told by Gregory of Tours, however, confirms that the practice was still prevalent at the end of the sixth century: he mentions a widow who, on behalf of her recently deceased husband, brings to the church every day an excellent wine from Gaza and eventually comes to realize that a subdeacon is substituting a worse one for it (Gloria Confessorum 64). In the East, the Testamentum Domini describes a liturgical installation at the entrance of the church for depositing the offerings and inscribing the offerers’ names (1. 19), and Theodore, as we have seen, may allude to the practice. We can gather from these testimonies that the practice, even where attested, did not attract particular attention. In fact, every time the prayer of the dead is discussed, writers mention only the anonymous commemoration during the intercessory prayers at the Eucharist - which may suggest that it was precisely the anonymous character of the commemoration that was being questioned.
Some historians, in trying to outline the development of the medieval missa specialis, have put forward the hypothesis that communion was received privately at the tombs. The evidence is very tenuous. We know that the consecrated Eucharist could be kept on private premises, but we have no clear idea of the use made of it. We might wonder whether it was actually consumed or simply kept as a kind of prophylactic (Walker 1984). Both Ambrose and Augustine allude to the Eucharist in connection with a commemoration of the dead at the tombs. Their sense of a need to protect the arcana, however, the ‘‘secret mysteries’’ reserved to the baptized, forced them to be vague, which does not help us to understand what ‘‘Eucharist’’ might have meant in that context. Ambrose only says that Luke 9: 60, ‘‘let the dead bury their dead,’’ can be understood in a prophetic sense: it was now prohibited to place on the tombs of the non-Christian dead what it had been acceptable in the past to place on the tombs of the elders (In Lucam 7. 43). Augustine refutes the understanding of Tobit 4: 17 as a reference to the Parentalia, arguing that the faithful know that can be done either ‘‘at the tombs of the dead’’ or ‘‘for the memory of the dead’’ - the Latin says rather ambiguously erga memorias (Sermo 361. 6. 6). I have found no similar allusion in the documents from the east. The evidence is not very convincing, and the most we can say is that the practice was not of great concern.
This lack of means for individual commemoration of the dead in the Church lies at the root of the numerous discussions about the prayer for the dead that were taking place both in the west and in the east during the fourth and the fifth centuries. If we look at the pastoral context of those discussions, it is apparent that they were not so much concerned with the efficacy of the prayers themselves as with the identity of the dead who could benefit from them. Both Augustine and John Chrysostom faced this pastoral problem, and they responded with the same answer: only baptized Christians not guilty of major sins can benefit from the prayers of the Church. While Augustine then insists on the limits imposed by the merits of the dead person, Chrysostom puts more emphasis on what other persons can do on their behalf. If Chrysostom gives more hope as to the help the dead can receive from the living, he clearly states that these hopes rely entirely on what the relatives care to do for their dead (Rebillard 2003: 189-97).
To define the boundaries of what the living could do for the dead was a capital issue in the creation of a Christian cult of the dead. The late antique Church, even if it had no single answer, was very cautious to state what those boundaries were. It did not forbid Christians to pray for those of their relatives who had died unbaptized or in sin, either personally or through intercessors like the poor or widows; but it gave no assurance about the outcome, any more than it did in the case of the non-Christian dead, and it left the care of the dead to the family. It is understandable, therefore, that the bishops, fearing to appear to be asking Christians to neglect their dead, did not turn them away from traditional forms of commemoration. In Late Antiquity, most of the dead who were still remembered were not Christian and therefore, according to church teaching, not saved; but Christians could cultivate their memory and still remain good Christians themselves. The memory of the dead and their salvation were two distinct matters, and only the second was a concern for the Church.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Rush 1941 is still the only synthesis in English. It provides good access to the principal sources, but their interpretation is largely outdated. Toynbee 1971 is mainly concerned with the burial practices of pagans in the first three centuries, but also includes a few observations about Christians. Brown 1981 draws interesting parallels between the cult of the dead and the cult of the saints. MacMullen 1997 emphasizes the continuity between the Christian and the nonChristian cult of the dead. Effros 2002, though about the Merovingian world, describes the development of burial practices and beliefs since Late Antiquity.
World History
