The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity

Introduction

ix q 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 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). x INTRODUCTION 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 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, PublicValues, 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...