It is only in our own day that the study of inscriptions generally, and especially of Christian inscriptions, has received that development which entitles it to a place among real sciences. It has now acquired a light and a solidity which constitute it one of the most trustworthy founts of ancient history. To confine ourselves, however, strictly within the limits of our present argument, we will speak only of the method which has been followed by De Rossi during the thirty years he has devoted so assiduously to this subject, and whereby he has been enabled to discover the laws which regulated the gradual development of Christian epigraphy. If we must summarize his method in a single word, we should say that his secret consists in a minute study of the topography of all inscriptions. In every fresh excavation—i.e., in every reopening of the galleries and chambers of the Catacombs, and clearing away the débris with which they have been so long encumbered—he has carefully marked and registered every stone, and even every fragment of every stone, bearing so much as a single letter or symbol engraved upon it, and taken note of the precise spot where it has been found. When a sufficient space has been cleared to enable him to make a study of its contents, he collects all the stones that have been discovered within this area; carefully eliminates all those which have evidently fallen through the luminaria, or in other ways have been introduced from the upper world; next, makes a separate class of those whose place of origin is doubtful—those
which there is some reason, either from their size, their shape, or for some other cause, to suspect may have come from outside; and then there remain, finally, those only which beyond all question belong to the subterranean cemeteries. Many of these he has, perhaps, discovered in situ, still closing the graves to which they were originally attached—and these, of course, are cardinal points in his system of arrangement; of many others he knows the chamber or gallery whence they came; and of all he minutely examines the language, the symbols, monograms or other ornaments, the form of the letters, the names, and, finally, the style and epigraphic formulæ; and the minute study of the inscriptions of innumerable areæ of various cemeteries according to this strict topographical system has led to wonderfully interesting and important discoveries, both as to their history and chronology. This process of examination, it need hardly be said, is laborious and wearisome in the extreme; even the material difficulties which surround it are not slight. It sometimes happens that within the limits of a single area—e.g., in that of St. Eusebio’s monument in the cemetery of San Callisto—there are upwards of a thousand fragments of epitaphs to be sifted and classified. De Rossi, therefore, occasionally gives utterance to a pathetic lament as to the dry and tedious character of the task he has imposed upon himself. Nevertheless, he has persevered in it with the most conscientious fidelity, even when at times the attempt at arrangement seemed almost desperate, and the results have in the end abundantly rewarded his labors. It is with these results that we are at present concerned; and it
is obvious that in these pages we can only reproduce them: we cannot enter into an examination of the evidence upon which they rest. This is the less necessary, however, since even the most bitter of Protestant controversialists admit that “De Rossi has the rare merit of stating his facts exactly and impartially, precisely as he finds them,” and that “his assiduous researches have been conducted with a sincere zeal for truth.”
Let us proceed, then, to state some of the conclusions to which De Rossi’s researches have led him—first, upon the general subject of the chronology of the inscriptions which have come to us from the Catacombs, and next as to the dogmatic allusions contained in them. And first, as to the inscriptions, it is patent that not one in ten bears its date on the face of it. Are the other nine (speaking generally) older or more recent? De Rossi pronounces quite positively in favor of their greater antiquity. He says that the most ancient Christian epitaphs make no mention either of the day or year of decease; that during the time of the first emperors there are very few exceptions to this rule; that in the third century the mention of the day and month of the decease was not uncommon, though the year was still passed over in silence; finally, that in the fourth century this also was added.[111] But he says that there are other tokens, such as the number and character of the names or of the symbols employed, the style of diction, the form of the letters, etc., which, if carefully examined and compared with one another, enable us not unfrequently to make a very probable statement as
to the age of undated inscriptions (probabili non raro sententiâ definies); if, in addition to this, we know the place where the inscription was found, and have had the opportunity of examining other inscriptions found in the same neighborhood, then it will rarely happen that there is any doubt at all about the age to which it belongs. It is not, of course, meant that it is possible to fix the year, or even the decade or score of years, perhaps, to which it belongs; but De Rossi would certainly fix its chronology within the limits of half a century or less (tum de ætate latè saltem sumptâ vix unquam grave dubium supererit); he certainly would never be in doubt with reference to any particular inscription, still less with reference to a whole class of inscriptions, whether it belongs to the ages of persecution or to the end of the fourth century.
Now, Mr. Withrow is either aware of these canons whereby the chronology of the inscriptions from the Catacombs is fixed, or he is not. If he is not, he is quite incompetent to follow by their means (as he professes to do, p. 415) “the development of Christian thought from century to century, and to trace the successive changes of doctrine and discipline.” If he is aware of them, his reasoning is most disingenuous when he first seeks to settle a disputed question by the testimony of the dated inscriptions of the first three centuries (p. 426)—which are not more than thirty in number altogether—and then proceeds to argue that “if those inscriptions which apparently favor Romish dogmas, of which we know the date, are all of a late period, we may assume that those of a similar character which are undated are of the same relative age, and therefore valueless as evidence of the antiquity of such
dogmas” (p. 446). There is no necessity, and indeed no room, for “assumption” at all. The question can be decided by scientific rules whether such and such inscriptions belong to the third century or the fifth, and he ought honestly to have told his readers as much, and to have stated what that decision is. As he has failed to do so, we must supply the omission.
First, however, let the limits of our task be clearly defined. We are not undertaking to establish any point of Christian doctrine by the unaided evidence of inscriptions or paintings from the cemeteries, though we are far from saying that there are none which might be so established. But at present we are only concerned to refute Mr. Withrow’s Protestant interpretation of these monuments, and to show that they at least favor, if they do not demand, a Catholic interpretation. We know that not even the writings of the Fathers present a complete picture of the whole doctrinal system of the age to which they belong, but must be studied by the light reflected upon them from the more developed and systematic expositions of those who came after them. Still less do we think it reasonable to look in a collection of epitaphs for a clear statement of the articles of faith professed by those who wrote them; the utmost that can be expected is that they should contain what De Rossi calls “dogmatic allusions”—more or less distinct, if you will, but always, or at least generally, merely indirect and casual. And as to drawing any trustworthy conclusions with reference to the antiquity of this or that Christian doctrine from the supposed absence of all allusion to it in the dated tombstones of the first three centuries, the mere enunciation of
such a theory is enough to demonstrate its absurdity.
Yet we are sorry to say that Mr. Withrow has been guilty of even worse absurdity than this, if it ought not rather to be called dishonesty. It is certainly worse than mere literary or dialectic trifling—it looks like a wilful throwing of dust in the reader’s eyes—to assert in the text (p. 517) that the order of acolytes, “discontinued in the Protestant communion,” was “probably the offspring of the increasing pomp and dignity of the bishops to whom they acted as personal attendants, especially in public processions and religious festivals,” and that “the only dated epitaphs of acolytes are of a comparatively late period,” whilst forced to acknowledge in a note that “Cornelius, Bishop of Rome in the third century” (A.D. 250)—i.e., at a time when “the pomp and dignity of bishops” consisted in their being the special objects of imperial persecution, and the only “public processions” in which they can have taken part were those in which they were led forth to public execution—that Cornelius, Bishop of Rome in the middle of the third century, “says there were in that church forty-two acolytes.” What does Mr. Withrow mean by placing these two statements together in the way we have described? Does he really wish to insinuate that the absence of an ancient dated epitaph of a deceased acolyte ought to counterbalance the testimony of the bishop to the existence of forty-two living ones? or does he think that the Protestant public, for whose tastes he so unscrupulously caters, will read his text and overlook his notes? or, finally, that, reading the notes, they will nevertheless give greater weight to the uncharitable suggestion of a Protestant clergyman