It seems, then, that there is not much evidence to be derived from the Catacombs as to the Sacrament of Confirmation; that, on the contrary, which has reference to the Holy Eucharist is most precious and abundant, and it is generally to be found in juxtaposition with monuments which bear testimony to the Sacrament of Baptism. The chamber in the crypt of Lucina which gives us the oldest painting of the baptism of our Lord gives us also what are probably the oldest symbolical representations of the Holy Eucharist; and certainly the chambers in the cemetery of San Callisto, in which we have just seen so many and such clear manifestations of the Sacrament of Baptism, contain also the most numerous and the most perfect specimens of the symbolic representations of the Holy Eucharist carried to their highest degree of development, yet still combined with mysterious secrecy. Before enumerating these in detail it will be best to make two or three preliminary remarks helping to clear the way before us. First, then, we may assume as known to all our readers, both that the doctrine about the Blessed Sacrament belonged in a very special way to the discipline of the secret, and also that from the very earliest times one of the most common names under which our Blessed Lord was spoken of was the fish, because the letters which go to make up that word in Greek were also the initials of the words Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. And, secondly, we must say a few words about the different circumstances under which a fish appears in the artistic decorations of the Catacombs; at least, of the different kinds of feasts or entertainments in which it seems to be presented as an article of food. These feasts may be divided into three classes: First, the fish merely lies upon a table—a sacred table or tripod—with one or more loaves of bread by its side, and not unfrequently with several baskets full of bread on the ground around it; secondly, bread and fish are seen on a table, at which seven men are seated partaking of a meal; and, thirdly, they are seen, perhaps with other viands also, at a feast of which men and women are partaking indiscriminately, and perhaps attendants also are there, waiting on the guests, pouring out wine and water, hot or cold. Paintings of this latter class have not uncommonly been taken as representing the agapæ, or love-feasts, of the early church. But this seems to be too literal an interpretation, too much out of harmony with the symbolical character of early Christian art. More probably it was meant as a representation of that wedding-feast under which image the joys of heaven are so often set forth in Holy Scripture; and in this case it is not necessary to suppose that there was any special meaning in the choice of fish as part of the food provided, unless, indeed (which is not at all improbable), it was desired to direct attention to that mystical food a participation in which was the surest pledge of admission to that heavenly banquet, according to our Lord’s own words: “He that eateth this bread shall live for ever.” However, it is not necessary, as we have said, to suppose this; it is quite possible that in these instances the fish may have been used accidentally, as it were, and indifferently, or for the same reason as it sometimes appears on pagan monuments—viz., to denote the abundance and excellence of the entertainment.
Paintings of the first class, however, are much too peculiar to be thus explained, neither is there anything resembling them in the works of pagan artists which could have suggested them; and those of the second class, we hope presently to show, can only have been intended to represent a particular scene in the Gospel history. It is only with paintings belonging to one or other of these two classes that we need concern ourselves to-day. And, first, of the bread and fish when placed alone, without any guests at all. In the crypt of Lucina it appears twice on the wall opposite our Lord’s baptism, and in a very remarkable form indeed. The fish is alive and apparently swimming, and he carries on his back a basket full of loaves, in the middle of which is a vessel of glass containing some red liquid. What can this mean? Nobody ever saw anything like it in nature. We know of nothing in pagan art or mythology which could have suggested it. Yet here it finds a place in the chamber of a Christian cemetery, and as part of a system of decoration, other parts of which were undoubtedly of a sacred character. Is this alone profane or meaningless, or does not rather its hidden sense shine forth distinctly as soon as we call to mind the use of the fish as a Christian symbol on the one hand, and the Christian doctrine about the Holy Eucharist on the other? The fish was Christ. And he once took bread and broke it, and said, This is my body; and he took wine and blessed it, saying, This is my blood; and he appointed this to be an everlasting ordinance in his church, and promised that whosoever should eat of that bread and drink of that chalice should inherit everlasting life. Here are the bread and the wine and the mystical fish. And was it possible for Christian eyes to attach any other meaning to the combination than that it was intended to bring before them the remembrance of the Christian mysteries, whereby death and the grave were robbed of all their gloom, being only the appointed means of entrance to a never-ending life? If anybody is tempted to object that the vessels here represented as containing the bread and wine are too mean ever to have been used for such a purpose, we must remind him that it had already been put on record by archæologists, before the discovery of this monument, that the early Christians in the days of poverty and persecution continued to use vessels of the same humble materials as had been used in the sacrificial rites of Jews and Gentiles before them, and that these were precisely such as are here represented. Nay, further still, that even when vessels of gold and silver had come into use in the church, still there were exceptional times and circumstances when it was lawful, and even praiseworthy, to return to the more simple and ancient practice. St. Jerome praises St. Exuperius, Bishop of Toulouse in his day, because, having sold the church-plate to relieve the pressing necessities of the poor, he was content to carry the body of Christ in a basket made of wicker-work, and the blood of Christ in a chalice of glass. Most assuredly St. Jerome would have been at no loss to interpret the painting before us.
But let us now pass on into the cemetery of San Callisto, and enter again the chamber in which we saw Moses, and the fishermen, and the ministration of baptism, and the paralytic. Let us pursue our walk round the chamber, and immediately after the paralytic, on the wall facing the doorway, we come to the painting of a three-legged table with bread and fish upon it, a woman standing on one side in the ancient attitude of Christian prayer, and a man on the other stretching out his hands over the fish and the bread, as though he were blessing them. Can it be that we have here the act of consecration of the Holy Eucharist, as in the adjacent wall we had the act of baptizing, only in a somewhat more hidden manner, as became the surpassing dignity of the greater mystery? Nobody, we think, would ever have disputed it, had the dress of the consecrator been somewhat more suited to such an action. But his breast and arm and one side of his body are considerably exposed, as he stretches out his arm from underneath his cloak; and modern taste takes exception to the exposure as unseemly in such a time and place. We have no wish to put a weapon into the hands of the anti-ritualistic party. Nevertheless, we believe that it is pretty well ascertained that at first no vestment was exclusively appropriated to the celebration of Mass. We are not sure that Dean Stanley was in error when he wrote the other day that St. Martin, the Apostle of Gaul and first Bishop of Tours, wore a sheepskin when he officiated, and that “he consecrated the Eucharistic elements with his bare arms coming through the sheepskin.” And at any rate it is certain that in the days of Tertullian, to which the picture before us belongs, many ministers of Christ’s word and sacraments used the pallium as the dress most suitable to their own profession. The writer we have named published a short treatise on the subject, in which, with his usual wit and subtlety, he commends its use, and he concludes with these words: “Rejoice, O Pallium! and exult; a better philosophy claims thee now, since thou hast become the vestment of a Christian.” Forty years later a fellow-countryman of this writer, St. Cyprian, expressed a strong objection to the dress, both as immodest in itself and vainglorious in its signification. Thus everything conspires to support the interpretation which the picture itself suggests and the age to which it has been assigned; and we conclude with confidence that those who first saw it never doubted that it was meant to set before them the most solemn mystery of their religion.
They would have recognized the same mystery again without hesitation, under another form, in the painting which follows immediately afterwards, in which seven men are seen seated at a table, partaking of bread and fish. Our own thoughts, as we look at it, fly naturally to the last chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, where such an incident as this is minutely described after the miraculous draught of fishes which was the occasion of it. But unless we are very familiar with the writings of the Fathers, our thoughts would probably go no further; they would rest in the mere letter of the narrative; we should not penetrate beneath the surface, and see (as all the Fathers saw), in every circumstance related, a prophetic figure of the whole history of the church: first, the immense number of souls caught in her net, then the union of those souls with Christ, “the fish that was already laid on the hot coals” (Piscis assus, Christus passus), their incorporation with him through partaking of that living Bread which came down from heaven, and consequently their sure hope of abiding with him for ever in the world to come. This is no private or modern interpretation; it is drawn out at greatest length by St. Augustine; but it is to be found also in all other patristic commentaries on Holy Scripture; and the marvellous unity, not only in dogmatic teaching, but even in the use of allegories and artistic symbols, which reached from east to west in the ancient church, warrants us in assuming that it was not unknown to him who selected this scene as the central piece of decoration for the principal wall of this chamber.
Next after it he painted Abraham with his son Isaac, the ram, and the faggot for the sacrifice—a type both of the sacrifice on Mount Calvary and (in a yet more lively manner) of the unbloody sacrifice still perpetually renewed on Christian altars.
Thus there is the most exact similitude between the illustrations used to set forth the Holy Eucharist on the one wall and those of holy baptism on the other. Both sacraments are at the same time veiled from unbelievers, yet indicated to the faithful, by types taken from the history of the Old Law, by incidents belonging to the life of Christ, and by representations, sufficiently simple yet obscure, of the actual manner of their administration. And then the last wall was reserved for the setting forth of our resurrection, in the example of Lazarus, which was, in truth, the natural end and completion of all that the sacraments led to.
We have not left ourselves space to speak at length of the miracles of changing water into wine, or the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, as other figures of the Holy Eucharist often to be seen in the Catacombs. That they were painted there in this sense we cannot doubt, when we consider how they were connected with that sacrament in the sermons and catechetical instructions of the early church. In the first miracle the substance of water was changed into the substance of wine; in the second a limited substance was, by Christ’s power, so multiplied as to be made present in a thousand places at once, capable of feeding a thousand persons, whereas a minute before it had been only present in one place and was sufficient only to satisfy the appetite of one. The analogy is obvious; but these miracles do not seem to have entered so early into the system of decoration of the Catacombs (except in a very fragmentary and indirect manner), neither do they anywhere enter into so long and beautiful a series of mystical figures, as those others which we have been just now examining. Those form a series of rare and very special interest. They are repeated, as we have already said, in several successive chambers, whose date can be determined, by a number of concurrent indications, as not later than the first quarter of the third century. In these chambers the same histories and the same symbols are repeated in the same style, freely changed in their arrangement and in some accessories of the composition, yet constant in their hidden meaning and theological sense; and that sense is briefly this: the idea of a new life imparted to the Christian soul by baptism, fed by the Holy Eucharist, and continued uninterruptedly throughout eternity.
TWO MAY CAROLS.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.
DARKNESS.
The authentic Thought of God at last