The Literary Evidence
 
 
 
 
 

J. Patout Burns

North American Patristics Society

May 1997
 

I should begin with some account of the state of the literary evidence for Christian funeral practice in Roman Africa: it is remarkably slim. We have brief accounts of the burials of Cyprian and Augustine in the Acta Proconsularia and the Vita of Possidius; we have Evodius' account of the death, burial, and mourning of a particularly promising member of his clergy; and we have Augustine's account of Monica's funeral at Ostia, in which he remarks on differences between the Italian and African practices. The triumphant torchlight procession which bore Cyprian's martyred body to its grave cannot be assumed to be representative of third century practice for ordinary Christians. In some of Augustine's surviving sermons and commentaries, he described and criticized deviant Christian practices. We have some counciliar legislation from the late fourth century, forbidding certain practices, which must have been common enough to gain notice. Finally, in de cura pro mortuis gerenda, Augustine provided a rationale for the practice of burial near the tomb of a martyr, for which there is remarkably little literary evidence in Africa. All other literary evidence of funeral practices can be found in incidental remarks, such as the use of the baths and the incense trade. Mourning and remembrance practices are thus documented but seldom receive the kind of full treatment which is provided, for example, for baptism. The evidence comes principally from the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, as well as the records of African church councils.

Two principles guided the divergence of African Christian rituals of death from those of the Roman Imperial culture: belief in the resurrection of the flesh, and the assertion that idolatry was rooted in the cult of the dead. The first is evident in the care bestowed upon the corpse: it was washed, anointed and wrapped with spices, buried rather than cremated, in a separate area within the established cemeteries or in Christian cemeteries. While the church was still a distinct society, it seems to have provided the services of the burial clubs for the poor, though not for the rich, insuring their individual burial and remembrance. The Christian rejection of idolatry is evident in the refusal to place garlands or crowns on the corpse, the denial of sacrifices to the dead, withdrawal from heathen burial clubs, and modification of participation in the Roman feasts of the dead, particularly the parentalia in February.

We will begin the survey of the literary evidence for African Christian burial customs by reviewing the particular practices and then attempt to specify the attitudes and assumptions which they articulated.

The most important preparation for death was securing the peace of the church. Catechumens were offered baptism through sprinkling; penitents were readmitted to communion if death was anticipated. Once the delay of baptism had become ordinary, provision was made for the emergency baptism of infants and even comatose adults, whose intention might be otherwise established. In certain instances, the faithful may have even demand the baptism of someone already deceased.

Indirect evidence suggests that Christian were buried on the day of death, parallel to the Jewish custom, rather than after elaborate ritual of mourning, which were followed in some classes of Roman society. The preparation of the corpse involved washing and the application of incense but there is no evidence of more elaborate embalming. Augustine's sermons do, however, indicate that some nominal Christians were following funeral practices which reflected pagan rather than Christian ideals: perfumed corpses were wrapped in expensive robes, carried to the grave on elaborate beds, accompanied by crowds of mourning dependents, and placed in elaborately constructed and decorated tombs, where they planned to rest eternally.

The funeral ritual included a commendation at the grave side before the burial. The second and third centuries we cannot determine that the burial itself included a celebration of the eucharist. In some instances, the eucharist seems to have been celebrated on one of the days following the burial. An African council in the third century, for example, punished violators of certain of its decrees by forbidding that the sacrifice be offered for them after death; Cyprian's confirmation of the application of this legislation was sought and given; because of the distances involved, his judgment could only have affected a celebration some days after the burial itself. In exile, Cyprian himself maintained the custom of offering the sacrifice, even for those who died in the persecution, once he was informed by courier of their deaths. He may have been continuing a peace-time episcopal responsibility. The evidence for fourth and fifth century practice indicates a eucharistic sacrifice but not its place in the sequence of actions comprising the funeral. In recounting Monica's funeral at Ostia, Augustine explained that the eucharist was celebrated at the grave site prior to burial, specifying that this was the Italian custom and thus implying that it was not the practice in Africa. By the time the Confessions was written, however, the African bishops had forbidden the celebration of the eucharist in the presence of the corpse. This was necessary to stop the occasional practice of placing the eucharistic bread in the mouth of the dead, a viaticum which replaced the coin need to pay Charon's fare. The legislation specified that sacrifice could be offered for the dead, however, as long as the clergy and mourners were still fasting and had not yet taken their first meal at midday. Thus the earlier African custom may also have been to celebrate the eucharist at the grave before burial. Thus Possidius says that the eucharist was celebrated prior to Augustine's own burial, implying that it involved those who had been present at his death rather than an extensive gathering of colleagues. When a burial was performed in the afternoon, the eucharistic sacrifice may have been made on a following day. Evodius specified, for example, that the eucharist was celebrated for his protege on the third day after burial. Augustine also remarks that the name of a deceased Christian for whom the sacrifice was being offered was sometimes but not always announced to the congregation; this might have been a community ritual on one of the days following burial.. Thus the offering of the eucharist as a sacrifice for the deceased seems to have been part of the funeral ritual by the third century; it was established and regulated late in the fourth.

Rituals of mourning associated with the burial are sparsely attested. Evodius' account of the three days of prayer at the grave of his young cleric implies, to my reading, that the procedure was extraordinary. Some may have observed the Roman custom which specified nine days of mourning; Augustine recommended that Christians who wanted to count days should observe seven, to symbolize the rest which the Christian dead attained in God's sabbath.

Continuing commemoration and prayer for the dead was a regular part of Christian life in Africa from the earliest second century. Tertullian disapproved of the annual Roman feasts of the dead but regarded the anniversary offering, which may have been the eucharist, as one of the responsibilities of a surviving spouse. Cyprian, who did not clearly distinguish the martyrs from the other faithful in this regard, specified that death dates must be carefully noted to enable to proper celebrations and appears to have made use of the records. Augustine indicated that the names of the deceased were listed during the sacrifice, and in order of rank, beginning with the martyrs, then the consecrated virgins, the bishops of the local church, and the ordinary dead. Prayers were not offered for the martyrs, he insisted, rather their aid was sought for the others. We would assume some structure or process of selection for determining who was mentioned on a particular day, since the lists could have been quite long, even by ancient standards. Perhaps individual faithful had the opportunity to call out the names of their loved ones, or to offer silent prayers which were then communally affirmed. The community prayed collectively for all the dead, so that none would go without the assistance of the church. Individuals also prayed privately for the loved ones apart from the liturgy. Facilitating this continuing prayer for the dead and their commendation to the protection of the martyrs was the sole basis Augustine offered for the practice of depositio ad sanctos, burial next to the tomb of a martyr

Augustine and Alypius, the bishop of Carthage, campaigned to restrict the funeral feasts which had become a regular practice of African Christians. They succeeded in banishing the banquets held to celebrate the anniversaries of martyrs and founding bishops. They attempted to modify rather than prevent the cemetery meals of bread and wine which were being held at the tombs of the ordinary dead, either on their anniversary or during the parentalia, the Roman festival of ancestors. Augustine urged the faithful to include prayers and even almsgiving in the name of the departed which could provide real solace to the dead. Christians clearly understand, he insisted, what even the thinking pagans grasped: the dead receive no benefit from the bread broken and wine poured over or into the tomb.

Mourning the Christian dead involved a tension between the sadness of death and the belief in paradisal life. Cyprian noted the practice of wearing black garments, avoiding entertainments and personal grooming but urged his flock to put these aside in accord with their belief that the dead were already clothed in white and enjoying paradise. Similarly, Augustine's shame over his grief at Monica's death is widely known. But after years as a pastor, Augustine recognized and approved the customs of mourning in the face of death. The care lavished on the bodies of the dead and the decoration of their tombs do not directly benefit the dead but do offer solace to the bereaved. In love, the living offer to the dead that service which each would want for one's own body, since no one hates his own flesh. He recognized that love of the departed entailed cherishing their body even more than the clothes and jewelry which had been dear to them. Augustine could, moreover, cite instances in which Christ himself had practiced or defended mourning the dead and caring for their bodies. Indeed, he suggested that the offices provided the dead could be regarded as a form of alms to the bodies which had been instruments of good works and which would be raised to life in the Kingdom of God.

The Christian practices of burial, mourning and prayer for the dead raise questions about the assumptions of the faithful on the condition or status of the dead. As is often the case, Tertullian provided the most full and explicit discussion of the topic, indicating the true and some alternative Christian beliefs. Heaven itself, he explained, was closed to all but Christ himself until the general resurrection and judgment. In the meantime, only the souls of the Christian martyrs enjoyed the delights of paradise, as was evidenced by the visions of Perpetua. The souls of the ordinary dead, both Jewish patriarchs and the Christians, were held with those of the heathen in the central parts of the earth, which is called Hades. Since sleep belongs to the body rather than the soul, they were in a state of consciousness, receiving consolation or punishment as they deserved. Some underwent continuing purification in anticipation of the judgment. Only by the divine power were the souls of the dead allowed to return to the land of the living; otherwise they were held incommunicado.

Tertullian did not compare the happiness of the Christian dead to that of their living counterparts. When Cyprian exhorted his flock to accept death by martyrdom or plague with more joy than equanimity, to refrain from mourning those who went ahead, he painted a truly glowing picture of the blissful condition to which death provided access. Unlike Tertullian and apparently much of his flock, he did not distinguish the rewards of the martyrs from those of the ordinary faithful: all immediately entered the presence of Christ; they were welcomed by the apostles and martyrs, indeed by all the faithful who had preceded them. Cyprian's views do not appear to have been widely shared by his people, who assigned special intercessory power to the martyrs. Indeed, Cyprian's portrait of paradise is contradicted by other elements in his campaign to undercut the authority of the martyrs in the deliberations of the bishops.

By Augustine's day, Christians were no longer a marginal subgroup; they had substantial stake in the earthly as well as the heavenly kingdom. Their beliefs in the state of the departed seem to have been closer to those expressed by Tertullian than Cyprian. In writing or preaching on mourning, Augustine did not appeal to the felicity of the dead as a means of consoling the bereaved; instead he squarely faces the sadness of death and dissolution.

The righteous dead had, however, been freed from gnawing concern for the welfare and salvation of those when they had left behind. Except in special cases of divine intervention, the dead knew nothing more of the living than the living did of the dead. In this, however, Augustine seems to have been preaching against the dominant belief of his congregation. Some Christians certainly believed that the spirits of the dead continued to be involved in the affairs of the living, since they appeared in dreams to give advice and warning. They may also have assumed that the breaking bread and pouring libations of wine, as well as the other services honoring the departed were recognized and appreciated. The miracles worked at the memorials of the martyrs, moreover, clearly indicated their continued presence and willingness to engage in the affairs of the living. Thus when Augustine devoted the final third of de cura pro mortuis gerenda to arguing that the dead are ordinarily and naturally oblivious of the affairs of the living, he had explain that the actual commerce with the dead is mediated by the divine discretion which makes them selectively aware of petitions they are to press or sends them to warn or console the living. Augustine must indeed have been working against a persistent and well established belief that prior to the resurrection, the dead, at least the privileged dead, continued to be absorbed in the struggles of the living.

The elaborate practices of praying for the dead also imply assumptions about their status. Tertullian indicated that purification continued in anticipation of judgment and even asked his readers' prayers for himself. In Cyprian' day it might have been assumed that to die without ever having lost the peace of the church was to enter the kingdom of heaven; only the reconciled lapsed needed the intercession of the bishop, the martyrs, and the whole church as they fearfully approached the judgment of Christ. Augustine, on the contrary, preached that Christians had to do good works, particularly of alms giving, to send ahead of them into the realm of death. He insisted on the dead's urgent need for prayer and intercession from the individual faithful, the martyrs, and especially the church itself. By sharing the banquet food with the poor rather than pouring it out on the tombs, or by giving alms in the name of the dead, the faithful could provide a true solace to the departed. Thus Augustine must certainly have believed and expected his congregation to believe that the faithful departed were in need of the assistance of the living. The judgment must certainly have been still before them.

When Augustine preached on the care of the Christian dead, moreover, he did not assert the pleasure and joy which the departed were enjoying as a counterbalance to the loss of earthly light and life. Rather he entered fully with his congregation into the sadness of viewing the corpse, the poor ruined dwelling of the soul, which had only yesterday walked and talked, shared in the common life. Here, perhaps, one finds manifest again the African Christian belief that only the martyrs had entered immediately into glory. Those ordinary Christians who had escaped damnation were in awaiting judgment in a condition which none would identify as more enjoyable, though it may have been safer, than the earthly life from which they had been torn in punishment for the ancient sin. Their condition, however, was certainly better than that of the evil who, according to the parable of Christ, was already being burned in fire, cut off from the least drop of water that might be poured into his tomb.

Finally, Peter Brown, in his work on the cult of the saints, has suggested that in the fourth and fifth centuries a conflict arose in the care of the dead between the traditional private claims of the family and the newer communal claims of the Christian church. In Christianity, unlike the Roman cults, the religious goods are communally rather than privately produced and secured. Brown focuses his analysis on the competition for privileged spaces in the depositio ad sanctos which was evident in Nola, whence Paulinus sought Augustine's advice. Brown also cites fourth century African instances of private control of the bodies of martyrs, which were then used for either the private good of families or to wield power within the churches. Against these claims, he points out, Augustine followed the model of Ambrose in insisting that the patronage of the martyrs could be accessed only through the publicly available rituals and intercession of the church. We have already noted that according to Augustine, God alone controlled the media of communication with the dead and channeled it through the rituals of the church so no one could secure private access to the martyrs. Without God's special intervention, he argued from scriptural precedent, the dead remain blissfully ignorant of the affairs of the living.

This same conflict between private and communal interests may be discerned in Augustine's dealing with the family feasts at the tombs of the Christian dead. Prayer for the dead, particularly prayers associated with the community's eucharistic sacrifice, he insisted, provided the primary means of assisting the deceased. He suggested that the food brought to the cemeteries would give greater solace to the Christian dead were it given as alms to the poor in their names rather than by being broken, poured out or consumed at their tombs.

Brown's hypothesis might also explain the vehemence of Augustine's attack on the ostentatious funerals of the nominally Christian wealthy. He and his audience might have been deeply offended by these raw assertions of family privilege in the face of communal solidarity. Refusing to give alms, they used their riches to build elaborate tombs which projected class distinctions across the boundary of death into the kingdom of God. I know of no other instances in which Augustine asserts that a baptized Christian is actually burning in hell.

The objective of this extended study of the church in Roman Africa is to understand the practice of Christianity and its relationship to the development of the peculiarly African theology which has been so influential in the Latin church. The examination of burial and mourning customs reveals a significant disconnect between theory and practice. The most significant deviation of Christian from Roman imperial practice may have been the firm commitment to inhumation rather than cremation. This, I suspect, may have owed as much to the Jewish roots of African Christianity as it did to the belief in the resurrection of the flesh. Only Tertullian elaborated an explanation of the status of the soul between separation from the body in death and reunion with it in resurrection which was compatible with Christian practices of mourning and prayer for the deceased. Cyprian's explanation of the afterlife contradicted expressions of grief and turned anniversaries of death into celebrations of triumph. Augustine fully approved the church's practices of mourning and intercession for the dead but failed to develop an explanation of the intermediate afterlife. Nor do I understand how his own theory of gratuitous and efficacious grace could have been compatible with his community's assumptions about the status of the soul between death and resurrection. He could not accept, however, the believers' assumptions about commerce between the living and the dead, contradicting them on the basis of reason, scripture and personal experience.

Funeral customs are notoriously conservative. The Christians may have done well in modifying Roman imperial practices enough to make them compatible with the communal and egalitarian foundations of their creed.