Foucault's Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs

Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome

E. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137468048
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The catacombs of Rome have captured imaginations for centuries. This innovative study takes a fresh look at these underground spaces, and considers how art, space, texts, and practices can tell us more about the catacombs and the people who dug and decorated them.

Chapter 1

Prologue

Standing in the Forum, the beating heart of the Roman Empire, a resident of third-century Rome was surrounded with signs of imperial strength and Roman hegemony: temples of Saturn and Vesta, the Arch of Augustus and the Augustan Forum, and other monuments to Roman might. From that perch atop the pinnacle of Mediterranean power, he could turn his face south and walk, passing the Coliseum on his left and then the Circus Maximus a farther distance on his right behind the bend of the Palatine Hill. He could walk along the Via Appia, one of the great arteries of the Empire, which carried the lifebloods of trade, humanity, and military power that animated and supplied the Roman world. He passed the Septizodium, a decorative façade with no building behind it, which had been constructed under the emperor Septimius Severus, and like the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps today, it served as a social gathering place for the youth of Rome. Passing by the throngs of chatting Romans, this traveler—whose name was Callistus—walked under the soaring and imposing Aqua Claudia, which carried water 45 miles from the countryside into Rome, where it served all parts of the city. As he made his way south, he came after two Roman miles to the Servian Wall, the city’s defensive wall and sacred boundary.¹ Passing out of it, Callistus was leaving the imperial city and entering the suburbs and the Empire beyond.

Mostly coextensive with the wall was the city’s sacred pomerium, the boundary within which the already-ancient cults of Rome held sway with various rules and restrictions, and without which the tumult and contestation of a cultural melting pot were freer to inscribe themselves upon the populace and the land. One such restriction, again ancient already, concerned death. No burials or cremations or interment of cremated remains could occur within the pomerium, and so upon exiting through the wall and into the suburban countryside, Callistus would have been confronted with the twin enterprises of death and memorialization. Convenience dictated that these industries, pushed outward from the city by custom and statute, would concentrate just outside its edges, and so all along the roads leading out of Rome, mausoleums and tombs dotted the countryside, and smoke rose from cremation fires.² At the height of its population, likely about a million inhabitants at the peak of the Empire, Rome produced about 100 corpses per day, the inevitable by-product of so many people living in one place, with the concomitant disease, violence, and shortened lives.³

About a mile from the wall, the Via Appia rose over a green hill, and if Callistus had paused to turn around and look over his progress, he would have seen from his vantage point on the hill the outer edges of the city pressing against the city wall, the smoke of cremation and cooking fires rising into the frame, and the Forum just out of view in the distance. Behind him now stretched the Roman road, reaching down through Italy toward the Bay of Naples and the buried ruins of Misenum, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. But he had no interest in continuing that far—his concern in following the Via Appia from the city went only as far this place, this green hill. Turning his eyes from the city below and to the north, he walked a short distance off the road and into a fenced-in area, where he slipped through a small door in a modest brick building and began walking down a stairway into the darkness.⁴

This was the entrance to what is now called the Callistus Catacomb, one of the earliest and grandest of the 60-plus Christian catacombs that were dug under Rome’s suburbs between the late second and fifth centuries.⁵ This particular catacomb, later named after Callistus, its first overseer and the man whose journey we followed south from the Forum, had probably existed earlier in the second century as a generic (non-Christian) burial site.⁶ But by the time of the third century, the catacomb was well established as the first and greatest church cemetery, already holding the bones of a great many of Rome’s early Christians.⁷ At this time the catacomb was well short of the 40 acres of space and 12 miles of tunnels that it would come to encompass in later centuries, but it was already an important part of the communal life of Christianity in Rome.

We have followed the journey of Callistus down the Appian Way to the catacomb, but our traveler might just as well have been someone else with an interest in the catacomb: a Christian with a relative buried there, a fossore (or digger) of the catacomb, an artisan hired to decorate the rooms below, or some other person with a personal or business interest in the subterranean spaces. Whatever the person’s role, as he descended the stairs into the darkness below, he entered a world markedly different from the green hill above and the imperial capital in view from its crest. This was the domain of the Christian dead, and very likely the only or one of the only spaces solely dedicated to Christian use in Rome at the time. The Callistus Catacomb and the other early Christian catacombs were, simply, the only spaces in Rome in the second and third centuries that truly belonged to Christian communities.⁸

The argument of this book is that viewing the Cubicula of the Sacraments, five rooms situated in one of the oldest parts of the Callistus Catacomb, with attention to their spaces, their works of art, the texts behind that art, and the practices undertaken and referenced in them, through the lenses of Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia,” reveals the ways the community of the Cubicula expressed its construal of Christianity in relation to its context in the Roman Empire and the city of Rome. Such a spatial analysis reveals how the community of the catacombs saw themselves in relation to Roman power and cultural hegemony: as critics of, foreigners to, and even opponents of the Roman ideology that surrounded them.⁹ Our task is to understand this spatially constructed, well-veiled inimical relationship between the Christian community that created the catacomb and the broader Roman culture and society, through the lens of heterotopian analysis of the catacomb itself (and especially the Cubicula of the Sacraments) and the spaces that surrounded it in and around the city of Rome in the second, third, and fourth centuries CE.¹⁰

First articulated as a spatial theory by Michel Foucault and later developed and refined by others, heterotopia describes the ways that certain spaces relate to other spaces by mimicking, mirroring, subverting, and critiquing those spaces. Heterotopia can describe many different kinds of spaces, both real and imaginary, but here I will use the concept in what is perhaps its most common form: to describe the relationship of a marginal or marginalized physical space to more hegemonic spaces.¹¹ This analysis will help to make sense of a contested set of relationships situated in just this kind of marginal/hegemonic environment—namely, early Roman Christianity’s relationship with the city and the Empire. The third chapter will be devoted to heterotopia, its historical and contemporary articulations, and the meanings of the word and idea as they will be used in this work.

The heart of this book, discussed in chapters 4 through 7, lies at the foot of those stairs Callistus descended atop the green hill south of the Servian Wall, in the so-called Cubicula of the Sacraments. The rooms are so named because of the rich decorations adorning their walls, featuring what the catacombs’ Counter-Reformation rediscoverers and interpreters understood as sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist. Additionally, the Cubicula contains images of Jonah’s journeys and trials with the kētos, communal meals, fishermen, fossores, Abraham and Isaac, Moses, and other images from both Jewish and Christian scriptures and Christian tradition.¹² The fourth chapter will be concerned with the catacomb’s and Cubicula’s places within the Roman urban landscape, and how that situatedness contributed to their heterotopian nature. The fifth chapter will examine the art of the Cubicula, reading the images for signs of heterotopia. The sixth chapter will consider the texts to which that art refers, noting what kinds of texts the communities were reading and painting, and asking what signs of heterotopia can be read there. And the seventh chapter will examine the practices that occurred in the catacomb or were depicted in the catacomb and ask how those practices contributed to and reinforced the heterotopian nature of the catacombs.

The purchase of these arguments is a vision of the early Christian communities of Rome as embedded in Roman space, inextricably linked to Roman life, customs, religion, commerce, language, and symbols, but nevertheless ineluctably opposed to it at the same time. It is a vision of conflict-in-space, embodied in the Christians’ construal-in-space of their understanding of their religion and their place in the world. It is a vision that takes seriously the existence-in-space of early Christianity in Rome and the consequences of that emplacement. First, though, we turn to the catacombs themselves—the history of their development, loss to memory, rediscovery, and interpretation—and to the long life of the Callistus Catacomb in particular.

Chapter 2

The History of the Catacombs

The Beginnings of the Catacombs

The word “catacomb” derives from the Greek words kata kymbas, used from at least the fourth century CE to refer to a locale along the Via Appia where the ground was hollowed out, forming cavities.¹ The designation came to apply particularly to the few Jewish and many Christian underground funerary complexes that sprang up around Rome between the first and fifth centuries CE.² By the end of the catacombs’ production in the fifth century, more than 60 complexes had been created by the Christian communities of Rome. These ranged in size from the small and familial to the grand and communal.³

I share a bias in my scholarly interest in the catacombs (and Christian material culture generally) with Graydon Snyder, who divides early Christian material culture into two periods: an early period and a late period, falling on either side of the reforms of Constantine in the early fourth century CE. The earlier period is the subject of Snyder’s interest, and he elegantly calls it “ante pacem,” or the time “before the peace” of Constantine.⁴ Like Snyder, I am interested in the earlier period, and therefore it is the pre-Constantinian catacombs that I find most compelling. These include, by Snyder’s estimation, portions of the Priscilla Catacomb along the Via Salaria in northeast Rome, portions of the Callistus Catacomb, and portions of the Domitilla Catacomb, located near the Callistus Catacomb.⁵ Others identify portions of the Catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus and the San Sebastiano Catacomb as catacombs belonging to this early period, although Snyder considers them “covered cemeteries” and not catacombs.⁶ The Callistus Catacomb, then, belongs to a small collection of Christian burial sites in Rome that predate the reign of Constantine and the beginning of the ascendancy of Christianity in the Empire.⁷ As such, along with its fellow early sites it is immensely important for understanding the nature and development of Christianity in the period before Constantine, and in particular of Christianity in Rome.⁸

The Callistus Catacomb probably had its origins as a Christian burial site in the late second century or very early third century.⁹ This date is arrived at by taking the earliest references to burials in the catacomb and the earliest archaeologically identifiable locations and extrapolating backward a period long enough to ensure the catacomb’s existence by that time.¹⁰ A date of about 180 CE is the most common assignation and is accepted here.¹¹ This earliest date of Christian usage, combined with the date of Christianity’s imperial patronage beginning in the early fourth century, means that for Snyder, myself, and others interested in the church before Constantine, there is an effective period of about 140 years, from 180 to the second or third decades of the fourth century, during which material culture might shed light on early Christianity.

Within the Callistus Catacomb, there are two “nuclei” that date to this period: the spaces called the Cubicula of the Sacraments, and the so-called Crypt of Lucina, located near one another in the “first area” of the catacomb.¹² The development of the catacomb began there and then spread out to the west, northwest, and northeast, and deeper into the earth, respecting property lines above ground.¹³ While other areas within the Callistus Catacomb might contai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  Prologue
• Chapter 2  The History of the Catacombs
• Chapter 3  Heterotopia
• Chapter 4  Heterotopian Spaces and Places
• Chapter 5  Art and Heterotopia
• Chapter 6  Heterotopian Texts
• Chapter 7  Heterotopia as Lived Space
• Chapter 8  Conclusions and Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Ancient Texts