Christian Burial

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Christian burial is the set of rites by which Christians dispose of and commemorate their dead, governed from the first by the conviction that the body is not discarded but awaits resurrection. Where the surrounding Greco-Roman world commonly burned its dead, the early Christians buried theirs whole, in deliberate continuity with the burial of Jesus and in keeping with the hope that the same flesh would rise again. That single choice — inhumation over cremation — shaped almost everything that followed.

The practice has roots in Jewish custom, which the first Christians inherited: the washed and wrapped body, the haste to inter, the tending of the tomb. Around Rome the dead were laid in the catacombs, the underground galleries where the faithful also gathered to pray; the grave of a martyr drew the living, and the altar came, over centuries, to stand above the bones of the holy. By late antiquity burial had moved from the cemeteries outside the walls to ground beside and beneath the church itself, so that the dead lay within the community of the living rather than apart from it.

Several features became conventional, though never uniform across the whole of Christendom. Graves were oriented east, the body’s feet toward the sunrise, on the reading that the resurrected Christ would return from that quarter and the dead should rise facing him; clergy were sometimes laid the opposite way, to face their people. The ground was consecrated, and burial within it was understood as a right of the baptized — one that could be refused to the unbaptized, the excommunicate, and, in many periods, those who had taken their own lives. The funeral liturgy gathered its own vocabulary: the vigil over the body, the requiem Mass for the soul’s repose, the committal at the graveside with its prayers over the earth.

The traditions divide on what the rite is chiefly for. Catholic and Orthodox practice treats it as intercession — prayer that aids the dead, bound up with belief in purgation and the communion of saints — while much of the Reformation stripped such prayer away, holding that the dead are beyond the reach of the living and that the service consoles the mourners and confesses the resurrection rather than altering the fate of the departed. The underlying hope, the raising of the body, the traditions hold in common; what the funeral can do about it they do not.

Scholarship has traced how durable the older instincts proved. The Christian preference for inhumation outlasted the doctrines that first justified it, and the long resistance to cremation in the Christian West — only formally relaxed by the Catholic Church in the twentieth century — is a measure of how deeply the body’s integrity was tied to the promise of its rising. The grave oriented to the east, the name cut in consecrated stone, the body kept whole: each was, in its way, an argument made in the ground, that the dead were not finished with.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Prothesis · Heart Burial · Aquileian Rite