Christian Burial

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Christian burial is the set of rites by which Christians inter 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 grave is not a place of disposal but a bed; the dead are not gone but sleeping, dormientes, awaiting a waking. From that one premise the whole architecture of the rite unfolds: the care of the corpse, the orientation of the tomb, the prayer over the earth, and the long argument with the surrounding cultures about what a body is for.

Caravaggio, “The Entombment of Christ” (c. 1603–1604), Vatican Pinacoteca — the burial of Jesus is the model from which Christian funerary practice took its shape. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The body kept, not burned

The first Christians inherited the burial of their own dead from Jewish practice, and from the burial of Jesus most of all. The Gospel of John describes Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking the body from the cross, binding it in linen cloths with a mixture of myrrh and aloes “as is the burial custom of the Jews,” and laying it in a new rock-hewn tomb before the Sabbath drew on (John 19:38–42). Every element of later Christian funerary instinct is already present there: the washed and wrapped body, the spices, the haste to inter before nightfall and the day of rest, the tomb tended afterward by women who returned to it. Second Temple Judaism had long buried rather than burned — ossuary reburial, family tombs cut into rock — and the Christian movement, emerging from within it, never broke that inheritance. (For the wider Jewish matrix from which these customs descend, see Second Temple Judaism.)

The Roman world around them mostly disposed of the dead by fire. Cremation was the prevailing rite of the late Republic and early Empire, the pyre and the urn the ordinary furniture of death; inhumation was a minority custom that revived, for reasons still debated, across the second and third centuries. Into this the Christians pressed a deliberate counter-practice, and they pressed it as a confession. The North African apologists made the argument explicit. Minucius Felix, in the dialogue Octavius (early third century), met the pagan taunt that fire would foil the resurrection by answering that Christians did not fear cremation but kept the older and better custom of burial; the integrity of the flesh, on this reading, was a sign held up against the furnace. Tertullian, in On the Resurrection of the Flesh and On the Soul, denounced the burning of the dead as a cruelty fit only for the heathen and the condemned. The point was never that God could not reassemble ashes — the apologists conceded he could — but that the Christian would not, by his own hand, treat as refuse a body destined to rise. The analogy ran straight from the tomb of Jesus to the grave of every believer: as he was laid whole in the rock and raised whole, so the baptized would be sown corruptible and raised incorruptible. The hope of the resurrection of the body made the body something to be kept.

From the cemetery outside the walls to the church floor

Roman law and Roman instinct kept the dead outside the city of the living. Burial within the walls was forbidden; the tombs lined the roads beyond the gates, and the Christian dead at first lay there too, in the subterranean galleries that came to be called catacombs. These were not hiding-places so much as cemeteries — the word coemeterium, “sleeping-place,” is itself a Christian softening of death into rest. In the tufa beneath Rome the faithful cut their loculi, the horizontal shelves stacked along the corridors, sealed the openings with slabs cut with a name and an anchor or a fish or a dove, and gathered at the graves to pray and to break bread on the anniversaries of the dead. Among those graves, certain ones drew the living more than others: the tombs of the martyrs.

Loculi — horizontal burial niches once sealed with inscribed slabs — in the early Christian catacombs of San Giovanni at Syracuse, Sicily (4th–6th century). Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The pull of the martyr-grave reorganized the geography of Christian death. To be buried ad sanctos — near the holy, beside the bones of one who had died for the faith — was held to place the ordinary dead under a powerful patronage, and the demand for such graves grew through late antiquity until the dead, who had been kept beyond the walls, came to lie within and beneath the church itself. The altar, in time, came to stand over the relics of a martyr, and the floor and walls around it filled with tombs. The instinct outran the theology, and one of the great theologians of the age set himself to test it. Augustine of Hippo, in De cura pro mortuis gerenda (“On the Care to Be Taken for the Dead,” c. 421–422), answered a question put to him by Paulinus of Nola: did burial near the tomb of a saint — in the case at hand, a mother’s wish to lay her dead son near the shrine of Felix at Nola — actually profit the soul of the buried? Augustine’s answer was careful and, in its way, deflationary. The place of burial, he argued, alters nothing in the state of the dead; even to lie wholly unburied harms the soul not at all. What helps the dead is not the proximity of holy bones but the prayer of the living and the offering of the Eucharist on their behalf — and burial near a saint helps chiefly by drawing the living to that place to pray. The cult of the saints and the care of the dead were thus knit together at the root: the body laid near the holy, the soul aided by the prayers the place drew forth.

Orientation, consecration, and the right to a grave

Several features of the Christian grave became conventional, though never uniform across the whole of Christendom. The most enduring was orientation. The body was laid with the head to the west and the feet to the east, so that the dead, rising, would rise facing the sunrise — and facing the quarter from which the returning Christ was looked for, on the reading of Matthew 24:27 that as lightning comes from the east, so would the Son of Man. The same logic that turned the apse and the altar of the church toward the east turned the graves in its yard. Clergy were, by a widespread custom, laid the opposite way, head to the east and feet to the west, so that at the resurrection a pastor would rise facing his risen flock, ready to lead them once more as he had led them in life. The orientation made the grave itself a small confession of the Second Coming: the body was not merely stored but aimed.

The graveyard of All Saints, Selworthy, in Somerset, England — a consecrated churchyard, the traditional resting-place of the baptized. Photograph by Dr Duncan Pepper, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The ground itself was set apart. Consecrated ground — a churchyard or cemetery blessed by the bishop and reserved for the dead of the Church — became the proper resting-place of the baptized, and burial within it was understood as a right that flowed from baptism. Because it was a right of the baptized, it could be refused to those outside the communion. The medieval and Tridentine discipline excluded several classes from Christian burial: the unbaptized, who had not entered the body of the Church; pagans, Jews, and heretics, who stood outside it; and the excommunicate, who had been formally cut off. The underlying maxim was severe and old — Pope Leo the Great, in 448, had laid down that those with whom the Church had held no communion in life it could hold none with in death — and the canon law drew the consequence that the burial of an excommunicate in consecrated ground desecrated the place and required, where possible, exhumation and reburial elsewhere. To these classes the discipline added, in many periods, those who had taken their own lives: the self-slayer, judged to have died in the act of a grave sin without space for repentance, was in much of Western practice denied the rites and the consecrated grave, and buried apart — a severity that softened only slowly, as the Church came to weigh the disturbance of mind that might lift culpability. (The deathbed preparation that aimed to forestall exactly such an unrepentant death belongs to the art of dying; the Viaticum and the anointing of the sick were the sacraments by which the Church sent the dying on their way.)

The liturgy of death

Around the grave a liturgy gathered, slowly, over centuries. The transition from the Roman funeral — a family affair, ordered by the household — to a Christian funeral ordered by the clergy was, as the historian Frederick Paxton has shown in Christianizing Death (1990), the work of the early medieval centuries above all, when Merovingian, Visigothic, Irish, and Carolingian materials were drawn together into a single ritual process. The shape that emerged ran from the deathbed to the grave and beyond it. As life left the body, the commendatio animae, the commendation of the departing soul, was said over the dying — the prayer that opens Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo, “Go forth, Christian soul, from this world,” and then names the Father who created, the Son who suffered, and the Spirit who was poured out, before unfolding into a litany of the saints and a sequence of deliverance prayers invoking Noah and Job, Daniel and Susanna and the three children in the furnace as patterns of God’s rescue.

“The Dead Man Before His Judge,” from the Grandes Heures de Rohan (c. 1430–1440), an illumination accompanying the Office of the Dead, depicting the departed soul commended to God. By the Rohan Master, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

After death came the vigil over the body — the wake, the watch kept through the night — and the Office of the Dead, the cycle of psalms and lessons sung for the repose of the soul, with its seven Penitential Psalms. Then the requiem Mass, named from its opening prayer that God grant the dead eternal rest, requiem aeternam; the absolution over the bier; the procession to the grave; and the committal, the prayers said over the earth as the body was lowered and the soil returned. This whole sequence, long carried in varying local books and regional uses, was fixed for the Roman Rite in the Rituale Romanum promulgated by Paul V in 1614, which gathered the visitation of the sick, the commendation of the dying, the funeral, and the Office of the Dead into one authoritative order — substantially the form the Western Church carried into the twentieth century. In the Christian East the care of the dead took its own shape, with the funeral service of the Byzantine rite and the practices of Eastern Orthodox Christianity keeping their own prayers, their own chants, and their own memorial cycle for the soul of the departed.

What the funeral is for: the great divide

The traditions divide, sharply, on what the rite is chiefly for. Catholic and Orthodox practice treats the funeral as intercession — prayer that genuinely aids the dead, bound up with belief in a purgation after death and in the communion of saints that joins the living and the dead in a single body of mutual prayer. On this understanding the requiem, the suffrages, and the prayers for the dead are not consolation only but real help sent across the threshold: the soul in purgatory is aided by the Mass offered on its behalf, exactly as Augustine had argued the dead were aided by the prayers of the living rather than by the place of their bones.

The Reformation cut this away. Holding that the dead are beyond the reach of the living, that Scripture warranted no doctrine of purgatory, and that salvation rested on faith and not on works performed for the departed, the reformers stripped prayer for the dead from the funeral. Martin Luther and John Calvin alike rejected the purgatorial economy of Masses and suffrages, and in England the second Book of Common Prayer of 1552 reduced the burial service to a near-bare confession of resurrection hope — its committal returning the body to the ground with the cadence of earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust — addressed to the comfort of the mourners and the praise of God rather than to the alteration of the dead’s estate. (For the wider movement, see the Reformation; for the Protestant settlement that followed, Reformed Christianity.) The underlying hope — the raising of the body — the divided traditions held in common, and confessed at every grave. What the funeral could do about it they did not.

The durability of the body’s integrity

How deeply the body’s wholeness was tied to the promise of its rising can be measured by what the West would not, for so long, allow. The Christian preference for inhumation outlasted the doctrines that first justified it and hardened, in the modern period, into formal prohibition: the Catholic Church forbade cremation outright, in part because in nineteenth-century Europe the cremation movement had become a banner of anticlerical and materialist parties who burned the dead precisely to deny the resurrection of the flesh. The relaxation came only in the twentieth century, and by stages. With the instruction Piam et constantem of 1963, the Holy Office allowed that cremation was not in itself opposed to the Christian religion and that the rites need no longer be denied to those who chose it, provided the choice was not a denial of doctrine; the permission passed into the Code of Canon Law in 1983. In 2016 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in Ad resurgendum cum Christo, reaffirmed the preference for burial of the body, permitted cremation, and yet held the old logic intact in a new key: the ashes are to be kept in a sacred place, in a cemetery or a space set apart, not scattered to air or sea, not divided among the family, not kept on the mantel — treated, that is, with the same reserve once given the whole corpse, because the same hope attaches to them. The reasoning had not changed; only the matter it governed.

Sources and scholarship

The primary apparatus for the early period is the patristic argument itself — the apologetic of Minucius Felix and Tertullian against cremation, Augustine’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda on burial ad sanctos — together with the epigraphy and archaeology of the Roman catacombs. The fullest older synthesis in the public domain remains the article “Christian Burial” in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, which assembles the canon law of exclusion and the early evidence, though its confessional frame must be read as such. The indispensable modern study of how the funeral became a clerical liturgy is Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell, 1990), which traces the Merovingian, Irish, and Carolingian strands that fed the Roman order; F. C. Cross and E. A. Livingstone’s Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church gives the standard reference treatment of the rite and its divergences. For the modern Catholic discipline the governing texts are the 1963 instruction Piam et constantem and the 2016 instruction Ad resurgendum cum Christo, both issued by the doctrinal congregation of the Holy See. The reconstruction of the Ars Moriendi and the deathbed office that precedes the funeral is treated in the companion entry on the art of dying.

The grave oriented to the east, the name cut in consecrated stone, the body kept whole and laid down to sleep: 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)

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