Early Christian lamps
The 34th canon of the Synod of Elvira (305), which was contemporary with him, forbade candles to be lit in cemeteries during the daytime, which points to an established custom as well as to an objection to it; and in the Roman catacombs lamps have been found of the 2nd and 3rd centuries which seem to have been ceremonial or symbolical.
The gift, mentioned by Anastasius,[8] made by Constantine to the Vatican basilica, of a pharum of gold, garnished with 500 dolphins each holding a lamp, to burn before St Peters tomb, points also to a custom well established before Christianity became the state religion.
We see, he wrote, a rite peculiar to the pagans introduced into the churches on pretext of religion, and, while the sun is still shining, a mass of wax tapers lighted.
Jerome, the most influential theologian of the day, took up the cudgels against Vigilantius, who, in spite of his fatherly admonition, had dared again to open his foul mouth and send forth a filthy stink against the relics of the holy martyrs.
Taken in connection with a statement which almost immediately precedes this Cereos autem non clara luce accendimus, sicut frustra calumniaris: sed ut noctis tenebras hoc solatio temperemus , this seems to point to the fact that the ritual use of lights in the church services, so far as already established, arose from the same conservative habit as determined the development of liturgical vestments, i.e. the lights which had been necessary at the nocturnal meetings were retained, after the hours of service had been altered, and invested with a symbolical meaning.
Paulinus, bishop of Nola (d. 431), describes the altar at the eucharist as crowned with crowded lights, and even mentions the eternal lamp.
At ordinations they were used, as is shown by the 6th canon of the Council of Carthage (398), which decrees that the acolyte is to hand to the newly ordained deacon ceroferarium cum cereo.
This symbolism was not pagan, i.e. the lamps were not placed in the graves as part of the furniture of the dead; in the Catacombs they are found only in the niches of the galleries and the arcosolia, nor can they have been votive in the sense popularized later.
The fact that many of the services took place at night, and that after the lapse of a generation or two the meetings of the Christians for purposes of worship were held, at Rome and elsewhere, in the subterranean chambers of the Catacombs, make it clear that lamps must have been used to provide the necessary means of illumination.
These admit of classification according to period and locality, the finer work, as in so many other branches of Christian art, being as a rule the earlier (see e.g. Leclercq, "Manuel d'archeologie chretienne" II, 557 seq.).
The mysteries are set in order, the censers are smoking, the lamps are shining and the deacons are hovering and brandishing [fans] in likeness of watchers" (Conolly "Liturgical Homilies of Narsai", p. 12).
A pilgrim writing in about 530 CE[15]: iv in the so-called "Breviarius" claims to have seen at Jerusalem what purported to be the actual lamp which had hung in the chamber of the Last Supper, preserved there as a precious relic.
