THE TRAINING FOR MARTYRDOM
We read in the pathetic and interesting study De Laude Martyrii (On the Praise of Martyrdom) by an anonymous writer—a study which usually follows the works of S. Cyprian—how some Roman officials who were assisting in the torture of a dying Christian saint said one to another: “This is really marvellous, this power of disregarding pain and agony! Nothing seems to move him; he has a wife and little ones, but even the love of these touches him not. What is the secret of his strange power? It can surely be no imaginary faith which enables him thus to welcome such suffering—such a death!”
The moral effect of this endurance—of this serene acceptance of torture and death—both on persecutors and persecuted, was no doubt very great. It has probably been underrated. What we have just quoted from the treatise De Laude Martyrii, i.e. the testimony to what must have happened many thousand times—viz.: how it struck the officials who were carrying out the stern law of Rome—was repeated in our own day and time by one of our most serious historians; one not likely by any means to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm. Lecky, in his scrupulously fair but at the same time cold and passionless chapter on early Christian persecutions, closes his review of the period with the following remarkable words: “For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things (he has been detailing some of the well-known tortures and deaths of the early Christian believers) without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr’s tomb.”[107]
Now, the more thoughtful of the pagan rulers who dreaded with a nameless dread the overthrow of the idol-cult, the preservation of which they believed was indissolubly linked with the maintenance of the great Roman Empire they loved so well, saw in the constancy of the martyrs a great danger to which this idol-cult was exposed.
Rulers so different as Nero and Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Antoninus, Severus, Decius, and Diocletian, and their ministers, felt that the sternest measures of repression of the new Faith were absolutely necessary if they would stem the fast advancing and apparently resistless tide of Christianity in the Empire.
In view of the powerful impression which the constancy of the accused Christian when brought face to face with all the horrors of torture and of death made upon the pagan population who beheld it or heard of it, every effort was made by the more far-seeing of the Roman magistrates to induce the accused Christian to recant and to yield to the will and wishes of the imperial government.
In countless cases this yielding was made seemingly very easy—just a few grains of incense thrown upon an idol altar; just an acknowledgment of the divinity of the reigning Emperor, which could after all be explained away as a simple official expression of fervid loyalty.
In some cases a recognition of one supreme deity—Jupiter—who would represent the one Almighty God of the Christians—was suggested as a “modus vivendi” by the plausible rhetoric of a statesmanlike magistrate who cared for Rome, but to whom all religions were myths.
The Christian senator, who for the sake of Christ had given up a beautiful home and an exalted rank, would be reminded by his pagan colleagues on the judges seat of the inescapable duty which one in his great position owed to law and order—to his master the Emperor;—surely he, of all men, should set an example of loyalty and obedience; was he to degrade his proud order by worshipping an unknown Crucified offender in defiance of the wishes and commands of the Emperor and the imperial government?
A yet more moving appeal was very often made to the brave Christians of both sexes by an eloquent magistrate to show some pity for those they loved,—for their aged father and mother; for husband or wife or helpless children. Were they by their fatal obstinacy to bring bereavement and disgrace, shame and poverty, on these unoffending ones?
Then behind all these specious arguments the Roman judge would show the pale confessor standing before him the awful tortures—the cruel death which surely awaited the one who refused, with what seemed a sullen and inexplicable obstinacy, to obey the laws of an immemorial Empire, when after all obedience was so easy.
And many did yield—of this there is no doubt. The number of martyrs who resisted unto death no doubt is very great, much greater than the cold and passionless critic chooses to acknowledge, but the number of those who did yield was no doubt considerable.
It was indeed a title to honour for a magistrate of Rome publicly to win over one or more of these confessors of the New Religion, to succeed in persuading some well-known Christian to scatter on the altar of the deified Emperor, or of the popular image of Mars the Avenger, or of Diana, or of the yet greater Jupiter, a few grains of incense typifying his return to the ancient pagan cult—or better still, to extract a few reluctant words in which the adored Christ was renounced and abandoned.
Such a judicial victory was ever a signal triumph for the Roman pagan judge. It would speedily bear its fruits and rally to the drooping standard of paganism a number of men and women pondering, doubting, hesitating on the threshold of Christianity; a threshold with such an example of recantation before them, which they would surely never cross!
And these scenes during the long years of active persecution were acted again and again. The war between the religion of Christ and the old idol-cult so dear to Rome and her subject millions was indeed a protracted and deadly combat, and, as far as men could see, the issue for long years trembled in the balance.
And all this time much—more than men now think—hung on the grave and solemn question of martyrdom.
It was an outward and visible sign of that new wonderful revelation which was influencing so many different minds, which was working restlessly in such varied classes, in Rome, and in the many provinces of the world of Rome, which from the early days of its appearance in the great Empire, began at once to work a mighty change in all ranks in all society where it penetrated, and every year it penetrated deeper.
The New Revelation was taught by an ever-increasing band of teachers, fervid, impassioned, eloquent—some of them learned and cultivated. It possessed too a literature which gradually increased in volume and power—a literature which was founded upon “a Record” which these teachers affirmed issued from no workshops of this earth.
But all this literature, powerful, soul-stirring though it was, only touched, comparatively speaking, a very few of the men and women who made up the mighty world of Rome. The great mass of the peoples of the Empire neither read the books nor heard the words of the teachers of the New Religion.
Something more was needed to touch the masses of the people—something thousands might see and hear of; something they might see for themselves. That something was supplied by the noble army of martyrs.
From the first days of the appearance of the new teaching the imperial government of Rome was determined, if possible, to stamp it out of the society which Rome controlled.
While the disciples of Him who gave the doctrine and the solemn charge to His own to teach the strange wonderful story to all men, were still living and bravely carrying out the command of their Master, began the relentless persecution of those who received the New Revelation (men named them Christians after their Master Christ); a persecution which was now fitful and uncertain, now fierce and relentless in its action, now languid and halting, but which never slept. During the two centuries and a half, the period roughly from Nero to Constantine,—to be a Christian was simply unlawful, and exposed its votary to the direst penalties, which at times were rigorously exacted. The law of the State at times was suffered to remain in partial abeyance; but to use the great African teacher’s nervous words spoken to the Christian Brotherhood, during all these long years—“Non licet esse vos.”[108]
The more statesmanlike of the Roman rulers, recognising the influence exercised by the martyrs over the people, as we have remarked, by all the means in their power encouraged apostasy—because a public renunciation of the Faith deeply moved the people. Every public act of apostasy was a heavy blow to the Christian cause; while on the other hand, each example of splendid endurance of suffering and death was a wonderful encouragement to the vast crowd of outsiders who were hesitating on the borderland of Christianity. What must be, thought these, and they were a great multitude, the secret power of the new Faith which could nerve strong men, tender women—of all ages and of different ranks—to endure such awful sufferings, and at the end to meet death with a smile lighting up the wan pain-wrung faces.
The Story they told must be true, otherwise never would it possess such a mighty power.
Now, the leaders of the sect of the New Revelation were fully conscious of these two factors in the life of their day and time. Anything like apostasy or public renunciation of the religion of Christ once adopted was a calamity to be guarded against with the utmost vigilance. On the other hand, each example of public endurance to the end was an enormous aid to the work of propagating the Faith,—so from very early days a school—we can use no other fitting term—was established in the great Christian centres, of preparation for Martyrdom. This most interesting and far-reaching work in the very early Church—the Church of the Ages of Persecution—has hitherto generally escaped notice; only quite lately has it attracted some attention.[109]
It was no haphazard temporary piece of work, this “training for martyrdom,” but as we shall see a veritable “school,” a protracted education for an awful, for a not improbable contingency. At the end of the second and through the third century it was evidently a recognized and important Christian agency. When once we are aware of its existence we begin to find unmistakable proofs of it in the writings of important teachers like Tertullian and Cyprian.
In this once famous but now forgotten school of martyrdom the well-known simile of S. Paul was the basis of the theory which seems to have inspired the work—the simile which compared the Christian combatant in the world-arena to the athlete in the well-known and popular games of the amphitheatre. There the athlete, before entering the theatre of combat, was carefully educated to endure hardness: a long and careful training before such an one could hope to win the palm and the crown was absolutely necessary. He must go through many long, laborious, and painful exercises, abstinence, watchings, fastings, before his body was fit to endure the perils and sufferings of a trained combatant in the public arena.
In like manner must the Christian athlete who looked forward to a possible martyr’s trial train himself. S. Cyprian, in the middle of the third century, thus definitely writes of what clearly had been the practice of the Church: “Ad agonem sæcularem, exercentur homines et parantur.... Armari et præparari nos beatus Apostolus docet.”[110] (“For the combat with the world are men trained and prepared.... The blessed apostle teaches us to be all armed and ready.”)
The prize of martyrdom was very great. The visions and dreams of the blessed sufferers were constantly read aloud in the congregation.
At the moment after death angels would bear them into Paradise—the garden of God. They would be welcomed there with words of triumph and even admiration. The Master would Himself receive His redeemed servants who had fought the good fight and won. His kiss of welcome, the touch of His hand, would at once fill their souls with a joy indescribable. The “Vision of Perpetua,” circa A.D. 200, or a little earlier, one of the early Passions of Martyrs, the absolute authenticity of which is undisputed,—for it has never been added to or re-edited,—is a good example of the “Visions” seen by the martyrs before their supreme trial.
But far more than the public recital of these well-loved acts and passions was required for the training and preparation work, so a number of short treatises or tracts were specially composed and put out for the instruction of the earnest and devoted men and women as “Manuals,” so to speak, of preparation for the great trial. Most of these have disappeared; they were composed by fervid teachers for a special season, for the years when the Church was exposed to bitter trial; and when the trial time was over they were no longer required, and as a rule were not preserved. A very few remain to us, such as the “Exhortatio ad Martyrium” of Origen, such tractates of Tertullian as “ad Martyres” and the “Scorpiace”; the letter “Ad Thibaritanos” of S. Cyprian, and the anonymous work quoted at the beginning of this chapter, De Laude Martyrii. These are fair specimens of what was once a considerable literature. In very many of the “Passions of the Martyrs” which have been preserved we meet with an oft-repeated answer made by the Christian to the judge when asked about his rank in life, country, family, and the like. “I am a Christian” was the almost invariable answer to these questions; often nothing more. This seems to have been the “formula” taught in the schools of martyrdom,—very few traces, however, of this “formula” appear in the treatises which have come down to us; it must, however, have been constantly repeated in the “lost” treatises or tracts placed in the hands of those under training, lost treatises to which reference has been made. The Epistle of S. Ignatius to the Romans was no doubt used as one of these treatises or manuals.
The words too of a famous teacher like Cyprian, who himself in the end suffered martyrdom, were treasured up. Some of them are contained in the Vision of S. Flavian before he suffered: “I saw in a dream the martyr Bishop of Carthage, and I said to him: ‘Cyprian, is the death stroke very agonizing?’ He replied: ‘When the soul is in a state of heavenly rapture the suffering flesh is no longer ours; the body is quite insensible to pain when the spirit is with God.”
This conception of the insensibility to pain on the part of the martyr was a very general one. Tertullian repeats it almost in identical words. S. Felicitas, quoted in the Passion of S. Perpetua above referred to, said: “When I am in the amphitheatre the Lord will be there and will suffer for me.”
S. Perpetua in the same well-known “Passion,” after having been tossed and gored by a wild and maddened beast, woke up from the ecstacy into which she had been plunged and asked the official standing near her when she was to be exposed to the infuriated animal. S. Blandina in another cruel scene of martyrdom was equally insensible to pain—her soul was far away speaking with or praying to the Lord.
But of all the various “Manuals of Martyrdom” which were put into the hands of those who desired to receive a special training against the day of trial, none seemed to have been efficacious, easy of comprehension, persuasive—like the words of S. Matthew’s Gospel. These were evidently committed to memory and murmured again and again in the sore hour of trial.
Such sayings as these—they were the Lord’s own words, the sufferer knew: “Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “How[111] strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.” “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
“Whosoever, therefore, shall confess ME before men, him will I confess (acknowledge) before My Father which is in heaven.” “But whosoever shall deny ME before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven.”
“He that loveth father and mother more than ME is not worthy of ME.” “And he that loveth son or daughter more than ME is not worthy of ME.”
“If any man will come after ME, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow ME.”
“And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children, or lands for My Name’s sake, shall receive an hundred fold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”
But the “training for martyrdom” to which a number of Christians in the first, second, and third centuries voluntarily gave themselves was by no means confined to the mastering of the contents of a small collection of carefully prepared treatises, or to the listening to eloquent and burning exhortations of devoted teachers, or even to the constant dwelling on the words of the Divine Master. This training included a prolonged and carefully balanced practice in austerities which would accustom the body to self-denial and to suffering, so that when the agony of the trial really began, the body, thoroughly enured to endurance, would be able to meet pain without flinching.
In this training for the mortal combat in which victory was so all-important to the cause, no efforts were spared—painful and laborious exercises, long fasting, watching and prayer, which would render the body insensible to fatigue, capable of bearing any suffering however poignant, were constantly practised. This training sometimes went on for a long while before a fitting opportunity presented itself of a public trial.
It was the want of this—the absence of this long and careful training alluded to in the beautiful and evangelical letter describing the Lyons and Vienne martyrdoms, which was the cause of many of the earlier failures, and shrinking from the agony of martyrdom, of some of the Lyons sufferers.
That great and severe master Tertullian, writing about A.D. 200, gives us some details of the austerities practised by those in training for a martyr’s death. We will quote a very few of his burning words here.
“Blessed martyrs designate, think,” he wrote, “how in peace soldiers (he was speaking of the training of the unconquered legions of Rome) inure themselves to war by toils, marching in heavy armour, running over the exercise yard, working at the ditches, framing the heavy ‘testudo,’ engaging in numberless arduous labours, so that when the day of battle comes, the body and mind may not shrink as it passes from the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, oh blessed ones! count whatever is hard in this lot of yours which you have taken up, as a discipline of mind and body. You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God is the President, the Holy Ghost is the trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic life.... Therefore your Master Jesus Christ has seen good before the day of conflict ... to impose on you a hard training that your strength may be greater” ... “the harder the labours in the training of preparation, the stronger is the hope of victory, ... for valour is built up by hardship.”[112]
In other places Tertullian quotes S. Paul in such passages as: “We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope” (Rom. v. 3, 4); and again: “Therefore I take pleasure” (2 Cor. xii. 10) “in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake” ... “always bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus” (2 Cor. iv. 10); and again (2 Cor. iv. 16, 17, 18), “Though our outward man perisheth yet the inward man is renewed day by day.... For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.”[113]
In his treatise on “Idolatry” Tertullian enters even more into detail on this question of “training for martyrdom.” He enjoined that every kind of austerity should be practised,—for instance, that hunger and thirst should be endured as an habitual observance.
This fervid exhortation closes with the singular words: “An over-fed Christian will be more necessary to bears and lions, perchance, than to God; to encounter wild beasts it will surely be his duty to train for emaciation.”
All this and much more in this curious “Study” of Tertullian partake of exaggeration, but it throws considerable light on the manner on which martyrdom was positively trained for, and the body prepared for the endurance of terrible suffering, a suffering invariably closed by death. Every example of such a bravely patient endurance—every “resistance unto blood”—the Christian guides and leaders of the first 250 years felt was of inestimable value for the propagation of their cause. Every public defeat and recantation, on the other hand, would be a grave injury to their work; so the pagan government strained, as we have remarked, every nerve to make recantation easy; while the Christian masters, on the contrary, did everything which ingenuity could invent or fervid devotion suggest to train up athletes who in the supreme public trial might win the prize of martyrdom.
They were successful—in spite of many defeats. These schools of martyrdom produced in Rome and in the provinces a countless succession of brave men and women of all ranks, of all ages—who, to the amazement of the pagan world, through pain and agony again and again won the martyr’s blood-stained glorious crown. It was quite a novel experience in the world, and the effect which it had worked on the rank and file of men and women was only clearly seen after the Peace of the Church. The people of Rome, from what they had seen, were persuaded with an intense persuasion, no one doubting that a Faith which could produce such heroes was surely based on something which was true and real.
Some eighty or at most ninety years before Tertullian lived and wrote, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, where he was doomed to be exposed to the wild beasts in the great amphitheatre, wrote his famous letter to the Roman Church.
The date of the letter is about A.D. 107–10. The little writing was highly esteemed in the early Church. It may be fairly styled a vade mecum of martyrs in the age of persecution. It accurately embodies the thoughts and aspirations which the “School of Martyrs” we have been picturing taught its pupils. We will give some of these thoughts as a fitting conclusion to this little study on “Preparation for Martyrdom” as practised during the first two hundred and fifty years.
This Letter of Ignatius breathes in its nervous and impassioned words a complete fearlessness, though the awful trial lay immediately before him; it tells of an intense and impassioned desire on the part of the writer to be allowed to bear his witness to the love of Christ—to be permitted “to resist unto blood” (Heb. xii. 4). The whole of the short letter is, in fact, a passionate cry for martyrdom.
Ignatius wrote somewhat as follows:
“DEAR ROMAN CONGREGATION,—Do nothing which may hinder me from finishing my course. If you keep silence, God will speak through me.” (He evidently feared that, through the intercession of powerful friends whom the great teacher knew he possessed in the capital, the death sentence might be postponed, possibly annulled.)
“Pray”—he wrote—“that I may have strength to do as well as to say. If only you will keep silence and leave me alone,—I am a word of God; but if you desire my life—then shall I be again a mere cry. It is good to get from the world unto God that I may rise unto Him.
“I would that all men should know that of my own free will, I die for God.... Let me be given to the wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of God (or of Christ). Bear with me.... Now am I beginning to be a disciple.... Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body. Come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me. Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ!... Him I seek who died on our behalf. Him I desire who rose again for our sake.... Suffer me to receive the pure light: when I am come thither, then I shall be a man. Let me be an imitator of the Passion of my God....”
“I write unto you in the midst of life, yet lusting after death. My desire (or my love of life) has been crucified, there is (now) no fire of earthly longing in me but only water, living and speaking in me and saying within me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I have no delight in the food of corruption or in the delights of life. I desire the bread of God which is the flesh of Christ, ... and for drink I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible.”
This was the new marvellous spirit in which the early Christian martyrs met and welcomed with a strange intense gladness, torture, ignominy, death. This was the spirit which the great pagan statesmen who sat at the helm of the Empire in Rome dreaded with a nameless dread, and longed to crush and to destroy, the new spirit which the wisest and most far-seeing among them felt was ever ringing the death-knell of the pagan cult, the cult they connected with the genesis, the power, and the very life of the Roman system, the cult which deified Rome and worshipped the genius of Rome’s Emperor.