The soldier of God is not abandoned in his pain nor brought to an end by death.
—MINUCIUS FELIX, OCTAVIUS 37.3
That early Christian martyr texts insist on painlessness during torture is remarkable in itself, but this assertion is all the more surprising in light of the fact that they were written at a time when other authors were highlighting the body as a site of sickness and pain. In the early Christian world the experience of pain was ubiquitous and there were limited ways of managing it. Modern breakthroughs in safe, reliable, and effective pain management have constructed certain relationships between the body and pain that are antithetical to ancient experience, and it is worth bringing to the forefront of our reading the fact that the martyr stories were written and received at a time when there were no reliably effective and safe anesthetics.1 Perhaps one of the only universal expectations in the ancient world was the unavoidable experience of pain, as Susanna Elm has compellingly argued: “Prior to the nineteenth century, pain was such an unalterable condition of humanity that it had the force of a natural, indeed, divine law. . . . Phrased differently, prior to the early nineteenth century and the widespread introduction of effective means to achieve complete and lasting insensitivity to pain, namely chloroform, ether, and morphine, lasting alleviation of most forms of pain had not been possible.”2
Even apart from common painful health issues—for example, malnutrition, malaria, and childbirth—everyday life carries with it stress, anxiety, and pain.3 When we think of how often we reach for aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or other sensory-numbing products, both legal and illegal, we begin to grasp how the world might feel if we did not have such easy access to these analgesics. Indeed, David Morris suggests that “Americans today probably belong to the first generation on earth that looks at a pain-free life as something like a constitutional right.”4 It was, after all, only in 1846—when ether was first introduced—that surgery could be performed without excruciating pain.5 And it was not until 1899 that aspirin was made available to patients suffering from daily-life pain and inflammation (and then only via physicians: it was not available over the counter until 1915).6
Some pain relievers were known and used in the ancient world, of course. A number of ancient medical writers refer to opium and mandrake, for example. Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, and Celsus all discuss various ways that pain can be alleviated.7 But the ancient/medieval world and the modern world are very different in terms of the effectiveness, safety, availability, and widespread use of pain relievers to achieve, or even to imagine, a pain-free existence.8 The pervasiveness of pain in ancient life is not unrelated to the cultural revolution Judith Perkins traces that “represented the human self as a body in pain, a sufferer.”9 Perkins’s examples include Stoic authors—Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius—medical writers, especially Galen, and Christian texts to demonstrate that in this historical moment, corporeal vulnerability became central to discourses about the body.
Whereas the previous chapter examined ways the martyr texts prime the audience to accept a counterintuitive narrative about the tortured body, this chapter focuses more directly on the various ways martyr texts reject pain as a locus of meaning for martyrdom. Explicit claims to impassibility during persecution will engage our attention in the first section of this chapter. In these cases either the martyr or the narrator unequivocally rejects pain as an experience of Christians during torture and death. The second section examines texts that obscure pain by constructing a mind/body dualism. In these stories sensations of the body are either nonexistent or of no concern to the Christian whose spirit is in heaven. The third section of the chapter explores narratives that describe Jesus or God as present with the martyr, giving comfort to him or her. In these texts the divine being takes center stage—overshadowing the martyr—as the active character in the drama, whose presence and support makes the Christian’s witness possible. These three narrative techniques—claims to analgesia/anesthesia, dualism, and divine presence—for asserting the insensitivity of the Christian body to pagan persecution are often found together and suggest that these narratives envision God as a central actor in the drama. The fourth section of the chapter turns to more subtle techniques of storytelling that build on and contribute to claims of painlessness. Specifically, it examines stories of the miraculous resistance of Christian bodies to the effects of torture. In addition, it surveys the martyrs’ surprising responses to torture—including on occasion humorous interludes. When read through the lens of explicit claims to painlessness, these stories may be seen to complement the narrative interests in reframing the reader’s interpretation of events from a model focusing on the experience of pain to a model focusing on the absence of pain through divine analgesia.
To reject explicitly the idea that the martyrs experience pain in torture, some martyr texts utilize the language of analgesia (analgēsia) or anesthesia (anaisthēsia) while others negate typical terms for pain (e.g., doleo or algeō). In the Latin version of the Martyrdom of Carpus, Pamfilus, and Agathonike, for instance, Pamfilus endures three pairs of torturers but, the narrator observes, “did not give up a cry of pain” (vocem non dedisset doloris; 3.5).10 In response to the proconsul’s pleas to recant his faith, Pamfilus himself asserts his insensitivity to the effects of torture: “These torments are nothing. Indeed, I feel no pain” (Haec vexationes nullae sunt. Ego autem nullum sentio dolorem; 3.6).11 In this example the common Latin word for pain, dolor, is negated twice, by narrator and martyr, in rapid succession: Pamfilus did not cry out in pain because he felt no pain. While the first example could be interpreted as demonstrating the martyr’s self-control in the face of torture—it was painful but he did not react to the pain—the second example clarifies the text’s interests: Pamfilus was immune to physical sensations. As we shall see later in this chapter, the double testimony to Pamfilus’s impassibility complements other narrative techniques by which this text constructs an ideology of martyrdom without pain.
In a long and complex poem about the martyr Romanus, Prudentius makes a number of claims about Christian fortitude, divine protection, and pagan impotence. He begins by addressing Romanus directly, begging him to supply the strength and words to convey the martyr’s own fortitude.12 “Patron, set in motion the tongue within my speechless mouth,” Prudentius pleads to the martyr whose witness proved that “the voice cannot be extinguished, not even if its passageway, having been cut out, trembles” (Peri. 10.1–10). The full import of Prudentius’s introductory exhortation is revealed to the reader only later: immediately before his death, Romanus’s tongue was cut out, but miraculously, his ability to witness to his faith was not affected (10.891). Before his tongue was removed, Romanus endured extensive torture: he was hanged up and his sides were gashed—Prudentius describes them as “plough wounds”—until white showed through where his bones were exposed (10.455). The persecutors were “laboring” and “panting” from the exertion, but Romanus was “at rest” (10.456–57). The Christian educates his persecutor—and Prudentius’s audience—on the disparity between appearance and reality: “If you seek, prefect, to know the truth, all this, all the mangling, is not painful [non dolet]” (10.459–60). The “truth” Romanus offers is the seemingly implausible claim that for Christians the rending of the physical body is painless. Later the prefect may acknowledge the martyr’s claim when he asks why Romanus’s “whole body has grown insensible” (obcalluit; 10.582).
In one of Romanus’s lengthy apologies for the faith, he addresses his exhortation to pagan crowds who gather to watch Christians die. It is their superstition and misunderstanding of reality that pains (dolet) Romanus (10.461). The claws used to tear the flesh, he goes on to argue, are nothing compared to the “awful attack” of disease on the lungs; the brands do not burn as hot as the fever; the rack is no different from gout or arthritis; the executioner is like the physician (10.482–98). Thus on the one hand, Prudentius’s poem describes a martyr who asserts unequivocally that torture is not painful (non dolet). And on the other hand, it assures audience members that they already experience pain that exceeds that of torture. Romanus serves as evidence of a pain-free existence in a pain-filled world.
Christian insensitivity to pain is a repeated motif in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, being explicitly invoked on three occasions and implied in several others. The previous chapter examined Blandina’s response to the torture that lasted from dawn until dusk, but the unequivocal language of insensitivity to pain deserves attention here. Blandina “was made young again by her confession, which brought to her recovery, rest, and insensitivity [analgēsia]” (1.18). Despite their desire to inflict pain, the torturers instead administered analgesics. A further round of torture for Blandina is recounted later in the letter, and its effects are similar: “after the whips, the animals, and the frying pan, finally, having been tossed into a net she was exposed to a bull, and being tossed a long time by the animal, she no longer felt [mēde aisthēsin] what was happening” (1.56). In this scene the text may be implying that Blandina was physically insensitive to torture. In some martyr texts, however, the Christian enters into a trancelike state, during which she does not know what is happening to or around her. Both interpretive options lead audiences to similar conclusions: Blandina was not aware of the pain of being tossed by the bull. The text’s insistence elsewhere on physical insensitivity, though, suggests that here too we are to understand that Blandina was corporeally unaffected by the torture.13
Sanctus’s experience of being burned with red-hot copper plates is also worth revisiting to examine its claims to painlessness. Throughout this horrific torture the martyr was “bedewed and strengthened by the heavenly fountain of the water of life that issues forth from the body of Christ” (1.22). The narrator explains the importance of Sanctus’s experience both for his contemporaries who were awaiting torture and for subsequent Christian audiences: he served as a “model for all the others that there is nothing fearful where the Father’s love is, nothing painful [mēde algeinon] where Christ’s glory is” (1.23). The author’s negation of algeō underscores that Sanctus—like Blandina—experienced impassibility during torture.
According to the Martyrdom of Pionius, the presbyter Pionius and several other Christians were arrested on the anniversary of Polycarp’s death. Pionius was chained, jailed, choked, carried upside down into a temple, clubbed on the head, hanged up, tortured by his fingernails, and finally condemned to be burned alive. As he approached the pyre, Pionius—like Polycarp before him—removed his own clothes, and “perceiving the holiness and nobility of his body, he was filled with much joy” (21.2).14 Closing his eyes, he prayed “secretly.” Afterward he opened his eyes and said with a “cheerful countenance,” “Lord, receive my soul” (21.8–9). The author describes Pionius’s death in this way: “As though belching, gently [hēsuchōs] and painlessly [aponōs] he breathed out and offered his spirit in trust to the Father, who has promised to preserve all blood and every spirit that has been unjustly condemned” (21.9). Modern readers may find this image distasteful, but it adequately illustrates the ease with which death comes, and the relief it brings, to the Christian: being burned alive is as painless as a burp. The final observation—that God preserves or protects (phulaxai) the blood and spirit of the faithful—may explain Pionius’s painless death: the martyr’s impassibility is simultaneously proof of the martyr’s faithfulness and of God’s loving commitment to the innocent.
The Martyrdom of Irenaeus, like many other martyr texts, includes a trial scene in which the persecutor asks the Christian to save himself by sacrificing to the emperor or the gods. After subjecting Irenaeus to unspecified but “intense” tortures, the prefect, Probus, implores the bishop: “Save yourself from death. Let the tortures you have sustained thus far suffice” (4.4). The martyr, however, challenges Probus’s perception of the events: what the prefect assumed he had done—brought pain to the Christian by means of torture—is rejected by Irenaeus as fantasy. “I directly spare myself from death through the torments which you imagine [putas] you apply to me, but which I do not feel [ego non sentio], because I receive eternal life from God” (4.4). This exchange challenges the listening audience as much as it does the prefect: anyone who equates torture with pain is aligned with the persecutors who do not—who cannot—grasp reality because they stand apart from faith. From the Christian perspective, pagan persecutors are obtuse; they “imagine” that they apply painful tortures, but Christians do not feel them.
Perhaps the most poignant example of the explicit claims to painlessness in martyr texts is found in the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius. Toward the end of the narrative Flavian recounts a vision he received of the bishop-cum-martyr Cyprian. Flavian asks Cyprian if enduring the “attack was painful [doleret].” “Obviously,” Flavian explains, “as a future martyr I deliberated about enduring the event” (21.3). Whether or not martyrdom hurts is clearly a pressing matter for Flavian—and perhaps also for the listening audience—as he awaits his death. His fear, again perhaps also felt by Christian listeners, is grounded in the assumption that torture causes pain. But Cyprian offers a comforting response that shatters the causal relationship between torture and pain: “The body does not feel this [nequaquam corpus hoc sentit] at all when the mind is entirely devoted to God” (21.4).15 Flavian’s vision of Cyprian contains a number of narrative techniques for distancing the Christian body from the experience of pain, but of particular interest here is Cyprian’s direct refutation of Flavian’s question: Is the deathblow painful? No, “the body does not feel” it. This text, furthermore, sheds light on its motivation for denying the pain of martyrdom. After recounting Cyprian’s consoling words to Flavian, the narrator turns to exhort the audience directly: “O words, with which martyr was encouraging martyr! He denied that enduring the attack was painful [dolorem] in order that the one who was about to die, might be quickened with resolve since he would not dread the slightest sense of pain in the attack” (quod nec paruum sensum doloris in passionis ictu timeret; 21.5). Flavian’s vision is instructive for subsequent Christians: although spectators—in this case even Christians—may think torture is painful, the reality is that martyrs feel not the “slightest sense of pain.” This anesthesia, moreover, is proof of faith: the Christian who does not experience pain is obviously “entirely devoted to God.”
These examples illustrate ways that a number of early martyr stories assert explicitly that the martyrs felt no pain. The language used allows the audience no escape from the startling and counterintuitive conclusion that Christian bodies are insensitive to the pain of torture. Often the texts differentiate the perception that torture hurts from the reality that the Christian body is impassible. The differentiation of perception and reality constructs social groups: pagans believe they are harming Christians, but Christians (should) know this is impossible.
Related to the explicit rejection of the experience of pain is the technique of differentiating the experiences of the martyrs’ spirits/souls from their bodies. When employing this strategy, authors may not utilize the terms “analgesia” and “anesthesia” explicitly, but the narratives nonetheless distance the martyr from the physical effects of torture by positing a dualism between body and spirit/soul. In Prudentius’s account of Eulalia’s martyrdom, for example, the martyr asserts that her body—made of clay—is easily destroyed in its frailty but “the tormenting pain [dolore] will not penetrate the inner spirit” (Peri. 3.94–95). Eulalia’s spirit will certainly not feel pain; whether or not her body does is less clear. The text, that is, does not make an explicit claim about the corporeal experience of martyrdom. But either way, the experience of the spirit is different from that of the body, and the latter is cast as insignificant. The truth of Eulalia’s statement is illustrated by the torture scene: as her body was being scraped with claws, “the awful pain was absent from the spirit” (3.143).
Vincent’s experience, according to Prudentius, is similar. In his defense before Datianus, Vincent differentiates the body—“a clay vessel” that will break—from that which “remains unmoved on the inside” (Peri. 5.164–67). The spirit cannot be injured (violare); it is “independent, at rest, unharmed, free from harsh pain [dolorum]” (5.159–60). It is this body/spirit distinction that informs the audience’s interpretation of Vincent’s experience on the pyre. As Vincent ascended the pyre, the persecutors threw salt onto the flames to cause the fire to spark randomly, and they placed a piece of fat over him so it would drip slowly onto his body. But through all of this, Vincent “remained unmoved as if unaware of pain” (inmotus manet tamquam dolorum nescius; 5.233–34). In this account the spirit/body dualism must be pieced together by the observant listener who interprets Vincent’s insensitivity to the fire through the lens of his earlier assertions about the spirit’s nature as “uninjured” and “free from pain.”
Perpetua’s experience presents an interesting case of body/spirit dualism. After Perpetua and Felicitas had been imprisoned for some time, they were brought into the Carthage arena to face a “wild heifer” (Pass. Perp. 20.1). The heifer tossed Perpetua, who landed on her back. Sitting up, she straightened her hair and pulled down her tunic, because she was “more mindful of modesty than of pain” (pudoris potius memor quam doloris; 20.4). Is the editor here conceding the experience of pain? Perhaps the text is suggesting that although Perpetua was primarily concerned about her modesty, she nevertheless felt pain. But the editor quickly complicates the issue. Indeed, it is clear that Perpetua was not simply more mindful of modesty; she was only mindful of that. After the women were called back through the Gate of Life, Perpetua
was awakened from a kind of sleep (being so completely in the spirit and in ecstasy), and she began to look around. To the astonishment of all she said: “When are we to be exposed to that heifer or whatever it is?” When she heard that it had already happened, she did not at first believe it until she examined certain marks of persecution on her body and clothes. (20.8–9)16
Perpetua did not feel pain because she was “in the spirit and in ecstasy.”17 Her insensitivity to the violence was due to a trancelike state. It was only when she saw the bodily marks that she was convinced that trauma had occurred; she could see, but not feel, the results of events that we think of as painful. Notably, this is the only time in this text that the editor uses dolor to describe the martyrs’ experiences during torture.18 Its use here, then, is intriguing. The editor may employ dolor here to create a rhyme (pudoris . . . doloris), as Craig Williams suggests.19 Since the term is not otherwise important for this editor, Williams is likely right that it reflects literary and not ideological interests.
Spirit/body dualism is also prominent in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. In chapter 2, I examined this text’s depiction of a group of martyrs who were tortured so violently that their veins and arteries were exposed. Here I wish to focus on one specific aspect of the text’s explanation for the martyrs’ endurance: these Christians demonstrated that “in the hour that they were being tortured,” they “had traveled away from the flesh” (2.2). This statement distances the soon-to-be martyrs from the experience of pain; they do not—indeed, cannot—suffer because they are not present in the flesh. The term employed here, apodēmeō, implies travel away from home, sojourning, or traveling abroad. The martyrs’ bodies are portrayed as abandoned abodes; their souls now reside elsewhere, as is clear when the author claims that the martyrs were “no longer humans but already angels” (2.3). As we will see, the text holds in tension the thick description of tortured bodies with the insistence that the Christians could not have felt pain because they had abandoned their corporeal dwellings. These Christians had relinquished their bodies even before their deaths; they could not, therefore, feel physical pain.
The author of the Martyrdom of Marian and James explains that Christians do not “feel the punishments of prison” or “dread the darkness of the world” because “the soul that has mentally embraced [mente conplexus] heaven with faithful hope in the favor to come no longer attends to its punishment [non interest poenis]” (6.2). The soul that single-mindedly contemplates the rewards promised to faithful Christians, this text claims, is disinterested in, or even absent from, the punishment meted out in prison. No place is “squalid,” “no circumstance is experienced as disagreeable” for those who place their trust in God (6.3). When the mind is in heaven, Christians are unaffected by torture. Similarly, the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius relies on mind/body dualism to distance Christian souls from the vulnerability of the body. Cyprian assures the soon-to-be martyr Flavian that “the body [corpus] does not feel this at all when the mind [mens] is entirely devoted to God” (21.4). Whereas some martyr texts’ use of dualism leaves open the question of the body’s experience—shifting the focus to the spirit—Cyprian links the mind and the body: when the Christian mind contemplates God, the body is insensitive to physical assault.
The recently discovered Acts of Gallonius employs dualism differently from the previous examples.20 Gallonius responds to the proconsul’s threats of torture by asserting, “Over my flesh [carne] you have power but none at all over my soul [anima]” (46). The proconsul meets the verbal challenge with a torrent of torture, but the Christian’s assertion is affirmed: “The spirit does not feel [non sentit], the flesh endures [patitur], the soul is saved” (50). The spirit, the element of the human that matters most for this author, does not feel anything; it is not vulnerable to harm from pagan persecutors. The statement about the body—it “endures”—is vague: does it feel pain, but withstand it? Or does the body endure persecution without accompanying pain? The text does not resolve the hermeneutical problem. But in either case the opposition of spirit and body shifts the focus away from an earthly to a spiritual plane. The Christian is not merely a body vulnerable to corporal punishment; it comprises an impassible spirit and a soul that enjoys salvation.
The division of body/spirit in narratives of martyrdom is also found in various Donatist texts. The story of the Donatist bishop Marculus, for instance, posits a dualism of body/spirit that explains his analgesic state during torture. According to the narrative, Marculus and his companions were stripped, bound to a column, and whipped. This ordeal was for Marculus a “contest with pain” (certamen doloris).21 But the spectacle of torture provided an opportunity “to exhibit the strength of God” because a Christian “cannot feel the pain of the body when the spirit embraces Christ and hope already occupies the kingdom” (nec dolorem corporis posse sentire quorum Spiritus complectitur Christum, et spes jam possidet regnum).22 As in the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius, so also in this text the Christian spirit that wholly embraces God attains impassibility for the body.
Dualism is even more conspicuous in the Passion of Maximian and Isaac. This text asserts that Maximian acted “as if his own body was not his own [alienus sui corporis].”23 Like the martyrs in Smyrna who “traveled away from” their bodies, Maximian abandons his body and thereby defeats his persecutors. The Abitinian martyr Dativus stands as yet another example of the differentiation of body and spirit in Donatist martyr texts. Dativus’s “chest was severed, his skin cut, and his viscera torn apart.”24 But through all of this the martyr remained unmoved. The author asserts that “the mind of the martyr is unmoved and even if his limbs were broken, his viscera torn apart, and his sides destroyed, nevertheless, the soul of the martyr endures unhurt and unchanged [animus tamen martyris integer inconcussusque perdurat].”25 The text further underscores the distinction between mind/spirit and body when it narrates another round of Dativus’s torture, during which the Christian’s “mind and spirit rested on the Lord”; the martyr “did not consider the pain in his body” (nihil dolorem corporis aestimabat).26 As opposed to texts that claim Christian martyrs experience analgesia, the Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs distances the Christian body from the experience of pain by asserting the impassibility of the spirit and its indifference to corporeal experiences.
The Passion of Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda contains a different type of argument about the relationship of spirit and body. During his interrogation, Anulinus, the proconsul, urged Donatilla to sacrifice lest she be tortured. In response Donatilla claimed that his “tortures will be great for my soul” (3). Rather than claiming that the spirit is disinterested in or unaffected by the experience of the body, this text makes the opposite claim: the body’s experience benefits the soul.27 Although this episode makes no explicit claims about pain, an observant hearer may interpret Donatilla’s statement in light of the assertions of Maxima, one of her fellow martyrs: when the proconsul issued the order for the women to be lashed, Maxima asserted, “The lashes are not powerful on the flesh that is beaten when the spirit has been saved and when the soul has been redeemed and strengthened” (5). The Christian, Maxima claims, whose salvation is assured is not bothered by torture. What appears to non-Christians as torture, this text argues, is instead the strengthening and redeeming of the soul.
Narratives that emphasize a body/spirit dualism may appear to devalue corporeal existence: the experience of the flesh is of little consequence since the soul is in heaven. But the texts’ focus on the body suggests the opposite: the body is a crucial site for the construction of martyrdom. Even texts that utilize dualism do not disregard the body. Rather, these martyr narratives describe the martyr’s victory over the physical assaults perpetrated by their persecutors. The body, as Shaw notes, remains “the critical site of power discourses that flow through it and are inscribed upon it.”28 In stories that posit a spirit/body dualism, the two are typically not antithetical but mutually supportive. The spirit that embraces the rewards of heaven conveys an important somatic benefit to the Christian: it attains impassibility for an otherwise vulnerable body.
Another way authors account for Christian impassibility is by positing the presence—and activity—of the divine. Augustine, for instance, makes this argument often. The patience Vincent exhibits, Augustine explains, can only be understood as “a gift of God”; it “must all be ascribed not to humans, but to the glory of God” (Serm. 274).29 In Serm. 275 Augustine returns to this point: Vincent was enabled to fight against all “the snares of the ancient enemy” and “against the pains of the mortal flesh” because he received “the assistance of the Lord.”30 In yet another sermon on St. Vincent, Augustine makes the same case: “let it be recognized, consequently, that divinity was at work” (Serm. 276).31 Perishable flesh cannot, unaided, stand up to pagan torments and human weakness: “when, I mean, can perishable dust persevere against such savage tortures, unless the Lord were residing in it?”32 It is this final point—the Lord is in the martyr—that Augustine emphasizes. The martyr himself is nothing more than a vehicle through which the Lord’s power and compassion are manifest:
If, in this event, one attended to human endurance, it begins to be incredible; if one acknowledges divine power, it ceases even to be surprising. Such barbarity was being waged against the martyr’s body, while such tranquility was being exhibited by his voice; such rough punishments raged against his limbs, and such composure issued forth in his words, that when we imagined, marvelously, that Vincent was enduring [patiente], it was another, not the one speaking, who was being tortured [torqueri].33
In his teachings on Vincent, Augustine shifts the focus from the martyr’s will to the divine aid as that which enabled Vincent to endure torture; indeed, Augustine implies that the Lord suffers the torture in Vincent’s stead. He makes a similar claim about the benefits of divine communion with the martyrs when he teaches that the martyrs “contended against sin all the way to bloodshed, because he himself was in them, through whom they conquered [quia ipse in illis fuit, per quem vicerunt]” (Serm. 335J.1). Augustine reminds his congregation that the martyrs’ strength comes from within: Jesus was in them, strengthening them for victory. But he does more still. In these sermons Augustine argues that the work of martyrdom—the endurance of torture—is accomplished not by the martyrs but by Christ.
Modern interpretations of martyrdom tend to center on the martyrs themselves: the narrative action and locus of meaning revolves around the Christian hero. But such a reading may compromise our ability to see a different character as central to the story: Jesus/God. Gillian Clark rightly reminds us that martyr texts “commemorate the suffering which the martyr had, with God’s help, endured.”34 This narrative point is relevant especially to the Christian community, as Isabelle Kinnard notes: “It is as though Christ is quite nearby. He is still present in these sufferings, and a martyr’s death serves as a distress call to invoke Christ on behalf not only of the individual, but of the entire persecuted community.”35 Christ is among them; they do not face opposition alone. This important theological point dispels possible concerns about God’s absence. Minucius Felix gives voice to this objection: either God “is not willing or not able to bring them aid” (Oct. 12). As if in direct answer to this problem, martyr texts insist not only on the presence of the divine with the martyr, but further, that this presence brings insensitivity to pain.
In many martyr texts the divine being is present with Christians, encouraging them, strengthening them, and often enduring torture in and for them. When Pamfilus asserts that the torments of his persecutors “are nothing,” for example, he does not merely assert the fact of impassibility but explains the reason for it: “I feel no pain because I have someone who strengthens me; one whom you are not able to see endures in me” (ego autem nullum sentio dolorem quia est qui me confortat; patitur in me, quem tu videre non poteris; Mart. Carp. B3.6).36 In this text the cause-and-effect relationship is explicit: Pamfilus experiences analgesia because some—unspecified—divine being is within him.37 The divine presence in Pamfilus does more than merely strengthen the martyr, however. In this text the experience of torture shifts from the martyr to the divine being, who endures on his behalf. Pamfilus feels no pain because the divine endures in him.
A similar claim for a divine spirit enduring in—and on behalf of—the martyr is made in both the Latin and Greek versions of the Passion of Perpetua.38 Felicitas, imprisoned when she was eight months’ pregnant, was saddened to think that she might not die with the other Christians (it was illegal, the editor notes, to execute a pregnant woman; 15.2). Her fellow Christians began praying for her, and immediately the labor pains (dolores) came. The editor explains to the reader that such an early labor is painful (doleret), and as Felicitas struggles with her pain, the prison guard asks what she will do when she is tossed to the beasts, if she is in such pain (doles) now? (15.5).39 Interestingly, when Felicitas responds to the guard, she replaces the word for pain, dolor, with patior, thereby shifting the locus of meaning from pain to endurance: “I alone endure [patior] this; but then another will be in me who will endure [patietur] for me, because I also will be enduring [passura] for him” (15.6). When referring to Felicitas’s martyrdom, the narrative privileges the notion of endurance (patior) over pain (dolor) and asserts the communion of the divine with the martyr.40
Likewise, when the Greek author narrates Felicitas’s labor, he notes that growing weary she felt pain (ēlgei; 15.5). The guard who taunts Felicitas as she is in labor also uses the term algeō but—just as in the Latin text—the Greek author changes the terms when Felicitas responds. Her answer does not connect pain with martyrdom. Rather, she uses paschō: Felicitas “endures” labor alone, but in martyrdom “there will be another” who will be in her, who will endure for her, and for whom she will be enduring (15.6).41 In both the Latin and the Greek versions, therefore, the rejection of “pain”—demonstrated by the texts’ shift to language of “endurance”—highlights the beneficial effect of the divine presence with the martyr. Felicitas rejects pain as a locus of meaning in her impending martyrdom because she anticipates divine presence in her, and divine cosuffering.
While many martyr texts claim that an unspecified aspect of the divine is present with the martyr, the Martyrdom of Conon explicitly states God is present with the martyr. According to this text, the prefect who condemned Conon to death first threatened the Christian with a slew of increasingly horrific tortures: “I will destroy you by making you bait for a harsh lion; or I will give you over as food to beasts of the deep; or I will have you put to death by hanging on a cross; or I will throw you into a kettle that has been heated over a fierce fire, and it will melt away your flesh, unless you offer sacrifice to the unconquerable and eternal gods” (5.5).42 Unsurprisingly, Conon is not distressed by these threats but instead offers a reply that wholly undermines the power of the prefect: “The tortures that you proclaim to me are not able to injure me [ou dunantai me adikēsai]” (5.8). This is the case, Conon explains, because he has “God who strengthens” him. Divine presence brings immunity to the tortured Christian.
Other martyr texts specify the presence of Jesus in or with the martyrs during torture. The benefits Christians receive from Jesus are highlighted in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons when the author explains that a group of Christians was persecuted so severely “that it did not seem possible to live, even if they obtained every kind of treatment” (1.28). The situation was dire; survival was improbable. Miraculously, however, even “left without human care, . . . having regained strength through the Lord, and having been strengthened in body and soul, they urged on and exhorted the rest” (1.28). Jesus’ act of healing is emphasized by the author’s insistence that the martyrs received no human attention; their surprising strength is only attributable to divine action. This miraculous healing, furthermore, brought encouragement to other imprisoned Christians, possibly by suggesting they would receive the same help from Jesus during their contests. Although the narrative interest in this case is not explicitly on pain, it does focus on the beneficial presence of Jesus with martyrs during persecution: Jesus provides a lifeline to martyrs who were assumed to be beyond medical help.
In other places the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons shows significant interest in the theme of analgesia in martyrdom, especially as a result of the presence of Christ in and with the martyrs. We have previously examined Sanctus’s bout of torture during which he was “bedewed and strengthened by the heavenly fountain of the water of life that issues forth from the body of Christ” (1.22). Here it is worth noting the presence of Christ with Sanctus at this moment: Sanctus received strength from Jesus’ healing presence, manifest in the water of life. Particularly illuminating of the text’s interest is the connection made between the perception of Sanctus’s body—“all one wound and bruise, having been contracted and having lost any external human form”—and the reality that Christ was “enduring” (paschōn) in Sanctus (1.23). Christ’s endurance effected “great glory, hindering the work of the Adversary, and showing as a model to all that there is nothing fearful where the Father’s love is, nothing painful [mēde algeinon] where Christ’s glory is” (1.23). The story of Sanctus demonstrates two complementary themes in this letter: first, Jesus is present with the martyrs, offering strength and relief (1.22); second, Jesus endures for the martyrs, in their stead (1.23). The Letter suggests an economy of exchange whereby Jesus takes on the physical experiences of persecution in place of the martyrs. This text controverts readings that suggest Christians valorized the experience of pain in imitation of Jesus’ passion. Rather, in the Letter the martyrs feel nothing because Jesus endures for them.
The author of the Letter typically describes the martyrs’ experiences with the term hypomenō. Thus the narration of Sanctus’s experience differentiates the Christian’s act of abiding or submitting (hypomenō) from Jesus’ act of undergoing or enduring (paschō).43 Although subtle, given the explicit claims in this text of Jesus’ presence with the martyrs and the martyrs’ painlessness, the distinction is an important one. A similar claim is made in 1.27–28 where Christ is seen as the one who “left unemployed” (katargēthentōn) the tyrant’s “instruments of correction” through the submission (hypomonēs) of the martyrs. Christ achieves victory by means of the martyrs, but his victory is not related to their pain. Rather, Christ is victorious because Christians are willing to submit to an experience that is ultimately transferred to Christ himself. The victory is Christ’s—not the Christians’—but through it the martyrs receive the crown of immortality.
Just as Christ endured in Sanctus, so also he dwells in other martyrs. The faithful Christians who were imprisoned are described as beautiful and joyful; even their chains adorned their bodies like “comely ornaments” (1.35). But the beauty of these Christians is not merely that of outward physical appearance: they even smelled different; their bodies exuded “at the same time the sweet odor . . . of Christ so that some imagined they had anointed themselves with worldly perfume” (1.35). In this text Christ’s presence with and in the martyrs is manifest in myriad ways, all of which relate Jesus’ presence to the martyrs’ ability to submit successfully to persecution.
In one of the best-known episodes of the Letter, Blandina benefits from the presence of Jesus. After experiencing a great deal of torture, she was hanged on a post to be exposed to the wild animals. The author describes her in this way:
looking like one hanging in the form of a cross, and by her powerful prayer, she created much readiness in those who were contending. For during their contest, with their physical eyes, by means of their sister they saw the one who was crucified for them, in order that s/he might persuade [hina peisē] the ones who believe in him that all who endure for Christ’s glory will have eternal communion with the living God. (1.41)
The author goes on to explain that Blandina “was clothed in Christ, the great and unconquerable athlete,” and through her contest she “was crowned with the crown of immortality” (1.42). Of particular interest to the current discussion is the relationship in this scene between Jesus and Blandina. On the one hand, some scholars argue that Jesus displaces Blandina. From this perspective the other martyrs no longer see Blandina hanging, but instead they see Jesus. Candida Moss, for instance, argues that “Blandina herself disappears, and in her place and in her physical form only Christ is apparent. The transformative quality of her imitation of the crucifixion is so strong that she vanishes; her identity is transformed into and subsumed by that of Christ.”44 Most English translations of the Letter reflect similar reading emphases, as Elizabeth Goodine and Matthew Mitchell demonstrate: the subject of hina peisē is understood to be Jesus (i.e., “that he might persuade”).45
Other scholars, on the other hand, argue that the visual (and grammatical and syntactical) focus remains squarely on Blandina, not Jesus. While the subject of the verb “to persuade” is ambiguous—referring either to Blandina or Jesus—Goodine and Mitchell argue that “grammatically and syntactically the best translation of this clause is to render Blandina, not Christ, as subject” (i.e., “that she [Blandina] might persuade”).46 In support of this claim they note that throughout this passage Blandina is the subject of the majority of the verbs. The two sentences that make up the passage center on Blandina, and she is the active agent: “it is she who prays, she who encourages, she who acts and stands in the stead of Christ.”47 From a grammatical and syntactical point of view, then, Blandina is best understood as the subject of the verb.
Blandina is also the center of the passage from a narrative perspective. Translations that obscure Blandina’s presence and agency in this scene, Goodine and Mitchell argue, “make of her a nonentity at the most critical point of the passage, that is, at the very point where Christ shares koinōnia with a human being and that human being thereby persuades others to faith.”48 Relatedly, the usual translation (“he might persuade”) compromises the parallels this text draws between the experiences of Sanctus and Blandina, and between the effects of their endurance on their fellow Christians. Retaining Blandina’s centrality in the scene preserves the parallels: whereas Sanctus’s endurance “teaches” about God’s love (1.23), Blandina’s endurance “persuades” others that they will enjoy eternal fellowship with God (1.41). Both have agency in communicating theological truths to their fellow Christians. Thus, as Blandina hangs, her image does not dissolve into Jesus’; rather, in Streete’s words, her “body is the effective rhetoric.”49 Although iconography plays an important role in recalling the object of faith for whom Christians are willing to die, this scene secures Blandina at the center of the visual imagination. Throughout this text Jesus works in and among—but does not replace—the martyrs: as Sanctus benefited from Jesus’ presence with him, so also does Blandina.
This scene’s interest in Blandina’s communion with Christ, furthermore, prepares the audience for the martyr’s last appearance in the Letter. After being scourged, thrown to animals, and placed in a frying pan, Blandina was tossed by a bull; but “she no longer felt [mēde aisthēsin] what was happening” (1.56). We have already noted Blandina’s impassibility, but the passage continues, explaining why Blandina did not feel the effects of torture: it was “because of the hope and firm hold on the things she had faith in and because of her communion [homilian] with Christ” (1.56). Communion with Christ brings insensitivity to Blandina just as it did for Sanctus. In both cases Jesus alleviated their pain and enabled them to submit to persecution; and in both cases the martyrs’ endurance was instructive to others.
Jesus is also envisioned as a key player in the narrative action of the Martyrdom of Polycarp. As the author explains at the beginning of his letter, “almost everything that took place before happened in order for the Lord to show us once again a testimony according to the gospel” (1.1). Jesus, however, does not work from the wings; he stars center stage, interacting with—even defending, helping, or suffering for—the martyrs.50 In an episode we have examined previously, the author describes the torture of a group of Christians. It is the text’s explanation for the heroic abilities of the martyrs that is our concern here. The author writes, “some, being torn to shreds by scourging until the very structure of their flesh was visible, down to the inner veins and arteries, stood firm [hypemeinan]” (2.2). If the audience focuses on the pain such violence might cause, they stand with the nonbelievers observing the torture, who “weep with pity” (2.2).51 But careful listeners are relieved of the burden of imagining this pain and feeling this pity: immediately after the physical trauma has been described, the author focuses our attention on the Christians’ ability to withstand this torture without uttering a grumble or groan. The martyrs’ surprising lack of response to torture is attributed to two complementary experiences: first, “Christ’s martyrs had traveled away from the flesh,” and second, “the Lord was standing near [parestōs], speaking with them” (2.2).52 As Jesus was “standing near,” the martyrs were “fixing their attention on Christ’s chariti”—his grace, favor, or possibly even his beauty (2.3).53 As they turned their attention to Christ, who was present before them,
they thought little of worldly tortures, through one hour buying for themselves eternal life. . . . And with the eyes of their hearts they looked up at the good things reserved for the ones who endure, which no ear has heard nor eye seen, nor has it entered into the heart of a human. But these things were revealed by the Lord for they were no longer humans but already were angels. (2.3)54
There are several points worthy of note here. First, the text connects the martyrs’ gazing at Christ to their disinterest in worldly torture. Jesus’ presence with the martyrs allows them to care little about torture and to focus instead on eternal life. Second, Jesus reveals “good things” to the martyrs, things that no human has ever seen. The statement that “no ear has heard nor eye seen, nor has it entered into the heart of a human” prepares the reader for the startling conclusion: this can only happen because the martyrs are not in fact humans but “already angels.”55 It is Christ’s presence with and among the Christians that allows them to stand firm and thus to earn the rewards reserved for those who do.56 The Martyrdom of Polycarp casts Jesus as an active character in the drama, one whose presence with the martyrs allows them to endure torture without experiencing pain; he facilitates their transition from physical to spiritual abodes.
In the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius the martyrs assert: “the greater the temptation, the greater is the one who conquers it within us. Indeed, it is not a battle, because it is protection under the Lord’s victory” (4.4). According to this text, it is Jesus who conquers temptation for the martyrs who, it seems, are free to enjoy the postwar victory. The author goes on to clarify that Christians do not participate in the battle itself; Christ has already won the battle. Torture is easy or tolerable (leue) for God’s people; indeed, “death is nothing when its sting is crushed and its struggle completely conquered through the triumph of the trophy of the cross” (4.5). Jesus’ prior victory shifts narrative attention away from the martyrdom itself. Although modern readers are accustomed to imagining the martyrs’ resistance to pagan persuasion as effecting their defeat of Satan and death, here the martyrs are not soldiers on active duty engaged in battle with the adversary but, rather, beneficiaries of a previously won battle. Through his death on the cross Jesus is imagined to have once and for all defeated death, and thus Christians receive the crown without fighting the battle, as the author makes clear: “For this reason we receive the reward of our crowns because the battle has already occurred; the palm is not handed over until the contest is completed” (4.6). Jesus has already waged battle and won; Christians share in this victory through Jesus’ presence with them because he defeats temptation and crushes the sting of death.
As we have seen, in this same text Flavian asks Cyprian if the deathblow is painful (dolor). I return to this scene to focus attention on the language Cyprian employs in his answer: “it is another flesh that endures when the spirit is in heaven” (Mart. Mont. 21.3). The attentive listener notices the shift in language that rejects the very terms of Flavian’s question and rejects pain as a locus of meaning: Flavian uses the term dolor in his question, but Cyprian answers in the language of endurance (patior). Moreover, if the other flesh to which Cyprian refers is Flavian’s—imagined as a changed flesh because the spirit has been liberated—then the text must be suggesting that although the Christian body can endure torture, it cannot feel pain because the spirit’s presence in heaven has changed the body on earth. But it is not at all clear that this other flesh should be understood as Flavian’s. The text may be claiming that Jesus offers himself in place of the Christian. In this reading, the other flesh that suffers on behalf of the spirit that dwells in heaven is none other than Jesus’. In light of other episodes in this text, this reading—that Jesus endures for the martyr—becomes more certain.
Jesus’ presence in and with the martyrs is very clear in the part of the text that deals with another of the imprisoned martyrs, Victor. This Christian received a vision of Jesus—in the form of a child—who revealed that the martyrs had yet to toil a little more. Having warned Victor that he had more to endure, the child Jesus offered consolation and a promise: “But be assured that I am with you” (7.4).57 Later in the narrative, Flavian’s insistence that he was a deacon drew the anger of the spectators, who called for him to be tortured anew. Flavian along with his fellow Christians had already been condemned to be burned alive (but the Lord’s dew extinguished the flames), starved, and imprisoned for many months. Finally his fellow Christians—from whom he was separated—died. Flavian though was spared any further torment, because “the Lord, who already understood his servant’s faith in the punishments of prison, did not allow the martyr’s already tested body to be touched by even the lightest laceration of torture” (20.6). In this case Jesus is described as stepping in on behalf of the martyr, directly shielding the Christian body from any further harm. The nearness of the martyr to the divine is made abundantly clear at the end of the story: “it was not difficult to have knowledge of the spirit when heaven and Christ were near” (23.5). Flavian shared fellowship with the divine and thereby received not only physical protection from harm but the fulfillment of Cyprian’s promise: “another flesh endures when the spirit is in heaven.”
Jesus’ protection is also a theme in the Martyrdom of Marculus. As the author builds up to a description of the torture of the martyr, he sets audience expectation for Jesus’ presence and aid during the torture. “Now who could give an account of the constancy of the glorious Marculus? Who, by virtue of eloquence, might be able to set forth either the unheard of madness of the persecutors or the wonderful defense of Christ the Lord displayed in his martyr?”58 Here the author makes clear that Marculus’s perseverance is attributable to the presence of the Lord within him. At times Marculus even fades from sight altogether as Jesus fights with the “Antichrist.” Eventually, the Antichrist changes his tack when “it was not possible to hold out against a soul invigorated by divine constancy,” and so he turned to inflict “a contest of pain on the frailty of the body.”59 Marculus met this challenge by fastening on to himself fetters that prevented him from avoiding the coming blows. But in the midst of the beatings, “Christ, clothed in the limbs of the martyr, disclosed a miracle: not only did he not allow pain to draw near [non solum dolorem adire non sineret], but he even wiped away from his body all marks of violence and all signs of torture.”60 Pain is obliterated for the faithful Christian; wounds are healed. The Christian body, enveloped by Christ, is not fragile, breakable, or passible.
The Martyrdom of Bishop Fructuosus and His Deacons, Augurius and Eulogius is unique among the martyr texts discussed here because it describes the presence of the Trinity among the martyrs. The text describes the Christians as being “like Ananias, Azarias, and Misael” (4.2). The comparison of the martyrs to the Jewish youths in Daniel prompts the author to discuss the presence of the divine in both stories: “the divine trinity was also perfected in them.”61 Like the Jewish youths, the Christian martyrs enter the fire and there experience a miracle: “the Father was not absent, and the Son gave aid, and the Spirit walked about in the midst of the fire” (4.2). These martyrs were comforted by the company of all three persons of the Trinity. In fellowship with the divine, the martyrs prayed until they died. In this text God is not a spectator in the heavens, or even directing events from a transcendent throne. Rather, God, Jesus, and the Spirit join the faithful Christians in the pyre; each of the persons of the Trinity sustains the martyrs in the final moments of their earthly lives.
Although we may expect martyr stories to praise the endurance of faithful Christians, such an interpretation undervalues the theological claims made by—and concerns about theodicy reflected in—these texts. Rather than focusing primarily on human fortitude, martyr stories teach Christians that during persecution and torture the martyrs are not alone.62 Jesus is with Christians, dwelling in them and enduring for them. Later homilies on the martyrs—including, as we have seen, Augustine’s homilies on Vincent and Perpetua and Felicitas—focus on this point. In fact Augustine exclaims: “Whoever imagines that Saint Vincent was able to master this by his own strength is wrong beyond measure.”63 And he argues that Perpetua and Felicitas were victorious because “he who lived in them conquered in them.”64 Augustine’s point appears to be directly in line with the kinds of claims we have seen in the martyr texts: Jesus is with the martyrs, in the martyrs, healing them, strengthening them, and perhaps enduring for them. The martyrs’ communion with Jesus also brings divine deliverance from pain, although the mechanisms by which this works may be imagined differently: at times the experience of analgesia is accomplished by divine protection of the body from torture; at other times, by the transference of the experience of torture from the martyr to Jesus. In all of these cases pain is anticipated but unrealized. Pain, in other words, is a necessary part of the discourse of martyrdom but in an unexpected way: the anticipation of pain highlights divine mercy.65
The narrative tools we have examined thus far reframe, redefine, and replace the image of bloody defeat with one of miraculous communion with the divine and its concomitant anesthesia. Accompanying these claims to impassivity are complementary narrative tools—claims to body/spirit dualism and divine companionship—that further facilitate the listener’s revised interpretation of the invulnerability of the Christian body to pagan torture. Martyr texts also destabilize audiences’ expectations for pain when the stories claim torture does not harm but instead heals. In place of broken, torn, and bloodied bodies, the narratives supply listeners with pictures of wholeness, youth, beauty, and perfection. Pagan attempts at torturing the Christian body are laughable: torture brings not pain and injury but refreshment and healing. Such assertions undermine audiences’ assumptions about persecutors’ power over Christian bodies, and in many cases they also challenge assumptions about the martyrs’ bodily pain. These narrative techniques work alongside more explicit claims about pain or painlessness, further engaging audience expectation regarding persecuted Christian bodies and then redirecting listeners toward a new paradigm.
The Martyrdom of Marculus, for example, asserts that torture applied to the martyr’s body brings healing rather than harm. Unbeknownst to his persecutors—who tag the bishop as an easy target—Marculus was not alone. As we saw above, Christ was in the martyr protecting him from feeling pain and erasing from his body “all marks of violence and all signs of torture.”66 Although ordinarily torture allows “the full weight of the state’s authority . . . to be inscribed on the flesh of the criminal,” as Castelli observes, Marculus’s body is unmarkable: the outward signs of torture are miraculously expunged.67 His flesh is imagined as a palimpsest in the making: the Christian’s body is momentarily marked but this unholy composition is effaced in preparation for a divine script. Secular authority may temporarily mar his body, but Christ’s superior authority restores it, proving that “in this contest, the enemy was conquered and subjugated.”68 In this text, for both the persecutor and the audience, perceptions are not reality. The bishop appeared to be frail, but he could not be defeated by torture because Christ was in him. Marculus’s story teaches that persecution brings not injury but health.
Unexpected outcomes of torture are a leitmotif of the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. Instead of being broken by her persecutors, Blandina’s experience brings “recovery and rest” (analēpsis kai anapausis; 1.19). Persecution does not break her body but instead repairs it.69 Sanctus experiences a similar phenomenon. Having endured such violent torture that his body was “all one wound and bruise,” Sanctus was eventually left alone (1.23). After several days his persecutors began to torture him again, believing “that now that his body had become swollen, another application of the torture would overcome him, since he could not bear up under the touch of a hand” (1.24). The persecutors used to their advantage the probability that Sanctus would die during a second round of torture: it would terrify the other Christians and thus serve as a warning to them. Listeners may find the persecutors’ assessment of Sanctus’s life span convincing given the trauma he is reported to have sustained. But to the amazement of all, Sanctus’s “body straightened out and was restored to health by the subsequent tortures; he regained his former shape and the use of his limbs, so that, by the grace of Christ, the second torture was not a punishment but a healing” (mē kolasin all’ iasin; 1.24). The engaged listener finds relief in the revelation that subsequent attempts at harming his body were so deeply ineffectual that they, ironically, cured him. The Letter uses these stories to illustrate that “the tyrant’s instruments of correction were left unemployed” (1.27). As with Biblis’s confession on the rack, the persecutors’ actions produce results that are in direct opposition to their intentions. These stories reinterpret events: torture that should bring pain, apostasy, and death brings instead renewed faith, rest, and health.
In the Passion of Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda the proconsul Anulinus orders the women to be flogged, but it does not harm them the way he anticipates. So he orders the women to be placed on beds of sharp shells. Maxima and Donatilla offer a defiant explanation for their endurance of torture: “We have a great physician who heals the wounds you inflict on us and strengthens our souls. You are assuredly diminished in the punishment, and we are amplified in glory. You are diminished in the verdict, and we are made better through our trust in God” (5). The martyrs are cured and strengthened by divine action.
Likewise the persecutors’ goals could not be realized through their torture of the Abitinian martyr Saturninus. In this story Anulinus, the proconsul, grows exasperated with the Christian who repeatedly confesses his faith but refuses to answer questions relating to the Christian assembly and his possession of sacred texts. In an especially poignant scene depicting the Roman quaestio, Saturninus is tortured by the same implements previously used on his father: “The exhausted torturers attacked the sides of the man with wounds like his father’s and they blended the father’s blood which had dampened the claws with the kindred blood of the son. Through the furrows of the gaping wounds you saw the father’s blood flowing from the sides of the son and the blood of the son mingled with the father’s flowing out from the moistened claws.”70 The narrator’s detailed and painstaking description paints the visual image for the audience. As the account is read, the listener pictures the bodies of both father and son, their matching wounds, and their intermingling and dripping blood. The persecutors designed this torment to maximize both physical and emotional pain. But something unexpected happened: “the youth, revived [recreatus] by the mixture of the two bloods, felt it a cure rather than torment” (medelam potius quam tormenta sentiebat).71 The desires of the persecutors were thwarted when their vicious actions effected healing. The failure of torture to harm the youth is emphasized by the author’s use of recreo, which connotes restoration or renewal from a previous state: the youth, it seems, was recreated by the torture. As was the case for earlier Christian martyrs, torture brings Saturninus miraculous recovery, not bodily torment.
The physical effects of torture are similarly challenged in the Martyrdom of Pionius. As I described earlier, after enduring various torments during his imprisonment, Pionius was finally burned alive. Unlike Polycarp, whose death could not be accomplished on the pyre, Pionius did succumb to the flames and die. As the account is narrated, the audience may imagine what a burned body looks like; they might visualize charred flesh or a form that is no longer recognizably human. But this image in the mind’s eye is rejected when the listener discovers that although the fire killed Pionius it did not touch his body. The text substitutes the listener’s mental image of charred flesh with one of youth and beauty: “After the fire had been put out, those of us who were near by saw his body arranged like that of an athlete in his prime” (22.2). After being clubbed, hanged, dragged, and burned, Pionius’s body was not wounded, bleeding, or charred but youthful and athletic. The narrative focuses especially on the details of his head as proof of his bodily perfection: “His ears were not awry; his hair lay in order on the surface of his head; and his beard was blooming like the first growth of hair. His face shone again” (22.3–4).72 The listening audience can take emotional cues from the eyewitnesses who “were more established in their faith,” and even those who had faltered “returned scared” (22.4). The preservation and perfection of Pionius’s body in the fire is a reminder of God’s presence with the martyrs, and it recalls apostates to the faith. The text foreshadows this moment by reporting the crowd’s assessment of Pionius’s changed countenance when he emerges from prison, “how he was always pale-green, but now his complexion is glowing” (10.3). This observation prepares the audience for what is to come: prison and death do not lead to decay and dissolution but to youthful vigor and athletic strength.
Stories such as these, which depict torture bringing healing not pain, are part and parcel of larger narrative claims to Christian invulnerability to persecutors’ acts. Listeners might assume that torture leads to bodily harm and physical pain, but the narratives undermine those assumptions by substituting claims to renewal, strength, and healing.73 Stories of the divine protection of the body may also reflect Christian interest in demonstrating God’s care for and presence in human life, functioning as an argument against the devaluation of corporeal existence. The author of the Martyrdom of Marculus, for instance, describes God’s protection of Marculus’s body—not merely his soul; God, the author asserts, “is devoted to the entirety of the martyr.”74 For many of the communities that produced martyr texts, God is not imagined as merely awaiting souls in heaven. God is active in the combat, engaging in the struggles of this world on behalf of—indeed, within—faithful Christians. God cares equally for the souls and the bodies of Christians, rewarding one and protecting the other.
The reality of the texts’ claims to impassivity/impassibility are equally observable in the martyrs’ reactions to torture: rather than responding to corporal punishment by screaming, crying, or groaning, Christian martyrs remain silent or in some cases crack jokes. These unexpected, often quite witty responses to physical assault are incongruous to the situation and thus require audiences to negotiate their meaning. They confirm the texts’ larger claims regarding the martyrs’ insensitivity to pain by disconfirming seemingly natural, instinctual responses to torture.
Silence is a prominent theme in martyr texts: during torture the martyrs do not cry out or groan but are instead silent. These stories certainly highlight the martyrs’ fortitude, but the narratives may also challenge assumptions about the relationship of injury to pain because the martyrs do not respond—even involuntarily—to torture. When the martyrs are beaten, scraped, or clubbed, there are no narrative markers of pain. This is the case in several of the texts I have already examined: in the Martyrdom of Polycarp the martyrs were silent even as whipping exposed their veins and arteries (2.2); and the Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike draws the audience’s attention to Papylus who though hanged up and scraped and subjected to three pairs of torturers, “did not give up a sound” (A35). The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons tells of the torture of Alexander, who “neither groaned nor grumbled at all but, rather, conversed with God in his heart” (1.51). Perpetua’s comrades “received the sword with silence” (Pass. Perp. 21.8). Pionius “kept quiet” when he was hit on the head with a club (Mart. Pion. 18.10), and “kept silent” when he was hanged up (20.1).
Rather than remaining silent, some martyrs demonstrate their insensitivity to torture with a joke. Many of us likely read the martyr accounts as eulogies that reflect on the martyrs’ faithful endurance, submission to authority, and the disintegration of the Christian body in witness to God. But humorous episodes in the martyr texts may suggest a different approach: these texts may emotionally engage the listening audience in shared defiance to tyranny and persecution. But can a funny thing happen on the way to—or even in—the arena? Could Christians have found humor in martyr texts? And if so, to what ends?
Martyrological humor is undoubtedly in play in the story of St. Laurence, who was purportedly a victim of the Valerian persecution. In Prudentius’s account in Peristephanon, the prefect accuses Laurence of laughing at him, mocking him, and making him the butt of jokes.75 Broadly speaking, Prudentius’s story about Laurence is built around humor that comes at the prefect’s expense. The repetition of this theme primes the audience for the story’s ultimate joke. The prefect, determined to burn Laurence alive, devises a method whereby death will come as slowly and as painfully as possible: rather than a raging pyre, the prefect orders the fire to be slowed. Laurence is placed on a spit above the heat. Such a fate does not provoke the saint’s anger or fear; instead, he cracks a joke. After being roasted for a while on one side, he quips, “It is cooked, devour it, try whether it is nicer raw or roasted” (2.406–8).76 The incongruity that produces the humor is obvious. Laurence offers his persecutors a tasting menu: do they prefer Laurence well-done or Laurence tartare? The martyr’s one-liner—which, not incidentally, casts the persecutors as cannibals—offers listeners an emotional break from the drama depicted. On the one hand, the joke offers much-needed relief to the listening audience, who if they have followed the story carefully must be imagining how excruciating it is to be roasted alive on a spit. This gruesome task is interrupted with a joke that shifts the audience’s focus to the persecutors as they are charged with breaking taboo. On the other hand, Laurence’s ability to make light of his situation disrupts the power dynamics inherent in the scene: the pagan persecutors’ monstrous attempts are not to be feared but ridiculed. As James Thorson aptly puts it, “death personified with pie in its face has lost its power.”77 Laurence’s ability to joke at the moment of his death challenges the notion that the prefect has won the match with the Christian. His failure is manifest in his inability to achieve his aim of exacting excruciating pain.
Gary Meltzer’s observation about Senecan wit is, mutatis mutandis, applicable to the martyr texts: it functions to reveal “the condition of both victimizer and victim beneath appearances which may be deceptive.”78 The dissolution of the Christian body may be a ghastly thing to picture in the mind’s eye, but the injection of gallows humor relieves the audience of the burden of that image, shifting their attention to the condition of the persecutors’ souls. As Christian bodies are burned and stretched, their outward appearances may no longer be recognizably human, but their faith demonstrates their true humanity. Laurence’s humor illustrates that the opposite is true for the persecutors: while their outward human appearance remains intact, their true inhumanity is revealed when they are characterized as cannibals.79 Thus the text invites its audience “to confront a more monstrous spectacle” than that of Laurence’s charred body: that of the persecutors’ “diseased soul[s].”80 In the martyrdom of Laurence, gallows humor accomplishes a constellation of things: it shifts the audience’s gaze from the anxiety-inducing physical condition of a Christian enduring a gruesome execution to the real—if concealed—spiritual condition of the persecutor; it injects levity into a difficult situation; and it functions in harmony with other narrative claims that for Christians torture and death are not what they appear to be.
E.B. White famously observed that “humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”81 A joke explained, in other words, is no longer funny. In this case, however, the upside of examining the martyrs’ jokes outweighs the downside. Investigating the presence of humor in such grim settings presses us to think about the various functions of humor. Why would anyone laugh at Laurence’s joke, told as it was in the midst of pain and execution and invoking the taboo of cannibalism? What is funny about being slowly roasted or eaten alive? Really, nothing. To find the torture of another human being humorous is the hallmark of a sociopath. But that conclusion may reflect a more objective stance than the martyr texts are aiming for. That is, generally speaking we should not find such gruesome and revolting events funny. To laugh at them is to betray a fundamental lack of empathy with the narrated events. But on the other hand, in these texts not laughing may mark a listener as ignorant of the story’s truths. This observation requires our attention. What is humor? How, and to what end, does it work? Although Laurence may be the most famous joking martyr, he’s not, I suggest, the only one who gives audiences something to chuckle about. Ultimately I am proposing that martyr texts are more playful than their subject matter suggests, and this playfulness is integrally related to the function of the texts within Christian communities.
Although theories of humor abound, none has proven wholly satisfactory. Why we tell jokes and why we laugh at jokes (or don’t) turns out to be complicated business. The type of humor we encounter in Laurence’s martyrdom—gallows humor—is a particular subset of humor that reflects moments of crisis. It is humor “that smiles under its tears.”82 At its most basic level this kind of humor relies upon the recognition and subsequent resolution of a perceived incongruity: when two things—an idea, an event, a statement—are paired but seem to be at odds, the resolution of the discord may lead a person to laugh.83 At its core the incongruity of gallows humor lies in its insistence on inserting humor into a deadly serious situation.84 It asserts the “right to be humorous in spite of unpleasant facts.”85 It is subversive in its insistence that imminent death is not deadly serious.
Gallows humor is intentional—not accidental—and is always in the service of larger social interests.86 There are, for instance, records of dark humor among Jews under Nazi rule, including jokes made in concentration camps.87 Although prisoners were given minimal rations, one man at Treblinka nevertheless cautions a fellow inmate about the dangers of gluttony: “Hey Moishe, don’t overeat! Think of us who will have to carry you.”88 The joke offered some levity—if only momentarily. When the world turns upside down, when we observe the horrors of human violence, normalcy and meaning are shaken. What truth do we cling to? What good can we find? Humor is a mechanism by which we can begin to steady our gaits again, to reorient ourselves to the world, and to try to reclaim some semblance of normalcy.
For communities fearing persecution and death, dark humor may function in two important ways. On the one hand, it can bolster the esteem of a minority or persecuted group; it can be used by an individual or group to assert superiority over others by laughing at them. In this way humor is a deeply cathartic act. On the other hand, humor can also lessen the fears of death and bodily dissolution by placing the discourse under the persecuted group’s control.89 Dark humor, as Paul Lewis explains, “consoles by making us feel that what we are dealing with is not worth taking seriously as an object either of fear or meditation. It’s only a joke, humor assures us, supporting the thrust of comedy away from law and fact, from death and pain.”90 This type of humor engages in a battle over the discourse about death.91
Humor then carries much hermeneutical weight. With martyr texts we are not dealing with a case of slipping on a banana peel. The dark humor in martyr texts can support an author’s theological claims about the superiority of Christian beliefs to pagan ones; it can undergird the claims to a reality that stands in contradistinction to appearances; it can forge bonds among Christian listeners as they laugh together with their martyrs at the ineffective—and thus senselessly barbaric—actions of their persecutors. What humor does not do, I think, is make light of martyrdom. As the editor of The Onion stated after the September 11 attacks, “I don’t think the act of laughter negates the act of crying. The two are not mutually exclusive.”92 To say that early Christians utilized humor in martyr narratives is not to say that these stories were not serious and meaningful. It is to say, instead, that one way some of these texts make the stories meaningful for Christian audiences is through humor.
Mary Beard issues a salutary caution to historians searching for humor in the ancient world: “we must not assume that successful translation between the Roman world and our own is possible.”93 Humor does not necessarily transcend culture. What ancient Christians found funny may be lost on us. And what we find funny may not have been funny to them. But in some cases there are clear indications that a martyr’s quip was intended to be funny. Taking into account Beard’s caution, then, I start with a position of certainty: that Laurence’s statement was supposed to be funny is clear when the narrative asserts that it was said “in jest” (ludibundus). Humor, furthermore, is woven throughout this martyr account and is in fact a leitmotif of the Christian’s interactions with his persecutor.94
Prudentius’s account of the martyrdom of Romanus may also employ humor to alleviate the tension of the narrative. Romanus and his persecutor Asclepiades exchanged lengthy speeches in defense of their religions and points of view. When Asclepiades tired of Romanus’s diatribes, he devised a means of torture that, he thought, would silence the Christian. He ordered the martyr’s cheeks to be cut open so any utterance would exacerbate the pain. But this, Romanus observed, allowed more, not less, opportunity to praise God, since “I throw open many mouths to speak of Christ” (10.563). The martyr’s wit shines through when he describes a face with innumerable mouths: “Look! all the cuts are mouths pronouncing praise” (10.566–70). The image of multiple mouths on a single face is funny, rather than revolting, because the martyr has already explained to both the persecutor and the listening audience that Christians are insensitive to the pain of persecution: “If you seek, prefect, to learn the truth, all this tearing to pieces or whatever, is painless [non dolet]” (10.459). The audience that believes Romanus understands that the persecutor’s actions are futile. Listeners then can laugh with Romanus as he ridicules Asclepiades: the torture that was intended to silence him provided instead myriad opportunities for confession.
Another example of martyrological humor may be found in the Donatist account of Maxima and Donatilla. After the women are lashed, placed on beds of crushed shells, and put on the rack, Anulinus, the proconsul, offers them “tatiba.” What tatiba is remains unclear, but Tilley’s suggestion—that it is a seasoned drink—is consonant with the subsequent dialogue.95 The women ridicule the proconsul’s offer: “You are a buffoon [fatuus]. Do we not have our august God most high as our seasoning?” (5).96 If the text intends this exchange to be humorous, the joke is built on the absurdity of mentioning seasonings in the midst of execution. The proconsul is ignorant of the irrelevance of tatiba—the mundane, earthly seasoning—in comparison with the reality—God’s seasoning—that awaits the martyrs.
Humorous episodes and funny martyrs are not the exclusive domain of post-Constantinian storytelling. If we are attuned to it, we may find hints of humor in earlier texts, which suggests that the subversive work of humor is not incompatible with fear of persecution and martyrdom. Instead, it may have been a tool used by authors to instruct their audiences in theological truths of the greatest magnitude.
Moving back a century from Prudentius, we find Pionius exhibiting his wit in the face of torture. Filled with joy as he prepared for death, Pionius stretched himself out on the stake and allowed the soldier to drive in the nails (Mart. Pion. 21.2). Afterward the proconsul implored the Christian to recant his confession and promised that in exchange the nails would be removed. Pionius delivered a deadpan response: “I feel [ēisthomēn] that they are in” (21.3). The story may be received as humorous because of the unexpected brevity of Pionius’s reply and its incongruity in the situation: precisely where we might expect pleading for one’s life, markers of excruciating pain, or Christian sermonizing—a favorite pastime for Pionius—we get instead the unexpected observation about how well the persecutors have done their job.
We have previously examined an episode in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas—animal attacks gone awry—that an audience might perceive as humorous. A subsequent episode, which recounts Saturus’s death, builds on and complements the earlier narrative humor. Whereas the persecutors have been utterly unsuccessful in staging the animal contests as they were planned, Saturus accurately predicts his death and it is then immediately accomplished. In 19.4, the editor tells us that Saturus anticipated being “destroyed by one bite of the leopard.” But instead he was matched with a boar and then a bear. Neither animal touched him, however. In 21.1–2, Saturus points out his prophetic prowess in a brief conversation with a soldier named Pudens:
In short, he said, it is just as I foresaw and foretold: as yet I have not suffered under any of the beasts. But now you must believe with all your heart: I will go forth and be perfected [consummor] by one bite of a leopard.97 And immediately at the end of the games, a leopard was presented and after one bite he was so bathed in blood that as he returned the people cried out in witness to his second baptism: Well washed! Well washed! (21.1–2)
This brief episode offers at least two options for an audience to find triumphant humor in martyrdom. First, Saturus (and God) succeeds when the pagans have repeatedly failed: the boar, then the bear, refused to do the job they were assigned. Saturus remained uninjured because, a Christian audience might assume, the prophecy must be fulfilled. At the last moment—as the games were ending—a leopard was finally let loose and immediately Saturus was bitten. The episode takes power away from pagan persecutors and gives it to Christians: they cannot be harmed, we are taught, apart from the will of God. Second, the crowd calls out to Saturus as he is drenched in blood, “Well washed!” This is a case of humorous double entendre. While the crowd intends this sarcastically—it was a common phrase of well-wishing at public baths—it reflects a truth more profound than they can imagine.98 Like Felicitas whose bloody childbirth prepared her for her “second baptism” (18.3), Saturus’s death brings him salvation. The editor does not allow his audience to miss the import of the crowd’s exclamation. The editor offers a pun on salvus. What would typically be a term of bodily health becomes, ironically in this situation, a term of true health, namely, eternal salvation: “For truly the one who bathes in this manner will be saved” (21.3).99
Humorous double entendre may also occur in the Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike. As part of the proconsul’s interrogation, he asked if Papylus had any children (A.28). Papylus answers in the affirmative: “Yes, many, thanks to God” (A29). The proconsul interprets the Christian’s statement as referring to biological children, but the crowd intervenes in the narrative to point out the lie (pseudē; 31). Papylus’s risqué hyperbole is underscored by his assertion that he is not lying when he claims to have children in “every district and city” (A32). The humor lies in the disjunction between biological and spiritual children, language recognizable to—and thus only appreciated by—a Christian audience but not to the pagan persecutor.
Polycarp may offer another example of early martyrological humor that aims to bolster Christian morale. During his trial he is simultaneously obedient and subversive when he complies with the letter—if not the spirit—of the proconsul’s command to exclaim, “Away with the atheists!” (Mart. Pol. 9.2). The double entendre provides an opportunity for the audience to find triumphalist humor in Polycarp’s accusatory words: the proconsul intends for the exclamation to function as Polycarp’s self-condemnation, but in Polycarp’s mouth it is instead a call for eschatological judgment against the pagans.100
The disjunction between the martyrs’ actions and anticipated behavior is not necessarily a marker for humor. But where humorous episodes occur, they may be particularly useful for locating the text’s challenge to expected responses to persecution—both on the part of the martyr and, importantly, of the Christian audience. Humorous elements in early Christian martyr texts therefore serve several complementary purposes. Humor is a cathartic act for the joke teller—whether we imagine that as the martyr or as the Christian community relating the story. According to Freud, humor is a sophisticated attack on the object of the joke. It is a form of aggressive behavior that is socially sanctioned: by means of humor “the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality. . . . It insists that it cannot be compelled to suffer, that . . . traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”101 Humor, thus understood, denies the reality of pain and suffering. At the moment of death the audiences’ eyes are firmly, and compulsorily, fixed on the destruction of the Christian body. As the body plummets downward along sharp crags, as flesh is slowly roasted, as heads are clubbed, nails driven into hands or feet—can the listener picturing these gruesome events find hope in the narrated events? Can the audience even continue to imagine the horrors applied to their faithful heroes? In those cases where torture does result in visual images of deformed, mangled, bleeding, and burning bodies, humorous interludes allow listeners to feel differently about those bodies. Humor offers levity to an emotionally taxing experience, thus moving the audience from seeing a story as deadly serious to seeing it as “comically groteseque.”102
Humor can function as a claim to power that shapes group responses and compels listeners to approach and understand particular experiences in new ways.103 In this way humor may help a person or group to view a difficult situation, such as martyrdom, from a different point of view, thereby alleviating some disconcerting aspects of it.104 In the case of the martyr texts, humor may allow an audience to include rather than exclude—to accept rather than reject—a gruesome body that would in other circumstances be abhorred. Humor may provoke affects that disrupt the audience’s “habits, norms and categories,” moving them “toward usually reviled objects rather than pushing them away.”105 The martyr’s humor therefore may complement other narrative techniques that distance the Christian body from the experience of pain. It offers incontrovertible proof—directly from the martyrs’ mouths!—of their corporeal indifference to torture. Only the listener who has already accepted the texts’ subversive claims about reality and perception, however, can laugh with the martyrs since bodies that are truly in excruciating pain are not funny. Thus the martyrs’ humor rests in the knowledge of reality shared between Christian martyr and Christian audience: that what should be painful is not. The employment of humor—in these precise moments—is crucial to bolstering the work done earlier in the narratives: not only does it provide emotional relief for the listening audience; it also provides an opportunity for the congregation to cheer on their martyrs and ridicule their oppressors. Humor in martyr texts allows audiences to utter “God bless his soul” but also “Attaboy!” and “You show him!”
But humor is not only a coping mechanism; it is also a weapon deployed in the interests of social control. When it can be identified in ancient martyr texts, humor signals places where constructions of reality are being contested. In these situations humor does not merely offer a chuckle, though it does that. It simultaneously constitutes “a battle for the control of discourse about death and disaster,” as Elliott Oring argues.106 Humor builds group cohesion in the face of opposition. Peter Farb, for instance, suggests that humor can “reinforce the picture a society holds of itself”; it can demonstrate “antagonism toward other groups and promotion of solidarity within the group that laughs together”; and it can “lessen the fears and anxieties of the group against some outside force.”107 Humor brings people together by creating alliances against a common foe.108 Thus humorous episodes in martyr texts may delineate in- and out-groups: listeners “in the know” are given the opportunity to ridicule those ignorant of reality. In this way the persecutors who mistake perception for reality do not merely miss the joke; they become the butt of it. By employing humor, the martyr texts turn the tables on the communal consequences of the persecutors’ actions: torture that is intended to fracture the Christian community reinforces it instead.
Gallows humor and other types of dark humor are crucial for persecuted communities because they give opportunity to speak the unspeakable, giving voice to a group that struggles for power.109 The deployment of humor is “an exercise of power.”110 In the period of persecution the fear of arrest and torture was high, even if the probability of it occurring was low.111 Through humor, martyr texts assert the right to control the discourse about the execution of Christians. The martyrs’ unexpected responses to torture reveal that what looks like a (deadly) serious situation is instead only a joke. In a battle for control over how the story of Christian torture and death is told, making light of pagan attempts at harming the Christian body is a powerful weapon.
Humorous episodes in martyrological literature—whether in the unexpected joke about death or in the surprising response to torture—complement other narrative techniques that resist the fundamental claims to power implied by torture and physical dominance. The martyrs’ textually constructed bodies are unaffected by pagan violence, and they prove the case by laughing in the face of their adversaries (and their adversities). The martyr texts, further, invite audiences to ridicule the pagan opponents, to find more power than victimization in the martyrs’ death, and to share in the triumphant humor of the stories. But equally the power of humor speaks to other social functions. It sustains the Christian audience during periods of persecution. It binds the audience together against their inhuman enemy, teaching that pagans are ignorant, incompetent fools who deserve our ridicule, not our fear.
The Christian martyr texts I have discussed thus far do not shy away from detailed descriptions of the dissolution of the body. These Christian ekphraseis, however, serve a surprising goal: they claim divine analgesia at the moment of death in order to reframe, redefine, and replace the image of bloody defeat with one of miraculous anesthesia. These texts invoke body/spirit dualism, divine companionship, terse descriptions of death, or visual obstructions of the martyred body to allow listeners to envision the Christian body as invulnerable to pagan torture. They challenge audience expectations of pain and painlessness, and they reinterpret the locus of meaning in martyrdom by rejecting pain as an experience of the righteous persecuted Christian. I turn now to another set of texts, those in which pain—not its absence—constitutes an important locus of meaning.