The setting up of revolting cruelties, description of extraordinary punishments, enormous exaggeration of the duration and method of application of known punishments, such are the means employed by the hagiographers to make the intrepidness of the hero shine forth.
—H. DELEHAYE, LES ORIGINES DU CULTE DES MARTYRS, 284
The previous chapters have argued that early Christian ideologies of martyrdom favor depictions of painlessness in the face of torture. The martyrs constructed by the texts I have examined so far benefit from divinely administered anesthesia. Even where language of analgesia or anesthesia is not explicitly employed, the texts betray no interest in locating pain in martyrdom as a marker of meaning. For the narratives I have examined, enduring excruciating pain does not make a martyr exemplary. Rather, in these texts pain is rejected altogether or dismissed as unimportant to the making of a martyr.1
It would be overly simplistic, however, to suggest that the discourse of pain exists only in the negative. Indeed, such cannot be the case since the narrative rejection of the experience of pain in martyrdom itself triggers the idea of pain for listening audiences. The assertion of Christian impassibility, therefore, is only one element in a complex and pervasive discourse, a discourse that is played out in the pages of martyr texts as well as in broader literary venues. On the one hand, claims to impassibility may serve as counternarratives that rescript prevailing cultural constructions of Christianity; I will examine this issue in chapter 5. On the other hand, even narratives that focus on the experience of pain can contribute to the particular ideology of martyrdom with which this book is concerned.
This chapter explores the broader discourse of pain in martyr texts by examining occasions when the narratives do depict the experience of pain as a locus of meaning. As Chris L. de Wet eloquently observes regarding John Chrysostom’s discussions of pain and slavery, “pain has a narrative; pain both tells a story and is a story in itself.”2 In this chapter I examine the story pain tells in the martyr texts. In the first section I focus on three situations in which pain appears in martyr texts: pain experienced by Christians that is not associated with martyrdom; pain felt by Christian apostates; and pain or injury suffered by persecutors.3 These uses of pain illustrate the complexity of the discourse, but they also remind us of the individuality of martyr texts: each text has its own interests and issues, and we understand them better—individually and collectively—when we appreciate their differences as much as their similarities. For instance, the Passion of Perpetua focuses particularly on the experience of pain apart from martyrdom, while the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons instructs readers by depicting apostates in pain. The transference of pain or injury from martyr to persecutor is a more widespread narrative technique, signaling perhaps a concern for immediate judgment of the unjust treatment of righteous Christians.
In the second section of the chapter I examine ideologies of martyrdom that privilege pain in death as a locus of meaning. Although this does not appear to be a prominent ideology, it is not wholly foreign to early Christian literature. We need not assume that all Christians at all times and in all places understood the meaning of martyrdom in identical ways. Indeed, it would be surprising if there were no alternative voices in the early church whose interpretations of the sustained assaults against the Christian body led to different evaluations of their meaning and importance.
Pain, as we have seen, was a useful category in the ancient world for communicating information other than simply the stimulation of neurological signals resulting in a feeling of discomfort. An author might invoke the experience of pain to describe an individual’s character or to explain divine judgment. Pain can be understood positively as purification or negatively as a character flaw. In the martyr texts the meaning of pain is not constant. At times pain may represent the human condition, from which martyrs seek separation as they move toward perfection via death. At other times pain signals a person’s or group’s relationship to God: martyrs, empowered and sometimes inhabited by God/Jesus, are divinely delivered from pain, while persecutors, often aligned with God’s cosmic opponent, Satan, may ironically experience the pain or injury they seek to inflict.
Early martyr texts rarely put their protagonists’ feelings on view. Narrative examination of the psyche is uncommon, though on occasion a text will attribute happiness or joy to the martyrs.4 For the most part, the martyrs’ emotional experiences lie beyond our grasp; the texts focus instead on their actions. Martyrs submit to arrest, confess, offer apologies for Christianity, endure torture, and die, but generally they do not grieve, fear, or worry. The Passion of Perpetua, however, is a notable exception: it regularly describes Perpetua’s and Felicitas’s psychological dispositions.5 In prison, for instance, Perpetua is “terrified” (expaui; 3.5) and “tormented with anxiety” for her child (macerabar sollicitudine; 3.6); separation from her child brings her hardship (labore) and anxiety (sollicitudine; 3.9). The repetition of sollicitus four times in the span of five sentences “heightens the drama” and increases the “emotional intensity” of the narrative, as Thomas Heffernan notes.6 This then is a text that regularly comments on the emotional experiences of its heroines. It is also in the Passion of Perpetua that we find the most extensive use of pain language. A sustained analysis of the discourse of pain in this narrative—and in related texts—reveals important communal assumptions about earthly versus spiritual existence.
The editor of the Latin Passion often describes the martyrs’ experiences by using dolor, “pain.”7 Pain language is prominent in episodes describing interactions between Perpetua and her father, who continuously tries to persuade her to recant her faith. Perpetua, for example, feels pain (dolebam) for her father’s sake because he would not grieve over her martyrdom (5.6); she feels pain (doluit) when her father was beaten by the governor; and her father’s “miserable” and “unhappy” “old age” pains her (sic dolui pro senecta eius misera, 6.5; ego dolebam pro infelici senecta eius, 9.3). In each of these cases the imprisoned Perpetua feels pain on behalf of her suffering father. Given this text’s interest in the discourse of pain, which I examined in previous chapters, the transference in these cases is likely that of physical rather than emotional experiences. Such is clearly the case when Perpetua’s father is beaten with rods: we are given no reason to think that his experience was anything other than painful, and thus we should take at face value Perpetua’s claim to the experience of pain: “my father’s misfortune pained me, just as if I had been hit” (et doluit mihi casus patris mei quasi ego fuissem percussa; 6.5). The editor has elsewhere shown an interest in assigning to Perpetua feelings of anxiety or distress, but here he chooses to utilize the language of pain, dolor; it is an authorial choice that merits our consideration. The scenes in which Perpetua interacts with her father are complex; they demonstrate Perpetua’s gradual separation from family and earthly ties.8 Although as his daughter (presumably remaining under his legal authority) Perpetua should obey his demands—to sacrifice to the gods and thus be freed—she has so firmly identified with her new faith that she cannot be called anything but “Christian” (3.2).9 The choice she makes, however, is neither simple nor easy; Perpetua is described as firm in her commitment but not without filial love and attachment. Her choice has consequences for her father, and she experiences pain because of it.
The editor of the Passion also depicts Perpetua experiencing dolor as a result of a vision of her dead brother, Dinocrates, who appears to be enduring some sort of deprivation after death.10 Perpetua feels pain (dolui/dolebam) when she remembers how he died and when she sees his suffering after death (7.1, 7.8). It is telling that while her brother experiences distress or toil (laborare) and her father experiences misfortune (casus), Perpetua’s empathetic response to her family brings her pain (dolui/dolebam). But are these experiences of pain central to the ideology of martyrdom in this text? Is it pain, in other words, that is fundamental to the making of the martyr?
Judith Perkins suggests that Perpetua’s visions of Dinocrates reflect Christian arguments for the salvific use of pain. From this perspective the text valorizes the experience of pain, relating it to salvation. “Unlike Dinocrates,” Perkins argues, “Perpetua can make use of her suffering; she is confident she can help her brother. She believes her suffering in prison has earned her favor and influence with the deity.”11 The text, however, does not explicitly describe Perpetua’s imprisonment as useful.12 Before her first vision a fellow confessor tells Perpetua that she is greatly esteemed (magna dignatione), but the text does not explain why this is the case (4.1). The narrative does not, in other words, connect Perpetua’s esteemed status to her imprisonment. If that connection were made, it would presumably also be true of the other confessors who endured similar experiences in prison. Imprisonment then does not appear to earn Perpetua special favor with the divine. Instead of emphasizing privilege, the text focuses on obligation: the unexpected remembrance of Dinocrates—“never before then had [his name] come to my mind” (7.1)—obliges Perpetua to pray for him. Since the memory occurred during prayer, Heffernan argues that the obligation (debere) Perpetua feels arises from her belief that the Holy Spirit brought Dinocrates to her mind.13 The active agent, then, is the Spirit, not Perpetua, and it is the Spirit who works for the good of Dinocrates. Thus whatever suffering Perpetua endures in prison is not explicitly linked to her salvation or that of her brother.
Instead of teaching the utility of pain, Perpetua’s visions of Dinocrates may foreshadow the martyrs’ own experiences. The text, for instance, describes Perpetua’s imprisonment and Dinocrates’s suffering in similar terms, as Heffernan notes: “Perpetua narrates this vision at the same time as she has been placed in the stocks, her limbs locked into place. . . . She too lacks all physical control; she cannot move, and she cannot supply herself with water to quench her thirst.”14 In both cases the narrative emphasizes alleviation of toil rather than the experience of pain: just as Dinocrates is toiling (laborare) after death—noticeably not experiencing pain (dolor)—so also Perpetua toils in imprisonment. The author also uses labor to describe Perpetua’s “distress” regarding her child (3.9). Similarly, Felicitas toils in parturition (15.5). God is at work in all three instances, easing the physical toil and emotional distress of Dinocrates, Perpetua, and Felicitas. As the Spirit will heed Perpetua’s pleas and relieve Dinocrates of his labors, so also Perpetua and Felicitas will be aided by God, and their labors will likewise be relieved.15
Ironically, then—in a text with demonstrable interest in shielding the Christian body from the experience of pain during torture—it is pain that is the particular experience of this female Christian as she observes the life and afterlife of her non-Christian family members.16 When Perpetua watches her father desperately trying to keep her in this world, at the expense of her eternal salvation, she feels pain, and when she sees an afterlife of perpetual toil, she is pained on behalf of her young, beloved brother. But this pain does not come from an outside agent, from a pagan torturer or a cosmic adversary. Rather, the pain arises from familial attachments to the world, ties that—according to ancient constructions of gender—connect women to the world; these connections must be severed to follow the path of martyrdom.17 This text teaches that responsibilities to, and care for, family make choosing death a difficult task, a task that may be so difficult that it becomes physically painful.
This text also employs the term dolor to depict pain associated with motherhood, in particular breastfeeding and childbirth. The author explains, for instance, that when Perpetua’s nursing son was kept from her, she was not in pain (ne . . . dolore; 6.8).18 In this case an anticipated sensation—pain due to the inability to nurse a child—is miraculously absent. The author’s interest in the painlessness of Perpetua’s breasts may be attributed to two narrative goals: first, the text describes the masculinization of the martyr, and the cessation of milk production marks an important moment in the construction of Perpetua’s sex; second, the unexpected absence of pain foreshadows the divine role in protecting the Christian body from the experience of pain.19 Similarly, the author uses dolor in his description of Felicitas’s experience of labor, as we have seen (15.5).20 The interest in pain in the scene describing Felicitas’s labor is unparalleled in early Christian martyr texts: the author employs variations of the term dolor three times in the span of only two sentences. The listening audience might not find the narrative emphasis surprising since the text is, after all, stating what would have been common knowledge: childbirth is painful. The guard’s challenge, moreover, is reasonable: torture and death in the arena are likely more painful than childbirth. When Felicitas responds to the guard, though, she does not accept his characterization of her experience. As we saw in the previous chapter, in this exchange dolor is replaced by patior, “to undergo” or “to endure” (15.6). When referring to Felicitas’s martyrdom, then, the narrative privileges the notion of endurance (patior) over pain (dolor).21 Dolor is not an appropriate characterization of Felicitas’s experience in death. For this text pain is not an uncommon experience for female Christians as they separate themselves from the demands of this world, but in spite of it these women are not deterred from their witnessing, and in that experience they are divinely protected.22
Although scholars concur that the Latin version of the Passion is the more original text, other versions of the story merit equal study for what they can tell us about discourses of pain in early Christian ideology. In the Greek version of the Passion of Perpetua, the term algeō is typically used for the Latin text’s doleo.23 It is this term that describes Perpetua’s encounters with her father (5.6, 6.5) and her reaction to the vision of her brother (7.1, 7.8). It is, furthermore, this term that is negated (mē . . . algēdoni) when Perpetua stops breastfeeding (6.8). Likewise, when the Greek author narrates Felicitas’s labor, he notes that growing weary with the birth, she felt pain (ēlgei; 15.5). The guard who taunts Felicitas also uses algeō but—just as in the Latin version—Felicitas changes the terms in play. She does not connect pain with her martyrdom; rather, she employs the term paschō. She “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). Thus if we assume the Greek text is derived from the Latin, it is telling that this author employs algeō for the Latin dolor, suggesting that the author understood the Latin text to be referring to pain rather than grief (in which case the author would presumably have preferred lupē).
The previous chapters have demonstrated that the early Christian martyr texts go to great lengths to avoid connecting the Christian body with pain. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, though, serves as an important reminder that—at least for the communities that utilized this text—divine analgesia did not extend to all areas of life. Christians must expect and prepare for physically painful situations that arise as their families, in particular, oppose their new religious allegiances. The text employs diverse elements of the discourse of pain in martyrdom that affirm, on the one hand, God’s presence with and protection of Christians as they undergo persecution for their faith. On the other hand, the discourse of pain also serves as a warning against complacency and surely also as a template for resistance. Indeed, Kate Cooper argues that Perpetua uses her father to “practice on”; an audience hearing the text might see Perpetua and Felicitas as examples to imitate in their willingness to separate themselves from worldly ties, but they also serve as warnings that such separation may be painful.24 This text then does not negate Christian experiences of pain but instead uses to good advantage both the experience of and the immunity from pain to teach about various aspects of Christian life.
Prudentius’s account of Romanus makes a similar—if perhaps more metaphorical—point about the pain martyrs feel because of others’ unbelief. Romanus, as we have seen, explicitly rejected the notion that torture causes him pain (non dolet; Peri. 10.460), but the faithlessness of his persecutors is painful to him: “What pains [dolet] me is the error seated in your breast, and that you are dragging away these lost ones with you” (10.461–62). Just as Perpetua felt pain because of her father, so here Romanus is pained because of the unbelief of the pagans around him. Pagans inflict pain on Christians not through torture and martyrdom but through their refusal to accept Christianity.
Early Christian martyr texts demonstrate that in addition to instructing Christians that it can be difficult to separate themselves from the demands of this world or to see others reject Christian faith, the discourse of pain can serve as a warning to those whose faith may waver in the face of persecution. Apostates do not star in many martyr texts, but one of the most intriguing episodes concerns one by the name of Quintus in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (4). A prominent theme of this text is the importance of imitating Jesus by waiting for God to hand one over for prosecution and death.25 The anonymous martyrs of chapter 2, Germanicus (3), and Polycarp (5–7) all exhibit this form of faithfulness, and they achieve—the text declares—“blessed and noble martyrdoms” (2.1). Quintus, however, functions as the antitype of the faithful martyr: he hastily gave himself up to the authorities, thereby usurping God’s will, and because he did not have divine help he was unable to see his witness through to death. Whereas the other Christians who imitated the Lord by waiting to be handed over (1.2) were able to withstand persecution and torture, Quintus could not: he quickly succumbed to the persuasion of his captors and offered sacrifice to the gods. Quintus is described as “unmanly” because of his jump-the-gun volunteerism, but the text does not suggest that he experienced unusual pain or suffering because of his actions.26 Quintus’s witness was incomplete—an important point for this text—but the discourse of pain is not central to the text’s argument.
The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons is worthy of consideration in this regard, however. In addition to the Christian heroes and heroines of Vienne and Lyons, whose witness we have examined in previous chapters, the letter also describes a second group of Christians: those who were arrested but who subsequently denied their faith. The author refers to this small group as “not ready” (anetoimoi), “unprepared” (agumnastoi), and “weak” (astheneis); they proved to be “miscarriages” (exetrōsan; 1.11). These negative descriptions stand in contrast to descriptions of the faithful Christians who are “manifest” (phaneroi) and “ready” (hetoimoi; 1.11). After describing unimaginable torture endured by Blandina and Sanctus—torture that brought not pain but analgesia—the author turns to describe the plight of those “miscarriages” in prison. Their apostasy did not bring the freedom they expected and for which they traded their salvation: “they received no advantage from their denial” (1.33). Indeed, the apostates received much worse treatment: whereas the confessors were imprisoned “as Christians,” those who denied their faith were imprisoned on the charge of being “murderers and defiled” and received twice as much punishment as the rest (1.33).
The author draws stark contrasts between the experience of confessors and that of apostates. Not only were the latter accused of more (and more heinous) crimes—and thus received double punishment—they also suffered negative emotions that the faithful Christians did not. Whereas, for instance, the confessors “were lightened by joy” and had “hope” (1.34), those who denied their faith were “greatly punished by their knowledge” (1.34). The two groups were easily differentiated by their miens: the former “advanced merrily” with a mixture of glory and grace on their faces while the latter appeared “dejected,” “downcast,” “misshapen,” and “full of all ugliness” (1.35). While spectators believed that the faithful Christians had “anointed themselves with a perfume,” they ridiculed the apostates as “ignoble and unmanly” (agenneis kai anandroi; 1.35).27
What narrative function might this bifurcation of the Christian community serve? It is, after all, unusual for a martyr text to describe apostates; generally the texts focus on witnesses worthy of imitation, not on failures. In this case the audience is not only provided with a description of the benefits of faithful confession—which leads to fewer charges and painless torture as well as to joy, hope, grace, and beauty—but they are also warned that apostasy, the seemingly easier choice, does not pay. Those who deny their faith should expect double punishment in this world, in addition to suffering eternally after death. The listening audience learns that faith brings beauty and apostasy makes one ugly, but they are not the only ones to learn this lesson. The instructional nature of this story of apostasy is built into the narrative itself: we are told that the apostates’ ordeal bolstered the resolve of the other imprisoned Christians (1.35). The fate of these failed Christians is not further described. Ultimately, it seems, this text is uninterested in relating any more about these miscarriages; they have served their purpose by teaching the audience about the immediate and tangible benefits of faithfulness and the immediate and tangible drawbacks of apostasy.
In addition to general descriptions about the perils of apostasy, the Letter provides a closer look at a specific case through the story of Biblis. We are told very little about this Christian woman except that she was among the second group—the miscarriages—and that the devil thought he had “swallowed” her (1.25). The devil considered her to be “easily broken and a coward,” and so he placed her on the rack with the hope of provoking her into incriminating other Christians (1.25). But torture, as we have seen, can have unintended consequences, as is the case here: “but, being stretched on the rack, she came to her senses and she awoke as if being called from a deep sleep, being reminded by the temporary punishment of the eternal chastisement in Gehenna” (1.26). The additional torture does not provide the persecutors with their desired (false) testimony—that Christians practice infanticide—but instead Biblis confesses the truth about Christian piety (1.26). The text implies that Biblis experienced the pain of the rack, which we would expect since she had apostatized, and that the pain brought her back into the fold by reminding her of the eternal retribution that awaits those who deny their faith. The story of Biblis may shed light on one element of this community’s ecclesiology: it admits the lapsed back into the fold. An apostate does not have to continue in her denial of faith, as Biblis’s testimony confirms. Having experienced momentary pain, she can come to her senses and rejoin the faithful in their witnessing unto death.
The inclusion of failed martyrs in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons therefore serves an important social function, presumably one that is of grave concern to the community that produced this text. Not only does this letter assert divine analgesia; it goes further by depicting the painful consequences of apostasy. The text underscores the reward of faithfulness by means of juxtaposition: the strength and resolve of the martyrs is clearer when it is contrasted with the cowardice and faithlessness of apostates. What appears to be the easy way out—denying one’s faith to save one’s life—turns out to be significantly worse than remaining true to God. According to this text, God “rescues the weak,” making them into “stable pillars” (1.6). But Christians who do not trust God reject “the glory that will be revealed” by attempting to avoid “present sufferings” (1.6). The discourse of pain is useful for instructing Christians about the pain of separating themselves from earthly attachments and for warning them against apostasy.
By far the most common way early martyr texts employ the discourse of pain is by transferring it to the persecutors. Shortly after the Edict of Milan was issued in 313 CE, the Christian apologist Lactantius penned a triumphalist treatise on the deaths of those who persecuted Christians. Its focused attention on the “terrifyingly practical consequences of the anger of God” validated Christian acts of faithfulness from the reign of Nero through the Great Persecution of Diocletian.28 Lactantius claims, for instance, that God did not allow Decius to be properly buried; rather—as was “proper for an enemy of God” (4.3)—his body was exposed and left for animals and birds to feed on.29 This postmortem punishment would surely be envied by the emperor Valerian whose punishment, Lactantius asserts, demonstrated that “the enemies of God always receive wages worthy of their crime” (5.1).30 As a captive Valerian was used as a step stool by the Persian king Sapor. Such degradation would be humiliating to be sure, but his death was altogether horrific: “he was flayed, and his skin, being ripped away from the flesh, was stained a red color” (5.6).31 We might see in the postmortem treatment of Valerian’s body an ironic imitation of the martyr cult: his flesh was placed in shrines of Persian gods to commemorate their triumph over Rome.
God’s wrath against his enemies, though, had not yet reached the fevered pitch it would against Galerius. Lactantius displays a particular animosity toward this emperor—responsible as he was for atrocities committed during Lactantius’s own lifetime—and so the punishments attributed to divine justice are particularly graphic. God inflicted on Galerius, for instance, “an injurious ulcer in the lower part of the genitals” that was especially aggressive (33.1).32 Surgeons attempted to excise it, but postoperative complications almost killed him: the wound broke open and he nearly died from the blood loss (33.3). Galerius began to recover, but just as a scar formed, the ordeal repeated itself. Eventually the cancer was unresponsive to treatment and spread rapidly. Lactantius seems to revel in describing the effects of the cancer: “His organs were rotting from the outside, and his whole seat melted away in putrefaction” (33.6).33 The rotting resulted in maggots infesting his gut, and the smell of decaying flesh pervaded—Lactantius insists—the entire city. As Galerius’s body rotted away, the reader is not left to wonder how this felt: it caused “intolerable pain” (intolerandis dorolibus; 33.8). After a year of living with rot, stench, maggots, bloat, and other ghastly side effects of divinely inflicted cancer, Galerius rescinded his edicts against the church and, thankfully, died.34
Lactantius’s descriptions of the punishments of persecutors served a cathartic purpose for the church.35 They demonstrated that God was not silent and would not overlook cruelties inflicted upon his people. Centuries of injustice were answered, and answered in ways that reflect a concern for equal repayment for injury sustained: Christian bones crushed, bodies destroyed, eyes gouged out, blood spilt, are repaid—measure for measure—in imperial bones, bodies, eyes, and blood. But imagining recompense for suffering is not confined to literature of the post-Constantinian era. A cryptic notice in the Acts of Cyprian may hint at divine retribution for unjust action: immediately after the account of Cyprian’s death, the author reports that “moreover, after a few days the proconsul Galerius Maximus died” (5.7). In most manuscripts this is the last sentence of the account, suggesting its narrative importance. Earlier the text explains that Galerius Maximus had come to Carthage to “recover a good state of health” (2.3). The text may associate the proconsul’s inability to recover with his execution of Cyprian.
Retribution is a central element of the coming judgment, and apocalyptic themes in martyr texts regularly invoke God’s justice and the inevitability of punishment for the unjust. But holding persecutors accountable is not merely a future hope: several martyr texts narrate reprisals within the narratives themselves. In these texts the reversal of suffering—from martyr to persecutor—is important to the larger discourse of pain. Thus the discourse of pain is complicated in martyr texts not only by Christian martyrs who feel pain as they extricate themselves from earthly attachments and by apostates who pay for their faithlessness here as well as in the future, but also in the descriptions of the immediate suffering of those who attempt to harm Christians.
The martyrs themselves are unaffected both by the threat and the experience of torture, as we have seen, but bystanders are often deeply affected. Although descriptions of these observers do not always explicitly employ pain language, broadening the scope of our investigation to include a study of emotions will aid our understanding of the larger discourse. The anonymous Christians in Smyrna, for instance, who remained silent while they were whipped, demonstrated that they had traveled away from the flesh. But in observing the ordeal, bystanders “felt pity and mourned” (Mart. Pol. 2.2). Similarly, the people of Tarragona—both pagans and Christians—loved Bishop Fructuosus; their love of the Christian, however, led to different emotions depending on how they understood the events taking place. When the bishop was led to the amphitheater, “the people” were pained (dolere; Mart. Fruct. 3.1). But “his brothers, who understood he was hastening on to great glory, felt joyful rather than suffering pain” (gaudebant potius quam dolebant; 3.2). The juxtaposition of those who perceive wrongly, and thus experience doleo, with those who perceive correctly, and thus experience gaudeo, reiterates the theme of reality versus perception. One’s status as a Christian results in knowledge about a situation that is not merely cognitive but also somatic: pagans experience negative emotions while Christians feel positive ones.
The emotions we might expect a martyr to feel—pain or grief—are moreover often transferred to the persecutor. In the fourth-century Acts of Perpetua I, dolor is used twice but, interestingly, in neither case does it describe Christian experiences.36 Toward the conclusion of a protracted interrogation scene, the proconsul pleads with Felicitas to “have regard” for herself, admitting that he feels pain (doleo) for her. Felicitas responds defiantly: “do what you will, for you are not able to persuade me” (5.8). In this case the thought of executing a young pregnant woman is apparently distressing to the proconsul, whose emotions are characterized by the author with the meaning-laden term dolor, although the feeling is apparently not attributable to the martyr herself. During the interrogation of Perpetua, the proconsul again attempts to persuade a female Christian to deny her faith in order to save her life. Noting the arrival of Perpetua’s family, the proconsul draws the woman’s attention to her parents’ tears, describing them as “tears of pain” (dolorem lacrimae; 6.4). Perpetua resists the emotional pull by insisting that their tears will not shake her resolve. In this text dolor is never the experience of the martyrs themselves but, surprisingly, it is the experience of the non-Christians who oppose them.
Some texts describe the transference of the physical effects of torture from martyr to persecutor—and interestingly, even to the instruments of torture. Like the previous cases the language of pain may not be explicitly invoked in these stories, but the texts encourage the audience to imagine how torture might feel since they do not redirect expectations for the injury/pain relationship. For instance, whereas Blandina is not worn out by the torture she endures from dawn to dusk, her torturers admit that “they were vanquished” (1.18). The act of torture conquers an unexpected party: those who were administering the torture rather than their victim. This narrative technique of “reversal of suffering” is also found in the Passion of Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda, as Lucy Grig points out.37 When the young women endure all the terrible torments the proconsul can imagine, he sends them away saying, “Go away from me, for I am now faint” (6). At this admission the women taunt him: “In what way are you faint after one hour? You have just now come and already you are weary” (6). This exchange draws the listeners’ attention to the juxtaposition of experiences: the young women, having endured the tortures, are ready for more, while the proconsul, who merely orders the tortures, is faint from exhaustion. The application of torture also exhausts the persecutors in Prudentius’s account of the martyrdom of Vincent. Whereas “the strong men had used up all their strength in eviscerating him, their gasping exertion had weakened and exhausted the muscles of their arms,” it rejuvenates Vincent, who “was so very joyful, his appearance completely void of melancholy and serene, being illumined by the sight of your presence, O Christ” (Peri. 5.121–28). This state of affairs is not lost on Datianus, who exclaims in anger and amazement: “The tortured is braver than the torturer!” (5.132).38 In the Martyrdom of Marculus the persecutors’ emotions are anthropomorphized and defeated: “Rage breathed with difficulty: now fierceness was subdued by the steadfastness of the one enduring and the faintness of the torturers.”39 In all of these cases torture takes a much greater toll on those who inflict it than it does on their victims.
Other texts reverse the experience of persecution by suggesting that the martyr’s endurance tortures the persecutor. In the Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs, for instance, Tazelita tortures his persecutor merely by speaking: “By asserting things like this, the glorious martyr himself tormented Anulinus in the midst of his own great torments.”40 The text makes this point even clearer when it juxtaposes Felix with the proconsul: the martyr “advanced into battle . . . uninjured and unconquered” (incorrupta invictaque), but he faced a tyrant whose “mind was ruined” (mente prostratus), whose “voice was dejected” (voce demissus), and whose soul and body were “destroyed” (dissolutus).41 Felix’s confession “pierced through” the “enemy.”42 Through the confession of other Christians the devil was “thrown to the ground” and Anulinus was “shattered.”43 Prudentius imagines how Datianus must feel when he realizes his plans for postmortem desecration of Vincent’s body have been thwarted by the very animals he thought would devour the remains: “How much did the piercing pricks of concealed pain [dolor] make you groan, when you discerned you were conquered by the virtue that was in the body you murdered, and you were inferior even to the bones, and puny compared to the lifeless limbs?” (5.423). The Passion of Maximian and Isaac takes the defeat of the persecutor to an extreme by narrating the torture of the weapons themselves: “Now the rods of the bundle conceded. They were powerless almost as if they were crushed to pieces by battle-axes or scythes.”44 Examples such as these illustrate an important aspect of the ideology of martyrdom: whereas Christians are sustained by divine aid, persecutors and their tools are subject to pain, injury, and defeat.
On occasion martyr texts narrate an ironic transfer of pain, injury, or other form of physical suffering in an ancient equivalent of the playground refrain, “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Whereas the martyr experiences divine analgesia, the persecutor or onlookers experience the physical effects of the attempted assault. In a sermon on Vincent’s martyrdom, for instance, Augustine contrasts the experience of the Christian with that of his pagan opponent: “Our martyr possessed coolness in his heart, while [Datianus] was applying the flames from without; but the torches of rage were being kindled, burning inwardly like a furnace, and burning up his tenant, the devil.”45 In an ironic reversal, Datianus attempts to harm Vincent by burning him alive but manages, if only metaphorically, to set his own inner being on fire.
The Latin recension of the Martyrdom of Carpus, Pamfilus, and Agathonike offers another interesting case of this type of transference. In this text dolor is used three times in close proximity. Pamfilus did not cry out in pain (vocem non dedisset doloris; 3.5) when he was scraped with claws. But the proconsul, observing Pamfilus’s physical ordeal, pleaded with the Christian to recant and save himself: “In fact, I feel pain [doleo] because of your great torment” (3.5). Pamfilus, however, was unaffected by the torture: “I feel no pain [nullum sentio dolorem] because I have someone to comfort me” (3.6). The repetition of dolor in this conversation is revealing: Pamfilus’s assertions of impassibility frame—and inform—the proconsul’s self-description. Whereas Pamfilus does not experience pain because of his faith and communion with Christ, the proconsul, who stands apart from and against God, is pained by the very torture he inflicts.
The same text describes Agathonike steadfastly maintaining her faith in the face of arrest, interrogation, and the threat of death. Arriving at the place where she was to die, she removed her clothes. The crowd around her saw her beauty and “being in pain” (dolentes; 6.5), they wept. This text employs dolor four times: twice it is negated as the experience of Christians, and twice it is affirmed as the experience of those who watch Christians being tortured. The juxtaposition of the martyrs’ painlessness with the persecutors’ pain is the special interest of the Latin author—it is not found in the Greek exemplar—so its occurrence in this text surely signals the author’s contribution to a particular Christian discourse about the body and the real effects of salvation on corporeal sensations.
A more dramatic case of ironic transference of injury is found in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Saturus was matched with a boar, but the animal attacked not Saturus (he was only dragged by it) but the gladiator who was facilitating the execution.46 The hunter (venator) who had tied Saturus to the animal “was instead gored by that very beast and died a few days after the spectacle” (19.3). Saturus repeatedly escapes harm—that he “was only pulled along” is surely to be understood as divine intervention—but his hapless persecutor is killed. In light of widespread Christian interest in narrating the punishment of persecutors, and in light of this text’s apocalyptic expectation of final judgment (17.1), this episode may be read as immediate recompense for the unjust imprisonment and torture of Christians. The text narrates a foretaste of the eschatological reversal of fortunes by transferring injury, death, and presumably also pain, from the Christian to the pagan persecutor. Opponents of Christianity do not benefit from divine analgesia; consequently, they experience the full range of negative sensations in torture.
Perhaps the most direct transference of injury from victim to perpetrator is found in the Martyrdom of Pionius. This narrative contains a series of long apologetic speeches delivered by Pionius while he is imprisoned, in which he emphasizes the irrationality of paganism and rehearses the pagans’ history of unjust prosecution (17.2). The text is one of the most confrontational of the early martyr texts, as seen in Pionius’s repeated goading of his interlocutors. It comes as no surprise, then, when Pionius is hit over the head by a soldier, with the intention of wounding him (traumatisai; 18.10).47 In this case the soldier is successful in effecting injury but not, we are led to believe, in inflicting pain since the text states that Pionius was silent after he was hit. The grammar of the text, furthermore, suggests that we are to read Pionius’s silence in contrast to the immediate physical trauma experienced by the soldier: “on the one hand, he [Pionius] was silent. But on the other hand, the hands and sides of the one who struck him were enflamed such that he could only just breathe” (18.10). The initiating event—Pionius being clubbed—led to two contrasting experiences: Pionius’s silence, suggesting his impassivity, and the soldier’s quickly bloating body, which comes just short of suffocating him. This text then simultaneously describes divine protection of the faithful and promises the immediate punishment of those who harm Christians.
In the Passion of Maximian and Isaac the emperor threatens to gouge out Isaac’s eyes. This is an ill-timed threat, as it turns out, since the Christian was within arms’ reach of the emperor. Isaac reached in and, “violently extracting [the emperor’s] eye, he emptied out the bereaved face of its seat of light.”48 Although there is no immediate description of the pain the emperor experienced, the narrative is nevertheless a poignant example of the exchange of injury (in this case quite literally an eye for an eye) between the immoral tyrant and the faithful Christian. What the persecutor threatens to do is promptly accomplished within his own body. Shortly thereafter, however, the text does assert that the emperor experienced pain (dolore) when Isaac gouged out his eye, and because of that pain he ordered the Christian to be savagely tortured.49
The fact that martyr texts—and other texts that participate in the construction of ideologies of martyrdom—often reject pain as an experience of Christians as they are tortured does not mean that pain is not an important element in the construction of martyrdom. It regularly functions to mark the human condition, as in the cases of Perpetua and Felicitas who experience pain as they separate from familial and worldly ties. But perhaps more importantly, pain—or more broadly the experience of torture and injury—signals group affiliations. Whereas faithful Christians are divinely delivered from the pain of torture as they confess their faith, apostates and pagans are not. The transference of injury, suffering, and/or pain from the martyr to the persecutor demonstrates that those who are not in communion with God remain vulnerable to pain. A similar transfer occurs in later texts, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s work shows. She contrasts the Golden Legend’s account of three women described as “unharmed” and “unhurt”—even though they “were fried in a skillet, had their breasts torn off, were stretched on the rack and finally beheaded”—with the description of their persecutor, whom the text claims “withered away, filled with rottenness.”50 Bynum argues that “whether or not fragmentation or diminution is characterized as significant (or even in fact as occurring) depends not on what happens to the body physically but on the moral standing of the person to whom the bodily events pertain.”51 Although the early martyr texts offer some exceptions to Bynum’s observation, in the vast majority of cases the experience of pain or suffering marks a character as “other,” as non- or anti-Christian. Pain is ubiquitous in the narrative worlds of the martyr texts; it is the human condition to which the body is vulnerable, but it is from this painful human existence that God delivers faithful Christians.
The early martyr texts certainly broaden the discourse of pain by narrating it in situations apart from martyrdom. But it would be an oversimplification to say that all Christians agreed about the experience of pain in martyrdom; not all texts, to be sure, assert the impassibility of martyrs. Another aspect of the discourse of pain in martyrdom that must be examined, therefore, is one in which Christians do indeed feel the pain of torture. The martyrs’ pain makes a brief but notable appearance in the Passion of Perpetua and sporadically in Eusebius’s recitations of martyr accounts in his Ecclesiastical History. The martyrs’ pain is more prominent—though certainly not ubiquitous—in the treatises and homilies of late ancient Christian writers.
Both Eusebius and the editor of the Passion of Perpetua allow for the experience of pain in martyrdom, though neither presents it as a necessary result of torture. Having observed the dominance of the motif of impassibility in early martyr texts makes these authors’ statements all the more striking and surprising. They remind us that even if there are identifiable trends in the ways martyrdom was imagined, these trends did not restrict authorial license: impassibility was not the only way to understand the events surrounding the deaths of faithful Christians. In terms of the larger narrative impulses of these authors, however, we would be mistaken to interpret these incidences of pain as dominating their ideologies of martyrdom. They are, rather, outliers that may prove the rule more than they redirect the broader aims of the texts. But even as outliers they are worthy of careful analysis.
The Passion of Perpetua explicitly associates Perpetua’s death with pain. Her fellow Christians died “in silence and without moving,” but Perpetua had “pain to taste” (21.8): she screamed when the gladiator’s sword struck her bone. The sword in this episode is the last in a series of swords found in this text. The Passion uses gladius five times and ferrum twice. In each case the context is life-threatening.52 Perpetua’s first vision—of a bronze ladder ascending to heaven—initiates the sword motif. The sides of the ladder are strewn with “iron implements [ferramentorum] of every kind,” including swords (gladii; 4.3). The ladder functions as “a gauntlet” symbolizing the difficulty and threat of martyrdom.53 The ladder’s narrowness requires Christians to ascend separately (singuli), indicating that martyrdom is a personal battle of endurance and will; moreover, the swords, spears, hooks, daggers, and spikes attached to the sides of the ladder remind the listening audience of the physical harm the martyrs endure as they ascend to heaven.54
Subsequently, the author describes the procurator Hilarianus as having “the right of the sword” (ius gladii; 6.3). This description emphasizes a particular set of procuratorial powers: it focuses attention on Hilarianus’s authority to levy the death sentence rather than on any of his other governing responsibilities.55 The political powers of the ruler are here framed explicitly in terms relevant to the martyr text: the procurator’s role—as far as this narrative is concerned—is to provide the means by which Christians attain martyrdom. The first three references to swords in the Passion, then, are related: Hilarianus’s ius gladii will provide Perpetua an opportunity to scale the ladder strewn with swords.
The remaining four references to swords also refer directly to the deaths of the Carthaginian Christians. In Perpetua’s fourth vision, the lanista who oversees her contest with the Egyptian describes the stakes of the agon in this way: “This Egyptian, if he conquers her, will kill her with the sword [gladio]. But if she conquers him, she will receive this branch” (10.9). In the vision Perpetua is victorious and so earns the branch and walks toward the Gate of Life. Here Christian meaning subverts common usage: victory does not indicate reprieve from execution but, rather, success in dying. Perpetua anticipates walking through the gate of eternal life by means of her death. The sword hanging from the ladder—which might scare less steadfast Christians—is now the sword that promises eternal life.
Later the editor reports about Secundulus: “his flesh certainly knew the sword [gladium], even if his soul did not” (14.3). As Jacqueline Amat succinctly notes, “la mort de Secundulus est mal précisée.”56 If the announcement that his flesh knew the sword is clear enough—he died by sword in prison—its accompanying observation about the soul is not. Heffernan suggests that this is the editor’s attempt to preclude questions about Secundulus’s faithfulness. Since his death is not related alongside the others at the end of the text, Heffernan surmises that rumors may have arisen about possible apostasy in prison.57 The editor in this reading is dismissing such rumors by describing Secundulus’s death in prison: his body gave out under the sword, but his spirit remained firm and unmoved.58
The final references to swords occur at the end of the Passion as the deaths of the other martyrs are related. After the Christians had been tortured ad bestias, they were recalled to the center of the arena so that when “the sword [gladio] penetrated their flesh, [the audience’s] eyes might make them partners in murder” (21.7). The martyrs, we are told, went willingly to the appointed spot and exchanged the kiss of peace before meeting the sword (ferrum) “without moving and with silence” (21.8)—all of the martyrs, that is, but Perpetua, who still had “pain to taste” (doloris gustaret; 21.9). While a great deal of the Passion challenges audiences’ expectations of torture and pain, this narrative climax threatens to undermine all that precedes it. Here the author not only uses the word “pain”; he also describes its effect: Perpetua “howled when her bone was punctured” (21.9). The young, possibly inexperienced gladiator struck Perpetua but missed his target. The unexpected wound caused Perpetua to cry out in pain. This episode is all the more surprising given the steady reference to swords in the text, all of which underscore the martyrs’ steadfastness and predict their victories. Although Perpetua appears to feel pain here, the incident—importantly—did not weaken her resolve. This scene therefore does not undo the work of the larger narrative, a point Augustine also makes in Serm. 281.2: “Therefore her pain [dolor] did not suppress the vigor of her strength.”59 In the end we are left with an image not of Perpetua’s pain but of her fortitude: “she directed the wandering hand of the young gladiator to her own throat” (21.9). Whatever she felt that caused her to cry out did not overcome her; she was still able to accomplish her will.60 The motif of swords throughout the Passion informs our interpretation of this final scene: momentary pain inflicted by the ferrum does not compromise Perpetua’s victory in the arena.
This incident reveals the Passion’s complex portrayal of martyrdom and pain. As we have seen, the editor readily concedes the experiences of pain caused by empathy with family members or by childbirth, but he distances the martyrs from the physical sensations related to the destruction of the flesh. In most cases the martyr is insensitive to bodily torture, and thus our horizon of expectation about martyr accounts—that the experience of physical pain is central—is activated but quickly rejected. But here at the end, the horizon of expectation is reactivated. The listener who has accepted the text’s promise of divine analgesia is startled when the experience of pain reenters the narrative. Perpetua’s scream rings out all the louder in contrast to the stoic silence of her fellow martyrs. What are we to make of this shocking narrative intrusion? Perhaps in this case the solitary exception proves the rule: Perpetua screams but then valiantly guides the trembling hand of the gladiator to her own throat, proving beyond all doubt that she willed her own death. The author’s assertion—“perhaps so great a woman could not be killed . . . unless she herself willed it” (21.10)—suggests as much. Thus the scream in pain serves as a final reminder of the disjunction between our expectations and the narrative claims: pain is of no real concern when God is present with the martyrs.
Alternatively, we might interpret this intrusion of pain in light of previous scenes in the Passion. First is the vision of the ladder with swords affixed to its sides. The gladiator’s glancing blow may remind the audience of the difficult ascent of martyrdom: flesh is mangled by metal weapons, just as Perpetua observed in her vision (4.3). The frightening weapons dangling from the ladder, though, harm only those who ascend “negligently or not aiming upwards” (4.3). Perpetua—regardless of the brief experience of pain—has demonstrated her single-minded desire for martyrdom; she is in no way negligent. The vision of the ladder then may assure the reader that Perpetua’s pain does not jeopardize her ascent into heaven: the gladiator’s sword will not impede her journey. Second, we may understand Perpetua’s experience in the arena in light of Felicitas’s assertions regarding Christ’s communion with martyrs: in the arena, another will be in them who will suffer for them (15.6). Heffernan compares these two scenes, asking whether Perpetua’s scream in the arena marks “the precise moment that Perpetua has been joined (as Felicity predicted) by her Lord, who will suffer in her stead?”61 In this case, as Felicitas felt pain in labor before receiving relief through koinonia, so also Perpetua tastes pain with the first blow before being joined by Jesus.
Yet another previous episode that may inform our interpretation of Perpetua’s scream is the one in which a heifer attacks Perpetua and Felicitas. The author reports that Perpetua did not feel anything because she was “in the spirit and in ecstasy” (20.8). Thus when Perpetua enters the arena and faces the young gladiator, she has not yet experienced any pain related to her death. This scene may draw on Latin traditions that feminize the fear of pain, as Craig Williams suggests: “whereas the Latin textual tradition is full of assertions that it is womanly to fear or avoid pain or to bear it badly, Perpetua takes action precisely in order to have some taste of pain (ut aliquid doloris gustaret), boldly bringing on death with a gesture that completes an ineffectual man’s botched killing with a purposeful woman’s suicidal thrust.”62 If Perpetua needs to experience pain in order to dismiss perceptions of womanly weakness, and if previous tortures did not result in pain, then here—at the narrative climax—we encounter Perpetua simultaneously feeling and overcoming pain in her quest for martyrdom. The episode therefore may invert gender expectations: Perpetua emasculates her executioner by drawing the sword to her own throat.63 Audiences may connect the death scene and its cry of pain to a number of events in this text, all of which mark the episode as meaningful because of its resonance with other narrative moments. To read it in isolation—as an example of pain in martyrdom—would divorce it from the broader narrative interests of this text and diminish its impact.
The Greek version of this scene in the Passion contains an interesting modification of the Latin. Whereas the Latin editor refers to pain—dolor—in his depiction of Perpetua’s death, the Greek text uses ponos: Perpetua had more “distress” (ponos) to taste (21.9). The semantic range of ponos is wide and while it can refer to bodily distress or pain, it typically means something more like “labor,” “stress,” or “distress.” As we have seen, the Greek author typically translates dolor with algos, so the shift to ponos in this scene may reflect the Greek text’s unflagging assertion of the painlessness of martyrdom.64 This author’s interest in downplaying the possibilities of pain may also inform the translation of Perpetua’s response to the gladiator’s strike: whereas the Latin states that when the gladiator struck her on the bone Perpetua “howled” (exululo), the Greek employs the term alalazō, which on the one hand can refer to a shout, but on the other is often used in the sense of “raising a war cry” or a “victory cry” (21.9).65 The Greek text’s preference for ponos over algos in the scenes of torture and martyrdom, coupled with the use of a term that may bring to mind a victory shout rather than a cry of defeat, suggests that this version—perhaps even more than the Latin—disassociates martyrdom and physical pain.66
The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas serves as an important reminder that early Christian ideologies of martyrdom are not univocal. Although most martyr texts—including the Passion—portray the martyrs as immune or indifferent to torture, they do so in different and sometimes mutually exclusive ways. As we strive to appreciate trends as well as differences among the early martyr texts, we must be careful to avoid collapsing the texts into one another, as if they were literarily dependent on one another. While many martyr texts appear to participate in a discourse about the divine protection of Christian bodies, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas reminds us to watch for exceptions that may either preserve discordant voices and traditions or reinforce narrative claims by recalling and then renegotiating expectations at critical narrative moments. In this text pain is not simply rejected. Rather, the text offers a nuanced argument about the expectations for and experience of pain in the world—for Christians and non-Christians alike. My reading of the text does not lead to the conclusion that this author privileged pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom—too much of the text challenges this view—but it does suggest that the author found pain, not just painlessness, to be a useful category for understanding the human condition and the requirements for perfecting faith.
Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History also employs pain language from time to time within the discourse of martyrdom, notably in his account of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.67 The Eusebian text is in part a précis: everything that takes place before Polycarp’s arrest—that is, the material between Mart. Pol. 2.2 and 7.3—is summarized briefly before the account focuses in more detail on Polycarp’s witness. It is the epitome of the deaths of the unnamed martyrs—found in Mart. Pol. 2.1–4—that is of interest here. Eusebius states that the martyrs stood firm against pain (algēdonas; 4.15.4). In this version of the account, the group of anonymous Christians who are whipped until their bodies are torn open are explicitly said to have experienced pain, though they do not give in to it. The text of this martyrdom, however, is preserved independently of Eusebius’s History. Indeed, the authors of the most recent critical editions of Polycarp reconstruct the text on the basis of other—non-Eusebian—manuscript traditions.68 The Martyrdom of Polycarp as reconstructed from these other traditions never mentions pain felt by the martyrs. As opposed to Eusebius who refers to martyrdom as “painful,” the more original text, as we have seen, explains that “the fire of the cruel torturers was cold to them” (Mart. Pol. 2.3). The Eusebian version, moreover, contains no references to impassibility or to the separation of spirit from body, suggesting that in his hands pain may be a locus of meaning. Without the assertions about painlessness, those who observed the martyrs’ actions were “struck with amazement” precisely because the martyrs stood firm against pain (H.E. 4.15.4). Thus Eusebius—or his source—recounts the deaths of these Christians in such a way that pain is meaningful to the ideology of martyrdom.
The Letter of Phileas, preserved in Greek by Eusebius, also describes the martyrs’ experiences as painful.69 The letter purports to be penned by the imprisoned bishop of Thmuis, who was implicated in the Diocletianic persecutions.70 The letter is addressed to the Christians in the Thebaid, detailing the atrocities the martyrs endured. Before Eusebius quotes the letter itself, he introduces the difficult circumstances of its production: “But both the tortures and the pain [algēdonas] endured by the martyrs of the Thebaid exceed all words” (H.E. 8.9.1). This introductory notice guides the audience’s subsequent interpretation of the account of torture. Bodies torn by sharp shards, women suspended in the air upside down and naked, Christians quartered by the inventive use of tree branches, decapitations, executions by fire and axe: all are described through a lens of pain (8.9.1–3). In spite of the spectacle of torture and pain, Eusebius reports, Christians continually turned themselves in, joyfully exclaiming their piety. Pain in this narrative highlights Christian faithfulness.
Pain continues to be an interpretive guide in the portion of the letter attributed to Phileas himself. As the bishop details the torture of being suspended from the roof by one hand, he observes that “the stretching of their joints and limbs brought nothing but the most terrible pain [algēdonas]” (8.10.5). The tortures that visibly marked the Christian bodies, Phileas reports, were even more frightful to see than they were to experience (8.10.8). Such a statement stands in contrast to accounts of other martyr texts that report the miraculous healing of the body such that the marks of persecution could not be seen at all. It also stands in contrast to martyr texts that describe Christian spectators as seeing—through spiritual eyes—the perfection rather than the torture of martyrs. This text instead emphasizes the psychological trauma endured, presumably, by Christian observers who nevertheless come forward of their own free will to confess their faith. Phileas continues, asserting that it was through endurance of these kinds of tortures—and the accompanying pain—that the martyrs defeated the adversary: “In this way, on the one hand, some died from the torture, putting to shame the antagonist by their persistence; on the other hand, others were shut up in prison half-dead, and after a few days, overcome by their pain [algēdosi], attained perfection” (8.10.9). This description of martyrdom highlights both persistence and the endurance of pain in the process of Christian perfection. Whereas the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons suggests that Sanctus’s and Blandina’s painless torture sustained other imprisoned Christians, Eusebius places pain squarely within the audience’s purview. Here the endurance of pain testifies to Christian piety and perfection.
Some of the martyr narratives included within Eusebius’s triumphalist history therefore provide evidence of alternative ways of making meaning of persecution. Though most early texts depict divine analgesia, some of Eusebius’s accounts locate meaning in pain. In addition to his account of the Smyrnaean martyrs and the letter of Phileas, we might note the Alexandrian Christians Epimachus and Alexander who “endured infinite pain” (murias dienegkontes algēdonas) from scrapers and scourges before they died (H.E. 6.41.17). Peter, a Christian in Nicomedia, moreover, “tread underfoot these pains” (algēdonas; 8.6.3). In all of these stories pain functions as many modern readers expect it to: the martyrs endured pain in their steadfast witness to their faith and for this they are praised. Eusebius does not avert his audience’s gaze away from the physical effects of torture. Indeed, many of the scenes of torture and martyrdom in Eusebius’s History are more graphic than those of earlier texts, and the thick descriptions of bodily dissolution are not alleviated by assertions of impassibility. In these cases pain appears to be a locus of meaning: the endurance of pain proves the martyrs’ piety and is the basis of their veneration.
Eusebius does not, however, present a consistent ideology of martyrdom that centers on the experience of pain. Alongside texts like the Letter of Phileas are stories—such as those in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons—that consistently assert analgesia in martyrdom. Indeed, the vast majority of accounts of martyrdom chronicled within the Ecclesiastical History make no mention of pain whatsoever. Neither though do they regularly claim analgesia or anesthesia. By and large pain is simply not of concern in the accounts Eusebius relates. It is unclear how many of these martyr texts, furthermore, represent Eusebius’s own ideology, and how many he merely reproduces from his sources. The most we can say with assurance, it seems, is that Eusebius was equally content to relay stories that privilege pain as a locus of meaning as he was to relay stories that reject pain as an experience of martyrs. These seemingly divergent views stand together in his History without explanation or apology.
The martyrdoms related in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and in the Latin Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas provide striking exceptions to the more common narrative interests in early Christian martyr texts regarding pain and martyrdom. Pain per se does not appear to be a locus of meaning for martyrdom in the Passion, but it may on occasion function as such in Eusebius. In neither case, however, do the authors shy away from incorporating pain into their depictions of martyrdom. Such variety in the textual record suggests that historians should not merely be relieved of, but deterred by the task of identifying the early Christian view of martyrdom, as Grig has argued: “we need not follow them in their attempts to iron out, smooth over or even obliterate tensions in pursuit of a party line.”71 More useful, it seems, is investigating where and to what effect ideologies of martyrdom differ.
This book’s focus is primarily on martyr texts, but there is a broader literary tradition that makes use of, reflects on, and interprets the torture and deaths of Christians. The epistolary, philosophical, and homiletical traditions of Late Antiquity exhibit continued interest in the experience of pain and painlessness in martyrdom. As we will see in the following overview, some texts echo the position of earlier martyr texts by claiming that martyrs are impassible in the face of torture, while others suggest that pain is an important aspect of martyrdom. Some authors, furthermore, take varying positions on pain within their own literary corpora. We have already seen, for instance, places where both Prudentius and Augustine assert impassibility, but we will examine other occasions in which these authors, and others, highlight pain in martyrdom. Thus late ancient texts testify to the growing elasticity of the discourse of pain in martyrdom.
Impassibility of Martyrs.The third-century North African Christian apologist and heresiologist Tertullian is often characterized as enthusiastically advocating martyrdom.72 The locus classicus for Tertullian’s interest in martyrdom is a portion of his treatise De Anima, which the Ante-Nicene Fathers translates, “Observe, then, the difference between a heathen and a Christian in their death: if you have to lay down your life for God, as the Comforter counsels, it is not in gentle fevers and on soft beds, but in the sharp pains of martyrdom” (55.4).73 Here Tertullian’s exhortation appears to privilege martyrdom by emphasizing its painfulness. Dying for God is not a peaceful death—one of gentle fevers and soft beds—but one of “sharp pains.” The Latin itself, however, does not make precisely this point: non in mollibus febribus et in lectulis, sed in martyriis (“not in mild fevers and in beds but in martyrdoms”). The Ante-Nicene Fathers translation betrays an ideological position that is not Tertullian’s—or at least not explicitly advocated by Tertullian in this text. He makes a similar claim in De Fuga: “Do not wish to pass away in beds, nor in miscarriages, nor in mild fevers, but in martyrdom” (De Fuga 9.4).74 In both texts Tertullian contrasts fevers and beds to martyrdom, but the contrast does not highlight pain as the distinguishing factor. Tertullian’s interest appears to be about private versus public deaths: Christians should wish to witness publically unto death rather than dying privately at home. Pain itself, though, is not a category of interest in these reflections on martyrdom.75
In his letter to the martyrs, Tertullian urges the imprisoned confessors to remember that the Holy Spirit is with them, and he compares the prison to the desert: it is a place of refuge where the pollutions of pagan life are absent (Ad Martyras, 2).76 The discomfort the martyrs experience in prison is likened to the training soldiers endure, training that will ensure a “good contest” and the victory wreath. Alternatively, Tertullian suggests, they might view the prison as a wrestling school, so that like those well trained in all kinds of hardships the martyrs may be presented victorious at judgment. Virtue, he argues, is built up by hardness and destroyed by softness. Nevertheless, Tertullian empathizes with the flesh (caro) that may fear the “heavy sword and the elevated cross, and the rage of the beasts and the extreme punishments of fire and all the ingenious tortures of the executioner” (4.2). The confessors, however, are urged to remember that others—“not only . . . men but also . . . women”—have endured these tortures for fame and glory (4.3). Although Tertullian enumerates specific tortures and the natural fears that accompany contemplation of them, his point is not that pain makes these deaths meaningful—indeed, he does not use pain language at all in this letter—but that Christians can endure for celestial victory anything pagans have endured for earthly fame. Tertullian’s address to the martyrs, furthermore, explicitly claims that the flesh of faithful Christians is impassible: “the leg feels nothing in its tendon [nihil crus sentit in nervo] when the soul is in heaven” (2.10). Like so many of the texts we have examined, the thrust of Tertullian’s argument to the martyrs is the promise of painlessness in torture when one is wholly devoted to God.
In “On the Martyrs,” John Chrysostom makes a case similar to Tertullian’s. As I have mentioned, he imagines the Maccabean martyrs addressing his congregation and saying, “The tortures are not a burden for even a short time for those who look to the things that are destined.”77 He goes on to have the martyrs say: “When the blessed Stephen, too, saw Christ with the eyes of faith, because of this, he did not see the showers of stones, but instead of those, he counted up the game prizes and crowns. Therefore you also shift your sight from that which is ready at hand to that which will be and you will catch not even a little sensation of the tortures.”78 The martyrs’ statement to the audience suggests two things: first, their actions and concomitant impassibility are not unique but can be imitated. By focusing on the future, the martyrs promise that others can also be immune to the pain of torture. Second, Chrysostom anticipates his congregation’s reticence and acknowledges the difficulty they might have in believing the martyrs’ claims to impassibility in torture. Thus he introduces the martyrs as “far more persuasive” than he could be in asserting “torture is not burdensome.”79 The claims, Chrysostom acknowledges, are difficult to grasp: how can such torture not hurt? But the victims themselves speak their truth: God protects them from harm.
Pain Experienced by Martyrs.While Tertullian and Chrysostom provide examples of the martyrs’ impassibility, early Christian and late ancient authors also present the experience of pain in martyrdom as meaningful. Origen is an interesting case in this regard because his writings predate some of the martyr texts we have already examined. Exhortation to Martyrdom, for example, was written in 235 CE for Ambrose and Protoctetus as the threat of persecution by Maximin loomed.80 Origen’s ideology of martyrdom in this text casts martyrdom as expiatory sacrifice, as Elizabeth Castelli has noted.81 This ideology serves a communal purpose: “the martyrs not only come from the Church but serve it by their baptism of blood, cleansing and purifying it.”82 Origen focuses on the experience of pain as a measure both of one’s faith and of the efficacy of one’s sacrifice.
That Origen’s focus is not merely on dying but on the difficulty of the death is apparent in his discussion of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane that “this cup” pass from him (Exhortation to Martyrdom, 29). He argues that Jesus is not asking for a reprieve from death—in which case he would ask that the cup pass—but for a different cup (not this one but another one). He surmises that the cup Jesus prefers would bring a “more grievous” (baruteron) death so the benefits of his sacrifice would be more widely distributed.83 Origen therefore underscores not merely dying for one’s faith but the onerousness of that death.
Throughout his Exhortation to Martyrdom, Origen emphasizes the pain and agony endured by the faithful, arguing that “those who have endured tortures and labors” in martyrdom demonstrate a “more illustrious virtue” than those who have not.84 The latter, who have not been tested by torture and labor, must “concede first place” to the former, “whose endurance has been manifested on the rack and by manifold tortures and by fire.”85 Origen quotes the Maccabean martyr Eleazar when he encourages others to embrace their pain: “I bear bodily pains [sōma algēdonas] from flogging, and in my soul I welcome these things because I fear him.”86 According to Origen, the story of the Maccabees shows that piety and love of God is best demonstrated through “the roughest labor and the most grievous tortures.”87 More than any other author we have considered, Origen’s writings on martyrdom center on the somatic experience as especially important for the efficacy of martyrdom.
Basil’s understanding of pain in martyrdom, as articulated in his homily on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, resonates with Origen’s assertions. After Basil recounts the governor’s sentence—that the martyrs will be exposed to the elements—he painstakingly details the physical processes of freezing to death, which highlight for his audience the excruciating pain endured by the martyrs:
The body that has been exposed to icy cold first becomes all livid as the blood freezes. Then it shakes wildly and seethes, as the teeth chatter, the muscles spasm, and the whole mass contracts without purpose. A piercing pain [odunē de tis drimeia] and an unspeakable distress [ponos arrētos] touches the marrows and causes a freezing sensation that is hard to bear. . . . The heat is chased away from the extremities of the body and flees into the depths. On the one hand, it leaves dead the parts that it has deserted, and on the other hand, those parts into which it is compressed, it gives over to pain [odunais], as little by little death is present from freezing. (Hom. 19.5)88
Basil walks his audience through the biological responses to freezing temperatures; his detailed account of blood, teeth, and flesh draws listeners in as they empathize with the martyrs. Who hasn’t experienced that strange sensation of bitter coldness that burns hot? Our teeth, too, chatter in winter and we shiver in the cold. The description engages the audience’s imagination by invoking familiar life experiences. Pain is not incidental to this description; it is the shared experience of both martyrs and observers.
Pain is also central to the martyrs’ own descriptions of their experiences. Enduring the cold, they cry out: “the winter cold is piercing, but paradise tastes sweet: freezing is painful [algeinē], but rest is pleasant” (Hom. 19.6).89 The repeated emphasis on pain as the experience of the martyrs—in both the third-person observation of freezing to death as well as the first-person account of the martyrs’ experience—suggests that pain is particularly important to Basil’s understanding of the meaning of these deaths. Pain in martyrdom is endured in exchange for eternal reward: one pays in pain briefly on earth to redeem eternal joy. Pain as payment is demonstrated by the martyrs’ exhortations to each other: “let the foot burn, so that it may dance continually with the angels; let the hand fall away, so that it may bring access to the Lord” (19.6).90 The common endurance of excruciating pain demonstrates the solidarity and virtue of the Forty; it is also what makes them martyrs.
Prudentius’s poems on martyrdom in Peristephanon contain varying assessments of martyrs’ pain. We have seen numerous occasions when he asserts the impassibility of Christian martyrs, but on other occasions the presence of pain is unclear. In recounting the martyrdom of Cyprian, for instance, he describes the Spirit descending on Carthage, empowering the Christians and teaching them “neither to be agitated nor yield nor be conquered by pain [dolore]” but “to resemble Christ and maintain faith” (13.74–75). Are the martyrs not vanquished by pain because they do not feel it? Or do they feel the pain but are not overcome by it? In still other poems, however, pain is explicitly foregrounded. Prudentius, for example, laments the “pains [dolore] the tormentor inflicted” on Emeterius and Chelidonius (1.81). The poet focuses on pain in the martyrdom of Cassian when he contrasts the merciful child, whose stylus struck deeply so as to hasten death, with the cruel child, whose stabs will not bring death but rather “stinging pains” (dolorum spiculis; 9.62). In another poem Prudentius describes the bleeding wound of one of the martyrs of Caesaragusta and the way “the burning pain” (dolor . . . ardens) clung to the flesh, drawing out the moment of death (4.130). As the martyrs’ experiences are described, listeners incorporate the corporeal experience into their interpretations, but in none of these poems is pain central to the meaning of martyrdom. Pain is not the locus of meaning. Prudentius’s account of Cyprian’s death, however, is a different case. The North African bishop asserts that “pain [doloris] is the price we pay for the hope of light and everlasting day” (13.43–45). In direct contradiction to Cyprian’s promise to Flavian in the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius, here the bishop claims pain is payment for future reward. Pain is central to the salvific value of martyrdom in this poem. Thus Prudentius’s Peristephanon includes a range of claims about the physical experience of martyrdom—from impassibility to insignificance to foundational.
Augustine’s writings likewise reflect different positions on pain in martyrdom. Previous chapters have examined a number of instances in which he claims that martyrs feel no pain. In other sermons, however, he asserts that pain is experienced but only to a degree that is appropriate for training. In one of his sermons on Perpetua and Felicitas, for example, Augustine discusses the scene in which the women are tossed by the heifer. He explains that the martyrs despised both “death and pain” (et mortem et dolores) for Christ (Serm. 280.4).91 But Jesus was present in the martyrs, protecting them from much—though not all—of the discomfort: “The one who lived in them conquered in them. . . . He was showing them spiritual delights, so that they would not feel bodily distress [ne sentirent corporales molestias], more than which lays the foundation not for failure but training” (280.4).92 Augustine imagines a small bit of physical discomfort will discipline or train martyrs, but Christ protects them from a surplus of pain.
A common refrain in Augustine’s sermons on martyrs is that the experience of pain is not itself meaningful because common criminals endure that. Even stoic endurance of pain is not praiseworthy because that can merely signal a person’s stubbornness. In his sermon on St. Vincent, for instance, Augustine argues that “it is not endurance” that makes martyrs victorious.93 It is the cause—not the punishment—that makes a martyr praiseworthy. After all, “many people, in fact, have endured pain out of obstinacy rather than steadiness; out of vice not virtue; being perversely wrong, not directed by reason; being mastered by the devil, not their persecutor” (Serm. 275.1).94 Likewise, in a sermon on the martyrs of Marseilles, Augustine teaches that it is possible for someone who has been “conquered by the devil” to conquer pain, thus proving again that endurance of pain is not itself proof of piety (283.4). Augustine’s sermons taken together reflect varying appraisals of pain, ranging from outright rejection of the martyrs’ experience of it to acknowledgments of its existence. In the latter case, however, Augustine tempers the impulse to overvalue pain as a marker of piety.
In John Chrysostom’s homily on Julian, pain is a natural result of torture. Chrysostom describes both the physical—“the pain [odunē] of the attacks”—and the psychological—“the agony of what would be”—trauma Julian faced.95 In this sermon, however, pain belongs to “the momentary and temporary age” and does not overshadow the pleasures of the immortal age.96 A boxer who wins the crown, Chrysostom teaches, has “no perception of the dangers at hand” and is not “exceedingly strained” by them.97 If such is true for the boxer, how much more true is it of martyrs who, although “enduring myriad dangers and having their bodies lacerated by different tortures,” nevertheless fix their sights on the heavenly rewards.98 By doing so, they teach that “the things that are burdensome and unendurable by nature become light and easy with the hope of things to come.”99 Pain in this homily is an expected result of torture, but it is the focus neither of the martyrs’ gaze nor of Chrysostom’s homily. Pain is inconsequential for those who believe in the rewards that await Christians in heaven.
Gregory of Nyssa’s homily “On Theodore the Recruit” engages with the discourse of pain through ekphrasis.100 Gregory draws his audience’s attention to artistic elements of the martyrium where they have gathered for the feast day: he describes the beauty of the carpenter’s and the mason’s works before turning to the contributions of the painter who captured the martyr’s “excellence, his opposition, his pain” (tas algēdonas).101 The artistic works are expected to relate—“as if in a book that speaks”—the details of the event to the worshiping crowd.102 In setting the scene of martyrdom, then, Gregory introduces the experience of pain as central to the interpretation of Theodore’s contest. Similarly, in the final portion of the homily, Gregory relates Theodore’s pain to the efficacy of his witness. In a direct address to the martyr, Gregory implores him to leave his heavenly home and return to his fatherland to observe the love and adoration of his people for him. The blood Theodore shed and “the pain” (algēdoni) he felt in the fire will bring him honor.103
Interestingly, the middle section of the homily, in which Gregory details the martyrdom itself, suggests that the martyr may not have felt pain. As Theodore endured torture—being hanged on a stake while his flesh was torn to pieces—he sang psalms “as if someone else was submitting to the punishment in his place.”104 That Theodore’s pain is relieved by the presence of another being resonates with the Passion of Theodore.105 In the Passion, for instance, Theodore asserts that he is not afraid of pagan tortures because “My Lord and God is before my face, releasing me from these tortures; you do not see him because you do not look with the eyes of the soul” (4).106 The miraculous protection of Theodore’s body—a theme likely drawn from the Martyrdom of Polycarp—provides further evidence of the saint’s prophetic words: Christ does save Theodore, though it is obvious only “to whom it was granted” (8).107 If Gregory’s homily on Theodore makes use of preexisting traditions, then it may represent an attempt at reframing an earlier martyr narrative around the experience of pain.108 The sermon establishes pain as an interpretive lens that guides the congregants’ experience of hearing the martyr story within the martyrium.
Gregory, however, does not always locate pain as central to the meaning of martyrdom. His sermon on the Forty Martyrs, for instance, concedes the experience of pain but rejects its importance. Thus whereas Basil’s homily repeatedly invokes the pain experienced by these martyrs, Gregory rejects pain as relevant to the ideology of martyrdom. In his homily Gregory grants that it is the nature of bodies to feel pain but because their spirits triumphed over their bodies the martyrs may not have actually experienced the pain: “Their nature endured what is proper and it received pain [algeina], but the nobility of the athletes contended against nature itself.”109 The athletes’ nobility fighting against their nature suggests that the martyrs vanquished pain. The martyrs were no longer susceptible to corporeal frailty. Gregory’s observation about a soldier left behind—“he was alive only inasmuch as he felt pain [algeinōn]”—should be understood in light of this triumph of the spirit: the soldier’s soul had already ascended to heaven and only his body, and its sensations, remained.110 Gregory does not shy away from expressing the pain that is normally associated with torture, but he—unlike Origen and Basil—does not isolate pain as foundational to the meaning of martyrdom.
This illustrative overview of late ancient writings on martyrs reveals that there was little consensus among commentators on the meaning of pain in martyrdom. In these texts the martyrs’ experience of pain could be rejected or accepted, and when accepted it could be understood as a minor nuisance—in comparison to the rich rewards to come—or a central aspect of salvation. Some authors’ positions resonate with the earlier martyr texts while others reimagine the experience altogether. My aim is not to present a comprehensive analysis of these authors’ ideologies of martyrdom but to shed light on the discordant voices participating in the discourse. If the martyr narratives themselves are similar—though by no means identical—in their claims to Christian insensitivity to pain in torture, later texts introduce alternative viewpoints. These differences are important because they illustrate that the discourse of martyrdom was dynamic; they may also inform readings of earlier texts. It is, after all, the nature of interpretation to set an earlier text in a new (and sometimes different) context. Authors such as Eusebius, Prudentius, and Augustine who rework martyr stories as they retell them, make choices about what elements they wish to emphasize. Thus later suggestions that martyrs experienced pain may affect rereadings of earlier texts that deny exactly that.111
Martyr texts and reflections on martyrdom contribute to an intra-Christian discourse on pain. Most of this study has been devoted to giving voice to an oft-neglected perspective about divine analgesia, but even texts that insist on the impassibility of the martyr make use of pain alongside painlessness. The discourse of painlessness, that is, does not exist in isolation apart from larger concerns about who experiences pain and why. Martyr texts do not merely reject pain as an experience of the Christian body; they also employ pain to illustrate group allegiances. But discourses are created through the contributions of multiple voices, and even within Christian traditions the discursive claims are not identical. Some authors mention pain in passing—as if it were simply the obvious but ultimately meaningless consequence of physical torture—while others focus on its relationship to salvation. While intra-Christian disagreements about pain and martyrdom are important to recognize, Christian voices are not the only ones that contribute to the discourse on pain and martyrdom. Pagan authors also construct Christian identity vis-à-vis martyrdom, and so another set of voices, those of non-Christians, must be heard as well. The following chapter examines various contexts—political, philosophical, and eschatological—from which the discourses of martyrdom and pain emerge and to which they contribute.