If we accept death with a calm and steadfast mind and we realize that it is not an evil and therefore not even an injury, we will much more easily endure other things—losses and insults, humiliations, exiles, bereavements, and separations.
—SENECA, CONST. 8.3
The judge, sitting with head thrown back, asked: “What is he called?” and they stated that he was called Hippolytus. “Hippolytus let him be, then. Let him get a team frightened and agitated and be torn to death by wild horses.”. . . Off go the horses headlong, rushing about blindly wherever the din and their quivering nerves and frantic excitement drive them, spurred by their wild spirit, carried on by their dash, impelled by the noise, and in their swift career unconscious of the burden that goes with them. . . . The body is shattered, the thorny shrubs which bristle on the ground cut and tear it to little bits. Some of it hangs from the top of rocks, some sticks to bushes, with some the branches are reddened, with some the earth is wet. (Peri. 11.85–122; LCL)
Thus Prudentius, sometime in the late fourth century, relates the death of Hippolytus. This unfortunately named Christian is forced to participate in a “fatal charade” in cruel imitation of his pagan namesake.1 The similarities between Seneca’s account of the pagan Hippolytus—with which chapter 1 began—and Prudentius’s description of the Christian Hippolytus are striking though unsurprising since the death of the former is explicitly invoked as the model for the death of the latter.2 As we have seen, in many ways post-Augustan literature can serve as a model for interpreting Christian martyr texts. In its indifference to pain and suffering it helps us recognize that narratives of bodily dismemberment are not necessarily valorizations of pain.
Prudentius, like Seneca, gives no attention to Hippolytus’s somatic experience. As the horses drag him, the Christian merely prays, “Let these snatch away my limbs, but Christ, my soul” (11.110). The audience is not asked to imagine the painful experience of being dragged to death by horses that “destroy fences and break through every obstacle” and that drag Hippolytus’s body “through woods and tumbling down rocks,” “downward and over rough ground” (11.115–20). Also like Seneca, Prudentius offers graphic and gruesome descriptions—by means of ekphrasis—of the dissolution of Hippolytus’s body. Prudentius describes the picture above the martyr’s tomb as portraying Hippolytus’s “bloody limbs as he was being dragged along” (11.125–26). In the painting the Christian poet testifies to seeing “the points of rocks dripping” and “dark red marks deposited on the thornbushes where a hand practiced in portraying green thornbushes had copied the blood-red in red-lead” (11.128–30). The painting depicts as well the aftermath of Hippolytus’s death, as those who loved him grieve while recovering his body. Prudentius painstakingly describes the effort to retrieve the Christian Hippolytus’s body parts, strewn hither and yon:
One could see the parts torn asunder and lying scattered in disorder up and down at random. The artist had painted too his loving people walking after him in tears wherever the inconstant track showed his zig-zag course. Stunned with grief, they were searching with their eyes as they went, and gathering the mangled flesh in their bosoms. One clasps the snowy head, cherishing the venerable white hair on his loving breast, while another picks up the shoulders, the severed hands, arms, elbows, knees, bare fragments of legs. (11.131–40; LCL)
To this point Prudentius may seem to be following Seneca’s script carefully. But the interests of the martyr texts are not identical to those of non-Christian post-Augustan literature, a point that becomes clear when the two authors describe the corpses of their respective Hippolytuses. Seneca’s Hippolytus is never fully recovered: the servants’ toil has not yet “succeeded in completing the body” (Phaedr. 1114). Seneca’s emphasis on bodily dissolution, however, does not end with the narration of Hippolytus’s death. It recurs throughout the play as characters recall the spectacle: when looking at his corpse, both Phaedra and Theseus must ask if they are looking at Hippolytus, so lost are any markers of his identity (1168–73, 1244–49).3 Seneca pushes the point to the edge as he narrates Theseus’s grief: “What is this formless and repulsive thing, with multiple wounds having been torn off from every quarter? What part of you it is, I am uncertain, but it is a part of you: here, place it here, not in its place, but in an empty place” (1262–68). This scene highlights the irrecoverable and unrecognizable nature of Hippolytus’s body. The fragmentation is so complete that even partial reconstruction is hopeless and thus correct positioning of parts retrieved is a futile effort. Theseus exclaims, “How great the part is yet absent for our tears!” (1261). Seneca’s story is one of unrelenting loss.
The allusions to Seneca’s account highlight the fundamental differences between pagan and Christian textual bodies, distinctions that emerge when Prudentius focuses his audience’s attention on the concluding scene of the martyrium’s painting. As we envision the Christian funereal band collecting the martyr’s remains, we see perhaps for the first time the crucial difference between the Hippolytuses:
With their garments also they wipe dry the soaking sand, so that no drop shall remain to dye the dust; and wherever blood adheres to the spikes on which its warm spray fell, they press a sponge on it and carry it all away. Now the thick wood held no longer any part of the sacred body, nor cheated it of a full burial. The parts were reviewed and found to make the number belonging to the unhurt [integri] body; the pathless ground being cleared, and the boughs and rocks wiped dry, had nothing of the whole man still to give up. (11.141–49; LCL)
The Christian Hippolytus does not remain fragmented; he is not the ancient Humpty Dumpty whose body is not put together again. Thus it is here that Prudentius’s careful allusions to Seneca’s work pay off. These Hippolytuses are not the same. Commonality of name and correspondence of death highlight rather than erase the fundamental differences in their identities: the martyr’s body is protected by God and is not susceptible to “scattering, rot,” or “putrefaction.”4 Not only are the Christian Hippolytus’s limbs, flesh, and skin reassembled; even the last drops of his blood are recovered. In striking contrast to his tragic counterpart, the Christian martyr’s body is miraculously restored such that visual inspection confirms its wholeness: we are asked to gaze on his dead but “unhurt” body. Thus Prudentius’s ekphrasis does not stop at the moment of dissolution but instead carries the audience well beyond Hippolytus’s death to the full restoration of his glorified body. Earlier martyr texts, I have argued, are engaged in a similar process: they paint a picture of the martyr’s torture and death but then direct the audience to an image of a renewed, miraculously whole, triumphant body.
In Divine Deliverance I have argued that a cluster of narrative techniques contributes to a particular early Christian discourse about pain and martyrdom. Rather than valorizing pain and suffering, early martyr texts reject it as a locus of meaning for Christian martyrdom. But some important questions remain. Who is served by texts that depict mutilated and tortured bodies as neither harmed nor in pain, by texts that in fact portray dead Christians as triumphant? How do the unresolved tensions in these texts affect their audiences, ancient and modern? When we look at these martyr texts in their larger context, what meanings and functions do they reveal?
The stories of brave Christians who endured painless torture in witness to their faith served fairly obvious needs when communities feared persecution. On the one hand, these narratives promised divine presence in and with the faithful: God protected the martyrs from the pain their persecutors sought to inflict. These stories therefore provided answers to pressing questions about theodicy: where is God when Christians are arrested, tortured, and killed? On the other hand, martyr stories also teach, at least implicitly, that those who apostatize will bear the full brunt of torture. Concerns about apostasy are broad and do not entail simply the abandonment of Christianity for paganism but, as Tertullian implies, a concern about shifting allegiances to forms of Christianity that (purportedly) devalue martyrdom. In Scorpiace, for instance, Tertullian reflects on the relationship between persecution and defection to Gnosticism: “When, therefore, faith is tossed and the Church is burning like the bush, then the Gnostics break forth, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom boil over, being themselves hot to strike, to transfix, to destroy” (1.5). Discourses of painlessness, then, are not merely useful in interreligious discourses but also serve heresiological interests.5 Éric Rebillard’s work on the multiplicity of Christian identities raises an important issue: discourses about martyrdom are not only comfort literature but may also be attempts at galvanizing communal boundaries when Christian “groupness” was not necessarily salient.6
Recent work in affect theory suggests another possible use of martyr texts. Amy Cottrill argues that violent texts engage audience’s fears of physical vulnerability and create a desire for protection.7 The textual violence in these texts, therefore, may have political significance beyond the rejection of “bad” rulers like Eglon, Sisera, or indeed Roman procurators: it demonstrates the ways in which the individual or community is vulnerable to existing power structures and resolves that vulnerability by presenting a particular political/religious figure as one who restores order and security. In the case of Judges, with which Cottrill is working, the violence of the Ehud and Jael narratives promotes the Deuteronomist’s political interests in the monarchy. In the Christian martyr texts, the textual violence promotes communal solidarity and presents an unsubtle threat to apostasy. While the martyr texts narrate what God does for those who remain faithful, they simultaneously narrate the consequences of the absence of that protection.
Christian martyr texts, however, served communities aside from those under the immediate threat of persecution, as is evident by their continued use long after the age of persecution had come to an end. Perhaps then there is yet another way of understanding the relationship between the martyr and the audience: might the martyrs’ bodies continue to be good “to think with”? Returning to post-Augustan literature as a starting place for reflection, Glenn Most suggests that in Seneca and Lucan, “the fictional bodies are gashed . . . [but] the persons whose sufferings seem to concern these authors most are not the victims, but ourselves.”8 Similarly, Catharine Edwards notes that in Seneca’s letters “we are brought to search for meaning . . . in the suffering body of the reader.”9 For Seneca, “the suffering body is now made to become an aid to self-knowledge, a route to philosophical progress.”10 Descriptions of bodily dissolution may be as much about the readers’ bodies and corporeal experiences as they are about those of the narrative characters.
An interpretation of the impassible martyr indeed benefits from—though is not exhausted by—an analysis of its relevance to “the suffering body” of the listener. Once we remember that pain was an unavoidable part of ancient life, and once we take seriously the unreliability of pain management in the ancient world, meaning comes to be made in the juxtaposition of the non-suffering martyr with the suffering audience.11 In this case the listeners themselves are in pain—perhaps simply by virtue of being alive in the ancient world, but perhaps also in anticipation of persecution—and the texts are offering faith as an analgesic. The authors describe an existence that is fundamentally different from the one in which the listeners are currently situated: the world created by the texts is one in which pain no longer exists.12 Eschatological expectations, as we have seen, affect the ways martyr acts envision Christian bodies: the martyrs lay claim proleptically to the promises of resurrected and glorified bodies. The listening audience, moreover, is given fellowship with the martyrs; they are invited to join in the eschatological moment—to embrace the anesthesia that faith, and nothing else in the ancient world, can offer—to participate in a world in which there is no death, no mourning, no crying, and no pain. The transmission of eschatological glory to those left behind is apparent in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. The martyrs, we are told, received life through their deaths, “and this they shared with their neighbor” (2.7). The martyrs loved peace, and it was peace that they left behind for the community, “entrusted to us forever” (2.7). Their martyrdom left “no distress [ponos] for their mother, no discord or combat for their brothers, but rather joy, peace, concord, and love” (2.7). Here too the promises of the New Jerusalem are gifted to the Christians remaining, a gift of charity from the martyrs who have gone off “completely victorious to God” (2.7). Ancient medicine could not reliably, effectively, and safely alleviate pain. Ancient philosophies such as Stoicism offered ways of intellectually disregarding pain but not of alleviating it.13 But Christian faith, as depicted in the martyr texts, offers a remedy that is bold, promising, and otherwise unavailable: freedom from pain. Perhaps we might understand not just martyrs but Christians more broadly as finding within the martyr texts a promise of divine analgesia.
If one question this study raises is that of interest—what and who is served by the descriptions of violence in martyr texts and the authors’ particular resolutions to it—another question revolves around the textual tensions inherent in the martyr texts. When my colleague asked whether the texts can actually do what they seem to want to do, my initial response was to show that the language of analgesia and other assertions and depictions of painlessness in martyrdom were demonstrably present in a large number of the earliest martyr texts. But that left me to struggle with the possibility that the texts undermine their argument when they so carefully catalogue the torture applied to Christian bodies. Is it really possible for a text simultaneously to detail dissolution and assert impassibility?
This book is the result of my struggle with that question. Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that the careful description of injury is a necessary component to the subsequent rejection of pain. Edwards’s description of Seneca’s project is analogous in this vein: according to Seneca, in order to “rise above physical distress,” we must face suffering head on. We must “know death for what it is, in order to be able to view it with contempt.”14 To deny pain, in other words, requires that we first name it. But rejecting the existence of pain is almost impossible when we approach the martyr texts through the lens of history. When we share somatic experiences with the martyrs, the narrative descriptions of impassibility—or even impassivity—strike us as absurd fantasy. Like the Bollandists who eschewed the miraculous, our encounters with divine analgesia in martyr texts may be an unwelcome intrusion into the historical world.
Scholars have examined the ideological interests of martyr texts, but these interests typically remain within the realm of historical verisimilitude: the martyr texts construct Christian communal identity by narrating historylike events. But what have perhaps been underappreciated are the deeply theological—and sometimes ahistorical—claims within these texts. We have emphasized the “martyr as model” but have thereby displaced “God as actor.” Foregrounding the discourse of painlessness brings God back into the action as the central narrative figure, without whom the story would be dramatically different and excruciatingly painful. If, however, we read the martyr texts as miracle stories, our focus on the merciful and miraculous acts of God in torture and death shifts the horizon of expectation. The audience can now make sense of the counterintuitive claims to Christian insensitivity: because God has intervened, bodies that should be in pain are not in pain. The stories of divine protection we have surveyed in this book—of the Smyrnaean martyrs for whom the fire was cooled, and of Blandina for whom torture brought anesthesia, and of Pionius whose body was perfectly preserved through the fire—sit alongside the exorcisms and healings performed by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. In every case the miracle attests to God’s presence among the faithful and divine concern for physical life.
In attempting to answer the question posed by my colleague, therefore, I argue that the description of torture is necessary and that some of the tension dissipates if the texts are read as theological assertions of God’s justice, mercy, and concern for corporeal existence. But there is yet another piece of the puzzle to examine. In earlier chapters I described the ways texts employ “ostensibly empathic narrative techniques” to engage the audience emotionally in an effort to guide them through difficult terrain, arriving at a particular understanding about Christian martyrdom and the miraculous interventions that protect martyrs’ bodies from the experience of pain.15 My focus has been on the listener who is sympathetic to and accepting of the text’s goals. But if the texts are clear about the martyrs’ experiences, why don’t we see that more easily? Why is the tension between what we expect and what we read so great that modern readers often do not overcome it?
To explain why so many contemporary readers understand the martyr texts differently from the way they seem to have been interpreted in antiquity, I draw on Suzanne Keen’s work on narrative empathy. First, readers are not identical. Openness to empathic readings depends on timing and context, as well as on individual readers’ openness to emotional experiences with narratives, which can be affected by “inattention, indifference, or personal distress.”16 Second, texts do not retain the same ability to invoke empathy across time. Keen observes that some texts “may only activate the empathy of their first, immediate audience, while others must survive to reach a later generation of readers in order to garner an emotionally resonant reading.”17 Third—and perhaps most important for the present discussion—is a phenomenon Keen labels “empathic inaccuracy,” which is “a strong conviction of empathy that incorrectly identifies the feeling of a literary persona.”18 In the case of empathic inaccuracy, there is discord between “an author’s intention and a reader’s experience of narrative empathy,” which may “contribute to a reader’s outraged sense that the author’s perspective is simply wrong.”19 For all of the reasons I mention above, readers expect to empathize with the martyrs’ pain. But in my reading, their empathy is at cross-purposes with the texts’ claims. This leads to a resistant interpretation by which readers assert a more plausible scenario—that martyrdom hurts—despite the texts’ claims to the contrary.
Keen gives an example that illuminates the ways empathic inaccuracy can affect interpretation, and her discussion may shed light on the ways modern interpretations of martyr texts might derive from empathic inaccuracy. The scene she describes comes from Flora Nwapa’s 1966 novel Efuru, which she argues is “almost certain to create confusion through the empathic inaccuracy of Western readers.”20 The scene describes female genital cutting and focuses the reader’s attention on the pain of the surgery: “Efuru screamed and screamed”; “Efuru’s husband was in the room. He felt all the pain.” Keen observes that empathetic readers who have imagined Efuru’s pain during surgery find it difficult to comprehend the woman’s descriptions of happiness immediately thereafter. She observes that readers “sometimes react with outrage at what they regard as an unjustifiable or implausible turn of events in the emotion cues offered by the novel.” In an attempt to resolve this emotional tension, some readers suggest that Efuru is speaking ironically when she describes the benefits of the surgery.21 But the novel itself, Keen argues, does not present Efuru’s evaluation of her condition in ironic terms. Nwapa, she says, is interested in economic independence for women, a state achieved by Efuru through female circumcision. While the novel urges readers to feel empathy for Efuru’s attainment of independence by means of the surgery, many Western readers empathize inaccurately because “their own cultural context condemns female genital cutting.”22 In this example, Keen demonstrates the ways that readers’ cultural expectations may resist or “defy the implicit intentions” of the text.23 At other times a text’s empathic cue may be wholly incomprehensible because it conflicts with “readers’ convictions about the universality of human nature.”24 Readers or audiences have difficulty empathizing with the impossible.
Keen’s insights suggest that if modern readers find claims to the martyrs’ impassibility too discordant with their own empathic experiences with the narrative, they may discard the texts’ claims because they see the empathic cues as historically, culturally, theologically, or generically problematic. When this obtains, readers make meaning of texts that are otherwise—to them—meaningless. Thus an answer to my colleague’s query about the martyr texts’ ability to do what they seem to want to do may not be an answer at all, but another question: Who is reading? Can martyr texts graphically depict the dissolution of the Christian body while simultaneously claiming—without irony—that the martyrs experienced no pain? I think so, at least for some readers in some times and places. But because meaning is always made between a text and its recipient, a text can mean differently. Some readers may find the tension between description and assertion too great and thus reject (consciously or not) the texts’ claims. Other readers may not find the texts’ description and claims discordant and thus accept the empathic cues within the narratives.
My interests in this book have been with observing the narrative tools and techniques that privilege a particular ideology of martyrdom. For all of the unique aspects of the texts, they converge in their insistence on the painlessness of martyrdom. But authors cannot control readers’ interpretations, and so readers may reject claims that seem improbable or impossible. I am less interested in arguing against particular interpretations of martyr texts and more interested in examining where readers find tensions in texts, why those tensions exist, and how those tensions are resolved.
Given the developing interest in the suffering body across the Roman world in the second century CE, it is not surprising that Christian texts demonstrate interest in and concerns about the body. Although I have argued that the martyr texts illustrate such concerns by rejecting the susceptibility of the Christian body to suffering, their authors still participate in the larger cultural discourse of the suffering body. What this unexpected use of the discourse of the “suffering self” may suggest is that Christian texts offer a promise of relief to the human condition: faithfulness provides relief from the life of pain. Christian Stoicism and developing doctrines about the resurrection may intersect with discourses about the suffering body, in answer to the problem of human suffering.
Interpretations of martyr texts that privilege the body in pain credit the Christian tendency to embrace bodily suffering as a contributing factor in the triumph of the new movement. It was the Christian sufferer, Judith Perkins argues, that “was essential for the growth of Christianity as an institution.”25 Her argument about the centrality of the discourse of suffering in this period is, I think, right. Not only was the ancient world a world full of pain; it was by the second century CE becoming a world where the pain and suffering of individuals was seen.26 The reality of life came to be culturally acknowledged in a new discourse, which allowed people to locate themselves discursively within this new category of “sufferer.” I also agree with Perkins that Christians exploited this discourse to good effect. If, however, the martyr texts reject pain as an experience of the martyrs, how does impassibility relate to this larger cultural interest in the self as sufferer?
My reading of the early Christian martyr texts suggests that Christians did indeed find the suffering self a useful discourse by which to construct their identities, distinguish their teachings, refute antagonistic claims, and retain believers. In these texts, however, suffering is not embraced as an identity but presented as a problem to be solved. Pain is the experience of those who live apart from God. At least in the moments at issue in martyr texts—trial, torture, and death—the Christian self is decidedly not a sufferer. God’s intervention miraculously transforms the physical experience. The torture that should hurt instead heals; the body that should be fragmented is instead made whole. In a world of sufferers, Christian martyrs serve as promises of another world where there is—existentially and not merely metaphorically—no pain.