Having just walked through the rest of the gallery and past paintings of the saints, it is thrilling to see them come to life so physically, so loudly and so subversively.
—CELIA GRAHAM-DIXON (YALE BOOKS BLOG1)
In July 2013 I visited the National Gallery in London to view some of the masterpieces of religious art. As it turns out, the visit was serendipitous because the museum was hosting a special exhibit on saints featuring the work of Michael Landy. Landy, Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist in residence at the National Gallery, created a number of 3-D mechanical pieces of art that reflected his interpretations of the very paintings I had gone to the gallery to see.2 The sculptures were larger than life, designed for audience interaction—indeed, one review describes the exhibit as inviting viewers to “to torment, mutilate, and martyr fiberglass effigies of church legends”—and simultaneously mesmerizing and disturbing.3 St. Appolonia held a pair of pliers and continuously tore out her own teeth, a mechanical action that would eventually destroy her face altogether. St. Thomas poked his finger at Jesus’ wounded side as if it were a punching bag. St. Jerome served penance by beating himself with a rock when someone stepped on a foot pedal. Visitors could play the part of the persecutor by spinning St. Catherine’s wheel.
The experiences I had that day in those two spaces—the special exhibit and the permanent exhibit—were strikingly different. As I stood in the gallery, observing Landy’s St. Francis hitting himself over the head with a crucifix when someone inserted donations, I was struck by the vast differences in experience and interpretation people have of martyr stories. I have worked with these texts for so long that perhaps I have become inured to the violence. Or maybe my time with these texts has brought me to see the violence in a new and different light. Landy “likes the saints because they are self-destructive.”4 In studying the martyr texts, he found “anarchists with pronounced self-destructive streaks.”5 Perhaps Landy’s interpretation of the martyrs stems from their willingness to submit to Roman authority. With few exceptions Christian martyrs do not attempt to avoid arrest, torture, and death. From this perspective we could see the martyrs’ actions as self-destructive. This is certainly a possible and, I would argue, even valuable reading of these texts for the modern world.6 In this book, however, I am more interested in thinking about the ways these texts might have functioned in early Christian communities. Thus in my readings these are not stories of people who destroy themselves—the martyr stories do not star masochistic Christians—but of people who are divinely delivered from pain, whose martyrdom preserves their bodies rather than destroys them. Landy’s exhibit was jarring to me because I saw in it what I fail to see in the martyr texts themselves: self-violence and bodily dissolution. While Landy’s saints function similarly to the martyr texts—both aim to make the martyrs’ physical and spiritual experiences meaningful to an audience—their messages are, I suggest, diametrically opposed. Where Landy’s martyrs inflict violence on themselves and in the process destroy their bodies, the martyr texts focus on the inability of outside forces to bring harm to and cause the dissolution of the Christian body.
In this book I examine a particular set of Christian bodies—martyred bodies as described primarily though not exclusively in second- and third-century martyr narratives—that endure torture but do not experience pain. Martyr accounts do not simply depict the history of persecution. Rather, as most scholars of early Christianity recognize, they construct the identities of nascent Christianities. The accounts thus challenge prevailing cultural norms and articulate a radically new understanding of the body. In all of this I join other scholars of early Christianity.
I diverge from previous scholarly work, however, by positing that with very rare exceptions the earliest Christian martyr texts do not claim that the martyrs experienced pain as a result of bodily torture. The ideologies of martyrdom developed in these texts, furthermore, are unconcerned with pain. To support this claim, I analyze the various narrative tools by which authors distance their heroes’ and heroines’ bodies from pain. I also contextualize the depictions of impassibility—the inability to feel pain—and impassivity—the lack of response to torture—within contemporary philosophical, religious, and judicial discourses. When viewed within these contexts, the martyrs’ experiences are not only less surprising than they may at first appear, but also more subversive. Divine Deliverance seeks to offer an alternative interpretation of early Christian martyr texts that parts from modern fascinations with gore and pain. Masochism may well be a part of martyrdom, but if it is, perhaps it reflects our own tendencies, not those of the martyrs.
Because pain is not wholly absent from the martyr texts, this book also analyzes its presence: which narrative characters experience pain? in what circumstances, and why? It explores the ways susceptibility to pain and injury differentiates Christian and non-Christian characters. I argue that the narrative depictions of pain and painlessness serve Christian needs far beyond the development of ideologies of martyrdom. By taking account of both sides of the discourse—pain and its absence—we see more clearly the ways martyr texts contribute to central Christian doctrines such as Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology.
This book is primarily concerned with the martyr texts’ assertions about pain, which may stand at odds with modern readers’ expectations. But to appreciate these narrative claims fully, we must also address several ancillary issues. The ways modern readers approach these texts, for instance, differ from ancient audiences’ experiences. We tend to read the texts silently, alone, and with particular genre expectations; ancient audiences most likely experienced these texts orally/aurally, communally, and almost certainly with different genre expectations. Most scholars are not threatened by persecution as they read these texts; many ancient audiences feared persecution, rightly or not. In addition, interpretive trends have shifted significantly over time—for instance, in the Middle Ages and again after the Enlightenment—and furthermore our relationship to and understanding of pain is markedly different from that of an ancient audience.
All of these differences matter because meaning does not inhere in the text itself but is instead created in the interaction between text and hearer. In this book I do not argue that interpretations of martyr texts that center on pain are misreadings, but they are readings produced within different cultural and historical circumstances than likely would have obtained in the first centuries of Christian history. When we move away from interpretations that privilege pain, we can see the texts’ emotional appeals more clearly. And when we resist interpretations built upon historical bodies—or even verisimilitudinous ones—we can perceive a broader set of ideological interests.
The vast majority of texts in early Christianity—indeed, in antiquity—were written with hearers, not readers, in mind. Consequently, the reader-response approaches that emerged in the 1960s have distinct limitations for understanding ancient textual practices. While these approaches rightfully reminded us that readers interpret text—texts, that is, do not have meaning apart from readers—they do not take full account of the oral/aural experience of ancient audiences. Given what we know about the sociological makeup of the early church and the literacy rates in antiquity, however, we simply cannot posit a community of readers.7 Scholars of antiquity who take up reader-response approaches, then, typically nod to the fact that in the ancient world “readers” are really “hearers” by substituting the word “audience” or the combination “reader/hearer” for the less accurate “reader.” But by and large, scholarly interpretations remain focused on texts, on manuscripts, on interpretive processes deeply rooted in written cultures. Even when the oral/aural culture is acknowledged, it may not influence interpretation.8
Focusing on reading rather than hearing audiences, however, risks distorting the exegetical process. A reader-centered focus, for example, may privilege meaning while underestimating the experiential effects of texts. In this case “response” is understood largely in cognitive rather than affective terms: responses are “not feeling shivers along the spine, weeping in sympathy, or being transported with awe, but having one’s expectations proved false, struggling with an irresolvable ambiguity, or questioning the assumptions upon which one had relied,” as Jonathan Culler notes.9 But in the ancient world, rhetoric is designed to move hearers and to prompt action.10 “Right listening,” Plutarch claims, “is deemed the beginning of right living” (Mor. 48D).11 We do well, therefore, to bring to the forefront of our interpretive practices a sensitivity to the ways that texts are not merely vehicles for constructing meaning but are events that invite audiences to participate in narrative action, in emotional appeals, and sometimes in social and political causes.12
Reading with an eye to orality reveals that even in their written form early Christian texts employ techniques of oral delivery, and this is certainly true for martyr texts: these narratives directly address their audiences; they appeal to the emotions; they explore alternative positions by means of question and answer; they imagine various characters’ positions.13 We must acknowledge, though, that a listener-centered focus is complicated because early Christian audiences are lost to us. For the earliest generations of hearers of martyr texts we can only imagine—more or less fictionally—what their experiences of the recitation of stories of martyrs might have been. For the earliest period, Christian hearers are beyond our empirical reach. Surely their experiences were varied, depending on time, place, and prior knowledge.
We do know a great deal about Christian audiences of a slightly later period. Augustine’s sermons, for example, offer evidence of the ways homilies were given and received in the fifth century. These sermons indicate that Augustine expected his congregation to experience a range of emotions when listening to martyr accounts. Discussing the famous North African bishop and martyr, Cyprian, Augustine reminds his audience that “we were listening with our ears, attending to it with our minds; we could see him contending, in a way we were afraid for him in his peril, but we trusted God would help him.”14 Augustine further describes that as he is “watching” and is “delighted by” Cyprian, it is as if he “can embrace,” “see,” and “rejoice” in the saint and his victory.15 Here Augustine maps the emotional contours of the aural experience; he guides his congregation through the emotions of fear, anxiety, and hope as they hear Cyprian witness to his faith. When Augustine and his congregation are afraid for Cyprian and hope for God to intervene, they are imagining themselves as eyewitnesses to the martyrdom. The pathos of the text—its appeal to emotions—brings past events into the Christian present collapsing chronological and geographical distances.16 The performance of martyr accounts makes the martyr saint fully present in the fifth-century church.17
But for the second- and early third-century church we must make some reasoned guesses, based on later practices, the architecture of house churches, clues in the texts themselves, and by drawing some informed parallels between Christian hearers in communal settings and other hearers in communal settings—such as the theater or the courtroom. Our interpretation must remain somewhat speculative; the discipline of foregrounding the listening subjects and investigating the range of their potential responses, however, balances out the uncertainty of interpretation. If we take seriously that the earliest encounters with martyr texts were decidedly not with the printed page but instead oral/aural, then we must be willing to wade into waters of some uncertainty since the terra firma on which interpretation so often relies is built upon a model that we know was not employed, namely, readers reading texts. To grasp the model that was employed, we must contemplate the real-time experience of the Christian audience as they gathered together to hear Christian texts. We must be attentive to the affective qualities of narratives, particularly in their sequential development, as Stephen Moore observes:
That we occupy a different world from that of first-century Christianity is a truism. But the orality-literacy factor persuades us that this is not the whole truth: we occupy not just a different world, but a different galaxy as well—“the Gutenberg galaxy”. . . . Since Gutenberg we have exchanged a primal sea for dry land, as it were, and now our water-breathing is confined by mime. Thus contextualized, the consecutive mode of exegesis, which seeks to immerse itself in the time-flow of the text, offers at least some corrective to our print-shaped, sight-dominant conception of biblical texts—that is, as quiescent, immobile objects to be dismantled or quantified.18
Augustine’s sermon on Cyprian and Moore’s exegetical program work in tandem to help us imagine the experiential qualities of early Christian martyr texts.
Before we can understand how the narrative sequences and plot structures of the martyr accounts affected the listening audience, we must first imagine who this ancient audience was. The names and personal experiences of these Christians are lost to us, but they heard, struggled with, and found inspiration in the stories of faithful Christians who witnessed unto death. What was their emotional experience in listening to the trials, to the unjust charges leveled against their compatriots, to the graphic tortures depicted so carefully that they became images burning in their minds? How might the collective experience of recitation and hearing affect their experience? How might a first-time hearer be swept along with more experienced Christians in the ups and downs of these stories? What experiences did these hearers bring with them to the community gatherings that would inform their interpretations of martyr texts?
Imagining these experiences may point us to ways early Christians used these texts; they can guide historical and literary interpretations, even if they do not delineate all possible meanings communities might find in these texts. The cultural knowledge ancient Christians likely brought to their listening experiences informs, as we will see, the range of meanings available in these texts.19 Although the questions above may not have empirical answers, they are nonetheless worth contemplating as we study the martyr texts. Such questions will inevitably add texture and nuance to interpretations of these texts since reading these texts qua texts and reading them in our own modern setting represent different experiences than would obtain in antiquity.
In most cases the earliest Christian audiences would have been together when they heard literary accounts of martyrdom, likely in a house church—a private home in which a group of Christians would worship. Most of our hearers were likely standing rather than sitting, and standing rather close to one another, according to Ramsay MacMullen’s work on the material remains of the early church.20 There would be, in other words, a clear sense of being a part of a collective. These hearers were not alone; they were not solitary receivers of stories, but rather they were among like-minded community members where they could have been influenced by each others’ physical movements, tears, laughs, gasps, retorts, and applause. The transference of emotion—emotional contagion—is triggered through facial, vocal, and postural feedback and is aided by an interest in the welfare of those around us.21 People are more likely, that is, to share the emotional experiences of those whom they like.22 The communal aspect of Christian worship sets the stage not merely for shared auditory experiences but also for shared emotional experiences. Emotional contagion can lead to what Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” which can electrify a crowd.23 This collective effervescence is, according to Randall Collins, “the rhythmic entrainment of all participants into a mood that feels stronger than any of them individually, and carries them along as if under a force from outside.”24 Those listening to martyr texts may have experienced emotional contagion at several levels: the martyrs’ own emotions—their fear, their confidence, their resolve—may have transferred to the audience; the fear or indignation the texts attribute to the narrative eyewitnesses of the martyrdom might transfer to the audience; and the emotions of fellow audience members could spread from hearer to hearer.
Early Christian listeners heard speakers. By stressing this, I mean to draw attention to the fact that speakers inflect their speech, tell stories, engage and entertain audiences.25 Ancient rhetoricians taught that the speaker must keep his audience on track by modulating his voice, by pausing effectively, by dramatic intonation, and even by facial expressions and physical gestures. According to the first-century BCE Greek rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus, texts offer implicit speech cues to the orator: do not the words “themselves cry aloud and teach us how they should be spoken, almost uttering aloud, ‘Here the tone should be refined, here you should speak eagerly, here in a measured way; here you should break off the continuity, here join together the sequence; here show sympathy, there be disdainful; be frightened of this, ridicule this, and exaggerate that?’” (Dem. 54). Appropriate tone, while important, is not enough, however. Dionysius teaches that the speaker must have the same facial expressions as “those who are truly experiencing it employ” (54). Likewise, the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian maintain that the orator who wishes to engage the emotions of his audience must exhibit those same emotions if he is to be received as credible.26
If Christian delivery of martyr texts followed these principles, not only would the dialogue be verbally expressive—quite unlike the monotone recitation of Scripture in many churches today—but it would also be physically expressive, embodying outrage, jest, pun, accusation, and confession. Discussing the power of the speaker over his audience, Cicero writes, “When the one speaking rises the assembly will give a sign for silence, then repeated assent, abundant admiration; laughter when he wills it or, when he wills it, tears” (Brut. 84.290).27 As Longinus observes, a good speaker directs his hearers’ emotions and thus can “run away with his audience” (On the Sublime, 16.2), stirring them, as Harrison notes, “to compassionate, empathetic identification with the emotion he conveyed, so that they shared it, were moved by it, and were irresistibly overcome by it.”28 We must not undervalue the power of rhetoric—tools and techniques Christians shared with the larger literary culture—in martyr accounts because it points to the social function of narratives. Rather, our interpretations should be informed by the study of the rhetorical tools—and their effects—utilized by authors of martyr texts. Imagining the speaker’s tone when reading different portions of the martyr accounts, for instance, affects meaning: would a given passage have been read with pity? with sarcasm? in condemnation? Such variations in tone lead audiences to understand narrative discourse in particular ways.
Hearing is second only to sight as the most important sense in ancient philosophical discussions of sense perception.29 The mechanism by which hearing works is analogous to sight: hearing impresses a memory on the mind, which allows images to be recalled. Cicero explains the importance of visualizing a memory that has been imprinted by hearing: since sight is the strongest of the senses, things that are heard are best remembered “if they are also transmitted to our minds by means of sight, with the result that things unseen and invisible are designated by a sort of shape and image and form so that we grasp things, as it were, by looking closely that we can barely embrace by means of thinking” (De Or. 2.87.357–58; LCL). Sense perception, moreover, was understood to form (but also reform or deform) the mind; so the things one heard or saw, or thought one heard and saw, were powerful for good or for ill.30 Vision, for instance, could “connect the viewer so intimately to its object that the adhesion could damage the soul beyond repair.”31 Thus Christian authors navigated vision and memory carefully to instruct and control not merely what, but also how Christians saw.32
Relatedly, ekphraseis, detailed verbal descriptions of events or objects, “enabled the hearer to ‘see’ what was being described and to feel as if they were in its presence.”33 Ekphrasis is “descriptive language bringing that which is being explained visible before the sight,” according to the first-century CE rhetorician Aelius Theon.34 Eusebius, relying on the power of the descriptions of martyrdom, exhorts his audience to make the martyrs’ “wondrous excellence a lasting vision before [their] eyes” (Mart. Pal. 2).35 Ancient audiences, as Aelius Theon and Eusebius indicate, were expected to have the ability to visualize the events they heard about, and such a skill, as Elizabeth Castelli argues, signaled “good listening skills and proper attentiveness.”36 This rhetorical technique promotes intimacy and immediacy by bridging the distance between event and hearer.37 Rich descriptions of events narrated by martyr texts—and visualized in the audience’s minds—therefore may have prompted Christians to feel as if they had witnessed the death of the martyr. This would explain Augustine’s exclamations: “I love the martyrs; I go and watch the martyrs; when the passions of the martyrs are read, I am a spectator, watching them” (Serm. 301A).38 Ekphraseis, furthermore, help an audience not only to visualize an event but also to hear it more fully; they offer, in Diane Fruchtman’s words, “a soundtrack to the scenes playing out before the reader’s eyes,” such that the martyrs’ actions are experienced “in real time.”39 Through ekphraseis hearers are transported through time and space; they are given the opportunity to witness for themselves events of the past. Hearing, then, is not divorced from seeing, but the seeing accomplished is of the mind’s eye; it sketches in color and with movement what the speaker relates in words. It brings past events to bear on the present.
Hearing may also draw on the sense of touch. In Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, the fourth-century bishop engages his audience through somatic empathy: the congregation should be able to imagine how the martyrs felt as they were exposed to the cold since they had themselves experienced bitter coldness. Gregory writes: “It was icy cold that day. It is absolutely unnecessary that I explain to you what kind of cold precisely. You can guess it from today: it was the kind of cold that even permeates the walls. With its intensity you are all familiar—both those from outside the region and the natives—so you don’t need to learn it from my sermon.”40 Audiences were expected to see and feel the events that were orally narrated, to imagine being a witness, to imagine being a martyr.
Those Christians standing in the house church listening to the martyr texts, moreover, were experienced listeners. Inhabitants of the Empire could learn the art of listening from attending—or even passing by—courtrooms. Far from being tucked away in quiet and private quarters, Roman trials were often public: the interactions of judges, advocates, litigants, and audience members were on public display as one walked through the streets of Rome.41 Some men learned the art of listening in school. Plutarch’s essay “On Listening”—written for Nicander when he assumed the toga virilis and prepared to study philosophy—argues that an audience member is a “partner in the speech and a co-worker with the one speaking” (Mor. 45E). But one need not have the leisure to attend court or the status to participate in schools in order to imbibe social expectations for listening. A wide variety of public events—“recitations of poetry and prose works, dramatic performances in theaters and at festivals, declamations in high rhetorical style, street-corner philosophical diatribes”—all “brought the fruits of literacy before the general population, educating the public in its uses and popularizing its conventions.”42 Thus Christian hearers learned to be hearers because part of the common culture was to learn to listen to and interact with speech.
Christians heard martyr stories within the context of Christian worship and thus their theological meaning must not be underestimated: these stories verified, commented on, and provided further testimony of Christian beliefs.43 Discussing the passio of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, Raymond van Dam goes as far as to see the passio as “a translation of the Bible.”44 Not only did martyr texts need to be rhetorically effective; they also had to be religiously instructive.45 In reading martyr texts, therefore, we must keep in mind the liturgical contexts in which they functioned for earliest Christianity; they were not received as documentary texts that merely catalogued atrocities against innocent Christians. They were religious texts that articulated the continued presence of God among the faithful; through ekphrasis, they brought the miraculous deeds of God into the present.46 Indeed, Augustine suggests that some Christians claimed the Passion of Perpetua as authoritative scripture.47 The Passion itself makes a clear bid for the scriptural authority of the martyr account and other contemporary examples of the “power of the one Spirit” (1.2–5).
In addition to learning about various rhetorical conventions, ancient hearers learned how to respond appropriately to speakers. A variety of ancient sources reflect on the participation of the audience in the performance of speech: Plutarch remarks that it is the “overbearing and coarse listener” who is “not softened or moved by anything that is said” (Mor. 44A). Such a listener “neither moves his brow nor speaks to betray that he is happy to listen, but by silence and an affected arrogance and attitude, hunts for a reputation for seriousness and depth; as though praise were money, he thinks that he is taking away from himself everything he gives to another” (44B).48 Thus we do better to think of early Christian hearers not as a silent audience at a modern Broadway play—where interjections would quickly result in ejection—but rather as conversation partners in the telling of a story. They interacted with the speaker through their facial expressions, applause, and even verbally.49 Indeed, patristic authors regularly comment on their congregations’ audible and physical responses to what they hear: Christian hearers react by beating their breasts, groaning, weeping, laughing, and applauding. Silence was a marker less of respect than of a failure to understand.50 John Chrysostom’s homilies force the congregation to consider various points of view, to see events from different characters’ perspectives, to agree or disagree, “in short, to converse.”51 Good listeners, Plutarch teaches, understand that a speaker’s words are a seed that is developed and expanded “by their own efforts” (Mor. 48C). Listening in the ancient world, then, was not a passive activity whereby information was transferred from speaker to audience but rather an active pursuit by which an audience participated in the making of meaning.
Hearing triggers memories related to events narrated. As residents of the Roman Empire, early Christians were not isolated from the larger culture. They did not hide in catacombs, protected from the desires, entertainments, interests, and art around them. One way this observation affects the way we think about listeners experiencing martyr texts, though surely not the only way, is the ubiquity of the amphitheatrical games. When modern readers study the text of the Passion of Perpetua, for instance, they may envision an amphitheater, and maybe even the one at Carthage, but surely they do not—they cannot—imagine it in its sensational entirety.
The amphitheater in Carthage as it stands now is not large, but its current state is misleading: in the early third century, when Perpetua and Felicitas are said to have been executed there, it was one of the largest amphitheaters in the Empire and would have seated at least thirty thousand people.52 Standing in the Carthage arena, it is easy to imagine the voices in the front rows calling out, the ground itself shaking from feet stamping on stone, from the clapping and jeering of the crowds. Because the seating was built at a sharp incline, the acoustics were good; spectators even in seats high up would have heard the action on the sand. Modern visitors can walk through the excavated areas, including what archaeologists have identified as the spoliarium, the room off the arena where the dead and not-yet-dead were taken, finished off as necessary, and stripped. Visitors can stand in these places and ponder the atrocities that occurred, but they likely cannot truly imagine the carnage. Divorced as we are from the violent reality of the ancient Roman games, we have trouble applying our intellectual knowledge to the experience of hearing martyr texts.
Since most modern readers lack experiences of violence like that of the arena, we must listen all the more carefully to our ancient sources if we are to appreciate the martyr texts’ potential effects on Christian listeners. A gladiator’s experience—imaginary though it may be—of the sights, sounds, and emotions pulsing through the amphitheater, for example, become palpable through Quintilian’s description: “The whole place hummed with all the machinery of death: one sharpened a sword, another heated iron plates in the fire; here rods were brought out, there whips. The trumpets began to sound their fatal blare, the stretchers of doom were brought in, and my funeral procession got underway before my death. Everywhere were wounds, groans, gore; the totality of my peril lay before my eyes.”53 Early Christians listening to martyr texts would inevitably have pulled from their own experiences of amphitheaters to make sense of the narrative worlds and to form participatory responses to literary action.54
Our reading is dulled because we have no access to the ways our senses—sound, smell, sight—would have informed our understandings of the martyr stories. When I, at least, read about Germanicus dragging a beast on top of himself, or Polycarp being burned and then stabbed, or Perpetua being tossed by a bull, or Saturus being bitten by a leopard, my visual imagery is sanitized. My martyrs die without blood, without gore, without screaming or writhing; absent are the mangled body parts strewn across the arena sands. But ancient hearers brought all of this to their auditory experience. On their way to the market or to their jobs or even to the house church, they passed homes with intricate mosaics depicting prisoners or gladiators fighting beasts and dripping in blood. They passed graffiti honoring particular gladiators or announcing impending games. They not only passed by but attended amphitheatrical games—as Tertullian and Augustine are so exercised about—where all of their senses were engaged, and this varied sensory memory must inevitably have played an enormous role in the communal reception and interpretation of the stories of the martyrs.55 These experiences informed and enlivened the ekphraseis of the martyr texts such that the events of the past clearly—and palpably—are brought into the present.
The ancient audiences who listened to the martyr stories, therefore, are decidedly not us. They brought to their listening a cache of cultural experiences that we do not have access to but that undoubtedly affected the ways they heard, responded to, and imagined the martyr stories.56 As a group they were involved audibly and physically; they had something at stake in the texts they heard, interacting with and making meaning of them. When scholars, alone in their studies, read their critical editions, they in effect hit the mute button, surely dulling the dynamism of these stories in the early church and their emotional potential.
When we approach the early martyr texts apart from the constraints of history or historical verisimilitude, it is easier to accept their claims to painless torture. The texts are more fruitfully read as “texts”—not “documents”—that construct reality but do not necessarily reflect actual or even plausible historical events.57 We should then focus on the rhetorical nature of the texts’ counterintuitive claims and concern ourselves less with their historical accuracy in depicting the corporeal experience of torture.58 From this perspective the martyr texts present a body that is, as Caroline Walker Bynum puts it, “not a raw biological fact but a cultural construct.”59 As such these martyred bodies reveal ways early Christians constructed themselves vis-à-vis the world and their God. This way of reading imbues the martyred body with much greater meaning and possibility. If we read the death scenes in Christian martyr texts not as reflections of a historical reality but as hopes for an eschatological reality, as accounts not of trials and tortures but of God’s miraculous interactions in the world, perhaps we may find in these texts bodies that speak a truth quite different from what we expect. The truth these bodies speak is significantly less masochistic than tradition has often assigned to them: they testify to the freedom from pain attained by divine deliverance.60 They offer a story that is very different from Landy’s exhibit, and one that is much more hopeful.
If we are to begin understanding the wealth of social and cultural influences on ancient hearers’ interpretations of martyr texts, we must bring to the forefront not only ancient horizons of expectation but also—equally—modern ones. Chapter 1 examines the cultural and social experiences of modern audiences that inevitably shape their understandings of martyr texts. These modern experiences must be recognized as foreign to the ancient world. Even when categories or experiences are shared, the meaning attached to them may differ; this is, I suggest, the case for the categories “pain” and “suffering.” Thus we must not only understand the different ways modern and ancient audiences receive the texts and the different cultural information available to each group, but also recognize that the two audiences have different understandings of the experience and significance of pain and suffering.
The following two chapters survey various narrative techniques early Christian martyr texts employ to distance the Christian body from the pain of martyrdom. Chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between the text and the listening audience in making meaning. It explores the ways martyr texts engage the audience’s interest and empathy to inscribe alternative meanings onto the body of the martyr. The texts carefully describe the physical assaults on the martyrs’ bodies, thereby activating the audience’s expectations for pain; but they immediately thwart that expectation by insisting the Christian martyrs were insensitive to pain. In addition, the texts challenge audience expectations for pain in torture by including stories in which the tools of torture refuse to participate in the persecution of Christians, or stories in which the persecutors themselves are unable to obtain their desired goals. Martyr texts also upend audience expectations by cursorily reporting the execution of the martyr or by obscuring the audience’s sightlines at the moment of death. In both of these cases death is seemingly less important than we might assume for a martyr text, a challenge to expectation that listeners must navigate and interpret. This chapter, therefore, examines narrative techniques that engage listeners and then direct them toward particular—perhaps surprising—(re-)interpretations of events.
Chapter 3 surveys narrative techniques for rejecting pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom. A number of texts explicitly deny the experience of pain altogether by employing the language of analgesia or anesthesia in their descriptions of the martyrs’ experiences of torture. Other texts employ typical terms for pain (e.g., doleo or algeō) but negate them. These characterizations are found in both Greek and Latin texts across the Roman Empire: from Pergamum to Lyons and Vienne to Carma, to Cirta, Carthage, Pannonia, and beyond. Such assertions are found in martyr texts that appear to date from the mid-second century into the fifth century and beyond.61 This language offers little opportunity to negotiate the startling and counterintuitive assertion that Christian bodies do not feel the pain of torture. Some narratives differentiate the experiences of the martyrs’ bodies from those of their spirits. Although in these cases the terms “analgesia” and “anesthesia” may not be employed explicitly, the narratives nonetheless distance the martyr from the experience of torture by positing a dualism between body and spirit or mind: Christians do not experience—or at least are not moved by—pain because their souls prevail over their bodies. Often texts claim the presence of the divine with, and in, the martyr during torture. The Christian’s impassibility—or at least ability to withstand torture—is attributed to the presence and support of the divine. Finally, many texts thwart the audience’s visual imagination by preparing listeners to envision a grotesque murder but then unexpectedly describing instead a beautiful body unharmed by torture. In these stories torture does not harm Christians; rather, it heals them.
Chapter 4 examines stories in which pain does function as a marker of meaning. In some texts martyrs experience bodily pain apart from persecution; severing worldly ties, for instance, may be painful, but the texts do not associate this pain with persecution for the faith. In other texts, confessing Christians are insensitive to the pain of torture, but apostates are not: in these cases the experience of pain is a marker of faithlessness. In still other texts injury is transferred from the martyr to the persecutor. Suffering, therefore, is directly related to torture, but it is surprisingly located: the persecutor rather than the martyr experiences the physical trauma.
Chapter 5 contextualizes the claims about the martyrs’ experiences by investigating ways this discourse of painlessness builds on or resonates with existing discourses. Assertions of impassibility in martyrdom, for instance, may reflect interactions with the broader discourse of Stoic philosophy. Although Stoicism, properly speaking, did not claim that the wise man would be immune to pain, there is evidence that this is precisely how some people in the ancient world understood it. Additionally, the discourse of painlessness may reflect communal appropriation of certain eschatological expectations about resurrected bodies and future rewards. The martyrs, that is, may be enjoying, proleptically, the rewards promised in Revelation 21:4: “pain will be no more.” This chapter, furthermore, examines ways that Christian claims to impassibility subvert pagan constructions of Christianity. Thus, rather than understanding painlessness as a “discourse,” it is perhaps better understood as a counter-discourse. Pagans constructed Christians as suffering and in pain at their prosecutorial hands. Christian claims to impassibility then function as a counternarrative, as a challenge to the description of pagan judicial triumph. In sum, this chapter explores competing discourses by means of which Christians aimed to change the story—if not for Romans then for themselves—about Christian death, from one that emphasized criminality, irrationality, stubbornness, and subjection to one that aligned Christian faith with piety, self-control, and glorification. At the center of these discourses and counter-discourses of pain and painlessness is the Christian martyr.
The Conclusion explores audiences’ encounters with martyr texts after fears of judicial violence have passed. Christian communities used the stories of the martyrs long after the period of active opposition to Christianity had ended. Thus we may trace a further relationship between text and audience in which, to appropriate Catharine Edwards’s words, “we are brought to search for meaning . . . in the suffering body of the reader.”62 The martyrs’ divine deliverance from pain may offer hope to later readers who, before widespread anesthetics, had little expectation for a pain-free existence. But divine deliverance—the miraculous intervention into physiological reactions—is also a stumbling block for many modern readers. The book concludes then with reflections drawn from recent considerations of narrative empathy, which offer insight into why readers may overlook or even reject the claims to impassibility made within these texts.