Hymn 5

5. The Passion of Saint Vincent the Martyr.

Blessed martyr, make prosperous

your day of triumph,

on which, as the wage of your blood,

the crown is given you, Vincent.

This day raised you from the darkness

of the age—the torturer and judge overcome—

up to heaven,

and gave you back to Christ, rejoicing.

Now a partner of the angels,

you shine in a glorious robe,

which, an indomitable witness,

you had washed in streams of gore,

when the idol’s henchman,

girt with black laws,

with sword and chains compelled you

to sacrifice to the gods of the nations.

And first he had poured out soft words,

coaxing you gently,

as the wolf, a snatcher about to seize

the calf, first frisks and fawns.

“The greatest king of the world,” he said,

“who bears the sceptre of Romulus,

has decreed that all should serve

the ancient worship of the gods.

You Nazarenes, draw near,

and spurn your raw rite.

These stones, which the prince worships,

appease with smoke and a victim.”

Here Vincent cries out,

a deacon from the sacred tribe,

a minister of the altar of God,

one of the seven milk-white columns;

“Let those deities preside over you,

you may worship stones, you wood,

you, a dead man, become

the high priest of dead gods.

We shall confess the Father, author of light,

and his Son Christ,

who alone is the true God,

Datianus, this we shall confess.”

Here that man, now more disturbed,

“Do you dare, unhappy one,” he says,

“to violate this law of gods and princes

with harsh words,

a law both sacred and public,

to which the human race yields,

and does the impending peril

of your fervid youth not move you?

For receive this decree:

either an altar with incense and turf

must now be prayed at by you,

or death must be paid with your blood.”

He answered from the other side:

“Come then, whatever of strength,

whatever of power you have,

openly I resist—put it forth!

Hear what our word is:

Christ is God, and the Father:

we are his servants and witnesses;

wrest from me my faith, if you can!

Torments, prison, the claws,

and the plate hissing with flames,

and death itself, the last of penalties,

are sport to Christians.

O your empty vanity

and the brute decree of Caesar!

Worthy of your senses,

you bid us worship deities

hewn out by a craftsman’s hand,

forged anew in hollow bellows,

which lack voice, which lack a step,

unmoving, blind, tongueless.

For these, costly shrines

rise in gleaming marble,

for these, the smitten necks

of bellowing bulls fall.

But there too there are spirits,

there are, but masters of crimes,

fowlers after your salvation,

wandering, powerless, filthy,

who secretly drive you, goaded,

into every wickedness,

to ravage the just with slaughter,

to tear at the people of the pious.

They themselves know and feel

that Christ is mighty and lives,

and that his dreadful kingdom

is now, now at hand for the faithless.

In short they cry out, confessing,

driven from the hiding-places of the flesh

by the power and name of Christ,

both the gods and the same demons.”

The profane judge did not bear

the martyr thundering these things.

He cries out: “Stop up his mouth,

lest the shameless man hurl out more.

Shut the voice of the speaker

and hand him swiftly to the lictors,

those Plutos of the accused,

fed on cut-away flesh.

Now I will make the railer feel

the praetorian power,

lest he have mocked at us with impunity

to himself, while our gods are torn down.

Shall for you alone, stubborn one,

the Tarpeian rites be trampled?

Shall you, moreover, alone crush

Rome, the senate, Caesar?

Bound, with his arms twisted back,

stretch him upward and downward,

until the framework of his bones,

torn apart, cracks limb from limb.

After this, with gaping blows

lay bare the hidden parts of his ribs,

that through the recesses of the wounds

his uncovered liver may quiver.”

God’s soldier laughed at this,

rebuking the bloody hands

because the fixed claw did not enter

his limbs more deeply.

And now all the strength of the strong men

had failed in the disembowelling,

and panting effort had loosened

the weary muscles of their arms.

But he, so much the gladder,

lights up his brow, serene,

free of every cloud,

seeing you, Christ, present.

“What a look is that—for shame!”

Datianus said, raging,

“he rejoices, he beams, he challenges,

tortured, fiercer than the torturer!

That force, exercised

on the deaths of so many guilty,

gains nothing in this contest,

and the art of pains is conquered.

But you, nurslings of the prison,

a pair ever unconquered by me,

hold back your right hands a little,

that the weary vigour may breathe.

When the sores are dried again,

while the scar gathers itself

of the cooled blood,

a hand, re-furrowing, will wreck them.”

Against this the deacon replies:

“If now you see the strength

of your hounds grow faint,

come, you yourself, greater butcher,

show by what means they can

split the deepest recesses,

and thrust in your own hand

and drink the boiling streams.

You err, bloody one, if you think

you take your penalty upon me

when you slay the limbs

liable to death, torn to pieces.

There is another, there is one within,

whom none can violate,

free, quiet, whole,

with no share in the grim pains.

This, which you labour to destroy

with such great forces of fury,

is a vessel, loose and of clay,

to be broken in any way.

Indeed, rather, now strive

to cut and punish that one

who stands firm within, who tramples,

tyrant, on your madness.

This one, this one provoke, this one shatter—

unconquered, insuperable,

subject to no storms,

and subject to God alone.”

This he says, and again is mangled

by the hissing hooks,

to whom the praetor with treacherous mouth

hisses out serpent words:

“If such great stubbornness

hardens the callous of your breast

that you abhor to touch

our sacred cushion with your hand,

at least uncover the hidden pages

and the concealed books,

that the sect, sowing what is wicked,

may be burned with righteous fires.”

Hearing this, the martyr says:

“The fire which you, malignant one,

threatening, hold over the mystic letters,

you yourself will burn in, the more justly.

For the avenging sword of the heavenly

volumes will burn through

the tongue, interpreter of so great a poison,

with its thunderbolt.

You see the ashes that betray

the crimes of the men of Gomorrah,

nor is the dust of Sodom hidden,

an everlasting witness of their destruction.

This is your likeness, serpent,

whom soon the soot of sulphur

and bitumen mixed with pitch

will enmesh in lowest Tartarus.”

At this the persecutor, wounded,

turns pale, reddens, seethes,

rolling his mad eyes,

and, gnashing, casts up foam.

Then, having hesitated long,

he decrees: “Let the last examination

of all be plied with fire,

the gridiron, and the plates.”

At this he hurls himself toward the offices

with hastened step,

and, swift with joy, he forestalls

the very ministers of his penalty.

They came to the wrestling-ground of glory,

where hope and cruelty contend,

they join a doubtful struggle,

here the martyr, there the torturer.

A serrated rule roughens the bed

with its scattered teeth,

which a great heap of coals

makes steam with a living breath.

This pyre the holy man mounts

of his own will, with undaunted face,

as though, already conscious of his crown,

he were climbing a lofty tribunal.

Beneath, with crackling spray,

he glitters, sprinkled with shaken salt,

and, boiling with hissing stabs,

is driven scattered through his limbs.

Then the fat, pressed on, washes

the fiery branding-iron,

whence a force of smoking dew

melts gradually into his limbs.

Amid these he remains unmoved,

as though unknowing of pains,

and lifts his eyes on high,

for the bonds had bound his hands.

Raised up the stronger from there,

he is thrust into a mournful cave,

lest the free use of light

should enliven his lofty spirit.

Within, in the deepest dungeon,

is a place blacker with darkness,

which the narrow stones of a sunken vault

strangle, shut up.

Eternal night lurks there,

without the daytime star;

this dreadful prison is said

to have its own underworld.

Into this pit the savage foe

casts the martyr,

and sets his soles in wood,

with his legs spread apart.

Indeed he adds a new penalty too,

a craftsman skilled in the cross,

known to no tyrant

nor heard of in story before.

He orders that fragments of potsherds,

rough, with unpolished corners,

sharp-pointed, shapeless,

be strewn beneath the lying man’s back.

Anxious pains arm the whole couch

with sharp points,

which, beneath his sleepless side,

may strike with a piercing edge to meet him.

These the crafty man, devising

with cunning skill, had set in place,

but Christ destroys the clever

contrivances of Beelzebub.

For the prison’s blindness

flashes with the splendour of light,

and the twofold biting of the stock

leaps apart, its hollows broken.

Here Vincent recognizes

that it is at hand, what he had hoped,

the reward of so great a labour,

Christ, the giver of light.

Then he sees the fragments

of the potsherds now clothe themselves

in soft flowers,

the prison breathing the fragrance of nectar.

Indeed too the thronging angels

stand and speak close at hand,

one of whom, more august of face,

addresses the man with these words:

“Rise, renowned martyr,

rise, secure for yourself,

rise and be added to the kindly

assemblies as our comrade.

Now you have run enough

the offices of menacing punishment,

and, by the fair exit of death,

all your passion is accomplished.

O most unconquered soldier,

stronger than the strongest,

now the savage and harsh torments themselves

tremble at you, the conqueror.

Christ God, the spectator of these things,

repays them with an endless age,

and crowns with a generous right hand

the partner of his own cross.

Lay aside this perishing little vessel

woven of an iron framework,

which, shattered, is dissolved,

and come free into heaven.”

So he; but his inner light

breaks the closed doors,

and a thin brightness, through the cracks,

betrays the hidden light.

When the keeper of the dark threshold,

whom a night-long watch had held

to guard the deadly house,

stood stupefied and terrified at this,

he hears besides the martyr’s

most sweet song of praise,

to which, like a rival voice,

the hollow chamber gives an echo.

Then, fearing, he looks in,

as far as his sight, set against the doorposts,

can enter through the narrow

joints of the hinges.

He sees the strewn potsherds

put forth spring with many flowers,

and the man himself, his bonds torn off,

walking about and singing.

The ears of the troubled praetor

are filled with this miracle;

conquered, he weeps and, groaning, turns over

his anger, grief, and disgrace.

“Taken out of prison,” he says,

“let him be revived a little

with kind warmth, that, refreshed,

he may furnish new food for punishments.”

You might see a faithful crowd

gathering from the whole town,

softening his propped-up couch,

drying his raw wounds.

One wanders over the twofold furrows

of the claws with his kisses,

this one rejoices to lick the empurpling

gore of his body.

Many a linen garment they fashion

with the dripping blood,

that they may keep it at home

as a sacred safeguard for their descendants.

Then the very master of the prison

and the keeper of the chains,

as conscious antiquity reports,

suddenly believed in Christ.

He had seen, with the bolts barred,

the cave of dense gloom

gleam, shut up, with the splendour

of a stranger light.

But indeed, after the martyr

reached the rest of the couch,

sick with the weariness of delays

and kindled with the thirst of death—

if such a thing is to be called death,

which from the body’s dungeon

releases the free mind

and gives it back to God its author,

a mind cleansed by blood,

washed clean in the lavers of death,

which offered itself and its own life

to be sacrificed to Christ—

so then, as he leaned back his head

on the soft hangings thrown aside,

his spirit, leaving his limbs,

a conqueror, seizes heaven.

For him a way is unbarred,

straight, by a lofty path, to the Father,

which blessed Abel, slain by his impious

brother, had climbed.

White-robed choirs of the saints

throng him as he goes, on this side and that,

and John the Baptist, sent forth

from a like prison, calls him.

But the foe of the Christian name

was being scorched: the vain poisons

of his gall and his livid heart

had burned him out, made savage.

You would believe a dragon raged,

unarmed, its teeth broken.

“He escaped, exulting,” he says,

“the rebel, and bore off the palm.

But that last thing remains,

to inflict punishment on the dead,

to hand the corpse to the beasts

or give it to the dogs to tear.

Even now I will blot out his bones,

lest there be a tomb for his body

which the common herd may honour

and mark a martyr’s title.”

So he gnashes, and the holy body

the profane man (ah, dread crime!),

naked, its covering denied,

exposes among the sedge.

But none of the dread famine,

or of beasts or of birds,

dares to defile the trophy

of glory with a foul touch.

Indeed, if any, screaming shamelessly,

had flown around it from afar,

driven off by the onset

of a fierce bird, it turned to flight.

For a raven, once given to Elijah

as a carrier of food,

fulfils this duty diligently

and keeps watch close by.

From the nearby thickets it,

hostile with the sound of its wings,

and lashing the eyes with its feathers,

drove off the monstrous wolf.

Who of the faithless would dare to believe

that a rapacious beast,

ready to grapple with bulls,

gave way to soft feathers?

It went, growling its malice,

terrified by the bird’s light flight,

and had fled the prey it had seen

at the threats of an unwarlike guard.

What was your feeling then, Datianus,

as you heard such things?

With what great stabs did a hidden grief

pierce you, groaning,

when you saw yourself conquered

by the power of a slain body,

and unequal even to the very bones,

and lesser now than the empty limbs?

But what end, stubborn tyrant,

will set a limit to this

unbridled spirit?

Will no measure break you?

“None, nor will I ever cease;

for if savage ferocity

grows gentle, and clemency

softens the devouring ravens,

I will sink the corpse in the waves:

the mad wave never pardons

the shipwrecked, and the foaming

deep knows not how to spare.

Either it will always be borne there,

shifting through uncertain mockeries,

by wandering blasts,

feeding the scaly throngs,

or beneath the broken crags

the rough spines of the rocks

will burst the torn flesh

among the jagged recesses.

Is there any of the men, skilled

to drive a boat with vigour

by oar, rope, and sail,

who can cut the sea,

who may snatch from the marshy turf

the body that lies untouched,

and, carried in a light skiff,

bear it away over the broad expanse?

But let a hempen sack

enclose the folded corpse,

which a stone, tied by a cord,

may sink headlong into the deep.

And do you dart forth over the waves,

swift with the dripping oar-blade,

until a longer distance

hides the abandoned land from sight.”

A certain one of the soldiers

(Eumorphio was his name),

violent, bold, barbarous,

seizes these orders, hot with fury.

He weaves the corded mat,

fills it with the sewn-up body,

and, having measured much of the strait,

shakes it out amid the storms.

O most mighty power of God,

creating power of all things,

which once had levelled the swelling sea

as Christ walked upon it,

so that, treading the back of the deep,

he passed with dry steps,

and the wayfarer of the vast abyss

wet not his soles in the waves!

This same power had ordered

the Red Sea to gape open,

while, the floor laid bare,

the people, secure, tread a dry road.

So now too it bids

the sea serve the holy body

with quiet glidings,

sloping toward the curving shores.

A stone of millstone weight,

like white foam, floats up,

and the basket, guardian of so great

a pledge, is borne upon the waves.

The sailors, amazed, behold it

carried over the re-measured deep,

gliding gently backward,

with favourable tide and wind.

They themselves too contend to cut

the sea with their swift vessel,

but the limbs far outstrip them

to the soft bosom of the land;

in short, the quiet earth

receives them, brought back first,

before the keel, driven by their utmost

efforts, could touch the harbour.

Happy that retreat of the pleasant

shore, which, cherishing the holy

flesh in its sands,

served in place of a tomb,

while the pious care of the saints,

weeping, adorns the mound

and, the body entrusted to the tomb,

keeps it for the life to come!

But soon, the enemies subdued,

when peace was now restored to the just,

an altar grants the due rest

to the blessed bones;

for, set beneath the sanctuary

and laid up at the very foot of the altar,

they drink, drenched below,

the air of the heavenly gift.

So the body; but the seat of God

itself contains the man, received

with the Maccabee brothers

and next to Isaiah, who was sawn asunder,

yet to them fell a simple

crown of their pains, for whom

the final exit of death

set an end to their evils.

What such thing did the dismemberer dare?

Did he cast the severed segments

of the body, after the saw, to the beasts,

or give them to the waves?

Did the tyrant offer the tongue

of the Maccabee martyr, torn out,

or the skin snatched from his head,

to the bloody birds?

You alone, O twice-renowned,

you alone bore off the palm

of a double prize, you prepared

two laurels at once.

A conqueror in harsh death,

then afterward, after death, a conqueror

with equal triumph, you trample

the robber down with your body alone.

Be present now and receive

the suppliant voices of those who pray,

an effective pleader of our guilt

before the throne of the Father.

By yourself, by that prison,

the increase of your honour,

by the bonds, the flames, the claws,

by the prison’s stock,

by that potsherd fragment,

by which your won glory grew,

and the couch which we, trembling

descendants, kiss,

have pity on our prayers,

that Christ, appeased, may incline

a favourable ear to his own

and not charge all our sins.

If duly we venerate the solemn day

with mouth and heart,

if beneath the joy of your

footsteps we are laid low,

glide hither for a little while,

bringing the favour of Christ,

that our burdened senses may feel

the relief of pardon.

So let no delay now remain,

but that the noble spirit may take up

the flesh, roused again,

endowed with equal power,

so that the flesh which, sharing the labours,

bore the common peril,

may be also co-heir of glory

through all the ages forever.