Ad Martyras

Among the nourishments of the flesh, blessed martyrs elect, which our lady mother the Church furnishes you in prison from her breasts, and which the brethren one by one supply from their own resources, accept also something from us that may serve to nourish the spirit as well. For it does no good to fatten the flesh while the spirit goes hungry. Indeed, if what is weak is tended, no less must what is weaker not be neglected. I am no one of such standing as to address you. Yet even the most accomplished gladiators are spurred on not only by their trainers and overseers, but even by untrained and idle bystanders from afar, so that hints thrown out from the crowd itself have often proved useful. First, then, blessed ones, do not grieve the Holy Spirit, who entered the prison with you. For if he had not now entered with you, neither would you be there today. And so make it your concern that he persevere there with you, and so lead you out from there to the Lord. The prison, indeed, is the devil's house too, in which he keeps his household. But you have come into the prison for this very purpose: to trample him underfoot even in his own house. For already you had trampled him in the encounter outside. So let him not say, "They are on my ground; I will tempt them with base hatreds, with desertions, or with quarrels among themselves." Let him flee your sight, and let him cower contracted and torpid in his own depths, like a snake charmed out or smoked out of its hole. Let him not have it so well in his own kingdom that he can set you against one another, but let him find you fortified and armed with concord; for your peace is war to him. This peace some who do not have it in the Church are accustomed to beg from the martyrs in prison. And therefore you ought, for this reason too, to have it and cherish it and guard it among yourselves, so that, should the case arise, you may be able to bestow it on others as well.

As for the rest, the encumbrances of the mind escorted you, like your kinsfolk, only to the threshold of the prison. From that point you have been cut off from the world itself, and how much more from the present age and its affairs? Nor let this dismay you, that you have been cut off from the world. For if we reflect that the world itself is rather the prison, we shall understand that you have come out of a prison rather than gone into one. The world holds the greater darkness, the darkness that blinds men's hearts. The world clamps on the heavier chains, the chains that bind men's very souls. The world breathes out the fouler defilements, the lusts of men. The world, in short, holds the more numerous prisoners, namely the whole human race. In the end it awaits the judgment not of a proconsul but of God. And so, blessed ones, count yourselves transferred, should the case arise, from a prison into a place of safekeeping. It has darkness, but you are yourselves light. It has bonds, but you are loosed unto God. A grim odour breathes out there, but you are a fragrance of sweetness. A judge is awaited, but you are going to pass judgment on the judges themselves. Let him grieve there who sighs for the fruit of the present age. The Christian, even outside the prison, has renounced the age; in the prison he has renounced the prison too. It makes no difference where you are in the world, you who are outside the world. And if you have lost some of life's joys, it is good business to lose something in order to gain greater things. I say nothing yet of the reward to which God invites the martyrs. Let us for the present compare the manner of life in the world and in prison, to see whether the spirit does not gain more there than the flesh loses. Nay, even what is rightful the flesh does not lose, thanks to the care of the Church and the love of the brethren; and over and above, the spirit obtains what is always useful to the faith. You do not see strange gods; you do not stumble upon their images; you do not share in the solemn festival days of the heathen by the very mingling with them; you are not battered by foul reeking smoke, nor struck by the shouting of the shows, by the savagery or frenzy or shamelessness of those who keep them; your eyes do not collide with the haunts of public lusts; you are free from scandals, from temptations, from evil memories—already, indeed, free from persecution itself. The prison offers the Christian what the desert offered the prophets. The Lord himself spent much of his time in retirement, that he might pray more freely, that he might withdraw from the world: in the end he showed his glory to the disciples in solitude. Let us do away with the name "prison" and call it a place of retreat. Though the body is shut in, though the flesh is confined, all things lie open to the spirit. Roam in spirit, walk abroad in spirit; and set before yourself not shaded race-tracks or long colonnades, but that road which leads to God. As often as you walk it in spirit, so often will you not be in prison. The leg feels nothing in the stocks when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole man about and bears him wherever it wishes. But where your heart shall be, there shall be your treasure also. Let our heart, then, be where we wish to have our treasure.

Grant now, blessed ones, that the prison is irksome even to Christians. We were called to the warfare of the living God already at that moment when we answered the words of the sacramental oath. No soldier comes to war amid luxuries, nor advances to the battle-line from his bedchamber, but from tents pitched light and stripped bare, where all is hardness and roughness and discomfort. Even in peacetime soldiers learn beforehand to endure war through toil and hardship—by marching under arms, by running the field, by digging the trench, by locking the testudo, by sweating. Everything depends on sweat, lest bodies and minds take fright at passing from shade to sun and from sun to frost, from tunic to breastplate, from silence to shouting, from quiet to uproar. Accordingly, blessed ones, whatever this hardship is, reckon it as a training of the virtues of mind and body. You are about to enter a noble contest, in which the living God is the president of the games, the Holy Spirit the master of the arena, the prize a crown of eternity, of angelic substance, citizenship in the heavens, glory for ever and ever. And so your trainer, Christ Jesus, who anointed you with the Spirit and led you out to this contest-ground, willed that before the day of the contest you should be set apart from your freer condition for a harsher regimen, that your strength might be made strong within you. For indeed even athletes are set apart for a stricter discipline, that they may give themselves to the building up of their strength. They are kept from luxury, from richer foods, from more pleasant drink; they are constrained, racked, wearied: the more they have laboured in their exercises, the more they hope for victory. And these men, says the Apostle, do it to obtain a perishable crown. We, who are to obtain an eternal one, take the prison to be our wrestling-school, that we may be led out to the stadium of the tribunal well exercised in every hardship; for virtue is built up by hardship, but undone by softness.

We know from the Lord's saying that the flesh is weak, the spirit ready. Let us not, then, flatter ourselves because the Lord agreed that the flesh is weak. For he foretold that the spirit is ready precisely to show what ought to be subject to what—namely, that the flesh should serve the spirit, the weaker the stronger, that even from it the flesh may take on strength. Let the spirit confer with the flesh about their common salvation, thinking no longer of the discomforts of the prison, but of the contest and the battle itself. The flesh will perhaps fear the heavy sword and the lofty cross and the rage of the beasts and the supreme penalty of the fire and all the executioner's ingenuity in torments; but let the spirit set before itself and before the flesh that, bitter though these things are, they have nevertheless been borne by many with an even mind—nay, even sought of their own accord—for the sake of fame and glory, and not by men only, but by women too, so that you also, blessed women, may answer to your sex. It would be long, were I to enumerate one by one those who by their own resolve made an end of themselves with the sword. Of women there is an example ready to hand. Lucretia, who suffered violation, drove a knife into herself in the sight of her kinsmen, that she might win glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his right hand on the altar, that this deed of his might have its fame. The philosophers did less—Heraclitus, who smeared himself with cow-dung and so burned himself up; likewise Empedocles, who leapt down into the fires of Mount Etna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago flung himself onto a pyre—since women too have despised the flames: Dido, when she was being forced to marry after her most beloved husband; likewise the wife of Hasdrubal, who, when Carthage was already ablaze, that she might not see her husband a suppliant of Scipio, flew with her children into the burning of her fatherland. Regulus, a Roman general, taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, when he had refused that he alone should be exchanged for many Carthaginian captives, chose rather to be given back to the enemy; and, packed into a kind of chest and pierced on every side from without with nails, he felt as many crosses. A woman willingly sought out the beasts—and indeed asps more dreadful than any serpent, more dreadful than bull or bear—which Cleopatra let loose upon herself, that she might not fall into the hands of her enemy. But the fear of death is not so great as the fear of torments. And so the Athenian courtesan yielded to the executioner: privy to a conspiracy, when on that account she was being tortured by the tyrant, she did not betray the conspirators, and at the last she bit off her own tongue and spat it into the tyrant's face, to show him that the torments could accomplish nothing against her, even if they should persist further. For it is no secret that what is today among the Lacedaemonians a most solemn rite is the diamastigosis, that is, the scourging. In this sacred ceremony all the noble youths are flogged with whips before the altar, while their parents and kinsfolk stand by and exhort them to persevere. For it will be reckoned an adornment and a glory, with the greater title of honour, if the soul has yielded to the blows rather than the body. Therefore, if so much is granted to earthly glory by the vigour of body and mind, that it should despise sword, fire, cross, beasts, and torments under the reward of human praise, I may say that these sufferings are slight in comparison with the attainment of heavenly glory and the divine reward. If glass costs so much, how much the true pearl? Who, then, would not most gladly pay out for the true as much as others pay for the false?

I pass over for now the motive of glory. These same contests of cruelty and torture have already, among men, been trampled underfoot by mere affectation, by a kind of disease of the mind. How many idlers does the affectation of arms hire out to the sword? Certainly they go down to the very beasts out of affectation, and think themselves the more handsome for their bites and scars. Some have even hired themselves out to the fires, to run a fixed course in a burning tunic. Others, with most patient shoulders, have strolled about under the huntsmen's whips. These things, blessed ones, the Lord has permitted into the world not without cause, but to exhort us now, and to confound us on that day, if we should shrink from suffering for the truth, unto salvation, what others have affected for vanity, unto perdition.

But let us leave aside these examples of constancy that come of affectation, and turn to the contemplation of the human condition itself, that even these things may instruct us—how steadfastly we ought to face whatever has been wont to befall men even against their will. For how often have fires burned men alive? How often have wild beasts, escaping from their cages both in their own forests and in the midst of cities, devoured men? How many have been done to death by robbers with the sword, and even by enemies on the cross, tortured first—nay, blotted out with every indignity besides? There is no one who cannot suffer even for a man's sake what he hesitates to suffer in God's cause. To this end let the present times indeed be lessons to us: how many persons, and of what quality, unexpected as it was given their birth and rank and bodily condition and age, have met their ends for a man's sake—either at his own hands, if they have acted against him, or at the hands of his adversaries, if they have stood on his side.