The Age of the Martyrs

For nearly three centuries, from Nero until the year 313, Christianity was a forbidden religion, and to remain a Christian could lead to death. The persecution did not weigh everywhere or always, but it could arise at any moment, and it returned in ever wider waves. From this ordeal the Church emerged not broken but grown, henceforth bearing at the heart of her memory those who had preferred to die rather than deny: the martyrs.

A religion outside the law

Rome was not hostile to religions: she welcomed them by the dozen, provided they were added to the worship of the gods of the city and of the emperor, guarantor of the order of the world. This public religion was everyone’s concern, and to neglect its rites was thought to draw the anger of the gods upon the whole Empire. Judaism, ancient and recognised, was exempted from it by a particular tolerance. Christianity had no such privilege: a new religion, sprung from Judaism but distinct from it, it offered adoration to the one true God alone and refused incense to idols and to the emperor. This refusal, a simple act of fidelity for Christians, was for Rome atheism and treason.

The slanders

To official contempt was added popular hatred, fed by rumours. Christians were accused of atheism, because they had neither temples nor statues. They were called cannibals, because they spoke of eating the body and drinking the blood of their Lord, knowing nothing of the Eucharist. They were suspected of incestuous unions, because they called one another brothers and sisters and shared meals they called love-feasts. They were held to be enemies of the human race, they who shunned the festivals, the games and the public honours. And when plague, famine or defeat came, the crowd cried that the gods were avenging this impiety: “Christians to the lions!” To bear the name was enough to be condemned.

Before the judge

Christians were not, as a rule, hunted down; but a denunciation was enough to have them arrested. Before the magistrate, the test was simple: to offer a few grains of incense before the image of the emperor and to curse Christ. Whoever accepted was released; whoever refused was tortured, then given to the beasts, to the fire or to the sword. The emperor Trajan had set the rule a century after Christ: not to seek out Christians, but to punish those who, once denounced, persisted, and to take no account of anonymous accusations. Later, under the great persecutions, each was required to produce a certificate proving that he had sacrificed. Everything was decided in an instant, in the choice to confess or to deny.

This rule is known to us from the letter in which Trajan answers Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, who around the year 112 had asked him how to proceed. Pliny describes there what he had learned of the Christians: they gathered before daybreak to sing a hymn to Christ “as to a god” and bound themselves to commit no wrong. It is one of the oldest views taken of the Church from the outside.

The great waves

The first persecution broke out under Nero, in 64: after the fire of Rome, of which rumour accused him, the emperor cast the blame on the Christians and made them perish in atrocious torments, crucified or burned like living torches. It was at Rome, under Nero, that Peter and Paul gave their lives. For nearly two centuries, persecution remained local and passing, set off by a governor or a riot rather than by a law of the Empire. Under Trajan, the bishop Ignatius of Antioch was led to Rome and given to the beasts.

Under Marcus Aurelius, around 177, popular hatred broke loose against the Christians of Lyon and Vienne, in Gaul. They were driven from the squares and the baths, they were arrested, and the inflamed crowd demanded their death in the amphitheatre, in the midst of the games. The old bishop Pothinus, more than ninety years old, died in prison from the blows he received. The slave Blandina, frail and thought to be without strength, was tortured from morning to evening without renouncing anything; the torturers who took turns on her admitted themselves beaten, at the end of their strength, astonished that she was still breathing. Exposed to the beasts, hung on a post, then enclosed in a net and given to a bull, she held to the end and sustained her companions. The very young Ponticus, fifteen years old, died near her. To take from the Christians even the hope of the resurrection, the bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into the Rhône. The account of those days has come down to us in a letter that the Churches of Lyon addressed to those of Asia. The same period saw the death at Rome of the philosopher Justin, beheaded for his faith, and at Smyrna of the old bishop Polycarp, burned alive; under Septimius Severus the young women Perpetua and Felicity perished at Carthage.

Then came the general persecutions, ordered for the whole Empire. In 250, the emperor Decius was the first to seek to compel all his subjects to sacrifice to the gods for the safety of Rome. Each had to offer incense before a commission, then receive a certificate attesting that he had done so; whoever could not produce it was held to be a Christian, liable to prison, torture and death. They no longer merely waited for denunciations: the faith was hunted throughout the Empire, by a regulated procedure. After decades of peace, many Christians wavered, sacrificed or bought a false certificate. The persecution was brief, for Decius died in battle as early as 251, but it left the Church covered with martyrs and divided over the fate of those who had yielded.

Soon after, under Valerian, the persecution changed its method and aimed at the head of the Church. Two edicts, in 257 then in 258, first exiled the bishops, priests and deacons and forbade assemblies, then ordered the clergy to be put to death and the Christians of high rank, senators and notables, to be stripped of their offices and their goods: by striking down the leaders and the powerful, it was hoped to deprive the faithful of pastors and break the Church from the top. Many bishops perished, among them Cyprian of Carthage, beheaded in 258, and the deacon Lawrence, put to death at Rome the same year. The persecution ceased when Valerian was captured by the Persians: his son restored to the Christians their peace and their goods, and the Church knew nearly forty years of respite, until Diocletian.

The last wave was the longest and the harshest. From 303, the emperor Diocletian launched against the Church a series of ever more severe edicts: the churches were razed, the holy books burned, the Christians stripped of their rights and offices, the clergy imprisoned, and at last sacrifice to the gods was demanded of all, on pain of death. Martyrs fell from the first edicts: those who refused to hand over the Scriptures or to burn incense were executed, and the East, where the persecution raged for nearly ten years, knew killings by the thousand. The Church keeps among these martyrs the names of Agnes and Sebastian. Agnes, a child of Rome barely thirteen years old, had vowed her virginity to Christ and refused all marriage; denounced as a Christian, she walked to her death with a joy that struck the witnesses, firmer than her judges, and fell by the sword. Sebastian, an officer of the imperial guard and a hidden Christian, sustained the confessors in prison; discovered, he was riddled with arrows on the emperor’s order and left for dead. Yet he survived; once healed, instead of fleeing, he came back to confront the emperor and reproach him for his cruelty, and was then beaten to death.

The meaning of martyrdom

The word “martyr” comes from the Greek martys (μάρτυς), the witness. The martyr renders to Christ the fullest witness: he would rather lose his life than deny him, and so gives of the love of God a proof that nothing surpasses. His death configures him to that of Christ, whose cross he shares in order to share his victory. The Church has always held it to be a baptism in blood: he who dies for Christ without having received the baptism of water is washed of all sin and enters heaven at once. The acts of the martyrs, those accounts of their trial and their death, show them often at peace, sometimes joyful before the torment, for this strength comes not from themselves but from grace.

The Church distinguishes from the martyr the confessor, who proclaimed his faith before the judge and suffered for it without dying: the confessors enjoyed great respect in the Church. She always held martyrdom to be a grace received, not a feat to be sought: she honored those whom persecution reached, but forbade denouncing oneself or running to meet death.

The veneration of the martyrs

From the beginning, the Church surrounded her martyrs with a particular honour. Their remains were gathered like a treasure, the day of their death was noted, which was called their birth into heaven, and each year the faithful gathered on their tomb to celebrate the Eucharist there. From this come the catacombs, those underground galleries where the dead reposed, and the usage, remaining to our day, of sealing relics of saints in the stone of the altar. The martyr being united to the sacrifice of Christ, the sacrifice was offered upon his body.

The question of the lapsi

The persecutions had their vanquished too. Many, out of fear, sacrificed to the gods or bought a false certificate: they were called the lapsi, the fallen. When peace returned, many asked to re-enter the Church, and there was division over their fate. Rigorists wished to exclude them for ever. The Church chose mercy: after a time of penance, the repentant sinner was reconciled, for no fault exceeds the pardon of God for the one who converts. This crisis strengthened the practice of penance and the idea that the Church, holy, nonetheless bears within her sinners called to rise again.

Some pushed this rigor to the point of rupture: at Rome the priest Novatian had himself consecrated a rival bishop and founded a Church of the “pure” that refused all pardon to the fallen, the first great schism born of a question of discipline. The Church, on the contrary, distinguished the degrees of the fault, graver for those who had sacrificed to the idols, lighter for those who had only bought a false certificate without touching it, and set for each a path of return.

The peace of the Church

At the beginning of the fourth century, the Empire gave up the fight. In 311, the emperor Galerius, dying, granted the Christians the freedom of their worship; in 313, after his victory, Constantine confirmed and extended it by the Edict of Milan, which restored to Christianity a full freedom. The age of the martyrs was ending. But the blood shed had not extinguished the faith: it had spread it. The crowd come to watch condemned men die expected cries and recantations; it saw men and women face the torment with peace, sometimes forgiving their executioners, and hold out to the end for a crucified man. Such constancy surpassed the strength of man. Many went away shaken by what they had seen; they questioned, sought to know this faith, drew near to the Christians to learn from them, and many of them ended by asking for baptism. In the words of Tertullian, the blood of the martyrs is a seed of Christians. The Church emerged from these three centuries strengthened, and she never forgot those who had sealed her with their blood.