To the Martyrs

The other hindrances of the mind likewise have accompanied you as far as the threshold of the prison, even as your own parents did. From that point you are separated from the world itself; how much more from the age and its affairs? Nor let this distress you, that you are separated from the world. For if we reflect that the world itself is rather a prison, we shall understand that you have gone out of a prison rather than entered one. The world has deeper darkness, which blinds the hearts of men. The world puts on heavier chains, which bind the very souls of men. The world breathes out fouler impurities, the lusts of men. The world finally contains more prisoners, namely the whole human race. It endures the judgments not of a proconsul, but of God. You, blessed ones, may consider yourselves transferred from the prison into a place of custody, as it were. It has darkness, but you yourselves are the light: it has chains, but you are free unto God.

A gloomy air breathes there, but you are a sweet fragrance: a judge is awaited, but you are those who shall judge the judges themselves. Let him be sorrowful there who sighs for the fruit of the age. A Christian has renounced the age even outside the prison; but in prison he has renounced the prison as well.

It makes no difference where in the world you are, who are outside the world; and if you have lost some of life's pleasures, it is a transaction 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 now compare the life of the world and of the prison, whether the spirit does not gain more in prison than the flesh loses, nay, and whether the flesh does not fail to lose even what is its due through the care of the Church, the love-feast of the brethren: and moreover what is always profitable to faith, the spirit acquires.

You do not see foreign gods, you do not run into their images, you do not share in the solemn days of the nations by mingling with them, you are not beaten by foul smells, you are not struck by the shouts of spectacles, by the savagery, or the frenzy, or the shamelessness of those who celebrate them: your eyes do not fall upon places of public lust: you are free from scandals, from temptations, from evil recollections, and now also from persecution. This the prison affords the Christian, what the desert afforded the prophets. The Lord himself was more frequently in retirement, that he might pray more freely, that he might withdraw from the age. His glory he showed to his disciples in a solitary place. Let us take away the name of prison, let us call it a retreat. Even if the body is shut in, even if the flesh is detained, all things lie open to the spirit.

Wander in spirit, range abroad in spirit, and setting before yourself not shaded colonnades or long porticoes, but that way which leads to God. As often as you shall walk along it in spirit, so often you will not be in prison. Nothing does the leg feel in the stocks when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole man with it, and transfers him wherever it will: But where your heart shall be, there also shall your treasure be. Let our heart therefore be there, where we wish to have our treasure.

Let the prison now be irksome even to Christians. We were called to the military service of the living God even then, when we answered to the words of the oath. No soldier comes to war with luxuries; nor does he march from his bedchamber to the battle line, but from tents light and compact, where all hardship and roughness and discomfort abide. Even in peace they learn already to endure war by toil and hardships, by marching in arms, by running over the field, by digging a trench, by forming the tortoise. All things are accomplished by sweat, lest bodies and minds should quail: from shade to sun, from sun to the sky, from tunic to breastplate, from silence to shouting, from rest to tumult. Likewise you, blessed ones, whatever hardship this is, reckon it as exercise of the virtues of mind and body.

You are about to enter a noble contest in which the president of the games is the living God; the trainer, the Holy Spirit; the crown, eternity; the prize, angelic nature, citizenship in the heavens, glory for ever and ever. And so your Trainer Christ Jesus, who anointed you with the Spirit and brought you forth to this arena, willed to set you apart beforehand from a freer condition to a harder regimen before the day of the contest, so that your strength might be built up in you. For indeed athletes too are set apart for stricter discipline, that they may be free to build up their strength: they are kept from luxury, from richer foods, from more pleasant drink. They are compelled, tormented, wearied: the more they have labored in their exercises, the more they hope for victory. And they, says the Apostle, to obtain a corruptible crown; we who are to obtain an eternal one.

Let us interpret the prison as our wrestling-ground, that we may be brought forth well exercised by all hardships to the stadium of the tribunal: for virtue is built up by hardness, but destroyed by softness.

We know from the Lord's precept that the flesh is weak and the spirit willing. Let us not therefore flatter ourselves, because the Lord agreed that the flesh is weak. For he foretold that the spirit is willing for this reason, to show what ought to be subject to what, namely that the flesh should serve the spirit, the weaker the stronger, so that it may draw even its own strength from the spirit. Let the spirit converse with the flesh concerning their common salvation, thinking now not of the hardships of the prison, but of the contest and battle itself. The flesh will perhaps fear the heavy sword, and the lofty cross, and the rage of beasts, and the supreme punishment of fires, and every device of the executioner in torments.

But let the spirit set before itself and the flesh, that though these things are bitter, yet they have been endured with equanimity by many, nay even sought out voluntarily, for the sake of fame and glory; and not by men only, but also by women, so that you too, blessed women, may answer to your sex. It would be long to enumerate one by one those who have slain themselves with the sword, led by their own resolve. Of women, Lucretia is at hand, who, having suffered the violence of rape, 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 be held in fame.

The philosophers did less: Heraclitus, who burned himself smeared with ox-dung; likewise Empedocles, who leapt into the fires of Mount Etna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago threw himself onto a funeral pyre: while women too have despised fire: Dido, lest she be compelled to marry after her most beloved husband; likewise when the wife of Hasdrubal, seeing her husband a suppliant of Scipio while Carthage was already burning, flew with her children into the conflagration of her homeland. Regulus, a Roman general, taken captive by the Carthaginians, when he had refused to be exchanged alone for many Carthaginian captives, preferred to be handed back to the enemy and, packed into a kind of chest pierced on all sides from without with nails, felt so many crosses. A woman willingly sought out beasts, and indeed asps, serpents more dreadful than a bull or bear, which Cleopatra set upon herself, lest she fall into the hands of the enemy. But the fear of death is not so great as that of torments.

And so, did the Athenian harlot yield to the executioner?

She, who was privy to a conspiracy, when she was tortured on that account by the tyrant, neither betrayed the conspirators, and at last spat her bitten-off tongue into the face of the tyrant, that they might know that torments could accomplish nothing, even if they persisted further. For what is today the greatest solemnity among the Lacedaemonians, the flogging ritual, that is, flogging, is no secret. In which sacred rite, before the altar, all the noblest youths are afflicted with whips, their parents and kinsmen standing by and urging them to persevere. For it shall be counted an ornament and glory, with a greater title indeed, if the soul rather than the body yields to the blows. If therefore so much is permitted to earthly glory by the vigor of body and mind, that they despise the sword, fire, the cross, beasts, torments, under the reward of human praise, I may say these sufferings are small in comparison with the attainment of heavenly glory and divine reward. If glass is worth so much, how much more a pearl?

Who then would not most willingly spend as much for the true as others spend for the false?

I pass over now the motive of glory. All those same contests of cruelty and torment, even among men, a certain affectation and a kind of disease of the mind has already trampled underfoot. How many idle men does the love of arms place at the sword? Certainly they descend to the very beasts out of affection, and they think themselves more handsome for their bites and scars. Already too certain men have burned themselves, so as to cover a fixed distance in a tunic on fire. Others have walked about with most patient shoulders under the hunters' thongs. These things, blessed ones, the Lord has not without reason permitted in the world; but to exhort us now, and to confound us on that day, if we should shrink from suffering for truth unto salvation, what others have sought out for vanity unto perdition.