To the Martyrs

1Blessed designated martyrs, while the lady mother church from her breasts and individual brothers from their own resources supply you in prison with food for the flesh, accept something from us as well, to nourish the spirit. For it does no good to fatten the flesh while the spirit hungers. Indeed, if what is weak is cared for, what is weaker still should not be neglected. Nor am I so great that I should address you. Yet even the most accomplished gladiators are encouraged not only by their trainers and managers but also by laymen and all sorts of superfluous people shouting from a distance, so that suggestions dictated from the crowd itself have often proved useful.

First of all, then, blessed ones, do not grieve the Holy Spirit, who entered the prison with you. For if He had not entered with you now, you would not be there today. So make every effort that He may remain there with you, and so lead you from there to the Lord. The prison is indeed the devil's house, where he keeps his household. But you have come into the prison precisely so that you may trample him even in his own house. You had already trampled him outside.

So let him not say: "They are in my territory. I will tempt them with cheap hatreds, with defections, or with dissensions among themselves." Let him flee from your sight and hide away in his depths, shriveled and numb, like a snake that has been stripped or smoked out. Let it not go so well for him in his own kingdom that he brings you into conflict. Instead, let him find you fortified and armed with harmony, because your peace is war against him. Some who do not have this peace in the church have been accustomed to beg for it from martyrs in prison. And so you ought to have it, cherish it, and guard it among yourselves for this reason: so that you may perhaps be able to supply it to others as well.

2The other hindrances of the mind have accompanied you as far as the prison threshold, just as your relatives have. From that point you have been separated from the world itself—how much more from its affairs and concerns? Do not let this disturb you, that you have been separated from the world. If we reflect that the world itself is more truly a prison, we will understand that you have gone out of a prison rather than entered into one. The world has greater darkness, which blinds the hearts of men. The world wears heavier chains, which bind the very souls of men. The world breathes out worse filth—the lusts of men. Finally, the world holds more prisoners: the entire human race. And it awaits judgment not from a proconsul, but from God. Consider yourselves, blessed ones, to have been transferred from prison to a guardhouse, if anything. It has darkness, but you yourselves are light. It has chains, but you are free before God. It breathes out gloom, but you are a sweet fragrance. A judge is awaited, but you will be judges of the judges themselves. Let the one who longs for the fruit of the world grieve. A Christian has renounced the world even outside prison; in prison he has renounced even the prison itself. It makes no difference where you are in the world, since you are outside the world. And if you have lost some of life's pleasures, it is a business transaction to lose something so that you may gain greater things. I say nothing yet of the prize to which God invites martyrs. Let us compare for the moment the life of the world and the life of prison: if the spirit does not gain more in prison than the flesh loses. Indeed, the flesh does not lose what is rightfully its own, through the care of the church and the love of the brothers; and beyond that, the spirit obtains what is always useful for faith. You do not see foreign gods, you do not run into their images, you do not share in the festival days of the nations by mixing with them, you are not struck by foul smells, you are not cut by the shouts of the spectacles—by the cruelty or frenzy or shamelessness of those celebrating—your eyes do not fall upon places of public lust. You are free from scandals, from temptations, from evil memories, and now even from persecution. The prison gives the Christian what the desert gave the prophets. The Lord himself often acted in retreat, so that he might pray more freely and withdraw from the world; indeed, he showed his glory to his disciples in solitude. Let us take away the name of prison and call it a retreat. Even if the body is shut in, even if the flesh is held, all things are open to the spirit. Wander in spirit, walk about in spirit—and do not set before yourself shaded colonnades or long porticoes, but that road which leads to God. As often as you walk along it in spirit, so often you will not be in prison. The leg feels nothing in the shackle when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole person about and transfers him wherever it wishes. Where your heart will be, there your treasure will be also (Matthew 6:21). Therefore let our heart be there, where we wish to have our treasure.

3But now, blessed ones, grant that even a prison is unpleasant for Christians. We were called to the military service of the living God at the very moment when we answered the words of the oath. No soldier comes to war with luxuries, nor does he advance to the battle line from his bedroom, but from tents that are light and tightly packed, where every hardship and discomfort and unpleasantness has its place. Even in peacetime soldiers learn to endure war through labor and troubles—marching under arms, running across the field, digging the trench, forming the tortoise formation, sweating it out. Everything is built on sweat, so that bodies and minds do not panic at the change from shade to sun, from sun to cold, from tunic to breastplate, from silence to shouting, from rest to uproar. Therefore, blessed ones, count whatever is harsh here as training for the strengths of mind and body. You are about to enter a good contest, in which the presider of the contest is the living God, the trainer is the Holy Spirit, the crown is eternity, the prize is angelic substance, citizenship is in the heavens, and glory is for ever and ever. And so your overseer Christ Jesus, who anointed you with the Spirit and brought you into this arena, wanted you to be set apart from a freer condition for harsher treatment before the day of the contest, so that your strength might be built up in you. For athletes too are separated off for stricter discipline, so that they can devote themselves to building up their strength. They are kept from luxury, from richer foods, from more pleasant drink; they are driven, tormented, exhausted. The more they have labored in their exercises, the more they hope for victory. And those men, says the apostle, do it to obtain a corruptible crown (1 Corinthians 9:25). We, who are going to obtain an eternal crown, interpret the prison as our training ground, so that we may be brought to the stadium of the tribunal well trained through every hardship, because strength is built by hardness, while softness destroys it.

4We know from the Lord's command that the flesh is weak, the spirit is ready (Matthew 26:41). So let us not flatter ourselves because the Lord agreed that the flesh is weak. He said the spirit is ready precisely to show what should be subject to what: the flesh should serve the spirit, the weaker serving the stronger, so that from it the flesh may also take strength. Let the spirit converse with the flesh about their common salvation, thinking no longer of the prison's discomforts but of the contest itself and the battle. The flesh will perhaps fear the heavy sword, the towering cross, the rage of beasts, the extreme punishment of fire, and every device the executioner's ingenuity can bring to torture. But let the spirit set before itself and the flesh that, bitter as these things are, many have accepted them with equanimity—indeed, have even sought them out voluntarily—for the sake of reputation and glory, and not only men but women too, so that you also, blessed women, may answer to your sex. It would take long to list one by one those who have killed themselves with the sword, driven by their own resolve. Among women, an example is close at hand. Lucretia, who suffered the violence of rape, drove a knife into herself in the sight of her relatives, to produce glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his own right hand on the altar, so that his deed might win renown. The philosophers did less: Heraclitus, who smeared himself with cow dung and burned to death; likewise Empedocles, who leaped into the fires of Mount Etna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago threw himself onto a pyre. Women too have despised fire: Dido, when she was forced to marry after the death of her most beloved husband; likewise Hasdrubal's wife, who, when Carthage was already burning, threw herself with her children into the flames of her homeland rather than see her husband begging Scipio. Regulus, a Roman leader, was captured by the Carthaginians. When he refused to be exchanged one man for many Carthaginian captives, he preferred to be handed back to the enemy, and packed into a kind of box pierced on every side from the outside with nails, he felt as many crosses. A woman willingly sought out beasts—and serpents more terrible than a bull or bear—which Cleopatra applied to herself, to avoid falling into the hands of her enemy. But the fear of death is not so great as the fear of torture. So the Athenian courtesan yielded to the executioner: she was party to a conspiracy, and when she was tortured by the tyrant for that reason, she did not betray the conspirators, and finally bit off her own tongue and spat it into the tyrant's face, so that the torturers might know they could accomplish nothing against her, even if they continued. For what is today the greatest solemnity among the Lacedaemonians—the diamastigosis, that is, the whipping—is no secret. In that sacred rite, noble young men are beaten with whips before the altar, while their parents and relatives stand by and urge them to persevere. It is counted as an ornament and glory, and with a greater title, if the spirit rather than the body yields to the blows. Therefore, if so much is permitted to earthly glory from the vigor of body and spirit that it despises sword, fire, cross, beasts, and torture under the reward of human praise, I can say these sufferings are moderate for obtaining heavenly glory and divine reward. How much is a glass pearl worth, compared to a true one? Who then would not most gladly spend as much for the true as others spend for the false?

5I pass over the motive of glory for now. Vanity and a kind of sickness of mind have already trampled down all these same contests of cruelty and torture among men. How many idle men does vanity for arms hire out to the sword? Certainly they go down to face the beasts themselves out of vanity, and they think themselves more handsome for the bites and the scars. Some have even hired themselves out to the fires, so that they might run a fixed distance in a burning tunic. Others have walked about among the bulls of the beast-hunters with most patient shoulders. God has not admitted these things into the world without reason, blessed ones, but to exhort us now and to confound us on that day, if we shall have feared to suffer for truth unto salvation what others have pursued out of vanity unto destruction.

6But let us set aside these examples of constancy that come from vanity. Let us turn to the contemplation of the human condition itself, so that those things may also instruct us—if any things are to be undergone steadfastly which have been accustomed to happen even to the unwilling. For how many times have fires burned people alive? How many times have wild beasts, slipped from their cages, devoured human beings both in their own forests and in the middle of cities? How many have been killed by robbers with the sword, by enemies even on the cross—tortured first, and indeed destroyed by every insult? There is no one who cannot suffer for a human being's sake what he hesitates to suffer in God's cause. For this purpose, indeed, let the present times be examples for us: how many persons, and of what kinds, report unexpected deaths—unexpected given their birth, their dignities, their bodies, and their ages—for a human being's sake, either from the man himself, if they have acted against him, or from his adversaries, if they have stood for him.