Ad Martyras - Tertullian
[8936]
Advanced Information
Translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall.
Text edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson and
first published by T&T Clark in Edinburgh in 1867. Additional
introductionary material and notes provided for the American
edition by A. Cleveland Coxe, 1886.
Chapter I.
Blessed Martyrs Designate,'Along with the provision which our lady mother
the Church from her bountiful breasts, and each brother out of his private
means, makes for your bodily wants in the prison, accept also from me some
contribution to your spiritual sustenance; for it is not good that the flesh
be feasted and the spirit starve: nay, if that which is weak be carefully
looked to, it is but right that that which is still weaker should not be
neglected. Not that I am specially entitled to exhort you; yet not only the
trainers and overseers, but even the unskilled, nay, all who choose, without
the slightest need for it, are wont to animate from afar by their cries the
most accomplished gladiators, and from the mere throng of onlookers useful
suggestions have sometimes come; first, then, O blessed, grieve not the Holy
Spirit, [8937] who has entered the prison with you; for if He had not gone
with you there, you would not have been there this day. Do you give all
endeavour, therefore, to retain Him; so let Him lead you thence to your
Lord. The prison, indeed, is the devil's house as well, wherein he keeps his
family. But you have come within its walls for the very purpose of trampling
the wicked one under foot in his chosen abode. You had already in pitched
battle outside utterly overcome him; let him have no reason, then, to say to
himself, "They are now in my domain; with vile hatreds I shall tempt them,
with defections or dissensions among themselves." Let him fly from your
presence, and skulk away into his own abysses, shrunken and torpid, as
though he were an outcharmed or smoked-out snake. Give him not the success
in his own kingdom of setting you at variance with each other, but let him
find you armed and fortified with concord; for peace among you is battle
with him. Some, not able to find this peace in the Church, have been used to
seek it from the imprisoned martyrs. [8938] And so you ought to have it
dwelling with you, and to cherish it, and to guard it, that you may be able
perhaps to bestow it upon others.
Chapter II.
Other things, hindrances equally of the soul, may have accompanied you as
far as the prison gate, to which also your relatives may have attended you.
There and thenceforth you were severed from the world; how much more from
the ordinary course of worldly life and all its affairs! Nor let this
separation from the world alarm you; for if we reflect that the world is
more really the prison, we shall see that you have gone out of a prison
rather than into one. The world has the greater darkness, blinding men's
hearts. The world imposes the more grievous fetters, binding men's very
souls. The world breathes out the worst impurities'human lusts. The world
contains the larger number of criminals, even the whole human race. Then,
last of all, it awaits the judgment, not of the proconsul, but of God.
Wherefore, O blessed, you may regard yourselves as having been translated
from a prison to, we may say, a place of safety. It is full of darkness, but
ye yourselves are light; it has bonds, but God has made you free. Unpleasant
exhalations are there, but ye are an odour of sweetness. The judge is daily
looked for, but ye shall judge the judges themselves. Sadness may be there
for him who sighs for the world's enjoyments. The Christian outside the
prison has renounced the world, but in the prison he has renounced a prison
too. It is of no consequence where you are in the world'you who are not of
it. And if you have lost some of life's sweets, it is the way of business to
suffer present loss, that after gains may be the larger. Thus far I say
nothing of the rewards to which God invites the martyrs. Meanwhile let us
compare the life of the world and of the prison, and see if the spirit does
not gain more in the prison than the flesh loses. Nay, by the care of the
Church and the love of the brethren, [8939] even the flesh does not lose
there what is for its good, while the spirit obtains besides important
advantages. You have no occasion to look on strange gods, you do not run
against their images; you have no part in heathen holidays, even by mere
bodily mingling in them; you are not annoyed by the foul fumes of idolatrous
solemnities; you are not pained by the noise of the public shows, nor by the
atrocity or madness or immodesty of their celebrants; your eyes do not fall
on stews and brothels; you are free from causes of offence, from
temptations, from unholy reminiscences; you are free now from persecution
too. The prison does the same service for the Christian which the desert did
for the prophet. Our Lord Himself spent much of His time in seclusion, that
He might have greater liberty to pray, that He might be quit of the world.
It was in a mountain solitude, too, He showed His glory to the disciples.
Let us drop the name of prison; let us call it a place of retirement. Though
the body is shut in, though the flesh is confined, all things are open to
the spirit. In spirit, then, roam abroad; in spirit walk about, not setting
before you shady paths or long colonnades, but the way which leads to God.
As often as in spirit your footsteps are there, so often you will not be in
bonds. The leg does not feel the chain when the mind is in the heavens. The
mind compasses the whole man about, and whither it wills it carries him. But
where thy heart shall be, there shall be thy treasure. [8940] Be there our
heart, then, where we would have our treasure.
Chapter III.
Grant now, O blessed, that even to Christians the prison is unpleasant; yet
we were called to the warfare of the living God in our very response to the
sacramental words. Well, no soldier comes out to the campaign laden with
luxuries, nor does he go to action from his comfortable chamber, but from
the light and narrow tent, where every kind of hardness, roughness and
unpleasantness must be put up with. Even in peace soldiers inure themselves
to war by toils and inconveniences'marching in arms, running over the plain,
working at the ditch, making the testudo, engaging in many arduous labours.
The sweat of the brow is on everything, that bodies and minds may not shrink
at having to pass from shade to sunshine, from sunshine to icy cold, from
the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to clamour, from quiet
to tumult. In like manner, O blessed ones, count whatever is hard in this
lot of yours as a discipline of your powers of mind and body. You are about
to pass through a noble struggle, in which the living God acts the part of
superintendent, in which the Holy Ghost is your trainer, in which the prize
is an eternal crown of angelic essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory
everlasting. Therefore your Master, Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with
His Spirit, and led you forth to the arena, has seen it good, before the day
of conflict, to take you from a condition more pleasant in itself, and has
imposed on you a harder treatment, that your strength might be the greater.
For the athletes, too, are set apart to a more stringent discipline, that
they may have their physical powers built up. They are kept from luxury,
from daintier meats, from more pleasant drinks; they are pressed, racked,
worn out; the harder their labours in the preparatory training, the stronger
is the hope of victory. "And they," says the apostle, "that they may obtain
a corruptible crown." [8941] We, with the crown eternal in our eye, look
upon the prison as our training-ground, that at the goal of final judgment
we may be brought forth well disciplined by many a trial; since virtue is
built up by hardships, as by voluptuous indulgence it is overthrown.
Chapter IV.
From the saying of our Lord we know that the flesh is weak, the spirit
willing. [8942] Let us not, withal, take delusive comfort from the Lord's
acknowledgment of the weakness of the flesh. For precisely on this account
He first declared the spirit willing, that He might show which of the two
ought to be subject to the other'that the flesh might yield obedience to the
spirit'the weaker to the stronger; the former thus from the latter getting
strength. Let the spirit hold convene with the flesh about the common
salvation, thinking no longer of the troubles of the prison, but of the
wrestle and conflict for which they are the preparation. The flesh, perhaps,
will dread the merciless sword, and the lofty cross, and the rage of the
wild beasts, and that punishment of the flames, of all most terrible, and
all the skill of the executioner in torture. But, on the other side, let the
spirit set clearly before both itself and the flesh, how these things,
though exceeding painful, have yet been calmly endured by many,'and, have
even been eagerly desired for the sake of fame and glory; and this not only
in the case of men, but of women too, that you, O holy women, may be worthy
of your sex. It would take me too long to enumerate one by one the men who
at their own self-impulse have put an end to themselves. As to women, there
is a famous case at hand: the violated Lucretia, in the presence of her
kinsfolk, plunged the knife into herself, that she might have glory for her
chastity. Mucius burned his right hand on an altar, that this deed of his
might dwell in fame. The philosophers have been outstripped,'for instance
Heraclitus, who, smeared with cow dung, burned himself; and Empedocles, who
leapt down into the fires of ¦tna; and Peregrinus, [8943] who not long ago
threw himself on the funeral pile. For women even have despised the flames.
Dido did so, lest, after the death of a husband very dear to her, she should
be compelled to marry again; and so did the wife of Hasdrubal, who, Carthage
being on fire, that she might not behold her husband suppliant as Scipio's
feet, rushed with her children into the conflagration, in which her native
city was destroyed. Regulus, a Roman general, who had been taken prisoner by
the Carthaginians, declined to be exchanged for a large number of
Carthaginian captives, choosing rather to be given back to the enemy. He was
crammed into a sort of chest; and, everywhere pierced by nails driven from
the outside, he endured so many crucifixions. Woman has voluntarily sought
the wild beasts, and even asps, those serpents worse than bear or bull,
which Cleopatra applied to 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 torture.
And so the Athenian courtezan succumbed to the executioner, when, subjected
to torture by the tyrant for having taken part in a conspiracy, still making
no betrayal of her confederates, she at last bit off her tongue and spat it
in the tyrant's face, that he might be convinced of the uselessness of his
torments, however long they should be continued. Everybody knows what to
this day is the great Lacedµmonian solemnity'the , or
scourging; in which sacred rite the Spartan youths are beaten with scourges
before the altar, their parents and kinsmen standing by and exhorting them
to stand it bravely out. For it will be always counted more honourable and
glorious that the soul rather than the body has given itself to stripes. But
if so high a value is put on the earthly glory, won by mental and bodily
vigour, that men, for the praise of their fellows, I may say, despise the
sword, the fire, the cross, the wild beasts, the torture; these surely are
but trifling sufferings to obtain a celestial glory and a divine reward. If
the bit of glass is so precious, what must the true pearl be worth? Are we
not called on, then, most joyfully to lay out as much for the true as others
do for the false?
Chapter V.
I leave out of account now the motive of glory. All these same cruel and
painful conflicts, a mere vanity you find among men'in fact, a sort of
mental disease'as trampled under foot. How many ease-lovers does the conceit
of arms give to the sword? They actually go down to meet the very wild
beasts in vain ambition; and they fancy themselves more winsome from the
bites and scars of the contest. Some have sold themselves to fires, to run a
certain distance in a burning tunic. Others, with most enduring shoulders,
have walked about under the hunters' whips. The Lord has given these things
a place in the world, O blessed, not without some reason: for what reason,
but now to animate us, and on that day to confound us if we have feared to
suffer for the truth, that we might be saved, what others out of vanity have
eagerly sought for to their ruin?
Chapter VI.
Passing, too, from examples of enduring constancy having such an origin as
this, let us turn to a simple contemplation of man's estate in its ordinary
conditions, that mayhap from things which happen to us whether we will or
no, and which we must set our minds to bear, we may get instruction. How
often, then, have fires consumed the living! How often have wild beasts torn
men in pieces, it may be in their own forests, or it may be in the heart of
cities, when they have chanced to escape from their dens! How many have
fallen by the robber's sword! How many have suffered at the hands of enemies
the death of the cross, after having been tortured first, yes, and treated
with every sort of contumely! One may even suffer in the cause of a man what
he hesitates to suffer in the cause of God. In reference to this indeed, let
the present time [8944] bear testimony, when so many persons of rank have
met with death in a mere human being's cause, and that though from their
birth and dignities and bodily condition and age such a fate seemed most
unlikely; either suffering at his hands if they have taken part against him,
or from his enemies if they have been his partisans.
Footnotes
[8936] Written in his early ministry, and strict orthodoxy. [It may be dated
circa A.D. 197, as external evidence will shew.]
[8937] Eph. iv. 30. [Some differences had risen between these holy
sufferers, as to the personal merits of offenders who had appealed to them
for their interest in restoring them to communion.
[8938] [He favours this resource as sanctioned by custom, and gently
persuades them, by agreeing as to its propriety, to bestow peace upon
others. But, the foresight of thoes who objected was afterwards justified,
for in Cyprian's day this practice led to greater evils, and he was obliged
to discourage it (ep. xi.) in an epistle to confessors.]
[8939] [Whom ministered to their fellow-Christians in prison, for the
testimony of Jesus. What follows is a sad picture of social life among
heathens.]
[8940] Matt. vi. 21.
[8941] 1 Cor. ix. 25.
[8942] Matt. xxvi. 41.
[8943] [He is said to have perished circa A.D. 170.]
[8944] [After the defeat and suicide of Albinus, at Lyons, many persons,
some of Senatorial rank, were cruelly put to death.]
Also, see links to 3500 other Manuscripts:
http://mb-soft.com/believe/txv/earlych7.htm
E-mail to: BELIEVE1@mb-soft.com
The main BELIEVE web-page (and index to subjects) is at:
http://mb-soft.com/believe/