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Kotzé, Annemaré
2020.
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom.
p.
135.
Article contents
Commemoration, Representation and Interpretation: Augustine of Hippo’s Depictions of the Martyrs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Recent studies of martyrdom in early Christianity look beyond the traditional perception of martyr acta and passiones as historical documents that can help us to reconstruct the past. While previously these texts had been deemed worthy of attention on account of their proven authenticity or historical veracity, now they are all valued as important sources that have much to tell us about the communities and environments in which they were produced. This approach does not deny the historical value of the sources, but rather it appreciates that they are a special kind of historical document. Texts and sermons about holy men and women never were created as objective accounts. Every textual portrait of a martyr reveals a prior judgement that inscribes meaning and purpose into seemingly meaningless events to present condemned criminals as religious heroes, horrific tortures as divine gifts, and public deaths as cosmic dramas. Consequently, the various methods of representation that were used to construct depictions of the martyrs are significant elements in their own right, whether they are rhetorical devices, scriptural allusions, artistic embellishments or miraculous occurrences. These are the very details that make martyrs; they turn death into martyrdom, and the dead into martyrs.
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References
1 Key studies include Castelli, Elizabeth, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory and Religion (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Cooper, Kate, ‘The Voice of the Victim: Gender, Representation and Early Christian Martyrdom’, BJRL 80. 3 (Autumn 1998), 147–57 Google Scholar; Grig, Lucy, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London, 2004), 146–51 Google Scholar; Leemans, Johanet al., Let us Die that we may Live: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from Asia Minor, Palestine and Syria (c. AD 350 — AD 450) (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salisbury, Joyce E., Blood of Martyrs: Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence (London, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a less recent but seminal study, see Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, IL, 1981, repr. 1982).Google Scholar
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4 Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 25: ‘From the earliest of sources onward, it becomes clear that the early Christians positioned the historical experience of persecution almost immediately within a framework of meaning that drew upon broader metanarratives about temporality, suffering and sacrifice, and identity.’
5 See Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory; Grig, Making Martyrs; Salisbury, Blood of Martyrs.
6 Castelli, Elizabeth, ‘The Ambivalent Legacy of Violence and Victimhood: Using Early Christian Martyrs to Think With’, Spiritus 6 (2006), 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1.
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11 S. 274.1 (WSA, 3/8: 23), 280.1 (WSA, 3/8: 72), 299F.1 (WSA, 3/8: 271), 335A.1 (WSA, 3/9: 211). Martyrdom narratives were not available for all the martyrs: S. 315.1 (WSA, 3/9: 129).
12 Brown, ‘Enjoying the Saints’, 6—7; Baraz, Daniel, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca, NY, 2003), esp. 39.Google Scholar
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14 For example, Gregory of Nyssa, Homily lb on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 145 (trans. Leemans, in Leemans et al., Let us Die, 98): ‘let us then narrate everything about the martyrs step by step, in a way that brings their contest under your eyes on this very stage’.
15 For the mnemonic function of violent images, see Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge, 1998), 101.Google Scholar
16 Ibid. 131.
17 Chrysostom, On the Holy Martyrs 4, 5 (trans. Mayer, Cult, 222); idem, A Homily on the Martyr Julian 2 (trans. Mayer, in Leemans et al., Let us Die, 132).
18 For example, Basil, Homily on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 5 (trans. Allen, in Leemans et al., Let us Die, 71–2); Gregory of Nyssa, Homily lb on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 153 (trans. Leemans, in Leemans et al., Let us Die, 105); Chrysostom, A Homily on the Martyr Julian 3 (trans. Mayer, in Leemans et al., Let us Die, 133); idem, On the Holy Martyrs, esp. 4, 8 (trans. Mayer, Cult, 221–2,226); idem, A Homily on Saint Romanus 7 (trans. Mayer, Cult, 232).
19 S. 280.1 (WSA, 3/8:72).
20 S. 301.1 (WSA, 3/8: 282).
21 Brown, ‘Enjoying the Saints’, 7.
22 For example, Letter, 89.2 (WSA, 2/1: 359); S. 275.1 (WSA, 3/8: 26), 285.2 (WSA, 3/8: 95), 325.2 (WSA, 3/9: 168–9), 328.4, 7 (WSA, 3/9: 177–8, 179), 335.2 (WSA, 3/9: 209). 335C.5 (WSA, 3/9: 222–3), 335G.2 (WSA, 3/9: 244). See further den Boeft, ‘Augustine on Martyrdom’, 118.
23 The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas 20; trans. Musurillo, Herbert, in idem, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford, 2000), 106–31 Google Scholar, at 129.
24 The Martyrdom of Saints Carpus, Papylas, and Agathonicê 6 (trans. Musurillo, Acts, 35).
25 The Martyrdom of Saint Crispina 3 (trans. Musurillo, Acts, 307).
26 Prudentius, Peristephanon 3 (LCL 398, 151–2).
27 Victricius, Praising the Saints 12; trans. Clark, Gillian, ‘Victricius of Rouen: Praising the Saints’, JECS 7 (1999), 365–99 Google Scholar, at 399.
28 See further Burrus, Virginia, ‘Word and Flesh: The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in Christian Antiquity’. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10 (1994), 27–51 Google Scholar; eadem, ‘Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius’, JECS 3 (1995), 25–46.
29 For the power of mental images to arouse lust, see Augustine, Confessions 10.30, 41 (WSA, 1/1: 264); S. 151.8 (WSA, 3/5: 46).
30 Leemans et al., Let us Die, 33–4.
31 e.g. Prudentius, Peristephanon 3, on Eulalia (LCL 398,142-56); ibid. 5, on Vincent (LCL 398, 168–203); ibid, 10, on Romanus (LCL 398, 290–3). See also Chrysostom, A Homily on Saint Romanus 8 (trans. Mayer, Cult, 233–4).
32 Leemans et al., Let us Die, 33–5.
33 S. 299D.4 (WSA, 3/8: 258–9); cf. S. 326.2 (WSA, 3/9: 171), 334.1 (WSA, 3/9: 204–5).
34 For the martyrs proclaiming the Gospel, see City of God 18.50; trans. Dyson, R. W., The City of God Against the Pagans, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 897–8 Google Scholar; S. 318.1 (WSA, 3/9: 147).
35 S. 274.1 (WSA, 3/8: 23).
36 S. 277A.2 (WSA, 3/8:48).
37 S. 281.3 (WSA, 3/8: 79), 282.1 (WSA, 3/8: 81).
38 S. 274.1 (WSA, 3/8: 23). Other examples include Cyprian: S. 313C.2 (WSA, 3/9: 102); Primus, Perpetua and Victoria: S. 335A.1 (WSA, 3/9: 212); Lawrence: S. 304.1 (WSA, 3/8: 316); 305A.4 (WSA, 3/8: 326–7); Quadratus: S. 306B.3 (WSA, 3/9: 30), 306C.1-2 (WSA, 3/9: 36–7).
39 S. 282.1 (WSA, 3/8: 81), 306B.3 (WSA, 3/9: 30).
40 En. Ps. 118(9).2 (WSA, 3/19: 379). See further Lucy Grig, ‘Torture and Truth in Late Antique Martyrology’, EME 11 (2002), 321–36, esp. 324–8.
41 While it is beyond the scope of this study to explore this issue in further detail, see, e.g., Beth Crachiolo, ‘Seeing the Gendering of Violence: Female and Male Martyrs in the South English Legendary’, in Meyerson, Mark D., Thiery, Daniel and Falk, Oren, eds, A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto, ON, 2004), 147–63 Google Scholar; Easton, Martha, ‘Pain, Torture, and Death in the Huntingdon Library Legenda aurea’, in Riches, Samantha J. E. and Salih, Sarah, eds, Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2002), 49–64.Google Scholar
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