Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 15

Trajan’s answer to his friend Pliny the Younger, who, as governor of one of the remote provinces, had asked him about the Christians, has been preserved. How was he to deal with them? The emperor answered clearly and definitely: Christianity was itself a crime and must be punished. Although he forbade seeking out Christians and repudiated anonymous reports, “which are unworthy of our time,” from that time anyone accused of being a Christian who did not exculpate himself by offering sacrifices to the gods was sentenced to death. True, the structure of the Roman judiciary enabled Christians to exist even under this condemnation. Rome had no state prosecutor; a private accuser had to bring a case against each Christian, while the state itself at first refused to take the initiative for persecutions. This explains both the relatively long lulls in the persecutions and their individual nature.
Still, the situation of all Christians was terrible; they were outside the law, and a single denunciation was enough for the irrevocable process of accusation to result in death.

From this time, for two entire centuries, the line of martyrs was never really interrupted. Sometimes there were outbreaks of mass persecution; for example, in Smyrna in 155, and in Lyons in 167. Sometimes there were individual trials: the martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch and Simeon of Jerusalem under Trajan, of Telesphorus of Rome under Hadrian, of Polycarp and other Smyrnean Christians under Antoninus Pius, of Justin the Philosopher under Marcus Aurelius, and so on. Whatever the situation, for two hundred years a Christian could not consider himself secure, and of course this awareness of his outcast state, and his condemnation by the world, is a central experience of the early Christian.

The descriptions of the persecutions that have come down to us reveal the whole significance the Church attributed to martyrdom, and explain why the Church seemed to recognize martyrdom as the norm of Christian life as well as the strongest proof of the truth of Christianity.
It would be false to reduce the meaning of martyrdom to heroism merely; if the truth of an idea could be established by the number of its victims, every religion could present adequate proofs. The Christian martyr was not a hero, however, but a witness; by accepting suffering and death he affirmed that the rule of death had ended, that life had triumphed. He died not for Christ but with Him, and in Him he also received life. The Church exalted martyrdom because it was proof of the most important Christian affirmation, the resurrection of Christ from the dead. No one has expressed this better than St.
Ignatius of Antioch; taken to Rome for execution, he wrote to his Roman friends requesting them not to attempt to save him: “Let me be fodder for wild beasts.
. . . For though alive, it is with a passion for death that I am writing to you. . . . There is living water in me, which speaks and says inside me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I do not want to live any more on a human plane.”5

In the cult of martyrs the Church laid the foundation for the glorification of saints; each of them is a witness, and their blood is a seed that promises new shoots. The Church does not consider its conflict with the Roman Empire a tragic misunderstanding, but the fulfillment of the promise of the Savior: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). For the Church, persecution was the best pledge of victory.

 

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