Prison as Training Ground

To the Martyrs

Blessed martyrs‑to‑be — along with what our lady mother the church provides out of her generous breasts, and what each brother provides out of his own pocket, for your bodily needs in prison, take something from me as well toward feeding your spirit. It is no good thing for the body to be feasted while the spirit starves. If the weak part of you is being carefully looked after, it is only right that the part weaker still should not be neglected. [b]

Not that I am anyone in particular to be urging you on. Even so, it is not only the trainers and the handlers who shout. Complete amateurs — anyone at all who feels like it, with no call to do it at all — will yell encouragement from a distance at gladiators of the highest skill, and useful advice has come out of the crowd of onlookers before now.

So then, blessed ones, first of all: do not grieve the Holy Spirit, who came into the prison with you. If he had not gone in there with you, you would not be there today. Make every effort, therefore, to keep him with you, and let him lead you out of that place to your Lord.

The prison is the devil’s house as well; it is where he keeps his household. But you came inside its walls precisely in order to trample the evil one underfoot in the place he has chosen. Outside, in open battle, you had already beaten him outright. Do not give him grounds to say to himself, “Now they are in my own territory. I will work on them with squalid hatreds, with loss of nerve, or with quarrels among themselves.” Let him run from you and slink off into his own pit, shriveled and numb, like a snake charmed out of hiding or smoked out of its hole. Do not hand him a victory in his own kingdom by letting him set you against one another. Let him find you armed and fortified with harmony instead, because peace among yourselves is war on him.

Some people, unable to find that peace in the church, have made a habit of seeking it from the martyrs in prison. So you ought to have it living with you, and cherish it, and guard it, so that you may perhaps be able to give it to others as well.

Other things came with you as far as the prison gate — hindrances to the soul, just as much as any — and your relatives may have come that far with you too. From there on you were cut off from the world; how much more from the ordinary run of worldly life and all its affairs. Do not let that separation from the world alarm you. If we stop and think that the world is more truly the prison, we will see that you have gone out of a prison rather than into one. [h]

The world has the deeper darkness, blinding people’s hearts. The world puts on the heavier chains, binding people’s very souls. The world breathes out the fouler filth — human cravings. The world holds the larger number of criminals: the whole human race. And last of all, what it is waiting for is the judgment not of the proconsul but of God.

So, blessed ones, you may think of yourselves as having been moved out of a prison into what we might call a place of safekeeping. The place is full of darkness, but you yourselves are light. It has chains, but God has set you free. The air in it is foul, but you are a sweet fragrance. A judge is expected any day, but you are the ones who will judge the judges. There may be sadness there for anyone who still sighs after the world’s pleasures. A Christian outside prison has renounced the world; inside prison he has renounced a prison as well. It makes no difference where you are in the world, when you are not of it. And if you have lost a few of life’s sweets, that is how business works: you take a present loss so that the gains afterward may be larger.

So far I have said nothing about the rewards God holds out to the martyrs. Meanwhile, let us compare life in the world with life in prison, and see whether the spirit does not gain more there than the flesh loses. In fact, thanks to the care of the church and the love of the brothers, even the flesh does not lose what is good for it, while the spirit gains important things besides.

You have no occasion to look at foreign gods; you do not run into their statues; you take no part in pagan holidays, not even by standing in the crowd; you are not choked by the reek of sacrifices; you are not battered by the noise of the public shows, or by the savagery and frenzy and indecency of the people who stage them; your eyes do not fall on brothels; you are out of reach of provocation, of temptation, of unclean memories — and you are free of persecution now as well.

Prison does for a Christian what the desert did for a prophet. Our Lord himself spent a great deal of time apart, so that he could pray more freely and be quit of the world; and it was in the solitude of a mountain that he showed his glory to the disciples. Let us drop the word prison and call it a retreat.

Though the body is shut in, though the flesh is confined, everything is open to the spirit. So in spirit, travel; in spirit, take your walks — not setting shady paths and long colonnades in front of you, but the road that leads to God. As often as your steps go that way in spirit, you are that often out of chains. The leg does not feel the shackle when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole person around with it and takes him wherever it wants. But where your heart will be, there your treasure will be. Let our heart be, then, where we want our treasure to be.

Grant, blessed ones, that prison is unpleasant even for Christians. Still, we were called up into the army of the living God at the very moment we answered the words of the oath. No soldier goes out on campaign loaded with luxuries, or marches into action from a comfortable bedroom; he goes from a cramped, flimsy tent, where hardness and roughness and discomfort of every kind have to be put up with. [l]

Even in peacetime soldiers harden themselves for war by labor and inconvenience: marching under arms, running the drill field, working at the ditch, forming the tortoise, going through many exhausting tasks. Everything is done in a sweat, so that bodies and minds will not flinch when they have to go from shade into sun, from sun into freezing cold, from a civilian’s cloak into a coat of mail, from silence into uproar, from quiet into chaos.

In the same way, blessed ones, count whatever is hard in this situation of yours as training for the powers of your mind and body. You are about to go through a fine contest. The living God is the official presiding over it, the Holy Spirit is your trainer, and the prize is a crown that lasts forever, made of the stuff of angels — citizenship in the heavens, glory without end. That is why your Master, Jesus Christ, who anointed you with his Spirit and led you out into the arena, thought it good to take you out of an easier life before the day of the fight and lay a harder regimen on you, so that your strength might be the greater.

Athletes, too, are set apart for a stricter discipline so that their bodies may be built up. They are kept from luxury, from richer food, from the more pleasant drinks; they are pushed, strained, worn out — and the harder their work in training, the stronger their hope of winning. As the apostle says of them, “And they do it to get a crown that perishes.” We keep the eternal crown in view, and so we look on prison as our training ground, that at the finish line of the last judgment we may be brought out well drilled by many hardships — since character is built up by hardship, just as it is torn down by soft living.

From our Lord’s own saying we know that the flesh is weak and the spirit willing. All the same, let us not take false comfort from the Lord’s admitting the weakness of the flesh. It was for exactly this reason that he named the spirit willing first: to show which of the two ought to be subject to the other — that the flesh should give way in obedience to the spirit, the weaker to the stronger, and so draw its strength from it. [o]

Let the spirit talk things over with the flesh about the salvation they share, thinking no longer about the discomforts of prison but about the wrestling match and the fight that those discomforts are preparing them for. The flesh will be afraid, perhaps, of the sword that shows no mercy, of the high cross, of the fury of the wild beasts, of that most terrible punishment of all by fire, and of every skill the torturer has. But on the other side, let the spirit set out plainly, for itself and for the flesh, how all these things, agonizing as they are, have been borne calmly by many people — and have even been eagerly wanted, for the sake of fame and glory. And not among men only, but among women too, so that you holy women may prove equal to your own sex.

It would take me too long to list one by one the men who have made an end of themselves on their own impulse. Among women there is a famous case ready to hand: Lucretia, after she was raped, drove the knife into herself in front of her family, so that her chastity would have its glory. Mucius burned his right hand on an altar so that the deed would live in fame.

The philosophers have been outdone as well. Heraclitus smeared himself with cow dung and burned himself; Empedocles jumped down into the fires of Etna; and Peregrinus, not long ago, threw himself on a funeral pyre. Women have despised the flames too. Dido did, rather than be forced into a second marriage after the death of a husband she loved dearly. So did the wife of Hasdrubal: with Carthage on fire, rather than see her husband a suppliant at Scipio’s feet, she rushed with her children into the blaze that was destroying her native city.

Regulus, a Roman general taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, refused to be exchanged for a large number of Carthaginian captives and chose instead to be handed back to the enemy. He was packed into a kind of chest and pierced all over by nails driven in from the outside — so many crucifixions in one. A woman has gone looking for the wild beasts of her own accord, and even for asps, snakes worse than any bear or bull: Cleopatra put them to herself rather than fall into her enemy’s hands.

But the fear of death is not as great as the fear of torture. Yet did the Athenian courtesan give way to the torturer on that account? Put to torture by the tyrant for her part in a conspiracy, she still would not betray her fellow conspirators; in the end she bit off her tongue and spat it in the tyrant’s face, to convince him that his torments were useless however long he kept them up.

Everyone knows the great Spartan ceremony still kept up to this day — the diamastigosis, the flogging. In that sacred rite the Spartan boys are beaten with whips in front of the altar, while their parents and relatives stand by and urge them to hold out bravely. It will always be counted more honorable and more glorious that the soul, and not merely the body, gave itself up to the lash.

But if such a high price is put on earthly glory won by strength of mind and body — so high that people will despise the sword, the fire, the cross, the wild beasts, the torture, for the praise of their fellow men, I might say — then surely these are small sufferings to pay for a glory that is heavenly and a reward that is divine. If a bit of glass costs that much, what must the real pearl be worth? Are we not called, then, to spend as gladly on the true thing as others spend on the fake?

Leave the motive of glory out of it now. All these same cruel and painful contests are trodden underfoot among human beings for nothing better than vanity — a kind of sickness of the mind. How many comfort‑loving men does a vain taste for weapons hand over to the sword? They go down to meet the wild beasts themselves out of empty ambition, and imagine that the bites and the scars of the fight make them better looking. Some have sold themselves to the fire, to run a set distance in a burning tunic. Others, with shoulders that endure anything, have paraded under the beast‑hunters’ whips. [w]

The Lord has given such things a place in the world, blessed ones, and not without reason. What reason could there be, except to stir us up now, and on that day to shame us if we have been afraid to suffer for the truth, and for our own salvation, what others have gone after eagerly, out of vanity, to their ruin?

Leave behind, then, examples of steady endurance that come from a motive like that, and turn to a plain look at the human condition in its ordinary state. Perhaps we can learn something from the things that happen to us whether we want them or not, and that we simply have to make up our minds to bear. [x]

How often have fires burned people alive! How often have wild beasts torn people apart — in their own forests, or in the middle of a city, when they have happened to escape their cages! How many have fallen to a bandit’s sword! How many have suffered death on a cross at the hands of enemies, after being tortured first, and put through every kind of humiliation as well! A person may even suffer in a man’s cause what he hesitates to suffer in God’s.

On that point, let the present time bear witness. So many people of rank have met their death for the sake of a mere human being, though from their birth, their honors, their physical condition and their age such an end seemed most unlikely — some suffering at his hands, if they took the other side, and some at the hands of his enemies, if they were his supporters.