The Fight of Confession

So we hold to the one position, and on this question alone we call for a fight: have martyrdoms been commanded by God? Once you know that he commanded them, you will believe they were commanded with reason, because God commands nothing without reason. Now the death of his own holy ones is precious in his sight, as David sings. I take it that this does not mean the death which falls to everyone’s lot and is a debt owed by all — that common death is actually disgraceful, since it goes back to the trespass and to the sentence of condemnation that trespass earned. It means the other death, the one met in this very work: bearing witness for our religion, keeping up the fight of confession for righteousness and for the oath we are sworn to. As Isaiah says: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one gives it a thought: for the righteous man perishes from before the face of unrighteousness, and he will have honor at his burial.” Here too you have both an announcement of martyrdoms and of the reward they bring. [a]

From the very beginning, in fact, righteousness suffers violence. The moment God began to be worshipped, religion got ill will for her portion. The man who had pleased God is killed — and killed by his own brother. Ungodliness started with the blood of kin so that it might go looking more easily for the blood of strangers, and in the end it hunted down not only righteous men but prophets as well. David is hunted; Elijah is put to flight; Jeremiah is stoned; Isaiah is sawn in two; Zechariah is butchered between the altar and the temple, leaving lasting marks of his blood on the hard stones. And that man himself, standing at the close of the law and the prophets, and called not a prophet but a messenger, dies a shameful death: beheaded to pay a dancing girl.

And certainly the men who were used to being led by the Spirit of God were guided by him to martyrdoms, so that they had to endure for themselves what they had also announced would have to be borne. That is why the three brothers too, when the dedication of the royal image became the occasion for pressing the citizens to worship, knew perfectly well what was required by the one thing in them that had not been taken captive — their faith: that they must resist idolatry to the death. They remembered as well what Jeremiah had written to the people over whom that captivity was hanging: “And now you will see the gods of the Babylonians carried on men’s shoulders, gold and silver and wood, striking fear into the nations. So take care that you too do not become altogether like the foreigners, and be seized with fear as you watch the crowds worshipping those gods in front of them and behind them. Say instead in your own mind: it is you we must worship, Lord.” So, having taken their confidence from God, they set the king’s threats against the disobedient at defiance, and said with strength of mind: “There is no need for us to answer you about this command of yours. Our God, the one we worship, is able to rescue us from the furnace of fire and out of your hands; and then it will be plain to you that we will not serve your idol or worship the golden image you have set up.” A martyrdom made complete even without suffering! And yet they suffered enough. They were burned enough — men whom God shielded for this very reason, so that it should not look as though they had misrepresented his power.

For the lions, with their pent-up and habitual savagery, would certainly have devoured Daniel on the spot as well — a man who worshipped no one but God, and who was accused and demanded by the Chaldeans for that reason — if it had been right for Darius’s worthy expectation about God to be proved false. For the rest, every preacher of God, and every worshipper too, who had been summoned to the service of idolatry and had refused to comply, ought to have suffered. That follows from this argument as well: the truth had to be commended both to the people then living and to those coming after them, and it is the suffering of its own defenders that wins trust for it, because nobody would be willing to be killed except a man who had the truth. Such commands, and such instances, going right back to the earliest times, show that believers are under obligation to suffer martyrdom.

It remains for us — in case ancient times are thought to have had this oath to themselves — to review the Christian order as we now have it, on the theory that it too comes from God and yet may be a different thing from what went before, and therefore opposed to it in its code of rules as well: so that its Wisdom would not know how to murder her own sons! Evidently, in the case of Christ, the divine nature and the will and the school are all unlike anything known before! He will have commanded either no martyrdoms at all, or else martyrdoms that must be taken in some sense other than the ordinary one — being the sort of person who urges nobody to a risk of that kind and promises no reward to those who suffer for him, since he does not want them to suffer. That, no doubt, is why he says, when he is setting out his chief commands: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The statement that follows applies first to everyone without restriction, and then in particular to the apostles themselves: “You will be blessed when men insult you and persecute you and say every kind of evil against you for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, because your reward in heaven is very great; for that is how their fathers used to treat the prophets.” So he foretold that they too would be killed, on the pattern of the prophets. [k]

But suppose he had laid down all this persecution, for those who obeyed him, only in the case of the men who were then apostles. Even so, through them the rule about enduring persecution would still have had to do with us as well, along with the whole oath, along with the graft of the name and the washing of the Holy Spirit — for we are disciples by inheritance, bushes, so to speak, grown up from the apostolic seed. For he speaks words of guidance to the apostles again: “Look, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves”; and, “Beware of men, for they will hand you over to the councils, and they will flog you in their synagogues; and you will be brought before governors and kings for my sake, as a testimony against them and the nations,” and so on. Now when he adds, “But brother will hand over brother to death, and the father his child; and children will rise up against their parents and have them put to death,” he has clearly announced, with reference to the rest of us, this particular form of injustice — one we do not find happening in the case of the apostles. Not one of them had a father or a brother for a betrayer, as a great many of us have. Then he comes back to the apostles: “And you will be hated by everyone because of my name.” How much more will we be, who face being handed over by our parents as well! So by allotting this very betrayal now to the apostles, now to everyone, he pours out the same destruction on all who possess the name — the name that will rest on them together with the condition that it be hated. But the one who endures to the end — this man will be saved. Endures what, if not persecution, betrayal, death? To endure to the end is nothing else than to suffer the end. And so there immediately follows: “The disciple is not above his teacher, nor the servant above his own lord.” For since the Teacher and Lord himself stood firm in suffering persecution, betrayal and death, it will be far more his servants’ and disciples’ duty to bear the same, so that they may not seem to be better than he is, or to have got themselves an exemption from the assaults of injustice; since this by itself ought to be glory enough for them, to be shaped to the sufferings of their Lord and Teacher.

And to prepare them for enduring all this, he reminds them that they must not fear the people who kill the body only and cannot destroy the soul, but must give their fear rather to the one whose power is such that he can kill body and soul both and destroy them in hell. Who, please, are these killers of the body only, if not the governors and kings just mentioned — men, I take it? And who is ruler of the soul as well, but God alone? Who is this but the one who threatens fires to come, without whose will not even one of two sparrows falls to the ground — that is, not even one of the two substances a man is made of, flesh or spirit — seeing that the very number of our hairs has been recorded before him? So do not be afraid. When he adds, “You are worth more than many sparrows,” he is promising that we shall not fall to the ground for nothing — that is, not without profit — if we choose to be killed by men rather than by God. “Whoever therefore will confess in me before men, in him will I also confess before my Father who is in heaven; and whoever will deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

The terms in which the confession and the denial are announced are clear enough, I think, and so is the way to explain them, although the two are put differently. A man who confesses himself a Christian bears witness that he is Christ’s; a man who is Christ’s must be in Christ. If he is in Christ, then he certainly confesses in Christ when he confesses himself a Christian, because he cannot be a Christian without being in Christ. Besides, in confessing in Christ he confesses Christ as well: by virtue of being a Christian he is in Christ, while Christ himself is also in him. If you have mentioned day, you have held out to view the element of light that makes day for us, even though you did not mention light. So although he has not said in so many words, “whoever will confess me,” the conduct involved in daily confession is no different from what our Lord’s declaration means. For a man who confesses what he is — a Christian — confesses at the same time the one by whom he is it, that is, Christ. Therefore a man who has denied that he is a Christian has denied in Christ, by denying that he is in Christ while he denies that he is a Christian; and on the other side, by denying that Christ is in him while he denies that he is in Christ, he will deny Christ as well. So both the man who will deny in Christ will deny Christ, and the man who will confess in Christ will confess Christ.

It would have been enough, then, if our Lord had made an announcement about confessing and nothing more. From the way he presents confession, its opposite — denial, that is — could have been settled in advance too: that denial is repaid by the Lord with denial, just as confession is with confession. And so, since the mould into which the confession has been cast lets you see how the case stands with denial as well, it is plain that what the Lord announced about denial, in terms different from the ones he used of confession, belongs to another manner of denying. He says, “who will deny me,” not “who will deny in me.” For he had foreseen that this form of violence too would usually follow at once, as soon as anyone had been forced to renounce the Christian name: that the man who had denied he was a Christian would be compelled to deny Christ himself as well, by cursing him. Not long ago, sadly, we shuddered at that struggle, fought out in just that way by some men with their whole faith at stake — men whose faith had promised so well. So it will be no use to say: “Even though I deny that I am a Christian, I shall not be denied by Christ, because I have not denied Christ himself.” Even that much will be inferred from the denial: seeing that he denies the Christ who is in him by denying that he is a Christian, he has denied Christ himself too. But there is more, because the Lord threatens shame with shame in return: “Whoever is ashamed of me before men, of him will I also be ashamed before my Father who is in heaven.” For he knew that denial is produced most of all by shame; that the state of the mind shows itself in the forehead; and that the wound of shame comes before the wound in the body.