Why the Martyrs Suffer

But if God cares about you, they say, why are you persecuted and put to death? Has he handed you over to this? No. We do not suppose that the Lord wanted us caught up in disasters. What he did was to foretell, the way a prophet does, what was going to happen–that we would be persecuted for his name’s sake, butchered, and impaled. So it was not that he wished us to be persecuted; he indicated in advance what we would suffer, by predicting what was going to take place, and in that way trained us for endurance, to which he promised the inheritance. And we are not punished by ourselves, but along with many others. But those others, they say, are criminals, and are punished justly. In saying that, they bear witness to our righteousness without meaning to, since we are punished unjustly, and for righteousness’ sake. But the injustice of a judge does not touch the providence of God. A judge has to be master of his own opinion–not pulled about by strings, like a lifeless machine that moves only when something outside it moves it. So he is judged in respect of his judging, just as we are judged in respect of the things we choose to want, and of our endurance. We do no wrong; and yet the judge looks at us as men who do wrong, because he neither knows about us nor wants to know, and is carried along by a prejudice he has no warrant for. That is why he too is judged. So they persecute us not because they suppose we are criminals, but because they imagine that in the very fact of our being Christians we are sinning against life itself–living as we live, and urging other people to take up the same life. [a]

But why are you not helped when you are persecuted? they ask. What harm is done to us, so far as we are concerned, in being released by death to go to the Lord, and so undergoing a change of life, as one passes from one time of life to another? If we thought about it rightly, we would be grateful to the people who have provided us with a quick way out–that is, if it is out of love that we bear our witness. If it is not out of love, then we would look to the crowd like worthless men. And if they had known the truth themselves, every one of them would have leapt onto this road, and there would have been nothing left to choose. But our faith, being the light of the world, shows unbelief up for what it is. “If Anytus and Meletus kill me, they will do me no harm at all; for I do not think it right that the better man should be harmed by the worse.” And so every one of us can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” And, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of the Lord, and no torment will touch them.”

Basilides, in the twenty-third book of his Commentaries writes as follows about those who are punished by martyrdom: [e]

“I say this: whoever fall under the sufferings I have mentioned fall under them because they were unwittingly going wrong in other matters, and they are brought to this good end by the kindness of the one who brings them there, though they are accused on other grounds. So they do not suffer as men condemned for what everyone agrees are crimes, and are not reproached as an adulterer or a murderer is; they suffer because they are Christians, and that will comfort them, so that they do not even seem to be suffering. And if a man who has not sinned at all should meet with suffering–a rare case–even he will not suffer anything through the scheming of a power; he will suffer as an infant suffers, who seems not to have sinned.”

Then, further on, he adds: “So then: the infant who has not sinned before, and has committed no act of sin of its own, but has in it the thing that sins, gets good out of it when it is subjected to suffering, and reaps the profit of many hardships. In just the same way, even if a perfect man has not sinned in what he did, while he endures afflictions he suffers as the infant does. He has the sinful principle in him, and it is only because he never takes the opportunity of sinning that he does not sin; so he is not to be counted as a man who has not sinned. For the man who wants to commit adultery is an adulterer even if he does not succeed in the act, and the man who wants to commit murder is a murderer even if he is unable to kill. In the same way, if I see the sinless man I am speaking of suffering, then even though he has done nothing bad I would call him bad, because he wanted to sin. For I will say anything at all rather than call Providence evil.”

Then, going straight on, he speaks plainly about the Lord, as though about any man: “If, then, you were to leave all these remarks behind and go on to try to shame me by saying–taking on somebody else’s part, perhaps—‘This man, then, has sinned, for this man has suffered,’ I will say, if you allow it, that he has not sinned, but was like an infant suffering. And if you pressed me harder still, I would say that the man you name is a man, and that God is righteous: for ‘no one is clean,’ as it was said, ‘of filth.’”

But the theory of Basilides says that the soul sinned earlier, in another life, and undergoes its punishment in this one: the chosen soul with honor, by martyrdom, and the rest purged by the punishment that suits each. How can that be true, when whether a man confesses and is punished, or does not, depends on us? For in the case of the man who is going to deny, the providence Basilides speaks of is done away with. So I will ask him about a confessor who has been arrested: will he confess and be punished by providence, or not? For if he denies, he will not be punished. And if, in order to escape and to dodge the necessity of punishing such a man, Basilides says that the destruction of those who are going to deny is itself by providence, then the martyr is a martyr against his will. And what then becomes of that exceedingly glorious reward stored up in heaven for the man who has borne witness, on account of his witness? If providence did not let the sinner get as far as sinning, it is unjust on both counts: it fails to rescue the man who is dragged off to punishment for righteousness’ sake, and it did rescue the man who wanted to do wrong–a man who had done the wrong so far as his will went, though providence stopped the deed–and so it favored the sinner unjustly. And how godless it is to make a god of the devil, and to dare to call the Lord a sinful man! The devil tempts us knowing what we are, but not knowing whether we will hold out; he wants to shift us off our faith, and tries to bring us under his own control. That is all he is allowed–partly out of the necessity of saving us, who took the occasion from ourselves, out of the commandment; partly to shame the tempter who has tried and failed; partly to confirm the members of the church, and the conscience of those who admire such steadiness. But if martyrdom is repayment by way of punishment, then faith and teaching too–the very things on account of which martyrdom comes–are accomplices in the punishment. What greater absurdity could there be than that? As for their doctrines about whether the soul is changed into another body, and about the devil, I will speak of them at the proper time.

For now, let me add this to what has already been said. Where, any more, is faith in the repayment of sins committed before the martyrdom takes place? Where is love for God, which is persecuted and endures for the truth’s sake? Where is the praise of the man who has confessed, or the blame of the man who has denied? And what use is right conduct, the putting to death of cravings, the hating of no creature? But if, as Basilides himself says, we take one part of the declared will of God to be the loving of all things, because all things stand in a relation to the whole, and another part to be to crave nothing, and a third to hate nothing–then by the will of God these things too will be punishments, which it would be godless to think. For the Lord did not suffer by the Father’s will, and those who are persecuted are not persecuted by the will of God. Otherwise one of two things must be the case: either persecution that comes about by God’s will is a good thing, or the men who decree it and inflict it are innocent. But nothing is outside the will of the Lord of the universe. What is left to say is that such things happen without God preventing them; this alone saves both his providence and his goodness. So we must not think that he actively produces the afflictions–far be it from us to think that–but we must be convinced that he does not prevent the men who cause them, and that he turns the crimes of his enemies to good: “I will take away its wall,” he says, “and it will be trampled underfoot.” Providence is an art of discipline: in the case of other people, for each man’s own sins; in the case of the Lord and his apostles, for ours.

To this point the divine apostle speaks: “For this is the will of God, your holiness–that you keep away from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to keep his own vessel in holiness and honor, not in the passion of craving, like the nations who do not know the Lord; that no one overreach or take advantage of his brother in the matter, because the Lord is the avenger in all such things, as we told you before and testified. For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. So whoever rejects this rejects not man but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you.” And so the Lord was not prevented in this work of making us holy.

If, then, one of them were to answer that the martyr is being punished for sins committed before he came into this body, and that he will reap the fruit of his conduct in this life over again, since that is how the divine administration is arranged, we will ask him whether the repayment happens by providence. For if it is not part of the divine administration, their whole scheme of expiations is gone and their theory falls to the ground; but if the expiations are by providence, then the punishments are by providence too. And providence, though it begins to move, so to speak, from the Ruler, is nevertheless planted in things along with their origin by the God of the universe. That being so, they must admit either that the punishment is not just, and that the men who condemn and persecute the martyrs are doing right, or else that even persecutions are brought about by the will of God. Toil and fear, then, do not attach themselves to human affairs as rust attaches itself to iron, as they say; they come upon the soul through its own will. There is much more to say on these matters, and I will keep it for later, taking it up in its proper place.

Valentinus, in a homily, writes in these words: “You are immortal from the beginning, and children of eternal life; and you wanted death parceled out among you, so that you might spend it and use it up, and so that death might die in you and by you. For when we dissolve the world, and you yourselves are not dissolved, you are lords over creation and over all decay.” For he too, like Basilides, supposes a class of people saved by their nature: a different race, which has come down here to us from above to do away with death; and he makes the origin of death the work of the Creator of the world. That is why he explains the Scripture “No man will see the face of God and live” as though God were the cause of death. And it is about this God that he makes those hints of his, writing in these terms: “As far as the portrait falls short of the living face, so far does the world fall short of the living Age. What, then, is the cause of the portrait? The greatness of the face, which supplied the painter with his model, so that the portrait might be honored by his name. For the form was not found true to the life; the name filled up what was lacking in the likeness. And the invisibility of God works along with it, toward faith in the thing that has been fashioned.” [p]

For he called the Creator, who is called God and Father, a “painter” and “Wisdom,” and said that what has been formed is the image of that Wisdom, made for the glory of the invisible One–since on their account the things that come from a pair are complete things, and the things that come from one alone are images. But since what is seen is no part of him, the soul comes from what lies between, which is different in kind; and this is the inbreathing of the different spirit–and, in general, whatever is breathed into the soul, which is the image of the spirit. And in general what is said about the Creator, who was himself made according to the image, they say was foretold by a perceptible image in the book of Genesis, in the account of the origin of man; and the “likeness” they transfer to themselves, teaching that the different spirit was added without the Creator’s knowledge. When we come to treat of the oneness of the God proclaimed in the law, the prophets and the Gospel, we will discuss this as well, for that subject is the chief of them all. But we must press on to what is urgent. If the special race has come for the purpose of doing away with death, then it is not Christ who has abolished death–unless he too is said to be of one being with them. And if he did abolish it to this end, that death might not touch the special race, then it is not these men, the rivals of the Creator, who abolish death, when on the principle of their own teaching they breathe into the image of their intermediate spirit the life from above. But if they say that this comes about through his mother, or say that they make war on death alongside Christ, then let them own their secret teaching: that they have the effrontery to assail the divine power of the Creator, setting his creation right as if they were his betters, undertaking to rescue the living image that he was not able to save from decay. In that case the Lord would be greater than God the Creator–for a son would never fight with his father, least of all among gods. But the point that the Creator of all things, the Lord Almighty, is the Father of the Son, we have deferred to the discussion of these matters, where I have undertaken to argue against the sects, showing that he alone is the God whom the Son proclaims.

But the apostle, writing to us about the endurance of afflictions, says: “And this is from God: that it has been granted to you, on Christ’s behalf, not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his sake, having the same struggle that you saw in me and now hear that I have. So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort of love, any fellowship of spirit, any tenderness and mercy, complete my joy: be of the same mind, having the same love, one in soul, thinking one thing.” And “if he is poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, he is glad and rejoices” —with the Philippians, the people the apostle is addressing, whom he calls “sharers with him in joy.” How, then, does he say that they are of one soul, and that they have a soul? And in the same way, writing about Timothy and himself, he says: “I have no one of like soul with me, who will genuinely care about your affairs. They all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ.”

So let the people I have been speaking of not call us “men of soul” by way of insult–and let the Phrygians not do it either, who now give that name to anyone who does not take up the new prophecy. I will deal with them in my remarks on prophecy. The perfect man, then, ought to practice love, and from there hurry on to friendship with God, carrying out the commandments out of love. And loving one’s enemies does not mean loving wickedness, or godlessness, or adultery, or theft. It means loving the thief, the godless man, the adulterer–not in so far as he sins, and not in respect of the acts by which he stains the name of man, but in so far as he is a man and the work of God. Sin, certainly, is an activity and not a being, and for that reason it is not God’s work. Now sinners are called enemies of God–enemies, that is, of the commands they do not obey, just as those who do obey them become his friends. The one group are named from their fellowship with him, the other from their estrangement, which is the result of free choice; for there is no enmity and no sin without an enemy and a sinner. And the command to crave nothing does not teach us to have no desire at all, as though the things we might desire did not belong to us–which is what those men suppose who teach that the Creator is a different being from the first God–and it is not because creation is loathsome and bad, for such opinions are godless. What we say is that the things of the world are not our own: not that they are monstrous, and not that they do not belong to God, the Lord of the universe, but that we do not stay among them for ever. As property they are not ours, since they pass from one man to another in turn; as things to use they do belong to us, to us for whom they were made, for as long as it is necessary to stay with them. And so, in keeping with natural appetite, the things that are not forbidden are to be used rightly, avoiding all excess and all inordinate attachment.

And how great kindness is! “Love your enemies,” it says, “bless those who curse you, and pray for those who treat you spitefully,” and the rest; and to this is added, “so that you may become sons of your Father in heaven”—pointing to a likeness to God. And again it says, “Come to terms with your opponent quickly, while you are on the road with him.” The opponent is not the body, as some will have it, but the devil, and those who have been made like him–the one who walks along with us in the person of men, men who copy his deeds in this earthly life. So it cannot be otherwise: those who confess that they belong to Christ, and who find themselves in the middle of the devil’s works, are given the most hostile treatment. For it is written, “so that he does not hand you over to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officers” of Satan’s kingdom. “For I am convinced that neither death”—through the attack of persecutors—“nor life” in this world, “nor angels”—the ones in revolt—“nor powers” (and Satan’s power is the life he chose for himself, for such are the powers and rulers of the darkness that belong to him), “nor things present”—the things we live among during our lifetime, such as the hope a soldier carries and the profit a merchant looks for—“nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing”—none of these, by the energy that belongs to a man, stands against the faith of the man who acts by free choice. “Created thing” here means the same as “activity”: it is our own work; and such activity “will not be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There you have a compact account of the martyr who truly knows. [z]