Martyrs

I. Come, Do What You Will

Can you drink the cup I am going to drink? —Matthew 20:22

Before Polycarp was taken to the stake, the magistrate questioned him one last time:

"I know you do not fear the beasts, so I will have you consumed by fire—unless you change your mind."

Polycarp answered:

"The fire you threaten me with burns only for a moment. You ignore the eternal fire of punishment that awaits the blasphemer, and the Judgment Day to come. Why hesitate? Come, do what you will."

As he spoke, his whole body gave off "the joyful spirit of a brave man."

Like Polycarp, many early Christian martyrs did not regard death as the price paid to fulfill their faith. On the contrary, they were filled with joy and even yearned for it. Death washed away sin and lifted them into heaven.

Death was only a beginning.

The longing exceeded reason. In a letter to the churches at the end of the first century, Ignatius wrote:

"I am willing to die for God, unless you prevent me. I beg you not to show me kindness at the wrong time. Allow me to become food for the beasts and thus draw near to God. I am God's wheat. Let the teeth of beasts tear me apart so I may become Christ's holy bread..."

When we discussed this passage, my classmates doubled over laughing.

They continued with the description of Polycarp after his ordeal:

"He did not look like a body burned black, but like bread newly taken from an oven, or gold and silver freshly refined in a furnace. Then we smelled a delightful fragrance, like musk or some precious perfume."

A blond boy stressed perfume, and the room erupted again. I sat behind them and laughed too.

Suddenly, I felt like the Jews and the common crowd surrounding Polycarp. His devotion seemed ridiculous to me; his holiness, absurd.

For an instant, I lost myself in the laughter.

Usually, we resembled the little group in Dead Poets Society. Before class, we recited strange passages and discussed sexual suggestions and the worship of suffering in Christian manuscripts. We even had a Captain Keating of our own: a professor who publicly declared himself an atheist in the first class, yet behaved in every respect like a holy Christian. He was gracious, a strict vegetarian, and even required us to use the smallest type possible to save paper on our essays.

But his words always floated in my ears:

"Intellectually, I have found no reason to believe in God."

More than once, I imagined that if God truly existed, would he send the professor to heaven on Judgment Day? Or, as Dante described in the Divine Comedy, would he place him in the first circle, granting him the same fate as Aristotle and Plato? There, they knew everything but could not see hope or the light of God.

More often, I was the one left behind by our little society. I knew nothing of Christian tradition and could not enter the conversation. I could only listen, or laugh along.

Now we were doing something perhaps unforgivable: mocking a saint within the tradition, mocking his sacrifice and suffering.

I admired my classmates' intelligence and insight, yet the laughter unsettled me. In a saint's eyes, were we not merely a pack of beasts pleased with our own cleverness? Knowledge and thought were only braces I had fitted over my fangs.

As a beast roaming the forest, I seemed to return to the day of Polycarp's death.

He was already eighty-six. He had a chance to escape and refused.

"May the will of God be done."

As he was led into the arena, he saw the common people in the stands and roared:

"Away, you blasphemers!"

Then the crowd poured into the arena to gather logs. The Jews fanned the fire and added branches. Before the flames rose, Polycarp looked toward the sky and spoke at length in praise of God.

He was burned alive, yet gave off a fragrance. Someone feared he might still live and stepped forward with a dagger. His blood burst out and "put out the entire fire."

The Christians present were stunned by the miracle. They all wanted to claim his body, to receive "the portion of his sacred flesh that belonged to them."

It reminded me of Qiu Jin and the townspeople in Lu Xun, of buns dipped in blood to cure illness.

How could I possibly understand the holiness and greatness of that instant?

The eyes of a beast can see only raw flesh and evil.

II. May the Will of God Be Done

For when I am weak, then I am strong. —2 Corinthians 12:10

Early Christianity was not recognized in the vast Roman Empire.

The apologist Minucius Felix once quoted the writing of an informer, who described Christian feasts this way:

"Some say they worship the head of an ass—the lowliest of animals! Others say they worship the genitals of their priest as if they were their father's... Oh, and they greedily drink the blood of children, fighting one another to divide the limbs..."

Christians were regarded as heretics, much as they would regard evolutionists centuries later. Romans tied them to posts, whipped them, gave them to beasts, and burned them.

Under torture, many Christians withdrew.

In the second century, the magistrate Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan about a Christianity he barely understood. Its followers held strange meals and rites, yet seemed "entirely harmless."

He tortured those who admitted being Christian. Many immediately recanted.

"That was a long time ago," one said.

"I abandoned the faith several years ago."

"I changed my mind twenty years ago."

Those who remained, like Ignatius, met suffering with glory and joy.

Strangely, they regarded the persecution ahead as God's will. Eighty-six-year-old Polycarp would not flee because God's will had not yet been completed, and that will was suffering and death.

The theologian Tertullian also faced persecution and death at the end of the second century.

Everything that happened contained the will of God, he said, and the persecution they would endure was in truth a test. Those who willingly died would ascend to heaven; those who fled would go to hell.

Do not regard persecution from outside as injustice, he said. It merely wore the devil's clothes. Satan was insignificant beside Christ. The Satan and flames before your eyes were only messengers sent by God.

Someone objected: if escape was the wrong choice, God could always bring him back to the stake.

Tertullian replied that if you had resolved to run, the decision was yours. If you had not resolved, remaining to face death was the nobler choice.

Reading these passages, I always pictured a bad Chinese television drama.

A Communist was locked in prison. A Kuomintang jailer with evil written across his face aimed a pistol.

"Speak! What is your name?"

A man who looked like Lu Xun glared back and shouted:

"My name is—Communist Party member!"

The gun fired. The scorched saint fell.

The common people laughed. The Jews' eyes were savage. Some Christians wept or looked toward the sky. Some stepped forward to cut a piece from his holy body. Others held buns, dipping them in blood to cure their children.

I often thought of them.

Before death, they were not merely composed. They rejoiced. They could hardly wait.

I could not understand their happiness or their pursuit of something beyond this life. To me, their well-intentioned transformation of fate could only provoke a smile.

Yet they had already found the meaning of their lives. My mockery came from nothing more than indulgence, jealousy, and self-consolation.

I remembered a history professor E once told me about. He showed his students a chart of social development. At first, the line barely moved. With the Industrial Revolution, it shot upward.

"To fit the Industrial Revolution into the chart, all the turns, victories, and tragedies I taught you in the first nine chapters become insignificant."

Do they? Insignificant?

That is only a modern person's fantasy. We imagine Polycarp and his kind would also obsess over supply-and-demand curves and fight over every unit of input and output. As though their material poverty made us rich. As though their insignificant productivity made us great.

We laugh at their vain visions and self-dramatizing desire for death—even as we own nothing either, beyond the blood of children, existence, and a savage song beside the fire.

III. Judgment Day

Jesus came to them and said: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, then, and make disciples of every nation. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to keep all I have commanded. I am with you always, to the end of the world. —Matthew 28

In Greek, the word martyr did not originally mean someone who died for faith. It meant witness. It became martyr only because so many who witnessed miracles went on to die.

Stephen is regarded as the first.

Like Jesus, he was dragged outside the city by the Jews. He looked toward the sky and saw God, with Jesus standing beside him.

"I see heaven open, and the Son of Man standing at God's right hand!"

The Jews covered their ears, then charged at him, roaring. They stoned him.

Stephen knelt and cried:

"Lord, do not hold this sin against them."

Then he died.

Thecla was a "martyr" who did not die.

In a popular biographical romance from the middle of the second century, she heard Saint Paul preach through a window and fell in love without seeing him. She resolved to abandon her approaching marriage and join Paul on the road of mission.

Her fiancé flew into a rage. Her mother too cried out for her to be burned. They took Thecla to the arena and bound her to the stake.

Before everyone's eyes, a cloud of ice descended from heaven and put out the flames. They released wild beasts, but a lion became gentle when it saw her, every trace of ferocity gone.

After many miracles, she hid in a cave and preserved her virginity for another seventy-two years.

These martyrs all witnessed God. Even if the vision was theirs alone, God already lived in the heart.

At least in the final moment of life, they were full.

Time passed, spring giving way to autumn.

Christianity finally emerged from its long and painful sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it reached its summit and maneuvered over an entire continent. Later it divided, was reborn, divided, was reborn, and at last declined.

Now people believed in science. The debate between Huxley and Wilberforce had become a joke.

The Judgment Day Paul foretold never arrived.

Or perhaps it had arrived long ago.

In Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's description of Piccadilly Circus in central London, not one human being appears. There is not even a living creature. Only the steel skeletons of department stores, stations, and banks; James Bond flickering on a giant screen, his gaze fixed ahead, rigid and numb, yet somehow sure of itself.

Human beings, enthralled by consumption, finally consumed themselves until nothing remained.

Ahead lay gray-black emptiness: vanishing, extinction, death, death, death.

In such a world, meaning had become extinct.

Of course, existence itself is meaning. But what existed were consumer goods, department stores, popular music—only the traces of things that once existed.

Was this the world after Judgment Day, or our world?

Naturally, we could not know where the martyrs finally went.

Certain moments endured stubbornly: the moments their lives withered, the moments they looked into the sky, and the moment Thecla, saved by miracles, finally caught up with Paul.

She said:

"I will cut off my hair and follow you wherever you go."

Paul told her:

"This is a shameless age, and yet you are so beautiful."

This is still a shameless age.

Perhaps it always has been.