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Pushpa Bhusal
Posted on:2016-03-26 10:16:37 A Most Violent Martyrdom
A Most Violent Martyrdom
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Pushpa BhusalPosted on:2016-03-26 10:16:37 A Most Violent Martyrdom
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A large painting depicting Bartholomew’s martyrdom was in the church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola. It was a nasty piece of work, showing the apostle, tied to a tree, being circled by fearsomely mustached, knife-wielding, dark-skinned men in turbans. Amazingly, this was not even the most offensive image I had seen of Bartholomew’s martyrdom. The most offensive image I had seen was painted by Nicolò Circignani—a sixteenth-century analogue to the torture-horror filmmaker Eli Roth—which is found in Rome’s Chiesa dei Santi Nereo e Achilleo. The image depicted pagans in the bloodily nightmarish middle stages of tearing off Bartholomew’s skin, with one pagan bracing himself against a tree for better pulling leverage. Circignani’s work savored the spectacle of bloody apostolic martyrdom, and I was hardly the only one troubled by it. On a visit to Rome, Charles Dickens was so disgusted by Circignani’s visions of apostolic murder he could hardly stand to look at them. With Christianity triumphant, and Christians able to worship freely in Rome for many centuries, why this fixation on martyrdom? Had this fixation not done enough damage to the faith already? Why continue to roll in the entrails of the martyred? Several early Christians attempted to warn their fellow believers about valorizing martyrdom. Early Christianity’s greatest theologian, Origen, whose father was a martyr, was ambivalent, concerned that consciously seeking out death from oppressors was a form of suicide. Clement of Alexandria disliked martyrdom, because it required another man to sin. Slowly, and then definitively, these views lost out. Consider a letter written by the disciples of the famously martyred early Christian leader Polycarp, which was written in the first half of the second century. This letter—the first recorded description of Christian martyrdom—proclaims their martyred leader’s bones to be “more precious than stones of great price, more splendid than gold.” Or consider Ignatius, who wrote the following to the Christians of Rome in the early second century while on his own way to martyrdom: “Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God.” The only Christian who would dare come between him and death, Ignatius wrote, was one who “hated” him. Or consider Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century: “Does God covet man’s blood?…I might venture to affirm that he does.” Tertullian went on to refer to martyrdom as “a second new birth” and, sounding more than a little Islamist, cautioned the pagan magistrates of Carthage that the “oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.” Those who die for their faith will always be admired by their co-religionists. But in a culture in which faith is normative rather than embattled, fascination with those who die for their faith quickly loses its devotional aspects. As far back as the second century, Marcus Aurelius made this point in his Meditations, criticizing Christians for their “obstinacy,” the undignified and “tragic show” they put on, in their lust for martyrdom. While some Christians were martyred for their faith, and even thrown to lions, the earliest Christian accounts of martyrdom fail to make clear one interesting wrinkle: killing men and women for perceived apostasy was highly uncommon among pagans, and most ancient-world authorities were inclined to be lenient toward Christians, many of whom, like Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, demanded death. Martyrdom, then, is a difference-obliterating mind-set that leaves death as the only thing to venerate. |
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Sanu Rijal
2016-04-03 18:48:23
True representation of current society.
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Shreya Sharma
2016-04-03 19:22:23
huh, terrific
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Sujan Mandal
2016-04-03 19:22:36
Very good
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Ram Mahat
2016-04-03 19:22:38
thik xa
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