Perpetua The Martyr

A difficulty with martyrs for me, is their impenetrable certainty. I am a natural doubter, and that includes the cosmologies offered by science as well as faith. I will make decisions on what I doubt least, so I find the lack of doubt of a martyr a little unnerving.

Vibia Perpetua, who kept a diary of her martyrdom, probably as the phrase goes, couldn't scare a fly. She was a twenty-two-year-old new mother from a well-regarded Roman family in Carthage. She refused to make an offering at the temple to the Emperor. When pressed as to the reason, she confessed to being a Christian. She was imprisoned with several others, including a slave, Felicitas, to whom she was very close, and Saturus, the man who converted her and voluntarily turned himself in when he learned that people he had "edified" had been imprisoned. A husband wasn't mentioned in her diary, nor did she surrender her young son to her husband's family, which would have been customary in those times. It seems he was either dead or didn't want anything to do with his Christian wife. 

Her father, a pagan, was devastated by his daughter's refusal to pay obeisance to the Emperor. He begged her to reconsider: "Have pity, daughter, on my grey hairs; have pity on your father, if I am worthy to be called father by you; if with these hands I have brought you unto this flower of youth and I have preferred you before all your brothers; give me not over to the reproach of men. Look upon your brothers; look upon your mother and mother's sister; look upon your son, who will not endure to live after you. Give up your resolution; do not destroy us all together; for none of us will speak openly against men again if you suffer aught. "

In another conversation, Perpetua responds: "Father, said I, Do you see this water vessel lying here, a pitcher or whatsoever it may be? And he said, I see it. And I said to him, Can it be called by any other name than that which it is? And he answered, No. So can I call myself nought other than that which I am, a Christian."

To comprehend the understandable distress of her father even further, in the Roman World of the third century CE, a daughter's role was to care for her father in old age.

When Perpetua was taken before the procurator for judgment, he tried to make it as easy as possible for her to recant: "Spare your father's grey hairs; spare the boy's infancy. Make sacrifice for the Emperor's prosperity. And I answered: I am a Christian. And when my father stood by me yet to cast down my faith, he was bidden by Hilarian to be cast down and was smitten with a rod."

The real question for us non-martyr types is, what was the woman thinking? She gives a clue in her visions, which prepared her for martyrdom. In the first vision following Saturus, her edifier, she ascends a narrow ladder guarded by a huge serpent and lined on each side of the rungs with hooks, swords, and spears. At the summit, she finds "a very great space of garden, and in the midst a man sitting, white-headed, in shepherd's clothing, tall, milking his sheep; and standing around in white were many thousands. And he raised his head and beheld me and said to me: Welcome, child." The bitter, unhappy, hectoring old man whom her father had become, or had always been, was replaced by this kind, comforting presence.

Sometimes a person will ramble on and on about a topic of no particular relevance and then suddenly interject the real reason for the conversation. Perpetua's second vision revealed a similar process. She sees her brother, Dinocrates, who died at seven from cancer that ate away at his face. Dinocrates tries to drink from a font, but it is too high. After the vision, Perpetua prayed for him day and night. She was rewarded for her effort with a new vision of her brother taking a drink from the font with a golden cup. In place of the repulsive wound, there is merely a scar. The vision ends with "being satisfied he departed away from the water and began to play as children will, joyfully."

Who wouldn't want to believe in a God that could give joy back to such a child?

She is led through a rugged winding pass to the amphitheater in the final vision. There she becomes a man and rises into the air to fight an Egyptian of vast proportions. She vanquishes him. The master of the gladiators kisses her and says, "Daughter, peace be with you," and then Perpetua is brought to the gate called the Gate of Life.

So we have the overcoming of frightening obstacles or the acquisition of supernatural power, then afterward the encounter with a fatherly presence and the righting of the injustice of a child cruelly dying of cancer. It doesn't take much effort to find a large element of earthly wish fulfillment in her visions.

Then there is her hope. We all do it except for extreme cynics and martyrs. Doubters hope and doubt. Believers hope and believe and doubt less. Martyrs step beyond hope into certainty and prove it by suffering and dying. It is undeniably a blessing to die with such certainty. If heaven is outside of space and time, maybe a moment of certainty is all we really require.

In the year 203, in front of a cheering crowd, Perpetua and Saturus achieved their martyrdom. Perpetua was wounded by a feral cow, and Saturus mauled by a leopard. The gladiators finished them off. The crowd was entertained and impressed.