The Early Christians in Rome

by H. D. M. Spence-Jones

II

That great and severe master Tertullian, writing about A.D. 200, gives us some details of the austerities practised by those in training for a martyr’s death. We will quote a very few of his burning words here.

“Blessed martyrs designate, think,” he wrote, “how in peace soldiers (he was speaking of the training of the unconquered legions of Rome) inure themselves to war by toils, marching in heavy armour, running over the exercise yard, working at the ditches, framing the heavy ‘testudo,’ engaging in numberless arduous labours, so that when the day of battle comes, the body and mind may not shrink as it passes from the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, oh blessed ones! count whatever is hard in this lot of yours which you have taken up, as a discipline of mind and body. You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God is the President, the Holy Ghost is the trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic life.... Therefore your Master Jesus Christ has seen good before the day of conflict ... to impose on you a hard training that your strength may be greater” ... “the harder the labours in the training of preparation, the stronger is the hope of victory, ... for valour is built up by hardship.”[112]

In other places Tertullian quotes S. Paul in such passages as: “We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope” (Rom. v. 3, 4); and again: “Therefore I take pleasure” (2 Cor. xii. 10) “in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake” ... “always bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus” (2 Cor. iv. 10); and again (2 Cor. iv. 16, 17, 18), “Though our outward man perisheth yet the inward man is renewed day by day.... For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.”[113]

In his treatise on “Idolatry” Tertullian enters even more into detail on this question of “training for martyrdom.” He enjoined that every kind of austerity should be practised,—for instance, that hunger and thirst should be endured as an habitual observance.

This fervid exhortation closes with the singular words: “An over-fed Christian will be more necessary to bears and lions, perchance, than to God; to encounter wild beasts it will surely be his duty to train for emaciation.”

All this and much more in this curious “Study” of Tertullian partake of exaggeration, but it throws considerable light on the manner on which martyrdom was positively trained for, and the body prepared for the endurance of terrible suffering, a suffering invariably closed by death. Every example of such a bravely patient endurance—every “resistance unto blood”—the Christian guides and leaders of the first 250 years felt was of inestimable value for the propagation of their cause. Every public defeat and recantation, on the other hand, would be a grave injury to their work; so the pagan government strained, as we have remarked, every nerve to make recantation easy; while the Christian masters, on the contrary, did everything which ingenuity could invent or fervid devotion suggest to train up athletes who in the supreme public trial might win the prize of martyrdom.

They were successful—in spite of many defeats. These schools of martyrdom produced in Rome and in the provinces a countless succession of brave men and women of all ranks, of all ages—who, to the amazement of the pagan world, through pain and agony again and again won the martyr’s blood-stained glorious crown. It was quite a novel experience in the world, and the effect which it had worked on the rank and file of men and women was only clearly seen after the Peace of the Church. The people of Rome, from what they had seen, were persuaded with an intense persuasion, no one doubting that a Faith which could produce such heroes was surely based on something which was true and real.

Some eighty or at most ninety years before Tertullian lived and wrote, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, where he was doomed to be exposed to the wild beasts in the great amphitheatre, wrote his famous letter to the Roman Church.

The date of the letter is about A.D. 107–10. The little writing was highly esteemed in the early Church. It may be fairly styled a vade mecum of martyrs in the age of persecution. It accurately embodies the thoughts and aspirations which the “School of Martyrs” we have been picturing taught its pupils. We will give some of these thoughts as a fitting conclusion to this little study on “Preparation for Martyrdom” as practised during the first two hundred and fifty years.