Conclusion: The Narrow Road to Martyrdom (original) (raw)
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Early Modern Martyrdom and the Society of Jesus in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
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This chapter explores the subject of Christian martyrdom in the early modern world, with particular reference to the Society of Jesus. It investigates the historical and contemporary contexts in which the Jesuits made their own appearance as martyrs and as contributors to the revived martyrological discourse of the early modern Catholic sphere. The study is concerned with how the Society as a whole, and Jesuits as individuals, accounted for the reality of violent deaths among their confreres, and how they elaborated a variety of responses, conceptions, and representations concerning the subject during the Society's first century. This chapter places these findings within the frame of the shifting meanings of martyrdom in the early modern period.
The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern, Church History 81: 3 (2012): 531-551
While the social and intellectual basis of voluntary martyrdom is fiercely debated, scholarship on Christian martyrdom has unanimously distinguished between “martyrdom” and “voluntary martyrdom” as separate phenomena, practices, and categories from the second century onward. Yet there is a startling dearth of evidence for the existence of the category of the “voluntary martyr” prior to the writings of Clement of Alexandria. This paper has two interrelated aims: to review the evidence for the category of the voluntary martyr in ancient martyrological discourse and to trace the emergence of the category of the voluntary martyr in modern scholarship on martyrdom. It will argue both that the category began to emerge only in the third century in the context of efforts to justify flight from persecution, and also that the assumption of Clement’s taxonomy of approaches to martyrdom by scholars is rooted in modern constructions of the natural.
Moreana, 2000
T he Oxford Encyclopedia of the Rejàrmation (1996) offers the entry "Books of Martyrs," by J.-F. Gilmont, which devotes nearly six columns to the Protestant works of Ludwig Rabus, Jean Crespin, John Foxe, Adrian C. van Haemstede (of Antwerp), and others, but little more than one column to Anabaptist memorials of those martyred for holding to believers' baptism, and a half-column to early modem works on Catholic martyrs on the European continent. But in the same year 1996, Brad Gregory completed his lengthy Princeton dissertation, "Anathema of Compromise," guided by Anthony Grafton and Theodore Rabb, which has become the more compact and updated book here under review. Professor Gregory, of the History Department of Stanford University, has ably produced a fully cross-confessional study of martyrs, martyrologies, and the solidification that both gave to the distinctive communal identities that emerged from sixteenth-century religious renewals and upheavals. Martyrologies thus take their place among the instruments of "confessionalization." Gregory' s work treats each of the three traditions of Protestant, Anabaptist, and Catholic martyrs and martyrologies in chapters of text and back notes extending weil over seventy-five pages each. This review will frrst treat these central, foundational portions, Chapters 5-7, before discussing how Gregory sets his documentary account into a historical
Martyrdom: A Philosophical Perspective
Martyrdom has played and continues to play a dominant role in the religious imagination of many. Jews and Christians alike conceive of their martyrs as exceptional people of faith who express exceptional love and devotion to God. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the conceptual features of martyrdom by virtue of which it has its role and to show, using those very features and using Simone Weil's observations, that martyrdom cannot mark the logical climax of the believer's love of God. Martyrdom has played and continues to play a dominant role in the religious imagination of many. Jews and Christians alike conceive of their martyrs as exceptional people of faith who express exceptional love and devotion to God. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the conceptual features of martyrdom by virtue of which it has its role and to show, using those very features and using Simone Weil's observations, that martyrdom cannot mark the logical epitome of the believer's love of God. 1 The paper has five parts. In the first part, I briefly present some of the philosophical presuppositions that underlie the paper's methodology and the manners in which they influence the selection of sources and the ways in which the sources are dealt with. The substantial part of the paper begins in section II, in which I approach the concept of martyrdom by means of the Talmudic discussion of " afflictions of love. " I examine the relation between the two concepts and argue for a logical continuum between " afflictions of love " and " martyrdom " – deadly " afflictions of love. " In the third and fourth parts, I distinguish different types of martyrs on the basis of their differing conceptions of their afflictions. In the third part, I distinguish the martyr whose death can be seen as a loving sacrifice to God (henceforth the " exemplary martyr ") from the masochist. In the fourth part, I distinguish both from the Socratic martyr, the Maimonidean martyr and the martyr who does not feel the pain of his execution. On
Pathology, identity, or both?: Making meaning from early Christian martyrdom
Mortality, 2022
Partly in response to an earlier 'pathological approach' that seemingly stigmatised early Christian martyrdom, recent scholarship has adopted an 'identity approach' that explains martyrdom as a normative discourse of self-construction. This explanation of martyrdom as Christian identity-making, not willing death, is insufficient for three reasons. First, this approach implicitly reaffirms the theological claim that religious identity alone makes martyrs. In doing so it reduces the complexity of the individual martyr to 'Christian.' Second, this approach excises the existential phenomenon of the martyr from martyrdom. Third, the term 'identity' has become ubiquitous, and its use to mark both sameness and difference has mitigated its value. As a result, the identity approach cannot answer a critical question: what makes the martyr different? Given the early Christian martyr's pride of place in cultural understandings of martyrdom and the present-day persistence of martyrdom across ideologies with tragic results, relevant scholarship must continue to address the impetus of the martyr-agent in addition to exploring martyrdom's identity-making functions. A multidisciplinary approach is required to avoid apologetics for early Christian narratives and to understand the complex psychosocial dynamics of martyrdom, whether in the ancient past or the present.
Seminare. Poszukiwania naukowe, 2018
Both in the past and today an act of bearing witness to faith in God through martyrdom has been a unique sign and testimony of love for Christ who himself was obedient to the Father usque ad mortem. It is at the same time a clear judgment against those cultures, which acknowledge odium fidei. In his moral encyclical Veritatis Splendor John Paul II points to several arguments in order to emphasize that the way of martyrdom has lost none of its relevance and significance for Christians nowadays. The Pope’s claim is grounded on the fact that “faith possesses a moral content” and so it is false to separate faith (credenda) from moral life (agenda) of those who believe. Consequently, in particular circumstances Christians are called to be ready to lay their lives both for love of God and acceptance of his commandments. Through imitating their Lord usque ad sanguinem his disciples demonstrate and defend their human dignity received from the Creator, the holiness of God’s law as well as th...
Traditions of martyrdom in the Ignatian Letters (In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi 2011)
Traditions of martyrdom in the Ignatian Letters The letters of Ignatius represent one of the key texts for the emergence of martyrdom during the second century AD in Christianity. This article is concerned with the question whether Ignatius contributed to a " theology of martyrdom " or whether he rather relied on previous traditions. The author argues, by undertaking an analysis of certain pragmatics and semantics, that the motif of martyrdom is solely used to buttress Ignatius' claim for authority among his intended addressees by referring to an understanding of martyrdom that has its roots in the New Testament. An identification of the author of the letters with a historical martyr is regarded as unlikely.
Martyrs and Missionaries: Strategies of Jesuit Sainthood between the Suppression and the Restoration
Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2022
This article explores the promotion of "Jesuit sanctity," in the delicate passage between the suppression and the restoration of the Society of Jesus, as a reflection of the process of revival of the order. The strategies of sainthood that were fostered by the ex-Jesuits during the suppression and by the restored Society reveal fundamental information about the self-image that the order wanted to show to the world. These strategies emerge clearly from the activity of the General Postulation for the Causes of Saints of the new Society of Jesus, which in the nineteenth century focused in particular on two models of sanctity: martyrs and missionaries (and often martyred missionaries). Presenting important case studies of Francesco De Geronimo and Andrzej Bobola, this article investigates the reasons why the Society of Jesus promoted these typologies of sanctity in lieu of the trauma of the suppression, which emerges as "martyrdom" in Jesuit sources, and in the process of re-establishment of the order. It eventually explores how this "policy" of sainthood fits more broadly in the history of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2012
The role of religious practices in cultural evolution and the interrelations of religious and other cultural practices are the topics of this paper. In that regard, religious and non-religious practices interact in a variety of ways and may be important or necessary for the maintenance of each. The preservation of particular practices by the deliberate manipulation of these interrelations is commonplace. Presumably, the motivation of authorities with the power to manipulate practices is centered on the value of outcomes produced. That value, explicitly or implicitly, is group survival or cultural survival. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the socioeconomic and historical conditions which generate religious practices associated with martyrdom. This analysis draws upon interdisciplinary contact between behavior analysis and social sciences such as sociology and anthropology by utilizing concepts of metacontingency and macrocontingency. We address the significance of this interaction to the role of religious practices such as martyrdom in group survival or cultural survival and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing behavior analysts as cultural engineers.
Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches, 2009
This paper seeks to test a venerable scholarly and popular commonplace: that the ideology of religious martyrdom is based upon and further reflects a literal or even hyper-literal interpretation of Scriptures. Through two test-cases from late antique Christian writings, Tertullian’s scorpiace and Origen’s exhortatio ad martyrium, I seek to demonstrate the inadequacy of the literal/allegorical dichotomy to comprise and comprehend the complex, ingenious ways in which “the dialect of the holy Scriptures” (Origen’s phrase) is claimed to speak in one unambiguous voice that instructs the Christian to accept martyrdom under persecution through confession. Self- and other-characterizations using the labels of the lexicon of hermeneutical claims of fidelity to or apostasy from the Scriptures is pressed into service by authors who, like Tertullian in Carthage and Origen in Caesarea, craft careful apologetic and protreptic arguments to support the claim that for Christians “it is better to prefer a religious death to an irreligious life.”