We select then for our purpose four distinguished men: Prudentius, the Spanish poet, Paulinus of Nola, some while a statesman, later an ascetic and a popular writer, Damasus, the famous Roman bishop, to each of whom reference has already been made; and S. Martin, the loved Bishop of Tours in Gaul.
Of these, Prudentius, the Spanish poet, not only speaks for his own country of Spain, but also gives us considerable information connected with other parts of the Empire, notably in Italy and Rome. Paulinus of Nola represents largely popular opinion in Italy and GauL Damasus and his work speak for the Christian communities of the capital and for the vast numbers of visitors and pilgrims from mmy lands to the sanctuaries of Rome. S. Martin is the representative par excellence of the vast province of Gaul.
The dates of the four are as follows:—
Prudentius 348-405; Paulinus of Nola 353-431; Damasus, Bishop of Rome from 366-384; Martin of Tours 316-400 A. D.
Prudentius apparently belonged to a Christian family, but in early and middle life religion does not appear to have much influenced his life and conduct. He was a lawyer of some distinction, and his career, a brilliant and prosperous one, culminated in his appointment to an important provincial governorship. Something occurred in that sunny, successful life which determined him to give up his public career as a servant of the State. Retiring from the world, he resolved to devote the evening of his life to literary pursuits, devoting his pen exclusively to the assistance of the religion he felt was so intensely real and true. He soon showed that he was a poet of no ordinary power, and he consecrated this power to the service of the Crucified Master, Who had summoned him at a comparatively late hour to His side.
We have still with us several of his works, which include his dogmatic poems and his collection of hymns which have as their theme the various divisions of the day "Rathemerinon," as it is termed; besides his answer to Symmachus the Senator, when that statesman claimed that the altar of "Victory" should be restored to the old place which it occupied when the august Senate legislated for a Pagan Rome. As poems, though they belong to so late a date in Latin literature, they are unmistakably the work of a master; the "Answer to Symmachus" being besides a piece of real historical importance.
But a more special interest attaches to his Peri-Stephianon, "The Book of the (Martyrs') Crowns." It contains fourteen distinct hymns or poems, several of them of considerable length. The theme of these pieces is the "passions" of certain once-famous martyrs, the various circumstances of their trials, the final victories of these hero-sufferers for the Faith.
This work is quite original in its character, it is framed on no earlier model, and Prudentius may be said to have had no subsequent imitator. Much of it is taken up with reproductions of scenes in Pagan Courts, when the Christian hero, or heroine as the case might be, was accused, examined, tortured, and then led out to a death of agony which was endured without flinching, the brave confessor welcoming indeed with unfeigned gladness the bitter suffering for the Lord's sake. These hymns attained a wide popularity, and some of them apparently were read or sung in churches, being substituted for the prose Acts and Passions of Martyrs which were frequently read on the day when the confessor was especially commemorated.
These fervid and impassioned poems or hymns cannot, of course, be received as faithful and exact pictures of what took place in the Diocletian or in the yet earlier persecutions; but they do represent what the popular imagination in the years immediately following the last great trials and sufferings pictured to itself as having taken place. The basis of the stories was true, but the popular fancy added many a legend to the simple original facts, and these legends were utilized by our poet.
It is the halo of glory surrounding these martyrs that especially strikes the historian. We see in these popular poems what a profound, what a lasting, impression the sufferings of the martyrs had made on the people of the Roman Empire. The saint-sufferer, man or woman, became soon positively an object of something more than reverence. Their noble confession, their splendid courage and endurance for the Faith's sake, so thought the people, had won for the brave confessor a strange power in Heaven, so that whatever they asked at the throne of God would be granted to their prayers. This Prudentius evidently held, when in his impassioned verse he thus apostrophized one of the saints of his hymns: "Hear me, 0 blessed Spirit. I am unworthy that Christ should listen to my prayer for pardon, but if thou wilt speak for me to the Master, He will surely listen to thy voice."
To Prudentius, and to those for whom he wrote, the noble army of martyrs, so largely recruited in the persecution of the first years of the century, were already in the enjoyment of the beatific vision of God, and their powerful intercession was eagerly sought by sufferers alike in body and in mind.
The saint heroes and heroines of Prudentius belong to no one land, to no solitary nationality, but in the heart of the poet, his own loved Spain evidently holds the foremost place. We possess indeed but few records of the days of the last persecution in Spain, but the vivid and fiery verses tell us how sharp and bitter must have been the harrying of Christians, how numerous the Spanish sufferers, in that dread time. Nowhere was the truth of the well-known saying that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church more conspicuously exemplified than in Spain, the home of Prudentius.
When our poet wrote in the second half of the fourth century, the cult of the martyrs was widely spread throughout the country. Already well-nigh every city of importance boasted what may be termed its patron saint or saints. Thus Emerita (Merida) was proud of the girl-confessor Eulalia, to whose memory the citizens had speedily raised a noble church; its interior glittering with gold and colored work, and bright with variegated mosaics and costly marbles. Tarragona was styled "happy" (felix) Tarragona, under the protection of its saintly bishop, the martyr Fructuosus. Saragossa (Caesar Augusta), however, surpassed all other cities, in our poet's estimate, ranking only after Rome and Carthage, since it possessed the greatest number of martyrs, the presence of whose ashes sanctified the whole place, where Christ reigned indeed as Sovereign Lord.
Nor was the protection in Heaven of these martyrs only a present help to those who sought their succor and intercession in days of sickness, and in hours of sorrow. In the bloody and fiery dawn of the final judgment of the world, the confessors of the great persecution would not only be at hand to succor individuals who had honored and paid them homage, but under the shadow of their strong protection whole cities, where their memory had been venerated, would find shelter and comfort. Perhaps the grandest of the many striking pictures painted by Prudentius in this Epic of Martyrdom, is the one where he describes, in his musical and stirring cadences, the Epiphany of the awful Judge descending in fiery clouds from Heaven, ready to weigh the peoples in His scales of judgment; and there, before the Judge, the Spanish cities pass, each one carrying the relics of the saint and martyr it had long honored, and in whose guardianship it had trusted, Prudentius, in many of his startling and rousing verses, is evidently the mouthpiece of a great multitude. Erroneous and exaggerated though much of his teaching was, evoking as it soon did the warning voices of serious and responsible scholars like the great Augustine, there is no mistaking its source of inspiration. What Prudentius wrote and clearly himself believed was without doubt the popular creed of the people among whom he lived, and who read and loved the pathetic and soul-stirring lilts of their favorite song man.
Nor was this outcome of the last great persecution, this enthusiasm of the masses for the Christian martyrs, confined to Spain and her popular poet; precisely the same devotion to the martyr for the Faith, the same curious trust in the superhuman efficacy of the martyr's intercession, is conspicuous in the writings of Paulinus of Nola, who may be taken as the representative of popular feeling in southern and central Gaul and in Italy. Paulinus was a contemporary of Prudentius, his poetry being written in the last quarter of the fourth and early years of the following century.
This Paulinus spent his youth and middle life in Gaul and Italy, and his later years exclusively in Nola, a city of Campania, dying at an advanced age Bishop of Nola, about the year 431.
He was the heir of a very noble and extremely wealthy family; among his ancestors were not a few persons who had attained to the highest dignities in the Roman Empire. Gaul proudly claims Paulinus as one of her sons, his father having chosen as his chief residence Bordeaux, in which city the young Paulinus was born. He had for his tutor the celebrated rhetorician and poet Ausonius, who became later the tutor of Gratian, the Emperor Valentinian's son. Ausonius was extremely proud of his pupil Paulinus, and used his great influence to procure his speedy advancement to the Consular dignity, and when Paulinus withdrew himself altogether from the world, determining to apply his great talents, his enormous wealth, and the prestige of his eminent name to devotion and to furthering what he deemed the best interests of Christianity, his tutor warmly and affectionately remonstrated with him, urging him to give up his newly-formed plans of life. It was about A. D. 389 that Paulinus finally gave up the world in which he promised to play so brilliant a part. For some thirty-five years or more, he resided at Nola, a small Campanian city, where a little basilica had been erected over the tomb of S. Felix, a martyred presbyter, whose memory was tenderly cherished in that part of Italy, and whose shrine was the object of the visit of innumerable pilgrims. This basilica he rebuilt at a great cost, erecting around it elaborate buildings for the entertainment of pilgrims to the shrine.
During this long period of retirement Paulinus by no means gave up his literary labors, but he devoted them exclusively to religion. He has left behind him, among other works, a valuable volume of letters, and a still more interesting collection of poems, many of them of considerable merit; poems which he wrote annually, on the occasion of the festival of S. Felix, largely bearing on the merits and good offices of the saint to men, but containing many vivid pictures illustrative of the popular aspects of Christianity in the latter years of the fourth and the early years of the fifth century; of which poems some five thousand lines have been preserved.
The special attraction which brought the illustrious convert to the shrine of Felix and induced him to spend the long protracted autumn of his life under the shadow of the Church which arose over the martyr's tomb, is not at first sight very evident.
It appears, however, that when a boy he had been taken to the little basilica on the occasion of the saint's yearly festival. His child-mind was impressed with what he saw, the miracles worked by the powerful intercession of the saint, the crowd of worshippers who thronged the little church, the earnest devotion of the pilgrim-visitors. These things were never, so he tells us himself, forgotten; and far on in middle life, the longing for a closer walk with God gradually took possession of him, absorbing all his thoughts, coloring all his project Paulinus attributed this strange change passing over him to the direct intervention and mediation of the martyr-saint. Gratitude to S. Felix determined him to fix his permanent abode hard by the tomb where the sacred remains rested. Henceforth he would watch over the holy spot himself, would even every morning play the humble part of sweeper of the threshold of the church, which he determined to enlarge and beautify, making fresh and ample provision for the reception and entertainment of the many pilgrims, who in ever-increasing numbers frequented the holy place. Paulinus' purpose remained unchanged; for some thirty-five years he dwelt in the little Campanian city, only quitting it once a year when he used to go to Rome and pray at the hallowed shrines of the martyr-apostles Peter and Paul. In addition to the work he carried out in the basilica and shrine of Felix, and in the pilgrims' buildings adjacent, he built a small monastery, to use a term which belonged to a somewhat later period; where, with his wife, whom he termed his sister, and a few like-minded friends, he led an austere and self-denying life, in which he asserted that he found a happiness and delight utterly unknown to him in his former days, when as a wealthy patrician, high in the favor of the Emperor, he played the part of an important Roman official of the highest rank.
How deep was the attachment felt and the devotion shown towards the martyr Felix, not only by the poor and sick, but by trained, highly-educated men like the cultured Paulinus, is shown by such an apostrophe as the following: "Be kind and propitious to your faithful followers, I have been tossed on the waves of the sea and on the heaving waters of the world, and I have come at last to such a quiet haven of rest close to thee, I have laid up my bark and fastened it to thy shore."
Our "cloistered" poet dwells on the number of pilgrims to the popular shrine of the Nola martyr. Every year these devotees grew more numerous. They came, many of them, from distant Italian provinces and cities, from Apulia and Calabria, from Naples and Capua, from Latium and the metropolis. He indulges in some rhetorical expressions when he mentions the enthusiasm shown by citizens and dwellers in Rome, which sent her thousands to little Nola whenever the anniversary festival of S. Felix came round. The Appian Way, he says, was literally hidden by the pilgrim crowd. He dwells on the miracles which he saw worked at the shrine of his favorite saint, miracles of healing, especially on the "possessed" by evil spirits. Very kind was S. Felix to all poor folk, hence his widely extended popularity. He tells us how the glorified martyr loved to listen to the prayers of these humble devotees, and did not disdain to grant even their curious requests for their sick beasts. These, he says, were constantly healed as a result of their petitions. But Paulinus' faith in the power of his martyr-saint went far beyond these comparatively humble manifestations of supernatural powers.
The early years of the fifth century witnessed the beginnings of the final ruin of the Roman Empire in the West. When the immediate danger of the invasion of Radagaisus the Sclavonian, and his barbarian host, was averted by the victory of Stilicho the general of Honorius, the annual poem of Paulinus in honor of his saint commences with a glad note of triumph. It was in truth a strange hymn of thanksgiving; the writer ascribes the great victory of Roman civilization over barbarism to the intercession of S. Felix, who, uniting his prayers to the Lord with those of Peter and Paul, had obtained a respite for the sorely-harassed and threatened Empire. Its days were to be prolonged in consequence of the powerful mediation of these saints.
The ascription of such a mediatorial influence to the great Apostles was a grave and utterly baseless innovation in the primitive teaching contained in the Master's Gospel, but to associate with these great ones, in such a tremendous responsibility, a comparatively unknown martyr like S. Felix of Nola was indeed to advance a novel and a startling claim; that it was put forward by one subsequently so well known and revered in the Church as Paulinus of Nola is a striking testimony to the exalted and exaggerated position to which the martyrs of the persecutions had attained, at all events in the popular Christianity of the day.
S. Martin, Bishop of Tours, A. D. 316-97, in the course of the second half of the fourth century attracted enormous love and veneration from the numerous Christian congregations of Gaul, leaving behind him an unsurpassed reputation for devotion and sympathy, for boundless charity and kindness to all sorts and conditions of men; his beautiful life-story is the chief subject of the writings of his eminent scholar-disciple, Sulpicius Severus. S. Martin followed the almost universal practice of his age in paying extreme reverence and even worship to the remains of martyrs for the Faith. Only before sanctioning these acts of devotion, he required solid proofs that the dead saint to be venerated was in very truth deserving of the honor which the credulous people were only too ready to offer.
It may possibly be pleaded, in extenuation of these extraordinary assertions respecting the power of the martyrs of the persecutions to influence the Most High in His dealings with men, that the assertions above quoted from Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola appear in poems; and that the writers in making them used a poet's license of exaggeration in their fervid pictures of the unseen world. But these poems, it must be remembered, were of the nature of hymns, and contained without doubt the creed of the devout and earnest writers; they also, it is clear, too faithfully represented the "credenda" of the mass of the people who read and listened to these glowing popular lilts.
The most striking feature of S. Martin's life is the enormous influence he evidently exercised upon the rank and file of the population in the great Gallic provinces.
He was no writer or scholar like the other three whom we have here selected to dwell on; he was simply a man of rare gifts in inspiring sympathy. The almost boundless power which he evidently obtained over the hearts of the inhabitants of Gaul from about the year 353, shows us that a large proportion of these provincials, if not already Christians, were kindly disposed to the sect. S. Martin is represented by his devoted biographer, Sulpicius Severus, not as the great missionary to a Pagan people, but as completing a work already largely done. He is spoken of as the instrument by which the remaining Pagans of Gaul, especially in the southern and middle districts, were brought to the confession of the Crucified.
And no small portion of his labors was devoted to winning over erring Christians, heretical Christians, to the Catholic Faith. When, full of years and honor, he passed away in the last year of the century, we hear of the citizens of two important Gallic cities, Poitiers and Tours, warmly disputing the possession of the remains of the loved teacher; and when Tours succeeded in obtaining the coveted prize, the whole city is represented as coming out to meet the body of S. Martin, together with about two thousand monks.
Of the eminent teachers and Christian leaders of the fourth century, Damasus, Bishop of Rome (A. D. 366-384), perhaps did more than any other to further the cult of the martyrs. Pope Damasus was a prominent figure in the Church life of that century which witnessed the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. But the work for which he is best known is his elaborate restoration of the catacombs, which as the resting-place of so many martyrs, were an object to him of special interest.
It was no mere antiquarian, or even religious, zeal for the works of his fathers in the Faith which inspired Pope Damasus to undertake so many and important operations in the City of the Christian Dead; but it was above all an ardent devotion to the martyrs whose remains had been deposited there at different periods. It was the same spirit of loving admiration for the heroes of the Faith, an admiration which too quickly shaded into devotion, which inspired the poems of Paulinus of Nola, the same spirit which lives along the pages of the hymns of Prudentius on "The Crowns of the Martyrs," a spirit which may be regarded as a remarkable feature of popular Christianity in the first years of its triumph.
Damasus' long and patient work was a labor of love. With immense pains and care in many places! he removed the earth and re-opened the closed corridors and sepulchral chambers, which had been earthed-up in the days of the Decian or Diocletian persecutions; he widened a vast number of the passages so as to make them accessible to the crowds of pilgrims, who, from all lands, wandered to Rome, to pray at these sacred shrines of the dead; and even constructed many flights of stairs leading down to the more illustrious tombs. In some more special cases he adorned the chambers with costly marbles, and opened shafts to admit air and light, when it was practicable, to facilitate the pilgrim visits. In nearly all the catacombs that have yet been investigated traces of these labors of Pope Damasus have been found, and as the excavations advance, fragments, large and small, of the beautifully-chiselled inscriptions of his famous artist Filocalus, are constantly being found. The works carried out during his Pontificate gave a great impetus to that passion for pilgrimage to the martyrs' shrines, which became henceforth a marked and enduring feature in Christian life.
THE TOMB OF S. EUSEBIUS, BISHOP AND MARTYR, A. D. 310.
So persistent and so general had this "cult" of the martyrs become that grave alarm was excited among certain of the more thoughtful Christian theologians. A note of warning was struck, perhaps with over-much bitterness, by one Vigilantius, in whom some have seen a very early pioneer of Luther, Vigilantius, born in Aquitaine, in Southern Gaul, about A. D. 370, was a friend, possibly a pupil, of Sulpicius Severus, of whom we have already spoken as the companion and biographer of S. Martin of Tours. For a time he lived in some intimacy with Paulinus of Nola and with Jerome. He was subsequently ordained and became a presbyter, settling in Gaul, or perhaps in Spain; in his later life he wrote a work, which obtained considerable celebrity, against superstitious practices, notably against relic worship, and the vigils in the basilicas of the martyrs. The treatise in question is lost, and is only known to us through the writing of Jerome, Contra Vigilantiuon, in which work the great Latin Doctor bitterly inveighs against the opinions of the Gallic divine. Largely, it would seem, in consequence of this unfavorable judgment of Jerome, Vigilantius came to be ranked among heretics. But the note of alarm which he struck gives us some indication that the exaggerated reverence for martyrs upon which we have been dwelling was gravely disliked, at least by a section of theological teachers.
But a far more considerable theologian than Vigilantius was also disturbed at the rapid growth and universal prevalence of the martyr cult. The great Augustine (A. D. 354-430) bitterly grieves over the popular superstition which led uneducated and superstitious crowds to kneel in adoration before the tombs of famous confessors of the Faith. He takes some pains to define the style of homage which might fairly be paid to saints and martyrs. "We," he writes, "do not treat these as deities; we have no intention of imitating the Pagans here, who adore the dead, we erect no temples in their honor, we adorn for them no altars, but with their remains we raise an altar to the one God." When the relics of S. Stephen were brought with great ceremony to Augustine's church at Hippo, he took the greatest pains that the enthusiasm of the people should be restrained from all extravagant excesses.
Yet in spite of sober theologians of the Catholic Church the mischief to a great extent was done. But with the theological question,with the consequent errors and superstition so disfiguring to Christianity, the historian has little to do. We have dwelt at some length upon this strange development, so general and so widespread, because it sprang almost wholly and entirely out of the last and final persecution of Diocletian. That supreme effort of Paganism was, as we have seen, gigantic, far-reaching, desperate. It harried uncounted thousands of every class and order; the sufferings which paganism inflicted upon its Christian foes were indeed terrible, but the very magnitude of the effort was one of the causes of its ultimate, its complete defeat. There were, of course, some, perhaps many, Christians whose hearts failed them in view of the awful suffering which lay before them. But on the whole, the courage, the brave patience, the noble constancy, of the Christian congregations enabled them to endure all rather than fail. A very great number shed their blood, and in pain and agony, borne in brave patience for the Name's sake, passed to their rest in the Paradise of God. Many more, who were not condemned to death, endured the loss of all things that made life pleasant and joyous.
But all this great suffering, the noble, patient endurance of the confessors, the spilt blood of the martyrs, was not for nought. Innumerable Pagan bystanders watched, and when at last the persecutors stayed their hands, and the Christians were left alone, largely owing to their persecutors growing weary of inflicting wrongs and suffering upon an unresisting folk, multitudes, who had seen and marvelled how their old foes had borne all, had suffered and had died rather than recant, determined to throw in their lot with the strange people who had been evidently helped in the deadly struggle by some unseen, mighty power.
This is the explanation of the sudden conversion to Christianity of a large portion of the subjects of the great Empire on the morrow of the proclamations by the Government of "Peace" for the Church.
The reasons of the extravagant glorification of the martyrs on which we have just dwelt are not far to seek. No honor was too great to show to the more conspicuous among the late sufferers for the Faith. The old man and the young girl, the senator and the slave, who in especially trying circumstances, had shown the sublime courage of the Christian martyr, became at once the objects of popular reverence. Nay, more, those noble souls who had borne so splendid a witness, were surely now, so many loved to think, very close to the Master for Whom, and for Whose cause they had died; surely He could refuse nothing to such brave and devoted servants. They would ask these glorified ones who had been so lately among them, of their company, in their homes, partners of their sorrows and their joys, to speak for them to their Lord. They, the martyrs, surely had only to ask a boon, and it would be at once granted. Hence the martyr cult. Its genesis is not difficult to grasp. It was, of course, a sad error, and a grievous one, deplorable indeed in its far-reaching consequences, but we can understand exactly how it came about.
The feeling of passionate reverence for these bravely patient sufferers for the Truth's sake was not peculiar to the men and women of the fourth and fifth centuries. It inspired one of the noblest passages in one of our latest philosophic writers.
"For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men and even weak girls endured these things without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr's tomb."