5
Prudentius used his poetry to craft and disseminate an idea of martyrdom as witness, but he was not terribly explicit about this aim. His transformational venture required an active and empowered reader or listener. Paulinus, too, employed poetry to argue for and induce in his audiences a form of martyrdom that did not require death, conveying his arguments for an ethically embodied (and witness-inspired) reorientation to God through transformational poetics. Our last author, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), though he does often operate on similarly subtle registers, is far more explicit in his advocacy for martyrdom without death. Like his two poetry-focused contemporaries, Augustine advocated for an understanding of martyrdom that did not involve death, and he tried to inculcate martyrdom in his audiences through his rhetoric. But unlike Prudentius and Paulinus, Augustine offered his most fervent arguments about martyrdom without death not through poetics but through sermons.
Sermons are, by their nature, exhortatory, and Augustine understood preaching to be not only a duty but a divinely provisioned opportunity to teach and to shape the hearts, minds, and values of his listeners.1 It is little wonder, then, that Augustine is often explicit and emphatic in his sermons about the possibility of earning martyrdom without death:
Anyone who preaches wherever he can is, indeed, a martyr.2
You will ever be crowned and depart from here a martyr, if you overcome the temptations of the devil.3
If you do not consent [to using pagan amulets], do not think that you are not a martyr. Your feast day might not be celebrated, indeed, but your crown awaits.4
Many, therefore, go to martyrdom on a sickbed: many indeed.5
He fights, every day, within his conscience, so that he might seek a crown from the one who sees it, when he conquers.6
This type of explicit pronouncement occurs in fourteen of Augustine’s Sermones ad populum.7 Similar lessons about martyrdom without death appear more subtly in another forty-eight sermons.8 Given that roughly 145 of the extant Sermones ad populum deal with martyrdom in any substantive way, we can see that martyrdom without death occupied a quantifiably prominent place in Augustine’s preaching about martyrs, entering into slightly less than half of these homiletic discussions of martyrdom.9 In addition, his arguments against equating martyrdom with death or even physically inflicted suffering seem to span nearly the entirety of his career as a preacher.10 He also preached this message in a variety of locations, not just at his home church of Hippo Regius but also at martyrs’ shrines and as a visiting preacher in various locations across Africa Proconsularis, including Carthage, Utica, and Bulla Regia.11 In other words, martyrdom without death was a longstanding and perennially foregrounded idea for Augustine.
Despite the pervasiveness and frequency of living martyrs in Augustine’s sermons, the possibility has, until very recently, tended to be overlooked or marginalized in scholarly treatments both of Augustine’s theories of martyrdom and of his homiletic practice.12 Their appearance has tended to generate incredulity, dismissal, or relegations to the margins of Augustine’s thought. For example, Edmund Hill (or someone in his editorial team at New City Press) has placed scare quotes around the idea of achieving living martyrdom through preaching in the paragraph heading for Sermo 260E, 2, which reads: “We too should be ‘martyrs’ for the faith, not more afraid of ridicule than the martyrs were of tortures and death.”13 Elsewhere, Hill expresses discomfort that Augustine “stretches the word ‘persecution,’ apparently, beyond the limits of normal usage to mean any kind of pain and hardship which people endure from any kind of motive.”14 Hill attributes this to Augustine “only giving half his mind to what he was saying.” Carole Straw, meanwhile, though she identifies witness as a central feature of Augustine’s definition of martyrdom and highlights the importance of causa to martyrdom, nonetheless reasserts the importance of death in Augustine’s thinking on martyrdom: she calls martyrdom without death “spiritual martyrdom” as opposed to “literal martyrdom,” bracketing martyrdom earned without death as a phenomenon somehow less fully realized. This is despite the fact that Augustine himself made no such differentiation and indeed (as we shall see) repeatedly emphasized that the literal meaning of “martyrdom” was “witness.” In Straw’s reading, the only witness that truly constitutes martyrdom is “witness through suffering,” which is why she is forced to frame Augustine’s affirmation of life and the body (and his disavowal of any “pathological fascination with death and torture”) as an outlook he held “despite” his position on martyrdom, rather than one that was entirely consonant with it.15
More recently, the idea that Augustine advocated martyrdom without death has gained more traction. Hill, for example, seems to have grown more comfortable with the idea over time. In his commentary on Sermo 306E, published in 2000 (three years after his last volume of translations of the Sermones ad populum), Hill not only recognizes that Augustine thinks Christians can share in the martyr’s reward “simply by having ‘a good will,’” but also links it to other moments where Augustine asserts the primacy of willingness over action.16 Notably, Hill refrains from actually calling these will-based martyrs “martyrs,” instead focusing on the shared reward. Meanwhile, Éric Rebillard has shown persuasively that Augustine sought to impose on his Christian contemporaries a hierarchical arrangement of their competing identities—that is, that whatever other social or ideological categories one might belong to, only one, in this case Christianity, should take precedence at all times.17 As Rebillard makes clear, this hierarchical arrangement of category memberships was not the default in late ancient North Africa, and Augustine was often speaking to audiences who assumed that their other, competing identities—their social locations, their familial roles, their local political and economic circumstances, their occupations, etc.—would and should have as much importance in their lives as their Christianity. Because it was so difficult and so unusual to prioritize one’s Christian identity, Rebillard writes, Augustine “promotes Christians who adhere to their Christian identity as their unique principle of action to the status of martyrs.”18 Rebillard elaborates, showcasing instances where Augustine attempts to inculcate this mentality in his congregants and correspondents, but because Rebillard’s emphasis is on the evidence of Christians not making their Christianity their primary guide, the account of martyrdom without death is sidelined. Finally, Annemaré Kotzé includes an account of living martyrdom in her analysis of the ways that Augustine formulated his definition of martyrdom in contradistinction to the Donatists’, but she nonetheless characterizes it as a metaphorical martyrdom—indeed, she has titled the section of her article that deals with living martyrdom: “Transposing Martyrdom to the Metaphorical Sphere.”19 Kotzé’s account thus does not capture the totality and reality of the living martyrdom that Augustine advocated.
The fullest recent treatment of Augustine’s theology of martyrdom that attends to martyrdom without death is Dupont and DeMaeyer’s “A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom on the Basis of Sermon 306C (Morin 15) on the Feast of the Martyr Quadratus.”20 After succinctly and clearly summarizing Augustine’s general thinking on martyrdom, including the important point that “Augustine emphasizes the need for an ethical ‘imitatio martyris,’”21 Dupont and DeMaeyer offer an introduction to and close reading of Sermo 306C. In their discussion, they highlight the sermon’s focus on the martyrs choosing a life “according to God” (283) and explicitly (and salutarily) acknowledge that Augustine is here advocating for “a contemporary martyrdom that consists in distancing oneself from what is earthly” (287)—that is, a life of martyrdom. But I do not think they go far enough. Dupont and DeMaeyer do not return to their discussion of Augustine’s general theory of martyrdom to note that, if we take Sermo 306C seriously, the “imitatio martyris” can actually be, in Augustine’s thinking, a martyrdom of its own. Such a conclusion is harder to avoid when we look beyond 306C to the other sermons that make similar arguments about rethinking martyrdom’s relationship to death. What Dupont and DeMaeyer see in this one sermon is amplified and enriched when we look to Augustine’s larger corpus of sermons.
And that is the project I am attempting here. What I argue in this chapter and the next is that the paradigm of living martyrdom was of central importance for Augustine, particularly in the homiletic context. He used both examples of living martyrs and exhortations to martyrdom (living or otherwise) to convince his hearers that martyrdom—real martyrdom—was just as achievable in the fifth century as it had been in the first, second, third, and fourth; he further used descriptions of martyrial mindsets to show his listeners how to cultivate a martyrial mentality, a worldview and habitus that rendered life itself a continual martyrdom. While humans live, Augustine argued, nothing about our salvation is certain, and we are continually besieged by temptations. The crown, therefore, can only be awarded at the moment of death by the same God who oversees both the will to martyrdom and its enactment. But, Augustine argues, martyrdom can be earned without visible suffering, in completely unspectacular fashion, years before one actually dies. This is because martyrdom is judged not by one’s external fate but by one’s internal orientation of obedience to God—that is to say, in Augustine’s words, non facit martyrem poena sed causa (“it is not the punishment, but the cause that makes a martyr”).22
In the next chapter, I offer both a full description of the life of martyrdom that Augustine advocated and an exploration of the vast rhetorical effort Augustine expended to make the life of martyrdom a lived reality for his audience. The present chapter offers an introduction to Augustine’s theology of martyrdom and argues that, to understand his thinking on martyrdom fully, we must center deathless martyrdom. In what follows, I survey and analyze Augustine’s configurations of living martyrdom, as well as those times when he seems to assert the necessity of death, with the aim of showing the essential role played by living martyrdom in Augustine’s homiletic treatments of martyrdom.
AUGUSTINE ON THE MARTYRS
For Augustine—throughout his career—martyrdom is always, above all else, reliant on the martyr’s internal struggle against sin, temptation, and desire for the world—a struggle that can only be initiated and endured with the help of God.23 The themes of suffering and death weave in and out of his treatments of martyrdom, but rarely is either deemed necessary, and Augustine frequently asserts the internal struggle to adhere to divine causae as paramount. Time and again in his sermons, Augustine tries to impress these points upon his audiences, arguing that martyrdom is earned not by one’s suffering but by the cause that occasioned the suffering; and furthermore, that all of the merit of martyrdom resides in God, not the martyr, who should be venerated only as a means to glorify God.
This is not to say that Augustine’s opinions of martyrdom were static over the course of his career. Scholars generally agree that Augustine’s enthusiasm for martyrdom increased over the course of his career in three identifiable stages.24 From his conversion to Catholic Christianity in 386 until the turn of the fifth century—a period that saw him ordained as priest (in 391), tasked with preaching (in 39225), consecrated as successor to the episcopacy of Hippo Regius (in 395), and assuming the role of bishop (in 396)—Augustine seems not to have been much interested in martyrdom or martyrs and their cults;26 his main concern in this period seems to have been improper veneration of martyrs—specifically through the feasting, drinking, dancing, and debauchery that often accompanied celebrations of the martyrs’ liturgically commemorated “birthdays.”27 From 401 until 415, however, Augustine shows far more interest in the martyrs, largely, it seems, as a result of “outward factors”: the popular veneration of the martyrs and his need to respond to the Donatists’ “pride in the martyrs of their schismatic church.”28 Finally, from 415, when the relics of the martyr Stephen were discovered and disseminated, until his death, Augustine was an energetic champion of the cults of the martyrs, though his underlying wariness of their misuse did not change.29 In short, Augustine seems to have come to value martyrdom as a central feature of Christian life more and more over the course of his career, engaging with the topic more frequently as his appreciation for its utility and relevance grew and as he found his theology of martyrdom to be useful in the various controversies he became embroiled in as bishop.30
But these changes in enthusiasm do not reflect any changes in what Augustine understood martyrdom to be in essence: although his phrasings, his emphases, and the frequency of his treatments seem to have changed over the course of his career, Augustine’s underlying theory of martyrdom seems to have been constant, encapsulated in the formulation that he would come to develop (almost as “a proverbial phrase”) and use frequently (“almost to the point of cliché”), that “it is not the punishment, but the cause that makes a martyr” (non poena sed causa).31 Martyrs are not defined by what happens to them or by their punishments; rather, the cause that motivates them is what establishes them as martyrs. As Augustine advises in a sermon on a martyr’s feast day likely delivered between 404 and 408:
First, as much as you can, choose a causa. For, with no cause chosen, aren’t those great things which the martyrs suffer the same as what robbers, adulterers, evildoers, and all sorts of sacrilegious people have suffered? If you look at their punishments, they are equal; if you look at their many causes, these are far distant from those.32
If martyrdom were solely about one’s suffering, there would be nothing to differentiate the martyr from the criminal or the saint from the schismatic. If suffering were martyrdom’s only criterion, Augustine reasoned in a slightly earlier sermon, even the Devil could be considered a martyr:
Look how much he suffers, whose temples are everywhere overthrown, whose idols are everywhere broken, whose priests and prognosticators are everywhere slaughtered. Could even [the Devil] be able to say: “And I am a martyr, too, because I have suffered so”?33
Suffering, then, is not a reliable indicator of martyrdom in Augustine’s eyes. The martyr, according to Augustine, is the one whose cause, or reason for being persecuted, is true and just. But if it is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr, would it not be possible for a Christian to be a martyr without any physically inflicted or visibly suffered punishment at all? This is, indeed, what Augustine argued. The causa to which one is committed trumps all other considerations, including how much or how visibly one suffers, and this is true through every stage of Augustine’s thinking on martyrdom.
This idea (though not the phrasing of non poena sed causa) is present from early on in Augustine’s thinking. According to Wojciech Lazewski, who in 1987 surveyed all instances of the phrase in Augustine’s writing, the constituent components were present at least as early as 393, in De Sermone Domini in Monte 1.13, where Augustine argues that “heretics” and “schismatics” can suffer persecution without sharing in heavenly rewards, because they are not suffering for the right cause of justice.34 And Carole Straw has noted the idea that everyday trials can constitute a martyrdom in Enarratio in Psalmo 29.2.9, which predates 392.35 The exact phrasing of non poena sed causa appears, at the earliest, with Sermo 335G, which may have been preached in 396. At the absolute latest, the phrasing non poena sed causa begins to appear in Augustine’s sermons in 405. But Augustine seems always to have understood martyrdom to be determined by internal criteria, like one’s commitment to a godly causa, rather than by death or suffering.36
Non poena sed causa is quite clearly connected to Augustine’s core principle that martyrdom is earned through an interior struggle rather than any externally discernible affair; it is also (though less clearly) connected to his second major proposition, that all credit for martyrdom belongs to God.37 Since martyrdom is marked not by any concrete outcome but, rather, by a martyr’s will, non poena sed causa becomes a reminder that it is God, not the martyr, who determines a martyrdom’s outcome. The martyr has no say in anything but his cause, and that is what, according to Augustine, should be the focus of any veneration or imitatio martyris. We see this in an undated sermon, as Augustine is distilling the lessons to be gleaned from the martyrdom of the White Mass, the Utican Christians who were martyred together after Cyprian’s death in 258:
It is not, therefore, within the power of man [to determine] by what exit he will end this life: but it is in the power of man [to determine] how he lives, so that he ends his life secure. Nor would even this have been in his power, unless the Lord had granted the power to become sons of God. But to whom [did God grant this power]? To those who believe in his name. This is the primary cause of the martyrs, this is the white mass of the martyrs. If the cause is white, the mass is white.38
We cannot control how we die, Augustine notes, but we can control, with God’s help, what cause we choose to commit to, and that is what guarantees our martyrdom. For those wishing to become martyrs, non poena sed causa is an admonition to focus on one’s own interior struggles and cultivation of virtues and to let God control one’s fate. It is, after all, “from God that the martyrs were granted to suffer for him.”39 Augustine makes this point clear on several occasions when he compares the seven Maccabean brothers with the three young men who walked unharmed through the furnace of Babylon. Their different outcomes are due not, Augustine emphasizes, to their differing merits but, rather, to the different uses to which God wanted their experiences to be put: by openly freeing the boys from the furnace, Augustine says, God was able to sway Nebuchadnezzar; by secretly crowning the Maccabees, God ensured that Antiochus slipped further into sin.40 We see a similar message in another year’s sermon for the White Mass—in this case, Augustine is even more pointed in his critique of those who would seek to control their fates because he was preaching during the height of the Donatist controversy and sought to vilify Donatist enthusiasm for death in martyrdom: whatever the realities of Donatist self-identity may have been, Augustine characterizes the Donatists as death-obsessed and prideful martyr fetishizers as part of his polemic against them.41 Augustine hammers home the idea that Christians should not be too eager for death in martyrdom by (re)configuring the candida massa as gentle, meek, and patient, and awaiting God’s cues: “[Their soul] did not hasten to accept the reward. For this is ‘waiting for the Lord’: that you accept only then, when God wishes to give.”42 God, according to Augustine, is in absolute control of one’s poena, so aiming for a specific outcome to one’s steadfastness in faith is an overstep.
Complicating this account of one’s ability to control even one’s causa—and illuminating Augustine’s theory of grace as it applies to the martyrs—is the fact that Augustine also argues that the very ability to choose and hold fast to a godly and virtuous cause is itself a gift from God. Augustine is adamant that the would-be martyrs should not arrogate to themselves any of the credit for their martyrdoms—not even for the act of will at the heart of their martyrdoms. God acts as a helper “that he might give [the martyr] true faith, that he might fashion in him a good cause.”43 After all, “there is nothing in us that is properly ours except sin.”44 When making these stark claims, Augustine often relies on Scripture—in saying that there is nothing in us that is ours except sin, for example, Augustine is riffing on Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 15:10 that whatever godly work he has done has, in fact, been accomplished not by himself but by “the grace of God in [him].”45 The text he most frequently and most extensively turns to in this regard is Philippians 1:29: “To you it has been given for Christ’s sake not only that you believe in him, but also that you suffer for him”).46 In Sermo 284, Augustine unpacks this quote at length:
You praise the patience of the martyrs, as if they could be patient on their own. Listen, rather, to the teaching of the apostle of the Gentiles, not the deceiver of the infidels. Really—you’re praising in the martyrs their endurance for Christ’s sake, and you attribute it to them? Listen, rather. . . . Listen, I say, to him saying that “to you it has been given for Christ’s sake.” Listen to piety encouraging, not flattery lying: “to you,” he says, “it has been given.” “It has been given”—Listen! “To you it has been given for Christ’s sake not only that you believe in him, but that you suffer for him.”47
Augustine’s exposition here actually continues for quite some time further, in similarly emphatic, disjointed, and repetitive language, restating and reinscribing this central point: the belief that underlies martyrdom, just as the occasion of suffering, is entirely a gift of God.48 Or, as he says in the anti-Pelagian Sermo 333, “When, therefore, God crowns your merits, he is crowning nothing but his own gifts.”49
While working within the bounds of these two primary concerns (that the martyr’s causa is paramount and that all credit be given to God), Augustine offers several discussions and explanations of martyrdom. Some of these emphasize blood, suffering, and death, while others emphasize the life of martyrdom. In the following sections, I explore how Augustine’s arguments about martyrdom unfold across these two trajectories—living martyrdom and death martyrdom. In the first section, I highlight the ways that Augustine makes his case to his parishioners that martyrdom can be achieved while a person is still living, that a life of martyrdom is possible for them. In the second section, I examine the times when Augustine advocates (or seems to advocate) for a more conventional understanding of martyrdom, one that requires death in persecution. Some of these instances are unequivocal, reflecting the continuing dominance of the martyrdom-by-death paradigm even as Augustine, in other contexts (sometimes within the very same sermons!), argues that blood and death are not essential to martyrdom. But some of these instances counterintuitively help bridge the gap between martyrdom-by-death and the life of martyrdom: their use in context effectively undermines the meaning of blood imagery and death.
MARTYRDOM WITHOUT DEATH
June 29, 411, found Augustine preaching in Carthage to an audience that included not only locals but also several visiting Catholic bishops, like himself, who had come to the city for a long-awaited confrontation with their Donatist counterparts. The Catholic side had emerged victorious only a few weeks earlier,50 and in the wake of this triumph, Augustine availed himself of Peter and Paul’s feast day not to gloat over the Donatists’ summary defeat, but to demand more of his audience, precisely on the same grounds on which he habitually criticized the Donatists: selfishness, pride, and worldliness. He instructs both clerics and lay Christians to put their love of God and God’s commands before their love of the world. Bishops are called to serve their congregations, even if it means risking their own deaths, Augustine argues, while congregants must be reminded of the frailty of all human judgment, the futility of all human ventures, and the fallibility of all human institutions (most visible in the sack of Rome, which had occurred less than a year previously and from which his congregants were still reeling). In the face of such human error, Augustine declares, one must look to God and (in a pointed rebuke of the “schismatic” Donatists) to the Church to find stability and safety.
The idea of living martyrdom enters the sermon (Sermo 296) when Augustine is describing how bishops must serve their congregations. After explaining that Christ’s charge to Peter to feed the Lord’s sheep was really a command to be willing to die for Christ’s flock, that “death for the Lord’s sheep must not be rejected” and that Christ “requires of his servants an aptitude for blood-suffering,”51 Augustine turns to others, beyond Peter, who have been similarly charged with sheep-tending: the apostles and their inheritors, the clergy. Augustine then obliquely exhorts the assembled bishops to living martyrdom by addressing his audience on behalf of the clergy: “We feed you, we are fed together with you. May the Lord grant us the strength to love you such that we are also able to die for you, either in deed or in feeling.”52 By clarifying that this death is either “in deed or in feeling,” Augustine is establishing that the “aptitude for blood-suffering” is the crucial component. The bishop’s mission to serve his flock is not stymied by the absence of physical death: the key is a willingness to die, a capability for dying, such that one might “die for” the Lord’s sheep in affect only. Augustine then proceeds to explain how martyrdom can be achieved without death:
For, just because suffering (passio) was lacking from the apostle John does not mean that the spirit prepared for suffering could be lacking. He did not suffer, but he was able to suffer: God knew his readiness. In the same manner, the three boys were cast into the furnace to be burnt, not to conquer: Shall we deny that they are martyrs, because the flames were not able to burn them? Ask about the fire: They did not suffer. Ask about the will: They were crowned.53
Drawing on the examples of the apostle John and the three young men who were cast into the furnace of Babylon, none of whom suffered or died at the hands of persecutors, Augustine establishes that martyrdom is not about the fact of one’s death or even the fact of one’s suffering, but rather about the interior qualities of the martyr, namely, their willingness to obey God. If John and the three young men could merit the crowns of martyrdom without any physically inflicted suffering, so too could Augustine’s listeners. Being prepared to suffer or capable of suffering for one’s obedience to God is enough to merit martyrdom.
This emphasis on martyrial interiority and cultivating a will prepared to obey God also links back to the larger theme in this sermon of trusting in God’s will rather than in fallible human judgment. Augustine explains that God had a clear aim in miraculously saving the boys from the furnace: it had the effect (which their deaths would not have had) of bringing Nebuchadnezzar to God, “[extinguishing] the fire of idolatry in the spirit of the king.”54 God’s plan is paramount, and to hope for any temporal outcome—even for the end of one’s earthly tenure via a glorious and spectacular martyrdom in the arena—is to make the same mistake that Peter had made when he objected to Jesus’s prophesying about his own imminent death (Matt. 16:22–23), namely, to think in “human ideas, rather than God’s.”55
The idea of living martyrdom, therefore, is intimately connected to the arguments that Augustine was attempting to make before his distinguished colleagues about what their duties as clerics demanded as well as to the laypeople in attendance about what their clergy’s service should look like. Surely all the Catholic clergy present would have been thinking well of themselves in the wake of their dispatch of the Donatists—some triumphalism would have been understandable, and it would not have been out of line for a homilist to dwell on the victory or to congratulate his peers. But Augustine instead chooses to remind his listeners of the fallibility of all human endeavors and to remind the assembled bishops of their duties to their flocks: he chastens them and offers these reminders in the presence of some of the congregants who comprised those flocks. He calls on the bishops to place their congregants’ needs before their own, to suffer with them in affect, to die with them in feeling. In doing so, Augustine not only calls the clergy to martyrdom but also clarifies for any parishioners in attendance (some of whom may have been Donatists or Donatist sympathizers, or perhaps Catholics who may simply have wanted arguments to wield against their Donatist peers) that this martyrdom may not look spectacular and may not include death. His arguments about martyrdom without death, then, are pivotal for Augustine at this moment in time, serving to guide the clergy, reassure the crowd, and galvanize the Church.
I chose to begin this section with Sermo 296 because it shows how central the configuration of living martyrdom was to Augustine’s thinking and to his preaching: it intertwined deeply with his major intellectual commitments to placing God’s judgment before all else and searching one’s own soul in the hopes of conforming to God’s will. Pastorally, he considered it important enough that he chose to highlight it on such a momentous occasion, one that would be remembered by its attendees for years to come and that would fuse itself into their memories of the Conference of Carthage itself; Augustine wanted to ensure that this was one of his colleagues’ takeaways. In the rest of this section, I aim to add to this picture, to cement the impression of living martyrdom’s centrality for Augustine, by surveying the many ways that martyrdom without death appears in Augustine’s sermons.
One frequent vehicle Augustine used to incorporate martyrdom without death into his sermons is the story of the three young men in Babylon’s furnace. We have already seen one instance of its use—the story is the proof-text for Augustine’s case that the apostle John could still be considered a martyr and that, by extension, so could any contemporary clergy who possessed the will to sacrifice themselves for their flocks. “Shall we deny that they are martyrs,” Augustine asks, “because the flames were not able to burn them? Ask about the fire: They did not suffer. Ask about the will: They were crowned.”56 Augustine is elsewhere likewise adamant that these divinely rescued figures should be considered martyrs. In Sermo 306E, he uses the boys as an example of saints who have “the mind of a martyr”;57 in Sermo 343, they are crowned;58 and in one sermon on the Gospel of John, he contrasts the three boys with the false martyrs of the Donatists.59
But the three young men are not just examples of living martyrs; for Augustine: they are model martyrs—prototype martyrs—whose example is foundational for all martyrdom. In another sermon on the Gospel of John, Augustine offers the three boys up as the ancient template to which all future martyrs would conform. Their response to Nebuchadnezzar’s threat was to assert the power of God and then to submit themselves to God’s will, even if it meant disregarding their own temporal lives: “God has the power to free us from this flame. . . . but even if [God] is not willing to openly free us, he is able to crown us in secret.” This sentiment, Augustine emphasizes, grounds all martyrial aspiration: “From this [attitude] the Lord himself, head of the martyrs, would make martyrs—as he said, ‘Do not fear those who destroy the body’” (Matt. 10:28).60 When Augustine talks about these martyrs, he talks about their willingness to abide by God’s judgment, their scorning of earthly threats, and their reward, which, though delayed,61 is nonetheless secure.
To highlight that martyrdom was defined by one’s interior response to the world rather than by any externally visible punishment, and to emphasize that God’s prerogative would determine what became of the soul prepared for martyrdom, Augustine often chose to juxtapose these rescued Babylonian martyrs with the seven Maccabean brothers and their mother, who perished. Augustine makes this comparison in thirteen extant sermons, a pattern thoroughly and helpfully explored by Catherine Brown Tkacz.62 Tkacz notes that Augustine emphasizes the martyrs’ different fates by omitting many details from both stories when he compares them, simplifying them to their points of parallel and the one point where they materially diverge—the suffering and death of their protagonists. The effect of these simplifications, according to Tkacz, is that “the contrast is thus clearly on the difference of outcome for two groups who suffered by fire for their faith, with ‘Sidrach, Misach et Abdenago’ unhurt but the seven brothers dead.”63 The former were “openly freed,” while the latter were “crowned in secret,”64 to serve God’s larger aims. But all were saved, and both groups were awarded the crown of martyrdom: “Those ones escaped, those ones then burned: both were tested. These [were] consumed in the flesh, these [were] inviolate in the flesh; both were crowned.”65 In being crowned as martyrs, the Maccabees and the boys in the furnace of Babylon share the same ultimate reward and are equally regarded by Augustine as martyrs (and used by him as martyrial exempla).66
While stressing the similarity between these two heroic Hebrew groups, Augustine does assert one major point of difference: the timing of their martyrial rewards. This is important because it helps us distinguish what Augustine understood living martyrdom to look like. Augustine argues that the Maccabees did, indeed, receive a greater reward than the Babylonian youths by being crowned earlier. To be clear, Augustine is not arguing that the Maccabees deserved a greater reward because they had suffered and died. Rather, he argues that their death made their reward come more quickly, which in itself was a blessing. The young men in the furnace, by contrast, still had to live on in the world, facing its daily temptations: “Certainly, these boys evaded the flames, but they were saved for the perils of this world: [the Maccabees] ended all perils in the flames. No further temptation of any sort remained for them, just the crown. Therefore, the Maccabees received more.”67 Augustine makes this point to reorient his listeners to the real perils they face just by existing in the world. Anyone who wishes they could share the fate of the three boys (earthly survival) rather than that of the Maccabees (earthly death) suffers from a “weak soul” that loves the world too much.”68 Such a person is seeing with “human eyes,” rather than the eyes of faith.69 Augustine is keen to impress upon his listeners that this world, into which the three boys were released, is its own arena, filled with its own persecutors. In effect, though they might seem to have gotten the better reward, the three boys really got the raw end of the deal because their trials—that is, their martyrdoms—continued for as long as they were in the flesh.70
This characterization of life as a continual temptation, as an arena in which one is continually enacting a martyrdom, is at the heart of Augustine’s argument that martyrdom is available to all Christians, regardless of external historical circumstances. This is why, he thinks, martyrdom is still always available to his contemporaries. Augustine habitually reminds his listeners that temptations never cease. For example, in Sermo 328 he declares: “No one should say: ‘I can’t be a martyr because there is no persecution now.’ Temptations haven’t ceased. Fight, and the crown is prepared [for you].”71 And in Sermo 4, a long, wide-ranging sermon centered on Jacob and Esau that Augustine delivered either in Hippo Regius or in Carthage in 403, he declares: “For persecution is not lacking. The Devil is the persecutor; an occasion for a crown is never absent.”72 Augustine elaborates:
But the soldier of Christ must understand the fight, and know whom he must conquer. For if a clear enemy of the body is not threatening you, does no hidden persecutor threaten you with allurements of the flesh? How many evil things he suggests! How many through desire; how many through fear!73
The crown could be earned by resisting temptations, Augustine insisted, because persecution did, in fact, continue to the present; in this world, all Christians are always subject to temptation and strife. They are always called to struggle. After giving some examples of resisting temptation, Augustine concludes the sermon by making explicit the lesson he wants his listeners to absorb:
Why have we said these things, brothers? So that when you celebrate the birthdays of the martyrs, you might imitate the martyrs, lest you think for some reason that the occasions for a crown could be lacking to you, because such persecutions are lacking now. For even now daily persecutions from the devil are not lacking, whether through suggestion or whether through some annoyance of the body. You only must know that you have a commander, who has preceded you into heaven. He gave you a path to follow; hold fast to him. Do not, when you conquer, credit yourself, in pride, as if you had struggled through your own strength. But rely on that one who gave you strength to conquer, because he himself conquered the world. And you will ever be crowned and depart from here a martyr, if you overcome the temptations of the devil.74
The Devil’s daily persecutions through temptation provide no fewer opportunities for martyrdom than the amphitheater; like those earlier martyrs, Augustine’s contemporaries could successfully navigate these persecutions by imitating Christ in resisting temptation and giving Christ all the credit for their success. Notably, as we saw above, pride in one’s own ability to endure is its own temptation—temptations are everywhere. If you surmount all of those temptations, you can achieve martyrdom.
Because there are so many types of continued persecution, so many types of temptation, Augustine argued, martyrdom can take many forms. If a nobleman or a powerful man compels you to give false evidence, and you resist, you are a martyr.75 Risking social ostracization by preaching at a dinner party makes you a martyr.76 The man who “has his will averted from money,” who “stands firm against those who threaten him with financial ruin,” is “the martyr of God,”77 as are those who scoff at the threats of exile and earthly disgrace.78 Loving one’s enemies merits a crown of martyrdom from God, who is watching intently the “cramped theater” of your heart.79 Even standing and listening patiently to Augustine’s sermons can merit martyrdom, Augustine implies: “We know that you’ve been listening patiently, and by standing and listening for a long time you have suffered alongside the martyr. May he who hears you love you and crown you.”80
And these are just a sampling of the martyrdoms Augustine has in mind. In Sermo 328, having just told his listeners that “Temptations do not stop. Fight, and the crown is prepared for you,” he interrupts himself with their anticipated question: “When?” Answering, Augustine makes clear that there are countless manifestations of martyrdom, and most of them are not even visible to outsiders:
Because it is tedious (longum) to recount in what ways the Christian soul is tempted, in what ways it conquers and achieves a great victory with God’s favor, with no one seeing, enclosed in a body; [the soul] fights within the heart, is crowned in the heart, but by him who sees within the heart.81
The struggle is the same—and the reward is the same—no matter what temptations Christians overcome or how they overcome them, regardless of whether either their struggles or their victories were externally visible. Thus, for Augustine, martyrdom was just as possible in fifth-century Africa as it had been under Decius, Valerian, or Diocletian.
Nor was resisting temptation the only means of achieving martyrdom. Like Prudentius and (to a lesser extent) Paulinus, Augustine frequently identified martyrdom with witness.82 At times he made the connection without comment or explanation, simply equating the two by treating them as synonyms.83 At other times he expanded on the conceptual connection as if his audience would be familiar with the link, as he does in a Saturday morning sermon on John 5:31–35 delivered in 416: “Aren’t martyrs witnesses of Christ, and don’t they offer testimony to the truth?”84 At still other times, however, he explicitly directed his audience’s attention to the etymological and conceptual association. In a sermon on Protasius and Gervasius roughly fifteen years later, nearing the end of his life, Augustine opens with the term’s etymology and usage as a way to clarify what exactly martyrdom is:
Martyrs—the name is Greek, but now custom uses that very name in Latin. In Latin, however, they are called ‘witnesses’ (testes). There are, therefore, true martyrs, and there are false, just as there are true witnesses and false ones. If a witness is false he will not escape punishment, nor will the true witness escape a crown.85
Augustine is using what his audience knows about courtroom witnesses (i.e., that they can be true or false) to make the point that not all those who are claimed as martyrs are, in fact, true martyrs and also to highlight witness as essentially what the martyrs do. They witness, as den Boeft enumerates, to what they themselves have seen, to the truth of Christ, to faith, and to eternal life.86
Occasionally, for Augustine, this witness seems to involve death, blood, or some form of punishment. In Sermo 329, for example, “blood is the witness” to the fact that the martyrs’ faith has been tested,87 and in Sermo 335A he explains that the martyrs are witnesses because they “endured such great things for the truth of their testimony.”88 But Augustine is, for the most part, clear that martyrial witness could occur without death: it was not the martyrs’ deaths but the fact that they witnessed for the truth while willing to die that distinguished them as martyrs. In the same sermon on Protasius and Gervasius quoted above (Sermo 286), Augustine identifies witness unto death specifically as a “great work.” But he also asserts that the position from which “there is nothing left to be desired” is that of the Christian who “in his confession is prepared to die for Christ” (emphasis mine).89 Death was not a necessary part of the witness that martyrs needed to make.
Observing witness, testifying witness, and enacting witness are all features of the martyrdom described in Sermo 260E, which includes one of Augustine’s most forthright descriptions of a living martyrdom through witness. Augustine begins with a discussion of the miracle-working apostles and their insistence on speaking out about Christ in defiance of their enemies because “we are unable not to speak about what we have seen and heard” (quoting the words of the apostles as depicted in Acts 4:19–20).90 Augustine then makes the connection between their actions and martyrdom—noting that (as quoted above) “they profess that they are witnesses of Christ; however those who are called ‘witnesses’ in Latin are called ‘martyrs’ in Greek.”91 Because they have seen and heard Christ (observing witness), they must testify about him (testifying witness), they have become witnesses in their actions not just by assuming the role and the title to be observed by others but also by “scorn[ing] the prohibition of humans, so they might have the blessing of God”92—a typical Augustinian distillation of the action of the martyr (enacting witness). But how, Augustine asks, should Christians who have not seen or heard Christ in the flesh act? Is similar witness available to the parishioners listening to his sermon? “They saw and heard,” Augustine says. “What about us? Ought we to preach? But we have not seen.”93 Augustine answers his own query by asserting that, while his listeners cannot have seen Christ in the flesh, they have heard Christ in Scripture. And so his audience must become martyrs, too:
Therefore say, even you: ‘We are unable not to speak what we have heard and to preach the Lord Christ.’ Anyone who preaches wherever he can is, indeed, a martyr. Sometimes, however, a person doesn’t suffer persecution, and instead fears shame. He happens, for example, to be attending a dinner party among pagans, and he blushes to say that he is a Christian. If he cowers at his host, how would he be able to scorn a persecutor? Preach Christ, therefore, wherever you can, to whomever you can, however you can. Faith is enjoined from you, not eloquence: let faith speak from you, and Christ speaks. For if there is faith in you, Christ lives in you.94
To unpack this using the model of tripartite witness: Augustine’s contemporaries hear the Gospel (observing witness) and speak about it (testifying witness), and then they, too, enact witness, in several ways. First, they are following in the footsteps of the apostles, using their very words in application to themselves, imitating them in actions and in speech. Second, while Augustine is clear that simply speaking about Christ and professing one’s faith regardless of context constitutes martyrdom, he imagines for his audience a persecutorial scenario into which they can insert themselves—or, rather, establishes a contrastive analogy between the Christian afraid to profess his faith at a dinner party and the Christians of the arena who “made light of persecutors.” The implication here is that by professing her faith wherever she can, regardless of worldly opprobrium, the Christian would be acting like earlier martyrs who suffered more pointed and more perilous persecution. Finally, the words the preaching martyr speaks are, according to Augustine, not those of the martyr herself but are those of Christ. The martyr speaks Christ’s words, making visible and audible the indwelling of Christ for those who would be observing her. So, we see enacting witness here three times over: the martyr embodies for onlookers the apostles, other martyrs, and Christ himself when she speaks out about her faith.
One of Augustine’s more frequent and most fully developed examples of living martyrdom is the “sickbed martyr”—the Christian who suffers illness without the aid of “illicit remedies”95 such as amulets or incantations. These martyrs appear seven times in Augustine’s extant sermons, spanning Augustine’s career as preacher (the earliest mention is as early as 397 and no later than 405, the latest likely in 428).96 In each case, Augustine lingers on the sickbed martyr—not on their suffering but on the ways in which their struggle constitutes martyrdom no different from that of martyrs in the arena. We can see a typical treatment in Sermo 4, which concludes with the example of a pious (hypothetical) Christian who is suffering from illness and is offered a “remedy of the devil.”97 Though he is offered evidence that the remedies would indeed heal his body, the sick man responds by saying that he would rather die than resort to such a cure, and that if he is saved from this illness, it will be by God’s will alone:
I would rather die than use such remedies; if God wishes, he scourges me and frees me; if he knows it needs to be so, he may free me; if, however, he knows that I ought to leave this life, whether grievously or joyously, I will follow the will of the Lord.98
For his radical trust in God, this willing act of obedience to God’s will, for persisting in his rejection of “wicked remedies”99 even at the possible expense of his own earthly life, Augustine asserts that the sick man has earned the crown of martyrdom.
You see him languishing, you see him gasping for breath on his bed, you see him scarcely moving his limbs, scarcely moving his tongue: exhausted, he defeats the Devil. Many have been crowned in the amphitheater fighting the beasts. Many are crowned conquering the devil in their beds. They seem as if they cannot move, and within, in the heart, they have such great strength, they wage such a great fight! But where the fight is hidden, there is the victory hidden.100
We see here the spectacularly unspectacular nature of the martyrdom Augustine is advocating—the martyr’s actions are interior and invisible to all but God; so too, then, is his crown. The sickbed martyr’s struggle mirrors that of the martyr in the amphitheater: his life is in danger, his body is wracked with pain, his mind is consumed with thoughts of imminent death, and corporal salvation is within reach, only a blasphemous word or action away. But in this case, the sick man is being tormented by the devil, who is testing him just as the earlier martyrs had been tested by their persecutors. The fight is real, as is the willingness to die for divine cause, even if no one ever knows about it. As Augustine notes in a later sermon, the martyr appears to be lying on his sickbed but is, in fact, “reigning in heaven.”101
Augustine is adamant that his audiences should see these sickbed martyrdoms as analogous to the amphitheater martyrdoms of old. In half of the sermons that deal with sickbed martyrs, Augustine pauses to explicitly note the similarities between the words of those tempting the sickbed martyr and the words that would have been said to martyrs in the arena. For example, in Sermo 318, Augustine comments on the words of the sick Christian’s tempter (“Do this, if you want to live; you will die if you don’t”), asking his audience to see the parallel between these words and those of earlier persecutors:
See if this isn’t, “You will die if you don’t deny Christ”! What the persecutor said openly to the martyr, here the hidden tempter says to you obliquely: “Take this remedy, and you will live!” Is this not, “sacrifice, and you will live”? “If you do not do this, you will die!” Is this not, “If you do not sacrifice, you will die?” You have found an equal fight—seek an equal reward. You are in bed, and you are in the arena; you are lying still, and you are wrestling. Hold steadfast in faith; and while you are weary, you are conquering.102
The scripts of the sickbed martyrdom and the arena martyrdom are identical, and so are their settings, no matter how different they may appear.103
Augustine’s intention of configuring sickbed martyrdoms as akin to arena martyrdoms is no less clear in Sermones 328 and 286, where the connection is made implicitly. In Sermo 328, Augustine describes the sickbed martyr suffocating the Devil in the form of the stalking lion described in 1 Peter 5:8, an image that recollects the specter of Christian martyrs being thrown to lions in the arena.104 In Sermo 286, Augustine connects the sickbed martyr to the arena martyr by contrasting Satan’s prior, overt persecution and his new methods, now that that empire is nominally Christian: “Many, therefore, go to martyrdom on a sickbed, many indeed. There is a certain persecution of Satan, more hidden and more subtle than it then was.”105 The sickbed martyrdom is here clearly still a trial inflicted at the Devil’s urging, for Augustine, differing from the arena martyrdom only in its visibility.
Two clarifications, I think, will be helpful here, because this example of the sickbed martyr may seem too much like martyrdom by poena and death to be categorized as a form of living martyrdom. After all, the illness that occasions this type of martyrdom is an easy parallel for the torments earlier martyrs faced in the arena, and the fact that the sickbed martyrs opt for death rather than participation in pagan rituals means that one could very easily see them as, once again, exactly analogous to martyrs undergoing official persecution and not in any way mandating a re-evaluation of Augustine’s thought on martyrdom’s relationship to physical death.
First, although Augustine makes sure to point out that his sickbed martyrs are, indeed, suffering on their sickbeds, he focuses precisely on the unspectacular elements of illness: fever, immobility, and weariness.106 This is in sharp contrast to the ways that Augustine’s Egyptian monastic contemporaries grappled with the question of illness. For Joseph of Thebes, illness was a trial to be embraced with patience and thanksgiving; this differs from Augustine’s sickbed martyrs, who endure their afflictions with patience but give no thanks for the opportunity for martyrdom.107 Unlike Palamon, Augustine’s sickbed martyr does nothing to invite sickness; he pursues no extreme fasting or bodily austerity that leads to illness.108 And unlike Syncletica, the sickbed martyr is not distinguished by the extent and variety of her physical suffering. Amma Syncletica’s medical woes are enumerated in graphic, loving, lingering detail in the Vita Syncleticae, while Augustine only describes torments insofar as they illustrate the sickbed martyr’s failure to appear triumphantly martyrial.109 There is little to no emphasis on the pain or bodily dissolution itself. To be clear, I am not saying that Augustine knew or was responding to these Egyptian ways of connecting illness and martyrdom; I merely want to point out that there were many ways such a connection might be made and that Augustine’s formulation is resolutely centered not on the poena of sickness but on the underlying commitment to a divine causa.
Secondly, Augustine never specifies whether his sickbed martyrs die or not and is, by contrast, quite pointed in saying that they may live. As with the martyr in Sermo 4, whose speech we saw above, the outcome of the martyr’s illness is not the focus here—the sickbed martyr becomes a martyr by virtue of his or her willingness to endure whatever outcome God wills. The martyr declares that God could save him from the fever but that he will abide by whatever choice God makes rather than use human or demonic means to prolong his earthly tenure. The sickbed martyr in Sermo 335D speaks similarly, though at greater length:
Even if that other fellow was saved in such a manner, I do not wish to be saved thus. For that one is able to save me to whom it was said, ‘You have saved humans and beasts, Lord, just as you have multiplied your mercies, God’ . . . But, say he does not will [to save me]. Would he ever take from me that divine salvation? . . . [Y]ou warn me about death—me, for whom life itself died? Christ offered his death for the impious; will he not give life to the pious?110
In this martyr’s words, we hear the same pattern of argument as the one that the young men of Babylon presented to Nebuchadnezzar: “God can save me, if he wills it. He may not, but I will be crowned nonetheless.” Is it too much to think that Augustine’s audience would have picked up on this parallel and understood the sickbed martyr to have lived, just like his Babylonian counterparts? Regardless, Augustine places the merit of the martyrdom in the knowledge that the martyr is looking only to God, not to man, to save him (or not). This is again established in Sermo 306E, where Augustine draws explicitly on the example of the Babylonian youths:
In such a circumstance, you must have the mind (animus) of the martyr, since he who made you is watching you, he who has called you is helping you. In such a circumstance, you must speak in the same voice of the three saints: “God has power either to free me from this death-bearing fever, but if not . . .”111
Though Augustine does not name the specific saints here, these are the words uttered by the Babylonian trio in Daniel 3:17. By making these boys the major comparandum for the sickbed martyr, Augustine is conveying that the sickbed martyrs may very well be rescued, just as the boys had been. The point is not the outcome; the point is the willingness. “Remain in the faith,” Augustine says, “and even though you’re exhausted, you conquer.”112
From bishops being willing to die, “in deed or in feeling,” for Christ’s sheep, to the youths in the furnace of Babylon, to a litany of examples of resisting temptation or of witnessing in some fashion, to suffering through an illness without the assistance of un-Christian remedies, Augustine offers his audiences a plethora of examples for how living martyrdom might be accomplished. In each case, Augustine argues that such martyrdom is possible because what is being judged as meriting a crown is an interior accomplishment, rather than any externally visible one, and because all the credit for martyrdom ultimately belongs to God alone. These examples are not, then, minor asides or afterthoughts. Martyrdom without death is a direct manifestation of (and an important tool in Augustine’s promotion of) his broader theology.
DEATH-CENTERED MARTYRDOM?
Living martyrdom was important for Augustine, and it is important for us to recognize its role in Augustine’s pastoral advocacy and his broader thinking. But there is a reason that the life of martyrdom has been widely marginalized in scholarly accounts of Augustine’s thinking: most of the time when he talks about martyrdom, he is (or seems to be) talking about martyrdom by death. Death is a near constant specter in his treatment of martyrdom, either through explicit statements about the deaths of the martyrs or through offhand comments about their blood or their endurance up to the point of death. But even as death looms large in Augustine’s thinking on martyrdom, it is not the totalizing constant that it has often been portrayed to be. In this section, I examine in broad strokes how death figures into Augustine’s thinking on martyrdom and then note ways in which this death focus is not as monolithic as it seems. I ultimately argue that many of the ways in which Augustine seems to be asserting the importance of death can actually be taken as evidence for his dislocation of death’s role in martyrdom.
Death’s Role in Martyrdom
One of the best ways to uncover latent beliefs and default assumptions about a topic is to identify and evaluate casual or cursory references. These brief mentions, unexpanded because their resonances and meanings can be assumed to require no further explanation, offer us a glimpse into the unspoken, indicating to us what is being taken for granted. A look at Augustine’s habitual locutions surrounding martyrdom, for example, would indicate to us what Augustine could assume would safely make sense to his audiences. They are telling, therefore, despite their brevity.
A survey of Augustine’s cursory or inferred references to martyrdom offers a picture of a world in which martyrdom and death were typical bedfellows. First, in asides and appositional phrases he often refers to martyrs as having died or suffered, saying that the martyrs have been “perfected by their suffering”113 or have spilled their blood.114 Second, he frequently connected martyrdom and death through description of the saint’s day of death as their “birthday.”115 These comments reflect the fact that Augustine was often preaching on the feast days of the martyrs, which comprised a significant part of the liturgical calendar.116 But one could easily imagine Augustine talking about the feast day as an arbitrarily designated time to honor and learn from the martyr, rather than an event marked by a heavenly birthday.117 Finally, there are times when Augustine’s narrative framings depend upon the audience making a connection between martyrdom and death. For example, in Sermo 107, Augustine imagines a Christian being threatened by a powerful man first with loss of property and then, ultimately, with death. Augustine steels his hypothetical Christian to resist by telling him, “Perhaps he is about to kill you, and thus make you a martyr.”118 Augustine does not explicitly say that death is a criterion for martyrdom, but the case is made narratively: whatever resistance the Christian in this story has to this point been mustering, it is his death that will make him a martyr.119 These instances of death’s centrality to martyrdom operate at the margins of conscious definition-dealing: a listener might intuit the necessity of death through these narratives without ever explicitly being told as much. These comments and presumptions, made in passing and with little or no further expansion, are significant in that they reveal what was either Augustine’s own default understanding of martyrdom or the default understanding he expected his audiences to have.
Conceptually and metaphorically, as well, Augustine connects martyrdom to death without explicit theorization—in particular by assuming and asserting the trope that the blood of Christians is the seed of the Church. Borrowing the image from Tertullian, Augustine makes clear that he sees it as a crucial part of Christian salvation history. In a sermon delivered in 413, he “recounts” the history of the Church via exhortatives that make every event in its development seem like a prophetic fulfillment, and he includes a remembrance of the martyrs: “let martyrs be everywhere slain, sown with grain so the fertility of the crop may sprout forth.”120 The martyrs’ role here is as part of God’s machinations to help cultivate and increase the yield of the Church. Beyond simply being ordained by God, the expansion of the Church through the spectacular deaths of the martyrs is a promise that, Augustine elsewhere emphasizes, God has fulfilled:
The world raged; the raging was promised not that the seed might be trampled, but so that the crop might be sown. The blood of martyrs was everywhere spilt, the harvest of the church filled the world. These things happened.121
The blood of martyrs acting as seed for the Church is a conceptual and metaphorical framework that is not just descriptive but is also prescribed and to be desired. It is proof of God’s fulfillment of promises and thus anchors both the sacred past of the Christian community and also its future. But Augustine also uses the metaphor to characterize the Church in the present. In Sermo 301, he links the Church to the mother of the Maccabees, “everywhere encouraging her sons to die for [God’s] name. . . . Thus the world is filled with the blood of martyrs [and] the crop of the church has sprouted from the scattered seeds.”122 The metaphor is pervasive in Augustine’s sermons, often linked to central soteriological and ecclesiological scaffolding, such as the historical trajectory of the Church, the surety of future salvation, and the nature of the Church at present.123 By using this metaphor, Augustine configures suffering, death, and blood in a way that seems to assume the centrality of death to martyrdom.
To this point, we have been examining the unarticulated or not-explicitly theorized relationships Augustine conveys between martyrdom and death. But there are also times when Augustine brings these assumptions to the foreground, specifically emphasizing the poenae of suffering and death as central features of martyrdom. Focused accounts of and references to suffering, bloodshed, and death occur frequently in Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs.124
For example, one of Augustine’s more explicitly elaborated explanations of blood and death as essential to martyrdom is through the idea of repayment: Christ spent his blood and his earthly life for human sins, and it is only right that the martyrs repay that debt with their own blood. The entirety of Sermo 329 is devoted to this idea—that martyrs differ from the mass of the saved by having had their faith “tested” or “proven” (probata est): “Blood is [its/their] witness.”125 Augustine goes on to explain that the martyrs were exceptional in realizing the need for this precise repayment, that when Christ offered himself as “food and drink” at the Lord’s table the martyrs “recognized, therefore, what they were eating and drinking, so that they might repay the same sorts of things.”126 Augustine draws heavily here on Psalm 116:12–15, in which the Psalmist asks how he is to repay the Lord and settles on the answer that “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his holy ones” (116:15). And he is also adamant that even the repayment must be credited to the one being repaid. Augustine asserts: “But from what source can they repay such things, unless that one who earlier spent [himself] should give them the means of repaying”?127 But the language of repaying (or giving back) blood for blood as distinguishing the martyrs is emphatic. We see a similar train of thought in Sermo 375B, which Edmund Hill speculates may have been Augustine’s first-ever Easter sermon. Here Augustine talks about the inevitability of death for all humans and the special opportunity afforded the martyrs to do their dying for Christ in repayment for his death:
We have, in his death and resurrection, an appointed task and a promised prize: the appointed task is suffering (passio), the promised prize resurrection. The martyrs have completed the task; we can complete it through piety, if we cannot through suffering. For it doesn’t fall to all to suffer for Christ and to die for Christ; nonetheless it falls to all to die. . . . Those to whom it falls to die for Christ have repaid, in a certain fashion, what he had expended for them. The lord paid out for them, so that he might die for them; they, by dying, paid him back for it. But who, wretched and destitute, can repay if the blessed lord had not given it to him? Therefore Christ gave to the martyrs what he had paid out; he gave them the means to repay Christ.128
There is something about blood and death that links the martyrs even more closely to Christ because, in effect, they are using the same currency. Here Augustine is clearly conceiving of martyrdom as something death-centered, and meaningfully so.129
Meaningful valuations of death in martyrdom can also be found when Augustine emphasizes the martyrs’ sufferings and modes of death—that is, when he focuses on the fact of the poena itself. Sermo 51 sees the martyrs “thrown to beasts, decapitated, consumed in fires,” as Augustine details their spectacle and highlights that anyone with true vision would see this as heroic, while the original observers saw it as degrading. Augustine is productively using the suffering of the martyrs to cement the affective unity of the Christian community—how one feels about the suffering of the martyrs indicates whether one aligns with the angels or with the materially minded.130 In a sermon on the martyr Quadratus, Augustine extolled the heroism of the martyrs by listing what they endured: “How many things the martyrs suffered, how much they endured! What chains, what squalor, what prisons, what tortures, what flames, what beasts, what types of death! They trampled them all.”131 Sermo 334 lingers even longer on the martyrs’ poenae:
. . . new torments were being devised, and ingenious cruelty invented unbelievable punishments. The martyrs of Christ were buried in disgraces, convicted of false crimes, enclosed in intolerable confinements, ploughed with claws, slaughtered with iron, thrown to beasts, consumed with fires—and they said, if God is for us, who is against us?132
This is as close as Augustine comes in his sermons to approximating Prudentian levels of gore. And these sufferings, in Augustine’s rendering, seem to have a close connection to meriting martyrdom: the passage above is followed by a dialecticon—a dialogue with an invented partner—in which Augustine feigns incredulity at the martyr’s disregard for bodily suffering. This affected skepticism highlights and centers the role of death and dismemberment in the martyr’s ability to witness to Christ. Clearly, Augustine found the martyrs’ death and suffering to be part of what had merited them martyr status and part of why the martyrs should be venerated and imitated.
Marking the connection between deadly suffering and martyrdom more pointedly, Augustine elsewhere claims that “The martyrs are great because they endured the very harsh difficulty of a bitter death.”133 The relationship between death and martyrdom is here depicted as in some way causal, with death necessary for martyrdom and with martyrdom honored because it has been earned by death. We get some insight into this logic when Augustine comments, “For who wishes to die? . . . If there were no bitterness in death, there would be nothing great in the fortitude of the martyrs.”134 Because death is hard and bitter, being willing to suffer it for God’s sake is praiseworthy.
Finally, there are times when Augustine argues rather explicitly that death is a requirement for martyrdom by contrasting death-martyrdom to other performances of faith. In a 417 sermon on St. Lawrence, for example, Augustine poses the question: “What hope is there for all of us, if no one can follow Christ without shedding blood for him?”135 He then offers an extended discussion of how, “beyond the effusion of blood, beyond the threat of a passio, a Christian ought to follow Christ.”136 Augustine here seems to separate Christians who die in persecution from Christians who don’t. Prefacing this discussion is a striking image of a division of labor among saints: the image of God’s garden, which contains not only the “roses of the martyrs but also the lilies of virgins, the ivy of the wedded, and the violets of the widowed.”137 That martyrs are separated out from the mass of those imitating Christ (and that they are designated by a flower known for its blood-red color) is striking evidence that Augustine considered a bloody death to be requisite for a martyr’s crown. This is corroborated by other instances in which Augustine demarcates a difference between martyrs and other saved believers, as when, in an Easter-week sermon early in his career, Augustine contrasts the martyrs with “all the faithful who have departed from the body after a good life.”138 And in Sermo 284, Augustine embarks on an extended discussion of why death is necessary to martyrdom—rather than praying for the martyrs, we commend ourselves to their prayers because they struggled against sin up to the point of death. In this, Augustine explains, they were like Christ, who easily scorned the devil’s alluring temptations (to show humans how to do it) but who suffered through the Devil’s final “enticements” or physical torments with equanimity and so ensured the salvation of all. Christians who are not tested in this way, Augustine argues, are not full and complete imitators of Christ: “For it is not enough to despise death, or to endure difficulties; where the contest is fought ‘to the shedding of blood,’ there is the full and most glorious victory.”139
There is, thus, a strong case to be made for death’s centrality to Augustine’s martyrial thinking. It is no wonder that this has long been the settled interpretation of Augustine’s martyrial ideology.
Death Destabilized
Nonetheless, there are many ways in which the case for death’s centrality to martyrdom is far weaker than it seems. The following paragraphs explore five primary critiques of any monolithic presentation of death as essential to martyrdom in Augustine’s thinking. I then conclude this discussion of seeming death-centered martyrdom by returning to what emerges when we discard our assumptions about the necessity of death to martyrdom, namely, the idea that non poena sed causa martyrem facit.
First, many of the sermons containing death-centered martyrial ideology also offer accounts of living martyrdom or statements that undermine the centrality of death. That is, we find death deemed unnecessary to martyrdom in the very same sermons that support the necessity of death. In just the sermons cited in this section so far, death is explicitly denied as necessary for martyrdom in three.140 Sermo 305A, in which Augustine emphasizes the day of the martyr’s death, also features a prolonged discussion of how persecution never ceases and quotes Cyprian’s saying that “in persecution it is soldiering, in peace it is conscience that is crowned.”141 In Sermo 159A, Augustine narratively assumes that the wife of a martyr will be a widow, but he also declares that the person who suffers financial ruin while adhering to his faith will be counted a martyr.142 And Sermo 286, in which Augustine uses the imagery of the martyr’s blood as seed, not only argues that “the true witness will not escape a crown”143 but also features a sickbed martyr and the Babylonian boys depicted as martyrs. To offer one final example of seemingly conflicting martyrial ideologies juxtaposed within one sermon, I would like to turn to Sermo 300, in which Augustine initially argues that death is required for martyrdom because Christ died as an act of power, to show his will. That same display, Augustine indicates, is required of the martyrs. He then, however, moves on to a discussion of the mother of the Maccabean martyrs and asserts that she was a martyr, seven times over, because she watched her sons suffer and encouraged them to resist until death:
[Her sons] each suffered by feeling in himself, she suffered by seeing what was done to all of them. The mother of seven martyrs was seven times made a martyr: by watching she was not separated from her sons, and she added to her sons by dying. She saw all of them, she loved all of them. What all of them suffered in the flesh, she bore with her eyes.144
This lengthy exposition on the martyrdom of the Maccabees’ mother takes up the last several sections of the sermon—she was clearly Augustine’s focus here, as he recommended that his audience imitate the martyrs. And it is noteworthy that he focuses on her septupled martyrdom, because each of the seven martyrdoms here was accomplished vicariously. Her own death “adds to” her sons’; it is not counted among the seven other martyrdoms Augustine attributes to her. That is, the only martyrdoms she is given credit for in this passage are the martyrdoms she earns by watching her sons die. She suffers, but the suffering she undergoes is emotional and vicarious, rather than physically inflicted.145 Whatever importance death had to Augustine as a criterion for martyrdom, it was not exclusive or privileged: it could exist side-by-side with martyrdoms that did not involve death.146
Second, Augustine spends vast amounts of time and energy relativizing death, destabilizing the very idea of it (much as Prudentius had done) and showing that it is not, in fact, the punishment it seems to be. For example, when Augustine notes in Sermo 299E “the diverse deaths” suffered by “those confessing Christ,” he concludes his point by pointing out that “All of [the deaths are] difficult, all of them [are] savage, all of them [are] horrendous: but in the sight of men.”147 In the sight of God, Augustine argues, these deaths are instead “precious.” Augustine’s evocative enumeration of the martyrs’ deaths actually comes in the middle of an extensive discussion of the ways that Christians should conceive of death as both inevitable and as an event to pass through on the way to “great sweetness.”148 This juxtaposition—the martyrs’ deaths and the relativizing of those deaths by various means—occurs almost ubiquitously in Augustine’s accounts of martyrial death. He characterizes the world in which his parishioners lived as the land of the dying and locates dead martyrs instead in the “land of the living” where the martyr “patiently awaits, with Christ, the redemption of his body.”149 What we think of as living, Augustine argues, is really dying, and vice versa. Eternal life is the only life that truly matters, and so this “present life must be scorned”150; indeed, he often reminds his audiences that the martyrs “lived by dying.”151 As he explains:
This is the shared intent of the holy martyrs, their shared stock-in-trade: to despise things that are fleeting so they might secure what is permanent; to live by dying lest by living they die; and to live forever by dying once, rather than to die twice and not deserve to live thereafter by delaying the death which is coming and, when it eventually arrives, not coming to the life which endures.152
The re-thinking and re-valuation of both life and death are at the heart of many of Augustine’s treatments of the martyrs. The martyrs do not despise life, they simply know what “life” really means; they do not fear death because they recognize that the only death to be feared is the second death, the death of the soul.153 Augustine is asking his audiences to revisit what they think they know about life and death, using the martyrs to highlight the impermanence, contingency, and unreliability of this life. Martyrdom thus becomes an opportunity for Augustine to relativize and re-define death.
Third, and even more centrally, Augustine almost always appears to understand death as a signifier of another primary achievement: scorning the world. Death is not, in other words, an end unto itself but is one means by which martyrs can demonstrate their commitment to God and their disdain for the world—both its blandishments and its threats. As we saw above, Augustine praises the martyrs for “despis[ing] things that are fleeting so they might secure what is permanent.”154 This is a repeated refrain, for Augustine: that the martyrs “despised all things present, and yearned for things of the future,”155 scorning earthly things as they focused instead on the eternal truth—“look at [the truth] the martyrs loved—thence they scorned present and transitory things.”156 Augustine often juxtaposes the martyrs’ deaths and their scorn for the world, as he does in a sermon about Cyprian preached at Carthage in 405: “What do we praise in the faith of the martyr? That he strove up to death for the truth, and thus conquered. He scorned the flattering world, he did not cede to its raging.”157 Even Augustine’s statement that “if there were no bitterness in death, there would be nothing great in the fortitude of the martyrs”158 can be understood in this vein: one does not have to suffer death to scorn it; the fortitude of martyrs could just as easily be seen in their attitudes toward bitter death as in their suffering it. In essence, even much of the time when Augustine points to death, his argument is not that the martyrs died, but that they scorned the world and its temptations, an all-important attitude that led to their deaths.
Augustine uses this reframing to explain and defend the idea of martyrdom without death, configuring world-rejection both as a way of imitating Christ and a way of obeying Christ’s commands. We see it as a crucial component of Christ imitation in a late-career sermon on St. Lawrence, where Augustine elaborates for his audience how “beyond the shedding of blood, beyond the peril of the passio, the Christian ought to follow Christ.”159 Augustine advocates “holding on to” Christ’s humility160 in order to replicate his ascent to heaven—a process that involves a wholesale re-evaluation of the world’s values:
Whatever the world offers up as delightful among temporal things, let it be spat out: whatever it bellows out as bitter and terrible, let it be scorned. And whoever acts thus, let him not doubt that he adheres to the footprints of Christ, that he might dare to say, deservedly, with the apostle Paul, “Our commerce is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20).161
Adhering to the footsteps of Christ requires an act of will, not re-enactment of his flagellation or crucifixion. Putting the world in its proper place, remembering that both its pleasures and griefs are transient—this is what ensures heavenly admission and the crown of martyrdom. But this reorientation of the will is not only an imitatio christi but also an affirmative response to Jesus’s explicit commands that his follower should “deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). In an earlier sermon, possibly delivered on the feast day of the candida massa, Augustine explains the meaning of this passage, concluding:
Behold what the holy martyrs did. They scorned those things that were outside: all the enticements of this age; all the errors and terrors; whatever was pleasing, whatever was terrifying, they contemned them all, trampled on them all. They came to themselves, and attended to themselves; they discovered themselves in themselves and displeased themselves: they ran to him, by whom they were formed, and in whom they returned to life, in whom they remained, in whom would perish what they had begun to be in themselves so that what would remain was what he himself had founded in them. This is [what it means] to deny one’s self.162
This rich, multilayered explanation of martyrdom centers the martyrs’ internal struggles and interior mortification. Scoffing at both the sticks and the carrots that the world has to offer, the martyrs instead turn to a self-reflection that ultimately brings them to reliance on God alone. We see, once again, how Augustine’s definition of martyrdom is rooted in the will and in casting all credit to God.
Fourth, Augustine often makes an important distinction, characterizing death as the moment in which the martyr’s crown is received, rather than the cause of its receipt. Dead martyrs are better off than those currently living a life of martyrdom because they have finished their struggle—we saw this above in Augustine’s comparison of the Maccabees and the boys in Babylon’s furnace. But this does not make death the factor that earns them martyrdom. To illustrate by means of a modern analogy: when an actor receives an Academy Award, what makes them Oscar-worthy is not the moment their name is called; it is the performance they offered months or even years earlier. Additionally, once a person is dead, there is no longer any question of their deserts. For good or for ill, those have already been decided. As Augustine says of Quadratus in Sermo 306B, delivered sometime after 412:
As long as he was in this body, everything was to be feared, lest he get stuck, lest he turn tail and run, lest he get derailed. Now, indeed, he has completed his run, he has finished the track, he has come to stand on solid ground. . . . Now, finally, he fears no temptation.163
Likewise, Augustine describes Stephen as a martyr during his lifetime in Sermo 314 (delivered after 415) but reserves description of his reward and crown for after the saint’s “most glorious end.”164 In short, whenever we see the crown being received at the point of death, in order to understand Augustine’s theology of martyrdom we need to ask (and cannot just assume we know the answer): is the crown being given now because it is time for the award to be disbursed, or because it has only now been actually earned? What can we learn if we refrain from assuming that death is paramount?
Fifth (and finally!), the case for death’s importance to martyrdom in Augustine’s thought is undercut by his use of Scripture. Though Augustine habitually quotes scriptural passages that support the idea that death is central to martyrdom, he several times takes pains to clarify that this is not his intended takeaway. For example, the biblical passage Augustine most frequently quotes in reference to the martyrs is Psalm 116:15 (“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his servants”).165 But this proof-text appears in sermons, for example, Sermones 286 and 328, where Augustine repeatedly conjures alternate and deathless definitions of martyrdom—by witness, by willingness, and via the sickbed. And it appears also amid take-downs of Donatists, where Augustine, as in Sermo 359B, makes clear that death is secondary to the requirements of pure love, a good conscience, and true faith.166 The martyrs are martyrs because they are holy ones, not because they have died; their deaths are precious to God nonetheless because, as we saw above, the specter of death illuminates a Christian’s scorn for the world.
A similar reassessment is warranted for Augustine’s use of Hebrews 12:4 (“You have not yet striven against sin up to the shedding of blood”), another of his most relied-upon scriptural touchstones for defining martyrdom.167 Even though Augustine referred to the text regularly, he did not always use it with the same interpretations in mind. There were times that, indeed, he marked this passage as confirming the necessity of death in martyrdom, as he did in the first lines of a sermon from 415/420: “We bless the holy martyrs . . . who struggled against sin up to the shedding of blood (usque ad sanguinem); we bless them, however, because they endured death for the truth, and discovered life by dying.”168 Here, as often in the sermons, usque ad sanguinem seems to be synonymous with usque ad mortem.169
But at other times, Augustine, in unpacking this very same quote, indicates that the correct interpretation of usque ad sanguinem or usque ad mortem pointed away from death. In Sermo 286, for example, Augustine delineates three types of Christian believers—“one who believes in Christ, and yet scarcely even timidly whispers ‘Christ’; another who believes in Christ, and publicly confesses Christ; and a third who believes in Christ, and is prepared in his confession to die for Christ.”170 He then characterizes these according to their merit:
The first of these is weak, such that shame, rather than fear, conquers him; the second has now a brave face, but not yet up to the shedding of blood (usque ad sanguinem). The third is complete, such that there is nothing more that he needs to do. For he has fulfilled what is written, “Struggle for the truth up to death” (usque ad mortem).171
What is notable here is that Augustine treats the third Christian, the one who was prepared in his confession to die for Christ, as having already done so—he is complete, and has fulfilled the usque ad mortem and the usque ad sanguinem requirements of perfect faith even without actually undergoing death and bloodshed. Readiness is all. As another example, in Sermo 318 (a mid-career sermon on Saint Stephen that also includes a sickbed martyr), Augustine selects as his signal exemplars the biblical figures Susannah and Joseph, neither of whom actually died amid their trials. Augustine says:
They themselves are perfect, who struggled against sin up to the shedding of blood. What is “against sin”? Against the great sin: against denying Christ. You know how Susannah struggled against sin up to the shedding of blood. But lest women alone should have consolation, and men search their number for some such hero as Susannah: You know how Joseph struggled against sin up to the shedding of blood. The case (causa) is similar. On the one hand she had as false witnesses those very same men to whom she was unwilling to consent, lest she sin; on the other he has her, herself, to whom he did not consent. And both parties to whom there was not consent for sinning gave false testimony; and those who heard believed them: but they did not conquer God. She was freed, and he was freed. . . . Thus they struggled to the point of blood—she against sin (that is, against adultery), and he against the same sin.172
Retelling their stories, Augustine makes no effort to hide that these two did not die. But Augustine has chosen these two figures deliberately, as illustrations of what it means to struggle usque ad sanguinem, despite the distinct lack of blood in their stories and despite God’s intervention to save them. Both received vindication, and Augustine lauds both for their steadfast resistance to temptation no matter the cost. Augustine points to these figures as fulfilling the criterion of struggling to the point of shedding blood because that is what they were willing to do for their cause.
The interpretation of usque ad sanguinem as pointing away from death is even clearer and more emphatic in Sermo 306E:
In these temptations of the world, therefore, let us plan (meditemur) to struggle daily against sin up to the point of shedding blood. . . . That ought to be the mindset of the martyr, for God does not delight in the shedding of blood: he has many hidden martyrs.173
God rejoices not in the blood itself, but rather in the willingness to struggle against sin and for the truth, even to the point of blood or death. This is why Susannah and Joseph are such excellent exemplars for Augustine’s purposes in Sermo 318: they highlight the daily resolve Christians should have in such a way that no misguided desire for death can be derived from their precedent. Both were willing to die, if need be, but neither of them sought out death, and neither was killed.
In short, as regards Augustine’s use of Scripture as well as his renderings of death in martyrdom, we must always be mindful to read more closely and not to assume a role for death that Augustine himself did not. No mention of death or blood can be taken for granted; every one of them must be interrogated and assessed. When we take the time to do these evaluations while holding open the possibility of living martyrdom, we find that many of the situations where Augustine talks about martyrdom in conventional terms actually corroborate the idea of martyrdom without death. His whole martyrial theology emerges as far less death-dependent than we have yet imagined.
Non Poena Sed Causa
Re-evaluating the assumption of death’s necessity for martyrdom helps us more clearly see and center the role of the concept of non poena sed causa in Augustine’s martyrial advocacy. Indeed, when we assess his exhortations to imitate the martyrs, we consistently find that he is asking his parishioners to imitate not the martyrs’ actions but their intentions. Martyrs, in Augustine’s retellings, stood for (and often died for) a number of worthy causes, including love or caritas (including love of enemies, love of good and justice, and correctly ordered love); unity; truth; justice; faith; and a commitment to striving against the devil, sin, and temptation.174 They are martyrs not because they died but because they devoted themselves so wholeheartedly to these causes that they were willing to die for them. It is this adherence to divine causes that Augustine urged his listeners to imitate, rather than the martyrs’ deaths.
Consider Augustine’s use of the cause of caritas, for example. In a 404 sermon that praised Vincent’s miraculous endurance, Augustine remarks that “It would be madness, if love were lacking.”175 No matter what Vincent endured, his cause had to be divine, Augustine continues, for his steadfastness to count as obedience, rather than “insane” obstinacy. Preaching to the Carthaginians about the dangers of the Donatists in the summer of 411, Augustine elaborated on this same theme, drawing on 1 Corinthians 13:
“If I give,” as Paul says, “all my possessions to the poor, and hand over my body so that I might burn”—There are the martyrs! But look what follows: “But if I do not have love, it is of no use to me.” Behold it has come to suffering, behold it has come to the effusion of blood, and even to the point of burning one’s body: and nonetheless it is of no use, because love is lacking. Add love, and everything is worthwhile; subtract love, the rest are worth nothing.176
Or as he related more simply in 416 in another anti-Donatist sermon preached in Carthage, this time at Cyprian’s shrine, “the one in whom love is crowned will be the true martyr.”177 Each of these examples deals with caritas, but the way in which Augustine emphasizes the cause over the punishment applies also to the causae of unity, truth, justice, faith, and resistance to temptation.
These causes were what Augustine constantly called those hearing his sermons to imitate when he enjoined them to imitate the martyrs. The object of imitation, in his framing, should never be death itself—it was always the martyrs’ commitment to something Augustine deemed good. For instance, in order to receive the crown that Stephen earned, Christians need not die, but instead to love their enemies: “Heed, brothers! Let us follow him; for if we follow Stephen, we will be crowned. However, we must especially follow him and imitate him in the love of our enemies.”178 In another instance, in a sermon on the martyrs Castus and Aemilius, Augustine explains to his audience that if we want to imitate the martyrs our best bet is to imitate their choice of and commitment to a good cause:
If you wish to imitate true martyrs, choose a cause for yourselves, so that you may say to the Lord: “Judge me, Lord, and distinguish my cause from an unholy nation (quoting Ps. 43:1); not my punishment; for even an unholy nation has this; but my cause, which no one has but the holy race.” Therefore choose for yourselves a cause, hold a good and just cause, and with the Lord’s help do not fear any punishment.179
Correct causa was what made one a martyr, in Augustine’s reckoning, and it was, therefore, the causa that Augustine urged his listeners to imitate.180
I hope that, at this point, my rationale for including a question mark in this section’s heading (“Death-Centered Martyrdom?”) is clear. Despite the ubiquity of death in Augustine’s depictions of martyrdom, and despite Augustine’s occasional assertion of death’s importance to martyrdom, Augustine does not have a conception of martyrdom as death-centered. For Augustine, there is martyrdom without death, and there is martyrdom with death; there is no such thing, for Augustine, as a death-centered martyrdom. That the deaths of the martyrs are their most spectacular and recognizable features, that the dates of their deaths are to be celebrated, that their blood serves as seed for the growth of the Church and repayment for the sacrifice of Christ—these are all ideas that appear frequently in Augustine’s sermons. But even alongside these assertions of death’s importance, we find revaluations that diminish the role of death and place the core of martyrdom elsewhere, in intention: assertions of death’s importance are juxtaposed with assertions of its irrelevance or redefinitions that render temporal death meaningless; death in martyrdom is configured as a consequence of (and secondary to) one’s willingness to scorn the world; death is configured as the moment of reward, not the cause of it; and biblical quotes that seem to demand martyrial blood often turn out to be, in Augustine’s reading, demanding instead a willingness to shed blood. Death is only central if it is accompanied by correct intention; only correct intention is a secure criterion of martyrdom. To put it another way, Augustine poses both causa and death as criteria for martyrdom, but while he often walks back or undermines the criterion of death, he never once does so for causa.181 The martyr’s cause is always central; their death is not.
LIVING MARTYRDOM IN POLEMICAL CONTEXT
To this point, I have avoided any sustained discussion of how Augustine’s martyrial thinking coincided with his engagement in the various controversies of his career. My motivation for saving such a discussion until the conclusion of this chapter is that I had hoped to avoid any semblance of a claim to causality. There is no doubt that Augustine’s theology of martyrdom and his arguments for living martyrdom figured into his arguments against Manichaeans, pagans, Donatists, and Pelagians.182 In each case, we can see that Augustine articulated, framed, and amplified his arguments about living martyrdom in a way that dovetailed with and was useful for his engagement in these controversies. But it would be irresponsibly simplistic either to attribute Augustine’s positions on martyrdom solely to his need to react to these controversies or, on the other hand, to assert that Augustine’s views were completely unaffected by them. Indeed, apart from any more theoretically inflected hesitations, the tentative nature of establishing dating and delivery context for most of the sermons renders any argument about causality or even temporal priority largely speculative.
Rather, I argue, we should think of Augustine’s underlying theology of martyrdom and the positions he came to argue in his role as controversialist as fueling one another, in a sort of feedback loop that defies any conclusive retrieval of initial or clear causation. This complex account of positionality and doctrine has best been modeled by Jason BeDuhn, who, in his reconstruction of Augustine’s journey to and through Manichaeism and its impact on his later thinking, has teased apart the various ways that none of Augustine’s “conversions”—to Manichaeism, to philosophy, to Catholicism—were discrete or totalizing events, but that they instead reflected Augustine’s multilayered and convoluted negotiations of his personal values, his concepts of authority, his experience of his faith, and his logical (and theological) commitments to coherence, comprehensiveness, and consistency.183 And so, we cannot pinpoint a “why” or isolate cause and effect for Augustine’s positions on martyrdom within the controversies of his day. But whether he developed his positions strategically in response to interlocutors or whether he simply rephrased what he already believed in order to meet the demands of the day (or whether the best account, as I believe, lies somewhere in between), we can nonetheless say with certainty that Augustine’s position on living martyrdom was deeply integrated into his arguments against each of these groups.
In the case of the Manichees, for instance, Augustine’s theology of martyrdom aligned with many of the ways he sought to argue against his former community, even if martyrdom was not a central or usually explicit area of contention in his dealings with that community. His need to counter Faustus’s claims that Catholics worshipped idols and human heroes rather than God certainly encouraged him to articulate clearly and forcefully the principle that God was the true object of worship in martyrdom, the one to whom all credit is due.184 This was already something Augustine believed, wrote about, and preached about, but we cannot imagine that Augustine did not have particular Manichaean addressees in mind as he formulated these arguments once again. So too must Augustine have had the voices of his former compatriots ringing in his ears as he cautioned martyrs against having pride in their piety and counseled them instead to adopt the humility that must come with acknowledging human frailty.185 His advocacy of humility (and of avoiding debauchery at the martyrs’ shrines) served a two-fold purpose in the debate against Manichaeans: not only would cultivating humility and sobriety in Catholic martyr-enthusiasts repel any Manichaean accusations of Catholic self-worship and licentiousness, but it would also highlight flaws within the Manichaean community itself—not only does Augustine accuse the Manichaeans of excessive pride, he also “frequently attacked [them] for not living up to the high ascetic standards they professed to uphold.”186
Augustine also found his martyrial theology helpful in arguments both against actual pagans and against elements of Christian lay practice that he sought to designate as pagan. By undermining the legibility of suffering in this world and refocusing the spectacle of martyrdom on the unseen realm of causae, Augustine offered his parishioners (as he does in Sermo 296, discussed above (169–170)) a rejoinder to those (whether pagan or not) who would suggest that Christianity was somehow to blame for the sack of Rome in 410, or that the suffering of the Romans was evidence of the Christian God’s impotence or abandonment. And of course, Augustine’s exemplary living martyrs, the sickbed martyrs, were primarily being tempted by remedies that he described as “illicit,” “sacrilegious,” “diabolical,” “detestable,” “harmful,” “unspeakable,” or “magic”—all terms that Augustine associated with pagan practice, which he configured as demonic.187 And in case these linguistic resonances proved to be too subtle for Augustine’s audiences, he makes the parallel clear by actively comparing the well-meaning tempters of the sickbed martyrs to the vicious pagan persecutors of old, offering in these same sermons variations of the exhortation, “See if this is not what the pagan said: ‘sacrifice and you will live.’”188 By constructing a form of martyrdom in which temptations never cease and the Christian is always “performing” in an invisible arena, with God the only spectator of their internal struggle,189 Augustine offers a prophylactic against temptations from real and imagined paganism.
The Donatist challenge, meanwhile, provided Augustine a fertile field in which to articulate his theory of martyrdom without death: after all, Donatist claims to being the “Church of the Martyrs” were central to their appeals to African Christians,190 and their progressive and systematic disenfranchisement over the course of Augustine’s lifetime certainly substantiated their claims of persecution. And so Augustine had no choice but to grapple—directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly, proactively and reactively—with their claims about martyrdom. But beyond this, we must also remember that the Donatists were Augustine’s most enduring and ever-present foes. Nearly every town in North Africa had a Donatist bishop, and there were Donatists everywhere, directly competing with their Catholic neighbors.191 Furthermore, the Donatist controversy was the only one that presented an immediate threat to Augustine’s life: Augustine several times refers to a Donatist attempt to assassinate him in 403 or 404.192 In short, the Donatist controversy dominated Augustine’s career in North Africa, so it should be no surprise that one would find Augustine’s theology of living martyrdom apparent in his dealings with them. But again, we must be cautious not to assume that Augustine’s theory of martyrdom was formulated “in reaction to Donatist claims and practices”193 (emphasis mine). Indeed, we must remember that, due to the presence of Donatists throughout Augustine’s Catholic childhood and schooling years, Augustine would never have had an uncomplicated understanding of martyrdom: even though Thagaste was by the time of Augustine’s birth “a Catholic stronghold,”194 its Donatist past lingered in living memory and there would no doubt have been Donatists at Madauros and Carthage. Augustine would never have known an uncontested Catholicism, nor an uncontested notion of martyrdom. His whole outlook, not just his view on martyrdom, would have been already shaped by competition between Catholics and Donatists and by his personal preferences, individual values, and pre-existing logical tendencies—there is here a history of influence and polemical entanglement that ought to be excavated much in the same way that BeDuhn has done for Augustine’s relationship to Manichaeanism. Finally, and very importantly, while Augustine’s doctrine of non poena sed causa was indeed a key tool in his arguments against Donatist claims to martyrial legitimacy, it does not appear to have been central to his preaching against Donatists: of the forty sermons from the Sermones ad populum routinely flagged as anti-Donatist, the phrase appears only in five.195 Given that the phrase appears in another eight of the Sermones ad populum with no clear anti-Donatist contextualization, non poena sed causa appears to have been more useful to Augustine in other pastoral and polemical contexts, while pointed discussion of martyrdom in those sermons took a “back seat.”196 In short, then, we must be wary of any simplistic rendering of Augustine’s ecclesio-political maneuverings on the issue of martyrdom.
But we must nonetheless acknowledge how perfectly suited Augustine’s configuration of martyrdom without death was for this historical and polemical moment. Augustine routinely attacked the Donatists for their pride as exemplified in their assertions of their own righteousness; in doing so, he mobilized his arguments about God being in sole control of martyrial outcomes and human goodness alike. And, of course, by centering martyrdom around causa rather than results, Augustine derailed the Donatists’ arguments that they were the only true martyrs because they suffered persecution. After all, as we have seen Augustine argue, if suffering were the only condition for earning the martyr’s crown, even the Devil would be able to say, “I am a martyr, too, because I have suffered so!”197 The two main Augustinian principles of relying on causa and giving full credit to God were really very useful here. Not only did they undermine Donatist arguments (thereby, at least theoretically, aiding both in recruiting from among the Donatists and retaining the allegiance of Donatism-tempted Catholics), but they also offered a positive account, for Catholics, of an alternative way to achieve martyrdom, one that was every bit as rigorous as that pursued by the (in Augustine’s view) spectacle-seeking Donatists.
In his anti-Pelagian sermons, Augustine was concerned primarily with the operation of grace in every aspect of Christian life and theology. Martyrdom does not arise as an explicit topic frequently in these sermons, but when it does, it relies significantly on Augustine’s arguments about the role of God’s grace in martyrdom and the martyr’s subsequent need for humility.198 Because humans are not in control of their own fates, the credit for a spectacular martyrdom could never be theirs, and therefore hoping for a particular form of martyrdom is merely a distraction from the real fights against sin and temptation on which the Christian martyr should truly be focused. As we saw Augustine arguing by contrasting the example of the Maccabees with that of the three boys in the fires of Babylon, God intervenes when, how, and to what end he sees fit. Rather than focusing on the ends—the “works” of suffering and death—Christians should instead focus on their own faith (which itself relies on Christ)199 and their caritas. Augustine returned, for instance, to 1 Corinthians 13 in an anti-Pelagian sermon of 416 to remind his audience that true martyrdom only comes when motivated by love: “The one in whom love is crowned—he will be the true martyr.”200 While the few anti-Pelagian sermons that grapple with martyrdom substantively (Sermones 299 and 335B) do not include living martyrs and might well be read as evidence for Augustine having a death-centered view of martyrdom, their overwhelming emphasis on humility and the need for God’s grace undercut that notion: Augustine in these sermons asks his listeners to focus not on the outcome but on the process of martyrdom: the interior commitment to a divine causa and the necessary work of cultivating humility and an absolute reliance on God. Once again we see how Augustine’s two underlying martyrial principles served him well within a particular polemical context.
CONCLUSION
Martyrdom without death is an important component of Augustine’s martyrial theology that has long been underacknowledged. It appears in a wide variety of forms that are all, despite their variety, intimately connected to Augustine’s central pastoral concerns with interiority and devotion to God’s will. And it often coexists with and even undermines or reframes his accounts of death-martyrdom. Even when martyrs do die, it is not their deaths that do the earning; it is not their deaths that are supposed to be imitated.
This is a crucial point to keep in mind. If we want to grasp the scope and spiritual impact of Augustine’s theology of martyrdom, we must, like diligent gardeners clearing away persistent weeds, be vigilant in uprooting our own habitual assumptions about death’s role in martyrdom. Once we clear away the creepers and thistles, it is much easier to see that Augustine’s calls to imitate the martyrs are intention-centered and that the imitatio martyris is, in Augustine’s view, actually a fully-fledged martyrdom.
Surveying Augustine’s sermons for the presence of deathless martyrdom offers us a new standard by which to explore his theology of martyrdom and with which to challenge the old paradigm of assuming that martyrdom requires death. Even those moments when Augustine endorses or seems to endorse death-based martyrdom turn out to be far from totalizing: Augustine, in fact, consistently undercuts any death-centered ideology of martyrdom. Indeed, as my reading of the sermones illustrates, Augustine’s ideology of martyrdom coheres around the principle of causa or intention, acquired and adhered to only with divine aid. If we want to understand Augustine’s ideology of martyrdom, we must center martyrdom without death.
Notes
1. See Shari Boodts and Anthony Dupont, “Augustine of Hippo” in Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, and Audiences in the Latin West, eds. Anthony Dupont, Shari Boodts, Gert Partoens, and Johan Leemans, A New History of the Sermon 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 177–197, as well as the treatments by Anthony Dupont, Preacher of Grace: A Critical Reappraisal of Augustine’s Doctrine of Grace in His Sermones ad Populum on Liturgical Feasts and during the Donatist Controversy, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 177 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Anthony Dupont, Gratia in Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum during the Pelagian Controversy: Do Different Contexts Furnish Different Insights?, Brill’s Series in Church History 59 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Cardinal Michele Pellegrino, “Introduction,” in The Works of Saint Augustine: Sermons III/1, ed. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 1992). I have also found helpful Peter Sanlon, Augustine’s Theology of Preaching (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). For preaching in Late Antiquity in general, see Dupont, Boodts, Partoens, and Leemans, Preaching in the Patristic Era, in particular the chapters by Leemans, Mayer, Dolbeau, Rebillard, and Dunn.
2. Augustine, Sermo 260E, 2 (MiAg 1, 503): ubi potest praedicet, et martyr est. In this and the following chapter, all translations are my own. However, I want to emphasize and acknowledge the quality of Edmund Hill’s translations of the sermons for the New City Press (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/1–11; henceforth cited simply as Hill). They are excellent, and Hill’s notes are clear and helpful, lending lovely transparency to his translation choices. I believe that Hill well captures the rhetorical grace of Augustine the preacher—certainly more evocatively than the translations I offer here, which attempt to hew more closely to the Latin even at the expense of eloquence in English.
3. Sermo 4, 37 (PL 38:52): semper coronaris et martyr hinc exies, si omnes tentationes diaboli superaueris.
4. Sermo 306E, 8 (Dolbeau 18, 215): Si ergo non consenseris, noli te existimare non martyrem. Non quidem celebratur sollemnitas tua, sed parata est corona tua. In this chapter, I use the term “pagan” as Augustine does: to refer to the practitioners of Roman religion and local non-Christian, non-Jewish religiosity in Augustine’s day. Whereas Prudentius used the term sparingly and Paulinus did not use it at all, Augustine habitually labeled his non-Christian, non-Jewish contemporaries “pagan.”
5. Sermo 286, 7 (PL 38:1300): multi ergo ducunt martyrium in lecto: prorsus multi.
6. Sermo 335J (=Lambot 29, PLS 2, 840): et pugnat cottidie in conscientia, ut ab illo qui illud uidet petat coronam, dum uicerit.
7. The Sermones ad populum refers to those sermons of Augustine’s that were not grouped together and edited into a continuous scriptural commentary. It is, therefore, a “catch-all” term for a collection whose composition regularly changes as new sermons (and new versions of sermons) are discovered. There are roughly 600 extant sermons in this collection—a small fraction of the many thousands that Augustine must have preached. Dupont (Gratia in Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum, 5–7) offers a good discussion of the question of distinguishing between sermones and enarrationes (a term first applied to Augustine’s collected works of commentary by Erasmus) or tractatus. There is, he says, “no clear difference” (6), generically speaking, but the convention used most often is that a piece is most aptly characterized as a sermon if the focus is pastoral and exhortative rather than trained on clarifying points of scriptural interpretation. But this is an imperfect distinction. Dupont also notes that the Sermones ad populum are also more likely to have been actually preached: he notes that a number of the enarrationes/tractatus were never delivered as homilies and that, instead, “some were dictated by Augustine as commentaries on the Scriptures, while others were put together as model sermons (as examples for other preachers) and never preached to a congregation” (6).I have elected to root the present analysis in the Sermones ad populum in part because they were likely to have actually been delivered and because they have, generally, been less edited (reflecting the versions produced by scribes whose job was to take down Augustine’s sermons as he spoke; see Boodts and Dupont, “Augustine of Hippo,” in Dupont et al., Preaching in the Patristic Era, 178); the other reason is that substantive discussions of martyrdom appear more frequently here than in any other location in Augustine’s corpus. I do draw at times from other sermons and some of Augustine’s other writings, but my primary reference is the Sermones ad populum. For an incredibly helpful overview of the status quaestionis of Augustine’s sermons, see Shari Boodts, “Navigating the Vast Sermons: Old Instruments and New Approaches,” Augustiniana 69, no. 1 (2019): 85–115.The fourteen sermons in which Augustine explicitly dissociates martyrdom from death are: 4, 36–37; 96, 9; 159, 8; 159A, 4; 260E, 2; 274; 286, 1; 296, 5; 301A, 5; 305A, 2; 306E (throughout, but see especially 6); 318, 2–3; 328, 8; 335J, 4. Such a claim also appears in Sermo 303, but that sermon does not appear to be authentically Augustinian.
8. Augustine, Sermones 20B, 10; 32, 15;36, 10; 53A, 11–12; 61A, 7; 64, 4; 64A, 1; 81, 3–5; 94A, 2–4; 128, 3; 136B, 4; 155, 2 and 12; 169, 15–16; 275; 277; 277A, 2; 280, 4; 285; 298, 1; 299F; 306, 2, 9–10; 306A; 306B; 306C, 5; 306D, 1; 309, 5; 313A; 314, 2; 315, 8 and 10; 316, 4; 317, 1–3; 319, 3; 325, 2; 326; 327; 330; 333, 1–2, 5; 335, 2; 335A; 335D, 3 and 5; 335E, 6; 335G, 2; 335H, 2; 335K; 335N, 2 and 7; 343, 2.
9. For treatments specifically of Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs, see Nicholas DeMaeyer and Anthony Dupont, “A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom on the Basis of Sermon 306C (Morin 15) on the Feast of the Martyr Quadratus,” in Felici curiositate: Studies in Latin Literature and Textual Criticism from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century in Honour of Rita Beyers, eds. Guy Guldentops, Christian Laes, and Gert Partoens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 275–292; Anthony Dupont, “Augustine’s Homiletic Definition of Martyrdom: The Centrality of the Martyr’s Grace in his Anti-Donatist and Anti-Pelagian Sermones ad Populum,” in Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity (300–450 AD): History and Discourse, Tradition and Religious Identity, eds. Peter Gemeinhardt and Johan Leemans (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012), 155–178; and Guy LaPointe, La célébration des martyrs en Afrique d’après les sermons de saint Augustin (Montreal: Communauté chrétienne, 1972).
10. See below, 164–166.
11. Following Hill, Sermones 159A, 169, 306A, and 313A were preached in Carthage, while Sermo 301A was preached in Bulla Regia, and Sermo 306A was preached in Utica. This only includes the sermons about whose location Hill is confident.
12. Alan Dearn (“Polemical Use of the Past in the Catholic-Donatist Schism,” DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 2003) and Collin Garbarino (“Augustine, Donatists, and Martyrdom,” in An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, eds. Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth [Leiden: Brill, 2011], 49–61) have both briefly acknowledged the living martyrs as such in the context of larger inquiries into the Donatist controversy. Neither dwell on the living martyr, instead treating the idea in limited fashion as an artifact of polemic; neither of these pieces has, to my knowledge, been cited since by anyone other than myself; Garbarino was not familiar with Dearn.
13. Hill, Sermons III/7, 204.
14. Hill, Sermons III/4, 22n4. See also Sermo 159, 8, where Hill misunderstands Augustine’s point about thousands of martyrs potentially being visible all around his audience. Augustine asks his listeners to imagine that, contrary to their expectations but in line with their ideals, they are in a congregation filled with “a thousand martyrs [lying] before our eyes, those lovers of perfect truth and justice” (milia martyrum adiacent oculis nostris, ipsi ueri amatores perfectique iustitiae [CCSL 41Bb, 48]). Hill proposes that Augustine means “the eyes of our hearts, presumably” and then floats the idea that the sermon may have taken place in a shrine to the massa candida. In Sermo 286, 3, the text reads quasi semine sanguinis impleta est martyribus terra, which Hill “corrects” because of a “misplacement of the genitive” (III/8, 106n8)—one could as easily read this as noting that there is such a thing as a “martyr of blood” that Augustine is specifically referring to here. Finally, in Sermo 296, Hill adds the phrase “a martyr’s death” in English to give the impression that John was not really a martyr in Augustine’s estimation, which, as discussed below (PAGE NUMBER), it is clear that he was. In these notes, I absolutely do not mean to disparage Hill, whose work I greatly admire—just to note how even the most astute reader of Augustine is habituated to reading martyrdom as requiring death (and even a particular type of death).
15. Carole Straw, “Martyrdom,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 538–541.
16. Hill, Sermons III/11, 281n18: “[Augustine] is there saying that we can share both in the martyr’s self-control, in his indifference to the allurements of pleasure, and in his patient endurance of physical suffering, and hence in his reward, simply by having ‘a good will.’ The same point is frequently made with reference to other good works, in particular to giving up everything and following Christ, or being generous to those in need. Even if you lack the means, it’s the good will that counts. See for example Sermons 101, 11; 107A, 8 (III, 4); 299D, 4 (III, 8); 359A, 12 (III, 10).”
17. Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: 250–450 CE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 5–6 on arrangements of identity categories and 61–91 on Augustine, specifically.
18. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 74.
19. Annemaré Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom, ed. Paul Middleton (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), 140.
20. DeMaeyer and Dupont, “A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom.”
21. DeMaeyer and Dupont, “A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom,” 278.
22. For a full(er) discussion of non poena sed causa, see below [165ff]
23. See Dupont, Preacher of Grace, 137–138; see also Sanlon, Augustine’s Theology of Preaching, 128–134.
24. See the excellent synthesis of scholarship on this topic in DeMaeyer and Dupont, “A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom,” 276–279. Also very helpful are Straw, “Martyrdom,” and Dupont, Preacher of Grace, 137–142.
25. Very unusually—see Boodts and Dupont, “Augustine of Hippo,” 177.
26. Jan den Boeft remarks that martyrdom’s minimal presence in the Confessions indicates that “martyrdom had not really entered the heart of his thinking” (“‘Martyres sunt, sed homines fuerunt’: Augustine on Martyrdom,” in Fructus Centesimus: Mélanges offerts à Gerard J.M. Bartelink à l’occasion de son soixante-cinquième anniversaire, eds. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, A. Hilhorst, and C. H. Kneepkens [Steenbrugis: In abbatia S. Petri, 1989], 115–124, here 117). As den Boeft points out, a spiritual autobiography would have been a good place for Augustine to muse on the martyrs, if they had had any impact on his journey to Catholic Christianity or if they were a topic of great interest for him as he composed the Confessiones. Their absence is therefore telling.
27. Straw, “Martyrdom,” 539. See Sermones 335D, 2 and 198, 9 for typical formulations of Augustine’s reminders against debauchery at martyrs’ shrines.
28. Den Boeft, “Martyres sunt,” 117.
29. T. J. van Bavel, “The Cult of Martyrs in St. Augustine: Theology Versus Popular Religion?” in Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective, eds. Mathijs Lamberigts and Peter Van Deun (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995), 351–361, here 351.
30. See “Living Martyrdom in Polemical Context,” pp. 192–196.
31. “Non facit martyrem poena sed causa.” Jan den Boeft calls it “a proverbial phrase” for Augustine (“Martyres sunt,” 188), and Alan Dearn describes its use in Augustine’s sermons as being “almost to the point of cliché” (“The Polemical Use of the Past,” 315). Within the Sermones ad populum, we see the non poena sed causa formulation in Sermones 53A, 13; 94A, 1; 274; 275,1; 285, 2; 306, 2; 306A; 325, 2; 327, 1; 328, 4; 331, 2; 335, 2; 335C, 5; 335G, 2; and 359B, 16–20. We see it as well in other works by Augustine: in Epp. 89, 93, 108, 185, and 204; in Enarr. in Ps. 34 (Sermo 2) and 88 (Sermo 1); and in the Contra Cresconium 3.47 and 4.46. For assessments of how Augustine’s martyrial theology and non poena sed causa in particular played a role in his polemics in the Donatist and Pelagian controversies, see the several works by Anthony Dupont already cited (Preacher of Grace; Gratia in Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum; “Augustine’s Homiletic Definition of Martyrdom”) plus his work with DeMaeyer (“A Study of Augustine’s Theology of Martyrdom”) and his “Imitatio Christi, Imitatio Stephani: Augustine’s Thinking on Martyrdom Based on his sermones on the Protomartyr Stephen,” Augustiniana 56, no. 1–2 (2006): 29–61. Augustine also used the logic of non poena sed causa as a way of divorcing earthly Christian prosperity from Christian triumphalism in the wake of the sack of Rome—in essence arguing against “pagans” who blamed Christians for the horrors that befell the city (see Sermo 296).
32. Sermo 335C, 12 (=Lambot 2; PLS 2, 753): Causam primitus, quantum potestis, eligite. Nam, non electa causa, nonne talia patiuntur martyres qualia passi sunt saepe latrones, qualia adulteri, qualia malefici, qualia quique sacrilegi? Si paenas attendas, pares sunt, si causas plurimes, longe illi ab illis sunt. For the dating, see Roger Gryson, Répertoire général des auteurs ecclésiastiques latins de l’antiquité et du haut moyen âge, Vetus latina 1/1, cinquième édition mise à jour du Verzeichnis der Sigel für Kirchenschriftsteller commencé par Bonifatius Fischer, continué par Hermann Josef Frede (Freiburg: Herder, 2007). In this chapter and the next, I largely follow Gryson’s dating, though my own inclination is toward less, rather than more, certainty on dating.
33. Sermo 328, 4 (PL 38: 1453): Si de passione gloriandum est; potest et ipse diabolus gloriari. Videte quanta patitur, cuius ubique templa evertuntur, cuius ubique idola franguntur, cuius ubique sacerdotes et arreptitii caeduntur. Numquid potest dicere: Et ego martyr sum, quia tanta patior! Gryson dates this sermon between 400 and 405.
34. Wojciech Lazewski, La Sentenza agostiniana martyrem non facit poena sed causa (PhD diss., Pontificia University Lateranensis, 1987), 223. Gryson dates De Sermone Domini in Monte to 394/395.
35. Straw, “Martyrdom,” 538.
36. Any attempt to sketch a timeline of Augustine’s developing thoughts about martyrdom and non poena sed causa is complicated by the fact that, as we shall see, there are many times when Augustine has multiple, seemingly disparate understandings of martyrdom at work within a single sermon. While there is, of course, the possibility of change over time, the simultaneous presence of multiple competing understandings of martyrdom in so many sermons weighs against any retelling of Augustine’s martyrial thinking that imagines Augustine proceeding through a series of discrete understandings along a recognizable trajectory.
37. For a full discussion of the role that these two principles played in Augustine’s polemical work, see below [192–196].
38. Sermo 306, 2 (PL 38:1400): non est igitur in hominis potestate quo exitu hanc uitam finiat: sed est in hominis potestate quomodo uiuat, ut uitam securus finiat. neque hoc in potestate esset, nisi dedisset dominus potestatem filios dei fieri. sed quibus? credentibus in nomine eius. haec est prima martyrum causa, haec est candida martyrum massa. si causa candida, et massa candida. Augustine concludes the sermon by reiterating his emphasis on faith: etiam fide simili imitari non formidemus (Sermo 306, 10 [PL 38:1405]).
39. Sermo 332, 3 (PL 38, 1462): Ab illo martyres acceperunt quod pro illo passi sunt.
40. See below, [170, as well as 202n61 and 203n68.].
41. For scholarly views of the Donatists, see Richard Miles, ed., The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). I discuss Augustine’s martyrial theology in relation to the Donatist controversy and other debates of his day below, [192–196].
42. Sermo 306A (=Morin 14; MiAg 1, 645): non festinauit accipere praemium. Hoc est enim dominum sustinere, ut tunc accipias quando uoluerit dare. See also 306C, 6: In hoc saeculo, fratres mei, quid nobis expediat, ignoramus.
43. Sermo 283, 9[4] (EAA 147, 625): Ille ergo adiutor adfuit, ut donaret ei ueram fidem, faceret ei bonam causam, et pro bona causa donaret patientiam. See 313E, 1 for another instance of good cause being gifted, where Cyprian’s truth is a gift from God, as is his ability to please God.
44. Sermo 306B (=Denis 18; MiAg 1, 92): non esse in nobis nostrum nisi peccatum.
45. He also uses Proverbs 8:35 (LXX) (“The will is prepared by the Lord,” in Sermo 333, 1[= Caesarius Arelatensis Sermo 226, 1]); Philippians 2:13 (“It is God who works in you both the willing and the acting on your good will,” in Sermo 335J, 4 [=Lambot 29]); and 1 Kings 17:9, where he characterizes God’s command to the starving widow to give of her scant remaining food to Elijah as a preparation of the will (“What is ‘I commanded?’ ‘I have prepared the will for faith,’” in Sermo 136B [=Lambot 10; PLS 2, 794]: Quid est: mandaui? uoluntatem ad fidem paraui.).
46. See Sermones 276, 1; 283, 9[4]; 297, 6; 333, 6.
47. Sermo 284, 3 (PL 38, 1289): Laudas martyrum patientiam, quasi a se ipsis possent esse patientes? Apostolum potius audi gentium doctorem, non infidelium deceptorem. Certe in martyribus patientiam pro christo laudas, et eam ipsis assignas? Audi potius apostolum martyres alloquentem, et corda humana sedantem. Audi, inquam, dicentem, quia uobis donatum est pro christo. Audi pietatem exhortantem, non adulationem fallentem: uobis, inquit, donatum est. Donatum est, audi: uobis donatum est pro christo, non solum ut credatis in eum, uerum etiam ut patiamini pro eo. Uobis donatum est: quid ad hanc sententiam addi potest? Uobis donatum est: agnosce donatum, ne perdas usurpatum. Uobis, inquit, donatum est pro christo: quid pro christo, nisi pati? Sed non suspiceris, audi sequentia: non solum ut credatis in eum; quia et hoc donatum est: sed non hoc solum donatum est; uerum etiam ut patiamini pro eo, et hoc donatum est.
48. In another instance, Augustine says this of preaching: “may he who granted the will grant the capacity” (Sermo 330, 1 [PL 38, 1456]: donet facultatem, qui tribuit uoluntatem). He immediately connects the sentiment to what occurs in martyrdom and concludes the same sermon with a reminder that denying oneself, like the martyrs and the apostles did, means not to “follow your own will, but that of the one who lives within you” (Sermo 330, 4 [PL 38, 1458]: Noli facere uoluntatem tuam, sed illius qui habitat in te). See also 335B, 5 for yet another instance of Augustine crediting the will for martyrdom to God.
49. Sermo 333, 5 (= Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 226, 5 [CCSL 104]): cum ergo deus coronat merita tua, nihil coronat nisi dona sua. For the inclusion of this sermon among Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works, see Dupont, “Augustine’s Homiletic Definition of Martyrdom,” 166.
50. The decision of Flavianus Marcellinus in the Collatio Carthaginiensis to dismiss the Donatists’ case enabled and precipitated the increasingly punitive laws that would secure Catholic dominance in Africa within Augustine’s lifetime. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 330–335. See also Neil McLynn, “The Conference of Carthage Reconsidered,” in The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, ed. Richard Miles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 220–248.
51. Sermo 296, 3–4 (MiAg 1, 403): Uidetis hoc pertinere ad pascendas oues domini, ut non recusetur mors pro ouibus domini. . . . Nunc uero dominus christus, quia seruo commendat oues quas sanguine comparauit, idoneitatem serui in passione sanguinis quaerit, tamquam dicens: pasce oues meas, commendo tibi oues meas.
52. Sermo 296, 4 (MiAg 1, 404): Pascimus uos, pascimur uobiscum det nobis dominus uires sic amandi uos, ut possimus etiam mori pro uobis, aut effectu, aut affectu.
53. Sermo 296, 5 (MiAg 1, 404): Non enim quia iohanni apostolo passio defuit, ideo passioni animus praeparatus deesse potuit. Non est passus, sed potuit pati: praeparationem eius deus nouerat. Quemadmodum tres pueri arsuri missi sunt in caminum, non uicturi: negabimus eos martyres, quia eos flamma urere non potuit? Interroga ignes, passi non sunt; interroga uoluntatem, coronati sunt.
54. Sermo 296 (MiAg 1, 404): Aliud deo placuit, non arserunt, sed ignem idololatriae in animo regis extinxerunt.
55. Sermo 296 (MiAg 1, 402): Audiuit a domino tunc: redi retro, satana, neque enim sapis quae dei sunt, sed quae sunt hominum; cui paulo ante dixerat – dicenti tu es christus filius dei uiui – beatus es, simon barioanna, quia non tibi reuelauit caro et sanguis, sed pater meus qui est in caelis. paulo ante beatus, postea satanas. Sed unde beatus? Non de suo: non tibi reuelauit caro et sanguis, sed pater meus. unde autem satanas? Ex homine, et in homine: non enim sapis quae dei sunt, sed quae sunt hominum.
56. Sermo 296, 5 (MiAg 1, 404): negabimus eos martyres, quia eos flamma urere non potuit? Interroga ignes, passi non sunt; interroga uoluntatem, coronati sunt.
57. Sermo 306E (EAA 147, 216): ibi opus est ut habeas animum martyris.
58. Sermo 343 (RB 66, 30): utrique coronati.
59. In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 11.14.
60. In Iohannis Euangelium Tractatus 43.12 (CCSL 36): potens est deus etiam de ista flamma liberare nos; sed et si non. Ibi fuit timor illius mortis, quam modo dominus comminatur, quando dixerunt: sed et si noluerit aperte liberare, potest in occulto coronare. unde et ipse dominus facturus martyres, et caput martyrum futurus, ait: nolite timere eos qui occidunt corpus, et postea non habent quid faciant. . . . sed eum timete qui habet potestatem et corpus et animam occidere in gehenna ignis.
61. Enarratio in Psalmum 68.2.3 (CCSL 39): quare eorum corona dilata est? The answer is, once again, that God wanted to redeem Nebuchadnezzar so that he could glorify God.
62. Five times in the Sermones ad populum (32, 15; 286, 6; 301, 2; 306E, 9; and 343, 2), six times in the Enarrationes in Psalmos (33.2, 22; 36.3, 9; 68.2, 3; 69.2, 3; 90.2, 11; 137, 14; 148, 11), once in the sermons collected in In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos 8, and once in the sermons collected in In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 11.14. Augustine also makes this comparison in Ep. 111.5 (to Victorianus). See Catherine Brown Tkacz, “The Seven Maccabees, the Three Hebrews and a Newly Discovered Sermon of St. Augustine (Mayence 50),” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 41 (1995): 59–78.
63. Tkacz, “The Seven Maccabees, the Three Hebrews and a Newly Discovered Sermon,” 63.
64. Enarrationes in Psalmos 148, 11.33 (PL 36, 67): illos aperte liberauit, istos occulte coronauit.
65. Sermo 343 (RB 66, 30): Illi euaserunt, illi mox arserunt: utrique tentati. Hii carne consumpti, hii carne illaesi; utrique coronati. See also Sermo 32, 15 (PL 38: 202): illi de igne euaserunt, illi ignibus cruciati sunt. utrique tamen in deo sempiterno uicerunt.
66. See Den Boeft, “Martyres sunt,” 121–122.
67. Sermo 286, 6 (PL 38, 1300), a late-career sermon on Protasius and Gervasius: Certe illi euaserunt ignes, sed ad pericula istius saeculi seruati sunt: illi in ignibus omnia pericula finierunt. Non ulterius restabat ulla tentatio, sed sola coronatio. Ergo plus acceperunt machabaei.
68. Sermo 286, 6 (PL 38, 1300): Fidem interrogo. Homines saeculi huius amatores si interrogem: ego inter tres pueros uolebam esse, dicit mihi anima infirma. Interestingly, Augustine describes other martyrs as having similar thoughts to these “weak souls”: “Consider the promises of God, and what happened to these very martyrs—do you think God gave them everything they asked for? No! Many hoped that they would be released, even released with some miracle, in the way that the three boys in the furnace were released” (Considerate promissiones dei. Istis ipsis martyribus quid, putatis quia omne quod postulauerunt dedit? Non. multi se optauerunt dimitti, et cum aliquo miraculo dimitti, quomodo dimissi sunt tres pueri de camino). After saying this, he turns to the reason that God saved the Babylonian boys, which was to bring greater earthly glory to God and God’s people. My read on this is that Augustine would say that his model martyrs here, in hoping for a miraculous release, were nonetheless thinking in divine terms. If they wanted a miracle, it would be for God’s glory, not their own attachment to the world.
69. Sermo 286, 6 (PL 38, 1300): Excutite fidem uestram, oculos cordis proferte, nolite humanos: habetis enim alios intus, quos uobis dominus fecit, qui uobis oculos cordis aperuit, quando fidem dedit.
70. See also Sermo 301, 2.
71. Sermo 328, 8 (RB 51,19): sed nemo dicat: non possum martyr esse quia non est modo persecutio. non cessant tentationes. pugna et corona parata est.
72. Sermo 4 (CCSL 41, 47): Non enim deest persecutio. Diabolus persecutor est, numquam deficit occasio coronae. For similar calls not to discount the possibility of martyrdom, see Sermones 94A, 2; 299F, 4; 301A, 5; 304, 2–3; 305A, 5; 306E, 8; 311, 1; 318, 2.
73. Sermo 4 (CCSL 41, 47): Tantum miles Christi intellegat pugnam, et sciat quem uincat. Numquid quia non te urget hostis manifestus corporis, non te urget persecutor occultus illecebris carnis? Quanta suggerit mala, quanta per cupiditatem, quanta per timorem!
74. Sermo 4, 37 (PL 38:52): quare ista diximus, fratres? ut quando celebratis natalitia martyrum, imitemini martyres, nec putetis ideo uobis deesse posse occasiones coronae, quia modo desunt tales persecutiones. nec modo enim desunt quotidie persecutiones a diabolo, siue per suggestionem, siue per molestias aliquas corporis. Tu tantum scito te habere imperatorem, qui iam praecessit in caelum. Dedit tibi uiam qua sequaris, tene te ad illum. Noli, cum uiceris, per superbiam tibi tribuere, quasi de uiribus tuis luctatus fueris. Sed praesume de eo qui dedit uires ut uinceres, quia ipse uicit saeculum. et semper coronaris et martyr hinc exies, si omnes tentationes diaboli superaueris.
75. Sermones 32, 15; 36, 10; 62, 14; 81, 4–5; 94A, 2; 107, 8–10; 301A, 5; 306E, 10.
76. Sermo 260E.
77. Sermo 159A, 4 (CCSL 41Bb, 59): Voluntate auersa a pecunia, stat martyr Dei securus aduersus eos qui damnis terrent.
78. See Sermo159A, 4 and 318, 2.
79. Sermo 315, 10 (PL 38, 1431): angustum theatrum. See also Augustine’s treatment of the widow in Zarephath (1 Kings 17), who obeys Elijah’s request for bread even while knowing she will not have flour left to make bread for herself and her son. Augustine characterizes her as a martyr in Sermo 136B, 4, using her as an example of how God prepares the will for faith within a larger argument about how the merits of the martyrs and the saints are in themselves gifts of God.
80. Sermo 274 (Pl 38, 1253): Nouimus quia patienter audistis, et diu stando et audiendo tanquam martyri compassi estis. Qui audit uos, amet uos, et coronet uos.
81. Sermo 328, 8 (RB 51, 19): non cessant tentationes. pugna et corona parata est. quando forte? ecce, ut aliquid commemorem—quia omnia longum est enarrare in quibus tentatur anima christiana et propitio deo uincit et facit magnam uictoriam, nemine uidente, in corpore inclusa; pugnat corde, coronatur in corde sed ab illo qui uidet in corde. See also Sermo 306E, 7, for a similar apophasis on the varied ways of earning the martyr’s crown.
82. Straw, “Martyrdom,” 538; Den Boeft, “Martyres sunt,” 122–123.
83. As in Sermo 299D, 1 (MiAg 1, 75): martyres sancti, testes dei; Sermo 299D, 5 (MiAg 1, 78): nihil tam proximum animae suae, quam caro sua; fames et sitis et aestus in carne sentis: ibi te uolo uidere, martyr bone, testis dei; Sermo 319, 1 (PL 38:1440): hoc tantum exhortor ad charitatem uestram aedificandam, ut sciatis sanctum stephanum honorem christi quaesisse, ut sciatis sanctum martyrem testem christi fuisse, ut sciatis eum tanta tunc miracula in nomine christi fecisse; and Sermo 335J, 1 (PLS 2, 839): martyres sancti, testes christi, usque ad sanguinem contra peccatum pugnauerunt, quia ipse in illis fuit, per quem uicerunt. In Sermo 334 he refers to Christ as martyrem martyrum, testem testium.
84. Sermo 128, 3 (PL 38: 714): martyres nonne testes sunt christi, et testimonium perhibent ueritati? See also Sermo 335A, 1.
85. Sermo 286, 1 (PL 38:1297): martyres, nomen est graecum, sed iam isto nomine consuetudo utitur pro latino: latine autem testes dicuntur. sunt ergo martyres ueri, sunt falsi: quia sunt testes ueri, sunt falsi. si testis falsus non erit sine poena, nec testis uerus sine corona. A more typical formulation can be seen in Sermo 260E, where Augustine is clear that nothing had been lost in translation from Greek to Latin: “They declare themselves witnesses of Christ, but those who are called ‘witnesses’ in Latin are called ‘martyrs’ in Greek” (Sermo 260E, 1 [MiAg 1, 502]: professi sunt se testes christi; testes autem qui dicuntur latine, graece martyres uocantur); similar statements appear in Sermo 299F, 1; Sermo 319, 3; and Sermo 328, 2.
86. Den Boeft, “Martyres sunt,” 123. Additionally, in Sermones 36, 10 and 306B, 6 Augustine connects witness to martyrdom contrapositively by depicting a person who would have been a martyr through witness but who could not withstand the pressure to lie.
87. Sermo 329, 1 (PL 38, 1454): sed martyrum fides probata est; testis est sanguis.
88. Sermo 335A (=Frangipane 6; MiAg 1, 219): Martyrum nomen graecum est, latine testes dicuntur: si ergo testes sunt, pro testimonii sui ueritate tanta perpessi sunt. See also Sermo 299D, 1; 299F, 1; and 328, 2 for juxtapositions of witness and suffering.
89. Sermo 286, 1 (PL 38:1297): et paratus est in sua confessione mori pro Christo . . . ut nihil sit amplius quod restet.
90. Sermo 260E, 1 (MiAg 1, 502): non enim possumus quae uidimus et audiuimus non loqui.
91. Sermo 260E, 1 (MiAg 1, 502): professi sunt se testes christi; testes autem qui dicuntur latine, graece martyres uocantur.
92. Sermo 260E, 1 (MiAg 1, 502): contemserunt hominum prohibitionem, ut haberent dei benedictionem.
93. Sermo 260E, 1 (MiAg 1, 502): Illi uiderunt et audierunt: nos quid? debemus et nos praedicare. Sed non uidimus.
94. Sermo 260E, 2 (MiAg 1, 503): Dicite ergo et uos: non possumus quod audiuimus non loqui et praedicare dominum christum. Quisque ubi potest praedicet, et martyr est. Aliquando autem homo non patitur persecutionem, et timet confusionem. Contingit illi conuiuari, uerbi gratia, inter paganos, et erubescit se dici christianum. Si expauescit conuiuatorem, quomodo potest contemnere persecutorem? praedicate ergo christum, ubi potueritis, quibus potueritis, quomodo potueritis. Exigitur a uobis fides, non eloquentia: fides de uobis loquatur, et christus loquitur. Si enim est in uobis fides, habitat in uobis christus.
95. Sermo 335D, 3 (PLS 2, 778): remedia inlicita.
96. “Sickbed martyrs” appear in Sermo 328 (dated to 401–402 by Hill [Sermons III/9, 181n1 and n8] and 400/405 by Gryson); Sermo 4 (dated to January 22, 403 and likely delivered in Carthage); Sermo 306E (dated to August 21, 397, by Dolbeau but 415/420 by Gryson and likely delivered in or near Carthage); Sermo 318 (dated to December 26, 425 and delivered in Hippo); Sermo 335D (dated to 424 or later and likely delivered in or near Hippo); and Sermo 286 (delivered near Hippo at some point after 425; Hill suggests 428 [see Sermons III/8, 105n1]).
97. Sermo 4, 36 (PL 38:52): remedia diaboli.
98. Sermo 4, 36 (PL 38:52): Moriar potius, quam talibus remediis utar; si vult Deus, flagellat et liberat me; si novit quia necessarium est, liberet me; si autem scit quia debeo exire de hac vita, sive contrister, sive laeter, sequar voluntatem Domini.
99. Sermo 4, 36 (PL 38:52): remedia scelerata.
100. Sermo 4, 36 (CCSL 41, 47): Vides illum certe languere, uides anhelantem in lecto, uides uix mouentem membra, uix mouentem linguam: lassus iste diabolum uincit. Multi coronati sunt in amphitheatro pugnantes ad bestias. Multi in lecto uincentes diabolum coronantur. Hac uidentur non se mouere posse, et intus in corde tantas uires habent, tantam pugnam exercent! Sed ubi est occulta pugna, ibi est occulta uictoria.
101. Sermo 335D, 3 (PLS 2, 778): in lecto iacentem et in caelo regnantem.
102. Sermo 318, 3 (PL 38, 1439): fac, si uis uiuere; morieris, si non feceris. Uide si non est, morieris, si christum non negaueris. Quod dicebat aperte martyri persecutor, hoc tibi ex obliquo dicit occultus tentator. Fac tibi hoc remedium, et uiues: nonne hoc est, sacrifica, et uiues? Si non feceris, morieris: nonne hoc est, si non sacrificaueris, morieris? Inuenisti parem pugnam, quaere parem palmam. In lecto es, et in stadio es; iaces, et luctaris. Permane in fide; et dum fatigatus es, uincis.
103. Augustine makes the same point in Sermones 306E, 7 and 335D, 5.
104. Sermo 328, 8.
105. Sermo 286, 7 (PL 38, 1300): Multi ergo ducunt martyrium in lecto: prorsus multi. Est quaedam persecutio satanae, occultior et astutior quam tunc fuit.
106. Sermo 306E, 7 (EAA 147, 215): Aliquando febris, et certas. . . . febris, et certas. In lecto es . . . infirmus es. Sermo 328, 8 (RB 51, 20): In lecto iacet et martyrium ducit. In lecto lassus et fatigatus febribus mouere se non potest. Sermo 4, 36 (CCSL 41, 47): Vides illum certe languere, uides anhelantem in lecto, uides uix mouentem membra, uix mouentem linguam. Sermo 318, 3 (PL 38, 1440): aegrotat; In lecto es. . . iaces; fatigatus es. Sermo 335D, 3 (PLS 2, 778): languit; uix mouet membra; aegrum . . . infirmum . . . in lecto iacentem. Sermo 335D, 5 (PLS 2, 780): In lecto iaces. . . . Non moues membra; febris. Sermo 286, 7 (PL 38, 1300): Iacet fidelis in lecto, torquetur doloribus . . . flagellatur.
107. Andrew Crislip, “‘I Have Chosen Sickness’: The Controversial Function of Sickness in Early Christian Ascetic Practice,” in Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Oliver Freiberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 179–209, here 197.
108. Crislip, “I Have Chosen Sickness,” 185.
109. See Vita Syncleticae, 104–106, 111 (PG 28.1551–1553; 1555).
110. Sermo 335D, 3 (PLS 2, 778): Ille autem aeger, quia non amat salutem hominibus iumentisque communem, dicit: si ille inde saluus factus est, ego inde saluus fieri nolo. Ille enim me saluum facere potest cui dictum est: homines et iumenta saluos facies domine sicut multiplicasti misericordias tuas deus—uides athletam dei, audis athletam christi. O uirum aegrum et sanum. O infirmum et fortem. O in lecto iacentem et in caelo regnantem—sed ecce non uult. Numquid mihi subtrahit salutem illam diuinam? sequitur: filii autem hominum in protectione alarum tuarum sperabunt. Sed istam salutem non uides quia salus iustorum a domino est. Ego scio quia seruat mihi. Qui me fecit ipse refecit. Sed de morte me terris pro quo ipsa uita mortua est. Mortem suam christus donauit impio, pio uitam non donabit?
111. Sermo 306E, 8 (EAA 147, 216): ibi opus est ut habeas animum martyris, quoniam spectat te qui fecit te, et adiuuat te qui uocauit te. Ibi est ut dicas illam sanctorum +inueni+ uocem: ‘Potens est deus et de ista mortifera febre liberare me, sed et si non. . . .’ Dolbeau emends inueni to IIIum, which does make more sense here.
112. Sermo 318 (PL 38, 1440): Permane in fide; et dum fatigatus es, uincis.
113. Sermo 285 (SE 56, 85): Martyrum perfecta iustitia est, quoniam in ipsa passione perfecti sunt.
114. Augustine often talks at length about the martyrs shedding their blood, especially in reference to Hebrews 12:4, but for some more cursory instances, see Sermones 24, 6; 51, 8; 116, 7; 126B, 14; 265E, 1; 284, 3; 302, 1; and 375C, 6. Similarly, Augustine often assumes that his audiences will link martyrdom to bloodshed and suffering, asking, in one instance, “for what did they shed their blood?” as if there could be no doubt that they had (Sermo 302, 1 [SPM 1, 100]: propter quod sanguinem fuderunt). In another instance, Augustine assumes that his audience will agree that the martyrs are the clear allegorical referents of the grilled fish Jesus eats in Luke 24:42: “Grilled fish means martyrdom, faith proved by fire” (Sermo 229J, 3 [MiAg 1, 583]: Piscis assus, martyria sunt, fides probata igne). Sometimes the connection to death is made more substantively, but still as an isolated aside, as in Sermo 313, 5: “Those who would not bow to the words of its preachers were broken in pieces by the virtues of its dying [martyrs]” ([PL 38, 1424]: Hanc effudit frameam spargendo usquequaque martyres suos: et conclusit aduersus eos qui persequebantur ecclesiam; ut quia praedicantem uocibus non flectebantur, morientem uirtutibus frangerentur).
115. Augustine did not always weave this point into his sermons at a subtle register. For an example of Augustine explaining, at length, why the martyr’s day of death is recognized as her birthday, see Sermo 310, 1. More typical formulations, notable for their mundane character, often look something like this: “In seven days . . . we will celebrate the birthday of the holy martyrs Peter and Paul” (Sermo 279, 1 (MiAg 1, 593): Post septem dies . . . celebrabimus etiam natalicium martyrum sanctorum petri et pauli); “How much ought we avoid [drunkenness], when we are celebrating the birthdays of the martyrs!” (Sermo 313G, 1 [WSt 121, 284]: Quantum hoc vitare debemus, quando martyrum natalicia celebramus); “Because the birthday of the blessed martyr has dawned, whom the lord wished us to celebrate with you . . .” (Sermo 335C, 1 [PLS 2, 750]: Quia beati martyris natalis illuxit dies quem uoluit nos dominus celebrare uobis . . .).
116. Approximately one-fifth of Augustine’s extant sermons (102 out of roughly 546) were delivered on the feast days of martyrs and saints. See Dupont, “Imitatio Christi, Imitatio Stephani,” 29.
117. Indeed, Augustine seems to have understood the placement of feast days in the calendar in quite practical terms: in a sermon on St. Lawrence, Augustine explains that certain martyrs are commemorated annually to remind Christians of their examples but that others are overlooked in the calendar so as to prevent Christians from growing bored with celebrations (Sermo 305A, 1).
118. Sermo 107, 10 (PL 38, 632): Forte te occisurus est, ut martyrem faciat.
119. We see the same type of narrative definition of martyrdom by death when Augustine configures the Jews as making Stephen a martyr by their act of killing him (Sermo 229I, 4). Similarly, in Sermones 65A, 10 and 159A, 10, we see Augustine cautioning wives against calling their husbands back from martyrdom on the premise that they should not be more concerned about becoming widows than about God’s wishes or their husbands’ souls—the implicit takeaway is that their husbands’ martyrdoms would mean their deaths.
120. Sermo 111, 2 (RB 57, 114): Occidantur ubique martyres, seminati cum grano unde fertilitas segetis pullulet.
121. Sermo 299A, 7 (EAA 147, 518): saeuit mundus, saeuire promissus est, non ut semen conculcaretur, sed ut seges seminaretur; fusus est ubique martyrum sanguis; mundum impleuit messis ecclesiae: facta sunt haec. See also 360B, 19.
122. Sermo 301, 1 (PL 38:1380): ubique exhortantem filios suos pro illius nomine mori, de quo eos concepit et peperit? Sic sanguine martyrum impletus orbis praeiactatis seminibus seges ecclesiae pullulauit.
123. In addition to the examples in this paragraph, see Sermones 22, 4; 286, 3; 301, 1; 313B, 2; 313D, 3; 335E, 2.
124. In addition to the examples discussed in this section, see Sermones 32, 1–2 and 15; 155, 12; and 299C, 1.
125. Sermo 329, 1 (PL 38, 1454): Empti sunt fideles et martyres: sed martyrum fides probata est; testis est sanguis.
126. Sermo 329, 1 (PL 38, 1454): Mensa magna est, ubi epulae sunt ipse dominus mensae. Nemo pascit conuiuas de se ipso: hoc facit dominus christus; ipse inuitator, ipse cibus et potus. Agnouerunt ergo martyres quid comederent et biberent, ut talia redderent.
127. Sermo 329, 1 (PL 38, 1454): Sed unde talia redderent, nisi ille daret unde redderent, qui prior impendit?
128. Sermo 375B, 1 (Denis 5): Habemus in morte et resurrectione eius opus indictum, praemium promissum: opus indictum passio, praemium promissum resurrectio. Opus hoc martyres impleuerunt: nos impleamus pietate, si non possumus passione. Non enim omnibus contingit pati pro christo, et mori pro christo; tamen ipsum mori omnibus contingit . . . contigit pro christo mori, quodammodo illud, quod eis erogatum fuerat, reddiderunt. Erogauerat eis dominus, ut moreretur pro illis; reddiderunt illi moriendo pro illo. Sed unde redderet miser egenus, si non dedisset felix dominus? Itaque quod erogauerat martyribus christus, dedit eis unde redderent christo. While Éric Rebillard and the Library of Latin Texts mark this Sermo as of dubious authorship, I have been unable to locate any discussion of this claim, and indeed Dupont, Sanlon, and other recent commentators treat it without comment as authentic. I am following their lead here. See Rebillard, “Sermones,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 773–792, here 788.
129. See also Sermo 265E, 1, where God declares that he had promised the “blood and crowns” of the martyrs and had “paid up.” ([PLS 2, 805]: Promisi sanguinem coronasque martyrum. Reddidi).
130. Sermo 51, 2 (CCSL 41Aa, 11): martyres, qui bestiis subiecti sunt, qui capite caesi, qui ignibus concremati.
131. Sermo 113A, 4 (MiAg 1, 145): quanta martyres passi sunt, quanta tolerauerunt. quas catenas, quos squalores, quos carceres, quos cruciatus, quas flammas, quas bestias, quae genera mortis. calcauerunt omnia.
132. Sermo 334, 1 (PL 38, 1467): . . . excogitabantur noui cruciatus, et poenas incredibiles inueniebat ingeniosa crudelitas. Obruebantur opprobriis, falsis arguebantur criminibus, custodiis intolerabilibus includebantur, ungulis exarabantur, ferro perimebantur, bestiis subrigebantur, ignibus cremabantur, et dicebant martyres christi: si deus pro nobis, quis contra nos?
133. Sermo 297, 3 (PL 38, 1360): inde martyres magni, quia amarae mortis asperitatem durissimam pertulerunt. See also Sermo 299E, 2; Sermo 273; Sermo 331, 1 and 5; 332, 3; and 335B, 1.
134. Sermo 173, 2 (CCSL 41Bb, 497): Quis enim uult mori? . . . Si ergo nulla esset mortis amaritudo, non esset magna martyrum fortitudo. See also Sermo 335B, 3 (MiAg 1, 560): Attendite martyrum gloriam: nisi mors amara esset, martyrum gloria nulla esset.
135. Sermo 304, 2 (PL 38, 1396): Quae istis, inquam, quae nobis omnibus spes est, si non sequuntur christum, nisi qui pro ipso sanguinem fundunt?
136. Sermo 304, 3 (PL 38, 1396): Intelligamus ergo praeter effusionem cruoris, praeter periculum passionis, quomodo christum debeat sequi christianus.
137. Sermo 304, 2 (PL 38, 1396): Habet, habet, fratres, habet hortus ille dominicus, non solum rosas martyrum, sed et lilia uirginum, et coniugatorum hederas, uiolasque uiduarum.
138. Sermo 252, 8 (PL 38, 1176): Nam si computentur, non solum omnes fideles, qui in bona uita exierunt de corpore, sed soli martyres; unus dies passionis martyrum si computetur, millia hominum inueniuntur coronatorum. Hill here reads “non omnes” rather than “non solum omnes” to make the parallel make sense and to complement the second clause of the sentence. I agree with his reading; there is clearly a contrast being made here.
139. Sermo 284, 5 (PL 38, 1291): parum est enim lethum contemnere, parum est aspera tolerare: ubi usque ad sanguinem certamen, ibi gloriosissima et plena uictoria.
140. Sermo 305A, 159A, and 286.
141. Sermo 305A, 2 (MiAg 1, 56): Audistis beatum cyprianum, martyrum et exemplum et tubam: in persecutione, inquit, militia, in pace conscientia coronatur.
142. Sermo 159A, 4.
143. Sermo 286, 1 (PL 38:1297): si testis falsus non erit sine poena, nec testis uerus sine corona.
144. Sermo 300, 6 (PL 38 1379): Isti in se singuli sentiendo, illa uidendo in omnibus passa est. Facta mater septem martyrum, septies martyr: a filiis non separata spectando, et filiis addita moriendo. Uidebat omnes, amabat omnes. Ferebat in oculis, quod in carne omnes.
145. See also Sermo 335J, in which Augustine both defines martyrs as those who have “fought against sin to the shedding of blood” (1 [PLS 2, 839]: usque ad sanguinem contra peccatum pugnauerunt) and asserts that “now, those who struggle against sin acknowledge the fight and desire the crown. . . . He fights, every day, within his conscience, so that he might seek a crown from the one who sees it, when he conquers” (1 [PLS 2, 839]: Et modo, contra peccata qui pugnant, agnoscunt pugnam et desiderant coronam and 4 [PLS 2, 840]: et pugnat cottidie in conscientia, ut ab illo qui illud uidet petat coronam, dum uicerit).
146. And these are just the sermons in which Augustine takes explicit positions on both sides of the issue. There are others in which one position is explicit and a contrary one implied (see, for example, Sermones 32, 65A, 155, 285, and 335E). There are also many sermons in which Augustine asserts the importance of death only to walk back those statements by re-centering causa and framing death as only a co-condition, if it is a condition at all (see, for example, Sermones 138, 335, and 335C and in the Sermo De Disciplina Christiana). In all of these sermons, Augustine tempers any assertions of death’s importance to martyrdom with alternate readings and alternative understandings that highlight the non-necessity of death to martyrdom.
147. Sermo 299E, 2 (MiAg 551): Confitentes christum diuersa perpessi sunt: alii gladio percussi, alii ignibus concremati, alii feris obiecti, alii nec sepeliri permissi. Dura omnia, saeua omnia, horrenda omnia: sed in conspectu hominum.
148. Sermo 299E, 2 (MiAg 551): mors enim amara est, sed per hanc amaritudinem ad magnam transitur dulcedinem.
149. Sermo 312, 1 (PL 38 1420): Et nunc relicta terra morientium, beatus possidet terram uiuentium . . . cum christo quietus exspectat redemptionem corporis sui. Augustine uses this phrasing of the “land of the dying” vs. the “land of the living” in at least six other sermons within the Sermones ad populum: 16, 45, 157, 216, 313F, and 347.
150. Sermo 302, 9 (SPM 1, 105): Uita aeterna diligenda est, praesens contemnenda est.
151. Sermo 299D, 1; 310, 3; 312, 4; 313C, 1; 335B, 2; 335N, 7; 359, 9; 360B, 6.
152. Sermo 313C, 1 (MiAg 529): Hoc est sanctorum martyrum commune consilium, commune commercium, contemnere fugientia, ut permanentia comparentur: moriendo uiuere, ne moriantur uiuendo: et semper uiuere semel moriendo, quam bis mori et postea uiuere non merere, mortem quae uentura est differendo, et, cum dilata uenerit, ad uitam quae mansura est minime ueniendo. See also 335E, 3.
153. For more examples of martyrs knowing what “life” really means: see Sermones 20B, 10 and 302, 7; for martyrs fearing the second death, see Sermones 229H, 3.
154. Sermo 313C, 1 (MiAg 1, 529): contemnere fugientia, ut permanentia comparentur. See also Sermones 297, 3 and 306C, 1—indeed, Matt. 16:25 (For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life on my account will find it) is one of Augustine’s more frequent scriptural touchstones.
155. Sermo 4, 2 (CCSL 41, 20): omnia praesentia contempserunt, in futura exarserunt.
156. Sermo 306, 10 (SE 56, 110): Ecce quod martyres amauerunt: ideo praesentia et transitoria contempserunt. For more moments where scorning the world is taken as the true meritorious act in martyrdom, see Sermones 96, 4; 319A; 335N; 344, 1; 345.
157. Sermo 311, 1 (PL 38, 1414): Quid laudamus in fide martyris? quia usque ad mortem pro ueritate certauit, et ideo uicit. Blandientem mundum contempsit, saeuienti non cessit: ideo uictor ad deum accessit. See also Sermo 297, 3.
158. Sermo 173, 2 (CCSL 41Bb, 497): Quis enim uult mori? . . . Si ergo nulla esset mortis amaritudo, non esset magna martyrum fortitudo. See also Sermo 335B, 3 (MiAg 1, 560): Attendite martyrum gloriam: nisi mors amara esset, martyrum gloria nulla esset.
159. Sermo 304, 3 (PL 38, 1396): Intelligamus ergo praeter effusionem cruoris, praeter periculum passionis, quomodo christum debeat sequi christianus.
160. Sermo 304, 3 (PL 38, 1396): Humiliauit se christus: habes, christiane, quod teneas.
161. Sermo 304, 3 (PL 38 1397): Quidquid delectabile de temporalibus rebus mundus ingesserit, respuatur: quidquid infremuerit asperum atque terribile, contemnatur. Et qui sic agit, non dubitet christi se cohaerere uestigiis, ut merito dicere audeat cum apostolo paulo, conuersatio nostra in coelis est.
162. Sermo 330, 3 (PL 38, 1458): Ecce quod sancti martyres fecerunt. Contempserunt ea quae foris erant; omnes illecebras huius saeculi, omnes errores atque terrores, quidquid libebat, quidquid terrebat, totum contempserunt, totum calcauerunt. Uenerunt et ad se, et attenderunt se; inuenerunt se in se, displicuerunt sibi: ad eum cucurrerunt, a quo formarentur, in quo reuiuiscerent, in quo remanerent, in quo periret quod ipsi per semet ipsos esse coeperant, et hoc maneret quod in eis ipse condiderat. Hoc est negare se ipsum.
163. Sermo 306B, 3 (Dolbeau 18): et, quamdiu erat in hoc corpore, totum timebatur, et ne remaneret, et ne retro rediret, et ne exorbitaret. Nunc uero cucurrit, uiam finiuit, in solido stetit. . . . Modo iam nullam temptationem timet. For other places where Augustine describes the path of salvation as a road upon which many travelers tread, see Sermones 169, 18 and 306B, 1–2. See also the treatment of St. Stephen in Sermo 314, 2. Stephen only gets his crown after his death, but he is described as a martyr while still living.
164. Sermo 314, 2 (PL 38, 1425): Persistens ergo beatissimus martyr in testimonio ueritatis, et charitatis ardens spiritu, sicut nostis, peruenit ad gloriosissimum finem.
165. Sermones 28A, 4; 113A, 9; 173, 1; 275, 3; 276, 4; 286, 3; 298, 3; 299E, 1; 306, 1; 310, 3; 313A, 5; 318, 1; 321; 328, 1; 329, 1; 335E, 2; 335I, 1 and 4; 359B, 16; and in Augustine’s Sermo De Disciplina Christiana, 13.
166. Sermo 359B, 16 (EAA 147, 339): Ex caritate pura et conscientia bona et fide non ficta.
167. Sermo 318, 2 (PL 38:1439): nondum enim usque ad sanguinem aduersus peccatum certastis. Augustine uses the formula usque ad sanguinem adversus peccatum in Sermones 159, 1; 284, 5; 297, 11; 306B, 3; 335B, 1; and 335J, 1. Similar or incomplete references appear in Sermones 90, 6; 286, 1; 306E:2, 6; and 310, 3. These overlap with his use of the complementary Sirach 4:28, “Contend for truth’s sake even to the death.”
168. Sermo 335B, 1 (MiAg 1, 557): beatificamus martyres sanctos. qui aduersus peccatum usque ad sanguinem certauerunt; beatificamus autem, quia pro ueritate mortem subierunt, et moriendo uitam inuenerunt.
169. See also Sermones 284, 5; 286, 1; 306E, 6; and 310, 3.
170. Sermo 286, 1 (PL 38, 1297): unum qui credit in christum, et uix timide susurrat christum; alium qui credit in christum, et publice confitetur christum; tertium qui credit in christum, et paratus est in sua confessione mori pro christo.
171. Sermo 286, 1 (PL 38, 1297): Prior ille tam infirmus est, ut pudor eum uincat, non timor: secundus iam habet firmam frontem, sed nondum usque ad sanguinem: tertius totum, ut nihil sit amplius quod restet. Implet enim quod scriptum est, certa pro ueritate usque ad mortem.
172. Sermo 318, 2 (PL 38:1439): ipsi sunt perfecti, qui aduersus peccatum usque ad sanguinem certauerunt. quid est aduersus peccatum? aduersus magnum peccatum: aduersus negationem christi. nostis quomodo certauerit aduersus peccatum susanna usque ad sanguinem. sed ne solae feminae hinc habeant consolationem, et uiri de numero suo aliquid quaerant tale, quale in susanna extitit: nostis quemadmodum ioseph contra peccatum usque ad sanguinem certauit. similis est causa. et illa habuit falsos testes eos ipsos, quibus consentire noluit, ne peccaret; et ille eam ipsam, cui noluit consentire. utrique quibus non est ad peccatum consensum, falsum dixerunt testimonium; et qui audierunt crediderunt: sed deum non uicerant. liberatur illa, liberatur et ille . . . et illa ergo contra peccatum, id est contra adulterium, et ille contra tale peccatum, usque ad sanguinem certauerunt.
173. Sermo 306E, 6 (Dolbeau 18, 214): in his ergo temptationibus saeculi, meditemur cottidie certare aduersus peccatum usque ad sanguinem. . . . Ipse animus esse debet martyris, non enim deus fuso sanguine delectatur: multos habet martyres in occulto.
174. On caritas generally: Sermones 53A; 94A; 138, 2 (PL 38:764): Ecce venitur ad passionem, ecce venitur et ad sanguinis fusionem, venitur et ad corporis incensionem: et tamen nihil prodest, quia charitas deest. Adde charitatem, prosunt omnia: detrahe charitatem, nihil prosunt caetera; 169, 15 (PL 38:924): in quo charitas coronatur, ipse erit uerus martyr; 274, 275, 277A, 285, 299F, 306, 306A, 325, 327, 328, 331, 335, 335C, 335G, 359B. On love of enemies: Sermones 314; 315; on love of good: Sermo 335C; on love of justice: Sermo 159; on correctly ordered love: Sermones 344; 345 (indifference to present life); 368; 138, 2. On unity: Sermones 274; 280. On truth: Sermones 94A; 274; 295; 300; 306E; 311. On justice: Sermones 274; 159. On faith: Sermones 51; 64; 229H; 229J; 260E; 274; 299; 306; 311; 328. On striving against the Devil: see, for example, Sermo 4. On striving against sin: Sermones 284; 297; 306E; 318; 335J. On striving against temptation: Sermones 4; 306E; 328; 335D.
175. Sermo 359B, 13 (Dolbeau 2, 337): Caritas desit, insania est.
176. Sermo 138, 2 (PL 38:764): si distribuero, inquit, omnia mea pauperibus, et tradidero corpus meum ut ardeam. iam ipsi sunt. sed uide quid sequitur: charitatem autem non habeam, nihil mihi prodest. ecce uenitur ad passionem, ecce uenitur et ad sanguinis fusionem, uenitur et ad corporis incensionem: et tamen nihil prodest, quia charitas deest. adde charitatem, prosunt omnia: detrahe charitatem, nihil prosunt caetera. See also Sermo 335G, 1 (PLS 2, 803): itaque martyres nostri multum amauerunt deum. quia perfectam in se habebant caritatem, propterea non timuerunt saeuitiam persecutoris. ergo perfecta caritas martyrum fecit eos nihil timere.
177. Sermo 169, 15 (PL 38:923–924): si enim in te fuerit charitas dei, communicabis christi passionibus et uerus eris martyr. in quo charitas coronatur, ipse erit uerus martyr.
178. Sermo 314, 2 (PL 38:1426): eia, fratres, sequamur eum; si enim sequimur stephanum, coronabimur. maxime autem sequendus et imitandus est nobis in dilectione inimicorum.
179. Sermo 285, 7 (PL 38: 1297): proinde si uultis martyres ueros imitari, causam uobis eligite, ut dicatis domino: iudica me, domine, et discerne causam meam a gente non sancta. discerne, non poenam meam; nam habet hanc et gens non sancta; sed causam meam, quam non habet nisi gens sancta. causam ergo uobis eligite, causam bonam et iustam tenete, et in adiutorio domini nullam poenam timete.
180. See Sermones 4, 37; 64, 1–2, 8; 64A, 1–3; 159A, 1; 300, 6; 302, 9; 304, 2; 305A, 4; 311, 1, 3; 317, 1; 325, 2; 328, 8.
181. The closest Augustine comes to distancing martyrdom from causa is in his discussion of the innocents massacred by Herod in the Gospel of Matthew. Too young to have causae, they are, instead, evidence for Augustine of God’s role in martyrdom—proof that God makes martyrs of whomever he wishes (see, for example, Sermo 373, 3); Vincent’s body serves the same role: Augustine, like Prudentius, makes a point to separate Vincent’s victories from those of his corpse (see Sermo 274). In both cases, Augustine’s aim is to emphasize the agency of God.
182. Very helpfully summarized and analyzed (with the exception of Augustine’s positions against paganism) by Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” 135–150. While I do think Kotzé offers too simple an account of causality in this piece, her assessments of the conflicts’ pressures and Augustine’s relevant responses are very clear and helpful. Please note that I use the term “pagan” here to mirror Augustine’s own use of the term for his non-Christian, non-Jewish, tradition-adhering contemporaries (see note 4).
183. Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume I: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume II: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
184. Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” 136–137.
185. Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” 137.
186. Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” 137. Kotzé also discusses Augustine’s focus on Christology in martyrdom as helping him triangulate a position against the Manichees, but as I discuss Augustine’s use of Christ in martyrdom below [PAGE NUMBERS] and because I see it as secondary to these two more fundamental positions (the focus on causa and the reliance on God’s grace), I decided to leave it out here, for clarity’s sake.
187. Sermo 306E: atque illae incantationes sint illicitae, diabolicae, detestandae atque anathemandae; Sermo 4, 36: remedia diaboli. . . . remedia scelerata; Sermo 318, 3: illicitum sacrificium, noxia et sacrilega ligatura, nefanda incantatio, magica consecratio; Sermo 335D, 3: remedia inlicita; Sermo 335D, 5: Abstinete uos ergo ab inlicitis rebus, a ligaturis, ab incantationibus, a mathematicis, a sortilegis.
188. Sermo 335D, 5 (PLS 2, 780): Uidete si non hoc est quod dicebat paganus: sacrifica et uiues. See also Sermo 335D, 3.
189. See Sermo 335K, 3, as discussed in Chapter 6.
190. Adam Ployd, “Non Poena Sed Causa: Augustine’s Anti-Donatist Rhetoric of Martyrdom,” Augustinian Studies 49, no. 1 (2018): 25–44; Maureen A. Tilley, “Sustaining Donatist Self-identity: From the Church of the Martyrs to the collecta of the Desert,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5, no. 1 (1997): 21–35.
191. Leslie Dossey, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 130.
192. See Sermo 198, 45; Ench 5.17.
193. Kotzé, “Augustine and the Remaking of Martyrdom,” 137. This, indeed, is Kotzé’s section title.
194. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 211; for its conversion from Donatist to Catholic, see Ep. 93.5.17.
195. Dupont, “Augustine’s Homiletic Definition of Martyrdom,” 161–162. Meanwhile, the phrase appears in a further eight of the Sermones ad Populum, indicating that the phrase was more useful to Augustine in other polemical or pastoral contexts.
196. See Ivonne Thulen (Buthke), Die Donatisten in den Predigten Augustins: Kommunikationslinien des Bischofs von Hippo mit seinen Perdigthörern (2010).
197. Sermo 328, 4 (PL 38: 1453): Et ego martyr sum, quia tanta patior!.
198. Dupont, “Augustine’s Homiletic Definition of Martyrdom,” 166–177; see also Dupont, Preacher of Grace and Dupont, “Gratia in Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum.”
199. See Augustine, Sermo 283, 4, where the martyrs’ causae are given by God. See also Augustine, Sermo 333, 1 (PL 38:1464): Paratam ergo habent martyres voluntatem in martyrio: sed praeparatur voluntas a Domino.
200. Augustine, Sermo 169, 15 (PL 38:924): In quo charitas coronatur, ipse erit verus martyr.