Martyrdom and Monasticism

The ancient Church understood monasticism as the successor to martyrdom: when the age of persecution ended with the peace of the Church under Constantine, the total self-offering that the martyrs had made in blood was carried forward by the ascetics as a daily, bloodless, or “white” martyrdom. This file traces that lineage — the ascetic ideal of the pre-Nicene Church, the order of virgins and continent ascetics who preceded the desert, and the way the monastic movement inherited and re-channeled the martyr’s witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Martyr as the First Ideal

For the first three Christian centuries the supreme image of Christian perfection was the martyr — the martys, the “witness” who followed Christ all the way to death and so was conformed most fully to the crucified Lord. The martyr’s death was understood as a baptism in blood, a direct entry into the presence of Christ, and the martyrs were venerated at their tombs as the Church’s true heroes (the theology is already fully present in the second-century Martyrdom of Polycarp and in Ignatius of Antioch’s letters, esp. To the Romans, longing to be “ground by the teeth of beasts” to become “pure bread of Christ”; trans. in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Michael W. Holmes, Baker Academic, 2007). The cult of the martyrs, and the conviction that the highest Christian life is a total, bodily conformity to the Passion, formed the spiritual world into which monasticism would be born.

The end of the great persecutions with the Edict of Milan (313) and the conversion of Constantine therefore posed a question that the tradition felt keenly: if the Christian is called to give everything, and the days of giving it in blood are past, how is the total offering now to be made? The answer the fourth century gave was the ascetic life. As the standard histories put it, monasticism arose in part as a response to the end of persecution — a way of preserving the radical demand of the Gospel in an age when the Church was becoming respectable and numerous and, some feared, lukewarm (Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City, Blackwell, 1966, on the transition from the age of the martyrs to the age of the desert; and the classic treatment in Edward E. Malone, The Monk and the Martyr, Catholic University of America Press, 1950).

Ascetics and Virgins Before the Desert

It is important not to imagine that asceticism began only with Antony’s withdrawal around 270–285. Long before the organized desert movement, the Church contained recognized ascetics: men and women who, remaining in their towns and households, embraced celibacy, fasting, vigil, and voluntary poverty as a permanent state of life. The New Testament already attests continence undertaken “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12) and the apostolic esteem for the unmarried state (1 Corinthians 7); by the second and third centuries there existed a recognized order of virgins and of continent men and women (sometimes called enkratitai, the “self-controlled”) within the ordinary congregations (Peter Brown, The Body and Society, Columbia University Press, 1988, on the pre-desert ascetics and the order of virgins; Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press, 1994, on the “household” and urban asceticism that preceded and accompanied the desert). In Syria this took the distinctive institutional form of the bnay qyama, the “sons and daughters of the covenant,” celibate ascetics attached to the local church — a form of consecrated life older than, and independent of, Egyptian monasticism (Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Cistercian, 1992, on the bnay qyama).

The desert, then, did not invent the ascetic ideal; it gave the ideal a new geography and a new intensity. Antony’s originality, in Athanasius’ account, was not that he practiced asceticism — he learned it from an old ascetic already living on the edge of his village — but that he carried it out into the desert, away from the inhabited world, and there made of it a lifelong warfare (Athanasius, Life of Antony 3–4; trans. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980). The virgins and ascetics of the towns were the seedbed; the desert was the field into which the seed was carried.

White Martyrdom: The Ascetic as the New Martyr

The link between the martyr and the monk was made explicit and became a commonplace of the tradition. The ascetic life was understood as a martyrdom of a different mode — not the “red” martyrdom of blood but a “white” or “bloodless” martyrdom of daily dying to self. Athanasius says of Antony that in his long solitary struggle “he was daily a martyr to his conscience, and ever fighting the battles of the faith” — that his asceticism was itself a witness unto death, though he did not shed his blood (Athanasius, Life of Antony 47; trans. Gregg, 1980). The point is that the martyr dies once, in an hour; the ascetic dies daily, over a lifetime, taking up the cross each morning (cf. Luke 9:23, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily”). The great scholarly study of this theme, Edward Malone’s The Monk and the Martyr, traces in detail how the fourth-century fathers consciously presented the monk as the heir and continuator of the martyr, and how the vocabulary of martyrdom — witness, contest (agon), crown — was transferred wholesale to the ascetic struggle (Malone, The Monk and the Martyr, 1950).

The image of “three martyrdoms” — red (by blood), and the bloodless martyrdoms of ascetic renunciation — passed into the wider tradition; in the Latin West it appears famously in the seventh-century Irish Cambrai Homily, which distinguishes red, white, and blue (or “green”) martyrdom, the white being the martyrdom of ascetic separation and penitential labor (the Cambrai Homily, c. late 7th century, is the earliest surviving prose in Old Irish and gives the classic threefold scheme; see Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom,” in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe, ed. Whitelock et al., Cambridge University Press, 1982). The scheme is Western in this precise form, but the underlying idea — that the monk takes up the martyr’s total offering in an unbloody mode — is common to the whole Christian world and is rooted in the Greek fathers’ reading of the ascetic life as athlesis, a contest crowned like the martyr’s.

The Inheritance and Its Meaning

Understanding monasticism as the successor to martyrdom clarifies several features of the vocation that might otherwise seem extreme. The severity of the desert’s fasting, vigils, and warfare against the passions is not self-punishment for its own sake but the shape that total self-offering takes when it is spread over a life rather than concentrated in an hour of execution. The monastic cell was sometimes compared to the martyr’s prison and the arena; the demons the desert fathers battled were the persecutors of this new contest; and the crown promised the faithful monk was the same crown promised the martyr (this is the sustained argument of Malone, and it is visible throughout the Apophthegmata Patrum, where the language of contest, warfare, and crown pervades the sayings; The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Ward, Cistercian, 1984).

There is a further, sober historical point. The transition was not a simple replacement, as if martyrdom ended and monasticism began. Persecution returned — under Julian, in Persia, among the Arian and later the iconoclast controversies, and catastrophically under the Ottomans and the Soviets (see Persecution and Revival) — and monasteries produced their own martyrs in every age, so that the two vocations remained intertwined rather than sequential. Theodore the Studite and his monks suffered exile and beating for the icons; the twentieth century filled the calendar with new-martyr monks and nuns. The relationship is best stated as the tradition itself states it: monasticism is martyrdom continued by other means, and when the age demands it, the white martyrdom of the cell becomes again the red martyrdom of blood (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015, on monasticism and the new martyrs; and see Theodore the Studite and the Stoudion).

References

Athanasius of Alexandria, St. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Antony learning asceticism from a village ascetic; the “daily martyr” of §47.)
Malone, Edward E. The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as the Successor of the Martyr. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950. (The foundational study of monasticism as the heir of martyrdom; the transfer of martyrial language to asceticism.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The transition from the age of the martyrs to the age of the desert.)
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Pre-desert ascetics; the order of virgins.)
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Urban and household asceticism preceding the organized desert.)
Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. (The Syrian bnay qyama, “sons and daughters of the covenant.”)
Stancliffe, Clare. “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom.” In Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock et al., 21–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (The Cambrai Homily and the threefold martyrdom.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The pervasive language of contest, warfare, and crown.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (Monasticism, martyrdom, and the new martyrs.)
Scripture: Matthew 19:12; Luke 9:23; 1 Corinthians 7.