The Elders and the Training

How the Athonite and Kollyvades spiritual fathers prepared would-be martyrs. Because two of the three paths to neomartyrdom involved deliberately confessing a faith the law would punish with death, the neomartyrdoms were often the fruit of a discipline: the testing of the resolve to be sure it came from God; the seclusion “alone with God” for intense prayer, fasting, confession, and Communion; and, in a number of cases, the accompanying of the confessor to his martyrdom and the recovery of his relics. The elder was the aleiptes, the “anointer” who trained the athlete of Christ.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

Why Preparation Was Needed

For the martyr of the “falsely accused” path, martyrdom came unbidden — a lie, an arrest, a refusal to confirm it, a death. But for the returned apostate and the open confessor (the first and third paths; see The Word and the Three Paths), the death was, in a real sense, chosen: the man resolved to go before the Muslim authority, to cast off Islam and confess Christ, or to proclaim Christ where the law forbade it, knowing the sentence. This raised two dangers that the Church took with great seriousness. The first was failure under torture — that a man who had rushed to confession in a burst of zeal might, at the sight of the instruments, deny Christ a second time, compounding his fall (the very outcome the ancient Martyrdom of Polycarp records of the volunteer Quintus; see The Canonical Caution). The second was false motive — that the impulse to martyrdom might spring not from God but from vainglory, from despair, from a wish to expiate a fall by a dramatic death, or from mere excitement. Against both dangers the tradition set a discipline of preparation, and its ministers were the spiritual fathers, above all on and around Mount Athos (Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018; Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000).

The Discernment of the Call

The first and most important task of the elder was discernment: to test whether the aspirant’s resolve was genuinely of God. The would-be martyr, often a man burdened by an earlier apostasy and seeking to undo it, would come to a spiritual father and open his heart; the elder would probe the motive, weigh the strength, and not infrequently counsel against the undertaking, or delay it, until he was satisfied that the call was true and the soul able to bear it (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; Russell, “Christian identity,” 2018). This discernment is the crucial hinge on which the Ottoman-era practice sought to distinguish itself from the reckless, provoked martyrdom the ancient canons condemned: not every zealous impulse was to be indulged, and a true call would survive testing, prayer, and the counsel of a father (see The Canonical Caution).

Alone with God

Where the call was judged genuine, the aspirant was typically secluded for a period of intense preparation — set apart, “alone with God,” to fast, to keep vigil, to pray, to make a thorough confession of his whole life, and to be strengthened by the sacraments for what lay ahead (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000, describing the preparation in a number of the acta). The aim was to bring the man to the point of his confession purified, resolved, and rooted in God rather than in his own excitement — so that, when he stood before the authority and the pressure came, and again when the torments came, he would stand not on his own zeal but on grace. The would-be martyr was communed before going out, and often confessed and communed as close to the hour of martyrdom as could be arranged (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000). This preparation is why so many of the acta present the martyr not as a man overtaken by events but as one who went to his death composed and ready, having already, in the seclusion, died to the world.

The Anointer of the Athlete

The tradition drew, for the elder’s role, on an ancient image. In the early Church the aleiptes (ἀλείπτης, “anointer”) was the trainer who prepared the athlete for the contest — the martyr’s contest above all — and the martyr’s acta had long spoken of the confessor as the athlete of Christ, “anointed” and trained for his agon (Russell, “Christian identity,” 2018, on the athletic imagery; and the ancient martyrological topos). The Athonite spiritual father who prepared a neomartyr stood in exactly this role: the trainer of the athlete, the one who tested, strengthened, and readied him, and who sometimes accompanied him to the place of his martyrdom — remaining near, sustaining him by prayer and presence, and afterward recovering and venerating his relics, and writing or transmitting the account of his death that would enter the collections (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; and the “impresarios” of the martyr-cults described by Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, Stanford University Press, 2011, ch. 5). The elder was thus present at every stage — before, during, and after — as discerner, trainer, companion, and hagiographer.

The Kollyvades Milieu

This preparation of martyrs was not incidental to the great eighteenth-century Athonite renewal but bound up with it. The Kollyvades fathers — St. Makarios of Corinth, St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St. Athanasios of Paros, and figures close to them such as St. Nikephoros of Chios — who sought the recovery of frequent Communion, of the patristic and liturgical sources, and of inner prayer, were also the great gatherers, preparers, and promoters of the neomartyrs. It was St. Makarios of Corinth who set in motion the compilation that became St. Nikodemos’s Neon Martyrologion, and the Kollyvades circle that encouraged, prepared, and recorded neomartyrs in these very decades (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000; and the account of the Kollyvades and the Martyrologion in The Neon Martyrologion; on the Kollyvades generally, St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite). The connection is telling: the same renewal that gave the Orthodox world the Philokalia — the anthology of the way of inner prayer and purification — also prepared and gathered its martyrs, and understood the two as one work. The martyr, on this view, is the athlete whom the whole ascetic tradition exists to train; frequent Communion, confession, and the prayer of the heart are the anointing for the contest, and the neomartyr is the tradition brought to its sharpest point.

The practice, however, sat athwart an ancient body of counsel that had warned precisely against seeking the contest — and it is to that tension, genuine and unresolved, that the companion file turns.

References

Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. (The “impresarios” who prepared, promoted, and recorded the martyrs, ch. 5.)
Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. Venice, 1799. (The Kollyvades gathering of the martyrs.)
Russell, Norman. “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18, nos. 2–3 (2018): 148–162. (The preparation, the discernment, the athletic imagery.)
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The preparation, seclusion, Communion, and accompanying of the martyrs in the acta.)