The Neomartyrs and the New Martyrs of Russia

The collection’s closing reflection: the neomartyrs of the Ottoman era set beside the repository’s sibling group-collection, the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Two “new martyr” companies, four centuries apart, under very different persecutions — an Islamic legal order over four centuries, an atheist ideological state over decades — joined by a single theology of martyrdom, a shared discipline of honest reckoning with sources and numbers, and the same place in the Church’s self-understanding as the seed of her renewal. And a sober assessment to close.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Two Companies of “New Martyrs”

The word this collection has used throughout — neomartys, “new martyr” — is the same word the Russian Church uses for its twentieth-century witnesses, the novomucheniki, and the shared name is not an accident. The Ottoman-era neomartyrs are, in the strict sense, the older referent of the term: they are the “new” martyrs against whom the ancient martyrs are the “old,” the company St. Nikodemos gathered and named in 1799. When the Russian Church, after the catastrophe of 1917, spoke of its New Martyrs and Confessors, it consciously took up an existing category and extended it to a new persecution (see What a New Martyr Is). The two companies are thus not merely analogous but genealogically linked in the Church’s vocabulary of sanctity: one word, two great gatherings of martyrs, at the two ends of the modern Orthodox experience of subjection.

What They Share

Beneath the shared name lies a shared theology and a shared discipline, and it is worth stating both.

A theology of martyrdom as the seed of the Church. Both collections rest on the ancient conviction that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Tertullian, Apologeticus 50) — that a Church passing through persecution is given a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) as the foundation of its endurance and renewal. The Ottoman-era neomartyrs were gathered precisely to strengthen a subject Church (the Neon Martyrologion‘s stated purpose; see The Neon Martyrologion); the Russian New Martyrs are venerated as the spiritual ground of the Russian Church’s post-Soviet resurrection (see The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia). In both, martyrdom is not defeat but seed.

A discipline of honest reckoning. Both collections are, distinctively, studies in source-critical honesty about numbers and sources. The Russian collection gives its casualty figures as named scholarly ranges and keeps sharp the difference between “repressed,” “executed,” and “canonized”; this collection gives the neomartyrs as a documented corpus of nearly two hundred, refuses inflated totals, and keeps sharp the difference between the documented, the named, and the estimated (see Numbers and What Can Be Verified; and, for the Russian parallel, The Scale of the Persecution). Both defer the biographies of their great individual saints to dedicated collections and treat the category. Both hold a live dispute honestly from both sides — the Russian collection the two glorifications and the Sergianism question, this collection the tolerance-versus-persecution historiography and the voluntary-martyrdom tension (§4.2). The method is one because the honesty required is one.

How They Differ

The differences are as instructive as the likenesses, and naming them guards against a false equation.

The persecutor and the demand. The Ottoman order was an Islamic legal state that did not seek the disappearance of Christianity but subordinated it, and killed chiefly at the conversion-boundary — over apostasy, accusation, and open confession — under a law that, in its own terms, preferred the apostate’s return to his death (see The Apostasy Law and the Count). The Soviet order was an atheist ideological state committed to the disappearance of religion, which framed its killings as politics and class war and rarely demanded a formal apostasy at all (see What a New Martyr Is). The one killed at a religious boundary named as such; the other killed a believer as a “counter-revolutionary.” The theological task of discernment differs accordingly: for the neomartyr the ground of death was usually explicit (the demand to profess Islam, refused), while for the Russian martyr the Church has had to discern, behind a political charge, a killing that was in substance for Christ.

The span and the scale. The neomartyrs are a company of the order of two hundred documented, spread thinly across four centuries; the Russian New Martyrs are the largest persecution in Christian history by absolute numbers, concentrated in a few decades (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, SVS Press, 1984; and The Scale of the Persecution). The difference in scale is real and must not be flattened by the shared name.

The archive. The Russian persecution left a paradoxical archive — the NKVD’s own case files — that makes some martyrdoms verifiable in forensic detail even as it complicates them (the non-betrayal question). The neomartyrs left chiefly a devotional literature, with only occasional independent corroboration (see The Genre and What Survives). The one is over-documented and contested in its documents; the other under-documented and pinned to its tradition.

A Sober Assessment

What, at the end, is the neomartyrs’ place? They are a real, continuous, and pan-Orthodox witness — men and women of a dozen peoples who, at the sharp boundary of two faiths, over four centuries, would not deny Christ, and whom the Church gathered, prepared, remembered, and glorified. Their story is not well served by the national myth that would make them the martial heroes of a nation’s grievance, nor by the revisionism that would dissolve them into “narratives”; it is served by the truth — that the Ottoman order was a subordination within which most Christians lived and worshipped, and that at its lethal edge these particular people gave their lives, and that the Church keeps them as saints. Held so, and set beside their Russian brethren, the neomartyrs make the same claim the whole company of the martyrs makes across the centuries: that the grace which sustained the martyrs of Diocletian’s day was at work under the Sultan and under the Commissar alike, and that the Church, in every captivity, has been given her witnesses. That is the claim the word neomartyr was coined to press, and it is the note on which this collection ends — soberly, without triumph, and with the martyrs.

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The scale and character of the Soviet persecution, for the comparison.)
  • Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. Venice, 1799. (The Ottoman-era gathering made to strengthen a subject Church.)
  • Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The documented neomartyr corpus.)
  • Tertullian. Apologeticus 50 (“the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”). — Scripture: Hebrews 12:1.