The Theology of the New Martyrdom

The meaning the Russian Church has drawn from her twentieth-century catastrophe: the ancient conviction, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” applied to a persecution larger in absolute numbers than any before it, and to the renewal that followed the Soviet collapse. This file treats martyrdom as witness, the peculiar theology of dying for Christ under a state that killed in the name of no god at all, and the place the New Martyrs have come to hold as the spiritual foundation of the Russian Church’s renewal — held soberly, without triumphalism.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Martyrdom as Witness

The Greek word martys means simply “witness,” and the theology of martyrdom is, at its root, a theology of witness: the martyr testifies, with his life and death, to the reality of Christ and the resurrection, so that his dying is not a defeat but a proclamation. From the earliest centuries the Church held that the martyr’s death is a participation in Christ’s own — that in laying down his life the martyr is conformed to the Crucified and receives, already, a share in the resurrection — and that such a death is therefore fruitful for the whole Church. Tertullian gave the conviction its classic form: semen est sanguis Christianorum, “the blood of the Christians is seed” — the more the Church is cut down, the more it grows (Tertullian, Apologeticus 50). The Russian Church has read her twentieth-century martyrdom squarely within this ancient theology: the New Martyrs are witnesses in the primary sense, and their blood is understood as seed.

The New Thing: Martyrdom Under an Atheist State

Yet the Soviet persecution posed the theology of martyrdom a genuinely new question, and the “new” in “New Martyrs” carries this weight as well as the merely chronological one. The classic persecutions were, in their own terms, religious: Rome demanded sacrifice to its gods, Persia to the sun, and the martyr’s death was a “no” to a rival cult. The Soviet state demanded submission to no god at all. Its ideology was atheist and its persecution was carried out in the name of a scientific, materialist future in which religion would simply have withered away; it did not, as a rule, offer the believer the old choice of “sacrifice and live,” because it did not want his worship redirected but abolished (on the ideological, non-religious framing of the Soviet persecution, see What a New Martyr Is; Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999). The New Martyr therefore witnessed against a new kind of adversary: not a rival faith but the claim that faith itself is nothing — that man is his own absolute and God a fiction to be cleared away. His fidelity was a testimony that God is real precisely where the whole machinery of a modern state was built on the premise that He is not.

This gives the new martyrdom a particular theological sharpness. The martyr under Rome died for the true God against false gods; the martyr under the Soviets died for God against the denial that there is any God to die for. His witness is, in a sense, more radical, because it answers not idolatry but nihilism — and because the state, framing his death as the liquidation of a class enemy rather than the punishment of a believer, tried to strip his death even of the name of martyrdom, to let him die without the dignity of dying for anything. That the Church has insisted, against this, on naming these deaths as martyrdoms — on reading past the fabricated political charge to the real ground in the person’s faith — is itself a theological act: a refusal to let the persecutor have the last word on the meaning of the death (see The Documentary Record; Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, on the Church’s reclaiming of the meaning of the deaths).

The Seed of the Church’s Renewal

The fruit of the martyrdom, in the Russian Church’s self-understanding, is the renewal that followed the Soviet collapse. A Church reduced by 1939 to a few hundred open churches and a handful of free bishops (see The Terror of the 1930s) had, within a few decades of the persecution’s end, revived on a vast scale — monasteries reopened, churches rebuilt, seminaries filled. The Church has read this revival as the harvest of the martyrs’ seed: that the Church did not merely survive the persecution but was, in some sense, refounded by it, its renewal resting on the witness of those who died. The glorification of the New Martyrs at the Jubilee Council of 2000 was, in this light, not only an act of honouring the dead but a claim about the source of the living Church’s identity — that the Russian Church of the twenty-first century stands on the New Martyrs as the early Church stood on the martyrs of the catacombs (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5–6, on the New Martyrs as the invoked foundation of the post-Soviet Church’s identity). It is a commonplace of Russian church rhetoric that the New Martyrs are more numerous than all the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries, and that Russia’s twentieth century was therefore a new age of martyrs on which a new age of the Church is built.

A Sober Reading

This theology is powerful and, within the tradition, entirely coherent; but it must be held soberly, and the honest treatment names three cautions.

First, the “seed of the Church” language, true as witness, can slide into a triumphalism that treats the catastrophe as simply a fortunate prelude to renewal — a reading that risks instrumentalizing the suffering and glossing the sheer horror and loss of the persecution, in which far more faith was crushed and far more people broken than were made saints. The theology of the seed is a confession of hope, not an accounting that makes the terror come out positive (a caution registered in the critical literature on the memory of the New Martyrs; see Memory and Controversy).

Second, the invocation of the New Martyrs as the foundation of the nation’s and not only the Church’s identity has drawn them into political uses — the martyrs enlisted for a narrative of national suffering and rebirth, or, at the extreme, for the “tsar-redeemer” current — that the sober theology of martyrdom does not warrant (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5–6; see Memory and Controversy). The martyr’s witness is to Christ, not to a state or a dynasty, and the theology is falsified when it is made to serve the very kind of power that killed them.

Third, the martyrdom includes a great multitude the Church cannot name and a real number of cases where men broke under torture (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases); a theology honest to the evidence holds the glory of the martyrs together with the frailty of the merely human, and does not pretend that everyone who suffered was a saint or that the seed grew without an immense and partly wasted sowing.

Held with these cautions, the theology of the new martyrdom is the deepest meaning of the whole subject: that a Church all but destroyed bore, in her destruction, a witness to Christ against the denial of God itself, and that she venerates the witnesses as the seed from which she has grown again — not because the terror was good, but because the fidelity was, and because the God to whom the martyrs bore witness is confessed to have brought life out of their deaths (Tertullian, Apologeticus 50; on the ecclesial reception of the martyrs as a genuine source of theological knowledge, cf. the treatment of hagiography as theology in the repository’s St. Xenia methodology).

References

Tertullian. Apologeticus 50 (“the blood of the Christians is seed”; semen est sanguis Christianorum). (The classic statement of the theology of martyrdom as fruitful witness.)
Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The New Martyrs as the invoked foundation of post-Soviet church and national identity; the political uses; the reclaiming of the meaning of the deaths.)
Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The atheist, ideological framing of the Soviet persecution.)
Scripture: Hebrews 12:1 (the “cloud of witnesses”); John 12:24 (the grain of wheat that must die to bear fruit).