Folly about Martyrdom

Lacey Baldwin Smith’s 1997 Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (CUSA) is a maddening book. On the one hand, it is peppered with insights into the dynamics and history of martyrdom. Like: “martyrdom for all of its religious and teleological overtones is at heart a public and political spectacle. It is the most dramatic symbol of defiance and condemnation that a man or woman can achieve” (p. 10). And: “The twentieth century is profoundly skeptical of those spiritual athletes” (14). And: “Martyrs violate the most revered and treasured abstractions that shape and create a society, giving it its uniqueness and vigor . . . . They strike at ties of loyalty, allegiance, and sense of collective security, wile at the same time they defy society’s – at least the ruling elite’s – definitions of justice, mercy, honor, love, and duty” (19).

Of early Christian martyrs, Smith writes,

“The early church fathers were well aware that the martyr who played his role to perfection . . . was one of the church’s most potent weapons in its battle against paganism . . . . Martyrdom . . . was a deeply disturbing performance to a society that was already questioning the values and tenets by which it lived” (96-7). It was particularly disturbing as a “domestic troublemaker,” since the church “struck the Roman world at its most tender and fundamental point: family and intergenerational ties that held society together” (99).

But the book is in equal measure salted by half truths like: Neither the martyr nor the traitor “needs the support or the affirmation of society” (6). Martyrs do not accommodate to the needs of others (15) and are incapable of living “in society with their fellow human beings” (15). They are “individualistic” (19). Christians went to martyrdom in hope of “personal immortality” (16) and shared the general distaste for the body (90-91). Theirs was “a profoundly personal and individualistic encounter with Satan” (94) – a strange thing to say a few pages before claiming that the martyr was also at war with paganism.” Though Smith eschews psychological accounts of martyrdom, he still says that the early Christian theology of martyrdom suited the “self-destructive and masochistic” urges of the time (95).

Taken as a whole, not recommendable; which is unfortunate, because the peppery parts are quite good.