It must be very difficult to be a Christian martyr. Presumably one cannot make oneself a martyr, but instead submit to the future community which will remember this death as a martyr-death. One must submit to the executioner's sword while also rejecting its authority. Too readily surrendering divests the death of the requisite antagonism to the powers of this world; over-surrendering is an act of suicide. The martyr must therefore simultaneously relinquish control of his own life and the meaning others will ascribe to his death at the hands of others.
In this carefully researched book, Elizabeth Castelli demonstrates that the most famous early Christian martyrs were frequently entangled in these very issues and often attempted to control the ways that they would be remembered. In practice, this leads to some paradoxes, two of which Castelli describes in the language of ‘spectacle’: (1) the need for martyrs to have an audience while playing down the importance of one's own life and (2) the fact that the martyrdom exposes the world's disbelief in the martyr's testimony while the martyr's death is itself a testimony. Through close readings of Ignatius of Antioch, Perpetua and Pionius, Castelli argues that these texts are examples of ‘self-writing’. They intended to persuade future audiences in their acts of commemoration and produced a ‘public self’ ready-made for remembrance.
Moreover, Castelli detects a powerful ideological element in the accounts of these martyrs: opposition to rulers and pagan society and identification with Christ's suffering, both of which are indicted for violently underwriting rigid boundaries between church and world and of further entrenching triumphant identities. At issue is not simply that Christians were less than objective in their rendering of history, but that the collective memory of martyrdom produced a self-righteous Christian culture which was radically dualistic.
As Nietzsche noted, it is not necessary to refute a martyr because the death of a martyr is not an argument. This need not mean that martyrdom does nothing, but only that the martyr's testimony is not justified as true by the martyr's death. Castelli's argument essentially picks up from Nietzsche's and goes further to show that the actual story of the Christian memory of martyrs is shot through with attempts to instrumentalise martyrdom in this way. Violence and truth are often joined together in a way which allows the remembering community to claim that the martyr's testimony was true because the martyr suffered violence.
In an extremely poignant discussion, Castelli describes the cult of martyrdom which arose about Cassie Bernall, who was killed at Columbine High School in 1999. Rather than dismissing this extraordinary example of the culture-making power of martyrdom as a departure from purer accounts in the early life of the church, Castelli argues that exactly the same phenomenon is at work. This is why Augustine asserted that the cause rather than the suffering makes a martyr, an assertion with which Nietzsche might well have agreed. The phenomenon of the suicide bomber as self-proclaimed martyr only recalls the temptation to associate violence and truth. Castelli's account hauntingly suggests that far nobler cases have not always overcome this same association.
I suspect that there are other ways of accounting for the appearance of instrumentalised martyrdom which others will want to explore theologically. After all, Christian thought has maintained that the truth hazarded by martyrs is not the possession of martyrs, just as the true martyr willingly throws herself into the unpredictable memory of the church, which is itself a declaration of faith. Castelli's book is a reminder of how very difficult this is to do.
