Diane Fruchtman's main claim is that scholars too often conflate martyrdom with death and thus ignore “living martyrs,” i.e., Christians who are considered as martyrs by their promoters without having faced a violent death and whose title to martyrdom comes not from death but from life. It is not that these living martyrs are not known but that they are explained away and marginalized. Diane Fruchtman makes a strong case that this is mistaken and can only lead to a partial understanding of martyrdom. Fruchtman endeavors to remedy this oversight by focusing on three authors who write in Latin at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century: Prudentius (chapters 1 and 2), Paulinus of Nola (chapters 3 and 4), and Augustine of Hippo (chapters 5 and 6).
The cases of Vincent, who died after his release from prison, or of Encratis, who lived to tell the tale of her tortures, illustrate how death is not centrally relevant to Prudentius's conception of martyrdom. It is well known that Paulinus of Nola composed many poems about the power of Felix and the power of his relics even though Felix died of old age. We have always been aware that some of the martyrs promoted by Prudentius and Paulinus did not endure actual death, but before Fruchtman's intervention, we thought they were an exception to the rule. Her close reading of the texts shows that both writers deploy a whole array of techniques to demonstrate a fully developed conception of martyrdom that does not focus on death and to teach their audience how to lead a life of martyrdom, either as witness (Prudentius) or through imitation (Paulinus). Ultimately, the goal of these writers is to encourage Christians to try to be martyrs, another way for them to promote a program of Christianization.
The chapters on Augustine are no less impressive. As with every topic related to Augustine, so much has been written that it is a daunting task to offer a valuable contribution. Fruchtman engages well with the scholarship on martyrdom in Augustine, whether in English or in other languages, and succeeds—again, it is no small achievement—to point to a blind spot. The well-known phrase non poena sed causa (it is not the punishment, i.e., death, that makes a martyr, but the cause) is often treated as a product of Augustine's controversy against the Donatists, and even when it appears in a context that is not related to that polemic, it is considered as an offshoot of it. Fruchtman establishes that there is a lot more to it and that Augustine—despite his notorious promotion, especially through his sermons, of martyrs who died for their cause—also develops a whole program of a “life of martyrdom” for his audience with a strong emphasis on how they can achieve martyrdom in their daily life. Several sermons, for instance, describe a sickbed martyrdom, that of Christians who on their deathbed refuse “pagan” remedies: their martyrdom does not consist in the death that follows but in their lying in bed; they are martyrs before they actually die.
Many pages of the monograph are a tour de force. Fruchtman more than once surprised me with her close reading of texts with which I am, or so I thought, familiar. Her reading of Sermon 81 deserves special mention. She renders a long, dialogic section of it as a script for a play in three columns: dialogue, directorial commentary, notes. It is a great tool for analyzing sermons, one that could be adopted fruitfully for reading sermons on many different topics.
Fruchtman does not fully explain why she focuses on these authors and this period. Long ago, Edward E. Malone had suggested that monasticism came to rank equally with martyrdom on the scale of Christian perfection (The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as the Successor of the Martyr, Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1950). Though he did not include Prudentius, Paulinus, and Augustine in his survey of sources and focused exclusively on monasticism for the fourth and fifth centuries, he had shown that earlier on some Christian writers had deemphasized death in their valuation of martyrdom. Fruchtman suggests that the three authors she studies proposed “new paradigms” (15) and, though she mentions in passing these earlier writers (e.g., 2 and 252), she never tackles the question of how new these paradigms are and what could have motivated Prudentius, Paulinus, and Augustine to propose them to their audience. Her material seems to point to a shift in emphasis that could be easily explained by the end of the persecutions. Although I do not think that such an explanation is satisfactory, in part because of the fallacies attached to the notion of a “Constantinian turn,” Fruchtman's choice to focus on three authors, all writing at the same time, while she asserts the “broad presence of these [living] martyrs throughout Christian history” (14) is not fully satisfactory neither.
The monograph, however, is definitively an original contribution of high quality to the field of late antiquity and will, I am confident, have an impact on martyrdom scholarship.
