Making Martyrs East and West

Canonization in the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches

Cathy Caridi

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781609091880
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In Making Martyrs East and West, Cathy Caridi examines how the practice of canonization developed in the West and in Russia, focusing on procedural elements that became established requirements for someone to be recognized as a saint and a martyr. Caridi investigates whether the components of the canonization process now regarded as necessary by the Catholic Church are fundamentally equivalent to those of the Russian Orthodox Church and vice versa, while exploring the possibility that the churches use the same terminology and processes but in fundamentally different ways that preclude the acceptance of one church's saints by the other. Making Martyrs East and West will appeal to scholars of religion and church history, as well as ecumenicists, liturgists, canonists, and those interested in East-West ecumenical efforts.

Chapter One

Christianity’s Unified First Millennium (until ca. 1054)

Introduction: Preliminary Remarks

In the first centuries of the church, the early Christians certainly never envisioned the existence of an established procedure to canonize martyrs as saints for the universal church, and anyone who expects to find such a system in early church history will search in vain. The Christian faithful could not have deliberately planned in advance a process for the official recognition of martyrs, any more than they could have foreseen the deaths of countless Christians as a result of the Roman Empire’s persecution of the church for generations. Rather, the procedures that ultimately came into being developed organically, from the first Christian believers’ entirely natural reactions to these persecutions. The concept of martyrdom arose spontaneously and gradually solidified into a set form, as did the practices intended to venerate those who were crowned with it.

Similarly, no one in the church’s earliest days could have imagined that the recognition of a martyr as such would eventually become what is fundamentally a canonical process, for at its origins there is nothing specifically canonical about it. As we are about to see, acknowledging that a Christian had died a martyr’s death initially required little more than some common sense and a right understanding of Christian theology. But rules and regulations gradually developed, for the precise reasons that all laws generally do: (a) gray, borderline situations arose that required both clarification and the development of official, consistent definitions of the terminology in use, and (b) perceived abuses cropped up that had to be checked. It was theology, not canon law per se, that required church officials to act.

For just as the faithful were presented with many cases of Christians who indubitably had to be acknowledged as martyrs, so they also encountered over time numerous examples of people who for a variety of reasons did not. It was the need to decide who belonged in which category that led the church to create a system to recognize martyrs in an official way. Terms had to be defined and consistent criteria had to be established. At the same time, many of the local solutions that were found were later adopted by Christians in other lands, ultimately leading to practices that were essentially uniform throughout the Christian world.

The end result was a more or less set legal procedure that cannot be found articulated anywhere in early church history, but that is firmly grounded in that history all the same. All the most fundamental elements of the system used to canonize new saints today, in both East and West, can find their origins right here, in the basic procedures that developed in the first centuries of Christianity. By the time of the great East–West Schism, traditionally dated to 1054 AD, the entire church was well familiar with the notions of martyrdom, the veneration of saints, and canonization, and there were already ample historical precedents to guide anyone seeking to canonize a new martyr for the faith.

Therefore, while the Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox in the East each subsequently followed its own separate path of theological development, they obviously share the same historical roots. If we wish to examine the ways in which each church regards the concept of martyrdom today and canonizes martyrs as saints, we have to start at the very beginning—back in the earliest years of Christianity, when there were no divisions between East and West, Catholic and Orthodox. Only in this manner can we truly understand and appreciate that Christianity after the Great Schism may have evolved procedures that appear radically different—but the basic concepts underpinning those procedures were/are exactly the same.

What follows, then, is a history of the evolution of the Christian understanding of martyrdom, and the process of canonization of martyrs, up until the time of the Schism in the eleventh century. It is divided into several parts. First, we will look at the development of precisely what it meant to be a “martyr,” in order to establish how the church ultimately arrived at its understanding of the definition of the term. Next will follow an examination of the evolution of the various practical elements of the church’s veneration of the martyrs, for these elements would, each in its own way, eventually constitute procedural requirements for a martyr’s canonization.

Finally, it must be noted that no terms can be officially defined, and no procedures can be authoritatively established or implemented, unless everyone involved is in agreement as to who exactly has the power to make such decisions. Consequently, the third part will trace the development of an understanding of which persons officially had the ability to set the rules and made decisions in individual cases.

Before beginning, however, a methodological caveat is in order. Because the church in its first centuries was not thinking in terms of an actual “canonization process,” it also did not think to document in any formal, systematic way the elements of what would become that process. And since the development of a process was unintentional and unorganized, trying to trace that development can be a very messy business. On top of that, of course, there undoubtedly were many documents that did exist, but have since been lost to us. This is especially true of the church in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, where we know that numerous writings were deliberately destroyed if they were written by persons perceived by their opponents to be heretics.1 Obviously we can only work with the historical sources that we have. Tracing the development of the various aspects of what would become the process, therefore, requires us in many cases to piece together information from extremely disparate sources. The result is that at times, some of the findings might seem to resemble not so much patchwork as guesswork. Nonetheless, the amount of information that is still extant is both sizeable and concrete enough to allow us to see rather clearly what led to the canonization procedures for martyrs as they stood at roughly the end of the first millennium of Christianity.

A. Development of a Theological Concept of Martyrdom

Originally the ancient Greek word μάρτυς (or μάρτυρ, in western Greek dialect) simply meant “witness,” a person who had seen something and could testify to its existence or veracity. As such it had no theological, much less specifically Christian, connotations. The Greek poet Aeschylus, for example, used the word when he wrote in the early fifth century BC, “I will show you evidence of what I say . . . a witness [μάρτυς] is here present.”2 And a century later, Plato noted in his Gorgias that “in the law courts . . . one side is supposed to refute the other side, when they bring forward multiple witnesses [μάρτυρας] to the things they have said.”3

Even in the New Testament, in the context of the first members of the church explaining their beliefs, the terms μάρτυς and μάρτυρion were still used simply in the sense of providing witness. Matthew, for example, quotes Christ Himself prophesying to the apostles that they would be “dragged before governors and kings for My sake, to bear testimony [ἔνεκεν έμο͡υ είς μαρτύριον] before them and the Gentiles” (8:18). Paul, meanwhile, calls himself “the least of the apostles,” and then states that “we testified [ἐμαρτυρήσαμεν] of God that He raised Christ” (1 Cor. 15:15), which if anything would suggest that Paul is equating being a martyr with being an apostle.4 While the specific object of a Christian’s witness might have been novel, the fact remains that a Christian μάρτυς was still essentially a witness.

In the Apocalypse, John the Evangelist even uses the word to refer to Christ, Whom he describes at the very beginning as “the faithful witness [ὁ μάρτυς, ὁ πιστὸς]” (Apoc. 1:5). Later, the Voice dictating to John instructs him to write, “These things says the Amen, the true and faithful witness [ὁ μάρτυς, ὁ πιστὸς, καὶ ἀληθινὸς], Who is the beginning of the Creation of God” (3:14). There seems no other way to interpret the word μάρτυς here than in the usual sense of someone giving testimony.5

It is not until the Christian persecutions in the second century AD that we find the earliest examples of the terms μάρτυς, “martyr,” and μάρτυρειν, “to be martyred,” specifically referring to those who give their lives for Christ. The unknown author of the so-called Letter of the Church of Smyrna, from the second century AD, recounts the death of Saint Polycarp and others, noting that “We write to you, brothers, about the things that happened to those who were martyred and about the blessed Polycarp, who put an end to the persecution, having as it were ratified it through his own martyrdom.”6 The mere fact that the verb to martyr is in the passive voice shows us that it cannot be intended to mean simply testifying as a witness; something clearly was done to these Christians, and not merely by them.

Not many years later, this idea was echoed by Origen (ca. 185–254), who made a specific reference to this terminology. He explained that it had become customary that only those persons were called “martyrs” who had shown witness to the sacred mysteries by the shedding of their blood.7

But while the term began to acquire a more specific definition, its original meaning was not completely discarded. In the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), the word martyr and related terms retained the sense of witnessing to Christ, even if not necessarily resulting in loss of one’s life for Him. Thus when writing of those who publicly professed their belief in Christ, Eusebius asserts, “Therefore they come and lead the whole church as martyrs, even those among the members of the family of the Lord.”8 Simultaneously, however, the term martyr and its derivatives were also being used in the more specific sense in which w...