25 MARTYRDOM

Martin Treml

The philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death by the People's Assembly of Athens in 399 bc for allegedly seducing young people, and he, convinced of his innocence, calmly accepted this judgment.

He has been regarded since then as the prototype for someone who is willing to die the “noble death”—the death in good conscience—of someone who refuses to relinquish their convictions even in the face of utmost violence (van Henten and Avemarie, 2002). In many religious cultures, a person who dies such a heroic death is called a “martyr,” derived from the Greek μaρτυς, “witness;” the Islamic martyr is also a “witness” (Arabic shahid).

Ideally, the following happens: a tyrant inflicts on the martyr a heroic death that is violent, agonizing, public (as it takes place in the arena or on a main square), and therefore spectacular. The martyr's death belongs to the “theatre of horror” (van Dulmen, 1991). It is not contingent, but always significant. Although there might be martyrs everywhere, it is only in the Western cultures of religion that they appear in an epidemic form—in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their filiations such as the Baha'i, a new prophetic religion that emerged from Shi'ite Islam in Persia during the 19th century (Dehghani, 2011). Because they do not want to abandon the ancestral practices, the “laws of the fathers” (Greek πατρlοt ν6μοt; Hebrew tora), martyrs act as examples of faith (Latin exempla fidei) or sanctify the name of God (Hebrew qiddush ha-shem) by their death. Whereas the tyrant is anxious to make the body of the martyr disappear following torture, interrogation, and cruel execution, the martyr's relatives and followers try everything to save the body, at least partially, and to bury it solemnly. The mortal remains later become relics, just like the martyr becomes a saint.

The martyr's tomb turns into a place of pilgrimage where miracles happen and the sick are healed. Believers want to be buried there in order to eternally repose in the immediate vicinity of the now holy martyr.

Christianity has long been credited with the origin and formation of the martyr cult. Since ancient times, it has harbored strong traditions of worshipping martyrs in images and text collections (so-called martyrologies), martyr acts, and legends. Christianity also knows long periods of martyrdom, such as during antiquity, the Reformation, and on modern missionary campaigns, as well as during the communist and Nazi tyrannies of the 20th century. Yet, science, philosophy, and politics also recognize the heroic death in terms of the unconditional task, self-conviction, or special mission undertaken by the martyr. Whoever dies in such a way becomes a hero of progress, truth, and ideological struggle, and is thus actually immortal, for the martyr lives on in cultural memory. Under secularization, the figure of the martyr has by no means disappeared (Weigel, 2007). On the contrary, since 2001, it has been possible to speak of its mighty return, even though 9/11 represents an epochal threshold only for secularized Christian cultures. Since then it has nevertheless been possible to observe how conflicts over religious symbols turn into political ones, with consequences for the figure of the martyr.

The popular notion of the martyr was born in Rome, so it is the Latin church of the West that gave it its final shape and established the secularized forms that survived the schism of the Reformation unscathed. Within cultural memory, the martyr has ever since been firmly connected with the unconditional acceptance of suffering unto death by terrible torture, inflicted by tyrants' servants, by wild predators, or by murderous apparatuses and devious devices. Churches are full of pictures of saints bearing both the palm, symbol of their final victory, and the instrument by which they were cruelly killed.

Yet from its very beginnings, the figure of the martyr has occupied two diametrically opposed forms: the warlike martyr and the quietist martyr who renounces violence. The Jewish protomartyrs, the Maccabees (who were also quickly incorporated into Christianity), were both. During the 160s bc they opposed the profanation of the Jerusalem Temple and fought a war against the Hellenizing policy of the Seleucid overlords and their collaborators in Jerusalem (Bikerman, 1947). Not only were Hannah and her seven sons violently killed, but so, too, were fighters who wanted to eradicate this disgrace by the sword, hoping thereby for immortality (cf. 2 Maccabees 7). In modern Turkish, there is a linguistic distinction (going back to its Arab and Aramaic etymology) between fehit, a soldier who dies on the battlefield, and fahit, a witness, but both are martyrs and figures of the same rank. The victim who passively suffers violence and death is equivalent to the fighter who falls in battle, even if this distinction seems to fundamentally differentiate Christianity from Islam. As different as they may seem at first glance, the two versions of the martyr coalesce in the context of their struggles, albeit in different ways. Their fights are always absolute battles, whether waged against beasts, tyrants, Satan, or absolute evil. This applies to all Western religions, for even if the figure of the suicide attacker has only reappeared in Islam since the 1980s after its beginnings in the Middle Ages and the early modern era, it has been notorious for some time (Reuter, 2004). Christianity also knows the miles Christi, the soldier for Christ and faith: “In those religions in which the religious and the political goals come together as one, all religiosi are also milites and war is the ultima ratio of all” (Harnack, 1981, p. 28). Often the best, most eager, savage fighter became a martyr—at least that is what the military saints of the Byzantine church are like. One of them is Saint George, one of the most frequently depicted martyrs in Byzantine art since the 4th century, who killed a dragon and an emperor alike (Maisuradze, 2007).

Within Christian martyrology, Saint George is often paired with Saint Demetrius, as on the west faςade of San Marco in Venice (Horsch and Treml, 2011) (Figure 25.1).

The relief there shows the saint in Roman uniform, which displays “the officer's sash tied in the Hercules knot” (Kantorowicz, 1965, p. 20). Demetrius and George helped Western Christianity during the Crusades; they are both fighters and martyrs—at least for a Christian consciousness as far west as Venice. Conversely, on closer examination, one finds within Islam a multifaceted tradition in which the martyr in battle represents only one of various figures who have been shaped in specific historical contexts, handed down and transformed to the present day. The history of religion is here an echo of the different primal scenes, which for Christianity is the execution of the Son of God on the cross, and for Islam is the fratricidal war (a conflict that has even been repeated several times for the Shi'ites). Every culture of religion has a history of persecution, but each occurs in a different way.

The figure of the martyr marks a transition between passivity and activity, pre-modernity and modernity, Orient and Occident, politics and poetics, violence and weakness. Positions that are otherwise generally fixed and appear to be non-negotiable are annulled or at least redefined

Figure 25.1 Relief depicting Saint George, 11th century, faςade of St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice. Source: Martin Treml.

by the martyr, who often connects the different cultures of religion more than separates them. Martyrs are hybrids, to use a term from current cultural studies. They die for a faith that is not only their own. The history of the origin and separation of Judaism and Christianity, in particular, offers numerous examples of this, up to the adoption of literary traditions and topoi. Sometimes it is unclear whether the noble death belongs to a Jewish or a Christian martyr (Boyarin, 1999).

Martyrs make a connection with the unconditional and voluntary devotion of the sacrifice. Usually, this is solemnly and publicly carried out in the sign of the renunciation of the martyr’s own life for the survival of the group for which this sacrifice is offered; the group is often a mainly spiritual community, like most Christian confessions after the Reformation. However, the purpose for which the martyr dies is variable, and God may be replaced by the nation, love—a theme common to both Arabic poetry and European opera (Pannewick, 2004)—or something similar. Such a shift has occurred in secularized Christian culture, too. Saint Sebastian, a Roman centurion, has been converted recently into the main figure of a queer love cult, due to his bodily appearance and the fact that he was pierced by arrows which he did not resist. Pathos becomes passion, and Saint Sebastian, the military saint, turns into the sign of a joyous and pure will to suffer for love.

This raises the question of whether martyrs are regarded as role models, or whether they just seem epidemic through infection. Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, died as a martyr around 200 ce and was followed by 400 other young people from the Roman upper class. She has thus become uncanny and ambivalent; she might be difficult to control, like the undead, zombies who want to drink blood, or other evil spirits. Martyrs often appear in groups, but sometimes they are isolated, sacred, and cursed figures, in the double sense of the Latin sacer (Benveniste, 2016). Martyrs draw a trail of blood through the history of religion and culture, which often allows victims and perpetrators to interchange. As a rule, opposing religious cultures (confessions in Christianity or denominations in Islam) negate or deny each other's martyrs during conflicts. These martyrs are considered only apostates or heretics whose deaths were carried out appropriately. The Church Father Tertullian compares the suffering of the martyrs with war for this reason (Apologeticum 50:1), and the rule of Saint Benedict describes the monks as a “spiritual army” (milita spiritualis).

Already for ancient philosophy, life, especially that of the philosopher, is like the battle of the soldier (Plato, Apology, 28d; Socrates refers here to Achilleus, the Greek arch-hero).

This cultural and religious-historical material suggests several approaches to a theory of the martyr-as-reenactment. The first arises from the fact that public and heroic dying often did not result in deterrence as anticipated by the tyrant. On the contrary, it contributed to the attractiveness of the martyr, in the sense of repetition and imitation. The famous statement of Tertullian, “the blood of Christians is seed,” implies exactly that (Apologeticum 50:13). The medium of this heroic death was the traditional text (Pannewick, 2004) or the local, stationary cult image (Belting, 1997). Now that the images have become secular, but also ubiquitous, they have lost their aura, but not their effectiveness. Their proliferation occurs directly and worldwide. They thus become components of a global pop culture that has absorbed the traditional cultures of religion, only to release them again as transformed images, whether as secularized or resacralized ones. In the latter case, images have become all the more powerful because they are now able to release the explosive power of the martyr within the realm of the political.

Rene Girard pursues another line of thought on the martyr in his reflections on the scapegoat, the figure who is expelled or killed as a substitute. His starting point is the distinction between two types of texts: one in which the scapegoat appears as a structure without being thematized as such, and one that is able to uncover the mechanism of persecution itself. The former, so-called “persecution texts,” are mythological or historical and have a magical effect. The latter, exclusively biblical texts (Prophets, Psalms, and the Gospels), show that the scapegoat, who is de facto innocent, is always the sole victim who is killed for the benefit of all others. Notwithstanding the fact that Girard exhibits a Christian bias, his reflections are still illuminating because they point out various aspects of the figure of the martyr, which almost urge reenactment. The most important aspect is the connection between guilt and innocence and between murder and its revenge, which is both inscrutable and indissoluble, and therefore demand endless repetition. Further, because the martyrs of one side represent murderers for the other, the thirst for blood in reenactment only changes the mode and makes victim and perpetrator indistinguishable. Reenactment becomes forced repetition (trauma).

Another theory of the martyr-as-reenactment can be derived from Michel Foucault's late work. What he calls a “practice” historicizes certain forms of rationality and, like discourse, is always orientated toward power and “truth-telling.” Here, practice not only renews sets of disciplines but also is located beyond them. By it, moments of freedom also become possible. A practice in this sense is more closely related to what Foucault calls souci de soi, “care of oneself,” which lies somewhere between an ethics and an aesthetics of existence. The care inherent in the concept of practices appears not so much as a normalizing form of taking care of the self, but as a mode of self-fashioning which is not necessarily always fully conscious. It aims at different sets of subjectivity, not at one that is “normal” for everybody, even if it is established as a new norm for some. However, this self-care can also turn into its opposite (or at least does so from the outside) when, for instance, it becomes death for a martyr. Highest care of the self now becomes lethal. Of course, this is the ultimate act of every “truth-telling,” which Foucault called parrhesia, drawing on ancient philosophical and Christian traditions. Although an individual practice, parrhesia can become generalized and thereby spawn reenactment, including reenactment of the martyr. That parrhesia and the martyr may form but one practice is best illustrated by the fact that at epochal thresholds, not only truth-telling but also the heroic death of the martyrs become epidemic, as in Antiquity, during the Reformation, and in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

25 MARTYRDOM

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