Celebrating Christian Centenaries
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 68, No. 1 - Fall 2025
Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Diane Shane Fruchtman. London: Routledge, 2023, xiii+280 pp., $190.00.
Martyrs are people that die bearing witness to their faith, right? To many that seems a self-evident fact. One might as well ask: “Is the pope Catholic?” or “Does a cat have climbing gear?” There is even a distinction in church history between martyrs (i.e., those who die for their faith) and confessors (i.e., those who experience persecution for their faith and survive). Yet, Diane Shane Fruchtman challenges this simple characterization with the aid of leading Christian thinkers from Late Antiquity who classified some survivors of persecution as martyrs. Through her detailed analysis of the works of Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine of Hippo, Fruchtman demonstrates the surprising plasticity of the conception of “martyrdom” in Late Antiquity.
Fruchtman has a bold argument that is sure to impact martyrdom studies. She argues, “not only that scholars can include martyrs who do not die in our definition of martyrdom, but also that we must do so if we are to glean from our sources a full, accurate, and fruitful understanding of what martyrdom is and has meant to Christians throughout Christian history” (2). Fruchtman calls three witnesses to her cause. She begins with the late ancient Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens.
Fruchtman divides her analysis of Prudentius in two chapters. Chapter one examines three poems from Prudentius’s Peristephanon that feature five martyrs. Among these martyrs are both those who perish in persecution and those who survive. This chapter shows Prudentius’s destabilization of the necessity of death in the definition of martyrdom. In chapter two, Fruchtman analyzes Prudentius’s grounding of martyrdom in witness rather than death. She identifies “the notion of witness…as the signal and central feature of martyrdom” for Prudentius (51). She lays out a tripartite division of witness: observing witness, testifying witness, and enacting witness. These three forms of witness guide analysis of living martyrs’ witness for the rest of the work.
After Prudentius, Fruchtman next calls upon Paulinus of Nola to give evidence for the role of living martyrs. Paulinus too receives two chapters’ worth of analysis. She investigates Paulinus’s advocacy for the veneration of St. Felix of Nola as a martyr, although Felix died peacefully. Fruchtman asserts that in his devotion to Felix, “Paulinus sought to encourage more Christians to aspire to martyrdom, to help them identify with the martyrs, and to model their expressions of Christianity on the martyrial life as exemplified by living martyrs” (96). She argues well for her thesis in this chapter, and Paulinus’s writings demonstrate the late ancient categorization of living martyrs. This chapter, however, could have used more contextual exposition. Specifically, more information on the rise of veneration of saints, including animal sacrifices at the shrine of St. Felix, would have been helpful for non-specialists. It may be that specialists are the assumed readership as this is published in Routledge’s Studies in the Early Christian World series. In chapter four, Fruchtman argues that Paulinus sought to transform his hearers into living martyrs through imitation of lives of witness.
Fruchtman saves her strongest supporter for last: Augustine of Hippo. Chapter five centers Augustine’s teaching on living martyrs on his assertion: non poena sed causa martyrem facit (it is not the punishment but the cause that makes a martyr). This chapter draws from fourteen of Augustine’s Sermones ad populum where Augustine time and time again afforded martyr status to any Christian who avoided worldly temptations. Fruchtman writes, “martyrdom without death was a longstanding and perennially foregrounded idea for Augustine” (162). Fruchtman examines Augustine’s praise of “sickbed martyrs” who refused pagan amulets and potions and entrusted their lives to God. Chapter five ably demonstrates Augustine’s usage of “martyr” for living Christians. Chapter six considers Augustine’s conception of living martyrdom and “the persuasive means that Augustine employed to help his audiences achieve the martyrdom he described” (214). Fruchtman’s rhetorical analysis of Augustine’s sermons is thorough, and she argues well for the necessity of taking seriously the conception of living martyrdom.
Fruchtman concludes this work with a call to modern historians and scholars of religion to take seriously historical usages of “martyr” and “martyrdom” that do not fit into modern definitions. She argues well that for many “late ancient authors, martyrdom meant a way of life rather than an experience of death” (249). While the categories of martyr and confessor remain useful, Fruchtman provides a helpful corrective to modern readings of late ancient sources. Scholars must not assume universal definitions for even such seemingly straightforward words as “martyr.” This is a narrow but impactful thesis, which is sure to affect studies of martyrdom in Late Antiquity and beyond.
