Blessed martyr, make prosperous your triumphal day, on which the crown is given to you, O Vincent, as the wage of your blood! This day, the torturer and judge being conquered, bore you up from the darkness of the world to heaven and gave you back to Christ exulting. Now, a partaker of the angels, you shine in a distinguished robe, which, an indomitable witness, you had washed in streams of blood, when the guard of the idol, girt with black laws, would force you with sword and chains to sacrifice to the gods of the nations. And first he had poured out soft words, coaxingly, persuading — as a wolf, the seizer, first frolics about the calf it means to snatch. 'The king,' he said, 'greatest of the world, who bears the public scepters, has ordained that all should serve the ancient worships of the gods. You, Nazarenes, stand aside and spurn this raw rite!
appease with smoke and victim these stones which the prince worships!' Here Vincent cries out, a Levite of the sacred tribe, a minister of the altar of God, from the seven milk-white columns: 'Let these deities preside over you; you worship stones, you worship wood; you, dead, become the dead pontiff of dead gods; we will confess the Father, the Author of light, and His Son Christ, who alone is also the true God, O Datianus.' Hereupon that one, now more agitated: 'Do you dare, O luckless one,' he says, 'to violate with harsh words this law of the gods and of princes, a law both consecrated and public, to which the human race yields, nor does the imminent peril of your fervid youth move you? For take this decree: either the altar is now to be entreated by you with incense and turf, or death must be paid for with your blood.' That one replied on the other side:
'Come then, whatever of strength, whatever of power you have, openly I resist — bring it forth! Hear what our voice is: there is Christ, and God the Father; we are His servants and witnesses; wring out, if you can, our faith! Tortures, prison, claws, the blade hissing with flames, and that very last of punishments, death — to Christians it is a game. O your empty vanity and the brutish decree of Caesar! You command that deities worthy of your senses be worshiped: hewn out by a craftsman's hand, recooked in hollow bellows, which lack voice, which lack step, motionless, blind, tongueless. For these the costly shrines grow with splendid marble; before these the smitten necks of bellowing bulls fall.' 'But there too are spirits.'
'There are, but masters of crimes, hunters of your salvation, wandering, impotent, sordid, who secretly drive you, goaded, into every wickedness: to lay waste the just with slaughters, to ravage the people of the pious. They themselves know and perceive that Christ prevails and lives, and that His dreadful kingdom is now, even now, at hand for the perfidious. They cry out, confessing at last, driven from the lurking-places of the inward parts by the power and name of Christ — both divine spirits and the same demons.' The profane judge could not bear the martyr thundering these things; he shouts: 'Stop up his mouth, lest the rascal hurl out more! Shut off the voice of the speaker, and quickly, lictors, give him over to those Plutos of the guilty, fed on the dogs cut up! Now I will make the railer feel the praetorian law, lest with impunity he should have made sport of destroying our gods.
To you alone, then, defiant one, are the Tarpeian rites to be trampled? Shall you further, alone, crush Rome, the senate, the Caesar? Stretch him, his arms twisted back, upward and downward, until the joint of his bones, wrenched apart, cracks limb by limb. Hereafter, with gaping blows, lay bare the hidden parts of his ribs, that through the recesses of the wounds his uncovered liver may quiver.' At these things the soldier of God laughed, rebuking the bloody hands, because the fixed claw did not enter the limbs more deeply. And now all the strength of the strong men had given way in disemboweling him, and panting effort had loosened the wearied knots of their arms; but he, the gladder for so much, lights up his serene brow, free of every cloud, seeing you, O Christ, present.
'What countenance is this — for shame!' said Datianus, raging; 'he rejoices, he beams, he provokes, more fierce when tortured than the torturer! That force, exercised in the deaths of so many guilty men, accomplishes nothing in this contest, and the art of pains is conquered. But you, foster-sons of the prison, a pair ever unconquered to my mind, hold back your hands a while, that the wearied vigor may catch its breath. The dried-over sores again, while the scar of the cooled blood gathers itself together, your hand, re-furrowing them, shall lay waste.' Against these things the Levite replies: 'If already you perceive the valor of your dogs to flag, come, you yourself, the greater executioner, show by what means they can rend the inmost recesses; put in your own hand and drink the seething streams! You err, bloody man, if you think yourself to exact my punishment when you mangle and kill limbs liable to death.
There is another, there is one within, whom no one can violate — free, quiet, whole, exempt from grievous pains. This which you labor to destroy with such great forces of fury is a vessel loose and earthen, to be broken in any way whatever. Nay rather, strive now to cut and scourge that one who stands firm within, who tramples, O tyrant, on your madness! This one, this one provoke, this one shake — unconquered, unsurpassable, subject to no storms, and subject to God alone!' This he speaks, and again he is mangled with the shrieking hooks; to whom the praetor, with crafty mouth, hisses out serpentine words: 'If such obstinacy hardens the callus of your breast, so that with your hand you abhor to touch our cushion, at least uncover the hidden pages and the closed books, by which your sect, sowing depravity,
be burned with just fires.' Hearing these things, the martyr said: 'The fire which you, malignant one, threaten against the mystic writings, you yourself shall burn with all the more justly. For the sword of the heavenly volumes shall be their avenger, scorching with its thunderbolt the tongue that interprets so great a poison. You see the embers, the witnesses of the Gomorrhans' crimes; nor does the Sodomite ash lie hidden, the perennial witness of that destruction. This is your example, O serpent — whom soon the soot of sulfur, the bitumen mixed with pitch, shall entangle in lowest Tartarus.' At these words the persecutor, wounded, grows pale, reddens, seethes, twisting his insane eyes and, gnashing, casts out foam. Then, after hesitating long, he decrees:
'Let the question be plied to the utmost of all, with fire, with the gridiron and with plates.' At this he hurls himself forward to the ministrations with a quickened step, and, nimble, in his joy at the punishment outstrips the very servants. They came to the wrestling-ground of glory; hope and cruelty contend; martyr on this side, executioner on that, join doubtful struggle. A saw-edged grid roughens the bed with sparse teeth, beneath which a great heap of coals exhales a living vapor. Of his own accord the holy man mounts this pyre with undismayed face, as though, already conscious of his crown, he were ascending a lofty tribunal. Beneath, with crackling sprinkling, scattered salt sparkles, flung out, and, hot with hissing points, it is fixed here and there throughout his limbs. Then lard, pressed on, washes the fiery brand, whence the force of smoking moisture trickles gradually into his limbs.
Amid these things he remains unmoved, as though ignorant of pains, and stretches his eyes on high; for the chains had pressed his palms. Raised up thence the stronger, he is thrust into a mournful den, lest the free use of light should quicken his lofty spirit. There is within, in the lowest dungeon, a place blacker than darkness, which the narrow stones of a sunken vault strangle, shut up. Eternal night lurks there, devoid of the daytime star; this dread prison is said to have its own nether regions. Into this abyss the ferocious enemy casts the martyr, and inserts his soles into the stocks with legs spread apart. Nay, the skilled artificer adds also a new torment of the cross, known to no tyrant nor learned of in story before: he commands fragments of potsherds, bristling with unpolished corners, sharpened, shapeless, to be strewn beneath the back of him as he lies.
Anxious pains arm the whole couch with sharp points, which beneath his sleepless side strike with their opposing edge. These things, cunningly, with sly art, he had devised and contrived; but Christ destroys the crafty inventions of Beelzebub. For the prison's blindness flashes with the splendor of light, and the twofold bite of the stock springs apart, its hollows burst open. Here Vincent recognizes that what he had hoped for is present, the reward of so great a labor, Christ, the giver of light. Then he perceives the fragments now of the potsherds clothing themselves in soft flowers, the prison breathing forth the fragrance of nectar. Nay too, frequent angels stand and speak close at hand, one of whom, more august of countenance, addresses the man with these words: 'Rise, illustrious martyr, rise secure for yourself, rise and be added as our companion to the kindly assemblies!
The duties of menacing punishment have now been run through by you enough, and by a fair exit of death your whole passion has been accomplished. O most unconquered soldier, stronger than the strongest, now the very savage and harsh torments tremble at you the victor. Christ God, the spectator of these things, recompenses with endless age, and with His bounteous right hand crowns the colleague of His own cross. Lay aside this perishable little vessel, woven of an earthen frame, which, scattered, is dissolved, and come free into heaven!' Thus he; but the inner lights break the closed doors, and through the slender chinks the brightness of the hidden radiance is betrayed.
When the warder of that gloomy threshold, who in his night-long care had been left to guard the deadly house, was struck dumb and terrified at this, he heard besides the surpassingly sweet song of the martyr at his psalmody, to which the vaulted chamber gave back as it were an answering, rival voice. Then, trembling, he peered within, as far as his gaze could enter between the doorposts, through the narrow joints of the hinges: he sees the bed of potsherds blossoming with many flowers, and the martyr himself, his bonds torn loose, walking about and planting them. The ears of the troubled prefect are filled with this miracle; vanquished, he weeps, and groaning he turns over in his mind wrath, grief, and disgrace. 'Let him be taken,' he says, 'from his prison for a little while and revived with kindly comforts, so that, refreshed, he may offer new fodder to my tortures.' You might have seen the faithful crowd gathering from the whole town, softening the couch that was prepared, and drying his raw wounds.
One man traverses with his kisses the double furrows left by the iron claws; another rejoices to lick the crimson blood of his body. Very many dip linen garments in the dripping blood, that they may keep at home a sacred safeguard for their descendants. Then the keeper of the prison himself, the doorkeeper of the chains, as faithful tradition records, suddenly believed in Christ. This man had seen, behind the bolted bars of that den of thick darkness, a stranger's brightness of light gleaming upon the shut-up prisoner.
But truly, after the martyr reached the rest of his couch—weary with the tedium of delay and kindled with thirst for death (if indeed such a thing is to be called death, which frees the unfettered mind from the body's prison-house and renders it back to God its Maker, the mind cleansed by blood, washed in the laver of death, which offered itself and its own life to be sacrificed to Christ)—then, as he leaned his head back upon the soft hangings, his spirit, victor over the limbs it left behind, took possession of heaven. For it the way is opened straight, by a lofty path, to the Father, the way that blessed Abel had ascended when slain by his impious brother. White-robed choirs of saints throng about him as he goes, on this side and that, and John the Baptist, sent from a like prison, calls him. But the enemy of the Christian name was being consumed by the ineffectual poison of his gall, and rage had scorched his livid heart.
You would think a dragon was raging unarmed, his teeth broken: 'He has escaped exulting,' he says, 'the rebel, and has carried off the palm. But one last thing remains: to inflict punishment upon the dead, to hand the corpse to wild beasts, or to give it to dogs to be torn. Even now I will utterly destroy the very bones, lest there be a tomb for his funeral that the common throng might cherish and on which they might fix the title of a martyr.' So he gnashes his teeth, and the profane wretch—ah, dreadful crime!—exposes the holy body naked, its covering denied, among the sedge. But none of the dreadful things, of hunger or of beasts or of birds, dares to defile that trophy of glory with foul touch. Nay, if any bird, screeching wickedly, had flown circling from afar, it was driven off by the onset of a fierce bird and turned to flight. For a raven, once appointed to Elijah as a bearer of food, fulfills this duty diligently and keeps watch close at hand.
From the nearby thickets this bird, fierce with the sound of its wings and beating their eyes with its pinions, drove off a monstrous wolf. Who of the faithless would dare to believe that a ravenous beast, ready to do battle with bulls, gave way before soft feathers? It went off muttering malignantly, terrified, in light flight, and had fled from the prey it had seen, at the threats of that unwarlike guardian. What feelings then were yours, Datianus, when you heard such things—with what darts a hidden grief pierced you as you groaned, when you saw yourself overcome by the power of a slain body, and unequal to the very bones, lesser now even than the emptied limbs? But what end shall set bounds to this irrepressible spirit of yours, stubborn tyrant? Will no measure break you? 'None, nor shall I ever cease;
for if the beasts' savagery grows tame, and mercy softens the devouring ravens, I will plunge the corpse beneath the waves: the raging billow never pardons the shipwrecked, nor knows the foaming deep to spare. Either it shall ever be borne there, tossed by wandering blasts through uncertain mockeries, feeding the scaly hosts, or beneath the crashing cliffs the rough barbs of the rocks among the jagged recesses shall burst and rend its torn entrails. Is there any one of the men skilled at vigorously driving a skiff with the oar, with rope and sail, who can cut the sea, who could snatch the body from the marshy turf—which lies untouched—and, conveyed in a light little boat, carry it off across the broad expanse?'
'But let a sack of esparto-grass enclose the wrapped corpse, and let a stone, bound to it with a rope, plunge it headlong into the deep. And do you dart out across the waves, swift, with dripping oar-blade, until a longer distance hide from view the land you have left behind.' These orders a certain one of the soldiers—Eumorphio was his name—violent, bold, barbarous, seething with fury, snatched up. He weaves a rope of esparto, fills it with the sewn-up body, and, having measured out much of the strait amid the storms, casts it overboard. O all-powerful power of God, creative power of all things, which once leveled the swollen sea as Christ walked upon it, so that, treading on the back of the deep, he might pass with dry steps, and the traveler across the vast gulf might not wet his soles in the waves!
This same power had commanded the Red Sea to gape open, while over the bared floor the untroubled people wore their dry path. And now too it bids the deep serve the holy body, with quiet glidings, downward to the curving shore. A rock of millstone weight floats like white foam, and the basket, guardian of so great a pledge, is borne upon the waves. The sailors gaze in amazement as it is carried, re-crossing the gleaming sea, gliding gently backward with favorable tide and breeze. They themselves too strive to cleave the sea with their swift vessel, but the limbs fly far ahead to the soft bosom of the land. At last the quiet earth receives the borne-back body before the keel, driven by the utmost efforts, could touch the harbor.
Happy that retreat of the pleasant shore, which, warming the holy remains in its sands, offered itself in place of a tomb, while the pious care of the saints, weeping, adorns the mound and, in the grave, keeps the entrusted body for a life to come! But soon, when the enemies were subdued and at last peace was restored to the just, the altar grants the owed rest to the blessed bones; for, placed beneath the sanctuary and buried close to the altar's base, they drink in below the breath of the heavenly gift poured over them. So a body, but the dwelling-place of God himself holds it once received, together with the Maccabee brothers and next to Isaiah who was sawn asunder. But to those there fell a simple crown of sufferings, for whom the final issue of death set an end to evils. What such thing did the dismemberer dare? Did he indeed cast the severed segments of the body to wild beasts after the saw, or give them to the waves?
Did the tyrant offer to the bloody birds the tongue of the Maccabean martyr, torn out, or the skin snatched from his crown? You alone, O twice-glorious one, you alone bore off the palm of a double prize; you prepared two laurels at once. Victor in bitter death, then afterward, victor with equal triumph after death, you trample down the robber underfoot with your body. Be present now and receive the suppliant voices of those who pray, you our effectual advocate at the throne of the Father! Through you, through that prison, the increase of your honor, through your chains, your flames, your iron claws, through the prison stake, through that fragment of potsherd by which the glory begotten grew, and through that couch which we, trembling descendants, kiss with reverence—have mercy on our prayers, that Christ, appeased, may incline a favorable ear to his own, and not charge us with all our offenses!
If we duly venerate this solemn day with mouth and heart, if we prostrate ourselves in the joy of your footprints, glide down hither for a little while, bringing the favor of Christ, that our burdened senses may feel the relief of pardon. So may no delay now remain, but that the noble spirit may take up again the awakened flesh, endowed with equal power, so that the flesh which, as partaker of his labors, bore the common peril, may also be co-heir of his glory for all ages to come.