Chapter I. Among the nourishments of the flesh, O blessed martyrs designate, which our lady mother the Church supplies to you in prison from her breasts, and which the individual brethren supply from their own resources, receive something from us also, which may serve to nourish the spirit as well. For it profits nothing that the flesh be fattened while the spirit goes hungry. Indeed, if that which is weak is cared for, no less ought that which is weaker not to be neglected. Nor am I so great a man as to address you; yet even the most accomplished gladiators are exhorted not only by their trainers and overseers, but also by unskilled and idle onlookers from afar, so that suggestions dictated from the very crowd have often proved profitable.
First of all, therefore, O blessed ones, «grieve not the Holy Spirit», who has entered the prison with you. For if he had not now entered with you, neither would you yourselves be there today. And therefore give heed that he may there persevere with you, and so lead you thence to the Lord. The prison is indeed the house of the devil, in which he keeps his household. But you have come into the prison for this very purpose, that you may trample him underfoot even in his own house. For already, when you engaged him outside, you had trampled him underfoot. Let him not therefore say: «They are in my domain; I will tempt them with base hatreds, with defections, or with dissensions among themselves.» Let him flee from your sight, and lurk in his own depths, shriveled and torpid, like a serpent charmed away or smoked out.
Nor let it go so well for him in his own kingdom that he should set you at variance with one another, but let him find you fortified and armed with concord: because your peace is war to him. This peace certain persons, not having it in the Church, have been accustomed to beg from the martyrs in prison. And therefore you ought for this reason also to have and cherish and guard it in yourselves, so that, if perchance, you may be able to bestow it upon others also. Chapter II. As for the rest, the impediments of the soul likewise will have led you as far as the threshold of the prison, up to which point your relatives too accompanied you. From thence you have been separated from the world itself; how much more from the age and its affairs? Nor let this dismay you, that you have been separated from the world. For if we reflect that the world itself is rather the prison, we shall understand that you have gone out of a prison rather than into a prison.
The world holds greater darkness, which blinds the hearts of men. The world puts on heavier chains, which bind fast the very souls of men. The world exhales worse defilements—the lusts of men. Finally, the world contains more prisoners, namely the whole race of men. And it endures at last the judgments not of a proconsul, but of God. Whither, O blessed ones, you may reckon yourselves to have been transferred, if perchance, from a prison into a place of custody. It has darkness, but you yourselves are light; it has bonds, but you are loosed unto God. There a grievous odor is exhaled, but you are the odor of sweetness. A judge is awaited, but you are they who shall judge the judges themselves. Let him grieve there who sighs for the fruit of the age.
The Christian, even outside prison, has renounced the world; but in prison he has renounced even the prison itself. It makes no difference where you are in the world, you who are outside the world. And if you have lost some of the joys of this life, it is a piece of business to lose something in order that you may gain greater things. As yet I say nothing of the reward to which God invites the martyrs. Meanwhile let us only compare the manner of life in the world and in prison, to see whether the spirit does not gain more than the flesh loses. Indeed, the flesh loses nothing of what is its due, thanks to the care of the Church and the love-feast of the brethren; and beyond this, the spirit acquires those things that are always profitable to faith:
you do not behold strange gods, you do not run up against their images, you do not share by mere mingling in the festal days of the nations, you are not assailed by foul reeks of sacrifice, you are not battered by the shouts of the spectacles nor by the cruelty or frenzy or wantonness of those who keep them; your eyes do not stumble upon the places of public lusts. You are free from scandals, from temptations, from evil memories, and now also from persecution. What the desert afforded the prophets, the prison affords the Christian. The Lord himself dwelt more often in retirement, that he might pray the more freely, that he might withdraw from the world. Indeed, he showed his glory to his disciples in solitude. Let us take away the name of prison, and call it a place of retreat. Though the body be shut in, though the flesh be held fast, all things lie open to the spirit.
Roam in spirit, walk abroad in spirit; and set before yourself not shady running-tracks or long porticoes, but that way which leads to God. As often as you walk it in spirit, so often will you not be in prison. The leg feels nothing in the stocks when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole man about, and transports him wherever it will. But where your heart shall be, there also shall be your treasure. Let our heart therefore be there, where we wish to have our treasure. Chapter III. Grant now, blessed ones, that prison is irksome even to Christians. We were called to the warfare of the living God even then, when we made answer to the words of the sacrament.
No soldier comes to war with luxuries, nor advances to the battle line from his bedchamber, but from tents pitched light and cramped, where every hardship and roughness and discomfort has its place. Even in time of peace they learn already to endure war by toil and inconvenience: marching under arms, running the field, digging the trench, packing the tortoise-shield. Everything is achieved by sweat, lest bodies and minds take fright at passing from shade to sun and from sun to frost, from the tunic to the breastplate, from silence to shouting, from quiet to uproar. Therefore, blessed ones, whatever is hard in this present state, count it as a training-ground for the virtues of soul and body.
You are about to enter a good contest, in which the presider is the living God, the master of the games is the Holy Spirit, the crown is eternity, the prize is angelic substance, citizenship in the heavens, glory unto ages of ages. And so your trainer, Christ Jesus, who has anointed you with the Spirit and led you forth to this arena, has willed to set you apart, before the day of the contest, from a freer condition to a harder discipline, that your strength might be made firm in you. For indeed athletes too are separated for a stricter discipline, that they may have leisure to build up their vigor. They are held back from luxury, from richer foods, from more pleasant drink. They are constrained, tormented, wearied: the more they have labored in their exercises, the more they hope for victory.
And they, says the Apostle, do it to obtain a corruptible crown. We, who are to obtain an eternal one, interpret prison as our training-ground, that being well exercised by every hardship we may be led forth to the arena of the tribunal; for virtue is built up by hardship, but pulled down by softness. Chapter IV. We know from the Lord's own precept that the flesh is weak, the spirit willing. Let us not therefore flatter ourselves because the Lord has agreed that the flesh is weak. For he foretold that the spirit is willing precisely to show what ought to be subject to what: namely, that the flesh should serve the spirit, the weaker the stronger, so that from it the flesh too may take strength.
Let the spirit hold converse with the flesh concerning their common salvation, no longer thinking of the discomforts of prison, but of the very contest and battle. Perhaps the flesh will fear the heavy sword, and the lofty cross, and the raging of the beasts, and the utmost penalty of the flames, and every device of the executioner amid the torments. But let the spirit set before both itself and the flesh: bitter though these things be, yet by many they have been borne with an even mind, indeed even sought out of their own accord, for the sake of fame and glory; and not by men only, but by women too, so that you also, blessed women, may prove worthy of your sex. It would be long, were I to enumerate one by one those who have made an end of themselves by the sword, led on by their own resolve.
Among women there is at hand Lucretia, who, having suffered the violence of ravishment, drove the dagger into herself in the sight of her kinsmen, that she might win glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his own right hand upon the altar, that his deed might have fame. Nor did the philosophers do less: Heraclitus, who, having smeared himself with cattle-dung, put an end to himself; likewise Empedocles, who leaped down into the fires of Mount Etna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago cast himself upon the pyre; while women too have despised the flames: Dido, lest she be forced to marry after her most beloved husband; likewise the wife of Hasdrubal, who, when Carthage was already ablaze, that she might not see her husband a suppliant of Scipio, flung herself with her children into the burning of her fatherland.
Regulus, a general of the Romans, taken captive by the Carthaginians, when he refused to be exchanged, one man for many Carthaginian captives, chose rather to be given back to the enemy; and being crammed into a kind of chest, pierced on every side from without with nails, he felt as many crosses. A woman willingly sought out the beasts, and indeed asps, serpents more dreadful than a bull or a bear, which Cleopatra brought upon herself, lest she should fall into the hands of her enemy. "But the fear of death is not so great as is the fear of torments." And yet did an Athenian courtesan yield to the executioner?
She, being privy to a conspiracy, when for that reason she was tortured by the tyrant, not only did not betray the conspirators, but at last bit off her own tongue and spat it into the tyrant's face, that he might know the torments accomplished nothing upon her, even should they persist further. For what is even today the greatest solemnity among the Spartans, the diamastigosis, that is, the scourging, is no secret. In this rite the young nobles are flogged with scourges before the altar, while their parents and kinsmen stand by and exhort them to persevere. For it is reckoned an adornment and a glory, indeed with a higher title, if the soul should sooner yield to the blows than the body.
Therefore, if earthly glory is granted so much power over the vigor of body and soul, that it can despise sword, fire, cross, beasts, and torments for the prize of human praise, I may say that these sufferings are but slight, measured against the attainment of heavenly glory and the divine reward. If glass is worth so much, how much is the true pearl worth? Who then would not most gladly spend as much for the true as others spend for the false? Chapter V. I now leave aside the cause of glory. All these same contests of cruelty and torture have already among men been trampled underfoot by mere affectation and a certain disease of the mind. How many idle men does the craze for arms hire out to the sword? Certainly they descend to the very beasts out of affectation, and think themselves the more handsome for their bites and their scars.
Now some have even hired themselves out to the flames, to run a fixed course in a burning tunic. Others have walked among the hunters' whips with most patient shoulders. These things, blessed ones, the Lord has permitted into the world not without cause, but both to exhort us now and to confound us on that day, if we should shrink from suffering for the truth unto salvation, what others have affected for vanity unto perdition. Chapter VI. But let us leave aside these examples of steadfastness that come of affectation. Let us turn to the very contemplation of the human condition, that those things too may instruct us, if any are to be steadfastly approached, which are wont to befall even against our will. For how often have conflagrations burned men alive!
How often have wild beasts, escaped both in their own forests and in the midst of cities, devoured men from their cages! How many have been slain by robbers with the sword, and by enemies even with the cross, first tortured, indeed dispatched with every kind of outrage! No one but can suffer even for a man's sake what he hesitates to suffer in the cause of God. To this end let even the present times be our lessons: how many and what manner of persons have met deaths unlooked-for, contrary to their birth and dignities and bodies and ages, for a man's sake, either from that man himself, if they have acted against him, or from his adversaries, if they have stood by him.