Tractates 17

On the day of the dedication of the basilica of the Assembly of the Saints. Our littleness cannot give thanks worthy of the divine gifts and heavenly benefits, dearest brothers. For our God granted that we should have the venerable relics of the saints; then he bestowed on us the power to found this basilica in their honour; and today he has granted that, having obtained the presence of the chief priests, we may be counted worthy to celebrate its dedication. For the holy bishops and apostolic men have come together to pay the homage of due devotion to their most blessed fathers and teachers, so that we might be enriched with a most abundant fullness of spiritual blessings; although the troublesomeness of the barbarians has taken away the greatest part of today's celebration, so that the other holy bishops, whom we believed would be present, did not come.

Now I shall begin to count, from here, who these are by whose blessed relics we are made illustrious. In the first place is John the Baptist, the last indeed but the greatest of the prophets: latest in time, because all the Law and the prophets were until John; but first in merit and more excellent in dignity, because Christ speaks thus of him to the Jews: "What did you go out into the desert to see? A prophet? I tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written: Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way." By one testimony of the Saviour the most blessed John the Baptist is declared angel, apostle, and chief prophet. For he is truly God's angel who is the forerunner and messenger of Christ; he is truly an apostle who was sent by God, for one who is sent is called an apostle: "There was a man," it says, "sent from God, whose name was John." And the holy man is called a prophet and more than a prophet because he was counted worthy to point out with his finger the Christ foretold by his own voice and by that of all the prophets, saying: "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world." After him we have the most blessed Andrew, first a disciple of John himself, then of the Saviour, whom Christ is written to have chosen as an apostle before the others: "Andrew," it says, "the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who had heard John say, Behold the Lamb of God, and had followed him. He first found his brother Simon and said to him: We have found the Messiah (which is interpreted Christ). And he brought him to Jesus."

Third is blessed Thomas, who after Christ's resurrection alone desired, and alone obtained, to touch Christ's limbs with hands that were curious, indeed, but surely worthy. For it came from burning desire, not from unbelief, that he said to his fellow disciples who had seen the Lord in his absence: "Unless I see and touch, I will not believe." For he was very anxious lest he should not enjoy with his eyes too what he believed in his heart; lest he should be deprived of the sight of that light by which the other apostles boasted that they had been enlightened. The Lord satisfied him in his hunger, he whose promise stands: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." He appeared a second time to the apostles to fulfil Thomas's desire; his longing profited the others too; nor does he himself have anything less because he sees Christ later. For he makes up the loss of the first sight by sight and touch together; and certainly, if he had been an unbeliever, as some think, Christ would not have deigned to appear to him after his resurrection. For it is written: "For he is found by those who do not test him, and appears to those who have faith in him." But when the Saviour said to him, "Do not be unbelieving, but believing," and "Because you have seen, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and have believed," he wished in him to shape all who would believe afterwards; so that our people, like Thomas, who was absent when Christ appeared to the apostles, should give undoubting faith to their report, and not demand to see in the flesh him whom it has learned, by the testimony of the apostles, to have risen after the passion of the cross and to have been seen. For after he returned to heaven, present in this world by his powers alone, he ought not to appear daily in the body to each and all believers at anyone's wish. Let it suffice us that holy Thomas's curiosity has satisfied the scruple of future doubt. For that he was absent, that he sought more eagerly both to see and to touch the Lord, was all arranged for our salvation, so that we might know more clearly the truth of the Lord's resurrection, which blessed Thomas, providently reproved for a necessary curiosity, affirms, saying to him: "My Lord and my God." Fourth is Luke the evangelist, who followed the blessed apostles with equal merit and wrote both the book of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles with wonderful exactness. Of these four we have the blessed relics here present, who, preaching the kingdom of God and righteousness, were killed by the unbelieving and wicked, and are shown by the powers of their workings to live always to God. John is said to have been perfected in the city of Sebaste in the province of Palestine, Thomas among the Indians, Andrew and Luke at Patras, a city of Achaia.

After these we have the most blessed martyrs Gervasius, Protasius and Nazarius, who a few years ago deigned to reveal themselves to the holy priest Ambrose at the city of Milan; of whom we hold the blood, collected in plaster, asking for nothing more; for we hold the blood, which is the witness of the passion. We have also received the holy ashes of Sisinnius, Martyrius and Alexander, whom a sacrilegious people in the Anaunia recently killed, as they clung more earnestly to the worship of our venerable religion, and burned with fire applied, so that they became a burnt offering to God themselves, who had forbidden, with most just rebuke, that his Christians should serve as victims to demons.

Now what shall I say worthy, after these ten, of the Forty Martyrs, who deigned to offer themselves as faithful companions of my journey when I was travelling through the cities of Cappadocia to Jerusalem? For in the greatest city of Cappadocia itself, which is called Caesarea, where the same most blessed ones have a famous martyr-shrine, we found certain handmaids of God, most worthy mothers of a monastery of holy virgins, altogether like Mary and Martha, whom Jesus rightly loves; sisters by nature, by faith, by zeal, and by the integrity of chastity. To them the venerable relics of these martyrs had long ago been handed down by their uncle, the high priest and blessed confessor Basil; and they gave them to our desire without hesitation and faithfully, approving us as fit venerators of a splendid gift, and at the same time confessing, with the Lord as witness, that they had always prayed our God that so precious a possession might pass to such heirs as would honour it with like faith and diligence, who would be both successors and increasers of their own zeal and veneration; since they were already in advanced years and daily expected their departure from this world. Behold, the faithful prayer has been heard. We set before the believing peoples today the venerable relics of the Forty Martyrs to be honoured, although it is known that from that time the due celebration of our office has never been lacking to them, since we have been salutarily bound to their splendid benefits.

But now I shall briefly tell in what order the most blessed ones themselves came to the glory of martyrdom; although I confess that I am unequal to pursuing their praises. They have indeed a herald fit for their merits and most worthy, a man of blessed memory, the confessor Basil, bishop of the church of Caesarea, whose singular eloquence and speech seasoned with apostolic salt blunts the poverty of my wit. For what new thing can I bring that he did not pour out richly in their praises with the abundance of his eloquence, adorn copiously, and express strikingly? For it is of huge difficulty to proclaim the same virtues in different words. I shall attempt, nevertheless, for the instruction of your love, at least to go over again the history of what was done. These men were soldiers stationed in the parts of Lesser Armenia, in the flower of their age, tall of body, praiseworthy for experience in war, honoured with military pay for the merit of their valour, and, what surpasses all this, Christians; adorned with every uprightness of conduct, with the good of our venerable religion, and instructed with the spiritual weapons of heavenly teaching. At once, when the trumpet of persecution sounded, love of the faith girded the bravest soldiers of Christ for battle. For when the deadly edicts of a sacrilegious king began to be posted by the judge, by which it was commanded that no one, whether civilian or soldier, should dare to profess the Christian name, but that the whole people should be compelled to sacrifice to demons, they burst forth of their own accord into the open, testify with the clearest voice that they are Christians, and declare that they cannot be torn from this saving worship by any terrors.

The dreadful persecutor, seeing the constancy of the young men, laid aside his authority and urged them with flattering speeches not to use this obstinacy, not to show themselves insulting toward their emperor, not to despise his commands, not, devoted as they were in other matters, to provoke the king's greatest offence by this deed, from whom they ought rather to hope for benefits and honours for this obedience in particular. It was surely unbecoming for warriors, he said, to perish by a most shameful death among the cowardly and the guilty. They ought to think of the flower of their youth and the pleasantness of this light and life, which they were being persuaded foolishly to lose without regard to any reason. Hearing this, the Christian men, and rightly wonderful, not only rejected with constant minds the poisoned flatteries of the deadly persuader but also refuted them with a most sharp answer. "Why," they say, "most wicked of all, having dared to rebel against God, do you try to trip up his servants with deceitful words? Why do you strive to bend us from the worship of the true and living God to the dead images of demons? Why do you attempt to corrupt our minds from the vigour of the heavenly faith with the perishable promises of earthly honours and the illusions of empty things? We curse gifts that bring the loss of salvation; we reject honours that take away that everlasting glory; we spurn the friendship of the king, which seeks to separate us from the love of God; we reject this temporal life of our body too, which, kept at the peril of faith, gains destruction for the soul; finally, we are not deterred by present punishments. We hand over our flesh to whatever penalties you wish to inflict, so that we may not, by denying Christ God, be plunged into the perpetual torments which have been prepared from the beginning for the devil and for you, his ministers."

Then that judge of iniquity, inflamed by such words, doubled his fury, which a little before he had wished to satisfy more subtly, by devising a novel kind of punishment. For he observed the nature of the region, stiff with excessive cold, and the season too, when the greatest harshness of winter pressed more violently with the north wind blowing; the mountains were covered with snow, the fields with frost; liquids were compelled to recognize their own nature only by the fires of the sun; the courses of the rushing rivers were numbed with huge ice; and the pool too lying below the city in which these things took place, spread far and wide, offered, as the hard frost held, a solid road to groaning wagons. Having observed this force of the place and the savagery of the season, the exactor of Gentile sacrilege commands this kind of punishment to be applied to the saints: that they should spend the night bound, with bodies stripped, in the frosty hardness of the open air, with baths steaming in sight of them some way off; where the cunning persecutor, wishing rather to kill their souls, promised a swift remedy to those who were defeated. But the most blessed martyrs, fervent in the Holy Spirit, throwing their clothes far away, hasten to the stadium, beholding the crown set from heaven for so great a contest. Then by mutual exhortations they kindle the strength of patience, prefer the glory of the heavenly kingdom to present punishments, and among other things repeat this: "We who for the safety of an earthly king scorned to fear the swords of the enemy, why should we not, for the faith of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal King, bear with calm minds all the torments inflicted on our body, so as to pass the more quickly, by the short road of a glorious death, to the blessedness of eternal light and perpetual life?" Amid the frosts faith was burning, and heavenly minds were glowing with desire for Christ. The sharpness of the excessive cold burned the shining skins of their stiffening bodies; but their devout minds, occupied with the love of God, thought of the pleasantness of paradise. The inner parts of their bowels were pierced by the frost, so that an inward icy torturer pressed the marrow of their bones with most grievous torments; and the unmoved strength of their souls, looking at the goal of its course, rejoiced at its near completion, awaiting with faithful endurance the promised gift of God.

But one of their number, unable to bear a pain that was very brief and already the last, began, poor wretch, to ask to be taken to the baths. Meanwhile the soldier who had been charged to open that bath of death to any who were defeated, while he watched with curious eyes from a high place the contest of these remarkable men, waiting for the outcome, sees the leader of the heavenly army coming down with a multitude of angels and giving the bravest warriors, one by one, bright garments and rich rewards, which only that wretched man, whose faith the devil had broken, did not receive. The unhappy man is taken to the baths; and there at once, by the breath of the heat by which he had believed he would be revived, he died, and lost both life and crown. An unexpected rejoicing follows the mournful deed. Suddenly the man who had marvelled at the vision described takes his place; he strips his limbs for the longed-for punishment; he cries again and again with a great shout that he is a Christian, he whom the power of that wonderful spectacle had suddenly made, from a Gentile, a true Christian. He is held at once, guilty of his profession; he is bound willingly and cruelly knotted with cutting chains; he perseveres in his bonds, glories in the punishment, is lifted up by the hope of the divine reward. Faith in Christ grows amid punishments; love increases amid torments. For he testified in the apostolic sense: "No force of punishments, no savagery of torments will be able to separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." In the midst of torments the new martyr, instructed by the Holy Spirit, is taught and advances; he dies and triumphs. The Trinity to be adored washes, cleanses, and leads to the kingdom of heaven more gloriously, by martyrdom itself in place of baptism, its witness who remained faithful amid the punishments. This fortieth saint dies at last with the saints, so that the sacred number which the Saviour had honoured with his fasting might be completed, as the blessed martyrs themselves are recorded to have prayed.

After this he ordered the executioners to carry the bodies of the dead some distance and burn them with fire. They were leaving one who was thought still to be alive, in case perhaps the solitude itself should change his will for the worse. There his venerable mother, who had nourished such a son with the good milk of heavenly wisdom, ran to the body of her still-breathing son and with her own hands placed him on the cart by which the bodies of the others, heaped together, were being dragged to the pyre. "Go, my son," she says, "on this good road, safe with your companions, and glorious, to the Lord." O admirable mother, and truly worthy of a martyr! Indeed, a martyr herself; who did not spare her own flesh, while she rejoices that her own limbs are punished in her son for Christ's name. Nor, in the last part, shall we keep silent about this: that when the ashes of the burned bodies were thrown into the river by the persecutor's command, there were not lacking devout hands which either snatched part of the ashes by stealth or bought it at a price. Hence both the church of Caesarea exults and our brotherhood not undeservedly glories, understanding that a saving gift has been kept for it by the providence of God. We have received a portion of the relics, and we trust that we possess nothing less, since in their ashes we honour and embrace all forty: like that faithful woman in the Gospel who was saved through Christ's fringe; she held the hem of his garment and drew out the power of his divinity; by the touch of the fringe faith drew healing for the believer and obtained the salvation it had presumed. And so the part we have been counted worthy of is the fullness; for these forty martyrs cannot in any way be divided from one another, whose relics are inseparable and undistinguishable. For as that fiery Spirit of God joined their souls in the unity of saving faith (for "the heart and soul of all the believers was one"), so also the fire, burning their limbs, reduced them into one body of ash.

We have, then, both these forty and the ten saints named above, gathered from different parts of the earth; and therefore we decree that this basilica, dedicated to their merits, ought to be called the Assembly of the Saints. For it is fitting that when we go forth to the venerable relics of so many martyrs we should profess that we are going forth to the assembly of the saints. Helped, then, by the patronage of so many just men, let us run in supplication in their footsteps with all faith and all desire, so that by their intercession we may be counted worthy to obtain all that we ask, magnifying Christ the Lord, the giver of so great a gift; to whom be all honour, power and glory, with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, before all ages, and now, and always, and for all ages of ages. Amen.