By Leonidas Contos, October 25, 1965
In Paul’s letter addressed to Timothy the delicate, pivotal question of the believer’s relationship to the state is summed up. On the feast which commemorates the heroic life, and still more heroic death, of the youthful martyr Demetrios, who was an officer in the state legions, Paul’s letter takes on a special meaning. It is addressed to an officer in the legions of Christ, as it were, and it deals with the basic tensions between a man’s citizenship and a man’s religion, the eternal conflict, sometimes so subtle and silent that it is hardly felt, between Caesar and Christ.
Saint Demetrios lost, or rather gave, his life about the end of the third century, during one last terrible blood-letting such as had stained the history of the early Christian era whenever things went badly for the decaying Roman Empire. In a particularly long persecution which must have taken hundreds of Christian lives, one may wonder what lends special significance to the violent death in a prison cell of a young Christian officer. Surely it is not legend alone, nor the catalogue of miraculous healings attributed to the holy relics, nor the phenomenon suggested by the mysterious fragrance these are said to give off. Perhaps we must look for some explanation in the attitudes of another era to the whole idea of martyrdom.
For us…martyrdom is a pretty remote notion…. This is not to say that the conflict between Caesar and Christ has lessened; it is only that the lines are not so sharply drawn in our own minds, and there is a system of law that safeguards human life. [And yet] some time ago one of the national magazines conducted a survey among its readers to determine what subjects Americans wanted most to hear about in the pulpits of their churches. It is surprising, and in a way reassuring, that in a land that is fat, well fed and prone to complacency, enjoying a living standard light years beyond what any age in human history could have fancied, the subject high at the top of the list was that of personal adversity and how to cope with it.
What are the worst things that can possibly happen to us? What are the major misfortunes that can overtake the Christian pilgrim on life’s road? Certainly we no longer live in fear of the Caesar’s legions; there is no spectre of the dungeon and the lash to haunt our sleep. But there are other, subtler shapes in which danger lurks. Caesar still governs his world, and that world has an insidious way of claiming our loyalties that leads to a gradual, no doubt unintentional, disavowal of our loyalty to Christ. And this is the real point of our commemoration of martyrs and ascetics. Not merely to sit in reverence and applaud their exploits; but to discover in their attitude something of the secret of victorious living. For there are ways in which everyday life is more perilous than persecution, victorious living in a sense more difficult than victorious dying. In persecutions the issue was always very clear. In everyday life there seem to be so many issues, and they are usually so fuzzy and puzzling to us. Caesar has a way of wanting to take over all our concerns, relieve us of our worries; which has a way of making Christ, unless He is very real to us, recede into the background.
There were those who did prove faithless under the terrible strain of protracted persecution. The last, begun under Diocletian, and carried to its gruesome conclusion by Maximian, under whom the holy Demetrios met his death, was the final test of the Christian faith, and in a sense its greatest triumph. Though temporarily weakened by the defection of many of its members, the Church soon found new sources of strength and vitality through the conversion of those who marveled at the stoic courage of the martyrs whose legends, in many cases, were widely circulated and admired. Writes Will Durant of this phenomenon: “There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned and oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.
~Adapted from Leonidas Contos, In Season and out of Season: Sermons by Father Leonidas Contos
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