Justified True Belief

(●) A young mother of Carthage kept a diary in prison, and it is the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman. + A woman of about twenty-two sits in a holding room in Carthage with a baby at her breast. Her father has just left in a rage. She is under guard, she has not yet been baptized, and she is going to be killed in a few weeks in front of a paying crowd. At some point in those weeks she got hold of something to write with, and she wrote down what was happening to her. That is why she is here. Vibia Perpetua is not a saint of legend, assembled by admirers three centuries later out of miracles and round numbers. She is a real provincial woman whose own account of her own imprisonment survives, eight short chapters of plain Latin, and it is the earliest writing by a Christian woman that anyone has. The word martyr, which the church has hung on her ever since, is simply the Greek word martys, a witness: someone who testifies to what they have seen. She testified, and then she signed it with her life. Her diary comes down inside a longer book, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, and the book is written in three hands: an editor who introduces the arrested Christians and later describes their deaths as someone who was in the amphitheatre, Perpetua herself in chapters 3 to 10, and her teacher Saturus, who contributes a vision of his own. The dates in the title are reckonings rather than records. She tells us she was about twenty-two, which puts her birth around 181 AD, and the book fixes the games only by saying that they were held for the birthday of Geta Caesar. Geta was the younger son of the emperor Septimius Severus, and Caesar was the junior imperial title he carried from 198 to 209, so the phrase narrows the year to a window eleven years wide and then stops. The African churches kept 7 March as the day; the year 203 is the conventional reckoning, and the text itself does not supply it.

(●) c. 181 AD: Born into a prosperous Carthaginian household that had given her everything a Roman girl could want. + Carthage in her lifetime was not a ruin. Rome had destroyed the old Punic city three centuries earlier and then rebuilt on the site, and by the second century after Christ the new Carthage was the capital of Africa Proconsularis, which is to say the Roman province run from Carthage by a governor of the senior senatorial rank called proconsul. It was one of the largest cities in the western empire, with an aqueduct, baths, a circus, a theatre, and an amphitheatre that could seat a substantial part of the population. The book introduces her in three quick phrases: respectably born, liberally educated, honourably married. Those are not compliments so much as a social address, and it is worth pausing on, because a woman who could be described that way had a household, a dowry, standing, and a family with expectations about how she would use all of it. She had a father and a mother, two living brothers, and an infant son. One brother was a catechumen like her: a catechumen is someone under instruction for baptism but not yet baptized, and in the ancient church that course of instruction could run two or three years, which is why a household could hold several half-made Christians at once. A third brother, Dinocrates, had died at seven of a disease that ate away his face, and she had not thought about him in years. Her father was not a Christian, and the whole of what follows turns on that. He is the only person in her diary she cannot answer.

(●) c. 202 AD: She was arrested as a catechumen, with a son still at the breast, and was baptized under guard. + Five were taken: two slaves, Revocatus and Felicity, along with Saturninus, Secundulus and Perpetua. Their teacher Saturus was somewhere else when the soldiers came, and rather than take the reprieve he walked in afterwards and handed himself over, so as not to be left out of whatever his students were about to go through. Two of the five had every ordinary reason to want more time. Felicity was pregnant, and Perpetua was nursing. What triggered the round-up is less clear than the older histories used to say. A late and notoriously unreliable source, the Historia Augusta, a set of imperial biographies put together well over a century afterwards by an author with a habit of inventing his own documents, reports that the emperor Septimius Severus forbade conversion to Christianity. Many historians now doubt that any such edict ever existed. What is certain is narrower, and it is enough: officials in Africa were prosecuting, and a group of catechumens in Carthage was picked up. They were held at first in custody outside the public prison, and baptized there. Perpetua records what she asked for in the water, and the request is startlingly practical. She did not ask to be let off. She asked for endurance in the body, which is the prayer of someone who has already done the arithmetic. Then they were moved to the dungeon, and she had never been anywhere like it. She writes about the darkness, the heat, the crush of people and the rough handling by the soldiers, and then, in the middle of all that, about the thing actually tormenting her, which was that her baby was not with her. Two deacons, Tertius and Pomponius, paid the guards to have the prisoners let out into a better part of the prison for a few hours a day. A deacon in that church was the officer charged with the practical care of the congregation, the man who carried the money and did the visiting, and this is what that job looked like in a city where the congregation was in jail. She fed her son. She got permission for him to stay with her, and the sentence she writes next is the one nobody expects: the dungeon became to her as it were a palace, so that she would rather have been there than anywhere else.

(●) c. 202 to 203 AD: Her father came to the prison again and again, and she would not give him what he asked. + Four times he came, and each time he tried something different. What he wanted never varied: one word from her, the denial the court would have accepted, after which she could have walked home to her son. The first time, while they were still in the guards’ hands and not yet in the dungeon, he argued, and she answered him with a water jug (T1). He threw himself at her as if to tear her eyes out, and left. The second time he had given up arguing. He was worn out, he begged, he kissed her hands, he threw himself at her feet, and he called her not Daughter but Lady. Have pity on my grey hairs, he said. Have regard to your son, who will not be able to live after you. Do not bring us all down. She does not write a word of contempt about any of it. She writes that she grieved for him, because he alone in the family would not be glad on the day she died, and then she gave him the only answer she had (T2). The third time was at the hearing itself, and it went worse than either of the first two. He appeared in the hall holding her son, which was its own kind of argument. When she would not sacrifice he tried physically to pull her down from the platform, and the presiding official had him thrown down and struck with a rod in front of the crowd. That is the moment her account cracks. She says his misfortune hurt her as if she herself had been beaten, and that she grieved for his wretched old age. She never suggests that the cost was small. The fourth time there was nothing left to try. A few days before the games he came up from the city worn out with grief, and she watched him tear at his beard, throw himself on the ground, lie there face down, and say things that she thought would have moved every living creature. She gives the scene four sentences and records no answer of her own, and those four sentences are the hardest thing in the diary to read. Christ had said that whoever loves father or mother more than him is not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37), and this is what that sentence looks like when a real family is standing in the room.

(●) Early 203 AD: She refused to sacrifice, the procurator Hilarianus condemned the whole group to the beasts, and her son was taken from her. + They were at dinner when the summons came, and they were marched to the town hall, where a crowd had already gathered. The man who should have been sitting in judgment was not there. Minucius Timinianus, the proconsul who governed the province, had died in office, and until Rome sent out a replacement the power of life and death fell to the next official in line, the procurator. A procurator was the emperor’s financial agent in a province, the man who looked after revenues and imperial estates, which meant that on the day Perpetua was tried the accountant was holding the sword. His name was Hilarianus, and he is not a figure invented for the story: Tertullian, writing in the same city a few years later, dates a crowd’s shouting against the Christians’ burial grounds to the presidency of Hilarian (Ad Scapulam 3). The offer he made was the standard one, and it is worth being clear about what it was, because it was not a demand that she stop believing anything. Roman officials asked for an act, not a creed: sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors, a pinch of incense, a public gesture of loyalty that any decent provincial could perform without thinking. Spare your father’s grey hairs, he said, spare your baby, and sacrifice for the emperors. She said, I will not. Are you a Christian, he asked. I am a Christian, she said. He condemned them all to the wild beasts, and she writes that they went back down to the dungeon cheerfully. Then she sent the deacon Pomponius to her father to ask for the baby back, and her father, who had not given up on her for a moment, refused to hand him over. What followed she records in a single flat medical sentence: the child no longer wanted the breast, and her breasts did not trouble her. A nursing mother cut off from her baby can expect days of swelling and pain, and she was spared it. She took that as mercy, and left it there.

(●) Early 203 AD: In the weeks before the games she wrote down four dreams and what she took them to mean. + The first one came because her brother asked for it. He told her she was now in a position of great dignity and could ask for a vision, and she promised him an answer by morning. What she saw was a ladder running up to heaven (T4), and because the only road it offered led up rather than home, she woke knowing what the answer was. She told her brother at once, and the two of them understood between them that suffering was coming, and from that day they stopped hoping for anything in this life. The second and third dreams were about Dinocrates, the brother who had died at seven and whose name surfaced in her mind during prayer after years in which she had not thought of him at all (T3). The fourth and last came the night before the games, and instead of the animals she was bracing for it put her in the arena against a man (T4). Dreams did not need defending in her world. Romans of every persuasion read them for guidance, kept records of them, and consulted specialists about them, and the Christians who prayed for this one had Peter at Pentecost in their ears, quoting the prophet Joel: "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams" (Acts 2:17). What is unusual is not that a prisoner had vivid dreams before dying. It is that she wrote them down herself, in her own words, and that the writing survived.

(●) c. 4 March 203 AD: Felicity gave birth in the prison three days before the games, so that she would not be left behind. + Roman law would not put a pregnant woman to death, on the reasoning that the child she carried had broken no law and could not be punished for its mother. That protection was the one thing Felicity did not want. She was eight months along, and what frightened her was not the arena but the calendar: if the games went ahead without her, she would be held back and killed later, on her own, among ordinary criminals instead of beside the people she had been arrested with. Her friends were as distressed as she was at the thought of leaving her behind. So three days before the show the whole group prayed together that the child would come, and her labour started that same day. Eight months is early, and the delivery was hard. One of the prison staff heard her crying out and asked the cruel, obvious question that anybody standing in that corridor might have thought of: if this is what you sound like now, what will you do when you are thrown to the beasts you thought so little of when you refused to sacrifice? Her answer is one of the most quoted sentences in the book. Now it is I that suffer what I suffer, she said, but then there will be another in me, who will suffer for me, because I also am about to suffer for Him (Passion 15). She had a daughter. A woman of the Carthaginian church took the baby and raised her as her own. Three days later a slave and a well-born matron walked out onto the same sand together, which in that city, in that century, was itself a kind of argument.

(●) 7 March 203 AD: She died in the amphitheatre at Carthage, and guided the gladiator’s sword to her own throat. + Her own writing stops the day before, with a line that reads like a note left on a desk: what happened at the show itself, let whoever wants to write. Someone did, and whoever it was had been there. At the gate the prisoners were told to dress up, the men as priests of Saturn and the women as priestesses of Ceres, which is to say as the clergy of two Roman gods, so that the killing would look like a festival of the old religion rather than an execution. Perpetua refused, and she argued them out of it rather than simply digging in: they had come this far of their own free will precisely so as not to do that sort of thing, and the tribune in charge of the prisoners gave way and let them go in dressed as they were. She walked in singing psalms. When the group passed Hilarianus they told him to his face that he was judging them and God would judge him, and the crowd, furious, had them scourged on the way past. The men were sent against a leopard, a bear and a boar. For the two women the organisers produced a wild heifer, which the editor notes was chosen to match their sex. Perpetua was tossed and landed on her back; she pulled her torn tunic over her thigh before she did anything else, and then asked for a pin and put her hair back up, because loose hair would have made her look like a woman in mourning on what she considered her day of glory. She saw Felicity knocked down, walked over, and pulled her to her feet. She came out of it so deep in prayer that she had to be shown the marks on her own body before she would believe it had happened, and she used the moment to tell a catechumen named Rusticus and her own brother to stand fast and love each other (Q). At the end the crowd called the survivors into the middle so they could watch the swords go in. They stood up and walked there themselves, and kissed each other first. The young gladiator who came to Perpetua was a novice and his hand shook, and after the first thrust went in between her ribs and tore a cry out of her she took his hand and put the blade against her own throat. The eyewitness who wrote it down had a theory about why she had to help: a woman like that, he says, could not have been killed unless she was willing.

What She Taught

(T1) A Christian can no more be called by another name than a water jug can. + Her whole theology of confession fits in four sentences, and she builds it out of a piece of pottery sitting on the floor of the room she is being held in. To confess, in the old Christian sense of the word, is to say out loud what you are at the moment when saying it costs you something; the early church called those who did it and lived confessors, and those who did it and died martyrs. Father, she says, do you see this vessel lying here, a little pitcher or something else? He agrees that he does. Can it be called by any other name than what it is? No, he says. Then neither can I call myself anything but what I am. It looks like a trick until you notice what the Roman courts were actually asking. They were not asking anyone to give up an inward opinion. They were asking for a word and a gesture: deny the name, offer the incense, go home. A century earlier the governor Pliny had written to the emperor Trajan from Bithynia genuinely unsure whether he was punishing crimes committed by Christians or simply the name itself, and Trajan’s answer left the name standing as the thing at issue (Pliny, Letters 10.96 and 10.97). So the name was the whole trial, and Perpetua’s little argument goes straight at it. A jug does not become a lamp because the owner would prefer a lamp. She is not claiming to be brave. She is claiming that the question has an answer whether or not she likes what the answer costs, and that saying otherwise would be a lie about a matter of fact.

(Q) "Neither can I call myself anything else than what I am, a Christian." + Source: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 3 (R. E. Wallis translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3). The first words of hers that survive, spoken to her father before her arrest was even formalised. In the Latin the last word is Christiana, the feminine form, and it is the same word she will give Hilarianus at the hearing when he asks her directly.

(T2) Nobody standing trial for Christ is in his own power, and that is a comfort rather than a terror. + Her father’s second visit is the hardest scene in the book, and her answer to it is four words long in effect: it is not up to us. The word she uses for the place she expects to stand is catasta, the raised wooden platform where prisoners were displayed to the crowd during a hearing, close enough to a modern dock or witness box. Whatever God wills, she tells him, will happen on that platform, because we are not placed in our own power but in God’s. Read quickly, that sounds like fatalism, the shrug of someone who has stopped hoping. Read in context it is the opposite, and you can tell because of what it does to her. It relieves her of the job of managing the outcome. She does not have to calculate whether a clever answer might save her, or whether her nerve will hold on the day, because the day is not hers to arrange. That is what Christians mean by providence: not that events are pushed around by fate, but that they are held by a Father who has purposes in them. Jesus had promised exactly this to people in exactly her position, telling his followers not to be anxious about how they were to speak or what they were to say, because what to say would be given to them in that hour, and that it would not be them speaking but the Spirit of their Father speaking through them (Matthew 10:19-20). Her calm is not a temperament. It is a doctrine, and she is leaning her weight on it.

(Q) "On that scaffold whatever God wills shall happen. For know that we are not placed in our own power, but in that of God." + Source: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 5 (R. E. Wallis translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3). Said to her father at the end of his second visit, after he had kissed her hands and thrown himself at her feet. Wallis’ "scaffold" renders catasta, the platform the accused stood on. Her father went away in sorrow, and she says so without softening it.

(T3) The dead are not out of reach of a sister’s prayer. + Of everything in the diary, this is the part that has been argued over longest, and it starts with a name surfacing in her mind while the group is praying. Dinocrates. Her brother, dead at seven, his face eaten away by what she calls a cancer, so disfigured at the end that people could not look at him. She is amazed that she has not thought of him in years, and she starts praying for him. That night she sees him. He is in a gloomy place with other people, filthy, parched, the wound still on his face, and there is a pool of water in front of him with its rim higher than he is tall. He stretches up and cannot reach it. Between him and her there is a gap neither of them can cross. She prays for him every day after that. Then, on the day the prisoners were put in chains, she sees him again: the place is bright, the wound is a scar, the rim of the pool has come down to the level of his navel, and there is a bowl of water beside it that does not empty however much he drinks. When he has had enough he goes off to play, the way a child does. Christians read these two dreams differently, and have for a very long time. Catholic and Orthodox readers take them as early evidence for two things they already hold: that the dead can be helped by the prayers of the living, and that some who die in God’s friendship are cleansed before they see him. They point to 2 Maccabees 12:44-45, where Judas Maccabeus makes atonement for soldiers already dead, and 2 Maccabees sits inside their canon, which is the list of books a church receives as Scripture. Protestant readers do not receive 2 Maccabees as Scripture and find no clear command anywhere in the books they do receive to pray for the dead, so they read Dinocrates as a private dream that moved a frightened woman and settles no doctrine. Augustine, who loved this book, took the question seriously enough to go looking for an ordinary explanation, and he found one he could live with without letting go of the book itself. What all sides grant is the plain thing she wrote down: a young woman about to die spent her last strength praying for a little boy who had died badly, and could not be talked out of hoping for him.

(Q) "Then I understood that he was translated from the place of punishment." + Source: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 8 (R. E. Wallis translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3). The last line of the second Dinocrates dream, immediately after she watches him drink his fill and go off to play. The confidence of that "I understood" is exactly what later readers have found both moving and worth handling carefully (T3).

(T4) The real opponent in the arena is not the animal but the devil. + Two of her dreams end with her foot on somebody’s head, and the second one tells her what the first one meant. In the first, a bronze ladder runs up to heaven, so narrow that only one person can climb at a time, with swords, spears, hooks and daggers fixed along both edges, so that anyone who climbs carelessly or looks down is torn open. A dragon of enormous size lies at the bottom waiting for climbers. Saturus goes up first and calls back that he is waiting for her but that she must watch the dragon. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, she says, he will not hurt me. The dragon slowly puts its head up as if afraid of her, and she uses it as the first step. At the top is an open garden, and a white-haired man in shepherd’s clothes milking sheep among thousands of people in white. He looks up, says welcome, daughter, and gives her a mouthful of the curd, and everyone standing round says Amen. In the last dream, the night before the games, she is led into the amphitheatre expecting animals and finds instead an Egyptian fighter waiting for her with his seconds, the attendants who worked a fighter’s corner and got him ready. She is stripped and becomes a man, and her own helpers rub her down with oil, which sounds stranger than it was: oiling a wrestler down before a bout was ordinary practice in any Greek gymnasium in the empire. A trainer taller than the amphitheatre itself announces the terms: if the Egyptian wins he kills her with a sword, and if she wins she gets the green branch hung with golden apples. She fights, gets him on the ground, and treads on his head, and the trainer kisses her and says, daughter, peace be with you. Then she wakes up and understands the thing she had been misreading all along: the fight is not with beasts. Paul had said the same in a letter she may well have heard read in Carthage, that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12). And when the editor describes her walking into the real arena a few days later, he says she went in singing, already treading on the head of the Egyptian, a phrase that reaches back to the oldest promise in Scripture, that the offspring of the woman will bruise the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15). She thought she was going to be eaten by a cow. She was told she was going to win.

(Q) "Then I awoke, and perceived that I was not to fight with beasts, but against the devil. Still I knew that the victory was awaiting me." + Source: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 10 (R. E. Wallis translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3). The closing lines of the fourth dream, and the last thing she wrote before handing the account on: what happened at the show itself, she adds, let whoever wants to write.

(Q) "Stand fast in the faith, and love one another, all of you, and be not offended at my sufferings." + Source: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 20 (R. E. Wallis translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3). Her last recorded words, reported by the eyewitness rather than written by her. She had just been thrown by the heifer and had come out of a prayer so deep that she did not believe she had been in the arena until she saw the marks on her body. She said this to her brother and to a catechumen named Rusticus, and within the hour she was dead. Carthage did not forget it.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) Her own city read the book aloud in church and kept the day she died. + The reception starts almost immediately, and it starts at home. Tertullian, the most formidable Christian writer in Carthage and very likely in the city when it happened, cites her by name as the most heroic martyr Perpetua, who on the day of her passion saw only her fellow martyrs in paradise (On the Soul 55, Peter Holmes translation). That is within a few years, from a man who could have checked with people who were in the crowd. From there the book travels. It was copied in Latin, translated into Greek, and cut down into two shorter versions for reading at services. Two centuries later and two hundred miles away, Augustine of Hippo preaches on their feast day and refers to the reading his congregation has just heard, which means the diary of a Carthaginian housewife was being read out in African churches alongside Scripture’s own lessons. Their day, 7 March, is entered in the Calendar of Carthage, the African church’s own calendar of feasts, and it had already reached Rome long before that: the Roman list of martyrs’ commemorations drawn up in 354 puts Perpetua and Felicity under the Nones of March, which in the Roman calendar is the seventh day of that month, and marks them as belonging to Africa. And the place stayed known, which is the sort of thing a spade can confirm. On the morning of 29 March 1907, excavating the Basilica Maiorum outside Carthage, Alfred Louis Delattre turned up a marble plaque from the sixth century listing Saturus, Saturninus, Revocatus, Secundulus, Felicity and Perpetua, and recording that they suffered on the Nones of March, the same 7 March the calendars had been keeping all along. The plaque is three hundred years younger than the martyrs, so it testifies to what the African church remembered rather than to the original record. What it shows is that they were still remembering the right day, with the right names, in the right order, three centuries on. The names of Perpetua and Felicity are still spoken aloud in the Roman Canon, the oldest of the great prayers of the Latin Mass, and Anglican and Lutheran calendars keep 7 March too.

(†) Augustine preached her for years, and made her weakness rather than her nerve the point. + Three of Augustine’s sermons for the feast survive (Sermons 280, 281 and 282), and they show a bishop working with a story his people already knew by heart. He cannot resist the names, and he does not try: Perpetua and Felicity, perpetual felicity, the reward not just of those two women but of every martyr who ever held on. Latin says it in two words, and he comes back to it more than once. The more interesting move is what he refuses to do with their courage. He will not let the congregation admire the women as heroines with unusual nerve, because that turns martyrdom into a talent that most people lack and lets everyone else off. Whoever lived in them, he says, is the one who conquered in them; the one who made himself weak for their sake was shown undefeated in them. He presses the point precisely where a Roman audience felt the difficulty, that these were women, one of them a slave girl who had just given birth. That is the argument, not the embarrassment. Paul had been told that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), and Augustine hands his people a nursing mother and a woman still bleeding from childbirth as the exhibit.

(†) She read her own dreams as settled answers, and the church that loved her book still would not treat it as Scripture. + What goes against her name is a caution rather than a charge, and it comes from the way she writes rather than from anything she did. She was twenty-two, she was about to be killed, and she does not argue for her dreams or hedge them. She reports them, and then she writes, I understood. Her brother is released from punishment. The fight is with the devil. The dungeon is a palace. Each of those lands in the diary the way a person states the weather. Most of that is unobjectionable. The difficulty is Dinocrates, because a private dream is doing doctrinal work: a boy’s standing after death is settled, in the account, by what his sister saw while asleep. Augustine felt the pressure of it two hundred years later, when a writer named Vincentius Victor reached for the story as proof that the unbaptized dead could be delivered by the prayers of the living. His reply is a model of how to honour a book without promoting it. There is no record of Dinocrates in canonical Scripture, he writes, and neither the saint herself nor "whoever it was that wrote the account" says the boy died unbaptized (On the Soul and its Origin I.12, Holmes and Wallis translation). Perhaps, he suggests, the child had been baptized and then dragged back to idols by his father. The point is not that Augustine had the answer. The point is where he put the weight: on the canon, not on the vision, and on a book he went on preaching every year. It is worth saying what the caution is not. She never sets her dreams beside the apostles, never tells anyone else what to believe on the strength of them, and never suggests that what she saw while asleep is binding on the church. She writes down what happened to her and what she made of it, which is all a witness is asked for, and she did not live to see the uses her account would be put to. The line Augustine drew is the church’s line, applied to a book it never stopped reading.