ON ST. SECUNDUS, PRESBYTER, MARTYR,
AND OTHER ALEXANDRIAN MARTYRS.
UNDER CONSTANTIUS.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.
The Acts of the Passion from St. Athanasius and its time and other circumstances.
Secundus the Presbyter, Martyr in Egypt (St.) The Alexandrian Martyrs under Constantius (SS.)
BY THE AUTHOR D. P.
Saint Athanasius, whose Acts we have set forth at large on May II, in the year 356 being compelled to yield to the fury of the Arians, and to betake himself to the desert places of the wilderness; that to the holy inhabitants of the Egyptian solitudes, Athanasius in the Epistle to the solitaries, among whom, repeatedly changing his hiding-places, he had somehow been saved, he might render thanks, and to them, confirmed in the true faith of himself and of Christ, might add courage against the violent counsels of the heretics, he wrote to them a prolix treatise, concerning which we treated in the Prologue to his Acts. Only the second part of this treatise, as we said there, and that not entire, is had under the name of the Epistle to the Solitaries, containing the history of the persecutions endured by the Saint, after by the conspiracy of the same Arians in the conventicle of Tyre he was condemned and abdicated under Constantine the Great, down to this his flight and a little beyond; so that the Martyrdom of St. Secundus (for whose cause, adjoined by Baronius to the Roman Martyrology on this day, we have prefaced these things) cannot be deferred
beyond the Lent of the year 357, in which the epistle was written.
[2] The Saint had shown that the persecution of that time was more savage than it had been under the heathen Emperors, describing the persecution stirred up by the Arians when at least among the neighboring and friendly Gentiles the Christians could lie hidden without the greatest danger to those receiving them; which not even now was permitted to the orthodox, the persecutors esteeming the cause of the received and of the receiver equal. Then he subjoins: It is not possible for me to explain according to its desert all the evils which they do; one thing I might be able to say, that to me, willing to write and recount the nefarious acts of that perversity, it occurs to think, whether perhaps this heresy be the fourth daughter of that horseleech, of which in Proverbs, which after so many injuries and so great slaughters knows not to say, It is enough. Prov. 30, 15 For still it rages and goes about seeking those not yet known to it; but those whom it has once hurt, the same it strives to hurt again. in the year 356, For lo, after the nocturnal violence, after the evils thence propagated, after the persecution made under Heraclius the Duke, they do not intermit to construct accusations before Caesar: for they know that whatever they have impiously proposed will be heard; and therefore they ask that beyond exile something be decreed; and that those who will not consent to their impiety thenceforth be slain; and to this point now has their audacity advanced.
[3] This is what the Epistle of Constantius threatened, after Athanasius was driven away, and that butchery about the feast of Easter was perpetrated, concerning which, and concerning the Martyrdom of St. Eutychius, we treated on March XXVIII, which, written to the Alexandrians, is thus concluded. It would be absurd for the most abandoned Athanasius Constantius commanding the supporters of Athanasius to be slain, to change region for region; but his flatterers and ministers, men vagabond and whom it were impious even to name, to be neglected when they raise tumults: wherefore again it is commanded to the judges to slay them. But perhaps, unless they timely repent of their former offenses, not even simply will those perish whose leader was the most impure Athanasius. By such rescripts impiety being goaded, what would it not dare against the pious; not only at Alexandria, where George had the seat of his bloody cruelty; but also in the rest of Egypt and the neighboring regions, where the Arian heresy had ministers like George?
[4] he narrates the Martyrdom of St. Secundus Therefore, says Athanasius in the place before cited, that worst Secundus the Pentapolite and Stephen conspired with him, knowing that the heresy would be for them an excuse, whatever at last they had injuriously done; and seeing that he who was the Presbyter of Barca did not consent with them, called likewise Secundus, and hitherto similar to the heretical Bishop, but dissimilar in opinion and faith, killed the same by trampling him with their heels. But he, when he was being slain, imitated the Saint, saying, Let no one avenge me before the judges: I have the Lord as my avenger, for whose sake I suffer these things from these men. But they neither pitied him so speaking, nor had any regard of the time: for in the very Lent they killed the man. This is the single mark of time which we are able to regard, in the Lent of the year 357, and from it to gather, if these things were done after the decrees promulgated concerning the slaying also of the supporters of Athanasius, as Athanasius seems to intimate, that they look rather to the following year 357, when Easter was celebrated on the day XXIII of March, and Lent had its beginning in the month of February.
[5] Meanwhile in the Roman Martyrology we read thus to-day. At Alexandria the commemoration of the holy Martyrs Secundus the Presbyter and others, whom on the sacred days of Pentecost, after in the year 356 under the Emperor Constantius, George the Arian Bishop most savagely ordered to be slain. Pentecost of the year 356, of which here is the discourse, fell on the day XXVI of May: nor yet even then was the thing done, but the feast being already past: for thus accurately does Athanasius himself describe that tragedy in the Apology concerning his flight: In the week after holy Pentecost, on the Lord's Day after Pentecost, when the people had fasted, for the cause of prayer they went out to the cemetery, because all turned away from communion with George. But that most wicked one, understanding this, goads the Duke Sebastian, a Manichean man, who then on the very Lord's Day with a multitude of soldiers, bearing arms and naked swords and bows and arrows, the Duke with soldiers attacking those praying, went out against the people. And when he had found only a few (for most had withdrawn for the hour) he did such things as it is fitting to be known to have been done by them.
[6] For kindling a brilliant pyre, and setting before it the Virgins, the Virgins to be cut in the face, he compelled them to say that they were of the Arian faith. But when he saw himself overcome by them, and the fire made of no account, he so cut up their bared faces, that not long afterward could they scarcely be recognized except with difficulty. But forty men seized he lacerated in a new manner. For straightway ordering rods to be cut from palms, which should still have adhering prickles, 40 citizens cruelly scourged, he so plowed their backs, that some indeed had to be handled by surgeons more often on account of the prickles fixed in, others, when they could not bear the cure, met death. All then who had been seized, together with the Virgin they banished to the great Oasis. But the bodies of the dead they at the beginning caused not even to be delivered to friends, but casting them out unburied they concealed them at their pleasure, because they hoped that such monstrosity could lie hidden. he ordered the bodies of the slain to be left unburied In which truly they vehemently erred; for the kinsmen over their dead, on this side rejoicing on account of the glory of confession, on that side grieving on account of the bodies, a more evident accusation of their cruelty and impiety arose.
[7] Thus far Athanasius in that place: then summarily touching the same things in the Apology to Constantius, he says, for several days, that more than three thousand of armed men had been led out against the unarmed, even boys and women, and occupied with prayer to God alone; but that the bodies of the slain, denied to burial, lay for some time exposed to dogs; until secretly they were withdrawn by their familiars, after long misery; so that in distinguishing them there was much labor of those seeking. Finally also in the Epistle to the Solitaries retracting the same things, he makes manifest to us the error of the former place, where only one Virgin is said to have been driven into exile with the men, through carelessness probably to be imputed to the copyist alone: for he both speaks here of several, and what he had not before indicated, he shows that that monstrous flagellation pertained also to them themselves: for thus he writes. The laity and the Virgins, whom they had before set before the pyre, they cast into exile, after they had so cut them with the strokes of rods received from palms, the rest he cast into exile. that after five days some of them died, others had long to be cured from the prickles sticking within their limbs, and to sustain torments heavier than death.
[8] Now indeed, as concerns the fast before the Synaxis to be celebrated on the very Lord's Day; let no one think that here is treated the Saturday fast, of that which by the solemn rite of the four seasons, in the very Pentecostal week, is now used in the Latin Church. Rather it seems to be indicated, that, just as at Rome on each Sabbath there was fasting, as Socrates writes book 5 chapter 21, so also it was done at Alexandria, perhaps newly introduced through Athanasius himself, who had tarried for some time at Rome. For also in the manner of gathering the church (which on the Sabbath as well as on the first of the Sabbath or the Lord's Day was done at Constantinople and elsewhere almost everywhere through the East, common to the Alexandrians and the Romans, at Alexandria not so) the Alexandrians followed the Roman church, as Sozomen writes book 7 chapter 19; in this, I believe, that after the fast of the Saturday day about evening only the assemblies were begun, and in them there was perseverance until the Matins Synaxis was completed: after which most betook themselves home, then first about to refresh the body. And this seems to be the hour, to which Athanasius indicates that most had withdrawn, when the Duke Sebastian rushed into that place, in which the assembly had been held; a few persisting there in prayer: of whom partly the crown of martyrdom fell, partly the laurel of confession, as appears from the things said above. not so to most other Egyptians. But that fast of the Alexandrians on the day of the Sabbath, for this it merited more specially to be noted by St. Athanasius, that, as the same Socrates and Sozomen in the same place testify, among the Egyptians in many cities and villages on the Sabbath toward evening they assemble having dined, and so partake of the divine mysteries, contrary to the custom of almost all other regions.