On Martyrdom, Suicide, and Christian Bioethics

Abstract

Christ has fashioned a remedy for the human condition out of mortality, making death the paradoxical means of salvation. Thus, the early Church saw martyrdom as the best kind of death, epitomized in the story of St. Ignatius of Antioch. He saw his death in Christ to be a birth into eternal life. Yet martyrdom and suicide can be conflated under crafty definitions and novel terminology, leading inevitably to calls to soften prohibitions against physician-assisted suicide. Whereas martyrdom locates death within the Christian lived experience of the Paschal mystery, suicide transfers the sovereignty of God over life and death to the individual, necessarily denying the goodness of creation in the process. I point to a liturgical foundation for bioethics as a better starting point for understanding martyrdom and suicide. Entering Christ’s sacrifice, Christians receive divine life and new vision to locate suffering, death, and health care within the Christian salvation narrative.

Summary:

Confusing martyrdom and suicide locates ethics outside the Church by bending language around the 5th commandment. St. Ignatius of Antioch's martyrdom clarifies the role of the Christian bioethicist to situate health care in the Church's life-giving liturgical experience.

Christ has inverted death from an unquestionable evil to a mysterious beginning of new life. “Trampling over death by death” in the Paschal mystery, dying becomes a weapon for holiness when wielded against sin rather than a source of despair and phrenetic consumption of passing things. As we pray in preface III of the Sundays of Ordinary Time:

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation,
through Christ our Lord (Daily Roman Missal 2012).

Although it is a consequence of our sin, mortality is to be the means of salvation in Christ. The early Church understood martyrs as the model Christians and martyrdom the best kind of death. Martyrs recapitulate Christ’s death and Passover to the Father by remaining steadfast in faith over all passing concerns. Suicide stood in clear contrast, for by killing oneself the will of God is frustrated, as St. Justin the Martyr writes.

Yet contemporary authors often conflate martyrdom and suicide, even considering Christ’s death on the cross as suicide (see Droge and Tabor 1992). Calls for Christians to soften their opposition to physician-assisted suicide inevitably follow from this confusion. David Thomasma (1998), for example, suggests that because martyrdom can be defined as “taking action in disregard for one’s life in view of a higher principle,” it follows that some circumstances can make assisted suicide resemble martyrdom in a moral sense (pp. 135–36). On the one hand, such definitions bear resemblence to Émile Durkheim’s ([1897] 2013) sociological categories positing martyrdom as “altruistic suicide,” betraying an approach to Christianity from outside tradition. On the other, Thomasma raises a valid question concerning the character of Christian bioethics by steering clear of typical secular autonomy-based reasoning regarding assisted suicide. He considers how St. Perpetua guided a trembling gladiator’s hand to her throat to complete her martyrdom, and reasons that it would be hard to deny her intention to die and participation in bringing it about (Thomasma 1998, 135). He is thus correct that considering the deaths of martyrs enriches our reflection on end of life issues; however, he goes awry by failing to locate suffering and death in sufficient relation to the Paschal mystery. This requires a more robust sense of theology.

In this essay, I shall discuss the martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch, and how he understood his own death in direct relation to the Paschal mystery. Then I will distinguish Ignatius’s Christian logic from both secular autonomy-based reasoning and Thomasma’s deflated analysis of assisted suicide. I will then point toward an alternative, liturgical approach to Christian bioethics, where Christian morality and, indeed, all of Christian tradition flows from the primordial lived encounter between God and the Church. Christian bioethics ought to see suffering and death firstly in reference to the kingdom of God.

Ignatius’s Crown of Martyrdom

St. Ignatius was one of the Apostolic Fathers, with Sts. Clement of Rome and Polycarp, and a disciple of St. John the Apostle. Born in 35 AD, Ignatius Theophorus was consecrated bishop of Antioch around 100 AD. As the first major center of Christianity outside Jerusalem, Antioch was where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), and is today part of Turkey along the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea. Ignatius pastored the Antiochians for some years until his arrest by Roman officials as early as 108, per Eusebius, or as late as the 140s. The latter date would make him upward of one hundred years old when killed by the imperial authorities. The Roman calendar remembers St. Ignatius of Antioch as a bishop and martyr annually on October 17.

The Roman Empire hoped to make an example of him as a prominent church leader by a gruesome, humiliating, public execution: being thrown to wild beasts in the Colosseum. His death was meant to inhibit the spread of Christianity, a threat to the pax Romana, the political peace promised by Roman force. Ignatius penned a letter to the church in Rome while in transit to the Eternal City, begging the community to pray for him to remain brave and steadfast in the face of certain death. Like the rest of the early Church, he held persecution as a diabolical temptation for believers to renounce the faith, but the crown of martyrdom was held as the highest honor to be bestowed on a Christian by God. Accordingly, Ignatius wrote, “What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me!” Even “if they are reluctant, I shall force them to it.” Martyrdom most perfectly let the disciple imitate Christ’s death and Passover to the Father.

Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—only let me get to Jesus Christ! Not the wide bounds of earth nor the kingdoms of this world will avail me anything. “I would rather die” and get to Jesus Christ, than reign over the ends of the earth. That is whom I am looking for—the One who died for us. That is whom I want—the One who rose for us. I am going through the pangs of being born. (Ignatius 1885 §5-6)

It would be difficult for these words not to shock us. Perhaps they were more palatable in the first century, when Roman cruelty was commonplace, and the average person knew more of suffering than we do in the twenty-first century. Today, we would probably call a psychiatrist to place an involuntary hold on him. Nonetheless, the content is instructive for understanding how Ignatius approached his own death. He sought, at last, to become a true disciple following his heavenly master from death into life, passing from this world to the next. The beasts would merely be the pangs of birth (Jn 3:3-8), as he says, into eternal life by submitting his will in union to God’s and, thus, suffering a death like Christ’s. According to the foolish logic of the cross (1 Cor 1:18-31), the Roman Empire induced Ignatius into labor from the Church’s womb of new life, passing through death as a sacred birth canal. Hence, he most feared renouncing Christ and thus being stillborn. It would place him in danger of fire and brimstone, not to mention grant his persecutors room to boast over the cowardice of Christians. Rather, bearing witness (mártus) to the faith by “imitating the Passion of my God” was his greatest hope (§6, see CCC 2473). Taken together, St. Ignatius employed an unmistakably robust theological mode of thinking, writing, and acting—the logic of the cross—seeing suffering and death in the light of the Paschal mystery (see Pope John Paul II 1984, Salvifici Doloris 14-24).

Extending this cruciform logic, he feared false compassion from the Roman Christian community to whom he addressed his epistle: “Realize that I am voluntarily dying for God—if, that is, you do not interfere. I plead with you, do not do me an unseasonable kindness. Let me be fodder for wild beasts—that is how I can get to God” (Ignatius 4). Obstructing the bishop’s reception of the crown of martyrdom would obstruct God’s plan of salvation for Ignatius and the whole Church and also divert the community’s energy and resources from evangelization to confronting the Roman Empire. Thus, “[if] I make a different plea, pay no attention to me” (§7). In the light of eternity, the universal Church would benefit more from his death than his continued shepherding of a single community, extending the incarnate dispensation of the Son of God securing the salvation of the world. The Antiochians would have Christ as their true pastor with or without Ignatius, whereas “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” as Tertullian (160-240 AD) later put it. Ignatius’s imitation of Christ’s death would unleash a spiritual power paradoxically to further spread Christianity through the Roman Empire. Far from despising life in this world, he set his vision on the joy of everlasting life, and his martyrdom helped extend Christ’s salvation of the world.

Ignatius employed a fundamentally liturgical language to express this. His baptismal imagery of martyrdom as a birth, noted above, is wed to Eucharistic idioms. He would be “a sacrifice for God while there is an altar at hand,” and the Christians in Rome would be a choir singing praise to the Father in Jesus Christ (§2, 4). The pleasures of this world were insufficient for him because he greatly desired “God’s bread, which is the flesh of Christ” (§7). Indeed, his personal sacrifice in martyrdom made him “God’s wheat,” tested and “ground by the teeth of the wild beasts” (§4). Yet Ignatius was not alone in interpreting his impending death in Paschal, liturgical terms. Discussing him alongside Polycarp, Origen, Cyprian, and others, Thomas Merton (2017), summarized their collective view of martyrdom as the crown of the Eucharistic life. This entails a bidirectional relationship between liturgical experience and martyrdom. The former prepares the Christian for the latter, while martyrdom signifies the completion of a liturgical life.

The Ignobility of (Assisted) Suicide

Although he did not volitionally walk into his arrest, Ignatius took active steps toward death by exhorting the Roman Christians to forebear in their compassion and permit him to face the beasts. He sought death inasmuch as his Master had done so first by voluntarily entering Jerusalem and mounting no defense. How is the martyr’s heroism contrasted with the suicide’s ignobility when both seemingly intend to die? G. K. Chesterton ([1908] 2010) says in Orthodoxy:

A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. (p. 69)

The martyr has feasts dedicated to his death day, while the suicidal person ought to receive fervent prayers, compassion, and protection from self-harm. Although “the early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness,” Ignatius and others saw death as a means. It was a cosmic Passover into eternal life when suffered rightly. Yet the prerogative to determine the moment of death belonged, mysteriously, to the Author of life, not the sovereign individual. “Thou shall not kill” extends to oneself, as St. Augustine said, accentuated inasmuch as suicide precludes repentance (City of God ¹⁹⁹³, I.20-22; see Pope John Paul II 1995, Evangelium Vitae 66).¹ Moreover, Justin Martyr (100–165 AD) says “if, then, we should all kill ourselves we would be the cause, as far as it is up to us, why no one would be born and be instructed in the divine doctrines, or even why the human race might cease to exist; if we do act thus, we ourselves will be opposing the will of God” (Second Apology 1885, 4). As long as he walked in the flesh, Ignatius labored for the Church. When Christ called him home through death, he eagerly acquiesced like St. Paul (Phil 1:22) for Christians belong to God in life and in death (Rom 14:8). Suicide, in contrast, ends in the grave, as it is always committed to exert authority over the moment of death—not seeking to bring about good outside the subject. Or, rather, not wielding death ascetically against sin but against the sovereignty of God. It seeks to enact death due to a lack of joy in this life, also denying the goodness of its creator.

Assisted suicide, following Chesterton, wants everything to end in a “death with dignity,” which is regarded as an end freely chosen by the strong-willed, maintaining control over the dying process, or avoiding becoming a burden. Taken together, the “dignity” language amounts to something resembling autonomy or independence that would translate compassion for the terminally ill to an obligation to assist them in ending life. Similarly, many attempt to rename physician-assisted suicide as physician (or medical) aid-in-dying. Who could oppose death with dignity or providing aid to the dying? Yet revising the language revises the moral discourse in a consequentialist idiom, especially by turning away from suicide terminology. The semantic sleight of hand reframes the physician’s wholistic commitment to the patient in a traditional mode toward a fixation on outcomes and effects. The end of relieving suffering or lightening the fear of being a burden is sought with whatever means can be efficiently devised to achieve it, while apparently maintaining a physician’s commitment to the dying patient via providing “aid-in-dying.” The language is pliable while maintaining a substrata affirming self-determination, rationality, and freedom from suffering as fundamental to the good life and denying the intrinsic moral evil of causing death (Death with Dignity 2019). The discourse is far from the Fifth Commandment’s prohibition against killing. In this mode of thinking, a February 2020 German Supreme Court decision declared assisted suicide a necessary option for expressing the fundamental human right to autonomy. “The decision to end one’s own life is of the most fundamental significance to one’s existence,” in the court’s opinion, and ought to be “guaranteed in all stages of a person’s existence” (Federal Constitutional Court 2020). Nonetheless, killing others or oneself steals the Divine prerogative over life and death (1 Sam 2:6). Suicide is murderous but not just against oneself: suicide murders the world, as Chesterton says. Christian martyrdom saves it.

The Church’s traditional funeral norms convey meaning about the morality of suicide, even the medieval practice of burying the suicide apart from all others. “The man’s crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible” (Chesterton [1908] 2010, 69). Yes, it violates the commandment against killing, but it destroys a link with being itself. To use stark language, it is closer to plotting the world’s destruction and completing it in intention, illuminating the Church’s hesitation to perform funerals for those who took their own lives. Pragmatically speaking, these practices contributed to suicide being far less common in the Middle Ages than the modern west. Burying the suicide apart, though sounding harsh today, unambiguously demonstrates the ignobility of taking one’s life for all to see.

The seriousness of the act, especially its finality that seemingly precludes repentance, motivates a great pastoral sensitivity for those tempted to harm themselves. It should be noted that judgment of a soul’s final destination belongs to God alone who searches hearts, truly knows man’s culpability, desires, intentions, wounds, and sicknesses, showing true mercy to all—but it does not negate the objective seriousness of self-killing with or without the assistance of a physician (CCC 2280-3; 1734; 1037). Given the moral gravity of suicide, medical professionals caring for dying or depressed patients clearly have an important pastoral role to play (see Kheriaty 2012).

We should observe a further distinction within Chesterton’s contention that a martyr dies for something outside himself. One could object that a patient desiring assisted suicide cares to relieve his or her family or the health care system of a heavy burden, after all. The Christian martyr does not conform his death to Christ’s for immanent gains. Ignatius very well could have spoken of his death as a political move, but he did not (though the Romans sought his death for political purposes). He suffered death for the eternal, transcendent concern to be with Christ and further the world’s salvation. These are not immanent or political ends. Both Christ and Ignatius, rather, acted in union with the Father’s will.² The logic of the cross clearly demonstrates a profoundly different vision of the good life and the good death that sees spiritual, ascetic value in one’s final days depending on the care and support of others (Bishop 2016, 265–68). Accepting suffering and dependence—even profound depression—in union with Christ to the end similarly saves the world according a higher logic than is accessible to secularism. With the martyrs as paradigm, the end of life for Christians presents a profound moment to participate in the ever-new Paschal mystery, completing the death of the “old man” and birth of the “new man” initiated in baptism (Behr 2015, 88–95).

This renders Christian death specifically Christian, whereas one could conceivably witness to Marxism, Liberalism, or Buddhism, as in monastic self-immolation (Kovan 2018). Perhaps Buddhist traditions honor self-immolators for the pursuit of political goals; perhaps secularists will join the ancient Stoics honoring assisted suicides. Christians, however, do not honor such deaths in their calendars, manifesting, at heart, an ontological difference from other moral communities driving deeper than discourse with shared language like “dignity” can usually make evident. Moral language, as Alasdair MacIntyre (1998) often says, acquires its meaning only within a tangible context. Language, practice, and social structures belong to particular moral communities employing a particular rationality. Thus, dignity, for example, assumes quite different meanings when embedded within different ways of life. End of life ethics is always wed to foundational commitments embodied in particular forms of life. Divergent meta-narratives are at play (Sulmasy 2013).

On secular terms, we can acknowledge that assisted suicide for the competent terminally ill person circumscribes suffering, bodily and existential, akin to other palliative measures. It protests the tyranny of disease, death, and disability. It asserts man’s freedom and self-determination to the extent of imposing limits on bodily corruption or at least limits to how much the body’s decay is consciously experienced before death. One can detect a certain secular nobility in wielding autonomy against a cosmic struggle with death and dependence, resonating with Seneca’s view on suicide: “It is a great man who not only orders his own death, but contrives it” (Letter 70, 207). As he reasons, “must I want for the pangs of disease…when I can strike through the midst of torment and shake my adversaries off?” (205). A faithless compassion distant from the cross would encourage and assist others in such a project without access to the theo-logic “fashioning a remedy from our mortality” (Preface III, Sundays of Ordinary Time).

David Thomasma sees similarity between some assisted suicides and the martyrdom of St. Perpetua because he approaches the tradition on secularized terms. He fails to appreciate suffering and death within the economy of salvation, that is, in the light of the Paschal mystery (Cherry 2003). The testimony of the martyrs does not simply declare death good for Christians, as Thomasma (1998) claims (p. 137). If that were true, the early Church and later believers ought to have advocated for suicide at least in some circumstances. Further, Christian martyrdom is not primarily a matter of abstractly “taking action in disregard for one’s life in view of a higher principle” (135–36). The martyrs rather affirm Christ’s lordship over death and affirm the fundamental importance of orienting all concerns toward the kingdom of God.

It is at this point that William Stempsey’s (1998) otherwise laudable response to Thomasma grows weak by straining the doctrine of double effect (pp. 219–20). From what is recorded in his letters, St. Ignatius certainly appears to have intended, not merely foreseen, to die, though as a matter of faith in Christ. Perhaps one could successfully reason against Ignatius’s intention. However, the case of ancient virgins whose chastity was threatened makes the issue more acute. In “Concerning Virgins,” St. Ambrose favorably recounts the story of a certain Pelagia, her mother, and sisters who placed themselves in danger of certain death by wading into a river while persecutors threatening rape approached. He even calls it “an instance of martyrdom,” by which “God is not offended” (2009) (§32-33).³ The critical issue for Ambrose is not Pelagia or her mother’s intention but rather conforming one’s life and death to Christ.

Locating Christian Bioethics

Comparing the various treatments of end of life issues in the previous section, Tristram Engelhardt (2000) is right to say “assisted suicide offers us a moral and theological Rorschach test to disclose foundational commitments regarding morality and theology” (p. 331). For St. Paul, Christians “speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory, and which none of the rulers of this age knew” (1 Cor 2:7-8). It is the foolish logic of the cross, which Ignatius embodied in his martyrdom. The baptismal and Eucharistic imagery in his letters, discussed earlier, underscores the importance of approaching suffering, death, and Christian bioethics, in general, with a liturgical grammar. At the start, St. Ignatius, the ancient virgins, and the Church fathers commenting on them primarily use language of self-sacrifice, and one could similarly consider how Abraham was preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Further, heaven’s cruciform wisdom belongs to the Church, the Body of Christ. This means its distinctions will be difficult to appreciate for those outside the Church’s liturgical experience where grace-filled relics of martyrs and the Eucharistic sacrifice coincide. Indeed, if the world had known God’s wisdom, it would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:8). Here, I point toward a liturgical foundation for bioethics that locates moral issues in the context of the Church’s ongoing experience of the Paschal mystery.

Christians today have access to the same wisdom Ignatius embodied in the second century. Fundamentally, once one has died in the waters of baptism and ascetically extended that death to self, suffering and bodily death are radically reframed as moments of sacrifice. Once one has ascended with Christ and been raised to heavenly places, the world is reappreciated from a new angle enlightened from the light of Mt. Tabor, saying, with St. Francis, “Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death” (2009). At stake for Christian bioethics is an epistemological high ground dependent upon a living link to the One who trampled down death by death. Christians have taken on his mind (1 Cor 1:16), manifested vividly when St. Ignatius says his suffering and martyrdom will, at last, make him a true Christian. This epistemological high ground entails a newfound vision of life to reappreciate suffering, death, eating, drinking, health care, and more in reference to the kingdom of God.

Furthermore, this new vision is transacted at prayer. Liturgy provides the living link between Christ and the Church, bringing believers into the halls of the kingdom of God. It invests her members with a God’s-eye view to take their experience of the kingdom into their moral lives in the world. Liturgy is the ontological condition for theology, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann put it, and thus also the condition for morality (Fagerberg 2018). To turn an ancient phrase, the Church’s rule of prayer establishes the rule of morality (lex orandi, lex moralis). This requires a grander sense of liturgy than often appreciated.

[To] properly understand this requires taking the lex [law, rule] with as much force as the orandi [prayer]. The appeal to lex orandi is an appeal to tradition, law, revelation, the grammar of Church doctrine, the application of the commandments of God, and acceptance of the Church’s rule of faith—all of which can be experienced as a living basis within the liturgical life of the Church. Theology is experiential union with God. (Fagerberg 2017, 121)

Having liturgy as the ontological condition for theology and morality articulates something similar to what the sociohistorically sensitive scholar appreciates. It means that Christian morality can truly only be intelligible within its context. Just as the modern citizen of a secular state can hardly comprehend an Aristotelian vision of social roles, obligations, and purposes when living outside the Greek city-state, so the person outside the Church’s lex orandi will struggle to apprehend its meaning or force. Liturgical morality goes further, however, by transcending social–philosophical categories. Its ultimate purpose is theosis or deification, taking hold of a person for a new life reaching deeper than a nominal adherence to moral norms or religious practices (Second Vatican Council 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8-12). Its logic is the Logos taking flesh in each believer.

Consider the Desert Fathers’ testimony: “The true theologian is the one who prays, and the one who truly prays is the theologian” (Evagrius 1972). This speaks to an ontological transition requiring ascetic conversion of heart more than intellectual study of texts, though the latter is not excluded. Thus, first theology is done by holy liturgists living the kingdom of God now, while second theology is done more academically by grappling with first theology. Liturgical morality happens when those first theologians take their personal experience of God, judged in the matrix of the whole tradition, into the world, including health care! In David Fagerberg’s words, “Moralis [morality] is ex-pired (breathed out) by the liturgical lungs of the Church because the Holy Spirit in-spires (breathes life into) the behavior of the person as that person leaves” the liturgy (2017, 123). The Christian bioethicist, then, is the one who truly prays, embarking upon new life in Christ and seeing health care in heaven’s light. The resurrected vision enables Christian bioethics to be a charismatic activity in an important sense, locating health care within the Christian salvation narrative via spiritual vision (Engelhardt 2000, 338). The pure of heart are blessed with clear moral vision.

The martyrs paradigmatically locate death and life within the ever-new Paschal mystery and, importantly, do so according to a liturgical grammar. St. Ignatius of Antioch saw his own martyrdom as putting him through the pangs of being born, as well as performing a Eucharistic transformation of himself as God’s bread. Having developed in the Church’s womb, her lex orandi, he came to full term as a new man in Christ. He was, and still is, a true theologian in the sense called for by Evagrius. This enabled him to take his liturgical experience into the world and see his impending suffering and death rightly. His example challenges Christian bioethics to do likewise by locating all of health care in relation to the kingdom of God. This entails beginning with living and experiencing the Church’s own Eucharistic wellspring of life and organizing reflections on the end of life around it. To repeat Fagerberg’s point: this requires a grander sense of liturgy than usually appreciated.

Liturgical morality “is an appeal to tradition, law, revelation, the grammar of Church doctrine, the application of the commandments of God, and acceptance of the Church’s rule of faith—all of which can be experienced as a living basis within the liturgical life of the Church” (Fagerberg 2017, 121). It is not a call merely for an aesthetic enhancement to bioethics by utilizing beautiful prayers as source texts for moral reflections or an impetus for a subjectivized approach where one’s “personal discernment” can lead them far outside the Church. In general terms, liturgical morality is “doing the world the way it was meant to be done,” to use Aidan Kavanagh’s words (Fagerberg 2017, 128). Spelling it out requires each of the elements noted above—tradition, law, revelation, and so on—while understanding that the Church’s liturgical life is prior to principles. Much more could be said on approaching end of life issues with a liturgical grammar, but it suffices here to identify a more robust foundation for Christian bioethics than supposed in conflating martyrdom and (assisted) suicide or in only approaching them via principles like the doctrine of double effect.

Conclusion

Novel formulations like “physician aid-in-dying” redraw moral categories foreign to the kingdom of God and the traditional language of murder, suicide, and sacrifice encountered in liturgical morality in order to repackage autonomy-based arguments. Conflating suicide and martyrdom in the manner of Thomasma and others represents a serious deflation of Christianity. It trades transcendent ends for immanent semantics, seeing two-dimensional shadows of the three-dimensional Body of Christ. The vision of liturgical morality, by contrast, necessitates approaching the light and deserting the cave of shadows.

In Chesterton’s day, people were suggesting “that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny” (Chesterton [1908] 2010, 68). That was the early twentieth century, peaking with modern confidence. Have medicine and bioethics yet evolved to the golden age? Differing moral communities will judge the age divergently as either golden or corrupted. St. Ignatius of Antioch, for his part, sought to become a real disciple by accepting death at Roman hands to be God’s sacrifice. “My Desire has been crucified and there burns in me no passion for material things. There is living water in me, which speaks and says inside me, ‘Come to the Father’” (§7). Iconography of Ignatius, like most imagery of martyrs, includes the weapons inducing his delivery into eternal life. Two lions gnaw on the bishop in his vestments as he dispassionately endures suffering, the light of glory shining through him. In the beasts and the colosseum, the Roman weapons of destruction became the means of salvation, just as the cross of Christ had been.

Biographical Note

Ethan M. Schimmoeller, BS, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Currently, he is away from clinical education to complete a master’s in bioethics from The Ohio State University. He hopes to match into family medicine, and practice in a small town.