PERSECUTION // AD 167

A fragrance sweet as incense permeated the open air. Fire arose like a curtain, wholly enveloping the man who stood freely at the pyre. His arms were bound but he asked not to be nailed to the pyre saying, "He who enables me to endure the fire will enable me to remain on the pyre without shrinking." The saint stood illumined- fire within and without- and much like the bush before Moses and the youths in the furnace so many centuries ago, the fire did not burn him. As the flames moved along his skin, it did not appear as burnt flesh but as the metallic iridescence of fire mingled with gold and silver. His persecutors, frustrated that he remained unharmed, pierced him through with a sword. And when the life of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, disciple of John the Apostle was snuffed out by the sword, so too were the flames upon the pyre extinguished, perishing into smoke and ash as holy fire left his body. 

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The body of Polycarp was destroyed by the authorities, but the story of his martyrdom would be enough for Christians to cherish, for it revealed great mystery of the Christian faith: just as Christ triumphed over his enemies by death, so too would the saints. The refrain of this mystery in various scales throughout Church history is nothing short of miraculous. Where the Church was persecuted to near extinction in one place, she would rise again elsewhere. After Rome was sacked in 390, Constantinople would bear the Church forward for over a millennia and when Byzantium fell in 1453, a new center for Orthodoxy was already on the rise far to the North. More recently in 1922, Soviet Russia expelled many dissenting Christian intellectuals to Paris (Nikolay Lossky and his then teenage son Vladimir among them) in an attempt to wound the Church. It was this act that exported Orthodox theology to Paris, then to the Western intellectual world as a whole through the writings of the 20th century neo-patristics: Vladimir Lossky, Georges Florovsky and Dumitru Staniloae, to name only a few.

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"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," so wrote Tertullian. Over time, those seeds would be sown thickly, the harvest reaped abundant.