What makes a martyr? The proclamation of Patriarch Kirill and the question of sacred violence

When Patriarch Kirill promises forgiveness of sins and the status of martyr to Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine, he is drawing on one strand of thinking about martyrdom in Orthodox Christianity. (Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images)

What makes a martyr? I ask this question because the answer is far from obvious, even just within the Christian tradition, and because rhetoric around those killed in Ukraine plays on language of martyrdom in troubling ways.

I want to reflect on why, within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, someone would invest the battlefield dead with the status of “martyr”, and to suggest that, against such moves, it is possible to recover a sense that victims of systemic and state violence, rather than perpetrators, are the true martyrs.

The give-and-take of martyrdom

The word “martyr” has covered a wide range of meanings over time, from a witness in legal proceedings to a someone whinging about being unappreciated. These senses are connected through the long Christian tradition of treating people who have been violently killed for their faith as witness of that faith.

From early in the second century, Christian communities applied the word “martyr” to women and men who died at the hands of Roman authorities, rather than renounce Christ. While the authorities saw these people as obstinate, treasonous, maybe even bafflingly suicidal, Christian communities treated them as heroes and witnesses (martyres) both to the truth of the Christian message and to their own good character. These individuals were commemorated first by local communities and, later, by the churches more generally, and became the first group of people venerated as saints. The memory of persecution and martyrdom — whether or not it was ever as ubiquitous and relentless as presented — would decisively shape Christian self-identity.

This brief account doesn’t really answer the question, though. What makes a martyr? What qualifies a person for this privileged status as hero and saint, with all the rewards presumed to go with that status?

As early as people were being called martyrs, there was debate about who counted as one. One issue especially was the problem of voluntarity. If someone sought out death, even if in dying they could proclaim their faith in Christ, then for many theologians they were not a martyr. They testified to their own pride and boldness, rather than to Christ and his Gospel. And yet popular accounts, including those regularly read in churches on the commemorations of martyrs, continued to praise even the most wilful sufferers as martyrs and saints in graphic descriptions of their confident speech, gruesome tortures, and ultimate victories in death.

There has always been some tension between a theological impulse to define and regulate martyrdom, and the impulse to celebrate bold figures and enjoy the lurid violence they courted.

The problem of soldier-martyrs

In a recent sermon, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, has taken this latter impulse further. He said in a sermon that Russian soldiers who die fighting in Ukraine will have all their sins forgiven. In effect, he has proclaimed death in battle as qualification for martyrs’ status. It would not be surprising if, in time, he or his successor calls for their veneration as saints in the Russian Church.

Kirill’s statement boldly amplifies the rhetoric he has long been employing, and which one can see displayed so garishly in the Russian Armed Forces Cathedral: Russian war is holy war. Thus, Kirill describes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a battle for the soul of Russia, for the future of the Orthodox Church, against a “West” aligned with cultural decadence, anti-Christian politics, and demonic forces. In that context, it probably isn’t surprising that he would treat Russian fighters as would-be martyrs. After all, the argument goes, they’re fighting for Holy Russia reconstituted as a glorious Christian empire against political entities aligned with the diabolical forces of “Western” secularism. Death in that fight makes martyrs.

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

There is much to be criticised, both socially and theologically, in Kirill’s rhetoric, which is shared by Russian politicians and some other Orthodox clerics. Others have discussed at length his homophobic ideology, his subjection of the Church to an arm of the State, his toadying to a violent, repressive, and authoritarian regime, and so on. For now, I want only to focus in on this characterisation of soldiers as martyrs.

The first question is whether Kirill’s rhetoric is even in line with Orthodox Christian traditions. In this regard, as distasteful as it seems, there is a long history of treating soldiers as martyrs, under the right conditions. Sometimes a martyr could be re-depicted as a warrior. Demetrios of Thessaloniki, originally remembered as a young man killed during the persecutions under Diocletian (circa 306), eventually came to be depicted as a soldier in full battle regalia. In the Western Middle Ages, there is Pope Urban II’s offer of forgiveness of sins to those who would take up the cross and retake Jerusalem from the Muslim Seljuks.

But in Greece, too, the New Martyrs include not just Christians who refused to convert to Islam but, eventually, revolutionary fighters in the War of Independence, beginning in 1821. The rebels represented Greece, united in desire for political freedom and Christian faith. For them, and in other situations where nationalism and religious commitment coincide, the heroic warrior, dying valiantly in battle, is easily and all too quickly assimilated to the martyr. Russia has appropriated this aspect of tradition with soldiers like Yevgeny Rodionov, who was killed after being taken prisoner during the First Chechen War in 1996. Images depicting Rodionov as martyr and saint adorn not only Russian, but some Greek churches.

When Kirill promises forgiveness of sins and the status of martyr to Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine, he is drawing on one strand of thinking about martyrdom in Orthodox Christianity. His claims cannot be easily dismissed, but they can — and, I think, should — be countered.

The testimony of human frailty

I want to begin by recovering the early sense of martyr as a victim of state violence, and expand a bit on what it meant to early Christians. In accounts of martyrs, the Roman authorities are frequently the unwitting puppets of diabolical forces bent on attacking Christians. There is a war, to be sure, but it is being waged between Christ and the Devil. It is simply acted out through violence inflicted on human bodies. But, in this war, the way to victory is not through killing but through dying, because the martyr’s death exposes the state-based violence performing the Devil’s will. To fight and kill, in this kind of war, means joining the Devil’s side, because in doing so one participates in his attack on humanity made in the image of God. Language of “warfare” serves to invert the roles of martial prowess and human frailty, and the “witness” of martyrdom reveals at once the value of human lives — made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ — and the evil of state violence, which, like the Devil, merely seeks to destroy them.

Today, this sense of martyrdom is to be found not in Kirill’s praise for Russian soldiers, nor in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rhetoric about Ukrainian soldiers. Neither of these are martyrs in the early Christian sense. Rather, to find that sense of martyrdom as revelation of value and violence, I turn to Houston, Texas, and to Joni Zavitsanos’s massive art project, “Living Icons”.

Joni Zavitsanos is herself Greek Orthodox, and draws on its iconographic traditions in her art. “Living Icons” is built of thousands of photographs of people of whatever age, ethnicity, or social status, who died from COVID-19 between 2020 and 2021. Zavitsanos has added a nimbus — the “halo” of icons, showing a figure’s sainthood — to each photograph. In effect, she has claimed that these people, who have died of disease and the social conditions of the pandemic, are saints.

It is a bold claim, especially if one asks, “What have these people done to be called holy?” The answer can only be that they have suffered, and they have died. For Zavitsanos, one purpose of the installation is to proclaim to viewers that these deaths mattered, because these lives mattered. In a time when the numbers of dead top six million worldwide, and cases in Australia surpass ten million, Zavitsanos picks out individuals and reminds us that each one is an image of God, created, loved, and cherished. None of them can be reduced to statistics — which, after all, only mask the processes that led to their deaths. As she confronts us with each life lost and reminds us why they died, Zavitsanos recovers a sense of martyrdom as revelation. Each portrait in “Living Icons” demands that we remember the person portrayed, and condemn the violence of apathy and individualism.

Zavitsanos’s subjects are not soldiers or warriors. They are ordinary people. But their deaths expose systemic violence just as early Christian martyrs did. They offer, I think, a better vision of martyrdom than lionised Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, and one even more deeply rooted in Orthodox Christian tradition. Martyrdom, in this tradition, is revelation through violence. It reveals and reminds that the values of this world are inverted, and that what truly matters is not victory for this nation or that, but rather the precious frailty of human lives loved by God.

Jonathan Zecher is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University.