Wicked Games

A book about the worlds that collided in the martyrdom of St. Perpetua

Creatures, if you had to face a beast, which beast would you pick?

Joyce E. Salisbury’s 1997 Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman is how I learned that it’s really hard to get animals to kill people. Romans who condemned Christians and other criminals “to the beasts” often ended up just killing their prisoners with swords, because even if you starve a beast, it isn’t actually an employee; the miracle stories in which leopards and assorted fangtoothed whatnot lay down at the feet of the faithful are one especially dramatic subset of a larger pattern in which animals bit or tossed somebody, but didn’t deliver the killing blow.

Perpetua’s Passion is about both the specifics of what happened to one small group of martyrs in the year 203 AD, and the huge, colliding forces of Rome, Carthage, and Church, all of which shaped their lives and their eventual deaths. I don’t know how much of this material would be new to someone better-versed in Carthaginian history than me, but I loved the discussion of what made Carthage’s culture different from the rest of the Empire; I was fascinated by the details about life in an imperial prison, the difference between Perpetua’s martyrdom and the later large-scale persecutions, the ecclesiological arguments reflected in the dreams of Perpetua and her cellmates… and I liked, too, that this book will say “arguments about how the church should be governed” rather than “ecclesiological.” It’s short and easy to understand.

The exploration of Perpetua’s prophetic dreams in prison might be the richest part of the book. Salisbury explains why the dreams so often locate power in the feet; when Perpetua dreams herself transformed into a male wrestler, and her naked male body is rubbed down with oil, Salisbury is blunt (yes, Perpetua would have known this was a sexual image) without being crude (no, it is not a sex fantasy). She explores how Perpetua’s dream-visions both reflected and shaped ancient liturgical practice. She gives you cultural context without judgment, she doesn’t impose one interpretation at the expense of others, and she lets the dreams feel wondrous and mysterious, suffused with more than fear.

Salisbury explores the way Perpetua’s prophetic dreams in prison melded pagan and Christian symbolism—or deployed pagan symbolism in the service of Christian witness. You sometimes hear arguments about whether a particular culture is too tightly-tied to sin for it to become available as a language for Christian witness, for articulation of one’s own identity as a Christian. Lol specifically, I hear people decry attempts to discern Christian truths preserved by various gay and queer cultures. (Obviously I disagree!) Perpetua’s dreams showed no qualms about speaking Christian truth in imagery taken from a religious culture that was literally killing Christians at that moment. The narrative of her martyrdom isn’t an easy text about the joys of enculturation. It can be troubling—Perpetua’s decision to take hold of her executioner’s trembling hand and guide it to her throat looks maybe more willful in the context of Carthage’s proud tradition of female suicide. But nobody around her seemed to think pagan culture was simply unavailable as a language of exhortation or hope.

I had two small criticisms. The final section, on the way Perpetua’s narrative of her own martyrdom was interpreted later, sometimes became tendentious. Salisbury seemed to assume that any interpretation by later male Christians would be intended to tame the wild girl, when in fact at least one of the interpretations she cites seems to highlight the subversive, anti-patriarchal nature of Perpetua’s witness. It sort of came across like arguing, “The 1950s were an age of conformity, as we see in Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl,’ which portrays the unsavory actions and bleak fates of those who dared to rebel.” Sometimes even in orderly ages, Christians want to emphasize the disorderly character of our religion! And I’m me, so I really missed the book that could have been, which would have given equal attention to Perpetua’s enslaved co-martyr Felicity, delving into the specific characteristics of Carthaginian slavery and the likely shape of Felicity’s life and thought-world. But overall, I found this book more rich and compelling than its length would suggest.

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icymi

I’m in America magazine, writing about the experiences of LGBT+ kids in Catholic schools and the Building Catholic Futures project, which intends to help young people of every orientation envision a good future for themselves in the Church. For more info please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com

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Leopard mosaic in the palace of Beit ed-Dine photographed by Guillaime Piolle, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.