such discourse provides the needed elements to certificate the martyrial validity of the confessors’
experience, and the reasons can be easily hypothesized:
1) first of all, the Hebrews’ words are a “confession” expressed in the face of the emperor, and could be for this reason perceived as a strong tertium comparationis between the biblical episode and the confessors’ experience;
2) one of the recurring topic in Cyprian’s theology is the idea that the validity of martyrdom does not result from the concrete development and outcome of the persecution. In this sense, Daniel’s companions’ discourse can be considered as the element of the biblical story which actually reveals – more than the same furnace – the
“martyrial connotation” of the experience.
In the Hebrews’ speech two different elements are systematically evoked by Cyprian as proofs of the effectiveness of their martyrdom:
1) the expression of the faith in God’s power;
2) the clause “et si non”, declaring their intention to undergo death. Such clause, more than any other element of the story, expresses in Cyprian’s interpretation the courage of the victims, who do not manifest any fear in front of the possibility to lose their lives.
Such intimate intention represents the element that makes of an experience a
“martyrial one”, whatever conclusion the persecution may know.
From a general overview of letters it appears reasonable to affirm that bodily death does not play a role in Cyprian’s definition of Christian martyrdom and in the acceptance of confessores’ “martyrial dignity”.
Affirmed in letter 6, such “dignity” finds its fullest expression in letter 61, where an
“addressee-confessor” can be praised with no reticence, for he is at the same time a bishop. The letter, that places itself on the opposed extremity of De Lapsis, represents for the author the occasion to even affirm that God himself wants to make confessores in order to reinforce the threatened church with the strength of direct testimonies.
Notwithstanding such “disregard” for physical death – that actually does not result to be ever contradicted – the panorama has to change when the perception of an imminent and unavoidable deflagration of the world leads the bishop and the community to the acceptance of a necessary
death. In those cases, since death is expected for everyone, the experience of martyrdom coincides with an occasion to die – so to speak – in the best way, which means conquering at the same time the reward of the eternal salvation. In front of apocalyptic sceneries, the condition of those who survive persecutions does not deserve to be mentioned anymore.
For this reason, in the case of letter 58, the expression “et si non” does not represent the certification of a respectable salvation, but the element that justifies the same citation of Daniels’
companions in the document: they indeed can be enumerated among those who were ready to face death. In this occasion the author seems to offer a support to those Christians who, unavoidably destined to die, should better choose to die as martyrs. This perspective emerges even more clearly from letter 67, where Daniel and his companions’ experiences are mentioned as an allusion to the strength of those who keep on manifesting the validity of faith also in the moment of the worlds’
deflagration; here the bishop does not even mention the discourse of the Hebrews, and simply alludes, in a generic sense, to the pain and the afflictions they accepted to sustain.
It must be conclusively stressed that the analysis of Cyprian’s works offers, apart from important elements concerning Dn reception, a wider occasion to notice how the same biblical material can be used to argument different positions and to actively deal with a range of various situations in community life. Scriptures become in this case a sort of trait d’union allowing to
“manage and modulate” a theological position according to different urgencies emerging from the Sitz im Leben.
5.2 HONORATA MORS.DANIEL “TALES” IN TERTULLIAN’S ELABORATION ABOUT MARTYRDOM
The definition of a link between Dn “tales” and the present of the communities does not represent a peculiarity simply ascribable to Cyprian: as has been mentioned, African context offers at least another important author who exploits such biblical material to elaborate a typological interpretation of the life of the church, that is Tertullian. In two different works both Daniel and mainly his companions are mentioned in order to articulate a discourse concerning the theology of martyrdom and the historical persecutions.
Before approaching those passages – one from Scorpiace and the other from Adversus Marcionem – it becomes necessary to underline a fundamental gap that distances him from the bishop of Carthage. If the treatise of De Lapsis and the epistolary of Cyprian can be considered as concrete tools allowing the absent bishop both to run a church menaced by problems of authority and to support believers in the time of persecution, the principal objectives of the works of Tertullian here considered should be researched, so to speak, in the exposition of a well organized and coherent theological system, capable to tackle other options and to prove the efficacy of the author’s position under a theoretical point of view.
In other words, it should be constantly remembered that if Cyprian’s principal care is represented by “concrete efficacy”, Tertullian’s main goal resides in “theoretical solidity”.