Join me this week as we encounter one of the earliest Christian martyrs, a man whose death offers an answer to an ancient philosophical question.
Name: Antipas
Life: died around 92 AD
Status: Saint
Feast Day: April 11
Today’s saint is Antipas of Pergamon. We don’t know when Antipas was born, but it was early enough that he could have known people who knew Jesus Christ. It’s been suggested, in fact, that he may have been brought to Christianity and mentored by the Saint John the apostle.
Antipas lived in the Greek city of Pergamon, near contemporary Bergama in Turkey. At the time Pergamon was a flourishing city in the Roman Empire. The city had benefitted from Alexander the Great’s conquests, which had the happy side effect of spreading Greek culture, philosophy, art and even the Greek language across much of the known world. As a result, there was suddenly much more room for culture, and philosophy entered the “Hellenistic” period. Greek speaking philosophers from all over Europe flocked to Athens, the centre of Greek culture. Even far away Pergamon produced one of the great leaders of the Skeptic school of philosophy. Then, about a century before the birth of Antipas, Athens took the wrong side in a local conflict and the Romans burned much of the city down. Hellenistic culture flowed outward, pooling all over the empire in Greek cities like Pergamon.
Pergamon was not just a cultural centre. It was also a religious centre, built around a high hill dotted with temples of the gods. In addition to the usual Greek and Roman gods, and of course the temple for the emperor’s divine spirit, Pergamon had temples for cults from the East. One of these, the cult of the mother goddess Cybele, had caused a scandal when it came to Rome about a century earlier. Conservative Romans had been disgusted at the rites performed by the cult’s crossdressing eunuch priests. Perhaps religion was in the air in Pergamon, for even some of the philosophers in Pergamon became mystical. A few centuries later Pergamon would become known for a variant of Neoplatonism which emphasized the occult practice of theurgy.
It often happened that philosophy in the Hellenistic world blurred the lines we would draw between religion and philosophy. The reason was that many philosophers were searching for a complete way of life, a way to live and die well. They were unsatisfied with the teachings of traditional religion, especially on questions like suffering. Disease, malice, error or just bad luck can bring suffering into the lives of the best prepared people. Is there anything we can do to make ourselves more secure against such twists of fate? Can philosophy help us to live or think or perhaps condition our minds in a way that will allow us to avoid suffering? The example of Socrates, the great father of philosophy, suggested that it might. When Socrates was condemned to die by the city of Athens, he went to his death cheerful and undisturbed, certain that a virtuous man could not be harmed in life or in death.