The Flowers of the Martyrs

“Then Herod, seeing that he had been tricked by the Magi, was exceedingly angry; and he sent and slew all the boys in Bethlehem and all its neighborhood who were two years old or under…” (Mt 2:16)

Brief their lives, brief their mention in Scripture, yet the Holy Innocents still arouse pity and devotion across the centuries. We commonly speak of martyrs “dying for Christ” meaning “for the sake of,” but these little ones actually died “in place of” Christ. Not only are they alteri Christi, like all the saints, but Our Lord’s blood brothers as well. As the Collect of their Mass says, the professed their faith “not by speaking but by dying.” The martyrdom is also an argument for salvation via baptism by blood, since they perished three decades before sacramental baptism by water was instituted.

Only mentioned in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the Innocent died unnoticed by historians of their day. Perhaps the slaughter of a few infants seemed trivial compared to some of Herod the Great’s other crimes, such as the murders of his favorite wife and his two sons by her. The lives of a dozen or so Jewish boys meant nothing to the Roman Empire.

But in salvation history, the Innocents do matter. St. Matthew applies a prophecy of Jeremiah to the Massacre of the Innocents: “…Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are no more” (Mt 3:18 after Jer 31:15). The cited text comes from a longer consoling text promising that joy will follow sorrows of the conquest and exile that were about to fall upon Jerusalem. Jeremiah continues: “…Let thy voice cease from weeping and thine eyes from tears, for there is a reward for thy work” (Jer 3:16). The Innocents’ passage from gore to glory fulfills both aspects of the prophecy.

Moreover, the Innocents are Types, symbolic figures illuminating the life of Christ. Escaping their disaster through the Flight into Egypt casts the Infant Jesus in three Biblical roles. He is the New Moses, evading a tyrant’s murderous design, the New Jacob eluding pursuit by a jealous rival chieftain, and the New Israel destined for glory after the destruction of the Old.

But as so often happens with Bible stories, the faithful craved more information than Scripture offered. So the apocryphal Gospel of James or Protoevangelium invented details surrounding the massacre. In this book, when Elizabeth flees with her infant son John the future Baptist, a mountainside obligingly opens to shelter them until danger is past. Meanwhile, Herod orders John’s father, Zachary, to be slain in the Temple in revenge for the baby’s escape. Zachary’s body disappears, leaving his blood congealed into stone beside the altar.

Other expansions have been offered in fiction, music, and media, but Anna Katharina Emmerich’s nineteenth century account in The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations (I:25) stands out for its sheer sadism. Here, Herod summons to his palace mothers and infants not only from Bethlehem but from as far away as Arabia, ostensibly to receive a reward. They are ushered into a great hall where soldiers seize the children and carry them away to be slaughtered in an adjoining courtyard while Herod watches from a tower window. The wailing mothers are sent home and the tiny corpses are cast into a mass pit grave that collapses at the moment of Christ’s death. Emmerich estimates the number of victims at 707 or 717.

Realistic numbers would be 12 to 20 children slain in Bethlehem, but those casualty figures had long been inflated to fantastic extremes. Eventually the Innocents became identified with the undefiled throng of 144,000 white-robed saints (Rev 14: 1-5), the first-fruits of the Kingdom who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” This text, along with the episode from St. Matthew, and Psalm 123/24 are used in the Divine Office and both Extraordinary and Novus Ordo forms for the Feast of the Holy Innocents. (The texts are deployed differently in the old and new liturgies, but comparison is beyond the scope of this article.)

The feast was first recorded at Carthage and spread throughout the Church during the fifth century. By 485, the Latin Church fixed its celebration right after Christmas on December 28th. The Byzantines chose December 29th. Their Memorial came to be known under different names, from the Destruction of the Children of Bethlehem in the East to Childermas in medieval England.

Patristic sermons expounded on both the destruction and salvation of the Innocents. St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395) describes in detail the agony of a mother torn between protecting both her nursling and her toddler from Herod’s soldiers. St. Augustine (d. 430), as quoted in the Roman Breviary, contrasts the care the children deserved with the brutality they suffered, ripped from “their mothers’ milky breasts.” Scarcely born from their mothers, he observes, they were reborn into eternal life. “Flowers of the Martyrs” he calls them, buds withered by early frost yet blooming as the first adornments of the Church.

But a generation before St. Augustine, the Innocents had already been called “Flowers of the Martyrs” (flores Martyrum) by Prudentius (d. 405), the first major Christian poet:

Hail, flowers of the Martyrs,
Whom at the very doorway of life,
The pursuer of Christ destroyed,
As a tempest blasts the budding roses.

You first victims for Christ,
A tender troop of the slain
Below the altar itself, you simple ones
Play with your palms and your crowns.¹

In 1568, St. Pius V added these and Prudentius’ other verses about the Innocents, Audit tyrannis anxius, (“The anxious tyrant heard”) as hymns for their feast day in the Roman Breviary.

The Holy Innocents also began appearing in Christian art during the fifth century. The earliest known example is a mosaic in the Basilica of St. Mary Major (ca. 440) featuring them in one episode from a cycle on the life of Christ. They appear in sculpture, stained glass, paintings, and manuscript illuminations across medieval Europe but less often in the East and never become routine subjects for icons. The motif was especially popular from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century as artists mastered complex action scenes. Notable images of frantic horror were painted by Matteo di Giovanni (1488), Jacopo Tintoretto (1582), Guido Reni (1611), Peter Paul Rubens (1612 and 1638). But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow” (1565) achieves chilling immediacy by placing the massacre in a contemporary Flemish village.

The popular cult of the Innocents seems to have radiated from the Holy land where the fourth-century Basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem included a chapel in their honor. In 414, relics purported to be theirs were brought from there to Gaul by St. John Cassian. Other relics were enshrined at the Basilicas of St. Paul Outside the Walls and St. Mary Major at Rome. The cathedrals of Lisbon and Milan, as well as various churches in France and Germany, also claimed to possess relics of the little martyrs.

The holy children also gave their name to the famous Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, where some two million of the city’s dead were buried between the twelfth century and its closure in 1780. The cemetery grounds had been a popular spot for socializing and even commerce among the charnel houses and mass graves, juxtapositions that did not shock people in times past. Neither did frivolous merriment on the Innocents’ feast day, like the medieval English custom of the boy bishop, a chorister in miniature vestments who presided over services then and on St. Nicholas Day. Reformers ended that practice, but pranks and foolery are still part of festivities celebrating the Innocents in the Hispanic world and the Philippines.

Regrettably, the little martyrs also became associated with some regrettable aspects of medieval and Renaissance life. For example, if the Holy Innocents were murdered children, then murdered children must be new Innocents and therefore holy. This equation was first applied to “St.” William of Norwich (1144), a boy whose homicide was blamed on Jews. Such accusations of ritual murder (the Blood Libel) fueled anti-Semitic hysteria for centuries.

The cult of the Innocents also inspired the disastrous Children’s Crusade (1212) in which thousands of European youths, armed only with the charism of their innocence, perished or were sold into slavery en route to free the Holy Land.

The massacred boys of Bethlehem acquired a new significance when foundling hospitals began to be established in medieval cities to care for abandoned infants. The Innocents became the patrons of these pathetic children, very few of whom would reach adulthood because mortality rates ran as high as 90 percent in such institutions. Fewer would have had decent prospects if they had managed to survive. Adoptions were rare and family connections were essential for success. Despite charitable initiatives, infanticide and exposure of unwanted infants have remained social problems in the West into modern times. Already considered the patrons of babies, the Holy Innocents should also be invoked against these issues and all forms of child abuse.

Of all the works cited here, medieval mystery plays uniquely capture the poignancy of the Innocents’ plight, for they come from an age when infant lives were fragile as flickering candles. Written, produced, and performed by anonymous guildsmen for their towns, these are popular art in the finest sense of the term. Plays about the Massacre of the Innocents “Offer some of the most moving depictions of grief in medieval culture.”² It was dramatized multiple times, but two versions from Coventry, England in the early fifteenth century have special merit: The Dead of Herod and The Shearmen and Tailors’ Play. Embedded in the latter is “The Coventry Carol,” an eerie blend of lullaby and dirge sung by a mother to doomed child:

Lully lulla, thow littell tine child,
By, by, lully lullay, thow littelltyne child,
By, by, lully lullay!

O sisters too,
How may we do
For to preserve this day
This pore yongling,
For whom we do singe
By, by, lully lullay?

Herod the king,
In his raging,
Chargid he hath this day
His men of might
In his own sight
All Yonge children to slay-

That wo is me
Poore child, for thee,
And ever morne and [may]
For thi parting
Neither say nor singe,
By, by, lully lyllay.

Recorded by many famous performers, this song endures in the modern repertoire of Christmas carols, a moan of grief among the season’s joyful sounds. It reminds us that not all Christmases are merry and not everyone is blessed with the warm embrace of happy family. The Holy Innocents who perished in place of Jesus foreshadow the Savior’s own death: from wood of the cradle to wood of the cross.

Yet it would distort the traditional significance of the Holy Innocents to focus only on the horror of their passing or the sufferings of other children. Their message is two-fold: destruction and salvation, death and life. The great French religious poet Charles Péguy (d. 1914) develops both those themes in his poem The Holy Innocents, a meditation on Prudentius’ ancient hymn. Péguy notes with gentle irony that babies who knew nothing of Jesus or Herod and had never opened their mouths to praise the Lord should become the only ones in Heaven who can sing God’s “new song” and who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” The Innocents are “rosebuds in a dew of blood,” flowers where later martyrs will be fruit. And the reward for their pain is simply to play at the foot of Heaven’s high altar.

What game can one play
With a palm and with martyrs’ crowns?
“I suppose they roll hoops,” says God, . . .

Endnotes:

² Eleanor Parker, Clerk of Oxford blog, Dec 24, 2014. This section is indebted to Parker’s insights.