Divine Stone

St. Vincent was martyred during the Diocletian persecution of Christians (303-311). He was a deacon in the Roman settlement of Caesaraugusta, which today is the Spanish city of Zaragoza (aka Saragossa). Instead of a deacon’s customary dalmatic, he wears a cape-like chasuble over an alb. Another signifier of a deacon is draped over his left arm – the short scarf known as a maniple.

We find Vincent engaged in a conversation with his neighbor, St. Lawrence, which Vincent is enlivening with his expressive hands. Perched on his left shoulder, a raven, with its own role to play in the narrative of Vincent’s martyrdom.

Little is known about Vincent’s life aside from the colorful accounts of his martyrdom. The narrative in the Golden Legend appears to be based principally on the hymn to Vincent in the Peristephanon (“Crown of Martyrs”) of Prudentius, a late fourth century Christian poet who composed in Latin and may have been, like Vincent, a native of Caesaraugusta. The  Peristephanon has been translated into delightful English verse by Len Krisak.

According to these accounts, Vincent served under Valerius, bishop of Caesaraugusta. Valerius had a speech impediment and often relied on Vincent to speak on his behalf. During the Diocletian persecution, Valerius and Vincent were arrested for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods and brought before Dacian, the Roman governor of Valencia. 

The Pedestal

The left and center sides of the pedestal depict Vincent and Valerius coming before Dacian. (Dacian could be the twin brother of the emperor on St. Lawrence’s pedestal. Perhaps John Angel employed the same model for both figures.)

The elderly Valerius clings to Vincent. Vincent stands erect before Dacian with his hand on his heart as he states emphatically that neither he nor Valerius will deny their Christian faith. 

Vincent’s response angers Dacian. With fist clenched and face contorted with rage, he threatens Vincent with the bone-crushing horrors of the rack. Vincent responds:

O unhappy man, how weenest [expect] thou to anger me? The more grievously that thou tormentest me, so much more pity shall God have on me. Arise up, thou unhappy man and cursed, and by thy wicked spirit thou shalt be vanquished, for thou shalt find me more stronger by the virtue of God to suffer thy torments, than thou hast power to torment me.

While Valerius is sent into exile, Vincent’s audacious challenge to Dacian earns him a triathlon of tortures. His bones are broken on the rack. (In some accounts, a wine press replaces the rack, which explains how Vincent became the patron saint of winemakers.) His flesh is lacerated by iron hooks, then seared on the gridiron. The pain he has suffered only strengthens Vincent’s resolve, as the Legend recounts: And for all this, he was unmovable, but he prayed our Lord Jesu Christ with joined hands up to heaven.

The exasperated Dacian then has Vincent taken to a dark prison cell where he is placed atop a bed of pottery shards with razor-sharp edges – the death of a thousand cuts. Dacian assumes that Vincent cannot possibly survive. But when Dacian’s henchmen peek into the cell, they find it filled with light, the shards transformed into fragrant flowers, and the air filled with the music of angels. 

Dacian then orders that Vincent be transported to a soft bed where he hopes Vincent will recover sufficiently to be subjected to a new round of tortures. But this scheme also goes awry, for Vincent at last gives up his spirit to God.

The pedestal, which leaves the visualization of Vincent’s gruesome ordeals to the viewer’s imagination, now picks up the narrative after Vincent’s death. Directly behind Dacian, we see a bird – a raven. The Legend tells the story:

Then the body of St. Vincent was cast in a field for to be devoured of the beasts and fowls, by the commandment of Dacian, but it was kept by angels from touching of any beasts, and after came a raven which drove away all other birds and fowls, greater than he was, and chased away also a wolf with his bill and beak…

Wishing to be rid of Vincent for good, Dacian commands that Vincent’s body be recovered, placed in a sack, attached to a millstone, and buried at sea. On the right side of the pedestal, we see a sailor preparing to hoist the sack into the sea. In an amusing detail, fish gather to feast on the corpse. But by the time the boat returns to port, Vincent’s body has miraculously floated back to shore, intact.

Vincent then receives a proper burial, but this is just the beginning of Vincent’s further peregrinations. At some point, Vincent’s relics were interred in a basilica in Córdoba. During the Moorish invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the 8^th-century, the relics were moved to Portugal for safekeeping. One account has them interred for a time on Cape St. Vincent, the extreme southwestern point in Europe. Today, with exception of his left arm, Vincent’s relics rest in Lisbon Cathedral in a silver reliquary depicting the casting of Vincent’s body into the sea. 

The saint’s purported left arm can be viewed in a reliquary in the ambulatory of Valencia Cathedral.

Vincent’s Raven

 The life-size raven perched on his shoulder makes Vincent stand out from the other figures in the portal. The raven is one of Vincent’s standard attributes, but one wonders if its prominence indicates a symbolic purpose beyond that of mere identification. I suggest that we might regard Vincent’s raven as a sign of God’s grace.

Ravens, by nature, are scavengers. Like vultures, they feed on decaying flesh. They are also one of the most intelligent species of birds, legendary for their cleverness. According to ornithologist Stephen Moss, “ravens have a larger brain relative to their body size than most birds.” 

Moss reports that ravens are known to find food by cooperating with human hunters and mammalian predators such as wolves. Though ravens are too small to kill large prey like deer, they have one big advantage over humans and wolves – they fly. Moss explains:

Only the raven can reconnoiter a large area of ground, locate potential prey, and then return to guide the hunters towards the target. If the hunters succeed in making a kill, they will feast on the animal’s flesh. But when they are done, they leave the remains behind, with enough meat on the bones for the ravens to scavenge a hearty meal.

If we consider how courageously Vincent endured the most excruciating torments with unwavering faith in God, it is unthinkable that a loving God would be so ungracious as to allow Vincent’s lifeless body to suffer the final indignity of being ravaged by predators. Instead, God sends a raven to drive the predators away.

That the raven should be chosen for this task is as ironic as it is extraordinary, for the raven is itself a flesh-eating predator. To abstain from feasting on Vincent’s corpse is contrary to every one of a raven’s natural instincts. Just as remarkable is how fiercely the ravens defend the corpse from other predators. The ravens even turn against the wolves, their hunting partners, as Prudentius recounts in Len Krisak’s translation:

This bird, from nearby bushes, drove

Away a savage wolf by beating

With its raucous wings and cries,

With feathers slashing at the eyes.

Prudentius compares Vincent’s ravens to those in an Old Testament passage depicted in the central portal above the figures of Elijah and Elisha. 

Here we see ravens again serving as agents of God’s grace. When the kingdom of Judah turns to the worship of Baal under the evil king Ahab, God withholds the rain. At God’s direction, the prophet Elijah escapes the wrath of Ahab and the drought by traveling to a brook in the wilderness. There “the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook” (I Kings 17:6).

Ravens are uncommon in New York City. Perhaps it was God’s grace that brought a pair of living, breathing, squawking ravens to join the sculpted stone ravens on the west front last year. To the delight of local birders, the ravens built a nest in the gable of the south portal, high above the traffic roaring by on Amsterdam Avenue. When five chicks appeared this spring, the birders keeping watch on the nest rejoiced in much same spirit as did the psalmist many centuries before:

Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving; 

Make melody to our God upon the lyre!

He covers the heavens with clouds, 

He prepares rain for the earth, 

He makes grass grow upon the hills.

He gives to the beasts their food, 

And to the young ravens which cry. (Ps. 147:7-9)

Sources

• “St. Vincent of Saragossa” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Moss, Stephen. Ten Birds that Changed the World (2023).
• Prudentius. Prudentius’ Crown of Martyrs, Ken Krisak, translator (2020).
• Stracke, Richard. Saint Vincent of Saragossa: The Iconography. https://www.christianiconography.info/vincent.html

St. Lawrence (from the Latin laurentius “laureled”) occupies the first niche on the south side of the Martyrs Portal. He turns his head toward his neighbor St. Vincent, who looks back at him. One wonders what they might be chatting about. Lawrence wears the knee-length, wide-sleeved vestment known as a dalmatic, the mark of a deacon, for he was first among the seven deacons serving under Pope Sixtus II in mid-3rd century Rome. 

The low-relief frieze on the dalmatic’s hem features symbols appropriate for a martyr: pomegranates (symbolic of eternity and fertility) and palms (symbolic of triumph over death), as well as representations of the method of Lawrence’s martyrdom – gridirons with flames below. The angelic figure bearing a scale and the demonic figure fleeing away from him are elements of the narrative depicted on the pedestal below.

He holds a purse of coins in his right hand for, as archdeacon, Lawrence oversaw the distribution of food, alms, and comfort to the poor of Rome. His left hand holds what to modern eyes is a portable hibachi grill –  a miniature model of the large griddle on which he was barbecued during a persecution launched by the emperor Valerian in 258.

In that year, Valerian issued two edicts, one requiring the entire population of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the pagan gods, and the other imposing severe penalties for failing to do so. The edicts came at a time of change for the social composition of the Christian church. No longer a fringe faith for slaves and the poor, Christianity was increasingly adopted by more privileged members of society, who enriched the church’s treasury with gifts. 

In short, Valerian was after the church’s money, for the empire was in crisis.  Persians were assailing its eastern border, and the imperial currency was on the brink of a catastrophic devaluation. As historian W.H.C. Frend explains: 

The aim of the persecution was to destroy the church, financially and socially, by confiscating its not inconsiderable property and by preventing the leadership from functioning … In addition, Christian services were forbidden and Christian places of worship confiscated.

Sixtus and six of his seven deacons were swept up in the persecution and quickly beheaded, but not before Sixtus authorized Lawrence to distribute the treasury to the poor, lest it be confiscated. This Lawrence did, apparently with such liberality that it attracted the attention of the city’s prefect (i.e., prosecutor), who had him arrested.

The prefect gave Lawrence three days to assemble and deliver all the treasures of the church. At the end of the three days, Lawrence appeared with a large crowd of the poor, the blind and the lame. Taken aback, the prefect demanded an explanation of the motley crowd before him. Lawrence enlightened him, saying: “These who stand before you are the treasures of the church.” At this affront, the prefect angrily commanded that Lawrence be roasted to death on a sizzling-hot griddle. 

This was an unusual sentence of death. Beheading had long been the standard method of capital punishment for Roman citizens. Only slaves were still crucified, though rarely. 

Some scholars have suggested that the griddle story may be the consequence of an error that a scribe made while copying a manuscript. They speculate that the scribe might have carelessly dropped the initial letter from a Latin phrase commonly used in hagiographies of martyrs – passus est (“he suffered”) – thus changing it to assus est (“he was broiled”). The error would have then been perpetuated as scribes made subsequent copies of the manuscript.

Nevertheless, error or not, Lawrence and the griddle have been inseparable for centuries. Were it otherwise, cooks would need to find a new patron saint.

And so would comedians. Lawrence became their patron for making a joke as he sizzled on the grill: “I’m quite done on this side. Turn me over and eat!” Catholic scholar Lawrence B. Porter suggests that the wisecrack may have been intended as an ironic reference to longstanding rumors of Christian cannibalism arising from a misunderstanding of the Eucharist.

Lawrence’s calm composure on the gridiron was remarked upon by the earliest commentators on Lawrence’s martyrdom – St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and the poet Prudentius, whose hymn to the saint is in his Peristephanon (“Crown of Martyrs”). British writer Amy Jeffs brilliantly crystallizes their thoughts on Lawrence’s serenity in her comments on a 12^th-century depiction of Lawrence in a panel of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral, now in the Cloisters branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Later images of Lawrence’s martyrdom tend to show him lying down or standing and holding a miniature griddle, but the artists of the Canterbury panel anticipate neither of these conventions. They have shown Lawrence enthroned, as if he is already in heaven, with his feet in the fire. Three further tracts of fire touch his body, though these are colorless. One fiery band crosses his waist, one crosses his shoulders, and the third rains down on his head. They refer to the theory that Lawrence overcame the earthly fire by the spiritual fires of his faith, his love of Christ, and his knowledge of God.

It is not, therefore, that he feels nothing during his torture and death, but that he is consumed by burning passions far stronger than anything that the world can provoke.

Lawrence’s body was interred in a catacomb. The emperor Constantine later built a basilica next to the catacomb, with stairs leading to Lawrence’s grave. The Basilica of St. Lawrence was one of three basilicas that Constantine commissioned for Rome. The others were dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, respectively. Porter suggests that by setting Lawrence on an equal footing with the two greatest apostles, Constantine was acknowledging how widely the saint was revered in the early Roman church.

The original basilica no longer stands. The site is now occupied by the Church of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, originally built in the 6^th century, expanded and altered in the 13^th and 19^th centuries. St. Lawrence’s relics are in the crypt beneath the high altar

Pedestal

For the pedestal, John Angel might have illustrated one of the familiar stories about St. Lawrence, but he chose instead a lesser-known narrative from the Golden Legend’s lengthy list of miracles attributed to the saint’s intercession. For what visual artist could resist the possibilities implicit in a cast of characters with an emperor, a hermit, demons, the archangel Michael, and the great saint himself?

The emperor is the Holy Roman Emperor Henry (or Heinrich) II (973-1024). The story concerns the weighing of his soul at his death. 

Psychostasia – the idea that at death one’s sins are weighed against one’s virtuous deeds – is a very ancient belief common to many cultures. Two millennia before the archangel Michael began to lift his scales, the god Osiris was weighing the souls of the Egyptians. Michael and his scales appear on the facades of countless churches and cathedrals, including St. John the Divine. Look for him atop the gable of the Martyrs Portal. With sharp eyesight or binoculars, you can observe the souls in the scale’s cups.

The Golden Legend’s narrative is told from the viewpoint of a hermit who experiences a vision. The hermit watches through the window of his hut. The hermit appears on opposite sides of the pedestal, for the story unfolds on a split-screen, as it were – earth on the left, heaven on the right.  

On the left side, as Emperor Henry dies, three demons come to claim his soul. Henry did not live a sinless life. He put his queen, Cunigunde, through a cruel ordeal when he unjustly suspected her of adultery. But he did many charitable deeds as well and made generous gifts to the church, such as a precious chalice that he donated to a church in the name of St. Lawrence.

The blobby-bodied, cloven-hoofed demons cackle as they seize the king, eager to drag him off to hell. Henry turns his head, desperately looking for help. 

Meanwhile, in heaven, on the right side of the pedestal, a bulky and impassive archangel Michael prepares to weigh the king’s soul.

The next part of the story is told to the hermit by one of the demons:

We have profited nothing, for when this false suspicion of his wife and all the good and evil things were laid in a balance, this burnt and bruled [scorched] Lawrence brought forth a pot of gold of much great weight. And when we supposed to have surmounted, he cast that pot in the balance on that other side, so that it weighed more and was heavier. 

In the center of the pedestal, we see a brawny jailer placing Lawrence on the grill. The flames below are burning full force. Lawrence gestures toward Henry with his right hand, as if to acknowledge the emperor’s appeal for help. With an acrobatic twist of his torso, he extends his left hand into heaven and deposits the chalice on Michael’s scale, tipping the balance and saving the emperor. 

On the pedestal, as in the Canterbury window above, Lawrence experiences both torment and triumph– the torment of the red-hot griddle and the triumph of saving a worthy soul from the horrors of hell. John Angel effectively transforms the saint’s outstretched, tortured body into a bridge extending from earth to heaven as well as from 3^rd-century Rome to 11^th-century Germany, in saintly disregard of the natural laws of space and time.

It is interesting to compare the pedestal with two other visualizations of the same narrative.

The weighing of Henry’s soul is depicted on the tomb that he shares with his queen in Bamberg Cathedral. The elaborate carvings on the marble and limestone sarcophagus were executed by Tilman Riemanschneider between 1499 and 1513. Note the demons in the lower right corner trying to drag down Michael’s scale.

The same scene is illustrated in the Nuremberg Lives of the Saints, an early 15^th-century manuscript illustrated by Michael Wolgemut and members of his studio, first published in print in 1502. Again, a demon attempts to tip the balance. Lawrence carries the chalice in one hand and a griddle, his attribute, in the other.

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Sources

• “St. Lawrence” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Frend, W.H. C. “Persecutions: Genesis and Legacy” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine (2008).
• Jeffs, Amy. Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic (2024).
• Kandazha, Iliana. “Roman Martyr and German Emperor” in The Saints of Rome: Diffusion and Reception from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, T. Vedris et al., editors (2021)
• Porter, Lawrence B. “St. Lawrence’s Death on a Grill: Fact or Fiction?” in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture (Fall, 2017).
• Prudentius. Prudentius’ Crown of Martyrs, Ken Krisak, translator (2020).
• Stracke, Richard. “Saint Lawrence: The Iconography.” https://www.christianiconography.info/lawrence.html
• Tan, Abigail. “The Golden Chalice and Judgment of Emperor Henry II.” https://obscurerdepths.wordpress.com/

St. Catherine, the second figure on the north side of the Martyrs Portal, was a princess, the daughter of the legendary King Costus and Queen Sabinella of Cyprus and Alexandria. The many Renaissance paintings of her invariably depict her as an expensively-dressed noblewoman with flowing locks topped by a coronet, as in the painting below by the Master of the Legend of St. Lucy.

John Angel breaks with this tradition, dressing Catherine in the everyday apparel of a third-century Roman matron. Rather than royal robes, she wears a voluminous mantle known as palla over an ankle-length stola. A simple head scarf replaces the customary coronet. Only one stray lock of her hair is visible. But her regal bearing betrays her noble birth. 

Her right hand rests on a broken wheel, an element in the story of her martyrdom. She lifts a small cross with her left hand, the symbol of the faith she adopted after turning away from her pagan upbringing. Her left arm is discolored with what master stonecutter Stephen Boyle suggests is gypsum pollution build up.

We are startled to see her feet resting upon a severed head. Here Angel revives the visual trope of hagiographic art known as “the persecutor underfoot,” where martyrs stand or sit triumphantly atop the image of their persecutors. In Catherine’s case, the persecutor is the Roman emperor Maxentius (c. 283-312). The Flemish painting above has another, slightly less ghoulish, example of the trope. 

The pedestal depicts two episodes in the life of St. Catherine –her mystical marriage to Christ on the left and her martyrdom under Maxentius on the right. 

The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine

What exactly is a mystical marriage?

The  idea of a mystical marriage has roots in both the Old and New Testaments. The lovers in the Hebrew Song of Songs are commonly understood as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel. In the New Testament, the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to a marriage by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. At several points in the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as “the bridegroom.” In Revelation, John has a vision of “the marriage supper of the Lamb,” again a metaphor for the union of Christ and the Church.

The idea of a mystical marriage between Christ and specific individuals emerges later. The religious  philosopher Louis Dupré explains that the permanence of the mystical marriage distinguishes it from the transient mystical experiences in which the faithful may experience an overpowering sense of God’s presence.

The final state of permanent union is characterized by an uninterrupted awareness of God’s presence … A divided consciousness enables the mystic to take care of ordinary duties, even to suffer and to be disturbed on one level while preserving tranquility on another … No pain or unrest enters that inner sanctuary.

Only a select few attain the high degree of holiness required to enter into the mystical marriage. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, a 19^th-century French physician who researched the topic, claimed to have identified seventy-seven such marriages in Christian history.

The mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria is by far the best known and the most frequently depicted in art. Her 14^th-century namesake, St. Catherine of Siena, probably takes second place. The two Catherines are easy to tell apart, for the Alexandrian usually wears a crown and the Sienese her Dominican nun’s habit. 

Catherine’s mystical marriage is depicted on the left side of the pedestal beneath her niche. Catherine kneels before the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. (Christ appears as a child in most representations of the mystical marriage, perhaps to dispel any notions of physical intimacy.)  From his seat on the Virgin’s lap, the Christ child places a ring on Catherine’s finger as she reverently bows her head. 

An angel hovers above the wedding party, looking on benevolently. In a charming detail, a second angel perches in a niche behind the Virgin, strumming a lute and, one imagines, joyfully singing. The exquisite rendering of the lute’s bridge and strings is a testament to the painstaking work of the Ardolinos in realizing Angel’s model down to its smallest details.

The Cathedral’s Chapel of St. Ambrose houses another depiction of the mystical marriage. Set into the chapel’s reredos is a painting by Bartolomeo Ramenghi, also known as Bagnacavallo, a northern Italian painter of the early 16^th century and a student of Raphael (to whom the painting was at one time misattributed).

The Virgin sits with the Christ child on her lap, her eyes cast downward to observe the child place a ring on the uplifted left hand of St. Catherine. The Virgin grasps the child’s left foot as if to help him rotate his chubby body and extend his arm. Catherine, her hair bound by a headband studded with gemstones, reverences them both as she receives the ring. In the background, a curtain is partially drawn back to reveal a landscape.

The Martyrdom of St. Catherine

The bases of the pedestals beneath the eight major figures of the Martyrs Portal are an irregular shape with a short face on their right corners. Angel often uses this corner to emphasize an important character or to transition to a new scene. On the corner of Catherine’s pedestal, we see a shift of scene signaled by the diagonal of the angel’s winged arm and the adjacent diagonal of Maxentius’s cloak as he wraps it around his shoulder, effectively placing a curtain between the drama’s two scenes.

The right half of the pedestal is devoted to the martyrdom of St. Catherine, or at least one episode of it. The best-known account is in the 13^th-century collection of hagiographic legends and lore known as the Golden Legend – an invaluable resource for generations of visual artists, including John Angel. 

Catherine’s path to martyrdom begins with her confronting the emperor Maxentius over the execution of Christians who refuse to offer sacrifice to pagan idols. She attempts to persuade him to abandon the folly of worshiping false gods and to turn to the true god, saying:

Thou shouldst rather marvel thee of heaven, and of the earth, and of all the things that be therein, and of the sun, the moon, the stars, and of the planets that have been since the beginning of the world, and shall be as long as it shall please God… (This and other quotations are from the Caxton translation of the Golden Legend).

Maxentius is taken aback by her erudition and skillful argumentation, as well as by her beauty. As a princess, Catherine received an excellent education in the liberal arts, including the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the art of spoken argument. Unable to refute her arguments himself, he gathers fifty distinguished philosophers to debate with her, with the expectation that their scholarship and sharp rhetorical skills will easily overcome hers. 

Catherine’s debate with the philosophers is the scene on the right side of the pedestal. Catherine is seated with a page of text in her hands. Two philosophers stand before her. One of them points to a passage in the text. The passage is most likely a quotation from Plato’s Timaeus that Catherines cites in her counterargument to the philosophers. In the end, unable to resist Catherine’s powers of persuasion, all fifty convert to the Christian faith. Maxentius, furious, orders them burnt alive. 

Nevertheless, entranced by her beauty, Maxentius begs Catherine to live in his palace and reign alongside him and his queen. Catherine rebuffs him, saying:

I am given and married to Jesu Christ, he is my spouse, he is my glory, he is my love, and he is my sweetness, there may not fair words nor torments call me from him.

Maxentius, enraged, has her scourged with scorpions and thrown into a dungeon with nothing to eat for twelve days. But angels visit to salve her wounds and a dove provides sustenance. All who encounter Catherine, from the queen and the captain of the guard to her jailers, fall under the aura of her holiness and convert to the Christian faith. 

After twelve days, Maxentius releases Catherine from the dungeon and repeats his demand that she renounce her faith and join him at the palace or suffer a painful death. Catherine responds:

Tarry not to do what torments thou wilt, for I desire to offer to God my blood and my flesh like as he offered for me; he is my God, my father, my friend and mine only spouse.

Maxentius then devises a new horror – wheels with razor-sharp spikes. The Golden Legend’s explanation of how the wheels work is a bit confusing, but it appears that the spiked wheels face one another and rotate in contrary directions, like a giant meat grinder. But before the wheels can do their diabolical work, an angel soars down and shatters them. The damaged wheel has become Catherine’s primary attribute.

The exasperated Maxentius then has her beheaded. At the last moment, Catherine hears a voice: Come unto me, my fair love and my spouse; lo! behold the gate of heaven is open to thee. Milk, not blood, flows from her trunk, and angels transport her body to Mt. Sinai.

In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian established a monastery on Mt. Sinai on the site of the burning bush that spoke to Moses. Three centuries later, the relics of St. Catherine were translated to the monastery where they remain today. Now known as St. Catherine’s Monastery, it still houses Greek Orthodox monks and is the oldest continuously occupied Christian monastery in the world.

Postscript: Maxentius

It is probably a fool’s errand to fact-check the legends about the saints. As the great medieval scholar Emile Mâle said of the Golden Legend: “The book’s greatest charm lay less in the true than in the marvelous.” 

Nevertheless, the historical record for Maxentius describes a man so different from the monster we meet in the Golden Legend, that I cannot conclude this article without speaking up for the maligned Maxentius.

The emperor Maxentius was not a madman, nor was he hostile to Christians. According to historian Timothy Barnes, rather than persecute Christians: “Maxentius granted the Christians of Italy and Africa the right to practice their religion freely very soon after he came to power in October 305.” Further, he later allowed Christians to recover property confiscated during Diocletian’s persecution.

A recent biography of Maxentius, Simon Turney’s Maxentius: The Last Great Roman, concurs with Barnes that Maxentius put an end to the persecution of Christians and even permitted the construction of new churches and Christian cemeteries in Rome, though he never adopted the faith himself.

So how did Maxentius acquire his bad reputation?

Maxentius was a rival to another contender for full command of the Roman Empire, Constantine. When the respective armies of Maxentius and Constantine met in the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine prevailed. While beating a chaotic retreat, Maxentius drowned as he was fording a river. 

Once in power, Constantine continued Maxentius’s policy of legitimizing Christianity while vilifying the man himself, as Barnes explains:

Constantinian propaganda rapidly transformed Maxentius into a textbook tyrant who massacred his subjects, raped the wives of senators, and examined the entrails of pregnant women, infants, and lions for magical purposes.

The Constantinian propaganda apparently influenced the narrative of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, resulting in the almost comically villainous character we meet in the Golden Legend.

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Source

• “St. Catherine” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Barnes, Timothy. Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (2013).
• Cameron, Averil. “The Reign of Constantine” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12 (2005).
• Dupré, Louis. “The Christian Experience of Mystical Union” in The Journal of Religion, January 1989.
• Stracke, Richard. “St. Catherine of Alexandria: The Iconography.” https://www.christianiconography.info/catherine.html
• Turney, Simon. Maxentius: The Last Great Roman (2026).

St. Alban is the last figure on the north side of the Martyrs Portal, next to Stephen. While Stephen is the protomartyr for the entire Christian church, Alban, as the first recorded British martyr, is especially revered by the Anglican expression of the faith.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed c. 731, is one of the earliest sources for the story of Alban and one that would have been familiar to sculptor John Angel. The basic narrative follows:

The time is the general persecution of Christians commenced by the emperor Diocletian in 303. The place is the Roman province of Brittania, where Alban, a Briton serving in the Roman army, is stationed in the town of Verulamium, now the city of St. Albans in the county of Hertfordshire to the north of London. 

One night, a Christian priest fleeing persecution knocks on the door of Alban’s hut. Though duty-bound to turn the priest over to his superiors, Alban takes pity on the man and shelters him. As Bede recounts:

This man he [Alban] observed to be engaged in continual prayer and watching day and night; when on a sudden the Divine grace shining on him, he began to imitate the example of faith and piety which was set before him, and being gradually instructed by his wholesome admonitions, he cast off the darkness of idolatry, and became a Christian in all sincerity of heart.

When soldiers searching for the priest approach Alban’s hut, Alban exchanges his soldier’s cloak for the priest’s vestment, enabling the priest to escape in the guise of a soldier. Alban is arrested, court-martialed, and beheaded. 

The pedestal relates the story of Alban’s martyrdom. Front and center, we see Alban being arrested and bound with ropes. On the pedestal’s left face, the priest makes his escape as Alban makes a gesture of farewell. On the right side, we see Alban’s executioner waiting with a broadsword at the ready. The Roman soldiers are anachronistically clad in the armor and mail of medieval knights.

Here John Angel again displays his gift for reducing a narrative to its essential elements. He evidently sees no need to crowd the pedestal with depictions of Alban’s conversion or his execution. Rather than distract us with excessive detail, he has his viewers focus on the image of Alban courageously facing death, arms bound but head held high. With the Christian priest behind him and two soldiers facing him, Alban stands on the spiritual frontier between the empire of Caesar and the Kingdom of Christ. 

Above the pedestal, the full-length figure of Alban holds two objects – a sword and a bowl. His right elbow nestles the sword’s hilt. The sword refers to both his life as a Roman soldier and the manner of his death as a Christian martyr.

The bowl suggests the hospitality he extended to the fugitive priest but may also suggest something more, for a martyrdom is more than just another tragic death. The bowl may suggest a eucharistic chalice or a baptismal font, for there is something sanctified, even sacramental, about a martyr’s blood.

In addition to the basic narrative summarized above, various retellings of the story interject some supernatural interventions. A sixth century account by the Celtic monk Gildas, included in his On the Ruin of Britain, has Alban parting the waters of the River Thames à la Moses at the Red Sea:

[Alban] opened a path across the noble River Thames, whose waters stood abrupt like precipices on either side; and seeing this, the first of his executors was stricken with awe, and from a wolf became a lamb; so that he thirsted for martyrdom, and boldly underwent that for which he thirsted.

Bede recounts the fate of the executioner who struck the fatal blow: He who laid impious hands on the holy man’s neck was not permitted to rejoice over his dead body; for his eyes dropped upon the ground at the same moment as the blessed martyr’s head fell.

This gruesome detail proved irresistible to later illustrators. The Book of Saint Alban, a thirteenth century manuscript, contains a vivid example.

Angel disregards the fantastical tales, save for one story from Bede.  As Alban approached the place of execution, a spring of water sprang up at his feet. Angel has the spring running across the figure’s right foot, perhaps suggesting baptism by martyrdom. 

The spring also appears in a window at St. Alban’s Cathedral in England.

Within St John the Divine, there are four more images of Alban. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum included him among the British and Celtic saints lining the entrance to the Chapel of St. Columba. Alban appears in three stained glass windows – the aisle windows in Armed Forces and Historical Bays as well as a full-length lancet in the clerestory of the Historical Bay. And then there’s the Pilgrims Pavement medallion for St. Albans Cathedral in the south aisle of the nave. 

Why the multiple images? There are approximately 150 individual saints represented in St. John the Divine’s sculpture, stained glass, and other works of art. Most of them appear only once. When a saint appears multiple times, one wonders why.

In the case of St. Alban, one might detect the hidden hand of Bishop William Thomas Manning, who oversaw the nave’s design, construction, and consecration. Manning was a proud Englishman by birth and a patriotic American citizen by naturalization. An ardent supporter of the military, he took a leave from his fashionable Manhattan parish to serve as an Army chaplain during the First World War. It is not surprising that he should have a special regard for a soldier saint like Alban. As the chairman of the Committee on Iconography, he was certainly positioned to play favorites among the saints. The Armed Forces and Historical Bays were particularly meaningful for Bishop Manning, as discussed in a previous Divine Stone article.

The Tomb of William Thomas Manning click to read

Two last notes: 

In the stained glass images above, Alban is clean-shaven, as was standard for Roman legionnaires, while John Angel’s north portal figure sports full facial hair. Perhaps Angel was influenced by the image of Alban on the 19^th century high altar screen of St. Alban’s Cathedral, which has a passing resemblance to the figure in the Martyrs Portal.

Finally, whatever became of the priest whose life Alban saved? Some accounts say that he was quickly captured and executed, while others have him safely making his way to Wales as a missionary. In later centuries he came to be known as Amphibalus. (Since this is also the Latin name for a cloak, there may have been some confusion between the garment and man who wore it.) St. Albans Cathedral houses a shrine for St. Amphibalus, originally built in the 12^th century and badly damaged during the Reformation, but since restored and reconsecrated in 2021.

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Sources:

• Atwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints 2^nd ed. (Penguin, 1983).
• Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, A.M. Sellar, translator. Dover Publications, 2011 reprint of the 1907 edition.
• Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2^nd ed. (OUP, 1987).
• Gildas. On  the Ruin of Britain, J.A. Giles, translator. Dodo Press, 2007 (accessed via Project Gutenberg).
• Low, Julia. “The restoration of the Amphibalus shrine,” St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society. https://www.stalbanshistory.org/

St. Stephen occupies the third niche on the north side of the Martyrs Portal. The story of his martyrdom is told in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. At his first appearance in Acts, we are told that Stephen is “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit” and “full of grace and power.” When he is brought before the council of religious authorities known as the Sanhedrin, “all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”

John Angel’s Stephen is nothing if not angelic, following a centuries-old tradition of representing the martyr as a beardless youth, though the Biblical account says nothing about Stephen’s age. Accordingly, Angel gives us a Stephen with full lips, large eyes, long, slender neck, and a coiffure of abundant wavy hair. His hands hold the stones that killed him and that became the attribute by which one can easily distinguish him from other saints.

Stephen was a member of the company of believers that formed in Jerusalem around the apostles during the days following Pentecost, holding “all things in common” and “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 3:44-46). As the number of believers increased, the apostles appointed Stephen and six others, to distribute food and minister to the needs of the assembled believers. They are considered the first deacons (from Greek diakonos, “servant”).

Stephen wears a garment that in later centuries became standard for deacons – a dalmatic, a calf-length, wide-sleeved tunic worn with a stole and over an alb. It is usually adorned with horizontal and/or vertical stripes and, at times, with tassels, like those on Stephen’s shoulders.

The pedestal depicts Stephen’s martyrdom by stoning, the punishment that Jewish law prescribed for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16). It is on this charge that he is hauled before the Sanhedrin, the council of elders that nominally governed Jerusalem under the close oversight of the Roman authorities. 

Invited to speak in his own defense, Stephen at first seems to seek common ground with the elders by delivering a learned discourse on the covenant between God and the children of Israel. He touches on Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, saying nothing that his listeners might find objectionable. 

But as he concludes his testimony, Stephen suddenly becomes accusatory and confrontational. He questions the centrality of the Temple, continuing:

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels but did not keep it.

At this, the outraged elders hustle Stephen outside and stone him to death, as depicted on the pedestal.

Stephen’s pedestal differs from other north portal pedestals in that it depicts a single scene with only four characters. Most of the other pedestals display two or three scenes of a narrative and as many as ten characters. The sculptor thus compels viewers to focus their attention on the central figure, Stephen standing with hands bound and his face reflecting patient acceptance of his painful death. Two stone-throwers flank him, though the account in Acts suggests that the stoning had a larger number of participants. 

On the pedestal’s left face, a man stands alone holding the coats of the stone throwers. He is Saul, who himself will soon convert and become the apostle Paul. He will later recount: “When the blood of thy witness Stephen was shed, I also was standing by and approving and keeping the garments of those who killed him” (Acts 22:20).

Stephen is known as the “protomartyr” –the first of countless martyrs to come. Stephen was also the prototype of the death a Christian martyr should die – witnessing to his faith in the presence of his persecutors (“martyr” is Greek for “witness”), speaking truth to power, facing violent death calmly and courageously, and asking God to forgive his executioners. 

The most important thing required of a Christian martyr is to be Christlike. The prototype of a martyr is nothing less than the Passion of Christ himself, depicted in the portal’s tympanum and friezes. Luke – the author of both Acts and the gospel that bears his name – draws explicit parallels between the Acts account of Stephen’s martyrdom and the gospel’s narrative of Jesus’s execution.

Both Stephen and Jesus face the same accusations: blaspheming and threatening to destroy the Temple. Both report similar visions to their persecutors. Jesus: “From now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 23:63); Stephen: “I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:58). 

Likewise, Jesus and Stephen make similar statements at the point of death. Jesus: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46); Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”(Acts 7:59). Stephen’s final words are “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60), echoing Jesus’s “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). 

More than a thousand years later, Stephen would be an exemplar to his north portal neighbor, Thomas Becket. After the catastrophic confrontation with Henry II that drove him to flee England, Thomas left the castle and stopped at a nearby church where, as historian John Guy recounts:

… somewhat provocatively, he put on the pallium, the defining symbol of his office as primate, and said the special mass used on St. Stephen’s Day in honor of the first Christian martyr, in which the introit was a passage from Psalms beginning: “Princes also did sit and speak against me” (Psalm 119:23).

Another image of Stephen’s stoning can be seen in the Acts of the Apostles window in St. Ansgar’s Chapel. 

For a modern take on St. Stephen, may I suggest the Grateful Dead’s “St. Stephen,” released in 1968. “Wherever he goes, the people all complain,” the song says to remind us that Stephen’s preaching was denounced as blasphemous. 

Robert Hunter’s elusive lyrics raise the question of whether the other side of the apparent courage and conviction that Stephen displays in the Acts of the Apostles account may be unspoken doubts and uncertainty about whether a painful death will have any meaningful significance:

“Lady finger, dipped in moonlight / Writing “what for?” across the morning sky…”

“Did he doubt or did he try? Answers a-plenty in the by and by.” 

“Did it matter, does it now? / Stephen would answer if he only knew how.”

The song would make a good starting point for considering the meaning of martyrdom in a world where the worst instances of human suffering can disappear from the news cycle in a matter of hours.

Fun fact: The memorial service for Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia was conducted at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Marin County, California.

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Sources:

• “St. Stephen” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
• Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Acts of the Apostles: A new translation with introduction and commentary (Yale University Press, 1998).
• Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel (Random House, 2012).
• The author’s recollections of his trip to Woodstock in 1969.