Ecumenical Commemoration
Deacon & Martyr
January 22 · d. 304
also known as Vincent of Saragossa, Saint Vincent, Vincent the Deacon
Vincent was a deacon of Saragossa, killed at Valencia in the persecution under Diocletian, by tradition in the year 304. His bishop, Valerius, had a speech impediment and made Vincent the preacher of the church there; when the two were arrested together, the bishop was exiled and the deacon was kept for interrogation and death. He was buried near Saguntum, and Saragossa kept a portion of his blood. His feast is January 22.
Vincent served as deacon at Saragossa, in Spain, under a bishop named Valerius. Valerius could not speak well; something in his tongue caught and stumbled, and a bishop who cannot preach must find a voice. He found Vincent's. So it was the deacon, not the bishop, who stood up in that church and said aloud what the church believed.
Then the emperors Diocletian and Maximian ordered that everyone in the world should sacrifice to the old gods, and soldiers came for the two of them. They were chained and taken away from Saragossa to Valencia, a strange city, to stand before a governor whom the sources name Dacian. There the bishop was sentenced to exile, and the deacon was kept.
You can see what the governor expected. He began gently. Prudentius, the poet who told this story a hundred years later, says he came on like a wolf that is pleasant with the calf it means to eat. The emperor has ordained that all the world return to the ancient forms of religion, he said; put away your crude observance; burn a little incense to these stones the emperor worships. And Vincent, in the poet's telling, answered: "As for us, we shall confess the Father who is the author of light, and Christ his Son; He is the true and only God, O Datianus."
So the gentleness ended. They stretched him on the rack. They tore him with iron claws. They laid him on a red-hot plate. And the poet has him answer, between one torment and the next, with the line the church has repeated ever since: "Torture, imprisonment, the claws, the hissing red-hot plate, even the final suffering of death, are all mere sport to Christians." When the executioners tired, he invited the governor to take a turn himself, and told him why it would do no good: "There is another, within the body, whom no man is able to outrage, who is unconfined, undisturbed, unharmed, exempt from all your grievous pains."
They threw him into a cell whose floor had been strewn with broken pottery, so that he could not lie down without being cut. The tradition says his jailer, watching him there, became a Christian. When at last he was dying, friends carried him onto a comfortable bed, and he died on it, at rest, which the church has always read as the persecutors' defeat: they had spent everything they had and could not make him die badly.
Even then Dacian would not let the body alone. He had it thrown out in the open for the carrion birds, and a raven stood over it and drove off a wolf. He had it sewn into a sack with a stone tied on and sunk in the sea, and the sea gave it back. Augustine, preaching at Hippo a hundred years later, gathered the whole of it into one sentence: Vincent "was victorious in his words, victorious in the pains he endured; victorious in his confession, victorious in his tribulations; victorious when burned with fire, victorious when submerged in the waves." His name means conquering, and the bishop of Hippo could not stop turning it over. Nothing his judges did to him could be made to stick.
Vincent's whole trial turned on speech: he was the one who spoke because his bishop could not, and speaking is what cost him. The earliest account of him is not a record of what he did but of what he said, refusal after refusal, and then of the one thing the governor could not reach, the self standing fast inside the body he was tearing. You will almost certainly never be asked what Vincent was asked. But you are asked, in smaller rooms, to say what you believe when it would be easier and cheaper to say something adjacent to it, or nothing. Where, this week, are you being invited to burn a little incense so that the conversation can move on?
Vincent wrote nothing, and no document from his own lifetime names him. Everything we have comes from two witnesses about a century after his death, and behind them a written account of his passion that no longer survives in its early form.
The first is Prudentius, the Christian poet of Calahorra in northern Spain, who composed the fourth and fifth hymns of his Peristephanon, the Crowns of Martyrdom, around 400 to 405. His fifth hymn is the source of the trial, the speeches, the rack and the claws and the red-hot plate, the raven that guarded the body, and the weighted sack cast into the sea; his fourth reports that Saragossa venerated a portion of Vincent's blood "just as if its native ground covered the very body," while the tomb itself lay near Saguntum. That fourth hymn is also careful about something the later tradition was not: it says Vincent was formed at Saragossa as a boy and suffered "in a strange city far from here," but it never says where he was born. Later sources supply three different birthplaces (Saragossa, Huesca, Valencia), which is a sign that none of them knew. What can be said is that he was brought up and ordained at Saragossa, tried and killed at Valencia, and buried near Saguntum. It should also be said plainly that these hymns are panegyric verse written for a feast day, not a court record; the speeches are the earliest surviving rendering of Vincent's words, not a transcript.
The second witness is Augustine, who preached five surviving sermons on Vincent at Hippo Regius between 410 and 413 (Sermons 274, 275, 277A, 276, and 277, in that order of date). They matter twice over. They show a bishop in North Africa keeping the feast of a Spanish deacon every year, a sea away and a century later; and they show him doing it from a written text, because he says so: "the glorious passion of blessed Vincent was being read," and, describing his own source, "as the reading proceeded, it made clear what words he heard, what words he replied with, what torments he overcame." Augustine already knows the sea-casting in 410. His famous image of the martyr as clay hardened rather than destroyed in the kiln is offered honestly as his own composition: Vincent, he says, "was able to say" it, not that he said it.
After that the evidence is calendrical and institutional. The Calendar of Carthage, compiled around 505 to 535, lists Vincent at January 22, between Sebastian and Agnes. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum commemorates bishop Valerius and deacon Vincentius together at Valencia on the same day, though its earliest surviving copies are eighth and ninth century and so attest the observance's persistence rather than its origin. The connected prose Acts we now hold, from which the parents' names and the converted jailer come, date from the eighth or ninth century and were compiled from tradition, which places them four to five centuries after the Passio Augustine heard read.
Vincent's remains were divided from the beginning, tomb near Saguntum and blood at Saragossa, and they went on being divided. Childebert I brought his stole and dalmatic to Paris in 542, founding the church that became Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Relics reached the abbey of Castres in 863 or 864 and made it a station on the roads to Compostela; England received relics in the tenth century, with Abingdon under King Edgar; Cremona and Bari made their own claims. In 1173 (some sources say 1175) Afonso I of Portugal had relics brought by ship from the far southwest of the Algarve to Lisbon, landing on September 15 and processing to the cathedral the next day. Valencia Cathedral holds a relic identified as his left arm. No one has reconciled the claims.
The most durable tradition is the raven. Prudentius has a raven guard the exposed body, and a shrine stood for centuries at the promontory now called Cape St Vincent; the twelfth-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi records it under the name its birds had given it, Kanisah al-Ghurab, the Church of the Raven. Lisbon's coat of arms still shows the ship that carried the relics, flanked by two ravens.
He is patron of Valencia, Saragossa and Portugal, and is invoked by vintners, brickmakers and sailors. In the East he is commemorated a second time on November 11; in the West his day is shared with Anastasius the Persian, a man of another century entirely, paired with him by the calendar rather than by history.
The two early witnesses are the ones to read. Prudentius, Peristephanon IV and V, composed about 400 to 405, carries the trial, the speeches quoted above (V.1 to 16, V.17 to 40, V.53 to 92, V.145 to 172), the raven (V.397 to 420), the sea-casting (V.433 to 470), and the divided shrine at Saragossa and Saguntum (Hymn IV); the quotations here are H. J. Thomson's translation in the Loeb Classical Library, volume II (Harvard University Press, 1953), pages 163 to 195, with the critical Latin in M. P. Cunningham's edition, CCSL 126 (1966), the Vincent poem at pages 294 to 313. Augustine's five feast-day sermons, 274 (410), 275 (411), 277A (411), 276 (412) and 277 (413), are quoted here from Edmund Hill's translation in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Part III volume 8, Sermons 273 to 305A (New City Press), edited by John E. Rotelle: the anaphora on victory from Sermon 274, the reading of the passion from 275.1, and the kiln and the tile from 276.3. Both translations are in copyright. For the later narrative tradition, the fullest recension of the Acts is the Passio amplissima, BHL 8627 to 8633, critically edited by Ángel Fábrega Grau in Pasionario Hispánico, volume II, pages 187 to 196, resting principally on a tenth-century passionary from San Pedro de Cardeña now in the British Library as Add. MS 25600; shorter recensions (BHL 8638, 8639) are printed in Analecta Bollandiana 1 (1882). Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English life survives in a single manuscript, Cambridge University Library Ii.1.33, discussed by Susan E. Irvine, "Bones of Contention: The Context of Ælfric's Homily on St Vincent," Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990), 117 to 32.
And. first of the interpretation of his name.
Vincent is as much to say as burning vices, or overcoming burnings and keeping victory, for he burnt and destroyed vices by mortification of his flesh, he vanquished the burnings of torments by stedfast sufferance, he held the victory of the world by despising of the same. He vanquished three things in the world, that is to wit, false errors, foul loves, and worldly dreads, which things he overcame by wisdom, by cleanness, and by constancy. Of whom S. Austin says that the martyrdoms of saints have enseigned that the world is overcome with all errors, loves and dreads. And some affirm that S. Austin wrote and compiled his passion, which Prudentius set right clearly in verses.
Vincent was noble of lineage, but he was more noble by faith and religion, and was deacon to S. Valerian bishop. He was in his childhood set to study, where by divine providence he flowered in double science most profoundly, that is to say in divinity and humanity; to whom S. Valerian, because he was empeshed in his tongue, committed to him the faits and works of charge, and himself entended to prayer and contemplation. And by the commandment of Dacian the provost, Vincent and Valerian were drawn to Valence and there cast in prison. And when the provost had supposed they had been almost perished for hunger and pain, he commanded them to come tofore him. And when he saw them whole and joyful he, being wroth, began to cry much strongly and said: What sayest thou Valerian which under the name of your religion do against the decrees of princes? And as the blessed Valerian answered lightly, S. Vincent said to him: Worshipful father answer him not so with a timorous heart, but put out your voice and escry him freely, and father, if you will command me, I shall go answer to the judge. To whom Valerian said: Right dear son, it is long since I hare committed to you the charge of speaking, and now it behoves you to answer for the faith for which we be here. Then S. Vincent turned to the judge, and said to Dacian: You have holden unto now words to reny our faith, but know you that it is great felony to the wisdom of christian men to blame and reny our christian faith. Then Dacian, being wroth, commanded that the bishop should be put in exile, and Vincent as a man presumptuous and despitous should be put to be tormented in the place named eculeus. And it was made like a cross thwart of which the two ends were fixed in the earth, and that his members should thereon be broken, for to fear the other. And when he was all thus tobroken, Dacian said to him: Say Vincent now seest thou your body unhappy? And Vincent smiling said to him: This is all that I have desired. Then the provost being wroth began to say and menace with many torments, and Vincent said to him: O unhappy man, how weenest thou to anger me? the more grievously that you torment me, so much more pity shall God have on me. Arise up you unhappy man and cursed, and by your wicked spirit you shall be vanquished, for you shall find me more stronger by the virtue of God to suffer your torments, than you have power to torment me. Then the provost was angry and began to cry, and the butchers took scourges and rods, and began to smite and beat him with rods of iron. And S. Vincent said: What sayest thou, Dacian? you yourself avenge me of my torments. Then the provost was wood, and said to the butchers: You wretches what do you, why fail and wax faint your hands? You have overcome murderers and adulterers, so that they could hide nothing among your torments, and this Vincent only shall more surmount your torments. Then the butchers took combs of iron, and began to comb him on the sides within the flesh, that the blood ran down over all his body and that the entrails and guts appeared by the jointures of his sides. And Dacian said to him: Vincent have pity on yourself in such wise that you may recover your fair youth, and win to spare the torments that be yet to come. And Vincent said to him: O venomous tongue of the devil, I doubt nothing of your torments, but I fear sore that you will fain to have mercy on me, for so much more as I see you angry, so much more am I rejoiced, I will that you in no wise minish ne lessen your torments, so that you know that you be vanquished in all things. Then was he taken out of the torment, and was brought into a torment of fire, and he blamed and reproved the butchers of their long tarrying. Then with his goodwill he mounted upon the gridiron and there was roasted, broiled and burnt in all his members, and was slicked with small nails of Iron, and pricked with burning poinlers of iron. And when the blood ran into the fire and made wounds upon wounds, then they cast salt into the fire, that it should sparkle and spring in the wounds of his body, on all parts of the wounds that it should more cruelly burn, and do him more pain on his body by the flames, in such wise that the pricks of iron might not hold on his members, but on his entrails which hung out of his body, so that he might not move him. And for all this he was unmovable, but he prayed our Lord Jesu Christ with joined hands up to heaven. And when the ministers had said this to Dacian, he said: Alas! we be all vanquished; and he lives yet, and because he may yet live longer, shut you him in a much dark prison, and gather together all the sharp shells and prick them in his feet, and let him be stretched on them without any human comfort, and when he shall be dead come and tell me. And these right cruel ministers obeyed him as to their lord right cruel, but the king for whom he suffered the pain so inhuman, changed to him all this into joy, for the darknesses were all chased away out of the prison by great light, and the sharpness of the shells were turned into softness and sweetness of all manner of flowers, his feet were unbound, and he used the comfort of the honour of angels, and like as he had gone on the flowers singing with angels, the sweet sound of the song, and the sweetness and odour of the flowers, which was marvellous, was smelled out of the prison. And when the keepers had seen through the crevices of the prison this that they saw within, they were converted and turned to the faith. And when Dacian heard this he was wood, and said: What shall we do to him more? we be overcome. Now then let him be borne into a right soft bed, with soft clothes, so that he be not made more glorious, and to the end that he die not yet, but that he be made strong again, and be kempt again in new torments. And when he was brought in a soft bed, and had therein rested a while he rendered and gave up his spirit unto God in the year of our Lord two hundred and eighty eight under Diocletian and Maximian Emperors. And when Dacian heard say that he was dead, he was much sorrowful, and said that in that wise he was also vanquished: But sith I might not overcome him living I shall punish him dead, and if I may not have victory I shall be fulfilled of the pain. Then the body of S. 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, and then turned his head towards the body as he that marvelled of the keeping of the angels. And when Dacian heard this thing: I trow, said he, that I may not surmount him when he is dead. Then commanded he that he should be cast into the sea with a mill stone bound to his neck, to the end that he that might not be destroyed upon the earth of beasts, should be devoured in the sea of belues and great fishes. Then the mariners that led the body in to the sea, cast it therein, but the body was sooner arrived aland than the mariners were, and was found of a lady and of some others by the revelation of Jesu Christ, and was honourably buried of them. And S. Austin says of this holy blessed martyr, S. Vincent, that he vanquished so in words, he vanquished in pains, he vanquished in confession, he vanquished in tribulation, he overcame the fire, he overcame the water, he vanquished death and vanquished life. This Vincent was tormented for to dwell with God, he was scourged for to be introduced, he was beaten for to be enstrengthened, he burnt to be purged, he was gladder of the dread of God than of the world, and had liefer die to the world than to God. Also S. Austin says in another place that a marvellous thing is set tofore our eyes, that is: a wicked judge, a cruel tormentor, and a martyr not overcome. And Prudentius wrote of cruelty and pity, saying that Vincent said to Dacian: The torments of the prison, the nails, the ongles, the straining combs of iron, with the flames of fire, and death which is last end of the pains, all these be plays and japes to christian men. Then Dacian said as overcome: Bind him and draw his arms out of their joints, and break you all the bones in such wise that all the members be departed, to the end that the breath of him spring out by the holes of his members so torn. And the knight of God laughed at these things, and blamed the bloody hands because they put not the hooks and nails deeper in his members. And when he was in the prison the angel of God said to him: Arise up noble martyr, surely arise up, for you shall be our fellow, and be accompanied with saints. O knight invincible, strongest of all strong, now these aspre torments and cruel, doubt you now a vanquisher. And Prudentius says: You are only noble of the world, you bear only the victory of double battle, you have deserved two crowns together. Pray we then to him that he impetre grace of our Lord Jesu Christ that we may deserve to come unto his bliss and joy in heaven where he reigns. Amen.
Three things are contested and should be named as such. The year is traditionally 304, but no consular or indictional date underlies it, and 303 is also in circulation. The governor Dacian is known only from hagiography; no inscription or administrative record attests him, and he presides over several other Spanish and Gallic passions, which suggests a shared narrative pattern rather than four independent memories (he is certainly not the well-documented Censorius Datianus, whose career runs from 337 to 365 in the eastern empire). And the gridiron, which painters give Vincent, most likely migrated to him from Lawrence, the other Spanish-connected deacon-martyr; Vincent's own attribute is the rack, and a gridiron-bearing deacon in the mosaics at Ravenna cannot be securely identified as one rather than the other.
What is not contested is the shape of the thing. A deacon named Vincent was killed at Valencia under the Diocletianic persecution, and within a century and a half he had a fixed feast, a circulating written passion, a divided shrine between Valencia and Saragossa, annual preaching in North Africa, a church at Regimont near Béziers by 455, three churches at Rome, and a dedicatory inscription on a pilaster in the basilica of Salona in Dalmatia.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Vincent of Saragossa boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Peristephanon /ˌpɛr.ɪˈstɛf.ə.nɒn/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12