Divine Analgesia
Chapter Three surveys narrative techniques for rejecting pain as a locus of meaning in martyrdom. A number of texts explicitly deny the experience of pain altogether by employing the language of analgesia or anesthesia in their descriptions of the martyrs’ experiences of torture; other texts employ typical terms for pain but negate them; some narratives differentiate the experiences of the martyrs’ bodies from those of their spirits. Often texts attribute Christian impassibility to the presence and support of the divine. Finally, many texts thwart the audience’s visual imagination by preparing listeners to envision a grotesque murder, but then unexpectedly describing, instead, a beautiful body unharmed by torture. In these stories, torture does not harm Christians but, rather, it heals them.