He Spoke to Us: Discerning God in People and Events by George Rutler

Author:George Rutler [Rutler, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496917
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-02-11T06:00:00+00:00

21

Governor Pliny and Governor Cuomo*

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus was governor of Bithynia–Pontus in present day Turkey from A.D. 111 to 113. That capped a long career during which he served as judge, staff officer, knight, senator, quaestor, tribune, praetor, prefect, consul, propraetor, and augur. He was popularly known as Pliny the Younger because his uncle, the naturalist and military commander, adopted him. When the Elder died, probably of asphyxiation, at Stabiae, during a rescue attempt when Vesuvius erupted over Pompeii, young Pliny was saving his mother at Misenum. Given his acrobatic balance in dancing to the tune of very different emperors: Vespasian, Titus, Domitian Nerva, and Trajan, he reminds one of Talleyrand, whom he actually surpassed in erudition as a writer of Greek verse and orator in the line of Cicero. Talleyrand would have admired his cynicism, as when he decried Domitian as soon as he died, having long extolled him. It is curious, but not atypical of the Italian Renaissance, that this torturer of Christians should be honored with a statue on the façade of the cathedral in his native town of Como.

A growing body of Christians was unsettling the pagan establishment in Bithynia. Pliny wrote Trajan a famous epistle beginning with the flattery he had mastered:

It is my constant method to apply myself to you for the resolution of all my doubts; for who can better govern my dilatory way of proceeding or instruct my ignorance? I have never been present at the examination of the Christians [by others], on which account I am unacquainted with what uses to be inquired into, and what, and how far they used to be punished; nor are my doubts small, whether there be not a distinction to be made between the ages [of the accused] and whether tender youth ought to have the same punishment with strong men? Whether there be not room for pardon upon repentance? or whether it may not be an advantage to one that had been a Christian, that he has forsaken Christianity? Whether the bare name, without any crimes besides, or the crimes adhering to that name, to be punished? In the meantime, I have taken this course about those who have been brought before me as Christians. I asked them whether they were Christians or not? If they confessed that they were Christians, I asked them again, and a third time, intermixing threatenings with the questions. If they persevered in their confession, I ordered them to be executed; for I did not doubt but, let their confession be of any sort whatsoever, this positiveness and inflexible obstinacy deserved to be punished. There have been some of this mad sect whom I took notice of in particular as Roman citizens, that they might be sent to that city.

Pliny deemed these people superstitious because “they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god.” Superstition was not a crime, and it was rife in the

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