Notes:

The foregoing text is based on a fairly lazy, inattentive reading of passages from _The New Eusebius_, plus some other material on the Church Fathers. It is a kind of pastiche, attempted as a way of feeling my way into some more serious questions (in the domain of patristics) about time, the event, witness etc.

The references to Laclau and Mouffe are a red herring, deliberate anachronisms. I’ve never even read Laclau and Mouffe.

Resurrection appears as general conversion - of sinful bodies into incorruptible, sorrow into joy, hatred into love, weakness into strength. The false body, with its pride and fear, must be “consumed”: the less there is left of it, the better. Martyrdom as symbolic ju-jitsu: the most uncongenial circumstances become the occasion and instrument of joyful witness.

Is martyrdom itself to be sought, or wished for? It should not be consciously avoided; but neither should it be prepared for. Martyrdom is _opportunistic_ - that is how it is to be recognised as an occasion of grace.

Above all, the eschatological horizon here is ungraspable: for the martyr, martyrdom is a short-circuit between the sinful present and the hereafter of resurrection - an end to the “long Sunday” of waiting for the apocalypse to arrive. But the apocalypse is not an awaited _moment_, it is an event that consumes all of time, that marks a transition between time and eternity, that which cannot be figured in the present temporal order. The martyr witnesses to the apocalypse in the present moment. How weird is that?