Early in the second century, Ignatius of Antioch wrote an unexpected letter. Sentenced to death for his faith, he was on his way to Rome to be fed to the lions. He wanted to be sure that fellow Christians there knew that he was embracing martyrdom, and in vivid language begged them not to try to prevent it: 

By embracing a gruesome death—and asking his fellow Christians to celebrate and even help bring about his martyrdom—perhaps Ignatius showed supernatural faith and heroic virtue. But could we say he showed prudence? 

There is at least a superficial way in which the martyr must be prudent. Classically speaking, prudence is that perfection of judgment presumed by all virtue, and hence prudence is the queen of the virtues. Prudence in this sense is necessarily at stake in any exercise of virtue and so must be especially at stake in the martyr’s choice; the extreme circumstances of heroic and saintly sacrifice would have to exhibit virtue in judgment more, and not less. 

This is the sort of reasoning we find from the great Catholic apologist Frank Sheed, for instance. “It is by the virtue of Prudence that the martyr clearly sees his way to martyrdom.” The martyr, on this understanding, is pre-eminently prudent. “There are occasions when the avoidance of martyrdom would be highly imprudent. The word Prudence itself is simply another form of the word providence, and providence is from the Latin word ‘to see’: it is the virtue that sees in advance and provides.” 

Sheed’s logic is tight, perhaps too tight. If it is true that the martyr is prudent, it feels a bit like an unhelpful truism—based on etymology and definition, but hardly illuminating the meaning of martyrdom. The theological principles seem sound, but they also seem abstract and not helpful for making sense of what we praise in the martyrs. 

Let us intensify the problem, for Ignatius was a bishop and everything in his life was ordered to the responsibilities of spiritual leadership. Other martyrs had clearer and stronger responsibilities in the world of natural relationships. From the diary of Perpetua we learn that her father came to her three times to beg that she turn from the path of martyrdom. We also learn that Felicity, who was imprisoned with her, had even more familial responsibility: she was pregnant. Can even the most zealous of modern pro-life heroes fathom that Felicity was upset that the law prevented the public punishment of pregnant women? She was “in great grief lest on account of her pregnancy [her martyrdom] should be delayed.” 

Even more surprising: while Felicity prayed that she could be martyred with the others, those others were themselves “painfully saddened lest they should leave so excellent a friend alone.” God answered their prayers: the baby was born early, destined to be adopted and raised by someone else, so her mother Felicity could be martyred. 

Whatever praise we may give to Perpetua and Felicity, however much we may admire their conviction and hope, it seems absurd to characterize them as prudent, much less as “supremely” so. Sheed’s Catholic truism seems empty here. Far more resonant with the extraordinary circumstances, and extraordinary judgment, of the martyr is the assertion of the legendary nineteenth-century president of Williams College, Mark Hopkins: “The hero is not prudent. The martyr is not prudent.” 

One might assume Hopkins was speaking of prudence in common parlance, in which it often doesn’t suggest classical virtue at all, but rather self-interest and self-preservation, avoidance of risk, even compromise. In this sense it might describe a strategy that is expedient or pragmatic—something functionally amoral, hardly a perfection of virtue. The zealous idealist who sacrifices all for noble principle neither embodies nor desires prudence. This usage presents us with another truism, for if prudence isn’t the queen of the virtues, if it is only a baser instinct for self-preservation unconcerned with spiritual health, then it is not even interesting to deny it of the martyr. 

But Hopkins was not denying that prudence is a virtue. He was making a different point. Within the horizon of everyday experience, prudence discerns the moral law, and it is precisely this horizon, where spiritual health is realized in earthly matters, that Hopkins finds the martyr transcending for the sake of some higher spiritual realm. Prudence discerns and applies the rules of right living, and the martyr “is brought into a position where the rules of prudence are out of place, and where it becomes necessary to vindicate the supremacy of the spiritual nature and the majesty of virtue by an unconditional trust in goodness and in God.” 

Compared to the scholastic precision of Sheed, wouldn’t we rather say with Hopkins that Christian martyrdom somehow transcends the classical understanding of prudence? When Ignatius begs to be fed to the lions, or when Felicity prays to be delivered of her baby so that she can leave it behind and be killed honourably with her friends, isn’t this remarkable precisely because it seems utterly beyond prudence, even overturning prudence, revealing a holy foolishness in light of the higher truth of the gospel? 

Classic works on martyrdom will speak of other virtues, especially courage, and they will praise the discernment and conviction of martyrs, but one looks in vain for specific attention to prudence. Even Thomas Aquinas, eager to integrate his various Christian sources with Aristotle, only indirectly addresses whether radical acts of Christian love are prudent. Saint Thomas characterizes martyrdom as virtuous, but the virtues he relates it to are courage, moderation, justice, and charity. He doesn’t mention prudence, and he implicitly acknowledges the common view that martyrdom is contrary to prudence: in an objection he says that martyrdom seems presumptuous and rash. 

Yet in replying to this objection he does defend martyrdom as reflecting a mind “prepared by divine law” to do what is right, and in this way the martyr acts “according to reason.” While he does not speak explicitly of prudence here, it is clear that he associates martyrdom with more than the moral virtues of self-control, courage, and justice. Insofar as an act of martyrdom is deliberately chosen, a genuine human act, it must manifest a perfection of a rational judgment. 

And yet this perfection is supernatural. The practical reasoning of the martyr is informed by faith, hope, and charity, and so seems to stand above the natural cardinal virtues. The practical wisdom of the martyr, then, is not an acquired habit but a gift. So, like Saint Thomas, we find his disciple John of St. Thomas, in treating the gifts of the Holy Spirit, saying something much closer to the Protestant Hopkins than to the Catholic Sheed: “The gift of counsel is not subject to the virtue of prudence, inferior to it, or to be resolved to it. For those who judge of revelations or divine truths should not judge according to the human standards of prudence but according to the standards of faith, to which the gift of the Holy Ghost is subject and by which it is regulated.” 

John of St. Thomas even says that it is not enough to describe this gift with the help of theologians; we need the saints, precisely because they have their own superior kind of prudence. Alluding to the Vulgate’s prudens eloquii mystici of Isaiah 3:3, John says that “in the examination of spiritual and mystical matters, there ought to be recourse not only to scholastics, but to spiritual and prudent men of mystical eloquence, who know how to judge the ways of the Spirit and can discern the differences of spirits.” 

Our question, then, is whether the “prudent man of mystical eloquence”—the saint or martyr who discerns their holy, supernatural fate—can be understood as being prudent in any conventional, non-biblical sense. Does the mystical prudence of the martyr transcend prudence or perfect it? 

In a well-known metaphor from Aristotle, the virtuous man choosing the mean of virtue is like the skilled archer. Prudence helps us aim at the target. The martyr seems to have a totally different target from the rest of us; but granted that natural virtue and holy martyrdom are different aims, don’t they both involve aiming—and so the skill of the archer? 

Of course, no matter how skilled, the archer does not absolutely control the arrow’s flight. The archer is not a puppeteer or a clock winder. He takes stock of circumstances beyond his control, to send the arrow on the path judged best to hit its mark. His acquired skill allows him to make intuitive adjustments throughout the process of preparing, taking aim, and releasing the arrow. Firing of the arrow, then, neither determines something entirely predictable nor abandons it to forces random and arbitrary. The archer makes a good shot because, relying on his judgment, he lets go and participates in the wider activity of the world. 

Aristotle especially emphasizes this active participation in calibrating the shot, up to the decisive moment of releasing the arrow: “It is with his eye on [the target] that the person with reason tightens or loosens his string.” The prudent choice, like the archer’s “best guess,” involves ongoing adjustments and reassessments; both the archer and the moral agent take an active and decisive role in seeking to hit the mark. 

Doesn’t this describe the judgment of the martyr? Granted that a glorious death is a possibility, or even an inevitability, mustn’t the martyr still calibrate how to face it, what steps would be available to reach it, and whether there are any honourable steps to avoid it? 

At the very least, the martyr is not deprived of agency, of actively finding the way to direct action in particular circumstances. More vivid than Aristotle’s image of prudence is Plato’s, taken up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: the prudent decision-maker is like a charioteer whose course depends on skillfully steering horses. Is the charioteer in control? Of his choices, yes, but of the horses and terrain, not in any deterministic way. The image of the guiding charioteer captures the dynamic conditions of decision-making, demanding masterful self-control without absolute predictability. Ambroise Gardeil says that the image helps us see prudence as “a tactical maneuver . . . , one that is utterly versatile because it unfolds on the essentially moving terrain of human contingencies.” 

Theologian Paul Scherz, distinguishing Aristotelian prudence from the modern social-scientific approach to risk management, emphasizes the key role of foresight and memory. These two aspects of how a prudent person conceives his action highlight that the virtue is embedded in a narrative history. Prudence, he says, involves “the engagement of the past to create a certain kind of narrative imagination, a form of perception.” 

What makes the martyr a martyr, and not a rash fool, is precisely this discerning of his life in light of a larger history of salvation. As Scherz puts it, “Through docility to the past, one learns the broad Christian narrative of salvation history. Actions must be consistent with that narrative.” We can push this point further: acts of Christian virtue must not only be consistent with but also confirm and participate in the Christian narrative. We might even say that the prudent Christian enacts that narrative. This is true for the martyr more, not less, than the naturally prudent. 

There are classes of acts that we know ahead of time should be avoided (do not steal) or pursued (honour your parents). But for individual, concrete actions, it is often a challenge to discern how and to what extent such precepts apply. How do you honour a parent who has been cruel or abusive? How do you respect rights of property in a life-threatening emergency? Prudence doesn’t simply grasp principles and kinds of acts; it is attuned to not-fully-intelligible circumstances of concrete life and finds a way for particular action. 

So as an intellectual virtue, prudence is already somewhat paradoxical, even in non-heroic circumstances and apart from the exceptional grace of martyrdom. Prudence has historically been associated with facing circumstances beyond one’s control, like a ship captain in a storm. Plato says the political art requires one to “cooperate with circumstances in a tempest.” 

As Saint Thomas describes it in Aristotelian terms, knowledge is of what is fixed and universal, but action depends on aligning one’s life, including one’s discernment of stable truths, with particulars “less certain and fixed.” Hence prudence differs from other intellectual virtues where reason has more certainty, “yet prudence above all requires that man be an apt reasoner, so that he may rightly apply universals to particulars, which later are various and uncertain.” 

The features Scherz focuses on, foresight and memory, are two of what Aquinas calls “integral parts” of prudence. Another integral part is discerning the salient features of one’s circumstances, the concrete particulars to which general moral truths must apply. This too pertains to the martyr’s judgment. Choosing a noble death requires the martyr to discern general principles (such as to avoid injustice and an ignoble death) while discerning the demands of the circumstances in which to apply those principles (that this here and now is a particular threat to life, that to try to avoid it in this way or that way would be shameful). Of course, without the eyes of faith, the martyr’s embrace of suffering will still not seem prudent—but with the eyes of faith, the conditions of prudent decision-making, the external and interior circumstances of choice, are manifest. 

Consider some of the other integral elements of prudence. “Circumspection” could sound like timidity, “caution” like cowardice. But as parts of a classical understanding of prudence they call forth a calibrated confidence in response to uncertain circumstances. Or consider “docility.” While this could sound like a passive meekness, it involves a reasonable acknowledgement of dependence on others. And then “shrewdness.” In English this might sound like a selfish cunning, but it is a perfection of discerning circumstances, estimating, discovering, and guessing at what will work. 

These last two parts of prudence—docility and shrewdness—receive special attention from Josef Pieper, who emphasizes that the prudent person must avoid inordinate confidence and yet cultivate a supple reliability. Docility, he says, “is the kind of openmindedness which recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced as does not cage itself in any presumption of deceptive knowledge.” And shrewdness is steadiness “when confronted with a sudden event,” nimbleness “in response to new situations.” 

Do not these describe the qualities of a Christian who doesn’t lose faith even while being led to the lions? Note that Ignatius is not counseling apathy, or Stoic resignation. We admire Felicity and Perpetua precisely for not allowing threats to shake them from their holy conviction. Martyrs are clever and creative, but they do not coldly calculate the most advantageous outcome. In this light, the activity of prudence, as personally ennobling, can hardly be confused with modern social-scientific discussions of risk management, precautionary reasoning, and prediction. 

The functionally amoral modern concept of prudence is essentially a fragmentation, or a disintegration, of the classical concept, breaking up elements of an organic whole. The components of prudence that Saint Thomas identified (eight of them, drawing on Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, and others) tune judgment so that the agent can align his actions with reality. Isolating or overemphasizing any one of these removes it from the context of virtue. 

The examples of the martyrs help us reintegrate these parts and better appreciate the virtue of prudence; they illuminate what it means for individual judgment to be in harmony with the whole of divine providence. 

This seems to be exactly Aquinas’s point mentioned earlier, answering the objection about the apparent unreasonableness of martyrdom:

It is commonly noted that for Saint Thomas the “principles of practical reason” (that is, truths grasped by prudence) are the same as the “precepts of the natural law” (that is, the order of human life determined for rational creatures by God). The martyr extends this connection: he has not mere natural prudence but supernatural or “divine” prudence, insofar as his mind participates not only in the natural law but in the whole plan of salvation, “the divine law.” 

The classical example of fortune—the deliberate agent subject to circumstances neither predicted nor controlled—is the farmer plowing a field and accidentally finding forgotten treasure. A biblical parable puts a twist on this: consider how prudent is the man who, knowing already that there is priceless treasure buried there, sells everything he has to buy the field (Matthew 13:44). In his work To the Martyrs, Tertullian, a great admirer of Ignatius, spells out the logic: 

This, distilled, is the prudence of the martyr: trading earthly treasure for heavenly reward. 

And the reward is not only for the martyr himself but also for the rest of the church: for the witnesses to martyrdom benefit from the manifestation of salvation history and the chance to participate in it further. Thus we hear and are moved by the eloquence of the martyr, so that in fact “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”! 

In this sense, the martyr’s choice is not an irrational, blind leap of faith; it is consummately reasonable—an embodiment of perfect prudence, a participation in the ultimate Logos who governs the universe and invites us to participate in his life. So when we look to Ignatius, Felicity and Perpetua, and all the martyrs, we can ask and trust not only that our hearts be shaped by the charity of their acts but that our minds be conformed to the discernment of their reason, to share in the virtue of their mystical prudence.