Feast of St Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. The account of his martyrdom in 155 for refusing to acknowledge that “Caesar is lord,” states that his was “a death conformable to the gospel”—in other words, a mystical reenactment of Christ’s passion. Polycarp was burned at the stake.
Conversation
The narrator records “the fire made the shape of a vaulted chamber like a ship’s sail filled by the wind, and made a wall around the body of the martyr. And he was in the midst, not as burning flesh, but as bread baking or as gold and silver refined in a furnace.”
2