Very little is known about Saint Lucia of Syracuse. After reading the rather short entry in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, all my mental images of St. Lucy bedecked in a wreath of candles or even of the beautiful young virgin holding her eyes on a platter faded as I realized that most of the stories about her are just that—stories. The details of Lucy’s life are cloaked in hundreds of years’ worth of legends that have sprung up, our hyperbolic attempts to understand her life, her choices, and her martyrdom. We don’t have Lucy’s life story handed to us on a platter.
What we do know is that Lucy was most likely martyred in the early fourth century. In 303, toward the end of Diocletian’s long reign, the last organized Roman persecution of Christians began. This period of persecution would end around the year 311 and Constantine would officially make Christianity legal in 313. During those final years before the legalization of Christianity, however, as our fledgling Church grew in strength and numbers, Diocletian struggled in vain to maintain his power base. Whereas, before his reign, emperors were typically deified upon their deaths, Diocletian declared himself to be a deity while still living, taking Roman arrogance to a new extreme. The Christian response to this arrogance is martyrdom—the opposite extreme of utter humility before the One God. Ultimately, the submission to death of these martyrs, which mirrors so beautifully Christ’s submission to death on the Cross, overpowered arrogance and persecution and helped restore balance. Lucy’s martyrdom is typical of the age.
According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, “A fourth-century inscription mentioning that a girl called Euskia died on Lucy’s feast-day survives at Syracuse.” This is literally the only historical evidence we have of Lucy’s martyrdom. Yet oral traditions are not to be dismissed. The generally accepted story about her martyrdom claims that Lucy, a young Christian, wished to dedicate her life to the service of Christ by remaining a virgin. One story claims that she wore a wreath of candles on her head in order to carry food to Christians hiding in the catacombs (one possible source of the Swedish tradition tying candlelit wreaths to the feast of Santa Lucia). Her mother, a widow named Eutychia, however, had arranged a marriage for her daughter with a young man who, tragically, was not a Christian. Lucy’s mother couldn’t understand her desire to shrug off a comfortable, secure lifestyle, so Lucy conceived of a way to help her mother understand the power of faith. Together, mother and daughter made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Agatha, where Lucy’s mother was miraculously healed of a long hemorrhagic illness. Overwhelmed and convinced, Lucy’s mother consented to her daughter’s wishes. Lucy’s suitor, outraged by her rejection of him and by her charitable distribution of her sizable dowry, denounced her as a Christian to Roman authorities.
According to legend, Lucy was brought before the governor who, in order to nullify her vow of chastity, ordered her sold into prostitution in a brothel. When the soldiers tried to drag her to her fate, however, they were unable to move her. Some stories claim that oil was then poured over her head and her captors attempted to set her ablaze, only to find that fire did not burn her (another possible reason that young Swedish girls depicting St. Lucy wear wreaths of candles on their heads). Lucy was then beaten, tortured, and eventually her neck was pierced with a sword and she died.
One legend claims that Lucy’s eyes were removed from her head during her torture because their beauty so enraged her captors. Yet another story says that when she, in her humility, asked her Roman captors what could possibly have caused her young suitor to pine after her so, she was told that it was her beautiful eyes, at which point Lucy, apparently without pain, removed her eyes and handed them over saying, “He may have them, then.”
Why do we feel so compelled to embellish upon what is known about Lucy’s life? We know, historically, what was happening to Christians who refused to publicly recant their beliefs or offer oblations on pagan altars. Isn’t it enough to know that this very young woman, through the grace of God, found the strength to die for her belief in Jesus Christ in the face of what must have been incredible fear? Can’t we be humbled and taught by her faith and fearlessness without having her life story in, well, gory detail? Must we be so hung up on the literal details rather than taking to heart the lesson that is so obvious to us? How much easier it should be to defend our faith to sneering skeptics rather than to government officials with the authority to torture and kill us for that faith!
On the other hand, human nature always yearns for details that we aren’t privy to. One friend pointed out to me that legends are embellished along the way out of sheer necessity. In order to remember a story, fantastic details are added in order that it be more memorable and easier to pass along orally. Yet, I believe that so many legends have arisen around Lucy because we desire to more fully witness and thus more fully understand her sacrifice.
Anthropologists have learned that they can take the skull and other bones of prehistoric people and recreate (supposedly accurately) what they may have looked like while living. With the help of computer models, they add layers of muscle, tissue, and skin in order to give themselves and us an actual “face” from the past to look at and study. This information often leads to hypotheses about what their living conditions may have been and, when compared with modern man, we can speculate about what has changed and why. Scientists can extrapolate all kinds of information that ultimately help us in our quest for deeper understanding of ourselves.
I posit, then, that these legends are, in fact, a kind of spiritual extrapolation. We take what little we know about Lucy’s life and martyrdom and, because we do appreciate the enormity of her sacrifice, we look at historical context and we try to reconstruct more fully the story of her life. We do this, I believe, so that we may meditate upon the implications for our own lives and the ways in which we are called to martyrdom for Christ, whether that be in the form of service to the church or the Christian upbringing of children in an increasingly anti-Christian world or even in marriage. Some are called to be an ethical voice in the workplace to the detriment of their careers. We are all called, in one way or another, to forsake our fallen nature in order to obey the commandments of God.
I know of an Orthodox parish that recently found itself divided over the issue of a new iconostas that turned out to be a good deal larger than their previous one, therefore making it far more difficult for the congregation to view the altar and the movements of the clergy at the altar during liturgy. The priest, in his wisdom, advised his congregation that everything we need to see is on the icon screen—through our iconography, we view the Kingdom of Heaven. Everything that is happening in the sanctuary is, in fact, fully represented by these “windows to Heaven.” Yet, in all honesty, won’t we always be compelled to try to glimpse just a little bit more? We strain to witness the Kingdom of Heaven so that we may strengthen our own faith and, in turn, witness to others.
SOURCES:
Farmer, David Hugh, General Consulting Editor. Butler’s Lives of the Saints: December. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), pp. 113–114.
Fournier, Catherine. St. Lucy of Syracuse. Domestic-Church.com.
(A special thanks to my husband, Sloan Rolando, for providing information on the reign of Diocletian.)
Gina Rolando received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Loyola University, Chicago. Having recently completed three years as a “seminary wife” at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, she now resides in Illinois with her husband and their three children, Kira (6), Gregory (3) and Lucia (1). She and her family attend St. Michael’s Pro-Cathedral (UOC) in Hammond, Indiana, where her husband, Sloan, will be ordained to the diaconate on November 20, 2004.
This article originally appeared in The Handmaiden Vol. 8 No. 4.
