Laurence of Rome

The archdeacon of Rome

Nothing certain survives of Laurence's origins. A late and much-loved Spanish tradition, first firmly attested in the Middle Ages, makes him a native of Osca (Huesca) in the Ebro valley of Tarraconensian Spain, born about 225, and brings him to Rome in the company of the future Sixtus II — a tradition that Spain has honoured with churches and pilgrimage but which no third-century source supports. What is historical is his office. By 257 he was archdeacon of the Roman Church: the first of the seven deacons of the city, and by that office the bishop's right hand in everything that touched money. Rome's deacons administered the seven ecclesiastical regions of the city, kept the registers of the poor and the widows, received and disbursed the offerings, and had custody of the sacred vessels. The Church of Rome in the middle of the third century was rich in exactly this sense — not in lands or palaces, but in a very large charitable establishment: a generation earlier Pope Cornelius could report that the Roman Church supported more than fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress. Laurence's office was to keep and to spend that fund, and it is precisely this that brought him to the notice of the state.

The persecution of Valerian

Valerian (r. 253–260) began his reign mildly toward the Christians and turned against them in his fifth year. Two rescripts define the persecution. The first, of the summer of 257, ordered the clergy to sacrifice to the gods of the empire and forbade assembly and the use of the cemeteries; it sent bishops into exile — Cyprian of Carthage to Curubis, Dionysius of Alexandria into the Libyan desert — and it took the life of Stephen I, bishop of Rome, on 2 August 257. The second, of the summer of 258, was far harsher and quite explicit: bishops, presbyters and deacons were to be executed at once, on identification alone; senators and equites who were Christians were to lose rank and property, and if they persisted, their lives; matrons were to be stripped of their goods and banished; Christians of the imperial household were to be sent in chains to the imperial estates. Its second clause is the key to what followed at Rome. The state was no longer only suppressing a cult; it was confiscating a treasury and interrogating the officers who kept it.

The rescript reached Rome in the first days of August 258. On 6 August, Sixtus II — who had been bishop for less than a year — was taken while seated in the chair, teaching, in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Via Appia, and beheaded on the spot with the deacons who were with him. Felicissimus and Agapitus, two of the seven deacons, suffered the same day. The Roman Depositio martyrum of the year 354 — the oldest calendar of the Roman Church, and a document of the highest authority — enters both events: VIII idus Aug. Xysti in Callisti on the sixth, and IIII idus Aug. Laurenti in Tiburtina on the tenth. That the archdeacon outlived his bishop by four days is therefore not legend but record; the reason for the interval is what the tradition supplies.

"Where are you going, Father, without your son?"

The scene of the parting of Sixtus and Laurence is the oldest and best-attested element of the story after the bare dates: Ambrose of Milan, writing his De officiis about 390 — within living memory of men who had known Rome under Constantine — gives it as a thing handed down. As the old bishop was led away, the archdeacon followed weeping and cried out that he was being abandoned: had the priest ever offered the sacrifice without his deacon? Where was the father going without his son? And Sixtus answered that he was not deserting him, but that a greater contest was reserved for him — that as strength is spared the old man, so a more glorious triumph over the tyrant was kept for the young — and that in three days he would follow.

The treasures of the Church

The interval was the state's doing, and Laurence used it. Ambrose tells the rest. Knowing that the archdeacon held the Church's money, the prefect of the city had him arrested and demanded that the treasure be produced; the legendary acta name the prefect Cornelius Secularis, and add that Laurence asked for three days to gather it in. In those days he went through the seven regions of Rome and gave away everything he had: the alms-fund, the plate, and — the tradition insists — even the sacred vessels, sold and distributed, on the principle that the Church's gold exists to ransom the poor and not to be surrendered to Caesar. On the third day he came before the prefect with a crowd behind him: the blind, the lame, the lepers, the widows on the roll, the orphans of the Church. These, he said, are the treasures of the Church, and they are treasures that neither rust nor moth consumes and that thieves cannot break through to steal; in these poor bodies Christ is stored up, and their hands have carried the Church's wealth ahead of it into heaven.

The saying is not a pious ornament. It is a compressed statement of the Roman Church's whole understanding of what its property was for, delivered at the moment when the state was attempting to seize it, and it is the reason Laurence became — far beyond the circle of his own city — the patron and pattern of Christian almsgiving.

The gridiron

For this the prefect, according to the tradition received everywhere by the fourth century, condemned him not to the sword but to a slow death by fire, so that the mockery might be repaid. An iron gridiron (craticula) was set over coals, and Laurence was bound upon it and roasted. He prayed for the city of Rome and for the conversion of its people; and after a long time he turned his head toward the judge with the words that made him, of all the martyrs, the most quoted: "It is roasted on this side; turn it, and eat." So the poet Prudentius has it in the Peristephanon at the end of the fourth century, and so Augustine repeats it in his sermons for the day. The relics were taken up by the Christians and buried in the cemetery on the Via Tiburtina, in the field afterwards called the Campo Verano.

The company of the passion

Around the martyrdom the fifth- and sixth-century Roman passio gathered a company of converts whom the Byzantine synaxarion partly received:

• Hippolytus, the officer of the prison in which Laurence was held, who saw him restore sight to a blind prisoner named Lucillus, was baptised with his whole household, buried the martyr's body, and was for that torn to pieces by wild horses — the strand of the legend that ties this Hippolytus, confusingly, to the several other Roman Hippolyti.
• Romanus, a soldier of the guard, who saw an angel wiping the martyr's face as he was tortured, asked for baptism at his hands, and was beheaded on 9 August, the day before Laurence himself.
• Cyriaca, a widow of the Caelian hill who sheltered Laurence and whose house served the poor of the city; and Justinus the presbyter, who gave him communion in prison. Cyriaca is the Latin form of the name of the martyr Kyriaki, with whom the calendars sometimes confuse her.

Relics, basilica, and cultus

Over the grave on the Via Tiburtina Constantine built a basilica — the basilica maior of St Laurence — and endowed it richly; rebuilt by Pelagius II in the sixth century and joined to a second church by Honorius III in the thirteenth, it is the San Lorenzo fuori le Mura of today, one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome and the burial place of many popes. About 560 the relics of the protomartyr Stephen, brought from Jerusalem, were laid in the same confession, and the two archdeacons of the Church — the first deacon-martyr of Jerusalem and the first of Rome — have shared a tomb ever since; a charming Roman legend has Laurence courteously shifting to one side to make room for his guest.

His name entered the Roman Canon of the Mass among the martyrs invoked after the apostles, standing between Stephen and Chrysogonus, and his feast acquired a vigil and an octave — a distinction shared at Rome with none but the apostles, the Baptist and, later, the Theotokos. The gridiron became one of the best-known emblems in Christian art, and because the Perseid meteor shower falls in the days around 10 August, the shooting stars of that week have been called in a dozen languages "the tears of St Laurence."

The saint in the East

Laurence is one of a small handful of purely Latin martyrs — with Clement of Rome, Sixtus, and the martyrs of the Via Salaria — whom the Byzantine calendar received and keeps with a proper office. The Greek Menaion of August 10 heads the day Ἄθλησις τοῦ ἁγίου μάρτυρος Λαυρεντίου τοῦ ἀρχιδιακόνου, Ξύστου πάπα Ῥώμης καὶ Ἱππολύτου — the three names in one notice — and appoints him a proper apolytikion in the third tone and a proper kontakion in the second. At Constantinople the empress Pulcheria built him a church in the quarter of the Pulcherianai, one of the great shrines of the fifth-century city; it was there that the relics of the prophet Isaiah were enshrined under Theodosius II, and there that Pulcheria herself was buried. The Antiochian and Greek usage keeps his memory on the tenth within the Dormition Fast and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration.