A Response to Professor Levering

Abstract

Let me begin by paying tribute to Professor Levering's profound and perceptive paper. TI1e art of dying is something of a lost art within our con­ temporary culture. We live in a world that avoids confronting death wher­ ever possible, that treats abortion as a surgical procedure yet prolongs life almost at all costs, that drugs the dying so that they end their days not in repentance but in opiate-fueled hallucination, that sends off its loved ones in closed coffins in a mood of stimulated pseudo-celebration. Our age} as St. Nikolai Velimirovich puts it, is one of "life without ai.m and death with­ out hope." Professor Levering sketches out a profotmdly Christian antidote to all this1 taking the gratitude and repentance (personal and communal) of Stephen as a paradigm for the way in which we should approach and pre­ pare for our own deaths. Professor Levering's paper is salutary in the fullest possible sense of the term. But I shall in the remainder of this paper focus on the Orthodox tmder­ standing and appropriation of the narrative of Stephen's martyrdom in the book of Acts. Stephen is, in the first instance,. rernembered as protomar­ tyr and protodeacon. It goes without saying t]iat Stephen's witness unto death has remained an inspiration and exernplar for the untold numbers of Christi.an martyrs fro1n the apostolic era down to our own. Stephen is also remembered for his being numbered among the first seven deacons appointed by tl1e apostles. It is as a deacon that he is invariably depicted within the iconographic tradition. TI1e patristic tradition contains a good deal of reflection on Stephen. A place ofhonor in this respect belongs to St. Augustine, who writes at length of the glories and miracles attendant upon the translation of the relics of St. Stephen to North Africa .. These astonishing scenes prornpt Augustine to reflect weightily on the puzzling relationship between death and life. Au­ gustine takes the miracles of healing and conversion worked by the relics