Amen dico vobis, quamdiu fecistis uni ex his fratribus meis minimis, mihi fecistis. “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)
I. The soldier, the monk, the bishop
For more than a thousand years St. Martin of Tours was the best-loved saint of the Latin West after the Apostles and the Mother of God. Thousands of churches and villages bear his name. His feast marked the turning of the year from autumn to winter. Kings carried his cloak into battle, and the place where it was kept gave our language the words chapel and chaplain. He was among the first saints the Church honoured publicly who had not died a martyr’s death. The age of persecution was over, and the Church learned from him that a long life of penance and charity could be its own kind of martyrdom.
His life fell into three parts, and he did not choose any of them. He was made a soldier against his will, because he was a veteran’s son. He chose the monastic life, but he could live it only in snatches, between exiles and journeys. He was made a bishop by a crowd that tricked him into coming to their city. Through all three he kept one thing constant. The sight of a poor man stopped him, because in the poor man he saw Christ.
Almost everything we know of him comes from one man. Sulpicius Severus was an educated Aquitanian nobleman who gave up his career for the ascetic life, visited Martin at Tours, and became his devoted disciple. He wrote the Life of St. Martin while the saint was still alive, about 396, and added three Letters and the Dialogues after his death. These writings are our primary witness. They are vivid and close to their subject, and they are full of wonders. A century and a half later another Bishop of Tours, St. Gregory, added the history of the cult and a great book of miracles at the tomb. What follows rests on these two men. Where a story is the pious tradition of the cult rather than history, it is given as such.
II. Sabaria and Pavia
Martin was born at Sabaria in the province of Pannonia, the modern Szombathely in western Hungary. His parents were pagans. His father was a soldier who had risen from the ranks to be a military tribune, and he named his son Martinus, “little one of Mars,” after the god of war. The boy grew up at Ticinum, the modern Pavia in northern Italy, where his father was stationed or settled.
The date of his birth is uncertain. Sulpicius says Martin was about eighty when he died, and Gregory of Tours places his birth in 316. But Sulpicius’s own account of Martin’s military career is hard to fit with so early a date, and many modern historians prefer a date near 336. The question cannot be settled, and the Church’s honour of him does not depend on it.
Sulpicius tells us that at the age of ten, against his parents’ wishes, Martin went to a church and asked to be made a catechumen. At twelve he wanted to go into the desert as a hermit, and only his age kept him from it. His father saw where this was leading and moved to stop it. A law of the Empire required the sons of veterans to serve in the army. When Martin was fifteen his father informed against him, and the boy was taken in chains and sworn into the cavalry.
He served, but not as other soldiers did. Sulpicius writes that Martin had one servant, a slave, and that the master waited on the slave, pulling off his boots and cleaning them, and that they ate at the same table. He was patient, gentle, and temperate, and gave away most of his pay. His fellow soldiers looked on him, Sulpicius says, as more a monk than a soldier.
III. The gate of Amiens
The scene for which he is best remembered took place in winter at Amiens, in northern Gaul, where his unit was quartered. The winter was so severe that many people died of the cold. At the city gate Martin met a beggar with almost nothing on. Many passed the man by. Martin had nothing left to give but his weapons and the military cloak he wore, because he had given everything else away. So he took his sword, cut the cloak in half, gave one half to the beggar, and put on the other. Some of the onlookers laughed at the figure he cut in his torn cloak. Others, Sulpicius adds, were ashamed that they had given nothing, when they had more to give.
That night Martin saw Christ in his sleep, clothed in the half-cloak he had given away. He was told to look closely at the Lord and to recognise the garment. Then he heard Christ say to the angels around Him: Martinus adhuc catechumenus hac me veste contexit, “Martin, who is still a catechumen, has clothed Me with this garment.” Sulpicius quotes the Gospel at this point. The Lord had said that what is done to the least of His brethren is done to Him, and now He showed that He meant it.
Sulpicius adds that the vision did not make Martin proud. He saw in it the goodness of God, and he hurried to be baptised. He was then about eighteen. Even after his baptism he did not leave the army at once. His tribune promised that he would renounce the world himself once his term of service was finished, and he begged Martin to stay with him until then. Martin stayed for about two more years, a soldier in name only.
IV. Christi ego miles sum
The time came when the Caesar Julian, the future apostate emperor, gathered his army near Worms to repel a barbarian invasion and gave the soldiers a donative, a gift of money, on the eve of battle. Martin judged that this was the moment to leave. He did not think it honest to take the gift and then refuse to fight. When his turn came he said to Julian: “Until now I have served you. Let me now serve God. Let whoever means to fight take your gift. I am Christ’s soldier; it is not lawful for me to fight” (Christi ego miles sum: pugnare mihi non licet).
Julian was angry and said that Martin was afraid of the battle. Martin answered that if they thought he was a coward and not a man of faith, he would stand the next day unarmed in front of the line, with no shield or helmet but the sign of the Cross, and go into the midst of the enemy. Julian had him placed under guard to hold him to his word. The next day, Sulpicius records, the barbarians sent envoys and surrendered without a fight. Martin was discharged.
Sulpicius tells the story as a contest between the two kinds of soldiering, and he dates it in a way that makes trouble for the chronology. Whatever its exact year, its meaning is clear. Martin had been made a soldier by force. He left the army openly, before the Caesar’s face, and he offered his life to prove that he was not leaving out of fear.
V. Hilary, Pannonia, and the island
Free at last, Martin went to Poitiers, to its bishop, St. Hilary, the great defender of the divinity of Christ against the Arians in Gaul. Hilary wanted to ordain him a deacon. Martin refused, saying he was unworthy. Hilary, who understood the man, offered him instead the order of exorcist, judging that Martin would not refuse an office so lowly. Martin accepted it.
Soon afterward Martin was warned in a dream to go home and bring his parents to the faith. He crossed the Alps. On the way he fell among robbers. One raised an axe over his head, and another held back the blow. They bound his hands and handed him to one of their number to rob. The robber asked him who he was and whether he was afraid. Martin answered that he had never felt so safe, because he knew the mercy of God would be with him in trials, and that he grieved only for the robber, who was unworthy of that mercy while he lived as he did. He began to explain the Gospel to him. The robber let him go, and Sulpicius says the man later became a monk, and that it was from his own mouth that the story was known.
In Pannonia Martin brought his mother to the faith. His father remained a pagan. Illyricum was then in the grip of the Arian party, and Martin opposed it almost alone. He was publicly beaten with rods and driven out of the city. He made his way to Milan and lived there as a hermit. But Milan’s bishop was the Arian Auxentius, who persecuted him and drove him from the city. Martin took refuge with a single priest companion on Gallinaria, a small island off the Ligurian coast near Albenga, and lived on roots. Sulpicius tells that he once ate hellebore, a poisonous plant, by mistake, and that when he felt death coming on he prayed and the danger passed.
Meanwhile Hilary himself had been sent into exile in Phrygia for his defence of the faith. When word came, about 360, that the Emperor had allowed Hilary to return, Martin went to Rome hoping to meet him on the road. He missed him there and followed him back to Poitiers.
VI. Ligugé
Near Poitiers, at Ligugé, Hilary gave Martin a place to live as a hermit, and disciples soon gathered around him. So began, about 361, the first monastery known to us in Gaul. The life there was poor and severe, a life of prayer and labour on the pattern of the Egyptian desert. Ligugé is a Benedictine abbey today, and claims with good reason to be the oldest monastic house in the West.
It was at Ligugé, Sulpicius says, that Martin’s reputation for miracles began. A catechumen who had come to learn from him fell ill of a fever while Martin was away, and died without baptism. Martin returned, found the brethren mourning, and sent them out of the cell. He lay on the body and prayed, and after some hours the dead man stirred and opened his eyes. He was baptised at once and lived for many years. Not long after, Martin restored to life a slave of a local landowner who had hanged himself. These are the first of many wonders in the Life. Sulpicius believed them and wrote them down from witnesses he named. They belong to the tradition of the saint and are given here as he recorded them.
VII. Bishop of Tours
About 371 the see of Tours fell vacant. The people wanted Martin, and they knew he would never come of his own will. So a citizen named Rusticius went to Ligugé, threw himself at Martin’s feet, and begged him to come and heal his sick wife. Martin went out of charity. Crowds were waiting along the road, and he was brought to the city under guard.
The neighbouring bishops who had come to consecrate the new bishop did not think much of him. Sulpicius reports their objections: he was a contemptible person, unfit for the office, with a mean face, shabby clothes and unkempt hair. The people laughed at them. It was the bishops’ own words, they said, that proved Martin’s worth. One of the objecting bishops was named Defensor. When the lector who was to read could not get through the crowd, a bystander took the psalter and read the first verse he found. It was a verse of the eighth Psalm, which in the Old Latin text then in use spoke of God destroying “the enemy and the defender,” inimicum et defensorem. The people raised a shout at the name, and the objection was overruled. Martin was consecrated. He was probably in his fifties.
He did not change his way of life. He kept the same humility of heart and the same poor clothing, Sulpicius writes, and he fulfilled the dignity of a bishop without giving up the life and virtue of a monk.
VIII. Marmoutier
At first he lived in a cell next to the church of Tours. But the crowds of visitors gave him no peace, so he went about two miles outside the city and built a monastery on the north bank of the Loire. It stood in a place shut in on one side by a sheer cliff and on the other by the river, reached by one narrow path. Martin lived in a wooden hut. Many of the brothers dug cells for themselves in the rock of the cliff. There were about eighty of them. This was the house later called Maius Monasterium, “the Greater Monastery,” Marmoutier.
Its rule was the rule of the desert. No one owned anything; everything was held in common. No one bought or sold, as many monks did. The only craft practised was the copying of books, and that was given to the young. The older monks gave themselves to prayer. Few left the cell except to go to the place of prayer. They ate together at a set hour, after the fast was over. No one drank wine unless he was ill. Most wore clothes of camel’s hair, and softer clothing was thought a fault. Sulpicius notes with admiration that many of them were of noble birth and had been brought up very differently. Many, he says, later became bishops. Martin’s monastery was a school for the clergy of Gaul.
IX. The apostle of the countryside
In Martin’s day the cities of Gaul were largely Christian, but the countryside was still pagan. The word paganus itself meant a country dweller. The old temples, the sacred trees and the shrines of the local gods stood in every district. Martin set out to win the countryside for Christ. He travelled the roads of his diocese and beyond it, on foot, by donkey, by boat on the rivers, preaching to the peasants, tearing down the temples and the idols, and building churches or monasteries in their place. Where he destroyed a shrine he founded a community to keep the faith alive in it. The rural parish system of Gaul owes much to him.
The work was dangerous, and Sulpicius tells of it in a series of scenes. In one village Martin had demolished an ancient temple and was about to cut down a pine tree that stood beside it, which the people held sacred. The pagans made him an offer. They would fell the tree themselves if he would stand where it was going to fall. If his God was as strong as he said, he would be safe. Martin agreed and was tied to the spot on the side where the tree leaned. As it began to fall toward him, he made the sign of the Cross against it, and Sulpicius says it swung round and crashed down on the other side, nearly crushing the onlookers. The whole district asked for baptism.
Another time a pagan rushed at him with a drawn sword. Martin bared his neck, and the man fell backward and begged forgiveness. At Levroux, when the people drove him off, he spent three days in sackcloth and ashes, fasting and praying. Then two angels appeared to him, armed like soldiers, and helped him destroy the temple while the villagers stood by, unable to move.
Martin also took care that the people’s devotion was rightly directed. Near Marmoutier there was an altar that had been set up over the tomb of a supposed martyr, and his predecessors had approved the cult. Martin found no reliable tradition about the man and was uneasy. He went to the tomb with a few brethren and prayed that God would show him who was buried there. A dark, fierce figure appeared and confessed that he had been a robber, executed for his crimes. Martin had the altar removed. The story shows a part of his character that is easy to miss. The saint who worked so many wonders would not let the people venerate what was false.
X. Before emperors
Martin often had to deal with the imperial court at Trier on behalf of others, and he never flattered it. Sulpicius tells that once he went to the Emperor Valentinian I to ask a favour. The Empress, who was an Arian, persuaded her husband not to receive him. Martin dressed himself in sackcloth, covered himself with ashes, and fasted and prayed for a week. Then, at the bidding of an angel, he went to the palace, and no one stopped him. Valentinian, angry that he had been let in, refused to rise to greet him, until fire covered the seat of the throne and the Emperor jumped up. He embraced Martin and granted everything he asked before Martin had even made his request.
Under the usurper Maximus, who seized power in the West in 383 and held court at Trier, other bishops went to the palace and fawned on him. Martin did not. When he was finally persuaded to dine at the Emperor’s table, a cup was brought to Maximus, who had it passed first to Martin, expecting to receive it back from the bishop’s hand. Martin drank, and then gave the cup to the priest who was with him. He judged that no one at that table was more worthy to drink after him than a priest, and he would not put the Emperor, or the Emperor’s relatives, before a priest. Maximus and his court admired him for it.
XI. The affair of Priscillian
The darkest episode of Martin’s life came out of this same court. Priscillian was a Spanish layman, later a bishop, who had gathered a following around an ascetic teaching that his opponents judged to be heretical and tainted with magic. Several Spanish bishops, led by Ithacius and Idacius, pursued him without mercy and brought the case before Maximus. The Emperor was willing to hear a capital charge.
Martin went to Trier. He rebuked Ithacius and begged Maximus not to shed the blood of the accused. It was enough, he said, that they had been judged heretics by the bishops and expelled from their churches. It was a new and unheard-of crime for a secular judge to try a case of the Church. While Martin remained in Trier, the trial was put off, and before he left, Maximus promised that no blood would be shed. After he had gone, the Emperor was persuaded otherwise. Priscillian and several companions were condemned and beheaded, about 385. It was the first time that Christians had put a man to death for heresy, and St. Ambrose, too, refused communion with the bishops who had brought it about.
Worse followed. Maximus prepared to send military tribunes into Spain with power to search out Priscillian’s followers, to take their lives and their goods. Such a commission would not have distinguished heretics from Catholics. Many devout men, Sulpicius notes, were suspected merely because they were pale and fasted much. Martin hurried back to Trier to prevent it. The Emperor’s price was that Martin should enter into communion with Ithacius and his party, whom Martin had refused to recognise. Martin refused at first. Then, learning that the tribunes were about to be sent, he gave way to save their intended victims. He joined in the consecration of a bishop with the Ithacians the next day, and the tribunes were recalled.
Sulpicius tells what this cost him. On the road home he sat down in the woods, grieving and accusing himself. An angel appeared and said to him: “You are right to grieve, Martin, but you could not have done otherwise. Recover your courage, so that you do not now put in danger not your reputation but your salvation.” Sulpicius adds that Martin never again attended any council of bishops for the sixteen years he lived after that, and that he said, with tears, that he felt his power of healing had grown weaker since the day of that communion.
The Church keeps the memory of this episode because it is true, and because it shows the measure of the man. He had fought for the lives of men accused of heresy, and he had paid for those lives with his own peace of conscience. He grieved that he had paid it, and he would have paid it again.
XII. The man himself
Sulpicius gives a portrait of Martin that he plainly drew from life. No one ever saw him angry or troubled, grieving or laughing. He was always the same, with a kind of heavenly gladness in his face, as if he were more than human. Nothing was on his lips but Christ, and nothing in his heart but piety, peace and mercy. He prayed without ceasing. Even when he seemed to be doing something else, his mind was on prayer, as a smith hammers on the anvil between strokes, Sulpicius says, to rest. He was often weeping for the sins of those who slandered him, and there were some, even among the clergy, who did. He let them be. He did not avenge any injury.
He saw the devil, Sulpicius says, in every shape, and he was never deceived by any of them. Once the enemy came to him while he was at prayer, surrounded by a purple light, robed as a king, with a jewelled crown and gold-embroidered shoes, smiling. He said he was Christ, come down to earth, and that he wished to show himself first to Martin. Martin was silent for a long time. Then he answered that the Lord Jesus had not said He would come in purple and a crown, and that he would not believe Christ had come unless He came in the form in which He suffered, bearing the marks of the Cross. The vision vanished like smoke. This is one of the best lessons in discernment the saints have left us. Martin would not believe in a Christ without wounds.
His charity did not grow cold with his dignity. The Dialogues tell that once, on his way into church to offer the Holy Sacrifice, he met a poor man who was half-naked in the winter cold. Martin went into the sacristy, took off his own tunic, and sent it out to him secretly. Then he put on his outer vestment over almost nothing and went to the altar. When he lifted his hands at the Sacrifice, his arms were seen bare, because the sleeves of the cheap garment the archdeacon had bought in haste were too short. The witnesses also saw, the tradition adds, a globe of fire above his head. Whatever one makes of the fire, the story is the gate of Amiens over again, forty years later. The bishop was still the soldier who would not ride past a cold man.
He was moved by the simplest sights. Once, seeing a sheep that had just been shorn, he said to his companions that it had fulfilled the precept of the Gospel. It had two coats, and it had given one away to him who had none. “So ought you to do,” he added.
XIII. Candes
In the autumn of 397 Martin learned that the clergy of Candes, a village of his diocese where the Vienne flows into the Loire, had fallen into a quarrel. He was very old, and he knew that his death was near, but he went to make peace among them. He stayed for some time, and he succeeded. Then, as he was preparing to return to his monastery, his strength failed.
He called his disciples together and told them he was dying. They wept, and begged him not to leave them. Moved by their grief, Martin prayed: Domine, si adhuc populo tuo sum necessarius, non recuso laborem: fiat voluntas tua. “Lord, if I am still needed by Thy people, I do not refuse the labour. Thy will be done.” The Church sings these words in his Office to this day.
He was in a fever, but he would not be moved from the bed of sackcloth and ashes on which he lay. When his disciples asked if they might at least put some straw under him, he answered that it was not fitting for a Christian to die except in ashes, and that he would be a sinner if he left them another example. He lay on his back with his eyes and hands raised to heaven, praying without pause. The priests asked him to turn on his side to ease his body. He said: “Let me look at heaven rather than earth, brothers, so that my spirit may be directed on its way to the Lord.” Then he saw the devil standing near, and said: Quid hic astas, cruenta bestia? Nihil in me, funeste, reperies: Abrahæ me sinus recipit. “Why do you stand here, bloody beast? You will find nothing in me, deadly one. Abraham’s bosom receives me.” With these words, Sulpicius says, he gave up his spirit. Those who were present said his face shone as if it were already glorified, and his body seemed like the body of a child.
The traditional date of his death is the eighth of November, 397. Gregory of Tours tells that a dispute broke out over his body between the people of Poitiers, who claimed him as their former monk, and the people of Tours, who claimed him as their bishop. While the men of Poitiers slept, the men of Tours passed the body out through a window, put it in a boat, and carried it up the Loire to Tours. The tradition of his cult adds that as the boat passed, the trees along the banks flowered out of season. The French and other peoples have long called a spell of mild weather in November “St. Martin’s summer.” These stories are the tradition of his cult, not the history of his death.
He was buried at Tours on the eleventh of November. Sulpicius says that about two thousand monks followed the body, together with a great company of virgins, and the people of all the towns about. The Church keeps his feast on the day of his burial.
XIV. Cultus
His tomb became at once a place of pilgrimage. St. Brice, his successor and once his troublesome disciple, built a small chapel over it. About 470 Bishop Perpetuus replaced it with a great basilica. In 573 St. Gregory became Bishop of Tours, and in the following twenty years he gathered the miracles worked at the tomb into four books. To the Franks, Martin was the protector of their kingdom. Clovis, the first Catholic king of the Franks, sent gifts to his shrine before marching against the Arian Visigoths, and after his victory at Vouillé in 507 he came to Tours to give thanks.
The half of the cloak that Martin had kept, the cappa, was treasured by the Frankish kings, who carried it with them on campaign and swore oaths on it. The shrine where it was kept was called the capella, and the priests who guarded it were called capellani. From these words come chapel and chaplain in English, and their counterparts in the other languages of Europe. The armies of Christendom have never lost the connection. Their priests are still chaplains, the keepers of Martin’s cloak.
His feast became one of the great days of the medieval year, Martinmas. It marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. Rents and wages fell due, servants were hired, and livestock were slaughtered for the winter. In parts of Gaul a fast was kept from St. Martin’s day until Christmas. A council at Mâcon in the late sixth century required fasting on three days of each week in this period. This “St. Martin’s Lent” was one of the roots of the season of Advent. The basilica at Tours was ruled by a chapter of canons, of which Alcuin, the master of Charlemagne’s palace school, was abbot.
The shrine suffered in later centuries. In 1562 the Huguenots sacked it and burned the saint’s relics, and only fragments were saved. During the Revolution the vast basilica was pulled down, and streets were laid across its site. In 1860 the tomb was found again beneath the ruins, and a new basilica was raised over it and consecrated in 1925. The relics that survive are venerated there. He is patron of France, of soldiers and cavalrymen, of the poor and of beggars, and of many cities and dioceses across Europe and the Americas.
In the 1962 calendar his feast is of the third class. The Mass is Statuit, of the Common of a Confessor Bishop, but the Gospel is proper to him. In place of the parable of the talents the Church reads Our Lord’s words about the lamp that is not hidden under a bushel but set on a candlestick, and about the single eye that fills the whole body with light (Luke 11:33-36). The Collect is proper and very ancient. On this day the Church also commemorates St. Mennas, an Egyptian soldier martyred under Diocletian. So she sets side by side two soldiers who left the Emperor’s army for Christ’s. One gave his blood in a single hour. The other gave sixty years.
XV. What his life teaches
That Christ is in the poor. Martin did not see a beggar at the gate of Amiens and think of Christ afterward. He saw Christ in the beggar, and Christ confirmed it that night. The Lord meant exactly what He said: As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40). The half-cloak is the whole of Christian charity. It was given at once, from what he needed, to a stranger, while others passed by.
That there is more than one way to be a soldier. Martin served the Emperor honestly until his conscience told him to stop. Then he left openly, offered his life to prove he was not a coward, and spent the rest of his days in a harder service. The Church honours soldiers who fight justly, and she has always honoured Martin as their patron. But she also teaches through him that every Christian is enlisted under another standard. Labour as a good soldier of Christ Jesus (II Tim. 2:3).
That humility does not refuse obedience. Martin did not want to be a deacon, and he did not want to be a bishop. He accepted what he was given and served in it without changing his way of life. A monk in a bishop’s chair, he did not use the chair to escape the cell, nor the cell to escape the chair.
That charity and truth must not be separated. Martin would not let the people venerate a robber as a martyr, and he would not let an emperor put heretics to death. Zeal for the truth that loses its mercy becomes cruelty, and mercy that loses the truth becomes indifference. Martin kept both, and suffered for both.
That the Christ to believe in bears His wounds. The devil came to Martin as a glorious king, and Martin sent him away. He would not accept a Christ without the Cross. Every age is offered a Christ of comfort and splendour who asks nothing and bears no wounds. Martin’s answer is still the right one.
That we must be ready to live or to die. Non recuso laborem. At the end Martin did not demand to be released, and he did not cling to life. He put the choice in God’s hands. For to me, to live is Christ: and to die is gain (Phil. 1:21).
Practice
Examine. Whom do I pass at the gate? Is there a person in my life, near or far, whose need I have learned not to see? When I give, do I give from my surplus or from what I need? Have I ever kept back the truth, or bent it, to stay in favour with those above me? Have I ever let my zeal for what is right turn into contempt or cruelty toward those who are wrong? Do I want a Christ without wounds, a faith that costs me nothing?
Do. Give something away today that you will miss, as Martin gave half his cloak. Look for one person you would ordinarily pass by, and stop. If you can, give clothing, or a coat, to the poor this week, in honour of the soldier at Amiens. Pray for all who serve in the armed forces, for chaplains, and for veterans, living and dead. In this month of the holy souls, pray especially for those who died in war.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Deus, qui conspicis, quia ex nulla nostra virtute subsistimus: concede propitius; ut, intercessione beati Martini Confessoris tui atque Pontificis, contra omnia adversa muniamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, who seest that we subsist by no strength of our own: mercifully grant that, by the intercession of blessed Martin, Thy Confessor and Bishop, we may be defended against all adversities. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Martinus hic pauper et modicus, cælum dives ingreditur. “Martin, poor and lowly here, enters heaven rich.” Or, with the saint himself: Domine, si adhuc populo tuo sum necessarius, non recuso laborem.
Devote. Ask St. Martin to obtain for you an eye that sees Christ in the poor and a hand quick to give. Commend to him soldiers, chaplains, and all who have left one service for another for the sake of conscience. If you keep the old custom, begin St. Martin’s Lent today: some small fast or abstinence on certain days of each week between now and Christmas, in preparation for the coming of the Lord.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Martin beside his master St. Hilary of Poitiers, his biographer Sulpicius Severus, his successor St. Brice, St. Gregory of Tours, and St. Mennas, the other soldier of the day. It also places him with the soldier-saints of the early Church, from St. Sebastian to St. Maurice. The Church History path takes up the conversion of rural Gaul, the Arian crisis in the West, the beginnings of Western monasticism at Ligugé and Marmoutier, the Priscillianist affair, and the Frankish kingdom that took Martin for its patron. The Sacred Liturgy path considers the cult of the confessors, Martinmas, St. Martin’s Lent and the origins of Advent, and the chapel and the chaplain. The Theology and Doctrine path examines the relation of the Church and the secular power in the punishment of heresy, St. Thomas on almsgiving (II-II, q. 32), and the discernment of spirits.
Sancte Martine, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Roman Breviary, lessons and antiphons for 11 November; the Roman Martyrology; Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini*,* Epistulæ I–III, Dialogi I–III and Chronica II.46–51; St. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum I.48, II.37, X.31, and De virtutibus S. Martini*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiæ II-II, q. 32; the Acta Sanctorum*; Butler’s* Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia. The miracles at Ligugé and in the countryside, the fire over the throne of Valentinian, the angel on the road from Trier, the apparitions of the devil and of the false martyr, and the globe of fire at the altar are given as Sulpicius records them. The carrying of the body through the window, the flowering of the trees, and St. Martin’s summer are given as the tradition of the cult.*