A reflection for the Feast of St. Martin I, Pope and Martyr — S. Martini Papæ et Martyris, III classis (12 November), Feria V infra Hebdomadam V quæ superfuit post Epiphaniam
In the summer of 653 the Bishop of Rome lay sick in bed in the Lateran basilica. He had had his bed carried into the church and set before the altar. Soldiers of the Emperor Constans II came into the basilica with drawn swords, under the command of the exarch of Ravenna, Theodore Calliopas. They had come to arrest the Pope. His clergy were ready to resist. Martin forbade it. He wrote afterward that he would rather have died ten times over than see blood shed for him in the house of God. He gave himself up, and he was carried down to the Tiber and put on a ship. He never saw Rome again.
The Church keeps his feast today. St. Martin I governed the Church for only six years, from 649 to 655, and spent the last two of them as a prisoner. He was tried in Constantinople, publicly stripped and chained, condemned to death, and then, by what was called mercy, exiled to Cherson on the Crimean coast. There he died of hunger and neglect in September of 655. He is the last of the Roman Pontiffs whom the Church venerates as a martyr. The Christian East honours him too, as “Martin the Confessor,” and keeps his memory in the spring.
His crime was a council. In October of 649, a few months after his election, Martin gathered more than a hundred bishops in the Lateran. They solemnly condemned the heresy called Monothelitism, which taught that Christ, though He has two natures, has only one will. They condemned also the two imperial decrees that had tried to settle the question by fiat: the Ecthesis of the Emperor Heraclius, which imposed the error, and the Typos of Constans II, which forbade anyone to speak of one will or two at all. The Emperor had ordered silence. The Pope would not be silent.
The Mass is from the Common of Supreme Pontiffs, the Mass Si diligis me, and the vestments are red. The Introit gives Our Lord’s words to Peter by the lake: “If thou lovest Me, Simon Peter, feed My lambs, feed My sheep” (John 21:15-17). The Epistle is Peter’s own charge to the shepherds of the Church, and the Gospel is the confession at Cæsarea Philippi and the promise of the Rock. The Church has given them to Martin with a kind of fearful precision. He fed the flock, he confessed Christ, he was a witness of His sufferings, and the gates of hell did not prevail.
It is also Thursday in the fifth week after Epiphany. On Sunday the Church read the parable of the wheat and the cockle: “while men were asleep, his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). The cockle of the seventh century was sown in the imperial palace and among the patriarchs of the East. Martin’s work was to tell the wheat from the tares when the farmhands could no longer see the difference, and to pay for it.
I. Seniores qui in vobis sunt: the Epistle
“The ancients therefore that are among you, I beseech, who am myself also an ancient, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ: as also a partaker of that glory which is to be revealed in time to come: Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking care of it, not by constraint, but willingly, according to God: not for filthy lucre’s sake, but voluntarily: neither as lording it over the clergy, but being made a pattern of the flock from the heart. And when the prince of pastors shall appear, you shall receive a never fading crown of glory. … But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you. To him be glory and empire for ever and ever. Amen.” (1 Pet. 5:1-4, 10-11)
Who am myself also an ancient. The first thing to notice is how Peter speaks. The man to whom Christ gave the keys does not command the elders; he beseeches them. He calls himself consenior, a fellow-elder, one presbyter among presbyters. He does not lay aside his authority, for he is plainly giving orders. But he gives them as a brother and an older man, and he gives his credentials not as a title but as a memory: he is “a witness of the sufferings of Christ.” Peter had seen the Passion, and had failed in it, and had been restored. He writes as a shepherd who knows what it costs.
St. Gregory the Great, who would sit in Peter’s chair half a century before Martin, built the whole second part of his Pastoral Rule on this balance. The ruler, he says, should be a companion to the humble in his humility, but should rise up against the vices of the wicked in the zeal of justice. He must not forget that he is a man like those he governs, and he must not forget that he governs them (Regula Pastoralis II.6). Peter’s “fellow-elder” and Peter’s “feed the flock” are both true at once.
Not by constraint, but willingly. Peter names three temptations of the shepherd and sets a remedy against each: duty without love, office for gain, and authority as domination. Against compulsion he sets willingness; against gain, a ready mind; against lordship, example. St. Bede, commenting on this passage, reads “a pattern of the flock” as the heart of it: the shepherd’s first sermon is his life, and the flock will follow what he does long before it heeds what he says (In epistolas septem catholicas, on 1 Pet. 5:3). St. Augustine had preached a long sermon against the shepherds of Ezekiel who “fed themselves” (Ezech. 34:2), men who drank the milk and wore the wool of the flock and did not care whether the sheep lived or died. The good shepherd, he says, may take what he needs to live, but what he seeks in the sheep is their salvation, not his own comfort (Sermo 46, De pastoribus).
Martin I is an icon of this text. He did not take the papacy as a prize; he took it in a year when everyone knew what the Emperor expected of the next Pope, and he was consecrated without waiting for the imperial confirmation that custom required. He did not use it for gain; he died with nothing, begging his friends in letters for a little grain and oil. And he did not lord it over anyone. When the soldiers came for him, he would not let his clergy fight. At his trial in Constantinople, when the witnesses were brought in to accuse him, he asked the judges not to make them swear on the Gospels, so that they might not damn their souls by perjury for his sake. The shepherd was thinking of the souls of the men who had come to condemn him.
A witness of the sufferings of Christ. The Greek word is martys. Peter calls himself a witness because he saw the Passion with his own eyes; in time he would witness to it with his blood, crucified in Rome. The word moved in the early Church from the one meaning to the other, from the man who testifies to what he saw to the man who testifies with his life. Martin never saw the Passion of Christ. But the Passion was, quite literally, what he died to defend. The question at stake in the seventh century was whether the Son of God, in Gethsemane and on the Cross, had a true human will that obeyed His Father, or whether His humanity was only an instrument moved from outside. Martin bore witness that the sufferings of Christ were the sufferings of a man who freely chose them. Then he suffered himself.
After you have suffered a little. The Church joins verses 10 and 11 to the first four, and the join is deliberate. Between them, in the full letter, stands the warning about the adversary who “as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour” (5:8). The shepherd who feeds the flock will meet the lion. Peter’s consolation is brief and strong: modicum passos, “having suffered a little,” God Himself will perfect, confirm, and establish you. The Vulgate’s last verb is solidabit, “He will make you solid.” It is the language of building and foundations, the language of the rock.
Martin’s sufferings did not seem little to him. His letters from Cherson are some of the most human documents a Pope has left us. He writes that bread could be had in that country only by name; that he was ill and famished; that the clergy of his own Church and the friends who once surrounded him had so completely forgotten him that they did not even send to ask whether he was alive. He does not pretend not to be hurt. And then, in the same letter, he turns. He commends his body to the Lord, who is near, and asks why he should be anxious. He prays that God, at the intercession of St. Peter, will keep the Roman Church steadfast in the orthodox faith, and especially the shepherd who now governs it (Epistulæ from exile, PL 87). That shepherd was Eugene I, elected at Rome while Martin was still living. The exiled Pope prayed for his successor. This is the “little while” of suffering, and this is what God did with it: He made the man solid.
II. Tu es Petrus: the Gospel
“At that time, Jesus came into the quarters of Cæsarea Philippi: and he asked his disciples, saying: Whom do men say that the Son of man is? But they said: Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets. Jesus saith to them: But whom do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answering, said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” (Matt. 16:13-19)
Whom do men say? Our Lord’s first question is a survey of opinion, and opinion is generous. Men say He is John, or Elias, or Jeremias, a prophet, a great man, a voice from God. None of it is false as far as it goes, and none of it is enough. St. John Chrysostom notes that Christ asks first what others think so that He may draw out, by contrast, what the disciples believe; He does not let them hide behind the crowd (Homiliæ in Matthæum 54). Then comes the second question, which no one can answer for another: “But whom do you say that I am?”
Every age of the Church has had to answer it again. The Arians said the Son was the greatest of creatures. The Nestorians said that the Son of God dwelt in the man Jesus as in a temple. The Monothelites of Martin’s day said, in effect, that the Word moved His humanity the way a hand moves a tool: a true body and a true soul, but no true human willing. Each was an attempt to say something reverent about Christ that was a little less than “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God,” true God and true man. Each was, in its way, a survey of opinion. And each time, the Church has had to give Peter’s answer again.
Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee. Peter’s confession is not his own discovery. It is revealed by the Father. St. Leo the Great, preaching on the anniversary of his own consecration, dwells on this: Peter is blessed not for what he saw with his eyes but for what he received from above, and the firmness of the faith he confessed is not his but God’s (Sermo 4, De natali ipsius IV). St. Hilary of Poitiers, in his great work on the Trinity, calls Peter’s confession the foundation on which the Church stands: upon this rock of confession the building of the Church is raised (De Trinitate VI.36-37).
Upon this rock. The Fathers read the Rock in more than one way, and it is honest to say so. Chrysostom and Hilary emphasise the faith Peter confessed. St. Augustine, late in life, recalled that he had sometimes explained the Rock as Peter himself and more often as Christ whom Peter confessed, and he left the reader free to choose the better reading (Retractationes I.21). But these readings were never set against one another in the ancient Church as they have been since. The confession is not floating free in the air; it is spoken by a man, and the Lord answers by giving that man a new name. “Thou art Peter.” St. Cyprian saw this plainly in the third century: the Lord builds His Church upon one man, so that its unity might be made manifest, and though He gives equal apostolic power to all, He sets up one chair so that the origin of unity might begin from one (De catholicæ Ecclesiæ unitate 4). St. Ambrose put the whole doctrine into four words: Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia, “Where Peter is, there is the Church” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 40.30). And St. Jerome, writing from the deserts of Syria in the middle of a schism, told Pope Damasus that he followed no leader but Christ, and so was joined in communion with the chair of Peter, because on that rock, he knew, the Church was built (Epistula 15.2).
The Church has gathered these streams together and defined their meaning. The First Vatican Council teaches, citing this very Gospel, that a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church was promised and conferred immediately and directly upon blessed Peter by Christ the Lord (Pastor Æternus, cap. 1), and that this primacy endures in his successors, the Roman Pontiffs, by the institution of Christ Himself (cap. 2). St. Leo had said the same thing, in his own way, twelve centuries before: the order of truth remains; blessed Peter, persevering in the strength of the rock he received, has not let go of the helm of the Church he took up (Sermo 3, De natali ipsius III, 3).
The gates of hell shall not prevail. Martin’s life is a commentary on this promise, and on what it does and does not mean. It does not mean that the Pope will be safe. Martin was dragged from his sickbed. It does not mean that the Pope will be honoured. In Constantinople he was brought before the court, stripped of his pallium in public, an iron collar put on his neck, and led through the streets of the capital with an executioner carrying a sword before him. It does not mean that the faithful will rally to him. His own clergy forgot him, and a new Pope was elected while he lay in exile. It means only, and entirely, that the faith Peter confessed will not be overcome in the Church built upon him.
And it was not. Martin’s chief ally was a Greek monk, St. Maximus the Confessor, who had come to Rome and helped prepare the Lateran Synod. Maximus too was arrested and tried. When the imperial officials told him that all the patriarchs were now in communion with Constantinople, and that even the envoys of Rome would soon be, he answered that if the whole world should enter into that communion, he would not (Relatio motionis). In 662, at more than eighty years old, Maximus had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off, so that he could neither speak nor write the truth again. He died in exile in the Caucasus that same year. Elsewhere Maximus had written that the Church of Rome had received from the incarnate Word Himself, and from all the holy councils, authority over all the churches of God throughout the world, and that whoever is in communion with Rome is in communion with the truth (Opuscula theologica et polemica 11). The Greek confessor and the Roman Pope died, both of them, in exile on the edges of the Black Sea, because they would not let the faith of Peter be traded for imperial peace.
Twenty-five years after Martin’s death the Sixth Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 680-681. It received the letter of Pope St. Agatho, solemnly defined that in Christ there are two natural wills and two natural operations, without division and without confusion, the human will following the divine and in no way opposing it, and anathematized the Monothelite patriarchs by name. The Council Fathers acclaimed: Peter has spoken through Agatho. The gates had not prevailed. The man who had held them shut did not live to see it.
The keys of the kingdom of heaven. The keys are the power to bind and to loose: to declare what is true and what is false, to admit to communion and to exclude from it. Martin used the keys in the most costly way a Pope can. He bound what the Emperor wanted loosed, and he loosed the Church from a silence that the Emperor wanted bound upon her. The Typos had commanded that no one speak of one will or two. To keep that silence would have been easy and, in a worldly sense, peaceful. But the truth about Christ is not a private opinion to be suspended for the sake of order. “Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven”: the Pope who will not bind the truth because the palace forbids it has handed his keys to Cæsar. Martin would not hand them over.
Si diligis me. The Introit of the Mass reaches past today’s Gospel to its fulfilment beside the lake, after the Resurrection, where the Lord asks Peter three times, “Lovest thou Me?” and three times gives him the flock. St. Augustine saw in the threefold question the healing of the threefold denial, and summed up the meaning of the papacy in one line: sit amoris officium pascere dominicum gregem, “let it be the office of love to feed the Lord’s flock,” as it had been the sign of fear to deny the Shepherd (In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus 123.5). And the Lord’s next words to Peter were a prophecy: “when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and lead thee whither thou wouldst not” (John 21:18). Martin, old and sick, was girded by another and led where he would not, across the sea to a strange coast. The keys and the cross were given to Peter in the same conversation.
III. The Mass as a whole: the will that goes forth and returns
St. Thomas built the Summa Theologiæ on the great circle of exitus and reditus: all things come forth from God and return to Him, and Christ, God made man, is the way of that return (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s Mass shows us that circle traced through the will.
The going-forth is from the Father. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father who is in heaven.” The confession of faith does not begin in Peter. It comes down. So does the office: Peter does not make himself the Rock; Christ names him. So does the strength to hold it: “the God of all grace … will Himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you.” Everything in the shepherd that is firm is received.
The return is through Christ’s human will, and this is exactly why Martin died. St. Maximus understood that the whole of our redemption hangs on the prayer in Gethsemane: “Not as I will, but as Thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39). If Christ had no human will, that prayer is theatre, and our human wills, which are what fell in Adam, were never taken up and healed. But because the Word assumed a complete human nature, will and all, His human will could freely, perfectly, lovingly conform itself to the divine will, and in doing so turn the whole of our nature back to the Father (Maximus, Opuscula 6; cf. Summa Theologiæ III, q. 18). “What is not assumed is not healed,” said St. Gregory of Nazianzen; the Monothelites would have left the human will unhealed. The Lateran Synod of 649 defended the very road by which we return to God.
Then Martin walked that road himself. The letters from Cherson show a man whose human will was not destroyed by grace but converted by it. He felt hunger, abandonment, and grief, and said so. And then he chose, with that same human will, to commend his body to the Lord and to pray for the Church that had forgotten him. That is Gethsemane in miniature: not a will extinguished, but a will given back.
The Holy Sacrifice is where the circle closes each day. At the altar the human will of Christ, once offered on the Cross, is offered again in the unbloody Sacrifice to the Father. The Pope, the bishop, and the priest stand there as Peter’s heirs and Peter’s fellow-elders, and the faithful stand there with them, and each brings his own will to be joined to Christ’s. “To Him be glory and empire for ever and ever.”
IV. The Collects
Gregem tuum, Pastor æterne, placatus intende: et per beatum Martinum Martyrem tuum atque Summum Pontificem, perpetua protectione custodi; quem totius Ecclesiæ præstitisti esse pastorem.
“Look graciously upon Thy flock, O eternal Shepherd, and keep it in Thy perpetual protection through blessed Martin, Thy Martyr and Supreme Pontiff, whom Thou didst set as shepherd over the whole Church.”
The Collect is addressed not to the Pope but to the Pastor æternus, the eternal Shepherd. Christ alone is the Shepherd in His own right; Peter and his successors are shepherds by His appointment, and Peter himself calls Christ “the prince of pastors” in today’s Epistle. The prayer asks that the flock be guarded, custodi, with a protection that does not end. It is a fitting prayer for the feast of a Pope whom no earthly power protected at all. The Emperor’s soldiers took the shepherd away. The eternal Shepherd did not lose the flock.
Refectione sancta enutritam guberna, quæsumus, Domine, tuam placatus Ecclesiam: ut, potenti moderatione directa, et incrementa libertatis accipiat et in religionis integritate persistat.
“Govern graciously, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy Church, nourished by this holy food: that, directed by Thy mighty guidance, she may receive increase of freedom and persevere in the integrity of religion.”
The Postcommunion could have been written for St. Martin. It asks two things for the Church: incrementa libertatis, growth in freedom, and integritas religionis, wholeness of faith. Martin knew that the two cannot be separated. A Church that is not free will not long keep her faith whole, and a Church that trades away the wholeness of her faith for the favour of princes has already lost her freedom. The Typos offered the Church peace at the price of silence. Martin chose freedom and integrity, and paid the price himself.
V. A word for practice
Examine. Whom do I say that Christ is, not in the abstract, but in the way I live? Have I let the opinions of the crowd, or the convenience of keeping quiet, decide what I will say about Him at work, among friends, in my own family? Is there a truth of the faith I have agreed to “not speak about” for the sake of peace? If I have any authority over others, as a parent, an employer, a teacher, a leader: do I exercise it as Peter commands, willingly, without seeking my own gain, without lording it over those in my care, as a pattern of the flock? And when I suffer, even “a little,” do I let it make me bitter or let God make me solid?
Do. Pray today, by name, for the Holy Father and for your own bishop, that they may be given the courage of St. Martin. Pray for all Christians in prison or exile for the faith, and for those whom their own people have forgotten. Write to, visit, or call someone who has been left alone: the sick, the old, the imprisoned, a priest in a lonely parish. Martin’s bitterest suffering was not the chain but the silence of his friends. Do not be one of the friends who forget.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, with its first words taken to heart: Gregem tuum, Pastor æterne. Then Our Lord’s own prayer in Gethsemane, which St. Martin died to defend and lived to imitate: “Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”
Aspiration. Tu es Christus, Filius Dei vivi. “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Devote. Thursday is the day traditionally kept in honour of the Most Holy Sacrament, the gift given on the first Holy Thursday, on the night Our Lord prayed in the garden. Make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament today, or a spiritual communion, and bring before the Lord the human will He assumed and offered for you, and your own will with it. Ask St. Martin to obtain for you the grace to confess the whole truth about Christ when silence would be easier, and ask St. Maximus the Confessor, his companion in the struggle, to pray that you may love the truth more than your own comfort.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path tells the full story of St. Martin I, from his years as papal legate in Constantinople to the Lateran Synod, the arrest, the trial, and the death at Cherson, and pairs it with the life of St. Maximus the Confessor. The Church History path takes up the Monothelite controversy, from the Ecthesis of Heraclius to the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and the long struggle between the Popes and the Byzantine emperors over the freedom of the Church. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the two wills of Christ and the Lord’s prayer in Gethsemane in St. Maximus and St. Thomas, and the primacy of Peter in Scripture, the Fathers, and the First Vatican Council. The East-West thread considers a Pope honoured as a saint by both East and West, and what his witness says about the primacy as the undivided Church understood it.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis II.6; St. Bede, In epistolas septem catholicas (on 1 Pet. 5:3); St. Augustine, Sermo 46 (De pastoribus), In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus 123.5, Retractationes I.21; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Matthæum 54; St. Leo the Great, Sermones 3 and 4 (De natali ipsius); St. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate VI.36-37; St. Cyprian, De catholicæ Ecclesiæ unitate 4; St. Ambrose, Enarrationes in Psalmos 40.30; St. Jerome, Epistula 15.2; St. Maximus the Confessor, Relatio motionis, Opuscula theologica et polemica 6 and 11; St. Gregory of Nazianzen, Epistula 101. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue, and III, q. 18. The First Vatican Council, Pastor Æternus, capp. 1-2. The Lateran Synod of 649 and the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) as given in Denzinger. For St. Martin: his letters from exile (PL 87); the Commemoratio of his sufferings; the Liber Pontificalis.
Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram ædificabo Ecclesiam meam.