Saint Martin I, Pope and Martyr
Et tu aliquando conversus, confirma fratres tuos. “And thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.” (Luke 22:32)
I. The last martyr of Peter’s chair
The early Popes were martyrs almost as a matter of course. Of the first thirty Bishops of Rome, the old lists honour nearly all as having died for Christ. When the persecutions ended under Constantine, the line of martyr-Popes seemed to have ended with them. Then, three centuries later, a Christian emperor did to a Pope what the pagan emperors had done. St. Martin I is the last Roman Pontiff the Church venerates as a martyr. He did not die by the sword. He died slowly, of hunger, cold, sickness and abandonment, on the far edge of the Empire, because he would not keep silent about the human will of Jesus Christ.
The sources for his life are unusually good. The Liber Pontificalis, the official book of the Popes, gives a short notice written in Rome not long after the events. The acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 survive complete, in Latin and Greek. Martin’s own letters survive, among them two he wrote from Constantinople and two from his exile at Cherson. And a Greek account of his sufferings, the Commemoratio, was written by friends who followed his trial closely. Few saints of the seventh century can be known so nearly in their own words. What follows rests on these witnesses. Where a story belongs to the pious tradition of his cult rather than to the record, it is given as such.
II. Todi and Constantinople
Martin was born at Todi, a hill town of Umbria above the Tiber. The Liber Pontificalis names his father as Fabricius. The year of his birth is not known. He is said to have been well educated and of noble family, and to have been known in Rome for his learning, his charity to the poor, and the purity of his life. Some later writers say he had been a monk before he was a cleric, but the early sources do not say so.
He became a deacon of the Roman Church. Under Pope Theodore I he was sent to Constantinople as apocrisiarius, the Pope’s permanent representative at the imperial court. The post was the training ground of the papacy. St. Gregory the Great had held it sixty years before. The apocrisiarius had to know the court, the patriarchs, the Greek language and the Greek theologians, and he had to be able to stand up to all of them. In Constantinople Martin came to know at first hand the controversy that would define his life, and the men who were driving it.
III. One will or two
The question that divided the Church in Martin’s day can sound remote. It was not. It concerned the prayer of Our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane: Pater mi, si possibile est, transeat a me calix iste: verumtamen non sicut ego volo, sed sicut tu. “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).
The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had defined that Christ is one Person in two natures, divine and human, without confusion and without division. But many Christians in Egypt and Syria had never accepted Chalcedon, and the Empire, threatened first by Persia and then by the armies of Islam, badly needed them reconciled. In the 620s Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, proposed a formula meant to satisfy both sides. Christ had two natures, he said, but only one “energy” or operation, and then only one will. The Emperor Heraclius made this the official teaching of the Empire. In 638 he published it in a decree called the Ecthesis, the “Exposition,” which forbade talk of two operations and taught one will in Christ.
The heresy was subtle, and its defenders were sincere men who believed they were honouring Christ’s divinity. But a will is part of what it is to be human. If the Son of God took a human body and a human soul but not a human will, then His humanity was not complete. It became an instrument moved from outside, like a tool in a hand. And the prayer in Gethsemane became theatre. The great opponents of the new teaching saw this at once: St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and above all the Greek monk St. Maximus the Confessor. They argued that Christ’s human will was real, and that its free and perfect obedience to the divine will was the very means of our salvation. It was the human will that fell in Adam. What the Word did not take up, He did not heal.
By the 640s the Popes had condemned the Ecthesis, and Pope Theodore I had excommunicated two Patriarchs of Constantinople. The new Emperor, Constans II, then tried another way. In 648 he withdrew the Ecthesis and issued the Typos, the “Rule.” It did not teach one will. It forbade everyone, under severe penalties, to speak of one will or two at all. Bishops who disobeyed would be deposed, monks expelled, officials stripped of rank, and private men flogged and exiled. The Emperor offered the Church peace at the price of silence.
IV. The Lateran Synod
Pope Theodore died in May 649. The Roman clergy elected Martin, and he was consecrated in July. By long custom a new Pope waited for the Emperor’s confirmation before his consecration. Martin did not wait. Everyone knew what the Emperor would require of the next Pope, and it seems the Roman Church judged that it could not ask leave to choose a man who would refuse it.
Within three months Martin called a synod at the Lateran. It met in five sessions in October 649, with about a hundred and five bishops, most of them from Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and Africa. Greek monks and clergy who had fled the East took part, and the theology of the acts bears the mark of St. Maximus, who was in Rome at the time and almost certainly helped to prepare them. The synod read through the writings of the Fathers and of the heretics side by side. Then, in twenty canons, it defined that Christ, being one Person in two natures, has two natural wills, divine and human, and two natural operations, united without confusion and without division. It condemned the Ecthesis and the Typos by name, and it anathematized the Patriarchs who had promoted the error: Sergius, Pyrrhus and Paul of Constantinople, and Cyrus of Alexandria.
Martin was careful to say that he did not condemn the Emperor. He sent the acts to Constans with a respectful letter, as if the decree of silence had been the work of the Patriarch Paul, who had in fact drafted it. He sent the acts throughout the West and the East, translated into Greek. He named Bishop John of Philadelphia as his vicar in the East, to depose bishops who held the error and to put orthodox men in their places. He wrote to the Churches of Africa, of Jerusalem and Antioch, and to the Frankish king, asking for support. He was not merely refusing to keep silent. He was governing.
V. The exarch Olympius
The Emperor’s answer had already set out. Olympius, the new exarch of Ravenna and governor of imperial Italy, came to Rome with orders to make the Italian bishops sign the Typos, and to arrest Martin if he could. He found the clergy and people of Rome united behind the Pope and could do nothing openly.
The Liber Pontificalis tells what he tried next. He ordered one of his guards to kill the Pope at Mass in the basilica of St. Mary Major, at the moment when Martin gave him Holy Communion. The book says that the guard was struck blind at that moment and could not see the Pope. Olympius took this as a sign from God. He was reconciled with Martin and told him of the plot. Afterwards, the book says, he went to Sicily to fight the Arabs, who were raiding the island, and died there of sickness. This story is told by an early and generally sober source, but it is told in the language of wonder, and it is given here as the Liber Pontificalis records it.
What is certain is that Olympius broke with the Emperor and held Italy as a rebel for some time. That would matter later. When Martin came to be tried, it was not for his faith. It was for treason, and the charge was that he had conspired with Olympius.
VI. The arrest
After the death of Olympius the Emperor sent a new exarch, Theodore Calliopas, with an army. He came to Rome in June 653. Martin had been ill for months. When the soldiers arrived he had his bed carried into the Lateran basilica and set in front of the altar. The exarch accused him, among other things, of having stored arms and stones in the Lateran palace. Martin had the palace opened so that the soldiers could see it was a lie.
Then the soldiers came into the church with drawn swords and read out an imperial order that Martin had been deposed as an intruder, elected without the Emperor’s consent. The Roman clergy were ready to defend him. Martin would not allow it. He wrote afterwards that he would rather have died ten times over than see blood shed in the church on his account. He asked only that some of his clergy be allowed to go with him. The answer was that anyone who wished could come. But that same night he was taken secretly from the city with only a few servants, down to the port, and put on a ship. The clergy who tried to follow him were stopped. He never saw Rome again.
VII. The long voyage
The voyage to Constantinople took fifteen months. The ship worked its way down the coast of Italy and across to Greece, and Martin was held for a year on the island of Naxos. The record of these months comes from his own letters. He was ill most of the time, with fever and with a disease of the bowels, and he was given little care. He writes that he was not allowed to wash. When the faithful of the islands brought him food and gifts, the guards took them for themselves, and beat or abused those who brought them. Yet in a letter written in Constantinople he says that he was not anxious about himself. He trusted, he says, that Christ would not let him be separated from His love, and he asked only for the prayers of the faithful.
He reached Constantinople in September 654. He was left lying on the deck of the ship in the harbour from morning till evening, while crowds came to stare at him, and some to jeer. That night he was taken to a prison, and he was kept there in solitary confinement for three months.
VIII. The trial
In December 654 he was brought before the court of the Senate. He could not stand, and he was carried in on a chair. The officials ordered him to stand, and the guards held him up between them.
The prosecution did not mention the Typos, the Lateran Synod or the two wills. The charges were political. Witnesses, many of them soldiers, swore that Martin had joined in the rebellion of Olympius, and some added that he had sent letters and money to the Saracens. When Martin tried to explain what had really happened in Rome, and what the Typos had demanded of the Church, he was stopped. He was told that he was on trial for treason, not for questions of faith. The Commemoratio records that when the witnesses were about to swear on the Gospels, Martin begged the judges not to make them do it. Let them say what they wished without an oath, he said, so that they did not damn their own souls. He was thinking of the souls of men who were lying to destroy him. At the end he said: “Do with me what you will. Cut me to pieces if you will. I will not communicate with the Church of Constantinople.”
He was found guilty. He was carried out into a courtyard where the Emperor could watch from a window. There, before a crowd, the officials tore the pallium from his shoulders and the vestments from his body, leaving him almost naked in the December cold. They put an iron collar on his neck and chained him, and an executioner walked before him with a sword, as he was dragged through the streets of the capital to the prison of the Praetorium. He was put in a cell with common criminals and left there in chains, so cold, the account says, that he could not stop shaking.
He was condemned to death. The sentence was not carried out. According to the Commemoratio, the Patriarch of Constantinople, lying near death himself, begged the Emperor to spare him, and Constans commuted the sentence to exile. Martin was kept in another prison for nearly three months more. In the spring of 655 he was put on a ship again, and in May he came to Cherson, a Greek city on the southwestern tip of the Crimea, the place to which the Empire sent those it wished to forget.
IX. Cherson
Two letters survive from Martin’s last summer, written to friends in Constantinople. They are among the most moving documents left by any Pope, because they are so plainly the letters of a sick, hungry, lonely old man who does not pretend to be anything else.
He writes that there is a famine in the country. Bread can be heard of there, he says, but not seen. What little grain there is can be bought only at a ruinous price, and he has nothing to buy it with. He asks his friends to send him a little grain, wine and oil, if they can. He writes with real hurt that the men of his own Church in Rome have forgotten him completely. They do not send him even the necessities of life, or ask whether he is alive or dead. He wonders aloud whether they are afraid of the Emperor. He cannot understand it, he says, because the property of St. Peter’s Church is great, and he is its bishop.
And then, in the same letter, he turns. He writes that he has commended himself to God, and that the Lord is near, so why should he be anxious? He prays that God, by the intercession of St. Peter, will keep the Roman Church steadfast in the orthodox faith, and above all the shepherd who now governs it.
That shepherd was Eugene I. The Roman clergy, under heavy pressure from Constantinople and fearing that the Emperor would impose a Monothelite on them if they waited, had elected him in August 654, while Martin was still on the way to his trial. Martin knew it. He did not denounce Eugene. He prayed for him. And Eugene, for his part, did not give way. When the Patriarch of Constantinople sent him an ambiguous profession of faith, the clergy and people of Rome would not let the Pope finish the Mass until he promised to reject it. Martin’s faith was kept in Rome by the very men who had seemed to forget him.
X. Death and cultus
Martin died at Cherson in September 655, traditionally on the sixteenth. He was buried in a church of the Mother of God outside the city. The Liber Pontificalis says that many miracles were worked at his tomb, and his grave became a place of pilgrimage for the Christians of the Crimea.
His companion in the struggle did not long outlive him. St. Maximus the Confessor was arrested in Rome at about the same time as Martin, tried in Constantinople, and exiled. When he was told that all the patriarchs were now in communion with Constantinople, and that even Rome soon would be, he answered that if the whole world should communicate with them, he would not. In 662, when he was more than eighty years old, his tongue was 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 summer.
Twenty-five years after Martin’s death the Sixth Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 680 and 681, under a new Emperor, Constantine IV. It received the letter of Pope St. Agatho and defined exactly what the Lateran Synod had taught: in Christ there are two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, without change, without separation and without confusion, and His human will follows His divine and almighty will, not resisting or struggling against it but subject to it. It condemned the Monothelite patriarchs by name. The Fathers of the Council cried out that Peter had spoken through Agatho. Martin had been condemned as a traitor by the Emperor’s court. The Emperor’s council vindicated his faith.
The tradition of his cult holds that his relics were later brought to Rome and placed in the church of San Martino ai Monti, which already bore the name of St. Martin of Tours. This translation is not clearly recorded in the early sources, and it is given here as the tradition of the cult.
The Christian East honours him as a confessor and martyr. The Byzantine calendar keeps the memory of “St. Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome” in the spring, and the Greek hymns praise him as the one who adorned the divine throne of Peter and held the Church firm on the rock of the faith. In the 1962 calendar his feast is on the twelfth of November, the day after St. Martin of Tours, III classis. The Mass is Si diligis me, of the Common of Supreme Pontiffs, in red vestments. The Epistle is St. Peter’s charge to the shepherds of the Church, to feed the flock of God and to be its pattern (1 Pet. 5:1-4, 10-11). The Gospel is the confession at Cæsarea Philippi and the promise of the Rock (Matt. 16:13-19).
XI. What his life teaches
That the Pope’s first duty is to confirm his brethren in the faith. The night before He died, Our Lord told Peter that Satan would sift the Apostles like wheat, and that He had prayed for Peter, that his faith might not fail. “And thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren” (Luke 22:32). Martin had no army and no allies who could help him. What he had was the office of confirming the faith of the Church, and he used it. When the Emperor ordered silence, Peter spoke.
That silence can be a betrayal. The Typos did not ask anyone to deny Christ. It asked only that the question be dropped for the sake of peace. That is often how the temptation comes. Martin understood that a truth about Christ which the Church has been given to guard cannot be set aside by command of the State, and that a peace bought with silence about the truth is not the peace of Christ. Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel (1 Cor. 9:16).
That Christ’s human will is our road home. Martin did not die for a technical distinction. He died for Gethsemane. Because the Son of God has a true human will, His obedience to the Father was a real human act, freely chosen, and it healed our disobedience at its root. Every time a Christian says “Thy will be done” and means it, he walks the road that the Lateran Synod defended.
That the shepherd must think of the souls of his enemies. In the Lateran he would not let his clergy fight for him. At his trial he begged that the men lying about him not be made to swear on the Gospels, lest they lose their souls. Martin resisted the Emperor to the end, but he never hated anyone. He was fighting for souls, including theirs.
That we can be faithful without feeling strong. Martin’s letters from Cherson are not the letters of a hero untouched by suffering. He was hungry, ill and hurt, and he said so. But he did not give way, and he did not grow bitter. He commended himself to God and prayed for the Church that had left him alone. Holiness is not the absence of weakness. It is fidelity in the midst of it. After you have suffered a little, [God] will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you (1 Pet. 5:10).
Practice
Examine. Is there a truth of the faith that I have quietly agreed not to speak of, to keep the peace at work, among friends, or in my own family? Do I let fear of what others will think, or of what it might cost me, decide when I stay silent? When I am treated unjustly, do I pray for those who wrong me, or do I wish them harm? When I feel forgotten or abandoned, by friends, by family, even by the Church, do I let it make me bitter? Do I pray for the Holy Father and for my bishop, or only criticise them?
Do. Pray today by name for the Pope and your own bishop, that they may confirm their brethren in the faith, whatever it costs them. Pray for all Christians who are in prison or in exile for their faith. Visit, call or write to someone who has been left alone: a person who is sick, old or in prison, or a priest in a lonely post. The bitterest thing St. Martin suffered was being forgotten. Do not let anyone you know suffer it from you. If you have more than you need, send something to someone who is hungry, as Martin asked his friends to send him grain.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Gregem tuum, Pastor æterne, placatus intende: et per beatum Martinum Martyrem tuum atque Summum Pontificem, perpetua protectione custodi; quem totius Ecclesiæ præstitisti esse pastorem. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“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. 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. Non sicut ego volo, sed sicut tu. “Not as I will, but as Thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).
Devote. Ask St. Martin to obtain for you the courage to speak the truth about Christ when silence would be easier, and the patience to bear being forgotten without bitterness. Commend to him the Holy Father and the Church of Rome. Ask St. Maximus the Confessor, his companion in the struggle, to teach you to love the truth more than your own comfort. On this Thursday, the day the Church traditionally gives to the Most Holy Sacrament, make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and bring your own will before the Lord who prayed in the garden.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets St. Martin I beside St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, his allies in the struggle, and beside St. Agatho, the Pope whose letter ended it. It places him too among the confessor-Popes who suffered at the hands of Christian emperors, from Liberius and Vigilius to Pius VII. The Church History path follows the Monothelite controversy from Sergius and Heraclius to the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and the long contest 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 prayer in Gethsemane in St. Maximus and St. Thomas, and the primacy of Peter as taught 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, and that of St. Maximus, says about how the undivided Church understood the see of Rome.
Sancte Martine, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Roman Breviary and Missal for 12 November; the Roman Martyrology; the Liber Pontificalis*, life of Martin I; the acts of the Lateran Synod of 649; the letters of St. Martin I (PL 87), including those from Constantinople and Cherson; the* Commemoratio of his sufferings and the Relatio motionis of St. Maximus the Confessor; the definition of the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) as given in Denzinger; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ III, q. 18; the Acta Sanctorum*; Butler’s* Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia. The blinding of the exarch’s guard is given as the* Liber Pontificalis records it. The translation of the relics to Rome is given as the tradition of the cult.