Saint Martin and the Search for Holiness | Régine Pernoud | Prologue to Martin of Tours

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November 11 is now a red-letter day on the French civil calendar: in 1918 that date marked the end of the slaughter that was the First World War. But even before France was called France, that date, the eleventh of November, had been a date on the calendar used throughout Christendom because it commemorated the burial at Tours of the amazing individual whom we call Saint Martin.

He was an amazing and even a paradoxical man: he never accomplished what he had hoped to do, and yet his accomplishments surpassed all possible expectations. To begin with, this man, who had always tried to go unnoticed, enjoyed extraordinary popularity. He wanted to be a hermit, to flee the world and devote himself to ascetical practices; instead he was constantly surrounded by people, during his lifetime and after his death: the pilgrimage shrine of Saint Martin in Tours was once the most important after the three great pilgrimage sites of Christianity, Jerusalem, Rome, and, later on, Saint James of Compostela. He is remembered as a soldier, and indeed he was one, albeit entirely against his will. He had refused to be ordained a priest, considering himself unworthy, and yet he became a bishop. He had fled the world and sought a life of seclusion, but instead his biography was written while he was still living!

Thanks to those who discerned the extraordinary qualities in this rather reticent, unassuming man who resolutely practiced poverty, we know the story of his life. It spans the fourth century, in which the Church became free at last to live above ground, only to be torn by dissension so widespread that it almost brought her to ruin.

There are not many individuals whose biographies were written during the fourth century, especially during their lifetime. This was the case, however, with Martin of Tours, thanks to his friend Sulpicius Severus, who survived him long enough to record for us also the story of his death. And so we have the unusual good fortune of possessing a contemporary document to tell us about a man who, throughout his life, sought only to live among his peers, in obscurity.

In Search of Holiness

Sulpicius Severus was handsome, young, and rich. He lived in Bordeaux, a particularly prosperous town in the fourth century, where he received an outstanding education; he practiced law there and excelled in his profession because of his great eloquence. His family belonged to that Gallo-Roman aristocracy which enjoyed the favor of the Roman emperors because their power depended upon it. Thus, in the region that would later be called Aquitaine, there were several families that owned enormous estates and a large number of slaves and were extremely wealthy. The province was crossed by navigable waterways, which guaranteed abundant commerce. Bordeaux at that time had the reputation of being an "intellectual" city; like Toulouse, it had quite a number of citizens who had conformed completely to the customs and tastes characteristic of the Roman Empire. In the region surrounding Toulouse archeologists have found as many busts and sculptures from the imperial era as they have in the vicinity of Rome–artwork intended to ornament the villas where these opulent families lived.

Sulpicius Severus, being a lawyer, had made a name for himself in "upper-middle-class" circles while he was still a very young man. His reputation is inseparable from that of the man who would later be called Paulinus of Nola, with whom he was bound by ties of friendship. Paulinus, a lawyer like Sulpicius, came from an even richer family than his and was likewise an avid man of letters. It is easy to imagine the two friends going together to the thermal baths or attending the literary gatherings of the day, where people discussed the poetry of Virgil or Ovid, or perhaps the eloquence of Cicero. Paulinus, who was highly valued by Emperor Valentinian II, had been appointed for a time as governor of Campania, but he had resigned from his official duties and returned to Bordeaux so as to lead there a life of elegant leisure, as was the fashion then on the banks of the Garonne River.

Now a new factor came into his life around the year 389 (Paulinus was about thirty-six years old at the time): he was touched by the gospel. The Christian religion, which had been spreading freely for a good sixty years–the Edict of Milan promulgated by Constantine, which ended the persecutions, dated back to the year 313–would thoroughly transform that pleasure-seeking aristocrat. In the year 390, together with his wife, Therasia, he received baptism. His encounter with the Christian faith may have been fostered by the great sorrow he had experienced at the death of a beloved brother.

Soon afterward, Sulpicius in turn was touched by grace. He had been married only a little while, and perhaps his motherin-law, Bassula, who was a fervent Christian, had had some influence upon him. He received baptism, but his wife died shortly after, and he found himself disowned by his father, who could not abide his conversion. Moreover, Sulpicius himself was preparing to follow the example of his friend Paulinus, who had begun to divest himself of all his property, following the evangelical counsel of poverty to the letter. Of what he inherited from his wife, Sulpicius kept only a small lot, a kind of temporary lodging, where from then on he would welcome a number of other Christian converts who wished to lead a life of prayer and asceticism. The place was called Primullacum in Latin, and it has been identified with the little city of Alzonne on the road from Toulouse to Carcassonne, not far from Brain, in the Aude in Languedoc. Sulpicius must have taken up residence there in 394 or a little earlier.

It was there, too, that he received the letters that Paulinus wrote to him. For example, the one in which he expresses, in the rather emphatic language of that era, his admiration for his young friend: