Saint Martin of Tours

Then a young soldier rode up. He had no money with him, for he had already given it all away. All he had left was his uniform and his cloak. He drew his sword, cut the cloak in two, gave one half to the beggar, threw the other half over his own shoulders and rode on. Some bystanders laughed and mocked the ridiculous sight of a soldier wearing half a cloak.

That night, the soldier dreamed he saw Jesus wearing the very half cloak he had just given away, saying to the angels around Him: “Martin, who is still a catechumen, has clothed Me with this cloak.”

That young soldier was Martin. He had not yet been baptized. And his half cloak would later leave its mark on the language of hundreds of millions of people, in a way no one would have guessed.

The family moved to Pavia, in northern Italy, where his father received land when he left the army. It was there that the boy Martin met Christians. At ten he went to the church of his own accord to ask to learn the faith, against his parents’ wishes. At twelve he dreamed of going into the desert to live like the hermits he had heard about.

But Roman law at the time required the sons of veterans to serve in the army. At fifteen, he was reported by his own father, arrested, put in chains and enrolled in the cavalry. A boy who wanted to be a hermit now wore armor and rode a warhorse.

His biographer, Sulpicius Severus, a Gallic nobleman and lawyer who knew him personally, tells that even in the army Martin lived like a monk. He kept only one servant, and it was usually Martin who pulled off and cleaned his servant’s boots, and the two ate at the same table. He did not get drunk like his comrades, nor bully civilians. His comrades both respected him and found him strange.

Sulpicius’s life was written while Martin was still alive, and is one of the first saints’ lives of the Western Church. Thanks to it, there are few fourth-century saints whose everyday details we know so well.

Some ask: why didn’t he give the whole cloak? One explanation often mentioned is that under the rules of the time, half of a soldier’s equipment belonged to the army and the other half was his own; Martin gave the poor man the whole of the part that belonged to him. That explanation is not in the ancient life, but it shows how people wanted to understand the gesture as a complete giving of everything he had the right to give.

As for the dream that night, Sulpicius says it did not make Martin proud, but made him understand one thing: the beggar at the city gate was Christ Himself. He remembered the Lord’s words: “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of Mine, you did for Me.” Not long afterward he asked to be baptized; he was about eighteen that year.

The other half of Martin’s cloak, according to tradition, was kept as a precious relic. The Frankish kings of the Middle Ages took it with them into battle and appointed a priest especially to look after it. A cloak in Latin is “cappa”; since only half remained, people called it “cappella”, the little cloak. The place where that little cloak was kept was also called “cappella”, and the priest who kept it was called “cappellanus”.

From that come the words “chapel” in English and “chapelle” in French, meaning a small place of worship; and the word “chaplain”. Every time someone in the world says “chapel” or “chaplain” in those languages, they are recalling, without knowing it, the half cloak of a young soldier at the gate of Amiens.

When his turn came, Martin refused the money. He said to the general: “Until now I have served you. From now on let me serve God. Give the bonus to those who are going into battle. I am a soldier of Christ; I am not allowed to fight.”

Julian grew angry and called him a coward, afraid of death and using religion as an excuse. Martin answered that if people thought he was afraid, then tomorrow he would stand in the front line of the battle, without weapons, without a shield, holding only the sign of the cross, and walk straight into the middle of the enemy. Julian had him locked up to test his words the next day.

But the next morning, according to Sulpicius, the Germanic tribes unexpectedly sent envoys to ask for peace, surrendering themselves and all their goods. The battle never took place. Martin was discharged from the army.

He is one of the first people in Christian history known for refusing to bear arms for reasons of conscience. And, ironically, he later became the patron saint of soldiers.

He went back to Pannonia to visit his parents, and won his mother over to the faith, though not his father. On the way, he was stopped by robbers in the Alps; one raised an axe to strike him, but Martin talked him round, and according to the story that robber later became a believer. He was beaten and driven out by followers of the Arian heresy. At one time he lived alone on a small island off the coast of Italy, eating roots, and nearly died from eating a poisonous plant.

Around 361, Martin returned to Gaul and founded a community of hermits at Ligugé, near Poitiers. It was the first known monastery in Gaul, today’s France. The Abbey of Ligugé still stands, more than sixteen hundred years later, and Benedictine monks still pray there.

So, according to Sulpicius, they used a trick: a man from Tours came to Ligugé, knelt and said that his wife was dying, begging him to come and pray. Martin set out at once. When he reached Tours, he found a whole crowd waiting, and realized he had been tricked.

Popular tradition adds a detail that Sulpicius does not record: Martin hid in a goose pen. But the geese honked so loudly that they gave away his hiding place. He had no choice but to become bishop. From that story comes the custom in many European countries of eating roast goose on Saint Martin’s day, November 11, as a way of “punishing” the geese that betrayed the saint.

Once a bishop, Martin still would not live in the bishop’s house. He founded a monastery at Marmoutier, a few kilometers from Tours across the Loire, living in a wooden hut, later in a cave. At one point eighty monks followed him, wearing rough camel-hair garments, seldom leaving their cells except for common prayer.

He traveled all over the countryside of Gaul, where most people still worshiped pagan gods. He founded the first rural parishes. At that time Christianity lived mainly in the cities; Martin was one of the first to bring the Gospel right out to the villages.

Once, in a village, Martin tore down an old pagan temple. The villagers did not object to that, but when he wanted to cut down the great pine beside the temple, a tree they considered sacred, they flatly refused. One villager challenged him: if you believe in your God so much, we will cut down this tree, and you will stand on the side where it is going to fall. If your God saves you, we will believe.

Martin agreed. They tied him to the spot where the tree would fall. The pine leaned slowly, creaking and cracking, and began to fall straight toward him. His disciples turned pale. According to Sulpicius, Martin simply raised his hand and made the sign of the cross toward the trunk, and the pine, as if pushed back by a gust of wind, swung round and fell toward those standing watching, almost crushing them. Sulpicius writes that on that day almost the whole region asked to learn the faith.

Another story is gentler, and perhaps closer to the man Martin was. Once, as he entered the city of Paris with a large crowd, he met a leper at the city gate, his face so covered in sores that everyone kept away from him. Martin went straight up to him, embraced him, kissed his face and blessed him. Sulpicius says the leper was healed at once. Whether or not that last detail is true, the gesture of embracing and kissing a man shunned by the whole city, under the eyes of the crowd, is very like the young soldier who had once cut his cloak at the gate of Amiens.

Sulpicius also records a time when Martin was invited to a banquet at the court of Emperor Maximus. Following etiquette, the emperor had the cup of wine passed to Martin first, waiting for him to drink and pass it back. But after drinking, Martin passed the cup to the priest who had come with him, because he regarded a priest of God as higher than any king. The whole court was stunned. But the emperor himself, according to the account, respected him all the more.

In 385, a Spanish bishop named Priscillian was accused by some other bishops of teaching heresy. They did not only want the Church to condemn him; they also took him before Emperor Maximus at Trier so that the court would sentence him to death.

Martin, though he did not agree with Priscillian’s teaching, went to Trier to protest. He said that letting a secular court judge a question of faith was an unheard-of crime. He begged the emperor not to shed blood. The emperor promised him. But as soon as Martin had left the city, Priscillian and some of his followers were beheaded.

It was the first time in history that someone was executed for heresy at the hands of people who called themselves Christians. Martin was so grieved that, according to Sulpicius, he did not want to sit with the bishops who had accused Priscillian. One could say that as early as the fourth century, a saint raised his voice to warn of something the Church would later take many painful centuries to learn.

The people of Poitiers and the people of Tours fought over his body. That night, while the people of Poitiers slept, the people of Tours secretly put the body in a boat and rowed upstream on the Loire back to Tours. Tradition says that along both banks of the river, though it was already the middle of November, the trees suddenly burst into bloom as if it were spring as the boat passed by.

Since then, in France and many European countries, sudden warm sunny days in the middle of November have been called “Saint Martin’s summer”. In England the name was in use until the middle of the twentieth century.

The day of his burial, November 11, became his feast day. Martin was one of the first saints who was not a martyr to be publicly venerated by the Western Church. Before him, “saint” was almost reserved for those who had shed their blood for the faith. Martin showed that a life of complete love is also a way of bearing witness.

On November 10, 1483, in the town of Eisleben in Germany, a baby boy was born. The next morning, the feast of Saint Martin, he was baptized, and his parents named him after the saint of the day: Martin. That boy was Martin Luther, who later launched the Protestant Reformation.

And on November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m., the armistice ending the First World War came into force. Many French people of the time noticed at once: peace had come on the very feast of the soldier who had laid down his sword, the man regarded as patron of France and of soldiers.

What Martin leaves us is not a whole cloak, but half a cloak. He did not give the beggar everything, nor keep everything for himself. He gave what he could give, right then, without waiting until he was rich enough, free enough, sure enough.

Perhaps that is what is closest to us. Few people can leave everything to follow the Lord. But everyone has their own “half cloak”: half a meal, half a free afternoon, half the money meant for something they do not need. And Jesus, in Martin’s dream, did not say: “He gave Me only half.” He said: “Martin has clothed Me with this cloak.”