Episode 93: Severus’ Life of Saint Martin

Sulpicius Severus, Saint Martin, and the Priscillian Controversy

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 93: Severus’ Life of Saint Martin. In this program, we will read one of the most famous of all the many Christian hagiographies, or Saint’s lives. Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, put into circulation in the late 390s, is one of the earlier works of Christian biography to have come down to us from antiquity. Its central figure is Martin of Tours, a Gallic bishop who lived from roughly 336 until 397, famous for his military background, his generosity, his abstemiousness, his small role in an ecclesiastical crisis in the mid-380s, and like so many Catholic saints, the many miracles he is said to have performed. This is the third of three episodes covering some of the earliest Christian biographies. We began with the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, a prison diary of a Roman Christian noblewoman executed in an amphitheater in 202 or 203. Then, in the previous episode, we studied four eremitic Saint’s lives – biographies of Christian desert hermits active between about 250 and 370, focusing mainly on Saint Antony the Great, but also Paul of Thebes, Hilarion of Palestine, and Malchus of Syria. In our third and final program on early Christian biography, we’ll move into the decades of the 380s and 390s, decades when for the first time in history, bishops and popes, newly secure after the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, were learning how to navigate relationships with Roman emperors.

The early Christian biographies covered in this sequence of episodes are from a period of Christianity in transition. At the beginning of the third century, when Perpetua and Felicity were executed in modern day Tunisia, the religion was moving in many different directions as different regions embraced trends like Valentinianism and other branches of Gnosticism, Montanism, and enormous quantities of mostly lost apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Apocalypses were written to supplement the earlier scriptures of the first century. But Christianity was formally welcomed into the Roman Empire with the Edict of Milan in 313. Christianity was given more specific doctrinal formulations at Council of Nicaea in 325. And most importantly of all, Christianity was made the official religion of the Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. In sharp contrast to poor Perpetua and Felicity dying in an amphitheater in the first years of the 200s, by the end of the 300s, powerful churchmen like Ambrose of Milan and Pope Damasus had begun to exercise some measure of authority over emperors like Gratian and Valentinian II. Pagan religion had always played a small role in imperial politics, but as the 380s and 390s passed, and the 400s began, a third party organization successfully inserted itself in between Roman rulers and their subjects.

Bishops After the Edict of Thessalonica

The decades between 380 and 410 were one of Christianity’s greatest triumphs. Throughout the Empire, by the year 400, Christians were safe. Rather than being martyred, like Perpetua and Felicity, and rather than going into the desert as refugees and living an ascetic lifestyle, like Saint Antony, Christians could live pious lives in security throughout the Empire. The Great Commission that Jesus had given the Apostles in the Gospels – to convert the entire world – seemed on its way to fruition. But still, there were problems to face. The increasingly powerful popes and bishops of the late 300s needed to determine how, exactly, church and state would be stitched together. Would the new, imperially buttressed church deal harshly with its enemies, or would it take a milder stance? Would powerful urban bishops throw themselves into the murky world of Roman politics, or would they stand aside and leave the state to its own devices? And more substantially, how would the Nicene Catholic church deal with Roman emperors who increasingly relied on mercenary barbarian armies – armies that practiced Arian Christianity and came from semiautonomous cultural enclaves within the empire – mercenaries who, by 400, had replaced Latin-speaking Roman field armies for good?

The story of how Rome became Christian is not a simple one – neither the breaking dawn that ecclesiastical historians reported it to be, nor the descent into dark ages often imagined in the modern period. And while so much of the story is now lost, beginning during the absolutely critical decades of the 380s and 390s, we have a wealth of primary source material from the most influential Christian writers ever to live after the first century – these were Saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and to a lesser extent, our author for today, Sulpicius Severus. Bracketing the other three for the moment, in the works that Sulpicius Severus wrote about Saint Martin of Tours, we encounter a Saint’s life tailor made for the late fourth century. Severus’ Saint Martin is not a martyr, nor is he a desert hermit wearing horsehair shirts in a cave, but instead, throughout Severus’ writings on him, a working bishop. While all of Severus’ writings on Saint Martin are suffused with miracle stories and confrontations staged to make the protagonist appear brilliant and infallible, nonetheless Saint Martin comes to us as an ever so slightly more realistic churchman than some of the heroes of earlier Christian biographies. He is an august figure, certainly, who survives direct confrontations with Satan, exorcises demons and heals the sick and the dying. But Severus’ Saint Martin is also a professional man of the cloth, from time to time negotiating his way through the sorts of controversies and conundrums that were confronting real bishops as dawn broke on the fifth century.

In this program, our main course will be Sulpicius Severus’ famous Life of Saint Martin, a gold standard of Christian hagiography produced shortly prior to Saint Martin’s death in November of 397. But we’ll also consider some of Severus’ other writings, and his other works on Saint Martin. In addition to the famous hagiography, Severus was also a church historian, and from his pen we have the longest contemporary account of something called the Priscillian Controversy, an unlovely crisis that rocked the western church between roughly 376 and 386, and in which Saint Martin, by all accounts heroically, attempted to intervene. We’ll spend a lot of time on the Priscillian Controversy toward the end of this program, but first, we need to meet Saint Martin and his biographer, Sulpicius Severus. So let’s dive into the history of the late 300s by first discussing our main author for today, a Gallic Christian convert named Sulpicius Severus, who lived from roughly 363-420.¹ [music]

The Life and Works of Sulpicius Severus

Sulpicius Severus’ most famous works are the biography of Saint Martin that we’ll read in this program, written shortly before 398, and a work of sacred history called the Chronica, finished a few years after 400. Our previous episode focused heavily on Egypt – the flowering of eremitic and communal monasticism in the Egyptian desert from roughly 275-350. In the present and the next two programs, however, we’re relocating to the southwest of modern day France.

The southwestern Gallic town of Burdigala, or modern day Bordeaux, over the 300s CE, was for about a century one of the most important hubs of Latin Christianity, and more simply, classical learning and education in the late Empire. Throughout the fourth century, Burdigala was a regional capital where both pagan and Christian learning, and various combinations thereof, flourished. The great fourth-century poet Ausonius, on whom we’ll focus next time, taught in Burdigala, and his epitaphs of colleagues throughout the region suggest that a qualified and hardworking professoriate was installed in the educational institutions of modern day Spain and France by 350 or so. This educational system was on the doorstep of our main subject of today’s show, Bishop Saint Martin of Tours. And it was the educational system that produced our author for today, Sulpicius Severus.

Sulpicius Severus, not to be confused with the Emperor Septimius Severus, who was on the throne two hundred years earlier – Sulpicius Severus appears to have been a convert – one who left a career in Roman law and gave away a great deal of his fortune for the sake of the Christian church. Up until around the age of 30, he seems to have led a normal aristocratic Roman life, being educated in oratory and law, and being married advantageously at a young age. His wife, however, with whom Severus shared a loving relationship, died young, which may have been a pivotal event in the young lawyer’s life.² Following her death, Sulpicius Severus ended up converting to Christianity.

What we know about Severus comes from odds and ends in his own writings, and from the letters of a man named Paulinus of Nola, a slightly older Christian convert whom Severus probably knew from their younger years in and around the educational institutions of Burdigala. A letter that Paulinus wrote to Severus praises Severus for giving up his fortune – Paulinus tells Severus, “you revealed the increase of your inheritance among the saints. This you did by your wholesome disposal of the burdens of this world, for you have purchased heaven and Christ at the price of brittle worldly goods.”³ It wasn’t just Severus’ embrace of Christianity that his friend Paulinus approved of – it was Severus’ turnabout from the old eclectic Roman paganism to the fourth century’s newly codified and doctrinally exclusive Christianity. Paulinus tells Severus in another letter that,

You rejected men’s praise of your talent, which was no smaller than your family wealth, and, sublimely indifferent to empty glory, you preferred the preaching of fishermen to all the fine writings of Cicero and yourself. You took refuge in the silence of worship to escape the din of wickedness.⁴

Severus’ friend Paulinus of Nola, himself an important figure in Christian history who’d given up his own family fortune, kept a wide correspondence up with many of the most famous theologians of the late fourth century. And it was through Paulinus that young Severus may have first heard of the great Saint Martin. In the biography we’re going to read in this episode, Saint Martin cures Paulinus of an eye infection, and whether the bishop was actually able to affect miracle healings, Martin was regionally famous by the time Severus converted, and perhaps directly involved in Severus’ decision to convert.

Severus visited Saint Martin around the time Severus was thirty, in the early 390s.⁵ This visit may have been the very thing that caused Severus to make the drastic decision to convert and give up his family wealth. Several famous fourth century converts experienced total turnabouts from pagan laity to Christian clergy, like Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine. In contrast, Sulpicius Severus, though doubtless an ardent Christian, never to our knowledge attempted to scale the ranks of the clergy, nor live off of bread and water and sleep in a cave. Sulpicius Severus retained one of his estates in southern France, lived modestly, and wrote profusely. In fact, given that Severus seems to have been trained for a career in Roman law, and had been the recipient of a classical education prior to his conversion to Christianity, these early scholastic influences doubtless motivated his bookish activities after conversion. Severus wrote the Life of Saint Martin before the titular Saint had actually passed away in late 397, a text that extolled the famous bishop who had been instrumental to his own conversion and that of his friend Paulinus. The biography seems to have been successful – according to Severus himself, three years after he wrote it, the hagiography was all over Carthage, Alexandria, and all the way through Egypt, and had become a bestseller in Rome.⁶ But the famous Life of Saint Martin was only the beginning of Severus’ output as a Christian convert.

Severus wrote a trio of dialogues in the style of Cicero’s philosophical works on the subject of monasticism and Saint Martin himself – we’ll talk about these a little later. Sulpicius Severus’ most famous work, apart from the biography that we’ll read today, was a text that generally gets called the Chronicle. This work was an abridged sacred history of Christianity, from the creation in the Book of Genesis up until Severus’ own fourth century. Modeled on works of ancient Roman history, the work’s principal audience is likely intended to be Christians, but its organization and historical survey format would have been accessible to the broader reading public, as well. The Chronicle, while offering a presentation of Biblical history back to the very beginning, is to us of interest largely because it details some events that unfolded during Severus’ own lifetime – thus making the book a primary historical account of some of the late fourth century.

So that is most of what we know about Sulpicius Severus, a well-educated Roman patrician from the southwest of modern day France, who once again lived from roughly 363-420. Sulpicius Severus is far less famous than Saint Martin himself, and some of his contemporaries like Augustine and Jerome. But nonetheless, considering how hagiography eventually became one of the dominant literary genres of the European Middle Ages, and Severus’ famous Life of Saint Martin brought the genre triumphantly into the fifth century from the fourth, it’s worth knowing a bit about the biographer behind the famous biography. So, with that all established, let’s open Severus’ Life of Saint Martin. Unless otherwise noted, the occasional quote will come from the Carolinne White translation, published by Penguin Books in 1998. [music]

Saint Martin’s Early Life

Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin begins with a dedication to the biographer’s brother. Severus writes that he scarcely believes his pen is up to the task of such a work, but that Christianity and its truisms are anchored in faith, rather than florid language. Severus writes that perhaps his name shouldn’t be printed when the biography goes into circulation, and adds that he’ll leave that up to his brother. And with this dedicatory letter complete, Severus begins his preface to the biography of Saint Martin.

Severus’ preface continues the literary self-consciousness evident in his opening dedication. He acknowledges that “Many mortals, vainly devoted to study and worldly acclaim, have. . .sought to immortalize their reputation, or so they believed, by using their pen to give an account of the lives of famous men.”⁷ This, in Severus’ opinion, is a grave mistake. Those who enthusiastically read the tales of Hector and Socrates succumb to the old pagan world’s assumption that the only form of posthumous glory was renown on earth. In truth, Severus asserts, the only thing worth pursuing was the pleasures of heaven, and this could be done simply by living a devout Christian life. Severus then tells us his biography will be judicious and factual. But not too factual – indeed Severus notes that too many details would likely cause the average reader’s attention to wander. And with these prefatory remarks established, the biography itself begins.

Saint Martin, Severus writes, was born in a town called Sabaria, in Pannonia. This, by the way, was probably in the far west of modern day Hungary, just a few miles across the Austrian border.⁸ Martin, however, wasn’t raised in the south-central part of Europe – he grew up in the northern Italian town of Pavia, just 25 miles south-southwest of Milan. There are two dates in Christian tradition attested for Martin’s birth – sometimes 316 and 336, but considering the fact that the opening sentences of his biography state that Martin undertook military service under Constantius, and then Julian, and that Julian the Apostate was on the throne from 361-363, the birth date of 336 seems much more likely.⁹ Anyway, Martin was born to well-off pagan parents, we will say, in 336.

At ten, Martin sought to begin the process of converting to Christianity, to the disconcertion of his parents. Martin’s father was a Roman military tribune and former cavalryman, and so as Martin, between the ages of 10 and 15, began talking about becoming a monk and going and living in the desert all alone, his parents were disconcerted. Soon, an imperial mandate decided Martin’s immediate fate for him. When he was fifteen, or roughly in the year 351, Martin learned that he would have to serve in the Roman military. The emperor had decreed that the sons of veterans had to serve, and so Martin was conscripted and made to swear oaths of obedience to the imperial army.

Martin did not, however, let this harsh plight sour his natural disposition toward selflessness and mildness. As a soldier, Martin was frugal, humble, patient, and chose not to participate in certain vices endemic to military life. And we should take a second to consider the circumstances of Martin’s conscription. Severus tells us that as a recruit, Martin “was content with the company of only one slave” (136). It’s an odd statement. Friends of mine who have enlisted and gone through basic training did not have servants sleeping beside them in the barracks. It’s important to remember that Martin was an aristocrat of some distinction in the military, likely awarded privileges associated with his father’s heightened rank, unlike, say, the Gothic recruits being used as cannon fodder by Roman armies throughout the late fourth century. The very fact that Martin’s fellow soldiers admired his frugality and humility attests to the young soldier’s tacitly superior social status and family wealth.

Saint Martin’s Cloak

Whatever the exact nature of Martin’s aristocratic background, Severus writes, Saint Martin was a heck of a nice guy. He polished his slave’s boots. He made sure that poor people had food and clothing, and he gave away his military salary beyond what he needed to survive. And this spirit of kindness led him to undertake what is probably his most famous act of generosity. Martin is known for a number of things, but the iconography and artistic depictions of him frequently feature the following scene, which takes place only a couple pages into Severus’ biography. I’m quoting from the Penguin Carolinne White translation here, published by Penguin in 1998 – Severus writes that:

One day, then, in the middle of a winter more bitterly cold than usual (so much so that many perished as a result of the severity of the icy weather), when Martin had nothing with him apart from his weapons and a simple military cloak, he came across a naked beggar at the gate of the city of Amiens. The man begged the people who were passing to have pity on him but they all walked past him. Then Martin, who was filled with God’s grace, understood that this man had been reserved for him, since the others were not showing him any mercy. But what was he to do? He had nothing apart from the cloak he was wearing, for he had already used up the rest of his things for a similar purpose. So he seized the sword which he wore at his side, divided the cloak in two, gave half to the beggar and then put the remaining piece on again. Some of the bystanders began to laugh because he looked odd with his chopped-up cloak, but many who were more sensible sighed deeply because they had not done the same despite the fact that, because they had more than Martin, they could have clothed the beggar without themselves being reduced to nakedness. (137-8)

It’s a beautiful little exempla story, perhaps with ties to some words of the proto-monk John the Baptist in the Book of Luke. John the Baptist tells a group listening to him, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none” (Luke 3:11).¹⁰ For Martin, following this advice, even if you have only one cloak, it’s your duty to share half of it.

Martin Clashes with Julian the Apostate

As much as Martin had an intense interest in Christianity, he was still a soldier at this point, and had more years were required of him in the service. The decade between 355 and 365, or the years when Saint Martin was roughly 19-29, were a transition period between the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, and at the outset of this decade, northern barbarians were crossing westward over the Rhine to invade the Gallic provinces. At this juncture, the future Augustus Julian summoned an army to the city now known as Worms in the western part of modern day Germany. Julian had climbed to prominence because he was a son of Constantine the Great’s half brother. The year was 356, and Julian had been sent to the Gallic provinces as a junior emperor – Caesar rather than Augustus, by Constantine the Great’s sole surviving son, Constantius II, who was a full on Augustus – remember that this is the period of the tetrarchy, when there are frequently two Caesars, or junior emperors, and two Augusti, or senior emperors. Anyway, history lesson aside, the future emperor Julian, hated in Christian history because he resisted the Christianization of the empire, appears in Severus’ biography of Saint Martin, not too surprisingly, as an antagonist.

Julian, preparing to defend the Gallic provinces from the barbarians spilling westward over the Rhine, had decided to offer his soldiers a preemptive bonus before the actual fighting began the following day. In Severus’ likely speculative recreation of this moment of Martin’s life, there is an actual line of soldiers to whom Julian is physically handing out bonuses. When it came to be Martin’s turn to accept the military bonus, however, Martin refused. Martin said he had no intention of fighting. Julian, understandably, was not happy. Martin doubled down. He told Julian he wasn’t afraid of death – that wasn’t it – it was just that he considered himself a soldier of Jesus, rather than Rome. Martin added that he was no coward or deserter. In fact, he said, he’d be willing to throw himself right into the opposing army unarmed, confident that Jesus would protect him. The future emperor Julian said this would all be fine with him, and it was arranged that Martin would indeed be required to dash unarmed into barbarian forces the following day.

However, although Severus sets us up for a hagiographic miracle scene, no such scene proceeds in the biography. Instead, Severus tells us that the barbarian army preemptively surrendered and gave up all their belongings to Julian’s forces, and that all of this was done due to Jesus’ will – Severus writes that Christ “removed the necessity for battle so that the holy man’s gaze would not be outraged even by the deaths of others” (139). This remarkable miracle marked the end of Saint Martin’s tenure in the Roman military. And to pause here for a moment of fact checking, the preemptive surrender of the barbarian army at this moment is not attested in the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who also served under Julian in the 350s and is our main historical source for many events of the fourth century. Marcellinus records the defeat of the Alamannic king Chnodomar at the Battle of Strasbourg in the year 357, which marked the successful conclusion of Julian’s military campaign to restore the security of the Gallic provinces, but, in Book 16 of Marcellinus’ Res Gestae, there is certainly no sudden and miraculous barbarian surrender before swords are even drawn, as Severus, forty years later, claimed that there was.¹¹ Severus, then, fictionalizes a fairly recent historical event at the outset of his Life of Saint Martin, setting the tone for the remainder of the biography. Hagiography, as entertaining as it is, has a pretty casual relationship with historical facts. [music]

Martin’s Early Pilgrimage

Following the end of his tenure in the Roman military, Saint Martin made his way west through the provinces of modern day France in order to meet a famous bishop in the town of Poitiers. Though born in present day Hungary and raised in the north of the Italian Peninsula, Martin would spend most of the rest of his life in what is today west-central France, and so his initial visit to Poitiers proved consequential one for him in the long run. Martin, at that point a recent convert, made a positive impression on Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, who told the young man he that should begin his career as an exorcist, and that to begin this process, Martin ought to make a visit to his home turf of Pavia, Italy. Martin, inspired by the wise bishop’s words, set out on his journey.

Unfortunately, on the way there, while going through the Alps, Martin was waylaid by a group of bandits. He was tied up and his belongings were confiscated. And when one of the brigands asked Martin whether or not Martin was scared, Martin said indeed he wasn’t at all afraid. Martin told his captor about his Christian faith and preached a sermon so compelling that the captor converted right there on the spot.

Martin dispatched this first threat fairly easily. But as he continued onward, after he’d passed Milan and was very nearly to Pavia, a much more serious adversary confronted him. This adversary was Satan himself. Satan said that he would torment and tempt Martin wherever Martin went, but Martin, quoting a Psalm (118) that Saint Antony quotes in Athanasius’ earlier biography of Antony, told Satan that he was unafraid, and Satan disappeared. Having fended off the perils he’d encountered during his journey, the 20- or 21-year-old recent convert then took it upon himself to convert his parents. He was successful with his mother, but his father remained skeptical of Christianity.

Now, if you caught the last episode, you’ll remember that one of the main concerns of Athanasius’ earlier Life of Antony was promoting Nicene Christianity over Arian Christianity – this was a primary enterprise of the theologians who ended up being on the winning side of fourth century Christian history. Like Athanasius before him, Severus held the Arian view to be incorrect, and so in the Life of Saint Martin we read of Saint Martin’s combative engagements with Arian Christians. In Severus’ account, Arian Christianity was popular in the north of Italy and particularly the eastern Adriatic coast during the late 350s. Martin came into contact with an Arian bishop of the city of Milan near his hometown, who expelled Martin. Martin thereafter went to live briefly on a tiny island of the northwestern coast of Italy, sharing humble quarters with a likeminded priest and subsisting off of the roots of grass. Fortunately for Martin, the winds at the imperial level changed, and Martin’s mentor in Gaul – again Hilary, the bishop of Poitiers, was recalled from his own exile. This meant that Martin himself could return to modern day France, as he had accomplished what Hilary had sent him out to do.

Martin Becomes a Bishop

Martin returned to Poitiers more devout than ever, and was even attracting some followers of his own. One of these, a recent convert not yet baptized, passed away from a sudden fever. He had been dead for three days, and miraculously, Martin was able to bring him back to life. Later, the man related to others that in the afterlife, he had been about to be condemned to the hellfire that awaited every person who was not a Christian, but Martin’s prayers had saved him in the nick of time. As if bringing one dead person back to life weren’t enough, Martin repeated this feat. A wealthy man’s slave had committed suicide by hanging himself, and Martin caused this man to come back to life, as well.

Having been granted special powers to resurrect the dead, Martin was clearly a Christian of some distinction, and he was nominated for the bishopric of the city of Tours. For those of us who don’t have French geography ready at hand, the city of Tours, then Turonum, in the fourth century as well as today, is in west central France, about 125 miles south of Paris, and about 60 miles northeast of Poitiers. Anyway, Martin was nominated enthusiastically to be the Bishop of Tours. He was initially reluctant, preferring a monastic life to a busy public one. But a groundswell of popular enthusiasm inveigled him out of his cell and brought him before an assembly of other bishops.

Some of the bishops formally considering Martin for the episcopate of Tours were skeptical. Martin didn’t really look like a bishop ought to, they thought. He had dirty clothing on, and his hair was messy. And while Martin’s unkempt appearance was evidence of his unfitness for office by certain bishops, by the broader public his tattered garments were, on the contrary, strong evidence for his fitness for office. After a dramatic public exchange involving a bystander reading a Psalm out loud, Martin was elevated to the position of Bishop of Tours, which is why today we know him as Saint Martin of Tours. [music]

Monks and Persecutions: Martin’s Actions as a Bishop

Martin, once elevated to the position of bishop, kept up his old ways. A staunch minimalist, he didn’t adopt any fancy clothing, lived in a small cell adjacent to the church, and then later, another cell two miles outside of town at the foot of a cliff face. There, in a strange turn of events, the Bishop of Tours attracted a small commune of monastically minded men – eighty of them, in fact, making Martin the director of an isolated monastic community at the same time he was a functioning bishop, as well.

Wearing two figurative hats, however, was only the smallest of wonders that Saint Martin performed once elevated to his bishopric. The first of these was as follows. Monks around Martin’s monastery tended to revere a nearby site of cult worship – a place, they believed, the site where a Christian had once been martyred. Martin tried to be respectful of the custom, but when he investigated, he discovered that it hadn’t been a Christian who’d been killed there, but instead an evil brigand who had been executed. Martin disabused his fellow Christians of their error, and the site was no longer used for worship.

Later, Martin saw a group of non-Christian peasants offering funeral rites to a man who had passed away. Martin, who believed their rites were demonic and pathetic, interrupted the funeral service, ordering the peasants to stop. They stopped, and instead began spinning around, unable to bear the corpse any further. The bereaved peasants were bewildered, and, having proved his power over them, Martin allowed them to continue with their funeral.

After this brush with the non-Christians around Tours, Martin’s persecutions of them grew more aggressive. He destroyed the ancestral temple of a village and began cut down a sacred pine tree next to where the temple had stood. Horrified, the pagan villagers tried to resist. Not believing in Martin’s god, they told him that if he’d stand beneath where the tree was going to fall, they’d cut it down themselves. And so the villagers chopped down their tree, and Martin was tied down to the space where it was going to fall. In the dramatic, if rather predictable, scene that follows, Martin made the sign of the cross, and he was not crushed by the pine tree – nor thankfully was anyone else. Speechless with amazement, the pagans speedily converted.

This incident with the tree evidently encouraged Martin’s persecutions of other non-Christian sites. He began destroying pagan places of worship and replacing them with Christian ones. During one such destruction, Martin was burning a beloved and ancient pagan shrine when the flames threatened to lick over and ignite an adjoining building. Martin, however climbed up on the other building and shielded it from the fire. During another planned demolition, Martin was preparing to destroy a non-Christian village temple rich with decorations. The pagans resisted, though, and so Martin wandered off and prayed for several days. Angels came to him and guaranteed that they’d keep him safe, and so he went back to the obdurate village and, protected by angels, smashed their temple and all of their sacred statues. The villagers abruptly converted.

Martin was ravaging another temple when a crowd of villagers rose up against the powerful bishop. One villager, about to attack Martin with a sword, found himself unable to move his arm. In a similar incident, when Martin was pulverizing another village’s sacred relics, a man who was trying to stab Martin found his knife suddenly knocked away from his hands. And the biographer Severus assures us that while such acts of property destruction consumed much of Martin’s career, he was also often able to convince non-Christians to destroy their own temples and holy relics by means of his verbal instruction. [music]

Miracles and Imperial Confrontations

Happily, not all of Saint Martin’s actions during his early episcopate were acts of oppressive and intolerant vandalism. Like so many protagonists of Christian hagiography, Martin had supernatural powers to heal the sick and exorcise demons. He healed an ailing quadriplegic girl. He exorcised a demon from a proconsul’s slave boy, and the proconsul converted. He encountered a violent demon who had possessed a man and caused him to attack a household cook. Martin fearlessly stuck his fingers in the possessed man’s mouth and told the demon that if it had any real power, it would bite his fingers. As if singed by hot metal, the possessed man recoiled, and the demon was exorcised in a sudden a spray of diarrhea from the man’s rear end. In another dramatic exchange with the minions of hell, a small flock of demons had convinced a town that barbarian invaders were coming. Martin confronted the demons’ leader and soon the town was disabused of the frightening rumor.

Martin’s miracles continued beyond bounds of his diocese. He kissed a leper in Paris, and the man was speedily healed. It was found that the scraps of Martin’s cloak and shirt, when torn off, also had magical healing properties. A Gallic prefect had an ailing daughter possessed with an awful fever, and the prefect happened to have a letter that Saint Martin had written. He placed it on his daughter’s chest, and immediately her fever went away. Martin cured a man named Paulinus, later Saint Paulinus of Nola, who was a personal friend of our author Sulpicius Severus, of an eye ailment. Once, Martin himself took a bad tumble down some steep stairs. An angel came and magically healed him, and Martin was restored to health.

Martin, at this juncture, had become even better known throughout the Gallic provinces. At one point, he and some other bishops had an audience with the Emperor Magnus Maximus. If you haven’t heard of the Emperor Maximus, that’s because his time on the throne was just five years – 383 until 388, because he was one of four emperors at this juncture, and also perhaps because Maximus’ main historical claim to fame is having been a short-lived tool for the much more famous Emperor Theodosius I. Theodosius I, the son-in-law of Valentinian the Great, used Maximus to usurp the throne of Valentinian’s biological son Gratian. Maximus then assumed control of Gaul and Brittania, again between 383 and 388, but when he launched a campaign against Theodosius I, Maximus was defeated, and Theodosius, expanding his power, was able to take over Maximus’ and his former brother-in-law and rival to power’s provinces. However, as much as Maximus seems to us little more than one of the many transient strongmen in the late Empire’s game of thrones, Maximus did rule over Saint Martin’s, and Sulpicius Severus’ home province in southwestern Gaul, and so he gets a brief but important story in Severus’ Life of Saint Martin.

The events of the story likely took place between 385-7.¹² This means that Martin would have been about fifty years old at the time. Severus opens the story by telling us that “Our age has become so depraved and corrupted that it is almost exceptional for a priest to have the strength not to yield to flattery of the emperor” (151). It’s an odd statement for two reasons. First, Severus’ biography was written only a decade or so after the time period he’s describing – hardly, as Severus puts it, an age later.¹³ Second, the twenty years between 380 and 400 were, on the contrary to being a time when bishops were licking the boots of Roman emperors, the very juncture when bishops were using their power to boss Roman emperors around – I’ll talk a little more about this in the next episode. Anyway, let’s return to Severus’ Life of Saint Martin – a text written in roughly 397, about an episode that took place around 386, when Martin himself was about 50. Severus tells us that the other Gallic bishops had bowed and scraped before the powerful usurper emperor Maximus. Martin, however, did not. Martin refused to dine with the Emperor. Martin did not stoop to petitioning the Emperor – he voiced his demands unambiguously. One day, at a banquet, the emperor Maximus was telling everyone about how he’d come to power. Maximus hadn’t violently usurped his predecessor Gratian’s throne back in 383 on his own account, Maximus said. His army had demanded it. And his army had been guided by divine will. Having made this gutsy proclamation in front of an assembly of Roman aristocrats and Christian churchmen, it was time for the Emperor Maximus to receive a holy libation from a bishop, and Martin was the holiest of all the Gallic bishops. Martin then drank a special sacred beverage from a cup, but rather than passing it to the Emperor, he handed it to the priest next to him, making the tacit statement that the holy men around the table were better than the Emperor himself. Adding another affront his denying Maximius the libation, Saint Martin told the Emperor that Maximus would fall in battle against the stronger scions of the Valentinian dynasty, as the author Severus, having the hindsight of living through what latter happened, knew that the Emperor Maximus would.

Now, we have no idea if a word of this story is true, and in Severus’ other writings, which we’ll get to a bit later, we learn more about what Saint Martin was up to in the year 386 – there’s a whole hidden sequence of events that doesn’t come up in the main hagiography most people read. For now, though, let’s stick with our principal text for today, the Life of Saint Martin. [music]

The Later Life of Saint Martin

After publicly derogating the minor Roman Emperor Maximus, Saint Martin continued to face challenges as he grew older. Satan and his minions assailed the bishop with foul language and illusions. Satan appeared as Roman deities – Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Minerva, and after donning all these disguises, Satan told Martin that God couldn’t possibly forgive everyone – some were reprobates beyond redemption. Martin disagreed and said that even if Satan himself repented, God would forgive the devil.

While, even as an old timer, Martin continued to deal with Satan, he also continued to inspire new converts. A hubristic young man in Martin’s monastery became possessed with the notion that he was ordained for a special level of holiness – indeed that he was a saint. He announced one night that he would be consecrated as such, and appear to them wearing all white, and indeed that very night the monks heard rumblings and strange noises, and the prideful young man appeared in bright white garments. As it turned out, though, this youth had been duped by Satan – when the self-styled Saint was reluctantly put in the same room with Saint Martin, his white garments vanished, showing that they, along with his misguided sanctimoniousness, were the products of the devil.

Meanwhile, over in Spain, another self-proclaimed saint had risen to prominence, even being worshipped by a local Spanish bishop, and Severus adds that another imposter still had proclaimed himself John the Baptist, risen again. While these faraway charlatans showed the devil’s wiles abroad, Satan continued to beleaguer Martin himself. At one juncture, Satan caused himself to appear as Christ to Martin, bedecked in a jeweled crown and golden sandals. Martin saw through the ruse right away, though, telling the devil that Jesus wasn’t the type of guy who would wear that kind of finery, and that Jesus would also reappear on earth with the wounds of the cross. Once Martin voiced this declaration, the devil vanished, leaving behind him only a stinky odor.

Following this final, and in some ways ultimate tale of how Saint Martin could differentiate good from evil, the biographer Severus breaks the fourth wall and tells us he heard about this dramatic episode from Saint Martin himself. Indeed, Severus tells us about his dealings with Saint Martin – how he went to meet Saint Martin because he wanted to write the authoritative biography, how nice Saint Martin was in person, and how he’d shared a meal with Severus and washed his feet. Severus claims that Saint Martin actually told him that Martin’s favorite living Christian was Severus’ friend Paulinus of Nola. Martin, Severus writes, was above all things wise.

Indeed, Severus admits that it’s hard to put everything there is to say about Saint Martin into words – the way the holy man lived on so little food and sleep, or the way he filled every moment of every day with contemplation, study and prayer, and even prayed under his breath when working on other things that didn’t demand much of his mind. In spite of such steadfast devoutness, though, Martin never judged others, and always turned the other cheek. He was emotionally impassive, betraying neither laughter nor tears, though he did cry for the sake of his critics, many of whom were bishops. In a final statement that is simultaneously self-conscious and quite presumptuous, the biographer Severus announces that

I am certain that this little work will please all holy people. For the rest, should anyone read this without faith, he will be sinning. Driven to write by faith in these things and by the love of Christ, I am confident that I have given a clear account of things and spoken the truth; and the reward prepared by God, as I hope, will await not whoever reads this but whoever believes it. (159-160)

In other words, if you don’t believe everything you’ve read in my book, God will punish you. Not really the humblest statement to close out the biography of a purportedly humble man, but at any rate, that’s the end of Severus’ famous Life of Saint Martin. [music]

Severus’ Later Writings on Saint Martin: The Second and Third Dialogues

So that takes us to the end of one of the great Christian hagiographies. The main biography that Severus wrote isn’t a very long work by any means – the Penguin translation we used in this episode weighs in at just 28 pages. But of course, brevity was a wise decision if one sought broad circulation prior to the printing press, and one certainly can’t accuse Sulpicius Severus of being longwinded in the biography. Episodes follow one another swiftly, and the short book ends with a brisk, but polite sense that it’s best to wrap things up rather than to pile on chapter after chapter.

However, in later works, Severus did allow himself to say quite a bit more about Saint Martin, offering us a sort of director’s cut of the great bishop’s life and deeds. In the remainder of this episode, we’re going to explore some of Severus’ additional writings on Saint Martin and other subjects. Some of these writings are formulaic and unmemorable miracle stories. But others are more historically grounded accounts of Saint Martin’s life and deeds – especially his actions during the 380s. We’ll begin with Severus’ dialogues, written around 400 CE, which largely focus on Saint Martin himself.

In Sulpicius Severus’ second dialogue, he set out to collect various stories and anecdotes about Saint Martin that didn’t make it into his earlier biography. Some of them are poignant, some are silly, and many of them are punchy miracle tales for which readers of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages evidently had inexhaustible appetites. While it would be excessive to summarize this second dialogue in its entirety, I’ll review some of the more memorable highlights that Severus squeezes into his short sequel to the famous biography. Severus first tells us that Saint Martin never sat on a throne or a chair – only a crude little three legged stool (II.1). He tells a story about a fiery globe appearing all around Saint Martin’s head that produced a head of long hair, and then how Martin magically removed poison from a boy bitten by a snake (II.2). He relates a tale of Martin bringing another boy back to life, and an entire village suddenly converting at the sight of the miracle (II.4). In another story, Martin seeks an audience with the Roman Emperor Valentinian. Valentinian, seeing the humbly dressed Christian bishop, did not rise to greet him, and so fire burst out of Valentinian’s seat cushion, which caused the haughty ruler to suddenly spring up and realize that the visitor truly was holy and blessed (II.5).

Another tale involving royalty and Martin is as follows. That aforementioned short-tenured emperor Maximus had a wife who was quite taken with Martin. Piously, this empress waited on the Christian Bishop and she showed him a unique degree of reverence and deference, revering the bread crumbs from the bishop’s meal (II.6). This empress wasn’t Saint Martin’s only female fan. Severus writes that virgins would go and visit the places where he’d stayed while traveling and kiss every spot he’d touched. One virgin found a straw from Martin’s bedding and used this straw to exorcise a demon (I.13). With these tales of women being spellbound by Saint Martin complete, Severus then offers a yarn about Saint Martin exorcising a demon from a possessed cow (II.9). A miracle involving a rabbit saved from hunting dogs prompts Severus to have Martin voice a short speech on the superiority of virginity – Martin says in Severus’ second dialogue,

[N]othing is to be compared with virginity. Thus, then, those who set marriage side by side with fornication grievously err; and those who think that marriage is to be placed on an equal footing with virginity are utterly wretched and foolish. But this distinction must be maintained by wise people, that marriage belongs to those things which may be excused, while virginity points to glory, and fornication must incur punishment. (II.10)¹⁴

This later dictum on virginity, by the way, is the longest statement about sex Severus advances through his biographical work on Saint Martin. As we discussed last time, a Catholic clergy gradually mandating celibacy in its ranks, at the helm of which around 400 CE were Jerome and Augustine, had begun to imagine themselves as superior to the laity due to their abstinence, with early hagiography painting pictures of divinely chosen saints resisting the potent temptations of sex, and instead opting for celibacy.

Also on the subject of women and marriage, Severus’ second dialogue tells a story of a hermit monk who wanted to have his former wife with him because he missed her. Saint Martin, being called on to weigh in on the situation, said that it would not be allowed – women weren’t allowed in the military, after all – their duty was to stay at home and not have sex while their husbands were away, and it would be ridiculous for a monk to have his former wife around (II.11). Another story about Saint Martin and women follows on the heels of this one. Severus says that there was a well known Christian virgin who had not allowed herself to be seen for years. She even refused Saint Martin an audience, which was just fine with Saint Martin, and Severus remarks on just terrific it is that Martin was not offended by her refusal to see him (II.12). Martin was even more to be praised for treating the virgin hermit respectfully, Severus writes, considering that there were also “those virgins who are always throwing themselves in the way of the priest, who get up sumptuous entertainments, and who recline at a table with the rest.”¹⁵ In other words, how nice of Saint Martin not to forcibly intrude on or curse an anchorite virgin in her cell, when priests always had virgins throwing themselves at them during feasts. It’s a weird little passage in the dialogues – one that harkens back to all the scenes of sexy noblewomen and virgins pursuing intercourse with the Apostles in the apocryphal Acts literature, but it’s the final story about Saint Martin that Severus set down in the second dialogue.

Severus’ third and final dialogue, also all about Saint Martin, continues the formulaic miracle stories that fill the main biography and previous dialogue. Saint Martin cured a twelve-year-old girl of being mute (III.2). Martin created a special vessel of holy oil that never ran out of fluid (III.3). The mention of his name magically caused a dog to stop barking (III.3). He frightened a tyrant away from a city (III.4). He found men possessed by demons who were floating, and upon exorcising the demons, Martin discovered that they were the Roman gods Jupiter and Mercury (III.6). He caused a pagan temple to be crushed after he prayed (III.7). A woman who touched his robe was cured of her menstrual problems (III.9). While these miracle stories really start to blur together, toward the end of Severus’ third dialogue, he gives us a genuinely fascinating story about Saint Martin, a story that he also offers in his Chronica, or book of Christian history.

This story is about a real historical event that happened in the 380s. And this event was, put simply, the first historically documented killing of Christian people by a Christian state. Six years after the Edict of Thessalonica made Nicene Christianity the official orthodoxy of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Maximus, under pressure from bishops out of western Spain, tried a religious leader named Priscillian for impermissible beliefs. Priscillian and a number of his associates were executed in the year 386. And while Saint Martin’s many miracles are conventional within hagiography, and the poignant and beautiful episode of him offering half of his cloak to a beggar appears most often in iconography, his role in what historians call the Priscillianist Controversy is something which we will now consider in detail, and it may indeed be the main thing that you remember from this program. [music]

The Priscillianist Controversy as Severus Relates It

During the 300s, two major theological controversies rocked the ecclesiastical offices of the Christian world. The more famous of the two was the one we discussed last time – the controversy surrounding Arianism, that belief that Jesus and Yahweh were not of the same substance, but that Jesus was indeed Yahweh’s son and not co-eternal with him. Arianism was one of the main subjects of the First Council of Nicaea in 325. This council did not cause Arianism to vanish – the Arian view of a subordinate Christ continued to be popular throughout the 300s, problematically among key barbarian enclaves and their mercenaries who fought on behalf of late Roman emperors. Nonetheless at Nicaea, in 325, theologians formally set down a doctrine of Christology that persists to this day in the majority of Christian institutions – that Yahweh, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three consubstantial, coeternal aspects of a single deity.

The second theological controversy of this century centered on a theologian named Priscillian, and it came to a climax in the 380s. The Priscillianist controversy was one that touched the western half of the empire more than the eastern, as its roots were all the way over on the western side of the Iberian Peninsula. Our contemporary historical source on the Priscillianist controversy happens to be our author for today, Sulpicius Severus. His account, folded into his history of Christianity, is a dark story – one which depicts the teacher Priscillian as a heretic, certainly, but one which also depicts Priscillian’s accusers and prosecutors as conniving murderers, as well. So, let’s hear the story of Priscillian as Sulpicius Severus tells it – to be very clear this is a historical narrative detailing events that took place between about 370 and 386, set down in a chronicle roughly between 400 and 410.¹⁶

Once upon a time, Severus tells us, there was a man in Spain named Priscillian. We don’t know when Priscillian was born, but by about 370 he was active as a theologian and teacher. According to Severus, Priscillian was an admirable person, “a man of noble birth, of great riches, bold, restless, eloquent, learned through much reading, very ready at debate and discussion” (II.46).¹⁷ Priscillian had all the makings of a robust Christian – he was strong and frugal, and a person of moderate appetites. But unfortunately, Priscillian was vain, and he fell under the sway of heretical teachers. These teachers had roots in Egyptian Gnosticism, and through Priscillian, a new movement began. Two Spanish bishops came under Priscillian’s sway – their names were Instantius and Salvianus. These bishops were so devoted to the charismatic Priscillian that they swore oaths to him. But a third Spanish bishop, Hyginus of Cordova, found out about these illicit oaths, and vowed to destroy the Priscillian movement.

Let’s talk for a moment about Priscillian ideology. We have a fair number of sources on this subject, from furious libel penned by Saint Jerome and others to a collection of writings called the Würzburg Tracts, some of which may have been written by Priscillian himself, which weren’t discovered and put into print until the 1880s.¹⁸ To sift through a lot of data fairly quickly, Priscillian seems to have been a plucky and independently minded religious leader, and also one comfortable operating outside of the established power structures of church leaders in his region. Priscillian was associated with asceticism. This alone was hardly objectionable to the greater Christian world – after all leading bishops were writing laudatory biographies of monks who fasted and slept in the dirt. Rather than any associations with asceticism, then, Priscillian seems to have run into trouble for two reasons. First, Priscillian was somehow connected with Gnosticism and Manichaeism. We know from past episodes that these were major Christian movements by the 300s, however amorphous and diverse they were – very generally speaking, both movements often involved a deprecation of the physical world, a rejection of the Genesis story of creation and Yahweh, and a counterbalancing optimism in the individual believer’s ability to see beyond the illusions of the physical world and commune with the spiritual one, even to the extent that she could save herself through pure living and personal spiritual awakening. These movements – again Gnosticism and Manichaeism – were disparaged in surviving theological writings due to their dismissal of core parts of the Old Testament, and their notion that individual believers could save themselves through accessing esoteric knowledge, but also because they were associated with the east – in Manichaeism’s case, the Sasanian Empire. Calling someone a Gnostic or Manichaean at a Catholic council in, say, 370 CE was a bit like calling someone a communist or socialist in America in 1955 – in both cases, associating an otherwise reputable member of an in-group with a vilified out-group from the east, however unfounded the accusation was and however imprecisely defined the western and eastern groups were.

So beyond associations with Gnosticism and Manichaeism, the second real reason Priscillian seems to have run into trouble was that he encouraged unconventional meetings and liturgical practices – gatherings in private homes rather than official places of worship, allowing women and men to read scripture together, and permitting congregants to take the Eucharist home with them and eat it there.¹⁹ In addition to these general offenses, Priscillian also had an unusual degree of interest in the apocrypha, an interest which two texts generally attributed to him support.²⁰ So, that’s a very quick overview of what we know about Priscillianism. And according to all accounts, by the year 380, Priscillian had ruffled some feathers.

Those who opposed Priscillian and his followers convened a synod – or an assembly of church leaders – in Zaragoza in the northwest of modern day Spain. The Synod of Zaragoza drew not only Spanish bishops, but also brought Gallic bishops over the Pyrenees to attend. Historians believe this meeting took place in the year 380. The Priscillianists, including their leader, did not make a showing. And at the synod, Priscillian and his followers were broadly condemned. Bishops were told not to offer them communion. A bishop named Ithacius became the ringleader in those bent on persecuting the Priscillianists. Ithacius’ diocese was in the southern part of modern day Portugal. And Ithacius, once the synod of 380 was finished, moved forward to destroy Priscillianists by any means necessary. Ithacius began his offensive by contacting the Emperor Gratian. And through Gratian’s decree, Ithacius was able to obtain an edict officially banishing all Priscillians from Spain.

However, Priscillian himself, together with the bishops loyal to him, refused to simply go away. The leading Priscillianists traveled to Rome and sought an audience with Pope Damasus. As Severus’ historical narrative of these events continues, he cuts in with various asides to degrade Priscillianism, telling us that Priscillian and his entourage “perverted with their teachings the people of Elusa” (II.48), and elsewhere, “they infected some with their errors” (II.48). Not above formulaic Roman libel, Severus tells us that Priscillian’s band of theologians travelled with wives and “strange women” (II.48), one of whom had become pregnant with Priscillian’s baby, but had aborted it.

Whatever their actual moral character, the Priscillianist assembly was unsuccessful in obtaining an audience with the Pope in Rome, and not long after, they were similarly unable to get an audience with Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Out of luck with the leading western church officials, then, the Priscillianists tried a different approach. Through the Roman imperial cabinet – a secular bureaucracy, in other words – they were able to get their exile repealed, and they returned to Spain, where, in Severus’ account, the Priscillianists bribed a proconsul to secure their position. Not inclined to forgiving and forgetting, the Priscillianists then made sure that Ithacius, the Portuguese bishop who’d taken action against them, was himself prosecuted. Ithacius fled to Gaul, where one of his allies prepared to petition the Emperor Gratian. A brief cat and mouse game followed, with Priscillianists trying to track down Ithacius, but their pursuit was interrupted in the year 383, when the Emperor Maximus usurped Gratian’s throne. Maximus appears briefly in Severus’ main biography – Saint Martin refuses to pass a cup to him in a scene we read earlier. However, in Severus’ later works, Maximus gets a lot more page space.

After Maximus usurped the throne from Gratian in 383, the Portuguese bishop Ithacius concentrated his efforts against the Priscillianists through overtures to Maximus. And the vengeful Ithacius’ efforts yielded success. The Priscillianists were summoned to a Synod at Bordeaux. One of the prominent Priscillianist bishops had his office stripped for him. But Priscillian himself was evidently craftier, voicing an appeal to the Emperor Maximus. In the midst of this morally murky politicking, the author Severus pauses the narrative to tell give us a sense of what he thought as all these events unfolded – he would have been in his twenties, incidentally, when all of this took place over the early 380s. Severus writes that the bishops who were spearheading a campaign against Priscillian charged into an imperial trial

as accusers; and I would by no means blame their zeal in overthrowing heretics, if they had not contended for victory with greater keenness than was fitting. And my feeling indeed is, that the accusers were as distasteful to me as the accused. I certainly hold that Ithacius had no worth or holiness about him. For he was a bold, loquacious, impudent, and extravagant man. (II.50)

In other words, there were no good guys on either side. To Severus, Ithacius’ persecutions of the Priscillianists were overzealous. The Priscillianists were indeed associated with fasting and diligent study, among their more controversial practices. But the anti-Priscillianist bishop Ithacius, in his overweening offensive, made it his mission to persecute any Christian churchman associated with asceticism and bookishness as somehow in league with the Priscillianists, including Saint Martin, who was by all accounts an exemplary Christian.

Ithacius’ accusations against Saint Martin, it seems, may have been a result of Saint Martin’s decision to get involved in the events surrounding the Priscillianist controversy. Because while Ithacius wanted severe measures – evidently executions – imposed against the Priscillianists, Saint Martin believed that being excommunicated was punishment enough. Perhaps the most important sentence in Severus’ historical account of these events is that “[Saint Martin] maintained that it was. . .a foul and unheard-of indignity, that a secular ruler should be judge in an ecclesiastical cause” (II.50). To Martin, Christian bishops ought not to be prosecuted in a Roman court. That was the sticking point, over and above the theological disagreements involved – the state must not intervene in matters of the church.

Saint Martin’s petitions were unheeded, though, and the trial in the Emperor Maximus’ court proceeded. Priscillian was accused of vile conduct – specifically, that he “had been accustomed to hold, by night, gatherings of vile women, and to pray in a state of nudity” (II.50). Not denying these allegations, Priscillian was put in prison, having been sentenced to death. The prosecuting bishop Ithacius realized his reputation would be diminished by the looming executions, and removed himself from the case, but the damage had already been done. Maximus began the executions. Priscillian was beheaded, along with two of his clerics, and several more associated with him. The fallout from the trial and executions destroyed the reputation of Ithacius, who was excommunicated. And his efforts, Severus writes, were completely in vain. Priscillian’s death made Priscillian a martyr, and his body was brought back to Spain. And in the aftermath of all these executions of the year 386, Severus concludes, there were no winners, but instead,

all things were seen to be disturbed and confused by the discord, especially of the bishops, while everything was corrupted by them through their hatred, partiality, fear, faithlessness, envy, factiousness, lust, avarice, pride, sleepiness, and inactivity. . .while, in the meantime, the people of God, and all the excellent of the earth were exposed to mockery and insult. (II.51)

Severus thus closes his account of the Priscillian trials with an unambiguous condemnation of all involved, with the sole exception of Saint Martin, who seemed to sue for clemency and exhibit sound judgment in the midst of the awful affair. Two years after the trial, the Emperor Maximus, who’d been persuaded to take a hard line stance against Priscillianism, was no longer on the throne, and the movement continued to flourish for the next century, which proved that the ignominious happenings of the early 380s hadn’t done anyone any good. Severus concludes that Saint Martin was so thoroughly disgusted by the affair that Martin “lived sixteen years after this, but never again did he attend a synod, and kept carefully aloof from all assemblies of bishops.”²¹ [music]

Modern Historians and the Priscillianist Controversy

The main focus of this episode has been Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, one of the major hagiographies in Christianity, and a work that harnessed some of the motifs and structural features of earlier biographies of ascetic saints by Athanasius and Jerome, and successfully propelled the tradition from the 300s to the 400s. Christian writers and readers of this juncture had a ravenous appetite for miracle stories, and the ascetic saint’s lives of the fourth century include hundreds of them. But more than miracle healings and exorcisms, which pervade sacred Christian writings from the Gospels onward, what stands out to students of history in these hagiographies are the intermittent references to current events in them. In Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the old hermit travels to Alexandria in 311 to glower at the sham trials Christians in the last days of the Diocletianic persecution. Jerome’s Paul of Thebes leaves civilization in the early 250s due to the Decian persecution. Severus’ Martin of Tours tries to intervene in the messy Priscillianist factionalism of the mid 380s, and he ultimately gives up. These historical reference points in the great Christian hagiographies are anchors in what can otherwise feel like generic fusillades of miracles.

In the case of Martin of Tours, and his fruitless attempt to intervene in the Priscillian crisis, we have a story that Sulpicius Severus returned to several times in his writings. The Priscillian controversy is scarcely touched in the main biography that most of us read. But later, in his third dialogue, and later still, in his Chronicle, Severus told the story of Priscillian controversy at greater and greater length. The fact that Saint Martin was ultimately thwarted in his attempt to mediate in the secular court must have motivated Severus to gloss over the events of the 380s fairly quickly in the main biography. After all, a holy man who could cure a quadriplegic, bring people back to life, exorcise demons, and beat Satan himself really ought to have been up to the task of shutting down a third rate emperor’s kangaroo court. But while Severus doesn’t give the Priscillian controversy the time of day in his most famous work about Saint Martin, in later writings, Severus revisited the ugly affairs of the mid-380s, wanting to at least establish for posterity what had happened. There is, accordingly, a sharp contrast between Severus’ popular and uncontroversial Life of Saint Martin and much darker events that Severus recorded in the years following his famous biography – the real story behind the usual routine of saintly healings, exorcisms, and resurrections.

What had happened to Priscillian was, in the words of church historian Henry Chadwick, a “tragedy,” and in scholar John McGuckin’s estimation, “a darkly symbolic moment when the Christians secured the first execution of a religious dissident among themselves.”²² Roman administrations had persecuted Christians and Manichaeans, but what the writer Sulpicius Severus saw was that precisely six years after the Edict of Thessalonica passed, in an ugly welter of back channel lobbying, Christian churchmen had begun killing each other. Their disagreements, according to modern historical assessments, may have had as much to do with regional bids for power within Spain as they did doctrine. Gnosticism and Manichaeism had always threatened the importance of ecclesiastical institutions in that they invited individual believers to pursue esoteric knowledge of the divine all by themselves. Priscillianism, rooted to some degree in these ideologies, added another threat by encouraging believers to worship at home when they needed to, thus further undermining the sovereignty of church officials and their physical bases of operations. Historian Michael Kulikowski writes that the churchmen ultimately responsible for Priscillian’s execution – longer quote here –

were responding to a profound challenge to the traditional relationship of town and country that they, as good Roman townsmen drawn mostly from local elites, instinctively felt in necessary to perpetuate. The city’s territorium had been controlled form its urban center ever since the peninsula had been given a Roman political geography. . .The bishops who met at [to condemn Priscillian in 380] were drawn from the elites to whom such obedience was due; some came to the episcopate directly from municipal magistracies, others continued in their curial duties while in office. Their role as Christian leaders, in other words, was an outgrowth of their role in the social life of the Roman town. From their point of view, the control of rural religiosity by an urban episcopate was the only form a properly disciplined Christianity could take.²³

By this estimation, then, while the persecution of Priscillian was a theological one, it was also undertaken to punish a maverick who undermined the church’s regional control. Lest Priscillian steal believers away from urban bishops with his renegade doctrines of posthumous self-determination, reading the apocrypha, fasting and allowing men and women to study together in the same room, the democratically-minded Christian leader had to be destroyed. To some extent, perhaps, Severus and his idol Saint Martin understood that what happened to Priscillian was the deplorable result of cynical power plays all around, many of them made by Christians in consecrated offices.

But what happened in the early 380s was shocking for other reasons. The Edict of Thessalonica had promised a new Roman world with Christianity at its core. The Priscillianist controversy demonstrated just how quickly this world could fall into an eclipse. To quote historian John McGuckin again, “because the [Priscillian] conflict became so rapidly politicized from 380 onward, drawing in more and more participants, it was increasingly difficult for those involved to moderate their positions without losing face. Positions hardened, new causes of grievance were found.”²⁴ Once Christianity had been wired into institutions, institutions that imagined their righteousness on the basis of orthodoxy and heresy, these oppositional categories began to define conflicts within the church. And these conflicts, as Severus’ generation saw in 386, would not be beneficently mediated by the Roman state, with which Christianity had so recently allied. Christ’s teachings in the Gospels emphatically promoted nonviolence. The Roman legal system did not share this value.

The generation that encompassed Jerome, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, and Sulpicius Severus – writers who came of age around the time of the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 – they had to decide how the church, now endorsed by the state, would negotiate its internal conflicts. The Priscillian controversy was a clear example of what not to do. While Severus clearly isn’t sympathetic to Priscillian ideology, he tells the story as a grim outbreak of factional violence, and little else. His saintly Martin of Tours, observing the situation spiraling out of control, pleads for ecclesiastical offences to be tried in ecclesiastical courts, but no one listens, Priscillian dies, and his movement thereafter blossoms, the violence not even producing the result that Priscillian’s prosecutors intended. It is a sad story, certainly, and one with no winners. But it’s also something of an inspiring one. Saint Martin may or may not have fed wild lions from his hands, or exorcised a violent demon from a cow.²⁵ But in the 380s, if Sulpicius Severus is telling the truth in the writings he left behind on the Priscillian controversy, Saint Martin did something equally miraculous. He saw, and Severus saw, with total horror, what could happen when a Christian state facilitated a religiously motivated execution. And both of them, likely at no small risk to themselves, stood up and spoke out against it. [music]

Hermits or Colleagues: The Paradox of the Late Antique Monk

At the end of our previous episode on Athanasius, we considered how clerical celibacy, ever more consistently mandated over the course of the 300s, likely drove readerly interest in stories about powerful, but chaste monks like Antony and Paul of Thebes. Sulpicius Severus’ generation of Christian intellectuals were men who, following the growing momentum of custom and consensus, had renounced sex and familial connections, and the eremitic and ascetic saints who emerge from this generation’s writings exhibit a lineup of exalted and celibate males, superhuman in their austere spirituality, as those who wrote about them aspired to be. Severus’ Saint Martin is of this general type, a man who is granted vast powers due to the worldly pleasures he has abdicated, as Paul of Thebes, Antony, Hilarion, and Malchus had in the works that inspired Severus’ biography.

While the Catholic clergy was transitioning into legally mandated celibacy during the fourth century, they were in the midst of a second, and in some ways paradoxical transition. This second transition was their increasing alliances with the Roman state. In Severus’ accounts of the Priscillian controversy, Saint Martin and the anti-Priscillian bishop Ithacius represent the conflicting imperatives of the fourth-century churchman – on one hand, to be pious and ultimately have an eye on God and heaven; on the other, to forge worldly collaborations that, however seedy or imperfect, nonetheless helped promote the ecumenical influence of Christianity. It’s no coincidence that one of the last things we hear about Saint Martin in Severus’ dialogues is that after the ugly Priscillian trials, “never again did [Martin] attend a synod, and kept carefully aloof from all assemblies of bishops.” To all the clerical readers of Severus’ hagiography, not to mention Jerome’s and Athanasius’ earlier hagiographies, ascetic saints were idealized versions of what they sought to, but could not, due to their professional obligations, be.

When we read the first ascetic saint’s lives, as we’ve done in this and the previous episode, we see a continuation of older biographical traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean that date at least back to the fourth century BCE. Ancient philosophy was already fond of abstemious and wise pagan figures by the time Plato created his literary version of hardy, virtuous Socrates. Xenophon, following on Plato’s heels, did the same, with the first book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia especially emphasizing Socrates’ severity and sanctity. Over six hundred years later, the tradition of writing about saintly pagan philosophers continued, with Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras from the late 200s, and Iamblichus’ biography of the same figure produced around the same time, both of them chronicling a self-denying vegetarian sage who passed his piety and his unique wisdom down to posterity. Pythagoras, with his distinctly saintly asceticism and knowledge of the unseen world, was so popular during the first few centuries CE that we even have a biography of a Neopythagorean – this is Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a laudatory history of a itinerant miracle worker and wise teacher produced around the time that Christianity’s first hermit monk was born – some decades before 250. Along these same lines, the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry’s biography of his predecessor Plotinus reads like a hagiography that doesn’t mention Christianity – Porphyry’s Plotinus, born on the page in the late 200s, is a wise and recently departed sage, a gentle guru who seems to have already transcended his earthly existence.

The generic figure of the Ancient Mediterranean sage, from Pythagoras and Socrates down to Plotinus, Paul of Thebes, and Saint Martin of Tours, has commonalities across the centuries. These figures require little from the world, and have a great deal to give. They have access to strength, fortitude and knowledge that set them apart from the masses. Rank and file thinkers might be distracted by the noise of contemporary controversies and transient fads, but the sage knows better, always greater than the sum of the ideological history that has produced him. Severus’ Saint Martin may briefly stoop to intervene in the Priscillian controversy, but Martin’s main concerns are with more permanent things – God and Satan and the afterlife which awaits the pious.

The fourth century Christians who wrote our surviving hagiographies from this period may have known that they weren’t doing anything especially new in their tales of enlightened hermits and ascetic bishops, though understandably we see no references in fourth century Christian hagiography to the lives and deeds of Socrates or Pythagoras. To return to the main work we covered last time, Athanasius’ Saint Antony, at one point, engages in a sparring match with two pagan philosophers, a sparring match in which the Greeks barely get in a word edgewise. Antony’s general attitude toward non-Christian learning is, “Let the Greeks pursue their studies across the seas and go in search of teachers of useless literature in foreign lands. We however feel no compulsion to travel or cross the waves for the kingdom of heaven is to be found everywhere on earth” (20).²⁶ In his actual conversation with pagan skeptics, Antony asks two Greek philosophers, “what comes first, mind or letters? And which is the cause of which? Does mind come from letters or letters from the mind?. . .if anyone’s mind is sound, he has no need of letters” (73).²⁷ It is a wildly strange thing to say, considering the extent to which Athanasius’ Life of Antony is embroidered from end to end with verses of the Bible. But Athanasius’ open scorn toward book learning is part of a broader aspect of early hagiography – the sense that the individual and the deity are the only paramount and consequential realities, and that everything else is illusory.

Now broadly, Athanasius’ generation and the one that came after it held the non-Christian world in contempt. Jerome, in one of his letters, writes, “Well does one of our own writers say: the philosophers are the patriarchs of the heretics.”²⁸ In a letter that Paulinus of Nola wrote to Sulpicius Severus, Paulinus offered some advice on friendship, telling Severus, “Even though he be a brother and friend and closer to you than your right hand and dearer than life itself, if he is a stranger and an enemy in Christ, let him be to thee as the heathen. . .Let him be severed from your body as a useless right arm.”²⁹ We would expect fourth century bishops and churchmen, of course, to describe the non-Christian world in stern and disapproving terms, and it’s no surprise that they do. But to turn back to the subject of fourth century saint’s lives, as Christian writers, deliberately or not, followed many of the customs of pagan philosophical biography, they created something of a problem for themselves. This problem was that although Paul of Thebes, and Saint Antony, and Hilarion, and Malchus were all heroic figures in their steadfast devoutness, they were also, to varying extents, not very collegiate with the greater Christian establishment. The figure of the enlightened monk, living on the desert fringe, might have encouraged ordained Christians to hold fast to asceticism and celibacy. But the exalted saint, who needn’t read anything, nor learn anything from anyone, was a potentially troubling figure for a Christian establishment trying to set down orthodox theology and practices. If, like Saint Antony, influential Christians simply began doing their own thing wherever they wanted, and however they wanted, sectarian forces could do great harm to the church. In their laudatory biographical works on Socrates, Pythagoras, Plotinus, and others, pagan philosophers were not trying to cement an institution that held ideological sovereignty over the known world. Athanasius, Jerome, and Severus, on the other hand, were trying to do exactly this.

It’s no wonder, then, that as monasticism emerges, so, too, do skeptical reactions to it. There were certainly pagan criticisms. Julian the Apostate found eremitic monks misanthropic and deluded.³⁰ The later Latin poet Rutilius Namatianus wrote, with great disgust, that monks ran from society out of fear and ended up abjuring the beauties and joys of human life.³¹ Edward Gibbon was characteristically harsh, describing monks as “a swarm of fanatics, incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity.”³² These writers not partial to Christianity generally see ascetic monasticism as a retreat away from the challenges and rewards of greater human society – a cowardly flight from the temptations of ideological diversity and into the safe harbor of isolation or likeminded communes. In the fourth and fifth centuries, though, in Christian circles, criticisms of monks were a little bit different.³³

Severus’ Martin: A Saint for an Interconnected Catholic World

Sulpicius Severus’ first dialogue is a conversation between himself and a Gallic friend named Postumianus, who has just returned to Gaul from a three year stay in the East, and especially Egypt. The dialogue has much to say about monastic life around the Mediterranean. In the dialogue’s first sustained description of the monks in the Middle Nile, Severus emphasizes the power that abbots command over their monks, and tells a story about an abbot whose power over his monastery was somewhat tyrannical (I.10). Severus writes that in the monastic villages of the central Nile, as many as 3,000 people can be clustered around a monastic institution (I.16). And Severus writes that,

The chief and foremost virtue in these places, as I have already said, is obedience. In fact, any one applying for admission is not received by the Abbot of the monastery on any other condition than that he be first tried and proved; it being understood that he will never afterwards decline to submit to any injunction of the Abbot, however arduous and difficult, and though it may seem something unworthy to be endured. (I.16)³⁴

Severus describes instances of extreme obedience – a newly matriculated monk who walked into fire for his abbot, but was unscathed, and a similar monk who was forced to water a dry twig for three years until finally it bloomed into a plant. (I.19). Though Severus’ fellow interlocutor in his first dialogue generally admires the monks he’s met on his trip to Egypt, he still endorses Saint Martin as by far holier than anyone else he’s met.

Saint Martin, to Sulpicius Severus, was the logical evolution of a line of ascetic saints – a line that had begun with Paul of Thebes in the dark decades of the mid-200s and come to its fruition in the late 300s, during the bright morning of the Christian Empire. When Jerome wrote his biography of the proto-hermit Paul of Thebes, the man who out-monked Saint Antony by living in isolation for a staggering 97 years, Jerome hurled himself into the tradition of ascetic hagiography. Jerome’s follow-up desert hermits, born on the page roughly between 389-91, were also xenophobic isolationists, particularly Hilarion. But during the end of the 390s, when Sulpicius Severus sat down to write his Life of Saint Martin, he created a different kind of ascetic saint.

Martin of Tours, first of all, was still alive. He was no isolationist, but a working bishop, enmeshed in an imperfect world rather than eating figs under the stars in the desert. Martin was also not some demagogic abbot, leading a bevy of monks to do goodness knows what in some remote corner of the Egypt or Syria. Nor was he a sectarian leader like Priscillian, weaving his own strands of Christianity apart from the establishment. Severus’ Saint Martin is the Catholic establishment, a figurehead from the bustling provinces of southwestern Gaul, and at the same time a purer and more rarefied specimen of churchman than his colleagues. While Severus’ Life of Saint Martin follows many aspects of the hagiographies that came before it, it is nonetheless a saint’s life for a slightly wiser more seasoned Christian readership. Severus knew that the complex and thorny new relationship between the Catholic Church and the Roman state would not be worked out by skinny desert hermits who never talked to anyone. Paul of Thebes and Saint Antony the Great – these were powerful role models to emulate – victors in the struggle for abstention and self control. But following the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, and the Priscillian Controversy of the next six years, a more worldly saint was needed – one who looked a bit more like Saint Martin.

Severus’ Saint Martin is, without a doubt, devout and morally unimpeachable. But he is also very slightly rough around the edges. A former career soldier, a convert, a man from a pagan family who couldn’t convert both parents, and later, at times even in the biography a sort of thug or vandal stomping around Gaul and destroying pagan temples, Martin comes down to us a person of action. While all the ascetic saints of the fourth century produced scores of miracles, Athanasius’ Antony and Jerome’s Paul and Hilarion are also associated with just sitting around in the dirt, occasionally clenching their fists in resistance to Satan, and living off of the land, or nutriment brought to them by followers. Not so with Saint Martin. In addition to Martin’s own battles waged against the devil, through most of the biography about him he is a professional – a soldier, a working churchman, and a bishop, sometimes contemplating and praying, but just as often hustling, converting, and negotiating with various forces arrayed against the Catholic establishment. Martin, as Severus surely intended, was a Saint for the dawn of a new century. Severus’ Martin showed readers that even converts with imperfect pasts could be exemplary Christians, and that even though it was exceedingly difficult to balance the demands of a bishopric with the exacting requirements of being an excellent Christian, doing both at once was still possible, and was something to aspire to. And while the protagonist Severus’ Life of Saint Martin certainly spoke to Christians of the subsequent century, Saint Martin eventually emerged as one of the paramount saints of Catholicism.

One obvious point I have not yet emphasized is that Martin was from the west – not Egypt, not the Levant, not Anatolia, nor any further afield, but good old fashioned Gaul via Central Europe. This alone helped endear him to Merovingian and Carolingian rulers for centuries after Sulpicius Severus lived and wrote about him. A cloak emerged in the seventh century alleged to be Saint Martin’s very own – a garment said to be the very cloak he shared with a beggar in Severus’ biography. A beloved relic in the region, the cloak, whether or not it was genuine, was carted around modern day France and beyond for various purposes. And Martin’s cloak ultimately made a contribution to European vernacular languages. As historian Dairmaid Macculloch puts it,

Martin was said to have torn his military cloak in half to clothe a poor man. . .The cut-down ‘little cloak,’ capella in Latin, later became one of the most prized possessions of the Frankish barbarian rulers who succeeded Roman governors in Gaul. . .and the series of small churches or temporary structures which sheltered this much-venerated relic were named after it: capallae. Thus the West gained its name for any private church. . .and later just for any small church.³⁵

This name in English, as you may have guessed, became the word “chapel.” Isn’t that neat? But Martin of Tours’ legacy was even more enduring than this. By the sixth century, his tomb had become a site for pilgrims to visit, and a later bishop of Tours, Gregory, wrote a collection of books about Saint Martin’s miracles. As a one-time soldier, Martin has been venerated by different generations of Catholic military men, emerging as a military saint in France at the end of the Second Empire, and coming to the forefront of French Catholicism during World War I. For the many generations who have revered Saint Martin, Sulpicius Severus’ writings on the famous bishop have stood the test of time, emerging out of the welter of ascetic Saint’s lives of the fourth century to offer a portrait of a man who, though not of perfect pedigree, still found a way to be a great bishop, an exemplary Christian, and a giving, compassionate person all at once. [music]

The Continuation of Pagan Ideology in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries

Well that, folks was Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, together with some other texts Severus wrote, and some background on how the Catholic Church was evolving in the first two decades after the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. For a sequence of four episodes, now, we have been predominantly exploring the Christian side of Late Antiquity, with our introductory overview of the beginnings of the Catholic Church, and the current sequence of three programs on Early Christian biography that we’re have now completed. But the next three shows, we’re going to something a little bit different, reading the works of the later Latin poets Ausonius and Rutilius Namatianus, two more writers from culturally fertile provinces of Southern Gaul, and later, the Dionysiaca, a final Greco-Roman epic from the fifth century that puts the “late” into Late Antiquity. Let’s start with the two Latin poets.

Ausonius and Rutilius Namatianus, while they’re some of the more obscure figures we’ll cover in Literature and History, are still extremely valuable in understanding the Late Antique period. Moving from Lucian of Samosata and Heliodorus to Athanasius and Saint Jerome, as we have thus far in this season, might give us the sense that during the 100s, 200s, and 300s, there were Christians, and there were pagans, and the two groups were at loggerheads, and the Christians won. This dichotomous view of Late Antique Roman culture misrepresents the complexity of what was actually happening. Neither Christian, nor pagan, but somewhere comfortably in between, Ausonius and Rutilius Namatianus were products of a changing world. As Saint Martin diligently undertook the work of a bishop, the western empire’s center of gravity was moving slightly to the north. In Central Europe, Vandal and Gothic tribes were swelling in size and power and taking on many aspects of Roman culture. If the hallmark feature of Rome’s fourth century was the solidification of Christianity as the official state religion, the hallmark feature of the next century was the final disintegration of the western empire. This disintegration was caused by continued imperial usurpations and civil wars – civil wars, after the 490s CE, fought almost exclusively by barbarian mercenary armies. Gothic, Vandal, and other immigrants from the north and east became permanent presences in the Empire by the 380s, drawing their swords to fight for a moribund sequence of generals and aristocrats who would hose cash at anyone who might aid their bids for power. Within the vortex of events that unfolded between the great Gothic War of 376-382 and removal of the final Western emperor in 476 – within that century, we see Catholicism as a force of solidification in a world pulverized by mass migrations and civil wars. And it’s easy to lose track of something in the western empire’s final, explosive century between 376 and 476 – a certain something that we’ve spent perhaps 200 hours studying together. That something is pagan culture – more specifically, the continuing vitality of pagan culture in the late Roman Empire.

Gothic and Vandal immigrants, and many others besides, poured into a world that was still very much divided. Bishops after the Edict of Thessalonica soon commanded great power, influence and wealth. But the Roman Empire, when Sulpicius Severus wrote his biography of Saint Martin around 400, remained a patchwork of different religious ideologies. We tend to see religious sectarianism in this period in the way that Christian chroniclers have told it – here are ardent pagans, bowing and scraping to idols in deviant temples, and here are figures like Saint Martin, invincible in their zeal, correcting the benighted impulses of an unconverted world. When we read figures like the late Latin poet Ausonius, though, again the subject of our next show, we see something different – not a heathen opposed to Christianity, and likely not a Christian, but instead a writer familiar with, but unconverted to the new religion.

Religious revolutions have to undertake the work of dealing with groups doctrinally opposed to them, like the rise of Nicene Christianity in the fourth century did with more antagonistic pagans and with Arians. But religious revolutions also, more simply, need to build inertia within an unconverted and indifferent world made up of people who simply don’t have very much interest in religion. The subject of our next show, Ausonius, a poet, professor, and later imperial tutor, may fall into this latter category. Ausonius was familiar with Christianity. He wrote some Christian stuff. But as we’ll see, Ausonius also didn’t go whole hog and give his possessions away. Toward the end of his life his former student, Bishop Paulinus of Nola – also Severus’ friend, as we saw in this episode – told Ausonius that he was disappointed the old professor had never shown more enthusiasm for Christianity. From what we can tell, Ausonius was quite fine where he was, writing poetry and hanging out at his country estate. And though posterity ended up preserving some of the more severe Christian texts from the fourth century, there must have been many provincial Romans like Ausonius who just couldn’t be bothered to care about religion much, one way or the other. So join me in our next show for the story of the late Latin poet Ausonius, a man who didn’t seem to be drawn to either side of an increasingly polarized epoch of history. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. I have a quiz on this program in the episode notes in your podcast app if you want to review what you’ve learned. For you Patreon supporters, I’ve recorded one of Romanticism’s greatest hits – William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a beautiful mid-length piece that’s a concise introduction to Wordsworth and some of the central themes of English romanticism more generally. For everyone, there’s a song coming up – stick around if you want to hear it, and if not, I’ll see you soon.

Still listening? Well, I got to thinking about hagiography – this was years ago, now. One of my grad school seminars covering the Middle Ages focused heavily on hagiography. I read a lot of saint’s lives that quarter – I mean a lot. Like any literary genre, hagiography has conventions, and one of the conventions that really stood out to me were the miracle stories. Late Antique and Medieval Christian readers absolutely couldn’t get enough of miracle stories – stories about Christians with superhero powers. By the end of the seminar I mentioned, I had a spreadsheet a couple of pages in length that was filled with acronyms to indicate miracles performed in various hagiographies – “CB,” for instance, was “cured blindness,” “ED” for exorcised demon, “RC” and “RA” for “resurrected child” and “resurrected adult.” It probably sounds like a pretty soulless way to read stuff – I mean just extracting statistical data like that – “AWE” for “animals wouldn’t eat” for the arena execution scenes when animals refuse to eat Christians, “MC” for “mass conversion,” “LS-H/V” for “long sermon – heaven/virginity.” But still, when faced with such utterly repetitious material, for me, tracking the genre’s recurring elements was a way to understand it from a high level, as data. And much more recently, in researching upcoming shows in this podcast, I’ve once again found myself reading a drove of hagiographies, and my experience with the genre, both past and present, has inspired me to write a song. This song is called “Saint Holyface the Holy,” and its titular character, I assure you, performs all of the requisite miracles normally featured in hagiography, and then some. So I’ll leave you with this new wave tune and story of a paradigmatic Christian saint, and the late Latin poet Ausonius and I will see you next time.

[“Saint Holyface the Holy” Song]

References

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