Dialogues 3.4–3.18

“You knew the exceedingly barbarous and above all bloodthirsty savagery of Avitianus, the former count. He entered the city of Tours in a rabid spirit, with lines of prisoners in chains following him in pitiable state; he ordered various kinds of punishment to be prepared for their destruction, and arranged to proceed to his grim work the next day, while the city was horror-struck. When Martin learned this, he went alone, a little before midnight, to that beast’s headquarters; but since, in the silence of the depth of night, with all asleep, there was no way in through the barred doors, he prostrated himself before the bloody threshold. Meanwhile Avitianus, buried in deep sleep, is struck by an angel bursting in: ‘The servant of God,’ he says, ‘lies at your threshold, and you sleep?’ At this voice he is shaken from his bed in alarm; calling his servants, he cries out in fear that Martin is at the door: they are to go at once and unbar the doors, lest the servant of God suffer wrong. But they, as is the nature of all servants, barely going beyond the first threshold, mocking their master for having been fooled by a dream, deny that anyone is at the door, judging from their own character that no one could keep watch at night, much less would they believe that a priest was lying in that horror of the night before another’s threshold; and Avitianus was easily persuaded of this. Again he sinks into sleep; but soon, struck more violently, he cries out that Martin is standing at the door: that was why no rest of mind or body was allowed him. As the servants delayed, he went himself as far as the outer threshold; there he found Martin, as he had sensed. Struck by so great a manifestation of power, the wretched man said: ‘Why have you done this to me, lord? There is no need for you to speak: I know what you desire, I see what you are asking. Go away as quickly as possible, lest heavenly anger consume me for the wrong done to you. I have paid penalty enough up to now. Believe me, it was no light thing that made me come out myself.’ After the saint had left, he called his officials, ordered all the prisoners to be released, and soon left himself. So, with Avitianus put to flight, the city rejoiced and was set free.

“These things were learned by many from Avitianus’s own account, and lately the presbyter Refrigerius, whom you see before you, heard them from Dagridus, a faithful man of the rank of tribune, who swore, calling on the divine majesty, that it had been told him by Avitianus himself. But I do not want you to wonder that today I am doing what I did not do yesterday, attaching to each miracle the names and persons of the witnesses, to whom anyone who is incredulous may have recourse, since they are still in the body. The unbelief of very many has required it, who are said to waver about some of the things told yesterday. Let them have, then, witnesses still safe and alive, whom they may believe more, since they doubt our good faith. But if they are so unbelieving, I declare that they will not believe them either. I wonder that anyone who has even a slight sense of religion would wish to commit so great a sin as to think that anyone could lie about Martin. Far from anyone who lives under God be that suspicion: Martin has no need to be championed by lies. But we lay the good faith of our whole discourse before you, Christ: we have said and will say nothing other than what we ourselves have seen, or have learned from clear sources or very often from Martin’s own account. Moreover, though we have adopted the form of a dialogue, so that the reading might be varied to relieve tedium, we declare that we are devoutly setting forth historical truth. The unbelief of some has compelled me, not without grief, to insert these things from outside the conversation. But let my speech return to our gathering: in which, seeing myself listened to so eagerly, I must confess that Aper acted firmly in turning away the unbelievers, judging that only those who believed ought to listen.

“I am carried away in spirit, if you can believe it, and I am quite beside myself with grief: do Christians not believe in Martin’s miracles, which the demons confessed? The blessed man’s monastery was two miles from the city; but whenever he set foot outside the threshold of his cell to come to the church, you would see the possessed roaring throughout the church and the bands of the damned trembling as though the judge were coming, so that the groaning of the demons announced the bishop’s arrival to clergy who did not know he was coming. I saw one man, as Martin approached, snatched into the air and suspended on high with his hands outstretched, so that his feet in no way touched the ground. And whenever Martin undertook the task of exorcising demons, he touched no one with his hands and rebuked no one with words, as for the most part a torrent of words is rolled out by the clergy; but when the possessed had been brought, he ordered the rest to go away, and, with the doors barred, in the middle of the church, clothed in sackcloth, sprinkled with ashes, he lay on the ground and prayed. Then indeed you would see the wretched people tormented with different results: some, their feet lifted on high, hanging as if from a cloud, and yet their clothes did not fall over their faces, lest the uncovered part of their bodies should cause shame; and in another part you would see people tormented without being questioned and confessing their crimes. They even revealed their names with no one asking: one confessed that he was Jupiter, another Mercury. In the end you would see all the ministers of the devil tormented together with their author himself, so that we must now confess that in Martin was fulfilled what is written: that the saints will judge angels.

“A certain district in the territory of Sens was ravaged by hail every year. Driven by extreme hardship, the inhabitants asked Martin for help: a quite trustworthy embassy was sent through Auspicius, a man of prefectorian rank, whose fields the storm had been accustomed to ravage more heavily than the others’. Martin prayed there, and so completely freed the whole region from the threatening plague that for the twenty years he afterwards remained in the body no one suffered hail in those parts. And lest this be thought to be chance rather than granted to Martin, in the year in which he died the storm returned and fell on them again: so much did even the world feel the departure of the faithful man, that it mourned the death of one whose life it rightly rejoiced in. Moreover, if a weaker listener demands witnesses to prove what we have said, I will produce not one man but many thousands, and will call the whole region of Sens as witness to the power it experienced. And yet you, presbyter Refrigerius, I believe, remember that we lately talked about this with Romulus, the son of that Auspicius, an honored and religious man; he told us these things as though we did not know them, and, fearing for future harvests because of constant losses, he lamented, as you yourself saw, with great grief that Martin had not been preserved for these times.

“But to go back to Avitianus: though in all places and in all cities he left unspeakable monuments of his cruelty, at Tours alone he was harmless; and that beast, which fed on human blood and the deaths of the unfortunate, showed himself gentle and peaceable when the blessed man was present. I remember that one day Martin came to him; and when he entered his office, he saw sitting behind his back a demon of extraordinary size. Martin breathed on it from a distance (to use a word that is not very good Latin, since we must) and ‘blew it out’; and Avitianus, thinking he was being blown at, said: ‘Why do you treat me so, holy man?’ Then Martin said: ‘Not you, but the one who sits foully on your neck.’ The devil gave way and left his familiar seat; and it is well established that after that day Avitianus was gentler, either because he understood that he had always been doing the will of the devil sitting by him, or because the unclean spirit, driven from his company by Martin, was deprived of the power to rage, since the servant was ashamed before his master and the master did not urge on the servant. In the village of Amboise, that is, the old fortress which is now thickly inhabited by brothers, you knew there was a pagan temple built with great labor. A towering mass had risen of highly polished stones, which, rising high into a cone, preserved the superstition of the place by the grandeur of the work. The blessed man had often ordered Marcellus, the presbyter living there, to destroy it. Returning after some time, he rebuked the presbyter for the temple building still standing. He pleaded that so great a mass could hardly be overthrown by a band of soldiers and the force of a public multitude, much less did he think it could easily be managed by weak clerics or feeble monks. Then Martin, having recourse to his familiar defenses, kept watch all night in prayer: in the morning a storm arose and threw the idol’s temple down to its foundations. Let these things be told with Marcellus as witness.

“I will tell of another miracle of his, not unlike, in a similar task, with Refrigerius confirming it. He was preparing to overthrow a column of enormous mass on which an idol stood, but there was no means of carrying this out: then he turned to prayer, as was his custom. It is certain that a column, somehow like it, was seen to rush down from heaven, which struck the idol and reduced that whole impregnable mass to dust: it was too little, it seems, that he should use the powers of heaven invisibly, unless those powers were seen by human eyes visibly serving Martin. The same Refrigerius is my witness that a woman suffering from a flow of blood, when she touched Martin’s garment after the example of that woman in the Gospel, was healed in a moment. A serpent, cutting through the river, was swimming toward the bank on which we had stopped: ‘In the name of the Lord,’ he said, ‘I command you to go back.’ At once the evil beast turned around at the saint’s word and crossed to the farther bank as we watched. When we all saw this, not without wonder, he groaned more deeply and said: ‘Serpents hear me, and men do not.’

“He was accustomed to eat fish during the days of Easter; a little before the hour of the meal he asked whether there was any at hand. Then the deacon Cato, who had charge of the management of the monastery, himself skilled at fishing, said that the whole day no catch had come his way, and the other fishermen who usually sold fish had not been able to take anything either. ‘Go,’ said Martin, ‘cast your net: a catch will come.’ We had our dwelling, as Sulpicius here has described, next to the river. We all went out, since it was a holiday, to see him fish, with everyone’s hopes intent that the attempts would not be in vain by which fish was being sought, at Martin’s word, for Martin’s use. At the first cast the deacon drew out an enormous pike in a very small net, and ran happily to the monastery, just as a poet whose name I forget says (we use a scholastic’s verse, since we are talking among scholastics): ‘and brought the captive boar to the wondering Argives.’ Truly this disciple of Christ, an imitator of the miracles done by the Savior, which he set forth as an example for his saints, showed Christ working in him; for Christ, glorifying his saint in every way, conferred on one man the gifts of various graces. Arborius, the former prefect, testifies that he saw Martin’s hand, as he offered the sacrifice, clothed as it were with the noblest gems, glittering with a purple light, and that at the movement of his right hand he heard the clash of the gems knocking together.

“I come now to that which, because of the stigma of the times, he always concealed, but could not hide from us: in it there is this miracle, that an angel spoke with him face to face. The emperor Maximus, otherwise indeed a good man, corrupted by the counsels of priests, after the execution of Priscillian, protected by royal power Bishop Ithacius, Priscillian’s accuser, and his other associates, whom there is no need to name, so that no one should charge him with the crime that through his work a man, of whatever kind, had been condemned. Meanwhile Martin, compelled by many grave cases of people in trouble to go to the court, ran into the full force of the whole storm. The bishops gathered at Trier were being kept there, who, communicating daily with Ithacius, had made his cause their own. When it was announced to them, unexpectedly, that Martin was coming, they were shaken to the core and began to mutter and tremble. And already the day before, the emperor, on their advice, had decreed to send tribunes armed with supreme power to the Spains, to search out heretics and, when caught, take away their lives and property. Nor was there any doubt that this storm would also lay waste a great crowd of saints, with little distinction between kinds of people; for at that time judgment was made by the eyes alone, so that a person was thought a heretic by his pallor or his dress rather than by his faith. The bishops felt that these things would by no means please Martin, but in their guilty consciences their most troublesome care was lest on his arrival he should keep himself from their communion, since there would be no lack of people who would follow the firmness of so great a man, once his authority had led the way. They take counsel with the emperor that officials of the master of the offices be sent to meet him and forbid him to come nearer the city unless he declared that he would be there in peace with the bishops staying there. He cleverly evaded them and declared that he would come with the peace of Christ. Finally he entered by night and went to the church, only to pray. The next day he went to the palace. Besides many requests which it would take long to go through, he had these principal ones: for the count Narses and the governor Leucadius, both of whom had been of Gratian’s party and had incurred the victor’s anger by their rather obstinate zeal, which this is not the time to explain; and above all, that tribunes with the right of the sword should not be sent to the Spains. For Martin had a devout concern to free not only the Christians who were to be harassed on that pretext, but the heretics themselves. But for one day and another the crafty emperor kept the man in suspense, either to give weight to the matter, or because, being bound to the bishops, he was implacable, or because, as many then thought, avarice opposed it, since he had his eye on their property. For that man, endowed with many good deeds, is said to have taken too little care against avarice, except that, by the necessity of the state, since the treasury had been exhausted by previous emperors and he was almost always in expectation of and readiness for civil wars, he will easily be excused for having procured resources for the empire on any pretexts.

“Meanwhile the bishops, whose communion Martin did not enter, ran in alarm to the king, complaining that they had been condemned in advance and that it was all over with their standing if Martin’s authority armed the obstinacy of Theognitus, who alone had condemned them by a sentence publicly pronounced: the man should not have been received within the walls; he was now no longer a defender of heretics but their avenger; nothing had been achieved by the death of Priscillian if Martin was to exact vengeance for him. Finally, prostrating themselves with weeping and lamentation, they implored the royal power to use its force against one man. And the emperor was not far from being compelled to involve Martin in the lot of the heretics. But though he was bound to the bishops by excessive favor, he was not ignorant that Martin excelled all mortals in faith, holiness, and power: he prepared to overcome the saint by another way. First he summoned him privately and addressed him blandly: the heretics had been condemned by law, by the procedure of the public courts rather than by the attacks of priests; there was no reason why he should think the communion of Ithacius and the others of his party should be condemned; Theognitus had made the breach from hatred rather than for cause, and he was the only one who had separated himself from communion for the time being; the rest had made no change. Indeed, a synod held a few days before had declared that Ithacius was not guilty. When Martin was little moved by these things, the king was inflamed with anger and rushed from his presence. Soon executioners were sent off against those for whom Martin had pleaded.

“When Martin learned this, he burst into the palace, though it was already night. He promised that if they were spared he would communicate, provided that the tribunes too, already sent to the Spains for the destruction of the churches, were recalled. Without delay Maximus granted everything. The next day the ordination of Bishop Felix was being prepared, a most holy man indeed and truly worthy to have become a priest in a better time. On that day Martin entered into communion, thinking it better to yield for an hour than not to provide for those over whose necks the sword was hanging. Yet, though the bishops strove their utmost to have him confirm that communion by his signature, it could not be wrung from him. The next day, hurrying away from there, as he was returning on his journey, grieving and groaning that he had been mixed even for an hour in a harmful communion, not far from the village called Andethanna, where the vast solitude of the forests affords privacy, he sat down while his companions went on a little ahead, turning over the cause of his grief and his deed, his thoughts accusing and defending by turns. Suddenly an angel stood by him: ‘Rightly, Martin,’ he said, ‘are you pricked with remorse, but you could not have got out of it otherwise. Recover your power, take up your firmness again, lest you now incur danger not to your glory but to your salvation.’ So from that time he took great care not to be mixed with the communion of the Ithacian party. Moreover, when he healed some of the possessed more slowly than usual and with less grace, he would confess to us with tears that because of the evil of that communion, in which he had joined, if only for a moment, out of necessity and not in spirit, he felt a loss of power. He lived sixteen years after that: he attended no synod, he kept away from all gatherings of bishops.

“But clearly, as we experienced, he made up with manifold interest the grace that had been diminished for a time. I saw afterwards a possessed man brought to the outer gate of that monastery, and he was healed before he touched the threshold. I lately heard someone testify that, when he was sailing on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the course that leads to Rome, whirlwinds suddenly arose and all were in the utmost danger of their lives. In this, when a certain Egyptian merchant, not yet a Christian, cried out loudly, ‘God of Martin, save us,’ the storm was soon calmed, and they held their desired course in the deepest calm of a peaceful sea. Lycontius, of the vicars, a faithful man, when a terrible plague was afflicting his household and, in an instance of unheard-of calamity, sick bodies lay throughout his house, begged Martin’s help by letter. At that time the blessed man said that the thing would be hard to obtain, for he sensed in spirit that that house was being scourged by divine will; yet he did not stop, continuing seven whole days and as many nights in prayer and fasting, until he had obtained what he had undertaken to pray for. Soon Lycontius, having experienced the divine kindness, hurried to him, at once announcing and giving thanks that his house had been freed from all danger. He also offered a hundred pounds of silver, which the blessed man neither refused nor accepted; but before that weight touched the threshold of the monastery, he at once assigned it to the ransoming of captives. And when it was suggested to him by the brothers that he should keep something of it for the expenses of the monastery, since all were short of food and many lacked clothing, he said: ‘Let the church both feed and clothe us, so long as we do not seem to have sought anything for our own use.’ At this point great miracles of that man come to mind, which we can more easily admire than tell. You surely recognize what I mean: there are many of his deeds that cannot be explained. Such is this one, which I doubt can be set out by us as it happened. One of the brothers (you know his name, but the person must be hidden, lest we shame a holy man), having found a good supply of coals for his little stove, drew a stool to himself and sat over that fire with his legs apart and his groin uncovered. At once Martin sensed that a wrong had been done under the sacred roof, and cried out in a loud voice: ‘Who is defiling our dwelling by uncovering his groin?’ When the brother heard this and recognized in his conscience that he was the one rebuked, he at once ran to us half dead, confessing his shame, not without Martin’s power.

“Likewise one day, while he was sitting in the very small courtyard that surrounded his hut, on that wooden seat of his which you all know, he saw two demons standing on that lofty rock which overhangs the monastery, and from there, eager and glad, uttering a cry of encouragement of this kind: ‘Come on, Brictio! Come on, Brictio!’ I believe they saw the wretched man approaching from afar, knowing what rage they had stirred up in his spirit. Without delay Brictio burst in in a frenzy, and there, full of madness, spewed out a thousand insults against Martin. For he had been rebuked by him the day before, because, though he had never had anything before his clerical career (for he had been brought up in the monastery by Martin himself), he was keeping horses and buying slaves. For at that time he was accused by many of having bought not only barbarian boys but also girls of comely looks. Stirred by these things to mad bitterness, the most unhappy man, and, I believe, driven especially by the instigation of those demons, so attacked Martin that he barely kept his hands off him, while the saint, with calm face and tranquil mind, restrained the unhappy man’s madness with gentle words. But the wicked spirit so overflowed in him that not even his own mind, empty as it was, remained under his control: with trembling lips and uncertain face, pale with fury, he poured out words of sin, claiming that he was holier, since from his earliest years he had grown up in the monastery among the sacred disciplines of the church, educated by Martin himself; but that Martin from the beginning, as he himself could not deny, had been defiled by the activities of military service, and now, through empty superstitions and ridiculous phantoms of visions, had grown old in utter dotage. When he had spewed out these and many other things, still more bitter, which it is better to pass over in silence, he at last went out, his fury sated, as though he had fully avenged himself, and was hurrying back with rapid steps the way he had come; meanwhile, I believe through Martin’s prayers, the demons were driven from his heart, and he was brought back to repentance. Soon he returned and threw himself at Martin’s knees: he asked pardon, confessed his error, and, at last saner, admitted that he had not been without a demon. It was no hard task for Martin to forgive a suppliant. Then the saint explained to him and to all of us how he had seen him driven by demons: he was not moved by insults, which had done more harm to the one who poured them out. Afterwards, though this same Brictio was very often charged before him with many grave crimes, he could not be compelled to remove him from the presbyterate, lest he should seem to be avenging his own injury, often recalling: ‘If Christ endured Judas, why should I not endure Brictio?’

To this Postumianus said: “Let that neighbor of ours hear this example. Wise as he is, he is unmindful of the present and unmindful of the future: if he is offended, he rages beyond his own control: he is savage toward the clergy, he attacks the laity, and stirs up the whole world to avenge him; and he has continued in this struggle for three years without a break, calmed neither by time nor by reason. The man’s condition would be pitiable and lamentable even if he were afflicted only by this plague of an incurable evil. You ought, Gallus, to tell him these examples of patience and calm more often, so that he might not know how to be angry and might know how to forgive. If he should happen to learn that this brief remark of mine was aimed at him, let him know that I spoke not with an enemy’s mouth but with a friend’s heart, because, if it were possible, I would wish him to be said to resemble Bishop Martin rather than the tyrant Phalaris. But let us pass over him, whose mention is not very pleasant, and return, Gallus, to our Martin.”

Then I, sensing that evening was already at hand as the sun set, said: “The day has gone, Postumianus: we must get up; besides, supper is owed to such eager listeners. As for Martin, you must not expect that there will be any end for one telling of him: he spreads too widely to be enclosed in any discourse. Meanwhile you will carry these things about that man to the East; and as you return, and coast past various shores, places, harbors, islands, and cities, scatter Martin’s name and glory among the peoples. Above all remember not to pass by Campania: even if it is very much off your course, let no loss, even of long delays, be so great to you as to keep you from visiting there that distinguished man, praised throughout the world, Paulinus. Unroll before him first, I beg you, the volume of our conversation, both what we finished yesterday and what we have said today; tell him everything, read him everything, so that through him Rome may soon learn the holy man’s praises, as he spread that first little book of ours not only through Italy but through all Illyricum too. He, not envious of Martin’s glories and a most devout appraiser of holy virtues in Christ, will not refuse to set our bishop beside his own Felix. Then, if you happen to cross to Africa, you will tell what you have heard to Carthage; though, as you yourself said, it already knows the man, yet let it now especially learn more about him, so that it may not admire there only its martyr Cyprian, though it is consecrated by his holy blood. And if, turning a little to the left, you enter the gulf of Achaia, let Corinth know, let Athens know, that Plato was not wiser in the Academy nor Socrates braver in prison: Greece is indeed happy, which was found worthy to hear the Apostle preaching, but Gaul has by no means been abandoned by Christ, to whom he has given Martin. And when you have come as far as Egypt, though it is proud of the number and the miracles of its own saints, let it not disdain to hear how, in Martin alone, Europe has not yielded to it or to all Asia.

“But when you have again committed your sails to the winds to make for Jerusalem from there, I lay on you a task of my grief: if ever you come to the shore of that famous Ptolemais, inquire carefully where our Pomponius lies buried, and do not disdain to visit those bones in a foreign land. Pour out many tears there, as much from your own affection as from our heart, and, though it be an empty gift, strew the ground itself with purple flowers and sweet-smelling herbs. Yet you will tell him (but not harshly, not bitterly, in the words of one who suffers with him, not with the verdict of one who reproaches) that if he had been willing to listen either to you once or to me always, and had imitated Martin rather than that man whom I do not wish to name, he would never have been so cruelly separated from me and covered by the sand drifts of unknown dust, having suffered death in the middle of the sea by the lot of a shipwrecked pirate, and barely found burial on a distant shore. Let all those who wished to harm me by avenging him see this work of theirs; let them see their glory, and, now that they are avenged, at least stop attacking me.” While we were lamenting these things in a most tearful voice, and everyone’s tears were stirred by our grief, we parted, with great admiration indeed for Martin, but with no less sorrow from our weeping.