Imagine we’ve come to the movies to watch the latest new Marvel epic suitably named AD 406. The curtain rises on the year 406 when in an unusually severe winter in which the Rhine has frozen solid, we watch in that peculiar ecstasy of pure horror the battle-hardened barbarian hordes stream across the frozen river into the civilized world of Roman Gaul.
The Rhine River forming a natural barrier dividing Latin and Germanic cultures has a long history that stretches down well into the 20th-century. The Rhine, winding in many places through its steep-sided valley formed a natural barrier – a boundary between civilization and the wilderness of the barbarian lands. Barbarian – a name the Graeco-Romans gave to all who lived beyond the geographic and cultural reach of their civilization. The barbarians represented the epitome of the psychological other. We need no further evidence today of how the psychological other functions to embody the terror of difference within individual and collective consciousness.
Vandal is a word that has made its way into the English language as the very symbol of destructive otherness. In his book on Martin of Tours, Christopher Donaldson describes how the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi, swarmed into Roman Gaul in complete disregard for their own loss of life. It was estimated that at least 20,000 Vandals alone lost their lives in the river crossing. Yet they still pressed on – forced by the relentless pressure of mouths to be fed and need for land. The great horde swept on into Roman Europe and North Africa leaving behind them a trail of devastation and confusion. In what had been the civilized and fertile countryside of Roman Gaul the only vestiges that remained were the giant buildings, aqueducts, and monuments of Roman civilization – things that a wattle and daub society had neither use nor imagination for.
On the South Bank of the River Loire, at a place called Marmoutier about 3 miles downstream from the city of Tours, there was a large grassy plain lying between the river and a line of forbidding grey cliffs rising for 100 feet or so. With trees clinging precariously to their face, the cliffs were honeycombed with caves, for all the world giving much the same appearance as the holes of sand-martin nests in the side of a disused quarry. And in the year AD 393 all the caves were inhabited and the grassy plain below was covered with the rough wooden shacks of a great camp of spiritual refugees, numbering in all some 2,000 men – a smaller group of women having formed their own community within the walls of the neighboring city of Tours. Working from contemporary eye witness sources, Donaldson tells us that the whole concourse was wrapped in a deep silence from morning until evening, punctuated only by the occasional singing of psalms or hymns, and the low voices of those who were reading the scriptures aloud.
The reason for this great gathering of men, many of them the sons of the Roman Gaul nobility, lay not only in the general urge to withdraw from the responsibilities of public service in a time of civic institutional breakdown, but also in the attraction of the unconventional personality of Martin, the holy man and Bishop of Tours. His appearance at the age of 77 belied the extraordinary depth and range of his character. For underneath the deliberately unkempt hair, the pallid emaciated features, and the rough surge slave’s robe in which he was dressed, lay a personality that at one moment recalls for us the image of a Mahatma Gandhi, quickly morphing into that of a visionary William Blake, before yet again emerging into a man forged by his years of discipline in the Roman Army – a military man of commanding presence.
Martin was born in AD 316 into a high-ranking, but non aristocratic Roman military family in what is now modern-day Hungary. His father was a military tribune in the Imperial Guard – then stationed on that other great river frontier separating the civilized and barbarian worlds – the river Danube. His parents were staunch pagans opposed to the growing influence of Christianity – and so they named their son Martin after Mars the god of farm and battle, in the hope he would grow up to become a champion for the restoration of the old order.
In AD 312, with the proclamation of Constantine as the new emperor, the last great period of intense persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian ended. Following Constantine’s conversion to Christ – a mere four years before Martin’s birth in 316 – the Church had begun its rapid expansion. Although already an extensive and growing influence, the most significant result of Constantine’s conversion was the incorporation of the bishops into the Roman Civil Service with the rank and more importantly for many, the stipend of a magistrate.
Yet, despite the new imperial patronage, a deeper and simpler reason lay behind Christianity’s rapid growth. Christianity offered to ordinary men and women fed up with the status quo an explanation and philosophy for living that was satisfying. Unlike enforced imperial obligation the Church offered a supportive and voluntary style of community life with an educational system based on the scriptures that met people’s intellectual and emotional needs. Despite strong parental hostility, Martin could not avoid being attracted from around the age of ten to this magnetic vision of a new way of being human with its practice of a more satisfying way of life.
To cut a long story short, by the time Martin reached the age of 15, his father – increasingly fearful for his son’s development into Roman manhood, arranged for him to be press-ganged (kidnapped) into the army. Martin was to spend the next 25 years of his life in conscripted military service. Army service did succeed in making a man of Martin – but not in the way his father may have envisioned.
Martin was far from being just another plebeian conscript. He enjoyed the privileges of being a Tribunes’ son. Interestingly, Martin found his way into the Army medical corp. As a medical officer, he would have been responsible not only for the surgical treatment of soldiers in the field but for their social and emotional welfare within garrison life. Thus, Martin found a strong synchronicity between this care for his men and his developing sense of what it meant to live as a Christian. For he showed an unusual compassion for the poor whom he would have encountered hanging around the edges of his garrison town of Amiens. This sensitivity – in another military officer decried as weakness – would have found acceptance or at least toleration among his peers as an attitude characteristic of a healer.
Martin’s concern for the poor is captured in the famous incident of his encounter with a beggar at the city gates – poetically depicted in our great St Martin window. In the window we see Martin cutting his cloak in half and placing one half around the beggar’s shoulders. Incidentally a soldier’s cloak was a garment of joint ownership. The half he gave to the beggar would have been the half he owned. The half he retained was army property – and not his to give away. That night he had a vision of Christ, clothed in half his cloak saying for as you have done unto the least – you have done unto me.
Martin died in AD 397 – a mere 9 years before the catastrophic collapse of the Roman Legions along the Rhine wall in 406. While he didn’t live to see this catastrophe, he nevertheless lived in the preceding decades during which anyone with any foresight might have foreseen this eventuality. For during the preceding decades leading to the curtain rise on the 5th-century, sensitive and intelligent people had known that the end of the centuries of stable government and cultural achievement was fast approaching. The signs were all around them.
Inflation had been steadily mounting for a century or more and had become so out of control that many were beginning to return once more to the simpler system of barter. Ordinary people knew that the wealthy were seeking every possible way of avoiding taxes and turning their backs on the virtues and responsibilities of public service which had become an increasingly unsavory and dangerous occupation. From time to time the army would attempt to raise up a new emperor – someone whose value had been proved in the field – to take control of the empire and make Rome great again. But things had gone too far for such simple solutions. In the Western half of the Empire the problems lay deeper than a return to the efficient management of the economy and the revival of a spirit of public service. Rather it was a complex exhaustion of morale in the inner minds and spirits of men and women throughout the West – where many increasingly feared that the civilization of Rome had run its course.
Donaldson notes that if there was any hope for the future of Western Civilization, it was hard to see it lying in the hands of the governing classes. Rather the future had come to rest in a group of men and women who had completely withdrawn from the civilized world – men and women who were quite careless of whether it sank or swam.
Martin is a transitional figure spanning the inflection point at the turn of the 4th & 5th-centuries. He remained hugely influential across the whole of Western Europe as far north as Scotland. When Augustine arrived at Canterbury 200 years late he found the ruins of a Roman Christian church dedicated to St Martin. St Martin’s Canterbury still stand today dwarfed alongside the great Cathedral. A mystic revered by the Druids for his love of nature in preference for the highly urban life of most Christian bishops. A pastor and a healer of souls who attracted the brightest and the best of a generation disillusioned by the degeneration of civic society. A reluctant and yet more than able administrator bishop – under whose leadership a disciplined structure of administration developed relatively free of the growing corruption afflicting the more worldly among his fellow bishops – increasingly corrupted by their magistrate’s privileges and state stipend.
Martin as a transitional figure is an avatar for us today. For we also are living at a similar inflection point to that of the late 4th and early 5th centuries – a time when the post-Enlightenment spirit of progress, order and the global peace – the product of Pax Americana -seems increasingly spent. Like the men and women of the age into which Martin was born, disillusionment and loss of hope mark the pervading zeitgeist of our age.
Yet there’s a key distinction between the inflection point of the 4th-5th centuries from that of the 20th-21st. As the 5th-century unfolded – despite the devastations brought about by the first wave of barbarian incursions and the collapse of the Pax Romana – invasion also brought an infusion of energy and vitality – forging a new spirit in Western Civilization – a spirit now channeled and guided by the growing institutions of a vital and energetic Christian Church. For Martin and his church stood at the beginning of something new – whereas we and our Church today feel increasingly as if we stand at the end of something old.
I believe that the jury’s still out on the accuracy of such a premonition, real though the experience maybe. As we navigate our way forward in a time of civic challenge at home and challenges to peace and democracy abroad, we might pay closer attention to the movement of the Spirit of the God of unchangeable and yet also everchanging power. God who empowers the work of restoring the world through the raising up of things which have been cast down and inviting us to collaborate in the renewal of things that have grown old.
Embroiled in this process as we are – of finding the confidence as Christians to entrust ourselves to the hope that is within us as we navigate our way forward in challenging times – we could ask for no better guide than Martin, our patron – whose spirit is infusing those who bear his name to become increasingly molded into his likeness.
What is that likeness we might ask? It’s the likeness of a man of courageous hope, deep humility before the divine mystery, a man of resolute faith infused with the gentleness of gratitude. We can only pray and work hard to ensure that gratitude is our well spring – gushing forth through lives marked by Martin’s spirit of compassionate generosity.
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