The Conversion of Europe - Richard Fletcher

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like a peasant. He founded a monastery at Marmoutier, not far from Tours, where he lived with his disciples, rather than in the bishop’s house next to the cathedral in the city. He was no respecter of persons. He insisted on forcing his way into the house of Count Avitianus in the small hours of the night to plead for the release of some prisoners. When dining with the usurping Emperor Magnus Maximus he was offered the singular honour of sharing the emperor’s goblet of wine; instead of handing it back to Maximus, Martin passed it on to a priest who was accompanying him. His pastoral activities, to which we shall return shortly, were most peculiar. He frequently encountered supernatural beings: the Devil, several times, once masquerading as Christ (but Martin saw through him); angels, demons, St Mary, St Agnes, St Thecla, St Peter and St Paul. He had telepathic powers, could predict the future, could exorcize evil spirits from humans or animals and could raise the dead to life. He worked many miracles and wonders, conscientiously chronicled by Sulpicius Severus. His fame spread widely. He was called over to the region of Sens to deliver a certain district from hailstorms through the agency of his prayers. An Egyptian merchant who was not even a Christian was saved from a storm at sea by calling on ‘the God of Martin’.

      Martin may have flouted social convention but it is equally clear from what Sulpicius has to tell us that his network of contacts among the powerful in the Gaul of his day was extensive. He may have behaved boorishly at the emperor’s dinner table, but Maximus showed ‘the deepest respect’ for him, while on a subsequent visit Maximus’ wife sent the servants away and waited upon him with her own hands. The wife of the brutal Count Avitianus asked Martin to bless the flask of oil which she kept for medicinal use. It was the vir praefectorius Auspicius, an exalted official, who invited Martin over to the Senonais to deal with the local hailstorms. It was from the slave of an even grander man, the vir proconsularis Tetradius, that Martin exorcized a demon. Tetradius became a Christian as a result of this wonder. There is some reason to suppose that he went on to build a church on his estate near Trier. (John Chrysostom would have been pleased.) A letter written by Martin was believed to have cured the daughter of the devout aristocrat Arborius from a fever simply by being placed on her body. Arborius was a very exalted man, a nephew of the celebrated poet Ausonius of Bordeaux, who had been the Emperor Gratian’s tutor.

      These connections were of significance in the activity to which Martin devoted so much of his energies. Here was a bishop who gave himself wholeheartedly to the task of bringing Christianity to the rural population of Gaul. His methods were violent and confrontational: disruption of pagan cult, demolition of pagan edifices. Here is Chapter 14 of the Vita Martini.

      It was somewhere about this time that in the course of this work he performed another miracle at least as great. He had set on fire a very ancient and much-frequented shrine in a certain village and the flames were being driven by the wind against a neighbouring, in fact adjacent house. When Martin noticed this, he climbed speedily to the roof of the house and placed himself in front of the oncoming flames. Then you might have seen an amazing sight – the flames bending back against the force of the wind till it looked like a battle between warring elements. Such were his powers that the fire destroyed only where it was bidden.

      In a village named Levroux [between Tours and Bourges], however, when he wished to demolish in the same way a temple which had been made very rich by its superstitious cult, he met with resistance from a crowd of pagans and was driven off with some injuries to himself. He withdrew, therefore, to a place in the neighbourhood where for three days in sackcloth and ashes, continuously fasting and praying, he besought Our Lord that the temple which human hands had failed to demolish might be destroyed by divine power.

      Then suddenly two angels stood before him, looking like heavenly warriors, with spears and shields. They said that the Lord had sent them to rout the rustic host and give Martin protection, so that no one should hinder the destruction of the temple. He was to go back, therefore, and carry out faithfully the work he had undertaken. So he returned to the village and, while crowds of pagans watched in silence, the heathen sanctuary was razed to its foundations and all its altars and images reduced to powder.

      The sight convinced the rustics that it was by divine decree that they had been stupefied and overcome with dread, so as to offer no resistance to the bishop; and nearly all of them made profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, proclaiming with shouts before all that Martin’s God should be worshipped and the idols ignored, which could neither save themselves nor anyone else.

      There are several points of interest for us in the Levroux story. First, it is notable that Sulpicius admits the – unsurprising – fact that Martin met with resistance. Direct action was risky. In the year of Martin’s death three clerics who tried to disrupt pagan ceremonies in the diocese of Trent in the eastern Alps were killed. Their bishop, Vigilius, to whose letter to John Chrysostom describing the martyrdom we are indebted for knowledge of it, was himself stoned to death by furious pagans a few years later. When the Christian community of Sufetana in the African province of Byzacena demolished a statue of Hercules a pagan mob killed sixty Christians in reprisal. Second, one cannot help wondering a little about the soldierly-looking angels. It is usually fruitless to indulge in speculation about what might have been the ‘real’ basis of miracle stories, but the question can at least be posed, whether Martin was ever enabled to make use of the services of soldiers from local garrisons. It is worth bearing in mind that the fanatically anti-pagan Cynegius, praetorian prefect of the east between 384 and 388, used soldiers as well as bands of wild monks for the destruction of pagan temples in the countryside around Antioch. Martin’s exalted contacts would have been able without difficulty to arrange a bodyguard for him; even to lay on a fatigue party equipped with crowbars and sledgehammers. Third, we are told that these violent scenes at Levroux resulted in conversions; we should note that Sulpicius concedes that not all the people were converted. We have not the remotest idea what the people of Levroux might have thought about it all, but Sulpicius is clear that because their gods had failed them they were prepared to worship Martin’s God. On another occasion, at an unnamed place, Martin had demolished a temple and was preparing to fell a sacred tree. The local people dared him to stand where the tree would fall. Intrepidly, he did so. As the tree tottered, cracked and began to fall, Martin made the sign of the cross. Instantly the tree plunged in another direction. This was the sequel as Sulpicius related it:

      Then indeed a shout went up to heaven as the pagans gasped at the miracle, and all with one accord acclaimed the name of Christ; you may be sure that on that day salvation came to that region. Indeed, there was hardly anyone in that vast multitude of pagans who did not ask for the imposition of hands, abandoning his heathenish errors and making profession of faith in the Lord Jesus.

      Like it or not, this is what our sources tell us over and over again. Demonstrations of the power of the Christian God meant conversion. Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-torching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelization.

      Martin was not alone in taking action. His contemporary Bishop Simplicius of Autun is said to have encountered an idol being trundled about on a cart ‘for the preservation of fields and vineyards.’ Simplicius made the sign of the cross; the idol crashed to the ground and the oxen pulling the cart were rooted immobile to the spot; 400 converts were made. Bishop Victricius of Rouen, like Martin an ex-soldier, undertook evangelizing campaigns among the Nervi and the Morini, roughly speaking in the zone of territory between Boulogne and Brussels. We have already met the ill-starred Bishop Vigilius of Trent. Across the Pyrenees in Spain Bishop Priscillian of Avila conducted evangelizing tours of his upland diocese before he was arraigned for heresy.

      The interconnections of this clerical society are worth unravelling, if only because we shall repeatedly find in the course of this study that missionary churchmen, though sometimes loners, have tended to be sustained by a network of connections – kinsfolk, friends, patrons, associates in prayer – whose support was invaluable. Priscillian gained a following especially – and it became one of the counts against him – among pious aristocratic ladies. One such observer of his work is likely to have been the heiress Teresa, whose family estates seem to have lain in the region of Complutum (the modern Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid), a mere fifty miles from Avila. Teresa married the immensely rich, devout aristocrat Paulinus of Nola (who was connected to Ausonius). Paulinus knew Martin: he was the beneficiary of one of Martin’s miracles

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