The old man claimed for burial by the party from Tours had once been a soldier. Indeed, he had served in the cavalry under Julian. It was not, however, for any feats on the battlefield that Martin was admired by his followers. Nor was it for his lineage, nor for beauty, nor for splendour, nor for any other of the qualities that traditionally had ranked as those of a hero. Among the notoriously haughty noblemen of Gaul, Martin had inspired many an appalled curling of the lip. ‘His looks were those of a peasant, his clothes shoddy, his hair a disgrace.’15 Yet such had been his charisma, such his mystique, that various aristocrats, far from despising him, had been inspired by his example to leave their estates and come to live as he did. Three miles downriver from Tours, on a grassy plain named Marmoutier, an entire community of them was to be found, camped out in wooden shacks, or else in the caves that honeycombed a facing cliff. It was a venture that brought a flavour of distant Egypt to the banks of the Loire. There, out in the desert, amid the haunts of bandits and wild beasts, men and women had been living for many years. Their ambition it was to reject the delusions of civilisation, to commit to a lifetime of chastity and self-abnegation, to live as monachoi: ‘those who live alone’. True, the Loire Valley was no desert. The monachoi – the ‘monks’ – who had settled there did not think to sacrifice everything. They kept their land. Peasants still worked fields for them. As they might have done in their leisure time back in their villas, they passed their time reading, talking, fishing. And yet for all that, to live as they did, after having been bred to greatness, and luxury, and worldly expectations, was undoubtedly a sacrifice. Seen in a certain light, it might almost be heroic.
And if so, then Martin – judged by the venerable standards of the aristocracy in Gaul – represented a new and disconcerting breed of hero: a Christian one. Such was the very essence of his magnetism. He was admired by his followers not despite but because of his rejection of worldly norms. Rather than accept a donative from Julian, he had publicly demanded release from the army. ‘Until now it is you I have served; from this moment on I am a servant of Christ.’16 Whether indeed Martin had truly said this, his followers found it easy to believe that he had. That he had breathed his last on a bare floor, his head resting on a stone, was the measure of how he had lived his life. Not even the most exacting standards of military discipline could have compared with the austerities to which he had consistently subjected himself. In an age when the rich, arrayed in gold and silk, shimmered like peacocks, Martin’s followers, camped out with him in their cells, dressed in nothing but the coarsest robes, looked on him as raw recruits might, gazing admiringly at a battle-hardened captain. By choosing to live as a beggar, he had won a fame greater than that of any other Christian in Gaul. In 371, it had even seen him elected as bishop of Tours. The shock, both to the status-conscious elite of the city, and to Martin himself, had been intense. Ambushed by those who had come with news of his elevation, he had run away and concealed himself in a barn, until his hiding place had been betrayed by geese. Or so the story went. It was evidence of Martin’s celebrity that many such tales were told of him. The first monk in Gaul ever to become a bishop, he was a figure of rare authority: elevated to the heights precisely because he had not wanted to be.
Here, for anyone bred to the snobbery that had always been a characteristic of Roman society, was shock enough. Yet it was not only the spectacle of a smelly and shabbily dressed former soldier presiding as the most powerful man in Tours that had provoked a sense of a world turned upside down, of the last becoming first. Martin’s disdain for the appurtenances of power – a palace, servants, fine clothes – was more than just a slap in the face of those who measured status by the possession of such things. It had charged him with a potency that, in the opinion of his admirers, owed nothing to human agency. Fabulous stories were told of its reach: of how fire would turn back at his command; of how water fowl, if they offended him by gorging too greedily on fish, would be ordered to migrate, and do so. None of his followers doubted the source of this authority. Martin, so they believed, was touched by Christ himself.
‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’17 So Jesus, asked by a wealthy young man how he might obtain eternal life, had replied. The rich man, greatly saddened, had beaten a retreat; but Martin had not. Even as bishop, he had lived his Saviour’s advice to the full, shunning the palace that was his by right of office, and living instead in a shack out at Marmoutier. That he had indeed stored treasure in heaven for himself was evident from the sound, heard as he lay dying, of psalms being sung in the sky; but also from the miraculous services that he had been able, while alive, to do the sick and wretched. Reports of his feats were lovingly treasured: of how the paralysed had been made to walk by his touch; of how lepers had been healed by his kiss; even of how a suicide, found hanging from a ceiling, had been brought back from the dead. Here, in these tales, was a challenge to the wealthy that grew more pointed with every retelling. Anecdotes no less than homilies could serve to instruct the faithful. Martin was not, as Gregory of Nyssa had been, a great scholar. It was his deeds rather than his words that his disciples tended most to admire. Unlike Gregory, whose vision of God as ‘the helper of the lowliest, the protector of the weak, the shelter of the hopeless, the saviour of the rejected’18 was powerfully informed by Origen, Martin’s genius was for the memorable gesture. Such was his truest and most influential legacy: the stories told about him.
And one in particular. The setting was the dead of winter, back in the days of Martin’s youth, before his resignation from the army. The cold that year was exceptionally bitter. A beggar in rags stood shivering by the gateway of Amiens, a city in northern Gaul. The townsmen, wrapped up warm as they crunched through the snow, gave him nothing. Then came Martin. Dressed for duty, he had no money, only his arms. As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak; and so, taking out his sword, he cut it in two, and gave one half to the beggar. No other story about Martin would be more cherished; no other story more repeated. This was hardly surprising. The echo was of a parable told by Jesus himself. The setting, as recorded in Luke’s gospel, was the road leading eastwards from Jerusalem. Two travellers, a priest and a Temple attendant, passed a fellow Jew who had been attacked by thieves and left for dead. Then came a Samaritan; and he tended to the injured man, taking him to an inn, and paying the landlord to care for him. Shocking to the sensibilities of Jesus’ original listeners, who would have taken for granted the thorough contemptibility of Samaritans, it was shocking as well to those of distant Gaul. To the tribalism that had always run deep there, Roman urbanism had added its own assumptions: that the wealthy, if they felt a responsibility to the unfortunate at all, owed it only to those of their own city. Martin, though, was not from Amiens. Born beside the eastern foothills of the Alps, and raised in Italy, he was not even a Gaul. More than any legal prescription could have done, then, more than any sermon, the compassion he had shown to a shivering stranger in the Gallic snow made vivid the principles to which he had devoted his life: that those with possessions owed a due of charity to those who had none; and that no bounds, no limits, existed on that due. The night after his encounter with the beggar, so it is said, Martin had dreamed; and in his dream he had seen Christ dressed in the very portion of the cloak that he had given away that day. ‘And the Lord said to him, as he had done on earth, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”’19