Bishop of Tours: The Reluctant Monk-Bishop

Around 371 the people of Tours, knowing Martin would never consent, lured him from his monastery by a ruse — a plea to visit a sick woman — and once he was within the city seized him and acclaimed him bishop against his will (Vita Martini 9). Some of the bishops summoned to consecrate him objected that a man so unkempt, mean in dress, and monkish in manner was unworthy of the episcopate, yet he was consecrated nonetheless. In becoming a bishop who refused to stop being a monk — keeping his ascetic life and withdrawing to Marmoutier — Martin created the unprecedented model of the monk-bishop that would shape the Western, and especially the Gallic and Celtic, episcopate for centuries.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)

The Acclamation by Ruse

The episode of Martin’s elevation is told by Sulpicius Severus in Vita Martini 9, and it is one of the most vivid scenes in the whole biography. By the time it occurs, Martin had been living as a monk at Ligugé for some years, and his reputation for holiness and miracles had spread (on Ligugé and the prior monastic life, see Ligugé and Marmoutier). The see of Tours (Caesarodunum Turonum) fell vacant, and the people of the city were determined to have Martin as their bishop. Knowing, Sulpicius says, that he could by no means be torn from his monastery by ordinary means, they resorted to a stratagem.

A certain citizen named Rusticius came to Martin and, “falling down at his knees,” begged him to come out and attend his wife, who was said to be gravely ill (Vita Martini 9; trans. Roberts, NPNF II/11). Martin, whose charity could not refuse such a plea, set out — and found, as he approached Tours, that the road was lined with crowds who had come precisely to escort him into the city and seize him. Sulpicius reports that “an incredible multitude not only from that town, but also from the neighbouring cities, had come together” for the election, and that they laid hold of him and brought him forward as their candidate (Vita Martini 9; trans. Hoare 1954). The date of this acclamation the Vita does not give; it is conventionally placed around 371: [Disputed: Martin's episcopal election is usually dated to 371 (Stancliffe 1983, 134–137; Van Dam 1985, 133), but the *Vita Martini* records no year, and the figure is a scholarly reconstruction; some references give 370 or 372, and the year cannot be fixed with certainty from the sources].

That an election should be carried by popular acclamation, even against the candidate’s resistance, was not in itself irregular in the fourth-century Church; the people’s voice was a genuine constituent of the choice of a bishop, and the reluctant ordinand who has to be compelled to office is a recurring figure of the age — Ambrose at Milan and Augustine at Hippo are the famous parallels (Van Dam 1985, 122–127; Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 2003, 86; on the contemporary episcopate compare St. Ambrose of Milan). What is distinctive in Martin’s case is the use of a pious deception to extract a monk from his cell, and the fierce humility that made the deception necessary.

The Objecting Bishops

The election by the people was not the end of the matter, for a bishop had to be consecrated by other bishops, and these had to be summoned to Tours. Here Sulpicius records the resistance that has made the scene famous. Some of the bishops who had been called to perform the consecration objected to Martin, “asserting forsooth that he was a contemptible person, that he was unworthy of the episcopate, being a man despicable in countenance, his clothing mean, and his hair disgusting” (Vita Martini 9; trans. Roberts, NPNF II/11). Their complaint was, in effect, that a man of his unkempt and beggarly monastic appearance lacked the dignity proper to a bishop of a Gallo-Roman city.

Sulpicius names one of the objectors: a bishop called Defensor, whose hostility the narrative turns to Martin’s advantage by means of a portent. When the reader appointed to chant the Psalm at the assembly was prevented by the crowd, a bystander seized the Psalter and read out the first verse that came to hand — Psalm 8:2 (LXX 8:3), “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou perfected praise because of thine enemies, that thou mightest destroy the enemy and the defender (defensorem)” — which the people took as a divine rebuke of Defensor and a vindication of Martin (Vita Martini 9; trans. Roberts, NPNF II/11; the wordplay on defensor is in the Latin). This is reported here as Sulpicius’s own telling — a piece of the biographer’s providential artistry rather than an independently attested fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Stancliffe 1983, 119, 366). Whatever the historicity of the omen, the substance of the objection is credible and revealing: it shows that Martin’s ascetic self-presentation was felt by some of his episcopal colleagues to be an affront to the standing of the office (Van Dam 1985, 124–126; Stancliffe 1983, 268–270).

The tension here is one to which Sulpicius returns throughout his work, for it reflects a real division within the Gallic Church between a worldly, well-born, socially established episcopate and the new ascetic ideal that Martin embodied (Stancliffe 1983, 265–278; Van Dam 1985, 119–140). Sulpicius’s own polemical sympathies are wholly with Martin, and the objecting bishops are presented as small-minded snobs confounded by Providence; the modern reader must allow for this bias while recognizing that the underlying conflict of ideals was genuine. In the event, the objections were overborne, and “to the great gratification of the people, Martin was made bishop” (Vita Martini 9; trans. Roberts, NPNF II/11).

The Monk Who Would Not Cease to Be a Monk

The decisive fact about Martin’s episcopate is the one Sulpicius states immediately after the consecration: becoming a bishop changed neither his manner of life nor his lowliness of heart. “Martin,” he writes, “continued the same as he had been before. There was the same humility in his heart, and the same homeliness in his garments. Full alike of dignity and courtesy, he kept up the position of a bishop properly, yet in such a way as not to lay aside the objects and virtues of a monk” (Vita Martini 10; trans. Roberts, NPNF II/11). Rather than take up residence in the manner expected of a city bishop, Martin first used a cell attached to the church and then, finding the comings and goings of the town intolerable, withdrew about two miles outside Tours and founded the monastery of Marmoutier, where he lived as a monk among monks even while governing his diocese (Vita Martini 10; on the foundation see Ligugé and Marmoutier).

This refusal to choose between the two vocations is the heart of Martin’s historical importance. Before him, the bishop and the monk had been, broadly, distinct callings — the bishop a public man embedded in the life of his city, the monk a man who had withdrawn from it. Martin held the two together: he was at once the pastor of a see and an ascetic of desert severity, exercising the public office of the episcopate out of a life of monastic poverty (Brown, The Cult of the Saints 1981, 113–116; Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 2003, 84–87; Stancliffe 1983, 27–29). His personal poverty was not abandoned with his elevation; the man who as a soldier had cut his cloak for a beggar (see The Cloak of Amiens) remained as bishop the miles Christi, the soldier of Christ, whose only wealth was Christ (on this ideal, The Miles Christi; Poverty and Simplicity). Sulpicius’s Dialogi preserve a string of anecdotes — Martin seated on a rough stool rather than a throne, Martin clad in a coarse garment — designed to drive home that the bishop never stopped being a monk (Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi 2–3; Stancliffe 1983, 12–15, 27).

The Monk-Bishop Model and Its Legacy

The fusion Martin achieved at Tours proved enormously fertile, and it is for this above all that Orthodox tradition honours him as a father of the Western Church. From Marmoutier, as Sulpicius notes, a stream of monks went out to become bishops of other cities (Vita Martini 10; Van Dam 1985, 134–136). The result was the propagation across Gaul of the monk-bishop: a prelate formed in ascetic discipline who carried the values of the monastery into the government of the Church. This pattern, fixed by Martin’s example and broadcast by Sulpicius’s wildly popular Vita, became one of the defining features of the Gallic episcopate of the fifth and sixth centuries, and it passed, through the cult of Martin and the missionary monks who venerated him, into the Celtic Churches of Britain and Ireland, where the union of monastic and episcopal authority would become especially characteristic (Brown, The Cult of the Saints 1981, 116–120; Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 2003, 86–87, 134–145; Stancliffe 1983, 27–29).

It is worth marking how thoroughly Eastern this development was in its roots even as it took a Western form. The marriage of monastery and bishopric was already familiar in the Christian East — the desert had given the Church monk-bishops, and the Cappadocian fathers had united ascetic and episcopal life a generation before Martin (Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 2003, 84–86; on the Eastern background and its transmission, The Monastic Influence). What Martin did was to naturalize that union in the Latin West and to give it, in himself, an unforgettable embodiment. He stands therefore among the Fathers of the undivided Church as a hinge between East and West — a Gallic bishop whose holiness was of a recognizably desert kind (see The Church Fathers; Pre-Schism Church; Monasticism).

The reluctant bishop of Tours thus inaugurated a model of Christian leadership in which authority flows from renunciation rather than rank, and in which the highest office in the local Church is held by one who has first learned to possess nothing. That paradox — the monk dragged from his cell to rule, who answers by turning his bishopric into a monastery — is the lasting bequest of Martin’s elevation in c. 371.

References

Sulpicius Severus. Life of St. Martin (Vita Martini). Trans. Alexander Roberts, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. Oxford and New York, 1894. (The ruse of Rusticius and the popular acclamation at ch. 9; the objecting bishops, Defensor, and the Psalm-omen at ch. 9; Martin unchanged after consecration and the withdrawal to Marmoutier at ch. 10.)
Sulpicius Severus. Life of Saint Martin, Letters, and Dialogues. Trans. F. R. Hoare, in The Western Fathers. London: Sheed and Ward, 1954. (Consulted translation for the multitude gathered for the election, ch. 9.)
Sulpicius Severus. Dialogues (Dialogi) 2–3. (Anecdotes of Martin’s ascetic simplicity as bishop.)
Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. (The election and its chronology, pp. 134–137; the Defensor episode and Sulpicius’s providential artistry, pp. 119, 366; the conflict between the established and the ascetic episcopate, pp. 265–278; the monk-bishop and Marmoutier, pp. 27–29.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (Martin as monk-bishop and the model’s diffusion, pp. 113–120.)
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. (The reluctant bishop, the Eastern background, and the Gallic and Celtic legacy of the monk-bishop, pp. 84–87, 134–145.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The election, the reluctant ordinand, the social tensions of the episcopate, and Marmoutier as a seminary of bishops, pp. 119–140.)