06 — Asceticism and the Soldier of Christ
The two threads that run through every ancient account of St. Martin of Tours (c. 316–397) and bind the soldier’s son, the catechumen of Amiens, the hermit of Ligugé, and the bishop of Tours into one figure: the miles Christi, the soldier of Christ who laid down the sword for the spiritual warfare of the monk, and the radical poverty by which that monk, made bishop, refused the pomp of the late-Roman episcopate. This section reads Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini and Dialogi for the ascetic shape they give Martin’s whole life, sets that shape against its Pauline background and its Eastern counterpart in the desert, and asks how an Orthodox reader receives a Western saint who is, in his hagiographer’s hands, the pattern of the monk-bishop.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)
Sulpicius Severus did not write a chronicle of Martin’s deeds so much as a portrait of an ascetic, and the two governing images of that portrait are military and economic. Martin is the soldier — first of Rome, then of Christ — who fights demons where he once would have fought barbarians; and he is the poor man who, having stripped himself of half his cloak at the gate of Amiens, never afterwards stopped stripping himself, refusing the throne, the fine vestments, and the courtly manners that a bishop of a great Gallic see might have claimed. These are not two themes but one: the militia Christi is renunciation under another name, and Martin’s poverty is the discipline by which the soldier of Christ keeps his armor. This section examines each in turn, anchored throughout in the earliest sources and read against the wider ascetic tradition, East and West, in which Martin stands.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-miles-christi.md | The militia Christi / miles Christi theme: Martin’s pivot from Roman army service to the militia Dei; his words before the emperor at Worms — “I am a soldier of Christ: it is not lawful for me to fight” (Vita Martini 4); how Sulpicius structures the whole Life around the soldier-to-monk transformation and the recurring combat with demons; the Pauline background (2 Timothy 2:3–4; Ephesians 6:11–17); and the shared East–West character of the imagery, which Martin first literalizes and then transcends. |
| poverty-and-simplicity.md | Martin’s radical poverty and rejection of episcopal pomp: the rough garments and unkempt appearance that scandalized some bishops at his election (Vita Martini 9); the three-legged stool in place of a throne and the episode of the ill-fitting tunic (Dialogi); the half-cloak as emblem of self-stripping (Matthew 25); the monk-bishop’s voluntary poverty against the grain of the increasingly grand late-Roman episcopate; and his bearing before the emperor (Vita Martini 20). |
See Also
- The Cloak of Amiens — the founding act of self-stripping from which both themes of this section flow
- The Late Roman World and the Army — the militia Martin literally served before he served Christ
- Bishop of Tours, 371 — the election at which Martin’s poverty and appearance became a public scandal
- Marmoutier and Ligugé — the monastic foundations that made his bishopric an ascetic one
- Confronting the Demonic and the Pagan — the spiritual warfare in which the miles Christi image is acted out
- Monasticism — the ascetic tradition, East and West, in which Martin stands
- St. Antony the Great — the desert paradigm of ascetic combat against the demonic
- St. Benedict of Nursia — the later Western codification of monastic poverty
References
- Sulpicius Severus. Vita Martini (Life of St. Martin). Trans. Alexander Roberts, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894.
- Sulpicius Severus. Dialogi (Dialogues) and Epistulae (Letters). Trans. Alexander Roberts, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. 1894.
- Hoare, F. R., trans. The Western Fathers. London: Sheed and Ward, 1954.
- Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
- Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.