08 — East and West
St. Martin of Tours (c. 316–397) died more than six and a half centuries before the rupture of 1054, a bishop of the one undivided Church whose communion embraced both the Latin West and the Greek East. This section establishes the ground on which an Orthodox Christian venerates a Western saint: the principle that the orthodox holy ones of the pre-Schism West belong to the whole Church, and the historical fact that Martin — the charismatic father of Gallic monasticism — stands at the head of a current that fed, by way of Cassian and Lérins and the Celtic mission, the monastic life of the entire Latin and insular West.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)
Martin is not an “import” into Orthodoxy from a later Catholic past; he is a saint of the period before there was a Latin past distinct from a Greek one. His feast on 11 November was kept across the undivided Church, and his cult — promoted by Sulpicius Severus while Martin still lived, and spread by Gregory of Tours two centuries later — became one of the most widely diffused devotions of late antique Christendom, East as well as West. The two files here treat, first, the principle and the practice of his veneration in the Orthodox East, with sober attention to the contested calendar dating; and second, the long arc of his monastic influence, from Marmoutier and Ligugé through the institutional consolidators Cassian and Lérins to the monasticism of Ireland and the British church.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| veneration-in-the-orthodox-east.md | Martin as a saint of the undivided pre-Schism Church; his feast on 11 November (Martinmas) and the question of the Byzantine Synaxarion’s 11/12 November commemoration; the principle of Orthodox veneration of orthodox Western saints who died before 1054; his place in the Roman Martyrology and in modern Orthodox usage (ROCOR and others promoting the pre-Schism Western saints). |
| the-monastic-influence.md | Martin’s influence on later Western and Celtic monasticism: Marmoutier and Ligugé as seedbeds; the Whithorn dedication to St Martin reported by Bede (HE 3.4) and the disputed Ninian–Tours link; John Cassian, Lérins, and the channeling of Egyptian asceticism into Gaul; Sulpicius’s deliberate Antony-parallel as the literary bridge. |
See Also
- Marmoutier and Ligugé — the two communities Martin founded, the seedbed of the influence traced here
- Sulpicius Severus and the Vita — the hagiographer who built Martin’s cult and modeled it on the Life of Antony
- The Shrine at Tours — the basilica and pilgrimage that carried the cult across Gaul and beyond
- Relics and Feast — the relic history and the 11 November feast in fuller treatment
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the first eight centuries to which Martin belongs
- Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism — what the 1054 boundary does and does not mean for a saint who lived before it
References
- Sulpicius Severus. Vita Martini and Dialogi. In Sulpice Sévère: Vie de Saint Martin, ed. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols., Sources Chrétiennes 133–135. Paris: Cerf, 1967–1969. English: F. R. Hoare, trans., The Western Fathers (London: Sheed & Ward, 1954); repr. in Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, eds., Soldiers of Christ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 1990; also ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
- Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
- Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
- Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.