Veneration in the Orthodox East

St. Martin of Tours died on 8 November 397 and was buried on 11 November, the date that became his feast across the undivided Church and that the Latin West still keeps as Martinmas. Because he lived and died more than six centuries before the schism of 1054, he is venerated in the Orthodox Church not as a borrowing from the Latins but as a saint of the one Church both East and West then confessed — a principle the Orthodox world has applied with renewed deliberateness in the twentieth century. This file sets out the historical and ecclesiological grounds for that veneration and weighs honestly the contested question of his date in the Byzantine calendar.

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

The first and decisive fact about Martin’s standing in Orthodoxy is chronological. He was consecrated bishop of Tours around 371 and died in 397, in the lifetime of men who had known the Council of Nicaea and a generation before the Council of Ephesus (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 9–10, on the episcopate; Epistula 3, on the death; ed. Fontaine, SC 133–135). His whole life falls within the period the Orthodox tradition calls the age of the undivided Church — the centuries in which Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem held a single communion of faith and Eucharist, before the long linguistic, political, and doctrinal estrangement that culminated only in the eleventh century (see The Pre-Schism Church). The five-patriarchate order, the seven councils, the great rupture over papal claims and the Filioque — all of this lay centuries in Martin’s future. He belonged to a Church that was not yet “Western” in any sense that would set it over against the East, because there was as yet no East and West to be set against each other in schism.

This is why Orthodox writers describe Martin not as a Roman Catholic saint whom Orthodoxy happens also to honor, but as an Orthodox saint of the Latin-speaking part of the one Church. The distinction matters. The Orthodox case for venerating the holy ones of the early West does not rest on any judgment about the post-1054 Roman communion; it rests on the claim that the saints who lived and died in the faith of the undivided Church are the common inheritance of all who still hold that faith (on what the 1054 boundary does and does not imply, see Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism). Martin’s orthodoxy in the strict sense is not in doubt: he was a staunch opponent of Arianism — suffering, Sulpicius reports, for his confession of the Nicene faith in the years of Arian ascendancy (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 6; ed. Fontaine, SC 133) — and he stood, however uneasily, on the side of doctrinal and disciplinary order in the Priscillianist crisis that shadowed the last years of his life (Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi 3.11–13; ed. Fontaine).

The Feast: 11 November and “Martinmas”

Martin died at Candes on 8 November 397 and was carried up the Loire to Tours, where he was buried on 11 November (Sulpicius Severus, Epistula 3, the encyclical letter on Martin’s death; Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 1.48 and De virtutibus sancti Martini 1.3–5, on the translation of the body and the burial; ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 1). It is the burial date, 11 November, and not the day of death, that became the saint’s principal feast — the pattern, familiar across the early Church, of keeping the dies natalis, the day the saint entered the tomb and was born to heaven (cf. the genethlia of the martyrs, the heavenly birthday; on the principle, see The Pre-Schism Church).

In the Latin West this became Martinmas, one of the great markers of the agricultural and liturgical year — the close of the harvest, the season of slaughter and the new wine, the beginning of the old forty-day “St Martin’s Lent” before the Nativity (Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 1981, on the diffusion and social weight of Martin’s cult; Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, 1985, on the Tours cult as a civic institution). The fame of the feast is itself a measure of the cult: by Gregory of Tours’s day in the late sixth century, Martin’s basilica at Tours was among the most frequented shrines of the Latin world, and his name was carried by the Frankish kings as a national patron (Gregory of Tours, De virtutibus sancti Martini, throughout; Van Dam 1985). The Roman Martyrology accordingly enters Martin under 11 November as bishop of Tours, “whose life was so illustrious for sanctity and miracles” — the date and the praise that the Latin calendar has kept ever since (Martyrologium Romanum, 11 November).

The Question of the Byzantine Date

For an Orthodox reader the natural question is where Martin stands in the Eastern calendar — and here the sources require care rather than confidence.

In current Orthodox usage, Martin of Tours is most often commemorated on 12 November, the day on which the Byzantine Synaxarion already commemorates several Western and Eastern saints, and on which a number of contemporary Orthodox calendars (including those circulated in English by ROCOR and the Orthodox Church in America) enter “St Martin the Merciful, bishop of Tours.” The 12 November placement aligns him in the Eastern menologion with St John the Merciful (John the Almsgiver) of Alexandria, whose principal commemoration falls that day, and the shared epithet “the Merciful” — earned by the most famous act of Martin’s life, the division of his cloak with a beggar at Amiens (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 3; ed. Fontaine, SC 133) — has reinforced the association.

The discrepancy between this Eastern 12 November and the Western 11 November is real and ought not to be smoothed over. Several factors are commonly named for it: the placement of Martin on the day after his Western feast so as not to displace the existing commemorations of 11 November; the ordinary one-day variations that arise when a Western dies natalis is received into the fixed Byzantine menologion; and, in calendars following the Julian reckoning, the further offset between Old and New Style that separates the civil date from the liturgical day. What the primary Latin sources fix securely is only the 11 November burial; the Eastern liturgical date is a matter of the later Synaxarion tradition and of modern calendrical practice, and the sources for it are not uniform.

[Disputed: the day on which Martin of Tours is commemorated in the Orthodox/Byzantine calendar. (A) The Latin tradition and the Roman Martyrology fix his feast on 11 November, the date of his burial at Tours (Martyrologium Romanum, 11 Nov.; Sulpicius Severus, Epistula 3; Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 1.48). (B) Much contemporary Orthodox usage commemorates him on 12 November, alongside St John the Merciful of Alexandria, often under the title “Martin the Merciful, bishop of Tours” (modern ROCOR and OCA service calendars; the Greek menologion association of the day). The earliest Byzantine synaxarial notices of a “Martin of the West” are brief and have themselves been read both as referring to Martin of Tours and as conflating him with other Martins; the 11-versus-12 November divergence in modern Orthodox calendars reflects the reception of a Western dies natalis into the Eastern menologion rather than a discrepancy in the primary record, which gives only 11 November.]

A related caution is needed about the way Martin is sometimes labeled in Eastern notices. Greek synaxarial entries can describe a “Martin, bishop” of the West in compressed terms, and care is required not to conflate Martin of Tours (d. 397) with Pope St Martin I of Rome (d. 655), the confessor who suffered under the Monothelite emperor Constans II and whom the Byzantine calendar commemorates in his own right (his principal Eastern commemoration falls in April, with a further notice in September). The two are distinct saints — a bishop of Gaul and a bishop of Rome, separated by two and a half centuries — and the occasional looseness of brief calendar entries should not be mistaken for an identification of them.

The Principle: Venerating the Orthodox Saints of the Pre-Schism West

Behind the calendar question lies the larger principle that governs Martin’s place in Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church has never held that holiness was confined to the Greek-speaking East. The West of the first millennium produced saints whom the undivided Church received without dispute — Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Leo of Rome, Gregory the Great, Benedict of Nursia, Patrick of Ireland, and Martin among them — and the Orthodox argument is simply that these belong to the whole Church because they belonged to it before the division (on the shared inheritance of the undivided centuries, see The Pre-Schism Church; on the monastic figures in particular, Benedict of Nursia and Patrick of Ireland).

In the twentieth century this principle was applied with new deliberateness. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), ministering to a diaspora settled in the historically Western lands of Gaul, Britain, and beyond, took up the cause of the local pre-Schism saints — compiling their lives, composing or recovering services to them, and adding them to its liturgical calendars — precisely on the ground that these were Orthodox saints of the places where the faithful now lived. The same impulse animated figures associated with the Orthodox revival in the West who labored to restore the memory of the “Saints of the British Isles” and of Gaul. This was not the invention of a cult but the reception of one: the recovery, by an Orthodox Church present in the West, of saints the undivided Church had already glorified.

It is worth stating the limits of the claim with the sobriety the sources demand. The Orthodox veneration of Martin does not depend on, and does not assert, any continuous Byzantine liturgical cult of him in the East across the whole medieval period; the evidence for his commemoration in the Greek calendar is thinner and later than the overwhelming Western evidence, and much of the present Eastern observance is a modern, deliberate reception. What is securely attested is the antiquity, the orthodoxy, and the vast reach of the cult in the undivided Latin Church — and on that the Orthodox case rests. Martin is venerated not because the medieval Greeks kept his feast prominently, but because he was a holy bishop of the one Church to which East and West then both belonged.

How Martin Is Venerated Today

In present Orthodox practice Martin appears in the calendars of jurisdictions that have taken up the pre-Schism Western saints, with a troparion and kontakion in circulation that name the cloak-sharing and his episcopal shepherding, and with his commemoration generally kept on 12 November (with awareness of the 11 November Western date). He is invoked as a model of mercy — the cloak divided with the beggar, in which Christ Himself appeared to him in a dream wearing the half-garment (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 3; ed. Fontaine, SC 133) is the icon’s defining scene — and as the soldier who laid down arms for Christ, the pattern of the ascetic bishop. His fuller relic history, the fate of the shrine at Tours, and the feast in its liturgical detail are treated elsewhere in this collection (see Relics and Feast and The Shrine at Tours).

The point to hold is the one with which we began. Martin of Tours is venerated in the Orthodox East not by exception or by ecumenical courtesy but by right: he is a saint of the undivided Church, glorified in the West while the West and East were one, and received by Orthodoxy as part of the inheritance that the schism of 1054 could divide jurisdictionally but could not unmake.

References

Sulpicius Severus. Vita Martini, Dialogi, and Epistulae. 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. (The cloak at Amiens, VM 3; the Arian confession, VM 6; the episcopate, VM 9–10; the death and burial, Epistula 3.)
Gregory of Tours. Historia Francorum (1.48) and Libri de virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi. Ed. Bruno Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 1. Hannover, 1885. English: Raymond Van Dam, trans., Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The translation of the body and the 11 November burial; the sixth-century cult at Tours.)
Martyrologium Romanum (Roman Martyrology), 11 November: Martin, bishop of Tours.
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The diffusion and social function of Martin’s cult.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Tours and the cult of Martin as a civic and political institution.)
Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. (Chronology of Martin’s life and death; the reliability of Sulpicius.)