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| Shield, on the medieval city walls of Aigues-Mortes, depicting St-Martin dividing his cloak with the beggar. Source: Wikicommons, photo by Ad Meskens |
I want to draw your attention to one of the oddities of the Benedictine sanctoral calendar, namely its longstanding decidedly un-monastic focus.
St Martin, as I've written previously is a wonderful saint, and one certainly worth celebrating.
Feast rankings
The ranking of the feast as Class II in the 1960 monastic calendar though, is something of an oddity, since St Martin is the only non-Benedictine monastic saint to be accorded this level of feast in the 1960 monastic calendar, and the feast is ranked only as a Class III one in the Roman calendar.
All of the other feasts of monastic saints of the same rank (duplex majus) in the previous versions of the calendar - such as those of St Basil the Great and St Augustine - were downgraded to Class III feasts rather than Class I or II, when translated into the 1960 calendar.
The rationale for the reduction of feasts to Class III is, I think, fairly obvious and understandable. In the Roman Office, whose calendar the Benedictine has largely mimicked since Trent, there was a huge incentive to add more feasts, since festal Matins in the Roman Office was significantly shorter than the ferial version, with nine psalms said rather than twelve.
In the Benedictine Office, though, the effect of higher level feasts is diametrically opposite: the length of the already relatively long Night Office more than doubles. Instead of one or three readings, Matins of Class II feasts has twelve readings and responsories, as well as an extra Nocturn made up of three canticles, two extra hymns (the Te Deum and Te decet laus) are added, as well as a gospel reading.
Why then did St Martin escape the reforms?
Monastic saints in the Benedictine calendar
In general the monastic calendar gives pretty short shrift to most monastic saints, Benedictine or otherwise.
Although the key later medieval founders of religious institutes are generally well-presented in the calendar, many key earlier monastic saints are missing altogether. St Pachomius, for example, was only added to the monastic calendar (as a memorial) in 1960; St John Cassian, though long listed in the martyrology (and present in some of the earliest, such as that associated with St Bede) for July 23, still does not feature in the calendar at all.
Even Benedictine saints are sparsely represented in the General Calendar - very few of the Order's wealth of saints are actually included at all, and even where they are, there are cases where they are actually ranked lower than in the Roman calendar.
St Benedict aside, the only monastic saints ranked Class II (or above) are St Scholastica (St Benedict's twin sister), St Gregory the Great (author of the Life of St Benedict) and, in the case of woman's monasteries only, St Gertrude the Great.
Trent and local traditions
This lack of emphasis on monastic saints did not actually originate in 1960 or even 1913, date of the previous major cull of the Benedictine calendar, though those purges certainly exacerbated the problem.
Rather, as far as I can see, the issue is a longstanding one, dating back, as far as I can see to the post Tridentine breviaries, which, as part of the counter-reformation purge of saints and imposition of a uniform calendar, largely wiped out a great wealth of monastic feasts and local cults to be found in medieval calendars.
Instead, the Breviaries of Paul V and Urban VIII largely mirrored the Roman calendar, albeit with a few supplemental feasts and approvals for saints particular to congregations and monasteries.
St Martin and St Benedict
The reason for the prominence given to St Martin in the 1960 calendar presumably goes firstly to the fact that St Benedict dedicated a chapel to the saint at Monte Cassino and secondly to his status as a soldier-saint (given the soldiers of Christ imagery in the Benedictine Rule).
The connection between the two saints seems to have continued in Rome as well, since one of the four monasteries, almost certainly Benedictine, that supported St Peter's basilica in the mid seventh century, was dedicated to St Martin.
St Martin's prominence in a 1960s era calendar though, is a little surprising since St Benedict's reason for dedicating a chapel to him was probably to highlight his own adoption of St Martin's (very un-PC) activist missionary approach, which included converting pagan temples, as St Benedict also did at Monte Cassino, into monasteries and churches.
St Martin, though, was an extremely popular saint throughout the middle ages, and an influential model referred to in many early rules and monastic texts, almost displacing (or at least equaling references to St Antony) in the West.
Martinian monasticism
Missionary activity aside though, St Martin's form of monasticism seems to have been very different in character to that promoted by St Benedict.
Although RB 1980, written some forty years ago now, could claim that the monastic life as lived in late antiquity was pretty much the same everywhere, few historians would accept that today.
Rather, historians are rediscovering, for late antiquity, the existence of what modern catholics would call distinct charisms - quite diverse forms of monastic life founded on very different theological and spiritual principles.
Where St Benedict, for example, advocated manual work, and encouraged his monks to try and support themselves as far as possible, St Martin's monks followed an entirely different branch of monastic theology, and did no manual work at all (the exception was that junior monks only were allowed to copy manuscripts).
Similarly, when it comes to the liturgy, the two approaches seem to have been very different.
St Benedict followed St Augustine in urging that prayer be frequent (RB 4), short but fervent (RB 19) rather than literally continuous. St Benedict's Office probably took up somewhere between four and eight hours a day; by contrast St Martin's seems to have been very long indeed, swallowing up most of the monastic day and night.
Indeed, even once Cassian's advocacy for a twelve psalm maximum for an hour of the Office had spread to Tours, the 567 Synod of Tours rather creatively reinterpreted the 'Rule of the Angel' as setting a minimum number of psalms rather than a maximum 'out of honour and reverence' for St Martin!
Influences on St Benedict?
On the face of it, then, if you were thinking about which (if any) pre-Benedictine monastic saints merited Class II status in the Benedictine calendar, I for one would be inclined to place St Basil the Great and St Augustine higher on my list.
That said, the life of St Martin is certainly an inspiring one, both as a model of charity, of determination to confront, combat and convert both pagans and Arian heretics, and as a monastic founder.
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