The Life of Saint Martin · Chapter XI
The false martyr unmasked: The criminal’s spirit beside the altar
Let us now turn to other admirable things that Martin did as bishop. Not far from the city, very close to the monastery, there was a grave where the people had got into the habit of going to pray, convinced that Christian martyrs were buried there — so much so that earlier bishops had even had an altar set up on the spot.
Martin, however, was not a man to believe lightly in half-told stories. He began asking the oldest priests and clerics of the diocese who that martyr had actually been and when he had died, admitting that he found it very hard to accept a cult about which the ancients had not left a single reliable record. For some time he even avoided setting foot there: since he had no certainty, he did not want to offend people’s good faith, but he also refused to lend official cover, by his presence, to a devotion that might be nothing more than superstition. Until one day he decided to go to the place, accompanied only by a few monks.
He stopped in front of the grave and prayed to God, asking Him to show him who was buried there and what kind of life he had led. No sooner had he turned his head to the left than he saw, standing right there, a dark figure of fierce appearance. Martin ordered it to say what its name was and what it had done in life. The spirit gave its name and confessed everything: he had been a highway robber, executed for the crimes he had committed, and was being venerated through the sheer mistake of the uninformed people; he had absolutely nothing to do with the martyrs, because while they were in the glory of God, he was serving his punishment there. The most striking thing is that the monks accompanying Martin could hear the voice answering perfectly well, although they saw no one.
Martin then told them what he had just seen and ordered the altar to be removed from that place at once, freeing the population from being deceived any longer by that false devotion.
At the end of the fourth century, devotion to the martyrs soared throughout the Roman Empire: every town wanted to have the tomb of a hero of the old persecutions, and an old grave had only to turn up by the side of a road for the people to start making pilgrimages to it.
Martin’s attitude is astonishingly clear-sighted for the period: instead of turning a blind eye because “it was good for the people’s faith”, he behaves like a demanding investigator. He questions the oldest priests, looks for historical records — the name of the martyr and the date of the martyrdom (acta martyrum) — and refuses to validate a cult without evidence. Note also a symbolic detail typical of the ancient world: the criminal’s shade appears on the left (ad laevam — sinistra in Latin), the side which, both in Roman culture and in the Gospel of Saint Matthew (25:33), was associated with condemnation.